The Murderer's Tale (23 page)

“You’ve worried this would happen, then,” the nun said.

“Not this precisely.” There was hardly better sport to be had then leading people to the conclusions he wanted them to have and this woman was ready to go wherever he led. “But something. Not even Lionel could put up with the fellow much longer. If he chose to let his demon do the striking, well.” He spread his hands to show himself both helpless in the matter and forgiving. “I’ll do the best for Lionel that I can when he’s in my keeping.”

“He needs clean clothing and a chance to wash,” the nun said.

“I’ll see about it.” Her meddling was unsubtle but in this case helpful. Apparent concern on his cousin’s behalf would give him excuse to talk with Lady Lovell and he had been wanting that, to be sure she still meant to go the way he had set her. He too often found it was one thing to put people on a course and another to keep them there, especially with women.

Still bent on everything she could glean from him, the nun asked, “What happens to your cousin when he’s attacked?”

Giles had told this often enough today that it was beginning to bore him, but it would not hurt to make it clear to one more person, especially since she seemed to be more able to talk at ease with Lady Lovell than he had ever yet managed. He shaped his face to regret and pain to show how difficult it was for him to speak of it and said, “He goes wild. He flings about, arms and legs in all directions. His body wrenches one way and another. He kicks and foams. Five men can’t hold him, the demon is that strong in him. And the sounds. God forbid you ever have the misfortune to hear what comes out of his mouth when the fiend is in him.”

“But if it’s that way with him, how could he possibly have been able to kill a man?” the nun asked.

Giles deepened his look of regret and added worry. “What I’m afraid of is that the demon may be gaining the upper hand with him. If that’s true, it will all be the worse with him from now on and danger to anyone who’s with him when the demon takes hold.”

“But at least there’s warning when an attack is coming. His hand.”

If she were half so eager at her prayers as she was at questions, she must be well on her way to sainthood by now; but she had given him another opening and he used it. “That’s been a blessing, right enough, but the warning doesn’t always come and now that he has a death on his hands, there may be nothing for it but to keep him confined all the time.”

“Oh, no—” Edeyn began, but Giles closed a hand hard over her nearest one, warning her against whatever halfwitted protest she had been about to make.

“If it has to come to that, it has to,” he said. “Do you want to risk him killing someone else? Think on it, my heart. If I can convince Lord Lovell I should have him in my keeping, at least he’ll be with people who know him, care about him. But he’ll have to be kept close even then, for your sake, for the child’s sake. For everyone’s safety, including Lionel’s.”

Edeyn bent her head, acknowledging he had the sorry right of it. He appreciated that about her. A stupid wife would have been troublesome, but Edeyn was clever enough to grasp a thing if he made it plain to her and did not think herself so clever as to argue with him. She did what he wanted her to do, when he wanted her to do it, and knew how to keep her mouth shut; and all of that was more than could be hoped for from this nun who talked too much and did not know when she ought to leave.

But Edeyn was useful that way, too. He squeezed her hand again so she would know how he wanted her to answer while he touched her face gently with his other hand and said, “You look pale. Should you lie down awhile? It’s not been a good day.”

Obediently, with only the quickest little glance at the nun, she said, “You may be right. I… could lie down, I suppose.”

“There’s my good girl. You’ll pardon us, I hope?” he added pointedly at the nun.

She took the hint, which was almost more than he had hoped for, made her farewell, and left. Giles loosed Edeyn’s hand, not caring whether she lay down or not. She did not need to so far as he could tell, and he was less concerned over her than annoyed at the effort it had cost him to be rid of that fool nun. “What was she here for? To hear all about Lionel so she could tattle it to anyone who’ll listen to her, I suppose. What sort of things did she ask?”

“Nothing in particular,” Edeyn answered. But Nan said with her, so that Giles nearly missed it, “Your shoes.”

Giles turned on her with narrowing eyes. “My shoes?”

“The ones that are lost,” Edeyn answered. “We haven’t found them yet or understood how they could be so lost, here in the room.”

“Servants too careless to remember what they’ve done or too dishonest to admit to their idiocy, that’s how you explain it. How did she come to be asking about them at all, come to that?”

He tried to make it casual but he wanted the answer, and when neither of them gave it to him, he snapped, “How did shoes come into your conversation? Nan?”

The maid bit her lip, confused because she did not know how angry he was going to be and frightened of what might come because of it. Servants knew enough to be afraid of him, and they knew enough to answer as fast as might be, and after a desperate glance at Edeyn who would be no help if she knew what was good for her, Nan gabbled, “It’s just she was in here this morning while I was putting your chest to rights and I told her I didn’t know why it was messed because I didn’t. Then just now she asked me if I’d found out why and I had, so I told her.”

God save him from women’s tongues. There would be no harm come of her having said so much, but he wished to the devil she had not said it at all. They would never find the shoes he had worn last night. By now they were buried in river mud or, even if they mischanced to be found, were not identifiable as his, and after that while in the river no one would likely be able to tell the stain on the right one’s sole was blood.

That had annoyed him, and that it was no one’s fault but his own had annoyed him more. He had been so intent on the pleasure of killing Martyn he had forgotten, when he shoved him forward across Lionel, that he needed to put the dagger in Lionel’s right hand and Lionel’s right hand had been under Martyn. So he had had to straddle over Lionel for a grip on Martyn’s shoulders, to pull him back and roll him sideways to clear Lionel’s hand, and when he did, he had slid his right foot into some of the blood and not known it until he had put his foot down again as he dropped Martyn and found it sticky on the floor.

So the shoes had had to go. It had not been much problem to hide their soft leather inside the front of his full-cut houpelande this morning, and when all the first shrieking and jabbering over Martyn’s death were done, he had only had to go for a walk to the river gate across the yard, watch the water flow awhile, and then take a moment when no one would see him to slip them into the water. He was sure of them; but for just now, for just this while, he would rather shoes were not thought upon by anyone or, more especially, not talked of by tongue-wagging nuns.

But the more he made of it, the less readily they would forget it, so he shrugged with a disgusted look, as if he had never heard anything so stupid in his life and flicked a hand at Nan to find something useful to do while he turned back to Edeyn.

Chapter 19

In the great hall the third person Frevisse asked was able to tell her that Dame Claire was gone out into the garden with most of Lady Lovell’s damsels.

“And Lady Lovell?” Frevisse asked.

“Still at work, my lady. There’s manor court tomorrow and she’s always more to do before that. So she’ll know at least as much as the folk she’s judging, she says.”

Frevisse thanked the man and betook herself out to the garden, glad of a reason to be outside again and away from her questions, even if only for a little while.

Not that she could truly escape her questions; but she had discovered that if she put them aside awhile, the answers were sometimes waiting for her when she came back to them. The trouble now was that although she thought she had the answer to what had seemed wrong about Martyn’s death, she had no way of proving what she thought. A while in the garden might be the respite that she needed.

Coming out of the shadowed passageway, she found the Pleasaunce empty of anyone. Formal garden and greensward under the trees were alike quiet, unpeopled, and she wondered where the women had gone instead of here. Then she heard music from beyond the arbor walk, a lighthearted turn on a psaltery, and in no great haste, enjoying her momentary solitude, she made her way to the arbor’s shaded way and through it to the rose garden where the rose-trellised cream stone walls held in the warm, mild afternoon sunlight.

Most of Lady Lovell’s damsels, the boy Harry, and his sister were there. The children were sitting on the path, rolling a leather ball back and forth between them, and a few of the older women were sitting with their sewing in their laps on the grassy bench that followed the wall, but in the center of the garden a woman was seated on the edge of the fountain, her dark red skirts spread around her, playing with clever fingers on the psaltery laid in her lap while the rest of the women and girls—Luce among them—circled her hand in hand in a quick-footed, laughing dance.

Frevisse paused, watching. It had been a long while since she had danced and she had no inclination to it now, but it was a pleasure to watch the others’ delight in it. It was a simple dance, a few steps sideways leftward, then a few steps sideways rightward, then more steps leftward, a clap of hands, a swirl of skirts as each dancer spun in her place, and then the sideways steps again. Simple, except that with each repetition the lady played a little faster than she had the time before it. Only a little faster but the pace steadily quickening as it was repeated over and over, faster and faster, feet beginning to tangle with skirts and dancers with each other until, breathless, laughing, unable to go on, the circle fell apart.

The lady with the psaltery flourished the tune to a triumphant end. Most of the dancers sank to the grass where they were and the others scattered to the grassy benches, everyone in happy talk. Luce, laughing and breathless like the rest, waved to Frevisse across the greensward. Frevisse smiled in return, but her mind was following a thought the dance had raised. Had it been like that for Giles? Had he started with small meannesses, ones as uncomplicated and simple as the first steps of that dance? No need to think about them much, or plan. They would have just come, as the steps had come with the music in the dance, easy and pleasant. For surely Giles took pleasure in what he did.

Why? Because unkindness was easier than kindness? Because it was more satisfying in the power that it gave him over others? Yes, that likely was it. See, I can make you hurt. You weren’t hurting and now you are. I did that. That’s how powerful I am.

And the more hurt one could give, the more powerful one was.

That was a lie, of course. The willingness to hurt was not power, it was weakness, because joy, even happiness, was a much more difficult thing to give than pain. Pain was the weakling’s way of dealing with the world. Giles had probably slipped from one small meanness to another, each one growing larger, no one’s feelings mattering except his own as the devil played him along the way, faster and faster like the steps in the dance, unkindness growing into cruelty, cruelty into… what?

“Dame Frevisse.”

She had been too intent on her own thinking to notice Dame Claire sitting an arm’s length aside from her at the end of the grassy bench beside the arbor’s arched way into the rose garden. Embarrassed at her absentmindedness— no, her other-mindedness—Frevisse joined her, no need for greeting between them and her mind already going back to Giles until Dame Claire asked, “Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

Frevisse tried to remember what it was Dame Claire had been supposed to learn and remembered and said, “There was no blood on anybody’s shoes, was there?”

“No.” Dame Claire contained a smile to the corners of her mouth. “But how could you be so sure?”

“Because the shoes Master Giles wore yesterday are missing.”

The dancers were standing up again, demanding a slow measure this time while the psaltery player protested her fingers needed longer rest than this. Their friendly argument filled up the space of Dame Claire’s silence, until she finally said, “And you think that means—what?”

Frevisse held her answer, feeling at it before she said more carefully than she might have, “I think that it is an uncomfortable chance that I saw what could have been part of a bloody footprint between the bodies and that Master Giles’ shoes should choose today to go missing.”

“And you think Giles was there when Martyn was killed, or afterward sometime, and chose to say nothing about it?”

Frevisse, gazing down at her hands folded in her lap, did not answer that.

So low even Frevisse could barely hear her, Dame Claire said, “You think it was Giles killed Martyn, don’t you?”

Still looking at her hands, Frevisse moved her head down in a single nod.

“But all you have against him are his missing shoes and a possible footprint,” Dame Claire pointed out. “And the footprint is gone so we can’t be sure it was a footprint and we can’t see if there’s any blood on Master Giles’ shoes. In brief, you have nothing.”

“We have a likelihood,” Frevisse said.

“We have a likelihood that’s very possibly grown from your dislike of him.”

“I haven’t—”

“You do dislike him.”

“And so do you.”

“But I’m not looking to find him a murderer. You’ve taken against him the way you take against Domina Alys—”

“With good reason in both cases!”

“In her case you maybe take more against her than you should, you’re so utterly against her. In his case you’ve taken against him more than any evidence warrants.”

Frevisse bit back a sharp reply to that. The music and dancing had begun again. So long as they kept their faces neutral and their voices down, no one was likely to heed what they were saying. She waited until she was sure of her face and voice before she said, “He’s lied and lied again about his cousin. He’s lied about the way Lionel’s fits take him, to make it seem more likely he would be frenzied enough to kill. He’s lied about how it was between Lionel and Martyn…”