The Murderer's Tale (15 page)

Giles was momentarily afraid the priests would hear and come, but there were two heavy doors and their own jollity to shield them: and the parlor below the chapel was empty this time of night. Here was as safe from interruption as any place was likely to be. And if it was not meant to happen, why should everything have fallen so readily into place? He would have done it wherever the next chance came, he had reached the end of patience, but with it coming here at Minster Lovell, who would suspect anything because who would do deliberate murder here when there were other, potentially far safer places for it? The only great trouble could have been Lord Lovell, but with him gone, nobody was likely to see anything except the obvious or ask unfortunate questions. Not that Giles meant for there to be anything to question. He was going to make it obvious what had happened, with no need for anyone to question anything. God himself must be sick of Lionel’s misery, to have made it all so easy.

And now was coming what he waited for. Lionel’s flailing faltered. His body went on jerking as if unable to give it up, his head still twisting from side to side, but the spasming of his legs and arms slackening until at last he was only lying there, sprawled out on his back, drawing breath in deep, raw gasps, still unconscious but finally quiet.

With a heavy sigh, Martyn let loose of him and sank back on his heels. In the usual way of things, he would now spread the cloak over Lionel to keep him warm, try to make that useless husk of a body comfortable, and then wait through the uncertain while until Lionel regained what passed for his wits. After one of these massive attacks that could be until dawn.

But not this time, cur, Giles promised silently. Quiet-footed, quickly, any sound of his movement covered by Lionel’s heavy breathing, Giles closed in behind him.

The main problem had been the weapon. Giles had considered it carefully, because it had to stay here. That meant he could not use his own nor bring an unexplained one with him, and Lionel always left his belt and dagger behind when he knew one of these attacks was coming. That left only Martyn’s dagger and now, like everything else Giles had needed to be right for tonight, it proved to be no problem at all. Martyn was still crouched beside Lionel’s body, leaning forward a little on his hands, head hanging while he recovered himself from the fight against Lionel’s madness. Giles’ hand slipped along his side from behind and had his dagger out of its sheath before Martyn knew he was there.

He felt it leave the sheath, though, and Giles could have struck then, simply, before Martyn could turn and know who was there, but that was not what he wanted. He wanted Martyn to know who did it to him. He wanted to be the last thing Martyn saw before he went to hell.

And it was easy. Simply a matter, with Martyn on his knees in front of him, beginning to turn, of reaching around to clamp free hand across Martyn’s forehead and jerk it backward so that Martyn stared upward into his face, too taken by surprise to resist. Giles, sure and harsh with pleasure, smiled down at him, saw recognition come, and slashed the long edge of the dagger across his throat, high up under the chin, flesh and windpipe gashed open in one clean stroke.

Martyn’s expression had hardly begun to change toward surprise when it went blank with shock. His hands moved toward his throat where there was blood now. Giles shoved him forward, away. Martyn lurched, one hand scrabbling outward as if to grab hold of something that would stop the dying, but there was not anything would do that now. His harsh gargling was attempt to cry out, but he had no voice to cry with; blood and breath were rasping out of the wound together. He was dead even while he was trying to live, and Giles in sudden exaltation shoved him again, sending him in a sprawl across Lionel’s body, and then stood over him, watching, until all movement and any sound ceased.

It had been so easy.

Chapter 11

The dawn darkness was astir with the murmur and movement of women the whole length of the long room. There was protest at the night lamp being out—“It was
not
my turn to be sure it was filled.”—and someone set open a shutter at the room’s far end, making a rectangle of lesser darkness that was small help. Light showed under the edge of Lady Lovell’s door, but it was nobody’s business to be disturbing her. Whoever had turn at attending her last night would be seeing to her now; the rest of them were expected to be readying themselves for the day, in the dark or otherwise.

After years of midnight and dawn risings in the nunnery, dressing in the dark was no particular problem for Frevisse and Dame Claire. They had laid out their outer gowns, wimples, veils, and shoes ready on either side of the bed when they undressed. Now while the other women were still complaining and groping, they put them back on without fuss or fumbling, Frevisse putting the last pin in her veil when Dame Claire, already finished, came around the bed to say in a low voice, “We could go to the chapel to pray before the household comes.”

Frevisse, realizing that was a thought she should have had herself instead of indulging in satisfaction at how adroitly she and Dame Claire were managing compared to the other women, agreed immediately; it seemed she was in particular need of prayers. With a quiet word to one of the women near Dame Claire and by the faint light through the window, they made their way to the door and out into the solar. Its unshuttered window and the growing dawn outside gave light enough they crossed it without trouble, lengthwise to the door to the chapel’s antechamber where the door standing open into the chapel itself let out welcome lamplight. Dame Claire was leading, and it was into her that Father Henry blundered, bursting out of the chapel as she reached the door. They both cried out and so did Frevisse, all of them startled, but Father Henry’s cry had the more fear in it, and behind him, from the chapel, Sire Benedict called out shrilly, “What is it? God have mercy!”

Father Henry had instinctively grabbed Dame Claire by her arms to keep her from falling. Now he hurriedly let her go and broke off the apology he had started to call back, “The nuns! It’s only the nuns!”

“Keep them out! For God’s pity, keep them out!”

Frevisse had no intention of keeping out. Father Henry was easily flustered but not readily made afraid, and he was afraid. Sire Benedict’s voice held horror as well as fear, and while Dame Claire recovered her feet from Father Henry’s and tried to ask him what was the matter, Frevisse slipped past them both into the chapel.

Two bodies were sprawled on the floor in front of the altar with Sire Benedict poised over them, his hands held out as if he meant to bless them. But his face, turned toward her, held not blessing but the shock and blindness of someone wanting to deny what he had seen.

But Frevisse saw all too clearly. Lionel first, stretched out on his back, his chest heaving as if he were trying to rouse from a heavy sleep, his head beginning to roll a little and his arms to move. Then Martyn flung out beside him, arms and legs carelessly thrown wide, his head canted aside so there was no way not to see the red slash high across his throat or the empty gaping of his face.

Frevisse had encountered death before, some as bad as this, but she turned her head away, sickened both by the ugliness and by her memory of Martyn as she had last seen him, laughing. Alive.

Sire Benedict, determined she should not be there, stepped between her and the body, shooing his hands at her, saying in distress, “It isn’t something you should see, my lady, please, go back, this isn’t something—”

“I’ve already seen,” she said. She had only with difficulty learned to keep her vow of obedience after she became a nun, and there were still times, when a matter was urgent enough, that she chose to forgo it. “We have to take Master Knyvet out of here before he fully rouses.”

Sir Benedict boggled at her, as if that were too difficult a thought for him to manage just now, but behind her Dame Claire said, “He shouldn’t see Martyn like that. Father Henry, help me. Sire Benedict’s room, I think.”

As the priory’s infirmarian, she was used in her own way to the disasters that could befall a human body, and when there was any chance at all to help or mend she fought fiercely; but there was no hope at all of Martyn and so Lionel was her concern. She went forward in her brisk certainty of what needed to be done, and Frevisse went with her, seeing more clearly what must have happened here.

Lionel was stirring more, closer to consciousness, she guessed. Martyn’s blood was matted darkly across him and on the floor beyond him, far more than was on Martyn himself. A practical corner of Frevisse’s mind noted that though Martyn lay partly on the woven carpet that ran down the altar steps and across the floor, Lionel was sprawled off of it and all the blood was on him or beyond him, leaving the carpet unmarred. That was the single good thing, she thought, defending herself against the increasingly sickening realization of what must have happened here, a realization worse than what she actually saw. A bloodied dagger lay on the floor at Lionel’s side. Its empty sheath was on Martyn’s belt. All the blood was apparently Martyn’s. There seemed to be no wound at all on Lionel.

“It was his demon,” Sire Benedict said behind her. “In his madness, when his demon came, he killed his man. God have mercy, God have mercy, God have mercy—”

“It’s
our
mercy Lionel needs now,” Frevisse snapped. Lionel was too much for her and Dame Claire to handle, even between them. “Help us,” she demanded. “He has to be taken out of here.”

“It’s the only mercy we can give him,” Dame Claire said. “He mustn’t see his friend like this.”

Her appeal more than Frevisse’s demand seemed to reach Sire Benedict and Father Henry both. They came and between them lifted Lionel out of the gore he lay in. Much of the blood went with him, soaked into his clothing, but at least he would be away from sight of what he had done. Dame Claire went ahead to push the chapel door wide and open the way into Sire Benedict’s room. She said over her shoulder as she went, “I’ll go tell Lady Lovell. She has to know as soon as may be.”

Frevisse stayed where she was; it would be wrong to leave Martyn’s body alone even for that little while. He had died in violence and without time for the last things that should be done to insure the soul’s safe going from the body. He needed prayers, as soon and as many as could be managed.

She tried to gather her wits to it but found she was only looking down at the darkened blood and abandoned dagger, trying to understand what had happened beyond the certainty that Martyn’s death had come from Lionel’s hand. Not by Lionel’s will surely; he must have been possessed when he struck the blow. Not that it mattered, she supposed. The final reality was what they would all have to deal with, more than how or why it had happened.

Sire Benedict returned alone. Past the first horror now but avoiding a direct look on Martyn’s body, he said calmly enough, “Father Henry is staying with Master Knyvet. He’s strong enough to restrain him if that’s needed.”

“Has he been told? Is he conscious enough to understand?”

“Not yet. He’s like someone taking a long while to come out of a heavy, heavy sleep.”

He brought himself to look down at Martyn’s body and made the sign of the cross over it; but as he raised his head, he saw the altar and his expression changed as a new realization came on him. “And everything here is profaned. It may even have to be reconsecrated! Oh, God have mercy!”

His cry was from the heart, and Frevisse silently echoed it. The shedding of blood had made the chapel unholy, unusable. Water and heavy scrubbing would maybe cleanse away the blood, but the pollution of spirit would only yield to a complex ritual, and until that was done, the place could no longer be used for any sacred services.

Sire Benedict moved past her to the altar, genuflected, took the small gold box of consecrated wafers out of the silver-gilt tabernacle, genuflected again, and extinguished what was meant to be a perpetual flame in the red-glass lamp, sign of the Presence that could not stay here now. Everything holy in the room would have to be taken out, the better of him for it. He was neither a fool nor coward as she had first feared, only a man caught out of his ordinary way of things, and though he had not shifted on the instant to face them, he was managing now. But relief was nonetheless plain in his voice as he cried, “Master Holt! Thank God! Can you make them go away?”

Master Holt could at least silence them. He made his orders crisp and to the point, and the babble of demands and exclaims fell sharply off so that he came into the chapel backed by what might have passed for a respectful hush, though Frevisse as she rose to her feet saw gawking faces still crowded in the doorway before Master Holt firmly shut the door on them.

His look asked whether Frevisse was help or hindrance or someone he could ignore. To show she could be the latter, she stepped back from the body, leaving it to him. Accepting that, he turned and looked first at Martyn’s body, then at the evidence of blood on the floor beyond it and asked, “That’s where Master Knyvet lay?”

Sire Benedict had come a few steps after him. “Yes. He’s in my room now. Father Henry is with him. He’s all covered with blood.”

“But unhurt himself?”

Sire Benedict’s expression reflected Frevisse’s own realization that none of them had thought to see for certain if Lionel was wounded. Uncertainly he answered, “No, no hurt on him, I think. Unless it’s very small.”

“So all this blood is Gravesend’s and more of it is on Master Knyvet.”

“Yes.”

Master Holt’s look returned with no eagerness to Martyn’s body. “That wound is too high in the throat to have spewed blood widely. What happened for there to be so much on Master Knyvet? Gravesend must have fallen across him after he was sliced. But that’s not the way they were found. What happened?”

He was asking the question of himself, but it was one that had already stirred in Frevisse’s mind. Forgetting she was supposed to have no part in this, she said, “They fell that way and then Martyn was thrown off by some last spasm of Lionel’s body.”