“Did the lad return to his home that night?”
“He stayed. Slept on t’straw there like this fella’ll do.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “Left next mornin’ soon as light t’see t’road.”
“I shall need Bruce tomorrow,” I told him.
There seemed too many coincidences. The bones, their location, the missing girl, the sale of nine sacks of oats, and the timing. Perhaps that was all it was: coincidence. But to learn if that was so, I must return to Burford.
I walked from the castle with a warm sun at my back. I had no urgent need to return to Galen House, so I stood on the bridge over Shill Brook and watched the wheel of Lord Gilbert’s mill turn slowly.
What if Margaret and her beau had quarreled? What if the argument had become violent? What if, in a fit of rage, the youth struck and killed her? What if he then took her body to Bampton Castle under the oat sacks? Would he not risk discovery in unloading? Would a distressed young killer think of that? Why not dispose of the body in some forest between here and Burford? There were too many questions. Tomorrow I would return to Burford and seek answers to these riddles. Some of them, anyway.
Bruce seemed eager to take me on my journey, perhaps because I always rode him at an easy pace to spare my rump the unaccustomed abrasions. Or perhaps he grew bored staring at the walls of his stall.
As Bruce shambled along the path north to Shilton and Burford, I observed the countryside more closely than I had on my first journey. Lord Gilbert’s remark about unused, vacant land was accurate. There were many oxgangs of meadow now growing back to woodland. At several places the forest was coppiced, but not so regularly as it would have been before the plague. I saw few travelers on my way, although there might have been more in the summer. Certainly there were many places where a body might be hauled from the road into a wood or overgrown meadow and never seen again, until the beasts of the forest had rendered it nothing but bones moldering in the moss and bracken.
I wanted to speak to Alard again, but before I spoke to him I hoped to find the crone with the basket of turnips who had sent me to him. There were things I wished to know about Margaret Smith that Alard might not wish to tell me. And other things he might not know, considering the possible relationship between a man and his daughter.
I rode Bruce up and down the High Street and crosslanes of Burford until folk began to peer at me with furrowed brows as I passed them for the third or fourth time.
I tried to remember what the old woman was wearing, but it was nothing unusual enough to recall. A plain brown cloak and gray wimple, which might once have been white: the habit of every woman her age in every village in England.
I gave up my search, crossed the bridge over the Windrush, and reined Bruce to a stop before the smith’s hut. I saw no smoke from his chimney. To my shout there was no response. The town mill was but fifty or so paces upstream along a path which wound through the willows. I went there seeking news of the smith’s whereabouts.
“He’ll be at t’churchyard, won’t he,” the miller answered, “buryin’ his Margaret.”
I remembered seeing a small knot of people in the churchyard as I passed it — several times. Death and burial are common enough that I did not associate this interment with the bones I had puzzled over. I decided not to wait for the smith’s return, but mounted Bruce and made my way back across the river and up the sloping High Street. I turned Bruce east into Church Lane as mourners passed out of the gate. Alard led the procession. Near its end was the old woman I sought.
I dismounted and followed the old woman to her house, leading Bruce by the halter. The house was wattle and daub, like most in the town, and showed signs of neglect, as did its owner. The thatching of the roof was thin, and chunks of daub had fallen from the walls, exposing decaying wattles. A widow’s home, I thought.
I tied Bruce to a fencepost and approached the door. It opened before I could raise my hand to knock. The woman saw me standing before her and started back so violently that I feared she would fall.
“Oh — you’ve nearly made me drop me eggs!” she exclaimed.
The woman clung to a basket. From the rear of the decaying house I heard hens clucking. They were apparently a source of income, perhaps along with turnips her only source of cash.
“Forgive me. I had no wish to frighten you. Do you remember me?”
“Aye. You asked of Margaret, the smith’s girl, a few days back.”
“I did, although I did not know her name until you told me. I would ask a few more questions about her.”
“I promised these eggs to the vicar before noon. Father Geoffrey likes his eggs fresh.” The woman’s house was but three streets from the church and vicarage.
“Will you return when your errand is done?”
“Aye, straight away.”
“I’ll wait.”
The woman kept her word. I spent the time observing the house and street. It was a duplicate of hundreds I had seen across England, and France, too, in my travels there. The streets were similar, but the stories of the people inhabiting them all different. The crone; was she a widow? Never wed? Children? Grandchildren? Had she loved and laughed once? The crinkled skin about her eyes said “yes,” but the downturned corners of her mouth revealed sorrow in her life. As I mused, the wrinkled eyes and downcast mouth rounded the corner and limped toward me.
I had not noticed her hobble as she walked away. Now she returned shuffling, nearly halting each time her left foot struck the ground. When she came closer I could see a grimace, too, when her weight shifted to her left foot. Her condition aroused my medical curiosity.
“You walk with pain,” I observed when she approached.
“Aye. Since Easter last I’ve suffered.”
“What is the cause?” I suspected the disease of the bones. She was of the age for it. It was unlikely her diet was rich enough to cause gout.
“It’s me toe. Swole up an’ red. ’At’s right, you be t’surgeon from Bampton. ’Eard of you.”
I wondered what she’d heard, but decided it could not have been too bad, as with her next breath she asked if I might examine the offending digit.
I followed her into her house, but the light there was too dim to properly diagnose either wound or injury. I carried a bench out to the sunlight, bade her sit upon it, and knelt before her to remove her shoe. I could see the swelling through the cracked, ancient leather, and heard her giggle softly behind her hand as I took her ankle to pull off the shoe. The giggle concluded with a gasp as the shoe abraded her toe.
Her pain was due to a badly infected ingrown toenail; one of the worst I’ve seen. The wonder is she could walk at all.
“Can you do aught for me?” she asked.
“Aye. But not now. I’ve no instruments with me.”
“Instruments?” She said it as a question, with a trace of alarm in her voice.
“You have an ingrown toenail. I must trim it back, and remove some putrefied flesh from about it.”
“Can’t you put somethin’ on it — a poultice, like?”
“I could, but that would serve only temporarily. The swelling might subside for a day, and the pain with it, but it would surely return. It does little good to treat pain. I must treat the cause of the pain.”
“I see; sore toes is much like other sorrows God’s children must endure.”
The old woman did not look like a philosopher, but surviving sixty or seventy years of the assorted trials common to mankind must turn all but the most shallow to contemplative thought now and again.
“I will return tomorrow to treat you. Can you find a flagon of wine?”
“You wants your pay in wine?” she said incredulously.
“No…no. I will bathe the wound in wine, to speed healing.”
“Wound,” she said limply.
“A small incision only. But I must tell you that we must do all we can to aid healing. You are not a young woman. The young heal more quickly than the old. And wounds of the extremities in the old heal even more slowly. I do not know why this is, but I have observed it so.”