A Play of Knaves (20 page)

“Thinks one of you did it, does he?” the fellow asked. “It’s more likely one of you we have to watch out for than anybody. Or all of you.”

That manner of thinking was precisely what the players had to fear, but Lynche said curtly, “Let it go, Hod. They’re Lord Lovell’s men. If anything’s done to them, it’ll be Lord Lovell we’ll be answering to.”

That was sufficient to silence Hod for now, although he looked to be inwardly grumbling as Lynche said at Joliffe, “You want to look along with the rest of them? Medcote’s still here.”

“He is?” Joliffe said in surprise.

The law was that a body was to be left where it was found until the crowner could come to view it where it lay, that he might better judge what had happened. But since it could take days for the crowner to be found, wherever he might be in the shire, and then to come, people—especially those in grief—often preferred to shift the body and pay the fine for having done so. There had been time enough today to shift Medcote’s body. Was his family going to leave it lying where it was? Why? Had they hated him that much? Or, there having been little love among them while he lived, were they indifferent now to respecting the dead? Or maybe they were just unwilling to “waste” money on the fine.

Whichever it was, Lynche didn’t answer his surprise, just led him toward the stream and the other men, Hod trailing behind. As they neared, one of the men left the body, saying as he met Lynche, “I’ve seen enough. We can spread the word he’s dead for sure.”

“Try not to make too merry over it,” Lynche said curtly.

“We’ll not,” the man said, but not as if he meant it. Over his shoulder, going away, he added, “We’ve not forgotten his whelp is still with us to make our lives hell.”

One of the men still at the stream called out, “Still, one down, one to go!”

The man leaving laughed at that and kept going. Lynche said after him and at the others, “Damn you for vultures and Saint Erasmus take your guts.” And at the two men still at the stream, “You’ve seen enough. Get out of here, too.”

They laughed, no offense taken, and went the other way, by stepping stones across the stream, to disappear along a path into the field on the other side. Besides that as a way someone could have come and gone, Joliffe saw there was a path, too, running through the woods; and there was always wading along the stream running low between its banks and hidden by the trees.

But now he was come to Medcote’s body lying on the stream’s muddy bank. Someone had at least pulled it out of the water and thrown a coarse piece of canvas over it. Lynche, with outward indifference, flipped a corner of the canvas aside, uncovering Medcote’s face. The dead man’s mouth hung open in the usual way and no one had troubled to close his eyes. They stared, bulging and blank. And as Kyping had said, the small fish that flicked through the shallows of the stream had been at him before he was found.

The bruise along his jaw was plain enough, though, and Joliffe said, pointing to it, “Looks like he fought whoever did for him. Any other marks on him?”

“If there are, they’re under his clothes and for the crowner to find out,” Lynche said.

“That blow to the jaw maybe stunned him enough for the other man to wrestle him down, pin him, drown him,” Joliffe said as if making unconsidered talk. He added more as if asking himself rather than either Lynche or Hod, “But why drown him, I wonder? Why not stab him?”

He guessed that both men would take too much pleasure in refusing to answer any straightly asked question. It was probably because he deliberately seemed to be not talking to them, only to himself, that Hod said, albeit glumly, “Stabbing? Stabbing might have been too quick for whoever did it, if they wanted it to last longer.”

Coldly, Lynche said, “There’d be no outcry with drowning. No chance someone would hear. That’s the more likely reason for it.”

“How much likelihood was there anyone would be out and about to hear anything anyway?” Joliffe asked.

“Not much at that hour,” Hod said. “A poacher maybe, but he’d move away from the sound of men, not toward it, likely.”

“So it was well after dark it happened?”

“It was after dark when he rode out,” Lynche said. “I closed the gate behind him.”

“Rode out?” Joliffe looked around as if expecting suddenly to see a horse he had somehow missed until then.

Lynche answered his look with, “Master Hal brought it back when he came with word he’d found his father.”

“How did he know where to look? Or was it only chance he came this way?”

“No chance to it. Hal knows this place as well as his father did and Medcote made no secret of why he was going out last night.” Lynche was flatly, glumly sure of that. He gave Joliffe a suspicious sideways look.

“Never did, come to that,” said Hod. “Liked to leave the kettle boiling behind him when he went, as it were.”

That meant that Medcote’s use of the place was as open a secret as Kyping had made it seem—and that almost any man in the household could have taken the chance to be rid of an unliked master. Joliffe would have liked to ask more questions that way, about the household and who might have been presently most angry at Medcote, but he’d have to leave those questions to Kyping or the crowner. Lynche was becoming restive with dislike at him being there. Joliffe doubted he’d have many more answers out of him and said with a shrug, starting to turn away, “Pity all the way around, I guess. Every time I saw him, he looked to be a man enjoying his life about as much as a man can.”

“Nobody else was, sure,” Hod muttered.

“What?” Joliffe asked lightly.

“Enjoying their life while he was around. Not that it’s likely to be all that better now.”

“That’s enough, Hod,” Lynche said, but Hod grumbled on, “Whether it’s to be son or widow we answer to now, it won’t be all that better and you can’t say it will be, Lynche, unless you lie. The only help will be if Mistress Eleanor marries again and goes off soon.”

“Oh?” Joliffe said easily. “I thought she seemed pleasant enough the little I saw her.”

“Must have been very little and at an odd hour on one of her better days,” Hod snorted. “As bad humoured as the rest of them she is.”

“With more reason,” Lynche put in stiffly. “She was well and away from here and then her husband dies and she’s right back in the middle of it.”

Given how short he was about most things, the steward’s readiness to say that much to the good about Eleanor Medcote told more than maybe he meant it to, but Joliffe was not sure whether that more was about Eleanor Medcote or Lynche himself, and he said, still easily, “Ah well, there’s trouble everywhere for everybody, isn’t there?” and walked away.

He had learned more than he had thought he would and took his time along the road, in no hurry to rejoin the others while he thought about it. First, those nearest to Medcote—family as well as servants—were surely in no great grief for his death. Second, any number of people could have known where he planned to be that night, and not just his near and not-so-dear, because if he’d gloated to them, there was no knowing who else he might have gloated to. And any servants who knew what he purposed could have talked of it at the village alehouse last night if they’d gone there. Or someone might have overheard him when he told Rose to meet him, with no need for anyone else to be told anything.

Add to that stretch of possibilities how many people would rather he were dead than alive—maybe beginning with his own family and certainly going outward from there—and the possibilities for who killed him spread out and out in a widening circle.

A circle that could even include Kyping, since his life would be far easier without Medcote stirring up constant trouble.

A circle that had to include Master Ashewell, quit of whatever had kept him bound to Medcote’s desire for marriage between Eleanor and young Nicholas. Of course Nicholas, too, had reason to want escape from that marriage, but Joliffe doubted the boy had the weight to hold down a man of Medcote’s size and likely strength.

Walter Gosyn had the needed size and strength, though. But if he had gone for anyone, wouldn’t it more likely have been Hal with his unwanted heed of Claire?

Come to it, once Medcote was down, a well-sized woman could have held and drowned him. It needn’t have come to fists between them. There was nothing to say a club or just a heavy branch couldn’t have laid him out, couldn’t have dazed him long enough for a strong woman to have him helpless and half-drowned before he recovered enough to struggle. Anela Medcote was not of a size to do it, but her daughter was.

But so were plenty of other women, common women grown strong with women’s heavy duties around the house and with fieldwork, and there was no telling how many of those there might be wanting revenge after being wronged by Medcote. And then there were men whose women had been wronged by Medcote, as well as all the men with other quarrels against him.

Joliffe did not envy Kyping, or the constable, or the crowner when he came for the questioning that was ahead of them. Before there was much hope of knowing who had killed Medcote, they would have to narrow the circle of possibilities down past who might
want
to kill him to who
could
have killed him, and that might not prove possible, given the difficulties Joliffe saw so far.

Altogether, he would settle for the players being given leave to go and never mind if they never knew who killed Medcote. Whatever Kyping said, they were still too easy to accuse, too readily at hand as a way to save everyone else the trouble of looking harder for a murderer. He’d maybe do well to suggest to Kyping to take note of whoever might first or most insistently point a finger their way, because the murderer might well do that, trying to end the matter before it came too near him.

He stopped at a gate into a ploughed field softly green with young shoots of grain. A lapwing was crying
pee-wit
from somewhere, but that was the only sound, and he bent and picked a small daisy out of the grass and chewed on its stalk for its sharp taste, leaning on the gate and gazing up at the White Horse on its hillside. Yesterday at this hour Medcote had been alive and now he wasn’t. That Medcote wasn’t a man to be mourned was beside the matter. Living and dying were a mystery deeper than any one man’s murder.

A man or woman lived and then they did not and mankind fumbled on its way and still there was the Horse, lifetimes old, in its flaring gallop across the hillside, its being a mystery among other mysteries.

Why had Medcote been such a curse toward everyone? Apparently prosperous when he was a butcher in Wantage, his lot had only been bettered by coming into this manor by way of his wife, a comely enough woman. He lived more comfortably than most men, and there was nothing outwardly wrong with either of his offspring. So why had he been such a complete cur? Had he thought the power to make folk miserable was a greater power than to play fair with them? That was a mistake common to small-witted people—to think good was a weaker thing than evil. From all that Joliffe had seen, evil—in both its greater ways and in such petty ones as bullying—was the weak man’s way, taking a fool’s pleasure in his strength to destroy. To destroy was easy. To create was hard. And solid goodness to others was harder still, with maybe the hardest thing being to stand strong in the good against the anger and force of those who understood only ugliness and destruction. Against people like Medcote.

And like whoever had killed him.

Joliffe pushed back from the gate and went on toward the players’ camp, hungry for whatever was for dinner and ready to be away from his thoughts for a while.

Chapter 13

At camp Joliffe found the tent up again, Tisbe grazing as if she had never left, and the players sitting, waiting while Rose cut bread and cheese on a board for them and a man Joliffe did not know. With the skill he had learned early as a player, he quickly judged by the way the man was sitting easily among them that he had likely neither brought nor meant trouble. That was to the good. Besides that, coming nearer, Joliffe saw that the man’s rough hosen and plain-made, serviceable tunic were all of good enough cloth and meant to last but more what a master would provide for a servant as part of his wages than what a man was likely to choose for himself. Add to that there was no horse of his to be seen and he did not look as if he was worn out with long walking, and it was an easy guess he was someone’s household servant and from nearby. Master Ashewell’s, likely, or maybe Gosyn’s.

Nonetheless, as Joliffe joined them and they all looked up at him, he made the man a low bow, complete with a sweep of his hat and, “My lord. You grace us with your company.”

The man gaped at him a moment, then caught the jest and threw back his head with a roar of laughter. There must be few jests around here, he took that one so much to heart, Joliffe thought as the man said, “Aye, that’s me. Lord Sy. Ya’ve seen through my disguise.”

“Sy’s come from Walter Gosyn,” Basset said more temperately. “We’re asked to his place to play this evening.”

Joliffe glanced at Basset for his cue. Basset gave it by a shadow of a nod, and without missing a beat Joliffe said, adding another bow for good measure, “It will be our honor and our privilege.”

Sy laughed again. “You’re a merry lot, I’ll say that for you. I wouldn’t be so blythe, maybe, with a murdered man almost on my doorstep and the crowner’s eye likely to be turned my way.”

As if he did not know Sy was fishing for talk he could take back to the Gosyn household, Basset held his hands out, palms up and shoulder-high on either side, in a kind of shrug meant to show the players’ innocence and unconcern. “We’ve gathered Medcote had men enough who wanted him dead for better reasons than we ever had against him, since we never had any. The crowner will have men in plenty to suspect without having to look at us.”

“That’s not always been known to stop a crowner,” Sy said with unexpected shrewdness. “Pick who’s likely to be the least trouble and settle on them to have done it. That’s been known to happen.”