“You had a quarrel with Maud some time past, here in the toft,” I said.
“Hot of temper is Maud,” Emma replied.
My experience of the two women was that Emma better fit such a description, but I saw no reason to voice the opinion. “What disturbed her?” I asked.
“Not a matter for Lord Gilbert’s bailiff… we of the Weald sort our troubles with the vicars.”
“And has the quarrel been settled? The vicars have rendered judgment on the issue?”
“Uh, not yet.”
“Have they been asked?”
“The matter is resolved. No need to trouble ’em.”
“And what was the result?”
“Not your bailiwick,” she muttered.
“Maud’s husband died upon Lord Gilbert’s lands. There is some question as to the manner of his death. So when I see his widow in conflict with another, I make it my business. What was your dispute with Maud about?”
“Me an’ Edmund had naught to do with it.”
I thought this a strange response. “I made no such accusation,” I replied. “Why do you fear I might do so?”
“Folk be talkin’. Sayin’ you don’t think Thomas did away with hisself.”
So gossip had prepared this ground before I cast a seed. Why, I wondered, did the woman seem startled to hear from me what she had already learned from others? And how had the rumor got loose in the town? Father Simon’s servant, perhaps?
“Did your words with Maud have to do with the death? Does Maud make accusation against you or Edmund?”
“Nay, wasn’t about that.” The woman fell silent, and looked away, across the crude fence which separated her toft from Maud’s. “Since Henry was kilt in the forest Thomas has been plowin’ into my land. Wouldn’t have done so was Henry alive to say him nay. Maud hired plowmen, an’ told ’em to widen the furrows, as Thomas was doin’.”
“You challenged her about this?”
“Aye.”
“To what end?”
The woman was again silent for several moments. “Edmund told ’er plowmen where they must stop. Maud was angry.”
“Is the plow-land in dispute land that Henry had of the bishop for many seasons, or is it of the land he gained when his father died?”
Emma again seemed startled, and I guessed the answer before she spoke. “’Twas of his father’s land. Henry was oldest, so was to have it. Thomas was resentful. An’ when Henry was slain ’e saw ’is chance to gain what was mine.”
“It may belong to neither,” I advised, and was rewarded with another surprised expression. “Your father-in-law possessed the land as dowry from his second wife, Alice’s mother, so I have learned. Henry seized land which should have gone to Alice.”
“Not so,” Emma declared. “Henry was due the land. Was it not so, the vicars would have denied him.”
“Perhaps they should have done. No bailiff is assigned to direct the bishop’s lands in the Weald, as you know. The bishop expects the vicars of St Beornwald’s Church to do the work. But they are more concerned with masses and keeping God’s house than maintaining order in the Weald.”
“Who says ’tis so?”
“Evidence will be presented when the vicars call hallmote, I am told.”
Emma snorted in disgust and turned back to her cabbages. I left her to her work and set out for Bridge Street and home.
I had but finished my supper when a rapping upon Galen House’s door drew me from my table. As I expected, Maud had been thinking upon what I had told her and now stood in the evening shadow at my door.
“G’day, Master Hugh. A word, if I may.”
I invited the woman into my surgery. Through the open door I could see Kate bustling about in our living quarters, with an ear cocked, I was sure, to the conversation beginning in the other chamber.
“’Ow’d you know Thomas went out to see to the hens two nights?”
“The man who drew him out the first night told me.”
“Man? Wasn’t no fox, then?”
“Nay, nor was there a fox the night of St George’s Day.”
“Then the same man who come the first time murdered my Thomas,” Maud declared. “Why’d the man call him out in the dark of night first time? Did ’e try then to slay Thomas an’ failed?”
“He said not. He wished to speak privily to Thomas, to apologize.”
“Apologize? For what? Doin’ ’im to death next day?”
“Nay. It was another who troubled your hens St George’s Day. The first man wished to seek forgiveness of past transgressions.”
Maud’s eyes widened as I spoke. She knew of Thomas’s multiple offenses against others, or at least some of them, but was at a loss to remember trespasses against her husband.
“Who was this, then, what came to our toft at midnight?”
“That you need not know. The man did not slay Thomas. I have spoken to him and know of his words with Thomas. You must trust me. I will seek whoso murdered your husband, but some things about the search you may not now know.”
Maud’s expression said plainly she was not pleased with this response to her visit, but she knew better than to dispute with Lord Gilbert’s bailiff, even was she a tenant of the Bishop of Exeter.
“You’ll be about finding ’im out, then?” She sought confirmation that Thomas’s death, now fading in the memory of most townsmen, would remain fresh in mine.
“I seek the felon each day,” I assured her.
Maud seemed pleased with my promise. She curtsied, which is not a necessary honor for a mere bailiff. Perhaps she thought that as a supplicant in my home such deference might advance her cause and would cost nothing.
I spent the rest of the evening on Lord Gilbert’s business, but my mind was more devoted to the confusion of death at Cow-Leys Corner than overseeing the care of Bampton Castle and Manor in Lord Gilbert’s absence at Pembroke.
Days grow long and nights brief after Whitsuntide. There was yet a glow in the northwestern sky, beyond the Ladywell and Lord Gilbert’s forest, when Kate and I sought our bed. The day had been warm with the promise of summer, but the eve soon cooled and I closed the window of our bedchamber.
Kate is a light sleeper, so heard her hens while I was asleep. She elbowed me to wakefulness and when she was sure I heard, whispered to me of the disturbance in the darkened toft.
“The hens are troubled… a fox, you think? Or has the man who murdered Thomas atte Bridge visited us to draw you into the dark?”
“Not a very inventive fellow,” I whispered in reply, “to employ the same ruse he tried before… a man intending me harm would seek some new method. ’Tis a fox in the toft, I think. I will see to it.”
“Take care,” Kate said softly, rising upon an elbow as I drew on chauces and kirtle.
“A fox,” I reassured her. “No man would try a second time what he had worked in the past.”
I must learn to listen to Kate’s admonitions. I stumbled down the darkened stairway, yet unsteady from an abrupt awakening. I unbarred the door to the toft and stepped into the darkened enclosure. A waning moon was just rising to the east, but Galen House blocked its light and the toft was in deep shadow. Kate’s hens seemed quieted. I thought, did a fox disturb them, the animal was probably now away, perhaps with the neck of a hen in its jaws to feed a litter of kits. I would count the fowls in the morn, to see were any taken.
I turned to re-enter Galen House as the blow fell. This perhaps preserved my life. Some shape, darker than the shadows of the toft, leaped toward me and before I could recoil I felt a sharp pain in my right arm, between elbow and shoulder.
My attacker grunted with the effort of his strike, and I yelped in pain. ’Twas most unmanly. Kate had already opened the shutters to see what I might be about, and when she heard my cry she shouted for explanation.