Fortune Like the Moon (21 page)

‘And Gunnora believed in this stupid prank?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘But didn’t it strike her as deeply irreverent, when she herself was about to take the first of her final vows?’

But she wasn’t, Helewise thought. And she was beginning to understand why. She sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Gunnora swallowed the story. She believed everything Elanor told her. Didn’t she, Milon?’

‘Yes.’ He was grinning. ‘She went along with it. She actually thought it was as funny as Elanor did.’

‘But all the time Elanor’s presence here had a much darker purpose,’ Josse said. ‘All along, you and your wife were planning to kill Gunnora.’

‘I keep telling you, it wasn’t like that!’ Milon cried. ‘We just wanted to make a friend of her, wanted her to like us, so that when she got her father’s money, she’d pass it on to us and not give it to the Abbey.’

‘You felt that your need was the greater?’ Helewise said, with some irony.

He turned to her. ‘No.’ His expression was aggrieved. ‘It wasn’t because of that.’

‘What, then?’ Josse demanded.

Again, Milon looked at both of his questioners in turn. Meeting the tormented, shadowed eyes, Helewise was reminded of a wild animal cornered by hounds.

But then, finding from some unsuspected reserve a vestige of pride, Milon sat up and straightened his shoulders. Raising his chin, he said with quiet dignity, ‘Because I’m his son.’

There was utter silence in the cold little room. Then Josse repeated, ‘His son.’

Helewise’s mind had leapt to one crucial thing. Silly, really, she thought, when so much else is at stake. ‘Your marriage wasn’t legal, if Sir Alard was indeed your father,’ she said. ‘A union between first cousins is within the prohibited degree.’

Milon dropped his eyes. ‘I know. But Elanor didn’t – I didn’t want to upset her, when we loved each other so much. Getting married was the only way, you see – we’d never have been allowed to be together unless we were wed. So I never told her who I really was.’

‘But surely Sir Alard would have done!’ Josse protested. ‘Great God in heaven, he should have been more responsible than to let such a union go ahead, no matter how much the pair of you wanted it!’

Milon waited until the blustering had finished – Josse must be beside himself, Helewise thought absently, to blaspheme like that, although the provocation was understandable – and then said, ‘Alard couldn’t have told her, since he didn’t know himself.’

‘Then how can
you
be so sure?’ Helewise asked gently.

‘My mother told me,’ Milon said. ‘When she was dying, I was the one she wanted to be with her.’ He gave a brief ironic smile. ‘That didn’t go down at all well with my brothers, but then they’ve always been jealous of me. I was different, you see. I looked different, for one thing, and I always had my mother’s favour. Even when they all ganged up on me, she’d look after me.’ He sighed. Then, as if recalling himself to the present, went on, ‘She didn’t have long to live, they were all saying that, so I did as she asked and went up to her room.’ His nose wrinkled. ‘It smelt.
She
smelt. I didn’t like it there, I wanted to go back to Elanor. But then my mother said I had to go and find my father, and when I said, all right, I’ll fetch him, she grabbed my arm and said she didn’t mean
him,
she meant my real father.’

‘That must have come as a great shock to you,’ Helewise said tonelessly.

‘It did, oh, it did!’ Milon agreed. ‘Of course, though, once it had sunk in, I realised. I saw how it explained a lot of what had been happening, all through my childhood. Then I got interested, and I asked her to tell me about him. My father.’

Helewise pictured the scene. The dying woman, anxious to impart a long-held secret to her favourite son. And the son, listening not out of love but because he was ‘interested’.

‘She said, “Go and find him, and get your inheritance off him,”’ Milon was saying. ‘She was very bitter, you know. She always had been, but I didn’t know why till then. From what she said – and she said a lot, believe me, for a woman who was meant to be dying – I gathered that she had imagined it would mean a bit of comfort for her, having a child by a rich man, even if she wasn’t married to him. And when the child turned out to be a son, well, that made it even more important, given that the man only had daughters. But it didn’t work out that way. She never even managed to tell him about me – he sent her letters back unopened. Didn’t want his wife, the Lady Margaret, knowing he’d had sex with another woman, that’s what she reckoned. She – my mother – couldn’t pursue it, she said, because, if she made too much fuss, she’d risk her husband finding out. And she only slept with Alard the once!’

What a tale, Helewise thought. Dear Lord, what a tale of greed and dishonour.

But it was not all told yet.

‘So your mother ordered that you try to obtain what she felt you were entitled to?’ she prompted. ‘Having told you where to go, she left it up to you to announce yourself? To convince Sir Alard that you were his son?’

‘Yes.’ Milon smiled faintly. ‘Daunting, wasn’t it? I mean, if, as my mother said, he only bedded her the once, would he even remember? I thought it was unlikely. And, if I told him and he refused to believe it, what then? I’d have blown my chances, and, no doubt, he’d have thrown me out and told his damned manservant to make sure I never darkened his door again. I had no
proof,
you see!’

‘Indeed I do,’ Helewise murmured.

‘The alternative – my plan to marry Elanor – was the best I could come up with,’ he went on. ‘It was her or nothing, I reckoned. Gunnora wouldn’t have looked at another man, and Dillian was smitten with Brice. So I went in search of my father’s niece.’ He paused, and the silence continued for some time.

Then he said, ‘But I fell in love with her, you see. It wasn’t about the money any longer, or not just the money.’ His eyes met Helewise’s. ‘I truly loved her.’

That, apparently, was too much for Josse. ‘Loved her enough to put your hands round her throat and choke the life out of her!’ he burst out. ‘Fine kind of love
that
is!’

It could have been that Josse didn’t see that Milon was weeping. But Helewise did. ‘Can you tell us what happened, Milon?’ she asked gently. ‘The night Elanor died?’

He raised his wet face to look at her. ‘We’d been making love, like I said. Carefully, because of her being pregnant. But it was as good as it always is. Then, afterwards, she was telling me about him. That Sir Josse.’ It was as if he’d forgotten Josse was in the room. ‘She was frightened of him, frightened of the questions about Gunnora, and she wanted me to let her come away with me there and then. But I said no, it’d only make things look even worse if she did, the only way was to sweat it out and keep denying everything. So she said she couldn’t, that she was tired, and sick, and needed me, and I got angry with her because we were
there
then, we’d all but done it, my father was on the very point of death and very soon it’d be over, she’d inherit and we could go away and live happily ever after!’

Happily ever after, Helewise thought. Just like a fairy tale. Appropriate, when this man and his wife were a pair of children. ‘You got angry,’ she repeated. ‘Lost your temper with her.’

‘It was frightening, her saying she wanted to tell him everything! I mean, how would it look? He’d never have believed I didn’t kill her, none of you would!’

‘But you did kill her,’ Josse said coldly. ‘You throttled her.’

Milon gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Yes, I know! I didn’t intend to, my temper got the better of me. I was just trying to stop her crying so loudly. But I didn’t mean Elanor. I’m not
talking
about Elanor.’

Helewise felt a small – a very small – song of triumph. I knew it! she thought. Knew it! She wondered what Josse was thinking.

‘Elanor,’ Milon was murmuring, smiling and humming to himself. ‘She’s my wife, you know,’ he said to the room at large. ‘My loving, clever, pretty wife. She’s going to have my baby. I’m going to go home to her, very soon now, and she’s going to take me into her bed and make me warm again. She’s going to light all the candles, and drive the dark and the shadow men away.’

Helewise made herself block it out.

Had Josse realised? she wondered. Did he know, before an answer was demanded of Milon, what it would be?

‘Milon?’ she said softly. ‘Milon, listen to me. If you weren’t talking about Elanor, what
did
you mean?’

‘I meant’ – Milon spoke as if to a dim child – ‘that I didn’t kill Gunnora.’

*   *   *

Helewise stepped back then, and Josse took up the questioning. I have no heart for this, she thought as she listened, this brutal hurling of words at someone who is already broken. Besides, I know that, even if Sir Josse carries on till Christmas, Milon will not vary his story.

Because he is telling the truth. We have to look elsewhere for the killer of Gunnora.

‘You ask us to believe,’ Josse was saying, with heavy sarcasm, ‘that, although you admit that you and Elanor cooked up a plot to separate Gunnora from her inheritance, yet you are innocent of her murder? When we
know
you were in the immediate vicinity at the time of her death, and she was killed only yards from your secret hiding place? With the marks on her arms where Elanor held her, and the slit in her throat which
you
made with that great knife of yours? Milon, give us credit for more sense!’

‘It’s true!’ Milon cried for the fourth time. ‘She was dead when we found her!’

‘You’re telling us that you and your wife – her own cousins, damn it! –
found
her, lying with her throat cut, yet did nothing for her?’

‘She was dead! What
could
we do?’

‘You could have run for help! Gone searching for the brothers at the shrine, come up to the Abbey and alerted the Abbess! Covered the poor lass up! Anything!’

‘But you’d have thought we killed her,’ Milon protested.

Suddenly Helewise had a mental image of Gunnora’s body, as they had found her. The skirts, so neatly folded. Without thinking, she said, ‘Elanor arranged her. She tidied Gunnora’s skirts, just as a nun is taught to fold her bedding, and then smeared the blood on her thighs. Didn’t she?’

Milon turned to her. He seemed to have gone a degree more ashen. His eyes held some sort of appeal; he said, ‘Yes, Abbess. She felt bad about it. We both did. But she said if we made it look like Gunnora had been raped, then even if anyone
did
start to think we’d killed her, they’d soon stop again, because we’d just have wanted her money. If she’d been raped and
then
killed, it couldn’t have been us.’

Helewise nodded thoughtfully. ‘Thank you, Milon. I understand.’

Josse was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Elanor did that?’ he said incredulously. ‘Gunnora’s own cousin? Turned back the poor woman’s skirts and spread her own blood on her? Dear God, what sort of a girl was she?’

‘A desperate one,’ Helewise murmured. Who, remembering the instruction she was being given in convent life – always fold your bedcovers like this, fold back, fold back again, just so – had, in some gesture of appeasement, tried to be neat in the arrangement of her dead cousin’s habit.

‘What of the cross?’ Josse demanded. ‘It wasn’t Gunnora’s own, and it wasn’t Elanor’s; hers was smaller. Did you drop it by her body?’

‘Yes.’

‘You brought it with you? Where on earth did you get hold of it?’

‘I didn’t bring it! It
was
Gunnora’s! It must have been, she was wearing it – she had it round her neck. Elanor said she’d have it, since the rubies were better than the ones in her cross, but I wouldn’t let her. Well, she realised, soon as I said, that it’d be a daft thing to do, it’d lead people straight to us if Elanor was seen with Gunnora’s cross. So we just dropped it.’ He sniffed. ‘That’s what I came back for. Elanor’s cross. She didn’t have it on her when I – She didn’t have it that night, or, if she did, I couldn’t find it. I was going to have another look down near our secret place, then follow the path she’d have taken down from the dormitory, searching all the way. Not that I had much hope of finding it
there.
I was going to come into the Abbey and try to get into the dormitory, then have a look in her bed.’ He seemed to slump suddenly. ‘I had to get it,’ he said wearily. ‘You’d have known who she was, if you’d got your hands on her cross. And then you’d have come straight for me.’

Josse turned away from him then, paced back to the door of the little room and stood, arms folded, shoulder leaning against the wall, staring down at the dusty floor.

Helewise watched Milon. He seemed surprised at the sudden cessation of the questions. Looking from Helewise to Josse and back again, he said, ‘What will happen to me?’

Helewise glanced at Josse, but he did not seem about to answer. So she said, ‘You will remain here until the sheriff and his men can be summoned. Then you will be taken under escort to the town jail, and, in due course, you will be tried for murder.’

‘It wasn’t murder,’ he said, hardly above a whisper. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her. I loved her. She was carrying our baby.’

Then, once again, he began to weep.

Chapter Fifteen

Josse and the Abbess walked side by side back to her room. Neither, it seemed, wanted to be the first to break the silence.

Josse wondered if she was experiencing the same feelings that he was. From what he could see of her face, and from the slump of her normally squared shoulders, he guessed so.

He was feeling – he was at a loss to name the emotion searing through him. It was a mixture, and, indeed, a mixture of elements which did not normally go smoothly together. There was anger – yes, anger was still there. But also an undermining, growing pity. And, to his distress, guilt; although he fought it, reminded himself again and again of those two pathetic dead bodies, he had the unwelcome sense that, by manhandling Milon up to the Abbey and throwing him in that cell, he had acted like a bully.

It was the lad’s weeping that was so disturbing, damn it! You couldn’t even call it that, really – it was like no crying that Josse had ever heard before. It was a quiet, high-pitched keening sound, like the wind blowing through thin reeds.