“Well, my good friend, it seems I must carry some of you with me as long as my gown lasts! Perhaps it will keep me warmer come winter and I shall be most grateful.”
The cat sat at her feet, rumbling softly, his green eyes round and his gaze intense.
Eleanor reached down and scratched him behind the ears. “It is time for you to go to work in the kitchen, fine sir. And it is time for me to take a walk, in the manner of our good Brother Thomas, to see what lies outside our priory.”
***
It was a warm day, mellow as late summer days could be, a day that lulled mortals into forgetting the sharp sleet and chill sea winds which came with punishing force as the life-giving seasons slipped into the long months of damp gloom. As she walked into the grove to the clearing where Thomas had been found, Eleanor thought about the dark time ahead and could understand why her pagan ancestors had woven such vivid and often cruel tales to explain the changing of the seasons. It was easy enough to see how they could interpret the end of spring and the harvest season as a time of cruel devastation, hopelessness and, aye, even murder. What amazed her was their ability to rebound and find hope in the renewal of life long before they had ever heard of Christianity. Giving His man creature such resilience of spirit, even in the benighted days, spoke volumes about God’s love. The thought gave her comfort as she walked through the trees where a man of violence had stalked not so very long ago. Such love would surely bring this person to justice in some way and soon.
Eleanor caught herself wanting to talk to her aunt about all that had happened; then she felt a quick pain. “Now it is up to me to answer my own questions, is it not?” she asked aloud in a quiet voice. “And it is certainly up to me to keep my mind to the mark and my eyes open for whatever there is to find,” she added as she walked into the clearing.
The birds twittered as they flew in search of insects. The insects hummed as they went about their business in spite of the birds. And Eleanor stood with her hands tucked into her sleeves, looking about her.
The clearing looked innocent enough in the daylight. There were no signs of midnight fires or foul, rotting holes from which Satan’s creatures might have burst forth upon the earth during the night. No, the evil that had skulked here so recently had had a mortal form.
Yet the crowner and his men still found nothing. If Lucifer’s most monstrous deeds had been imperfect, and he had been one of God’s highest-ranking angels, then surely no mortal man could commit a crime without leaving behind evidence of some kind. There must be something…
Eleanor turned slowly around. What might the crowner and his men have failed to notice? They were, after all, men. She smiled with both love and gentle amusement. The image of her solemn-faced but sweetly earnest brother Hugh came to mind. A warrior in the mold of his hero, King Richard, Hugh could always see where a castle’s defense was weakest, but he would then trip over a sharp stone on the way to scale it.
The eyes of most men are more used to looking at the grander plans of intrigue and battle, she thought, and, in so doing, they often miss some small thing, perchance a commonplace thing that an eye impatient with tiny detail would pass over. A woman’s eye might be more useful here, an eye trained to the domestic and the mundane, and therefore more likely to note a simple object out of place. Indeed her own training had hardly been domestic, but, in learning to joust with the finer points of philosophers’ arguments and in the minute study of her mortal fellows, she had found great pleasure in details of a sort. Hers was still a woman’s mind trained to minutiae, she argued to herself, albeit somewhat different concerns than occupied most of her gentle sex.
As she walked passed the place, she looked down and saw the bloodstains in the grass where Thomas had lain. She recoiled slightly. Her feelings for him were still too tender and uncontrolled. Then she pressed her hand flat against her chest as if binding her heart with a bandage and walked away, up the slight hill toward the trees and the rushing sound of the nearby stream.
***
The brook was pretty in this season, the bubbling water flashing bursts of light where it flowed into the sun. After a storm, the stream might become a dangerous torrent, but now the water was low, although running swiftly. As it entered the priory grounds, it served to give Tyndal fresh fish and clean water for watering gardens, bathing, washing, and making ale, although few drank the water, knowing how dangerous it could be to their health. As it left the priory, it washed away the refuse from the latrines, and the kitchens, and carried all into the sea. Truly one of many gifts from God, Eleanor thought, as she started down the slope toward the banks.
Her foot slipped in the moist brown earth of the embankment, and she caught herself by grabbing an exposed tree root. A reminder that she was doing something she shouldn’t, perhaps? Of course, she should not be here alone. Even a prioress was required to have proper and prudent companionship wherever she went.
“Indeed, that is true, but I am still too new at Tyndal to know whom I can fully trust and whom I cannot,” she sighed. With a murderer possibly in their midst, she felt safer by herself than with someone who might be of danger to her, especially as she wandered around, looking for something to uncover that very culprit. Even the seemingly open and pragmatic Sister Anne had shadowy corners in her soul, although Eleanor felt increasing comfort in the company of the nun.
“No, I am safer alone,” she said aloud to nothing in particular.
As she walked along the edge of the stream, she knew she hadn’t the vaguest idea what she was looking for. She stopped and glanced around, in part to mark her path back to the priory and in part to look for something out of the ordinary.
The ground was rocky near the stream. No footprints surely.
As she looked up at the high banks, she imagined this charming little stream as it turned into a raging river and gouged this deep channel into the earth. Indeed, several of the trees, not just the one at her descent, extended tangled and naked roots into the space above her head. She would have to check whether the stream’s course through the priory was sufficiently constrained when she got back.
With her mind distracted and her gaze turned upward, Eleanor stumbled and fell on the uneven, rocky ground. She cried out when her ankle turned and her hands scraped against the gravelly surface as she broke her fall. For just a moment, she shut her eyes tight against the sharpness of the pain; then she twisted herself around into a sitting position and concentrated on feeling her throbbing ankle.
“Not broken,” she said with relief and considerable gratitude. It would be difficult enough to get back to the priory by herself with a sprain, let alone with a cracked or shattered bone.
She looked around for a broken branch close by that would be sturdy enough to support her. Nearer to the bank, there were a couple of promising limbs. She half-crawled, half-pulled herself toward the branches.
The first one was rotten and broke in half as soon as she put pressure on it; however, the second held, and she began to pull herself up. As she did, an intermittent breeze rose and fell, and she noticed the movement of something against the bank.
She eased herself back into a sitting position. Close against the bank lay a huge boulder, over which a netting of roots lay, attached to a large tree. The tree sat precariously balanced between rock and bank, some of its roots still bound deep into the earth. From one of the largest roots a woven grass mat hung down between rock and cliff. One edge of the mat was weighed down with a heavy stone, but the other, the one that moved in the breeze, had lost its weight.
Eleanor once again pulled herself up with her strong branch, and, grabbing the broken one as she did so, limped closer. The breeze moved the matting again. Behind it, there seemed to be a small gap.