The Murderer's Tale (21 page)

“But he was lying stretched out on his back as if to rest, as if he had been carefully placed that way. And the blood on the floor wasn’t smeared, as it should have been if he had moved that violently. It looked as if he fell and Martyn fell across him, bleeding, and then Lionel never moved at all but Martyn did.”

“Then it had to be a last spasm by Martyn?” Lady Lovell asked, not refusing the problem Frevisse was making but considering other possibilities.

Frevisse held silent. It would be so simple if that were it. But… “I don’t know.” She turned to Dame Claire. “How much would a man likely move after a wound like that? After bleeding as much as he did over Lionel?”

Unwillingly, Dame Claire said slowly, “It was a very great deal of blood. Martyn was assuredly unconscious and probably fully dead as he lay on Lionel, there was so much blood there. He might… twitch. The body sometimes does when death comes too suddenly. But to move enough to be…” Dame Claire stopped, apparently trying to remember in greater detail than she had wanted to what she had seen in the chapel. Even more slowly than before, she finished, “… to be lying as far away from Lionel as he was, no, I don’t see how he could.”

Though she had found her way through the words almost one by one, not liking them even as she said them, she was sure of what she said. The three women looked at one another. If it could not have been what it had so readily seemed, what
had
happened?

Carefully Frevisse said, “There was a thin smear of what I thought was blood on the bare floor between the bodies. As if from a…” It was harder to say it than it had been to think it. “… a foot.”

“A footprint?” Dame Claire asked.

“No. Nothing so definite. A smear. Not even foot-sized.”

“There was so much blood,” Lady Lovell offered. “This was simply more.”

“All the rest of the blood there was thick, had flowed over Lionel, over Martyn. This was apart from both of them and smeared thin.”

Dame Claire began to make what looked to be an objection but stopped and waited, her gaze going from Frevisse’s face to Lady Lovell’s and back again. Lady Lovell said nothing at all for a long moment, then, lifted her skirt a little, put out her slippered foot, and slid it slightly across the floor. “Smeared like that?”

Frevisse nodded. “Like that. As if there had been blood on just the forepart of a shoe and the foot had slipped and smeared it.”

“Neither of them could have stepped in the blood after the blow was struck?” Lady Lovell asked.

“I’ve already looked at Martyn’s shoes and there was nothing. I want to look at Lionel’s.”

“It might have been Sire Benedict or your priest, careless when they first came in and found them.”

“The smear was dark and dried. It had been there longer than that.”

“Long enough that maybe someone came in well before then, came close enough to step in the blood, and left without raising a cry for some reason or other?”

“They might have,” Frevisse conceded.

“Or it wasn’t blood at all but a stain already on the chapel floor,” Dame Claire suggested.

“Then it will still be there when I go back to look again,” Frevisse said.

“The chapel is new,” Lady Lovell said. “There had better be no stains on its floor.”

“The wound,” Dame Claire said as if startled.

Frevisse and Lady Lovell looked at her. “The wound?” Frevisse asked.

“The wound!” Dame Claire gestured toward her throat, trying to make them see. “It was a single slash across his throat. A single, clean wound. Only that one. Do you see?”

Belatedly, Frevisse did, finally able to grasp what had made her uneasy when she had spoken of Martyn’s death to the servants. And judging by Lady Lovell’s soft exclamation, she saw it, too. Despite all the talk of Lionel killing in a demon-driven frenzy, there was only the one wound. No wild slashing or stabbing or signs of struggle. One wound and…

Lady Lovell completed Frevisse’s thought aloud, “And it had to have been made from behind, to have been put like that across his throat so cleanly and high up.” The way the huntsman finished a deer in the hunting field, by straddling its downed body, jerking back the head, and slicing open the throat, not from in front but from behind.

They looked at each other, all with the same question, but it was Lady Lovell who finally said it aloud.

“What was Martyn doing with his back to Lionel?”

Chapter 17

Neither Frevisse nor Dame Claire made answer to that. For Martyn to turn his back on Lionel, to be so distracted as to let his dagger be taken and his throat be cut by the man he was there to watch and help…

“And then for Lionel to fall and be lying perfectly straight on his back with his hands arranged on his breast, and Martyn to wait until then before falling across him,” Frevisse said slowly. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Lady Lovell, her voice as even and almost as pleasant as usual but with a hard anger in her eyes, said, “Apparently there’s going to be more for the crowner to ask about than we thought at first. Dame Claire, will you do something more than you have already?”

Somewhat unwillingly, Dame Claire nodded.

“Would you see if Sire Benedict or your priest have blood on their shoe soles? I can’t think of any way to find out except by asking to see them, but if you could do it so they don’t know that it matters, it would be better. Can you do that?”

“Yes, my lady. Father Henry has only the one pair of shoes, I know, but does Sire Benedict have more so he could have changed?”

“He has only the one pair and they’re new ones, part of his Easter livery. He always gives his old ones away afterward, for charity’s sake and to have no more than he needs. Dame Frevisse, as well as Lionel’s shoes, would you find out exactly what happens in his attacks? I’ve always let it be enough for me to know he has them and to pray for him and made a point not to pry beyond that. Enough people pry at him, he’s needed a few friends who don’t; but maybe if we know more about them, we’ll find we’ve only misunderstood something and there’s no problem after all.”

Unhesitatingly Frevisse said, “Yes, my lady,” ignoring Dame Claire’s sideways look at her that said she suspected Frevisse would have tried anyway, asked or not.

Lady Lovell shook her head. “I don’t want to be doubting where there was no doubt, but if it’s possible Martyn didn’t die the way we thought, if it’s possible Lionel didn’t kill him, then…” She stopped but what she did not say was there in the silence with them.

If Lionel had not killed Martyn, then someone else had, and while Lionel was chained with his despair in the dark room, the murderer was still free among them.

In the great hall after they had left Lady Lovell, Dame Claire said, “Before anything, I think we should go to the chapel for at least one of the morning’s offices. We’ve done none of them.”

With sharp guilt, Frevisse realized that was true. Yesterday she had been missing St. Frideswide’s familiar ways. Today she had forgone everything that made St. Frideswide’s most precious to her. She bent her head in quick agreement. “In the chapel?”

It had been blood-polluted, but it was quiet and apart from the general bustle of the household, still a good place to pray.

Dame Claire agreed with a nod, adding, “Besides, I doubt I could draw you as far away as the church again, could I? Not with your mind all turned to this.”

Frevisse knew how little Dame Claire had liked her morning spent in what had seemed indulgent curiosity and too much talk. “Dame Claire, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for asking questions? You always ask questions. And it seems this time you’re in the right with them. There seem to be questions that ought to be asked before Lionel is condemned. But there are also prayers to be said.”

She said it without irk or anger, only firmly, and did not wait for more agreement but led the way back to the stairs that would take them up to the solar rather than across the hall now busy with servants beginning to set up the tables for dinner. Frevisse followed, meaning to say nothing else, but as they came to Lionel’s guarded door, with Deryk still outside it, she said, “Wait only a moment, I pray you.” Before Dame Claire had turned around to ask her why, she said, “Deryk, I need to see Lionel again.”

Behind her, Dame Claire made a disapproving noise, but Deryk was already unlocking the door without question or hesitation, and when he opened it and stood aside, Frevisse went in without looking back to see how annoyed Dame Claire now was.

The thin band of sunlight through the slit window had strengthened since early morning, but even so the room would have been mostly darkness until the door opened, letting in the fuller light from the stairs. Lionel, still seated where she had left him, slumped forward on the chest, did not respond. Only Fidelitas, still leaning against his knee, lifted her head to see who had come. To one side the food Father Henry must have brought him sat on the floor untouched even by Fidelitas.

There was no particular point in talk. What comfort she could offer, she had offered before, so she simply said, “Let me see the bottom of your shoes.”

Lionel stirred and looked at her, not speaking but visibly working to draw his mind back from whatever darkness it had reached. Finally, more slowly than Frevisse’s impatience would have liked, he grasped what she had asked of him and lifted his left foot and cocked his knee to bend his foot toward the doorway and the light. There was nothing on the sole beyond expected scuffs.

“Your other one,” she said.

There was no blood on it either, but this time as he set it down he asked, “Why?”

She could not tell him, not with Deryk there to hear and the chance it would not come to anything after all. “There are people who care about you. Hold to that. Remember it.”

Fidelitas whined small in her throat and nudged her muzzle against his arm. Lionel moved his free hand to the nape of her neck and sank his fingers into her fur, holding to it as if to a lifeline.

Frevisse drew back and let Deryk close the door.

“Has anyone besides Father Henry come to him?” she asked.

“Only our priest, and he didn’t do good with him either,” Deryk readily answered.

Dame Claire said nothing to her at all, simply turned away and went on to the chapel.

It smelled of lye and scrubbing and had a barren air, with the long woven carpet rolled up from across the floor to lie in front of the altar that now was stripped of its white covering and all the things that had stood on it. Over it the lamp hung dark.

But the chapel was still a good place for prayer, a place where holiness had been, and quiet and apart from the household bustle. Frevisse and Dame Claire went past the large damp places where the scrubbing had been done to kneel in front of the altar. Times for the early and mid-morning offices were long past, but it was close to the time for None and they settled to the prayers and psalms together. Frevisse knew she took too long to draw her mind fully into them but thought she had managed it until at the end, while she was saying, correctly, with Dame Claire, the Paschaltide responsory of Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, she found she was thinking, far more strongly, the prayer from the end of None.
Misericordia et Veritas praecedent faciem tuam, Domine.
Mercy and truth go before you, Lord.

In the head-bowed silence after they had finished, she went on praying for that. For mercy and truth. And that there would be mercy in the truth once it was found.

If it was found.

Chapter 18

It was time for dinner when they finished, and though Frevisse dreaded the talk there would be with so many people brought together for the first time since this morning, there was no choice but to go.

It helped that she and Dame Claire were at the high table, though their company there was noticeably diminished not only by Lionel’s absence but by that of Giles and Edeyn and Sire Benedict. Lady Lovell saw to it that the talk around her was kept to ordinary things, but enough snatches and scraps of conversation from the lower tables reached Frevisse to make plain there was no restraint there. It seemed interest in the general bloodiness of the murder had eased in favor of speculation over Lionel. It did not matter that it was understood he had only killed because he was possessed. That warranted pity and pity was granted, in limited amounts; but it warranted fear, too, because what could be expected of a man so readily seized on, so readily driven out of his mind? And with the fear went indignation that—like the fear—was the more enjoyable because it could both be safely indulged in and was so undeniably justified.

With dinner over and the household scattering to their afternoon tasks, Dame Claire said, “I’ll speak with Father Henry before he goes and find out Sire Benedict afterward. What are you about?”

“I want to talk to Edeyn about Lionel’s fits.”

Dame Claire went away toward Father Henry where he was in talk with some officer of the household about coursing hares, to judge by their gestures.

Frevisse made her own way through the thinning shift of people, picking up snippets of talk as she went, most of it no different from the rest she had heard and, so far as she could tell, summed up by one of the maidservants she had earlier heard in the solar, exclaiming still on a variation of her theme, “And think! They’ve left him loose all this time! It’s a wonder it hasn’t come to this before. It’s a wonder it hasn’t. And it could have been anyone he killed. It could have been any of us!”

“And could still be one of us,” the man she talked to said. “Think on it. They say he takes on the strength of fifteen men when the demon takes hold of him. How likely is he to be held by those little chains and that door there and Deryk? The sooner he’s gone the better.”

“They say Sire Benedict blessed the chains with holy water, to be sure they’d hold,” another woman said. She had serving dishes stacked in her hands and was probably meant to be clearing the table.

“And how much good do you think Sire Benedict’s holy water is going to do against a demon that can murder a man in a chapel?” the man scoffed. “If it wills it, Master Knyvet’ll pull the chains out of the wall and burst the door and go where he pleases, and where will we be then?”