Music of the Distant Stars (31 page)

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Authors: Alys Clare

BOOK: Music of the Distant Stars
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‘I know what she did,’ I whispered. ‘She made Lady Claude give up her vocation to be your wife.’
‘She did, she did,’ he sighed heavily. ‘And, weakling that I am, I agreed. But you must believe what I said just now: in truth, and I swear it upon what little honour remains to me, I would not have abandoned Ida. I could never have done that. Ida and I have always been discreet; Claude knows nothing of what we are to each other, and I would have made sure she never found out. I had formed a plan to acquire a little cottage for Ida where she could bear my child and raise it in safety, where I would have visited when I could.’ He turned to Edild, sitting so still and silent as she listened. ‘I would have supported them, my Ida and my child!’ he said urgently.
‘On your wife’s money,’ Edild said neutrally.
She was right, and there was no denying it. All the same, I felt a stab of pity for Sir Alain, for as my aunt spoke those four damning words, he flinched as if he had been stabbed.
I said, wanting, I think, to save him further pain, ‘Alberic’s motive for attacking you must, then, have surely been jealousy, for Ida, whom he adored, had given her love to you and not to him.’
He frowned. ‘Yes. Perhaps, yes.’
I thought of something that might confirm that it had undoubtedly been Alberic who hit Sir Alain. ‘Did you notice anything unusual just before the attack?’ I asked.
The frown intensified as he tried to remember. ‘I heard something very odd,’ he said eventually, and I knew I’d been right. ‘It was a sort of humming, and the very notes were enough to make a listener feel so sad, as if all the happiness had been sucked out of the world.’ I sympathized; I, too, had suffered the same reaction.
Unless there had been two men skulking around and humming in the graveyard, we had our proof of Alberic’s guilt.
I thought about it, extending the image of Alberic’s furious attack to encompass another killing. ‘It must have been Alberic who killed Ida,’ I said slowly, for all that I knew I had originally decided he was innocent. ‘He came here full of hopes to claim her and marry her, now that his wife’s death had left him free, and when he approached her, she told him she was pregnant by another man who loved her, and she loved him too, so there was no hope for Alberic, after all he’d been through, and he strangled her. Then he had to kill Derman because he thought he’d witnessed the murder, and then finally he tried to kill you, Sir Alain, for despoiling Ida.’
My tumble of words was followed by utter silence. Edild was studying me closely, but her expression told me nothing, and I did not know if she agreed with my suggestion of what had happened or if she believed I was quite wrong.
Tentatively, Sir Alain said, ‘It could, I suppose, have been as you say . . .’ His voice tailed off as if he could not quite convince himself.
The silence fell again, enveloping us all. Then at last Edild spoke. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But consider this.’
She stood up, gracefully, in one single movement. She crossed to the place in the corner where we store firewood and, selecting a length of birch as long as her arm, held it in both hands. She swung it through the air, first from right to left, then from left to right.
‘I am right-handed,’ she said, ‘and it is natural for me to swing a weapon this way.’ She swung the wood again from right to left. ‘My right hand and arm are the stronger, because habitually I use them more, and swinging this way lets the stronger arm dominate.’
She put the wood tidily back in its place and sat down once more beside Sir Alain. She reached out and touched the swelling on his head, hidden under its compress. ‘You were hit on the back of your head on the left side,’ she said. ‘Derman, whom Lassair suggests was felled by the same man, was hit on the right side of his head.’
She looked at me, at Sir Alain, and then back at me. Neither he nor I spoke, so in the end she did.
With a faint sigh, she said, ‘One attack was by a right-hander, the other by a left-hander. You and Derman, Sir Alain, were assailed by two different men.’
NINETEEN
 
T
he effort of talking seemed to have exhausted Sir Alain, who was lying back on his pillows with his eyes closed. ‘He should sleep,’ Edild whispered to me.
I nodded. ‘Can you spare me for a while?’ I asked.
‘I can, yes. If you are going out, you can take this tonic round to William for his old mother.’ She took the small vessel down from the shelf and handed it to me.
I put it in my satchel. ‘What’s in it?’
Edild gave a wry smile. ‘Little that will do her any good, I fear, for she is dying. It is mainly honey and water, with some cleansing herbs that will give a bitter tang and make the medicine taste sufficiently unpleasant for the old soul to believe it must surely be beneficial.’ She had suggested to me before that even a mixture that was mainly water might persuade a patient that his symptoms had been reduced if the healer presented it with sufficient conviction.
I was turning to leave when my aunt caught my sleeve. ‘Don’t accept anything in payment,’ she said. ‘It would not be right, for what I am sending is worthless.’
I nodded my understanding.
Worthless
, I thought as I strode away. I would do as my aunt commanded and take no payment, but I did not agree with her assessment of her remedy. She may not appreciate it, but the people of our village believe in her, and indeed they are right to do so. Even a bottle of water has worth when it comes from Edild’s hands.
I made my way to William’s tiny house and, when he came to the door in answer to my soft tap, I gave him the remedy. He stared at it as if I had presented him with a magical elixir – which, in a way, I suppose I had.
‘Thank you,’ he breathed, his eyes moist. ‘Thank your aunt, please. I know how much this will help Mother.’
It did not seem right to allow him to hope. I said, as gently as I could, ‘Do not expect a miracle, William. She is very old and frail, and it may be that her time on earth is drawing to its close.’
He looked at me. ‘I know,’ he said simply. ‘But I am not sure she does. If I can keep her spirits up, it helps.’
I reached out and took his hand. His words had moved me, and I admired him for his selflessness. That it came at a heavy cost to him was evident in his face and his bearing. I could think of nothing to say, so presently I let his hand drop and, with a brief farewell and a reminder to call on us if he needed anything, I left.
I could stride away in the sunshine of a lovely day. William, poor man, had to shut himself up in the frowsty darkness with a very old woman. I asked the spirits to support him and give him the strength he needed.
William’s house was on the far side of the village, near the spot where the road diverges and paths strike off towards Breckland to the north-east and Thetford to the east. Instead of returning along the bend of the track that runs through the village, I cut due south across the higher ground that lies to the east so as to approach Edild’s house from the back. The land was much drier up here above the marshes, but even so it did not yield much. There was some pasture, cropped close by the nibbling teeth of Lord Gilbert’s sheep, and an area of strips was under the plough. As I walked I nodded to some of the villagers working away there on the upland. There were never very many of them. Most of the labour force of the village was down on the fen cutting reeds and sedge and carving out peat for fuel. It was hard work; few men or women in Aelf Fen made old bones.
Directly ahead of me was an ancient oak tree, a rare enough specimen in our area for it to be a landmark, and indeed I had been using it as a marker, for when I reached it I would turn right and come out behind Edild’s house. I was preoccupied, thinking that William’s mother was probably the village’s oldest inhabitant and wondering just how old she was, when I sensed movement among the thick foliage of the oak and, almost simultaneously, someone dropped out of its lower branches and called out to me.
It was Alberic.
‘What do you—’ I began, before he shushed me violently and beckoned to me to join him in the huge tree’s deep shadow. ‘What are you doing here?’ I hissed as I approached him.
‘Is he dead?’ he whispered urgently. ‘I couldn’t help it – I saw him there by her grave, and I went wild.’ The words were tumbling out of him. ‘He seduced her and made her pregnant, and all the time he knew perfectly well he was going to wed that whey-faced woman who would far rather be a nun, but I didn’t mean to kill him, and I shouldn’t have hit him like I did! He—’
I put my hand on his arm, trying to quieten him. ‘Sir Alain is alive,’ I said clearly and calmly. ‘My aunt is a healer, and she has tended him.’
I watched as Alberic absorbed the news. Then, predictably, he said, ‘Does he know who hit him?’
‘He heard you singing,’ I replied. ‘Besides, it is, I think, fairly obvious.’
The dread and the terrible anxiety seemed to leach out of him, and he slumped against the broad, accommodating trunk of the oak, sliding down until his buttocks rested on the ground. ‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ he muttered. ‘I’m not a violent man.’
I sat down beside him. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ I suggested.
Alberic slowly shook his head, but not in denial. ‘I don’t think there’s much to tell,’ he said. ‘I attacked him, right enough. He was kneeling by her grave with his back to me. I’d been sitting there all night, singing my song to her, and I think it was all too much.’ A sob broke out of him. ‘I knew he’d always had an eye for Ida, but I didn’t really think anything of it because, from what I’d seen of him, he was like that with all the pretty girls. Funny thing is, they must all have realized the sort of man he was, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. They all liked him.’ He shook his head again as if in puzzlement at the incomprehensible ways of the world.
I pitied him. Married to a jealous and possessive dragon of a woman, the one ray of light in his wretched life had been a girl whom he did not dare approach and with whom all he could share was the occasional song. What a contrast with Alain de Villequier who, as I had observed myself, did indeed have a way with women . . .
‘They were that discreet, it didn’t even occur to me there was anything going on between them,’ Alberic said sadly. He glanced at me. ‘I – I thought better of Ida,’ he said, shamefaced. ‘I believed she was too good, too pure, to give herself to a man betrothed to another woman. But then, what do I know?’ he added bitterly.
‘When did you find out?’ I felt hugely sorry for him. Yes, he had just attacked a man and left him for dead, but I was beginning to understand what had driven him to it.
‘When I came here to Aelf Fen to seek her out,’ he replied. ‘I discovered that Lakehall was nearby, and I reckoned I’d be able to live rough, it being summer and the weather good, while I found her and told her I was now free.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Fat lot of good
that
did me, I can tell you. She looked at me out of those lovely eyes of hers and said she was honoured by my affection for her, but she loved another. When I pressed her, when I told her about my tidy little cottage and the decent living I make with my flint-working and the music and that, she said she was very sorry, but she could never be mine.’ He paused, and I saw tears in his eyes. ‘I went on at her, demanding to know who the other man was, and in the end she took pity on me and told me she was carrying this other feller’s child.’
‘She didn’t mention Sir Alain?’
He smiled grimly. ‘No. But now she’d told me there was someone else, I thought back, and I saw what I should have seen all along. She loved him all right. I knew then it was hopeless.’
I reached for his hand, then, pitching my voice so he would realize it wasn’t a serious suggestion, said, ‘You didn’t kill her in a fit of jealousy?’ I already knew the answer.
‘No,’ he said, his gentle face full of emotion. ‘I had to face up to the fact I had lost her, but I knew I just had to let her go. I loved her. It was not in me to take her life because she did not love me. I told her I wished her well, and in my heart I made myself believe it.’
That was true love indeed, I thought, that a man would place a woman’s happiness so far above his own, even though she would enjoy it with someone else.
‘I believe I know who put her in my Granny’s grave,’ I said. ‘I believe it was Derman.’ I explained my theory.
‘Derman?’ Alberic said when I had finished.
I explained about Derman too.
‘Didn’t know about
him
,’ Alberic muttered. ‘Someone else who couldn’t keep their eyes off my Ida.’
I was just thinking that, unless he was a very good liar, it didn’t look as if Alberic had killed Derman, when he spoke again. ‘Reckon I know who you mean, though,’ he said. ‘Big, awkward sort of feller, large head, big, floppy mouth.’
‘That was Derman, yes.’
‘Hmm.’ I waited. ‘Saw him talking to a woman,’ Alberic went on after a while. ‘Or, I should say,
she
was talking to
him
, standing there in front of him wagging her finger at him, giving him a right ticking-off.’
I stiffened. ‘What did this woman look like?’

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