A Play of Piety (21 page)

Joliffe would have liked a word with Rose but could only lay a hand briefly on her shoulder as he passed, catching her glance and strained smile up at him in return. Behind him, as he went out, Sister Ursula was saying, “Sister Letice, go back and keep watch by the body, to be sure no one moves it more. It should stay untouched until the crowner sees it,” at the same time that Sister Margaret was saying, “I’ll fetch a sheet to put over him.”

Jack was unbarring the gate for the day as Joliffe came from the hospital. Told what had happened, he shook his head over it and hoped Joliffe would find Borton still at home. Borton was, and at Joliffe’s report, asked, “This Master Aylton. He’s the fellow got himself beaten yesterday?” At Joliffe’s surprised look, he added, “There was talk at the tavern last night.”

Joliffe’s surprise went away. “That’s him.”

Borton sent one of his servants to find the constable, someone named Credy, telling Joliffe, “Happens he has an uncle in your place,” before adding, “He’ll know who best to send for the crowner,” because a crowner might take some finding. Only a few and largest of towns had their own. Mostly, two crowners served for a whole shire and so could be anywhere besides home when needed, since one or the other of them had to be summoned to look into all unexpected deaths, to rule whether there had been simply an accident or else a crime that turned it into a matter for the sheriff and royal fines and punishment.

“After you’ve given him the word, though,” Borton told his man, “you go straight on to the field. I’ll be along as soon as might be.” And to Joliffe, “Let’s go, then,” not troubling to hide his impatience at having to delay his day’s right work. Harvest, being life or death for everyone, was more important than one unfamiliar man’s death.

As they came to the hospital, they encountered Father Richard leaving the church. His look of surprise at seeing Borton changed to distress when he was told why. “I should come, too,” he said. “Prayers for his soul are needed, surely.”

“Surely,” Borton agreed.

As the three of them were crossing the foreyard, Jack called from his window above them, asking why they had not gone by way of the orchard gate. “It would have been shorter.”

Father Richard made an impatient sound at himself and said, “Of course it would be. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Nor was I,” Borton said easily. “I raided apples enough there when I was young. Never mind. Come on then.”

Joliffe was fairly certain he should give over following them and turn to his own right work, but only Rose was in the kitchen as they passed through, and she did no more than catch his eye and raise her eyebrows at him. He raised his in return and kept going, leaving her shaking her head. Outside again and trailing the two men along the path through the garden, Joliffe saw Sister Letice, standing beside the stream in her appointed guard over the sheet-covered form on the grass. Emme and Amice were hovering not far off, no more seeing to their work than Joliffe was to his. That no one else was there meant word of the death had not spread beyond the hospital yet, to bring the curious. And that Sister Ursula, Sister Margaret, and Sister Petronilla were either more devoted to their duties, Joliffe thought wryly, or better restrained in their curiosity than he was.

Sister Letice moved away, joining Emme and Amice, as the men approached. Borton gave them a nod but his heed was on the body, and while Father Richard knelt, signed a cross toward it, and bent his head to pray, Borton said with heavy resignation, “Best have a look, I suppose.” And to Joliffe, “You, help me lay the sheet back.”

With the strangely large respect so often given to a dead body surely past caring, Joliffe and Borton each took an upper corner of the sheet and lifted it back into careful folds at the corpse’s feet.

As Sister Letice had said, it was Aylton and he was beyond doubting dead. After pulling him from the water and turning him over, she must not have touched him again. His legs were twisted one over the other from when she turned him over, his arms were flopped out loosely at his sides, and his head was canted crookedly, the hair flattened wetly to it, his mouth gaping, his eyes a little open. He was fully clothed. Either before or after getting himself out of the hospital, he had managed to dress, and that must have cost him some pain, given that by then he must have been stiffened with his bruises and all. To suffer through that, he had been very determined on escaping.

Well, he
had
escaped, although more thoroughly than he intended, Joliffe thought. He had made it this far, then collapsed, unfortunately into the stream, either senseless or too weak to push himself out. That yesterday’s violence to him had played a part in that was probable, but how much his death would be ruled his own accidental doing versus how much Mistress Thorncoffyn might be held responsible for it would likely turn into a matter giving several lawyers a good income before it was settled.

That was all for later. Here and now, what caught most deeply at Joliffe was, as always, the utter emptiness of a dead body. Where there had been someone alive a while ago, now there was only a dead and useless corpse, all its point and purpose gone. That was likely why the immediate urge was always there to straighten and tidy a dead body, to give it what little dignity it could have in the while left to it. This particular body, though, no one moved to straighten. Given the death was unwitnessed and therefore uncertain, the body was supposed to be left as it was for the crowner to see. With the warm weather and all, if the crowner was likely to be too long delayed in coming, the constable might decide to have it moved after all and the town pay the fine for doing so. For now, though, waiting for the constable, Father Richard prayed and Borton stood staring away into the apple trees, rocking a little back and forth on his heels. With nothing more to see or do, Sister Letice drifted away into the garden, and Emme and Amice, too, were starting to draw away when Jack came limping through the garden. Leaving Emme, Amice went to him, took his hand. He gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek, then looked past her to the little gathering beside the stream and said, “He’s truly dead then. Mistress Thorncoffyn won’t be best pleased.” He took another step forward for a clearer look. “Daveth will be, though.”

“Daveth?” Joliffe echoed in surprise. He could imagine Mistress Thorncoffyn displeased at being forestalled from whatever miseries of the law she had planned for Aylton, but, “Where does Daveth come into it?”

“Daveth was afraid of him,” Jack said. “Aylton liked to slap or hit him if he chanced on him alone. Daveth told me he once kicked Heinrich, too. Heinrich doesn’t seem to notice much, but he’s sense enough to be afraid of Aylton afterward. It was Daveth asked me to come be sure Aylton was really dead. Now I can tell him that he is. Ah, well, back to the gate with me.”

“To the laundry with us,” Emme said. “Come on, girl.”

The three of them went away together. For them, Aylton’s death was no more than a briefly interesting interruption of their usual days, while for Daveth it would be welcome; for Mistress Thorncoffyn and possibly Geoffrey, a disappointment; for those like Borton whose duty required them to deal with it, an annoyance. Was there anyone to whom Aylton’s death would mean more? It was a sad thought that perhaps, no, there was not.

Despite knowing it was time he went back to his own right duties, Joliffe went forward, to the other side of Aylton’s body from Father Richard, bent, and lifted the corpse’s nearer hand. Besides clay-pale, the flesh was cold and slack, as if already beginning its slump off the bones, but the arm moved only unwillingly. Borton made a half-inquiring, half-disapproving sound. Joliffe laid the hand carefully down where it had been and said, “He’s stiffened. He’s been dead a fair while.”

“Since well before dawn, I’d guess,” Borton agreed. “He wasn’t trying to make his escape by first light anyway.”

The year was not so many weeks past the short nights of mid-summer that a night’s hours were all that long yet. They were long enough, though, that if Aylton had got himself from the hall soon after Sister Margaret made her last round for the night and got his horse out of the inn’s stable and away, he could have been a good many miles from here by now, with no one likely to know which way he had gone.

But if Aylton had headed back to the inn to get his horse and maybe whatever else he had left there, he must have been counting on Geoffrey being still here with his grandmother. Had he known she was ill? Probably not, and would not have dared risk going to the inn while there were folk up and about and the chance of meeting Geoffrey. So had he stayed in his bed until he thought it was late enough to chance going, or had he left the hospital, meaning to lurk somewhere near the inn until the hour was late enough he could hope to slip in unnoticed?

Then again, did it matter when he left? Whenever he did, he had only come this far and no farther.

Or was it just too . . . simple that Aylton should have struggled this far only to collapse in the one place and one way sure to kill him?

Simple sometimes happened. In fact, simple was usually the way of things. Simple stupidity. Simple greed. Simple carelessness.

But sometimes simple was . . . too simple.

Joliffe’s eyes had been traveling while his thoughts did, and he heard himself saying aloud, “No sign of struggle here.”

Borton said in surprise, “Why would there be?”

Joliffe shrugged. “I only say it.”

Father Richard signed himself with the cross, sighed, stood up, and said sadly, “He passed from aware to unaware and fell and died without time for even a prayer for God’s mercy. A great many prayers are going to be needed for his soul.”

“Not that Mistress Thorncoffyn is likely to pay for them,” Borton said. “She’s more likely to stomp on his grave once he’s in it. Here comes Credy.”

Joliffe looked up and around from his thoughts woven among the long water weeds waving in the swirling clear flow of the stream just beyond Aylton’s head to see a tall man coming through the garden. He looked no happier at having to be there than Borton did. He greeted Father Richard, traded a wordless nod with Borton, apparently summed up Joliffe as a servant, and gave his heed to the corpse, brooding down at it for a long moment before saying, “Aye, he’s dead. He’s the fellow someone here beat on yesterday?”

“He’s the one,” Borton agreed.

“Think that’s what killed him?”

“Hard to say yet. Could have drowned.”

“Not of purpose,” Credy said, flatly enough that Joliffe was uncertain whether he meant it seriously or was making a jest of someone trying for self-murder in so shallow a stream.

“Accident then,” Borton suggested.

“Likely.”

Credy changed his heed to Joliffe. “You found the body?”

“No, I . . .” Was there for no better reason than naked curiosity, but he was saved from having to say so by Master Hewstere, saying harshly from behind them, “Why wasn’t I summoned immediately? Why did I have to hear of this only after I came to the hospital to make my morning round?”

All the men turned to stare at him. A little beyond and aside from him, Sister Letice was standing, her hands twisted into her apron. If he had troubled to greet her at all, it must have been by no more than a silent gesture, set on his indignation as he was. “I should have been called immediately when he was found!”

Borton shrugged, openly not so impressed as Master Hewstere intended him to be. “No point in having you here. There was no doubting he was dead.”

With every show of outrage at someone presuming to usurp his prerogative as a physician to recognize death and life, Master Hewstere demanded, “On whose word was that determined?” As if death, several hours on as this one had been, was not simple enough for anyone to determine, physician or not.

Softly, Sister Letice said, “I told them.”

Master Hewstere turned on her. “You?” He sounded both incredulous and offended. “You presumed to determine he was dead?”

“His head was in the water. He wasn’t moving. I—pulled him out,” she said as if suddenly uncertain she should have.

“You
moved
the body?” Master Hewstere exclaimed. “You’re supposed to leave bodies where they’re found!”

“Ah, but he might not have been a body yet, see,” said Joliffe, to draw Hewstere off Sister Letice and deliberately sounding as thick as the plank across the stream, “Might have still been alive, see. Couldn’t tell, with his head in the water like that.”

Master Hewstere turned on him with a glare. “You. Why are you here?”

Joliffe was spared answering that by Amice calling from the far side of the garden, “Joliffe! Emme says we’ll be needing water and wood soon. When are you coming?”

“Now,” he called back, made a single hurried bow to priest, constable, bailiff, and—vaguely—physician all at once, and escaped. Behind him Credy was saying as he went, “What we need from you, sir, is to know whether there are any hurts on him new from yesterday when you saw him. Anything that might have put him in the water. Head bashed or something.”

That was to the good. Even while openly wishing he did not have the bother, it seemed the constable meant to know all he could about Aylton’s death.

Joliffe was stacking his last armload of firewood in the laundry when Emme said to Amice and him both, “Come see,” and they joined her at the doorway to watch Sister Ursula leading a small procession into the yard, Borton and Credy following her with Aylton’s body carried between them, followed by Father Richard, Master Hewstere, and trailing them all, another man Joliffe did not know, carrying a wooden box of no great size. Sister Ursula stopped outside one of the open-sided, empty sheds on the rear-yard’s other side, said something to the men with a gesture that seemed to invite them to use of the shed, and left them. She might have gone straight back to the hospital, except Emme called to her and she turned aside to the laundry, answering before anyone could ask, “I know it’s over-soon to be moving the body, not even giving the crowner time to be here. But our Master Hewstere claimed he couldn’t look for new hurts on Aylton if he wasn’t laid out somewhere and properly stripped.” She glanced over her shoulder to where Borton and Credy had set down the body and were dragging forward trestles and boards to the shed’s middle. She lowered her voice. “I think he was hoping to put it off altogether.”