A Shadowed Evil Page 24

  ‘Aye, for a very good reason,’ Josse said instantly. ‘His death is no fault of yours, Isabelle.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Herbert asked shakily.

  ‘It was his habit to press Queen Eleanor against his lips,’ Josse said gently. ‘He must have gone to sleep like that, and, when the pillow smothered him, the chess piece was pressed into his flesh, cutting his lip and bruising his chin. It’s been checked,’ he said, raising his voice against the outburst of objections, ‘and there is no mistake. Furthermore, there was a small piece of fluff attached to Queen Eleanor when I found her under Peter’s bed, and we now know where it came from.’

  ‘Where?’ Isabelle demanded.

  He held up his hand. ‘I will tell you very soon,’ he said. ‘First, we need to speak of Olivar’s night terrors, and what – or, rather, who – caused them, and why we believe this person was driven to act so cruelly.’

  ‘Is it – is it the same person?’ Jenna asked, as if she couldn’t bear to think two people capable of such acts could be present under Southfire’s roof.

  ‘Aye,’ Josse said gently. ‘Driven by one of the oldest instincts: the desire to protect an unborn child.’

  Herbert shot to his feet. ‘You’re speaking of Cyrille, aren’t you?’ he cried. ‘It’s Cyrille you mean when you say all that stuff about not wanting anyone to interfere with the inheritance, because it’ll come to me, and then to Olivar, once he’s legally my ward. But she’s not – she wasn’t pregnant, Josse! She wasn’t! I was her husband! Don’t you think I would know?’

  He stood panting with his hands resting on the table, supporting him.

  ‘I think she was, Herbert,’ Helewise said calmly. ‘There were many little things she did that implied she was suffering the early effects of pregnancy, and taking the appropriate care to protect herself and the baby.’

  ‘But – but she’d have said!’ Herbert whispered, although his voice held less conviction now.

  ‘Perhaps she was waiting to be absolutely sure before she told you,’ Helewise suggested kindly. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted you to face the disappointment if she was wrong.’

  Herbert sank back into his seat. ‘I thought she was too old,’ he said. Only desperation, Josse thought, aching for him, could have wrung that revealing confession out of him.

  There was a short, awkward silence. Then Meggie spoke. ‘If it would be appropriate,’ she said diffidently, ‘I could look at the lady. I’m a healer,’ she added, ‘and I am experienced in caring for pregnant women.’ She turned to Herbert. ‘I will treat her with the utmost respect,’ she said earnestly.

  Herbert stared at her for a moment. Then, waving a hand, he said, ‘Oh, do what you like.’ Then he stood up again and strode out of the hall.

  Meggie looked at Josse, then at Isabelle. ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ Isabelle said firmly. She got up. ‘Come with me, Meggie. Everyone else, stay here. This is not a matter requiring witnesses.’

  They were not gone for long. Quite soon, their footsteps could be heard coming back from the chapel. Josse glanced at Helewise. She looked anxious; nervous, even. With good reason, he reflected. This was her theory, after all.

  Isabelle and Meggie sat down. Meggie looked up, around the intent faces. ‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ she said, her voice low but clear.

  ‘Then why would she—’ Jenna began.

  Isabelle held up her hand for silence.

  ‘She was probably too old to conceive,’ Meggie went on, ‘and it’s possible she confused the symptoms of the time of change in a woman’s life with those of pregnancy. She certainly wouldn’t be the first to do that.’ She paused. ‘There’s something else, I’m afraid.’

  Josse stared at her. What could be coming? He shot a glance at Isabelle, who was also staring at Meggie as if this was unexpected for her, too.

  ‘Go on, Meggie,’ Josse said.

  Meggie looked at him, and he saw from her face that she was both embarrassed and distressed. ‘I’m really sorry to have to say this, because I realize it’s not what you all thought, and what you’d been told, but, all the same, it’s true and there’s absolutely no doubt.’ She seemed to brace herself, then said, ‘The woman lying dead in the chapel there has never borne a child.’

  There was a stunned stillness in the Old Hall. Nobody seemed to know what to say. Helewise, watching Josse, thought he looked guilty, as if afraid that it was his determination to discover what had happened to Aeleis that had brought all this disruption, distress and tragedy. It isn’t your fault, dear heart, she said silently to him.

  Then, breaking the mood, there came the sound of footsteps. Two pairs: one firm and steady, the other, a dragging shuffle. Several pairs of eyes turned to the doorway leading to the family’s quarters in the original extension, where, presently, Herbert appeared, his grandfather holding on to his arm and propping himself up with a stick held firmly in his other hand.

  ‘Father!’ Isabelle leapt to her feet. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ She rounded on her son. ‘And Herbert, you should know better than to risk him damaging his health and injuring himself – what were you thinking of?’

  ‘Leave him be, daughter,’ Hugh said, with a note of command in his voice. ‘You, what’s your name, Josse, give me a chair!’

  Hastily Josse leapt up and, between them, he and Herbert installed Hugh in the seat he had just vacated.

  Isabelle, still sending fuming glances at both Herbert and Hugh, stood impatiently tapping her foot.

  ‘Well, this is nice!’ Hugh said, staring round at his assembled family with a smile. ‘I really should come along to the Old Hall more often. I can already feel it doing me good.’ Carefully he laid his stick down beside his chair then, folding his hands, rested them on the table. ‘My mind is clearer tonight than it has been for a long time,’ he went on, ‘although –’ he glanced compassionately at Herbert – ‘this may well be because this young man’s distress touched me deeply, as did the fact that he chose to come to me for comfort.’ He paused. ‘Not quite so far into my dotage as you all thought, eh?’

  ‘Father, that’s not fair!’ Editha protested. ‘We’ve only treated you like a confused and forgetful old man because that’s what you’ve been, for weeks and months!’ She was almost in tears. Getting up, she ran to Hugh and took his hand. ‘It’s wonderful to see you back in your rightful place, and I don’t know how you could even think we wouldn’t all be delighted!’

  ‘Peace, Editha,’ Hugh said, patting her hand. ‘I dare say you’re right. I can’t seem to tell – for a long time it’s as if I was seeing you all through a darkness, a shadow, but now, all at once, it’s gone.’ His eyes roamed over his kinsmen and women, over his own hall, with an expression of wonder. Then, staring straight at Josse, he said, ‘I gather you have been making some discoveries, nephew.’

  ‘Er – aye, I—’

  ‘Don’t bother, Young Herbert here has already told me,’ Hugh said. He turned to Meggie. ‘You must be Josse’s daughter, since yours is the only face I don’t know.’

  ‘I am,’ Meggie agreed.

  ‘And the lady wasn’t pregnant, was she?’ Hugh went on remorselessly.

  Meggie met his hard eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘And I will hazard a guess that she had never before had a child.’

  Meggie looked surprised. ‘You are quite right.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Herbert demanded.

  ‘What is all this?’ Isabelle cried, loudly and angrily. ‘Father, you must explain!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Hugh roared. Silence fell. ‘I have been wandering in my mind, as you are no doubt all aware, but there has been one thing that has haunted me all this time, so that, even when I permitted myself to be treated like a dying man, petted, pandered to and patronized, yet always something kept nagging at me. Something I knew it was up to me to put right.’

  An image flashed into Josse’s head: Uncle Hugh, very distressed, struggling to get out of bed, calling for his horse and saying, I have
to see to this and try to sort it out, for it’s all a muddle and I don’t understand.

  ‘I will tell you what it was, for, now that I appear to be in my right mind again, all is perfectly clear.’ Hugh turned to Herbert. ‘I’m sorry, my lad, for this will pain you, but your late wife misled you. She told you – or rather, let us be kind and say she allowed you to believe – that Olivar was her son; hers and William’s.’

  ‘Yes, because that’s—’

  ‘The truth?’ Hugh interrupted him. ‘No, Herbert, I’m afraid it isn’t. William Crowburgh was married before, you see, to a very lovely woman whose name was Marthe de Withan. She bore William a son, but, very sadly and to William’s great grief, she never fully recovered from the birth and she died a couple of years later.’

  Herbert’s face worked with emotion. ‘It’s a lie!’ he shouted. ‘She wouldn’t have pretended Olivar was hers if he wasn’t! You’re mistaken, Grandfather, you’re thinking of someone else and you’ve become confused again, and—’

  ‘Do not treat me like an imbecile!’ Hugh shouted. Then, more kindly, ‘Herbert, you must face the truth. Besides the fact that Meggie here has just confirmed what I’m telling you, you are forgetting that William Crowburgh’s late father was my close friend.’ He paused. Then, touching Herbert’s hand with an expression of deep tenderness, he said softly, ‘Lad, I went to both the wedding and the baptism.’

  Herbert looked imploringly at him. ‘Didn’t you also go to William’s wedding to Cyrille?’

  ‘No, Herbert. Harold de Crowburgh was dead by then, and I had lost touch with the younger family.’

  Herbert sank down on to a seat. ‘She—’ He shook his head, a bemused expression on his face. ‘Why did she lie?’ he whispered. ‘Surely she knew I’d fallen in love with her? It didn’t matter to me one bit if Olivar wasn’t her son – it was her I wanted.’

  Nobody spoke. Josse, looking at Helewise’s eyes on Herbert, guessed she wanted to go to him, to try to find words of comfort. But he didn’t think there were any. As if Hugh, too, felt Herbert’s pain and wanted to alleviate it, he reached out for his grandson’s hand.

  ‘I think that’s enough, for now,’ he said quietly. ‘Take me back to bed, please, Herbert. I’m very tired.’

  Josse and Herbert got him to his feet, and, all but carrying him, got him to his room. They helped him into his bed, where he lay back against the pillows with obvious relief. Presently Isabelle brought a soothing draught. ‘Go,’ she said to Josse and Herbert. ‘I’ll sit with him until he sleeps.’

  ‘Why did Cyrille lie?’ Josse demanded. He and Helewise were back in their own room – Isabelle had found Meggie a bed in a small room along the passage – and he was pacing to and fro.

  ‘I would imagine, because she thought Herbert would be more likely both to marry her, and to adopt Olivar, if he believed the boy was her own son,’ Helewise said. ‘As it is – as it was, I suppose I should say – Olivar has no connection with Herbert at all, being neither his own nor his late wife’s true child.’

  ‘He’s his old friend’s child,’ Josse said quietly. ‘Knowing Herbert, I think that will matter rather a lot.’

  ‘That’s what Uncle Hugh kept trying to say!’ Helewise exclaimed. ‘When we thought he was saying martyr, he was actually saying Marthe.’

  Josse grinned. ‘I always thought it highly unlikely that he’d had a late conversion to religious fanaticism.’ He looked at Helewise, an expression that was almost furtive in his eyes. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but I can’t help being very pleased that Olivar isn’t Cyrille’s child. Hugh said his real mother was a lovely woman, and Cyrille—’

  ‘Cyrille wasn’t,’ Helewise finished for him. It seemed to be the least unkind thing she could think of to say.

  EIGHTEEN

  Josse was awake very early the next morning, the one thought going round and round in his head making it impossible to sleep any more. As the welcome daylight paled the sky, he got out of bed, put on his outer garments, picked up his boots and tiptoed out of the room. He peered into the little place where Meggie had slept, but the bed had been tidied away and she wasn’t there.

  He found her in the Old Hall, sitting alone beside the great hearth, cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed. He waited. Presently she opened her eyes, looked at him and said, ‘There is such a sense of relief in this house, Father, that I should think even you can feel it.’ She was smiling, as if wanting to make sure he knew she was teasing.

  ‘Oh, I can,’ he assured her. ‘What strikes me as sad is that nobody’s grieving for her.’

  ‘For – yes, I see what you mean.’ She hesitated. ‘Actually, I meant the house itself is relieved, not the people in it.’ Before he had time to comment, she hurried on, ‘I don’t know how Herbert feels. He has shut himself away, perhaps because he is trying to cope with overwhelming sorrow. As for everyone else …’

  She didn’t need to complete the observation.

  After a moment, he said, ‘It may surprise you, but in fact I know exactly what you mean about the house, because I’ve been coming here since I was a boy and I’ve long been aware that it wasn’t quite like other houses.’ He sought the right words. ‘I think it’s precisely because I first came here when I was too young to question it, but I’ve always felt its spirit very powerfully.’ He stopped, embarrassed.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ she said. ‘To me, it simply shouts out, and it’s not only powerful but undoubtedly benign. Protective of its own,’ she added thoughtfully. She shot him a questioning look.

  ‘Er – aye,’ he agreed. Then – for talking about such matters made him awkward – he said, ‘Meggie, I would like you to do something for me, if you will.’

  ‘Anything within my ability.’ She stood up, a single easy, graceful movement.

  ‘I’m afraid it involves going back to the body in the chapel.’

  ‘I don’t mind bodies, Father.’

  He nodded. ‘Come on, then.’

  They stood either side of the corpse. Josse had folded back the linen sheet to waist level. Silently he watched as Meggie went about her task. After only a short time, she said, ‘She has breathed in water. Her nose and her throat are saturated.’

  ‘Does that—’

  Meggie held up a hand and shook her head, indicating she wasn’t ready to say any more yet. He watched as she worked on, checking in the ears, feeling all over the head. At one point, she laid the flats of both her hands on the chest, steadily increasing the pressure until she was leaning down with almost all her weight. A trickle of water and some regurgitated food trickled out of the body’s partly open mouth.

  Meggie nodded, then carefully rearranged the disturbed garments, pulled the sheet up over the face and, stepping away from the trestle, said, ‘The fall didn’t kill her, or, at least, not straight away. She had time to draw several breaths, and, as far as I can tell, she took in water until she could no longer breathe.’

  ‘She drowned?’ He had to hear her say it.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  He went over to her and gave her a swift hug. ‘Thank you. I have to go – there is something I must check.’

  ‘Are you going outside?’

  ‘Aye.’

  She grinned. ‘I’ll come with you. Some good, fresh air is exactly what I need.’

  He led the way out of the main door, through the gates and round beneath the front wall of the house. ‘Be careful here,’ he warned as they negotiated the narrow gap between the wall and the start of the steep slope that fell away to the valley. ‘It’s slippery, after all the snow.’

  They went on, placing their feet carefully and sometimes holding hands, until they were standing directly beneath the north wall of the solar. Then, turning sideways to the sloping ground, they edged their way downwards.

  ‘Here,’ Josse said, stopping. ‘She was lying here, with her feet pointing towards the valley.’

  Meggie took in the scene. ‘From the evidence of the mud and the flattened gr
ass, it looks as if the highest level that the stream waters reached was here.’ She took a pace back up the slope.

  ‘Aye,’ he agreed. He was crouched down, studying the place where Cyrille had lain, staring intently at the ground.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Hmm?’ He didn’t look up.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come and look at this.’

  There was something in her voice – some altered tone – that made him instantly comply. He scrambled up and went to stand beside her. Silently she pointed.

  In the mud some two paces above the spot where the body landed were two clear booted footprints. They were small, no bigger than a boy’s; a youth’s at most.

  ‘Do you think—?’ Meggie cleared her throat and tried again. ‘Did one of those who came out to bring in the body stand there?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe these are the prints of any member of the recovery party. Whoever it was stayed still for some time,’ he said. He spotted something else: over to the right of the footprints there was a narrow hole. ‘Long enough to make quite deep impressions.’

  ‘What about whoever first found her? They could have stood there trying to work out how to wade into the water and pull her out.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Helewise was the first to reach her, but the others weren’t far behind. Apart from the fact that you and I both know Helewise wouldn’t have wasted time deciding what to do but would have plunged straight in, the levels had already gone down a little by then, and Cyrille was clear of the water.’

  ‘Then—’ Again, Meggie hesitated to put her conclusion into words.

  Josse did it for her. ‘Somebody stood here and watched as the waters rose up,’ he said solemnly. ‘He – or she – must have seen she was still alive; that, even if the fall had gravely injured her, she was still breathing.’ He looked up, meeting Meggie’s clear eyes. ‘They left her to drown,’ he murmured. ‘Either she fell into the water, or else it rose up over her as she lay helpless on the grass.’

  And, although he fought the memory, telling himself it could only be coincidence, he couldn’t help but think of Aeleis, and her utter certainty that Parsifal de Chanteloup was perfectly capable of turning the curse that led to his beloved wife’s death against its perpetrator.