[Roger the Chapman 06] - The Wicked Winter (9 page)

I hurried after him, once more holding the lantern high, afraid that he might lose his footing.

Lady Cederwell was not to be found there, either.

This third room was slightly less bleak than the others, largely because of a pair of ornate silver candlesticks which stood one at each end of a makeshift altar, the metal gleaming richly in the light from the lantern. Two scented wax candles had burned down almost to nothing, the flame of one still guttering feebly in the draught, while a faint spiral of black smoke rising from the stump of the second showed that it had not long gone out. A prie-dieu, made of rosewood, was placed against another part of the circular wall, and above it hung one of the ugliest crucifixes I have ever seen. Made of ebony and ivory, the black cross, at least three feet in height, supported the pale, contorted body of the crucified Christ writhing in all the agony of a Roman execution. I could almost feel the excruciating pain of dislocating joints as the body began to sag, and the swelling of the tongue in the Palestinian heat. The crown of thorns, too, was like a row of jagged spikes across the forehead, piercing the tender flesh, but there was no wound in the side of this figure. The victim was not yet dead: he still suffered. Again, there was nothing here of serenity or comfort.

Friar Simeon gave the crucifix no more than a passing glance and a brief genuflection before continuing to look around him.

'Well, my lady's not here,' he said. 'We must go back to the house and hope to find that she has returned there before us.'

'Wait!' I exclaimed. 'There are more stairs. They must lead up to the look-out platform.'

'Lady Cederwell won't be out of doors in such weather as this,' my companion protested. 'You'll be wasting your time, Chapman, if you go up there. Come, let's be off.'
 

'It won't take long,' I encouraged him, 'and we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we have searched everywhere possible.'

Grumbling under his breath, the friar followed me up the steps, pointing out sourly, when we discovered that there was no one on the roof of the tower, that he had been right.

Ignoring his sudden bad temper, I ventured warily over to the parapet which surrounded the platform and, raising my lantern, leaned between the battlements, looking out towards the estuary. The snow flumes had eased, and a fleeting break in the clouds enabled me, just for a moment, to see something, or someone, lying sprawled below me on the frozen earth. I called Brother Simeon over.

'What do you make of that?' I asked in a voice which was not quite steady. 'Down there! Surely it's a body.' But that pallid shaft of light, a last echo of the short winter's day, had disappeared beneath the darkening pall of sky, and it was difficult now to make out any part of that storm-tossed landscape.

'You're talking nonsense,' the friar said sharply. 'We should have seen anyone lying on the ground as we approached. The light had not completely vanished.'
 

'No, no,' I answered impatiently, catching at his skinny wrist with my free hand and shaking it. 'Here, we are standing on the opposite side of the tower to the door and the track from the house. Whatever it is down there.., whoever it is, was completely hidden from our view.'

'I still say that you're imagining things,' the friar insisted. He shivered. 'Understandably, perhaps. This is not a spot which encourages congenial thoughts.'

I wondered if Simeon had ever entertained a congenial thought in the whole of his life, but I was too anxious to investigate further to pursue the idea. I made for the stairs.

Some ten minutes later, after I had nearly slipped twice on the worn treads and Simeon had only saved himself from a nasty fall by grabbing at a notch of stone which stood proud of the wall, we emerged from the tower into the snowy darkness. Without wasting any further words in argument, I groped my way around the outside of the building until I judged myself to be roughly on the opposite side to the doorway. I was about to raise my lantern higher when I tripped over something lying in my path and went sprawling.

'What's happened? What are you doing?' Simeon demanded querulously from behind me. He had, however, stopped short several paces away and so avoided a similar accident. 'What is it? what have you found?' I made no answer but picked myself up off my hands and knees, my first action being to discover what damage had been done to the lantern when I dropped it. By some miracle it had landed on its base and remained upright, the candle still burning brightly inside it.

'What have you found?' Friar Simeon repeated. His voice was shriller than before.

'I don't know yet.'

I crouched beside the object and once more held the lantern high. Even in that dim light, and without touching it, I knew it was a body; a woman's body. Several long strands of hair had been shaken loose from the plain lawn hood and veil which normally confined them. She was lying prone, the head turned away from me, the splayed hands seeming to claw at the earth in a kind of final desperation. I crossed myself, then put out a hand and felt the shoulder nearest me, but the flesh beneath the clothes was unyielding. That stiffening which afflicts the dead within a few hours of the soul's passing had already taken hold, hurried on no doubt by the icy weather.

Simeon had come to kneel on the other side of the body, his eyes two great pools of blackness in his haggard face.

'You were right,' he whispered. 'who... who is it?'
 

'I don't know for certain,' I answered grimly. 'But I should guess it to be Lady Cederwell.' I lifted my head and looked at the sheer wall of the tower beside me. 'She must have been leaning over the battlements for some reason, lost her balance and fallen.' I rose awkwardly to my feet, still feeling a little bruised from my own tumble. 'We have to go back to the house and inform Sir Hugh.'

Simeon did not move at once, but stayed kneeling. Then he, too, made the sign of the cross and started to intone the prayer for the dying. 'Go forth, O Christian soul, out of this world, in the name of God the Father Almighty, who created thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for thee, in the name of the Holy Ghost, who sanctified thee...'

'She's gone, Brother,' I interrupted forcefully. 'She's been dead for many hours. You can do nothing now.' I helped him to his feet. Just for a moment, I thought he was going to faint. He staggered and fell heavily against me, so that I had to support him with my free arm, but he recovered quickly, pushing me away almost angrily, ashamed of his momentary weakness.

'Lead on, Chapman,' he said in a husky whisper. 'Let us do what has to be done. The sooner this unhappy business is resolved the better.'

The turmoil of the past hour had subsided, to be succeeded by an abnormal calm. The house was suddenly quiet, the silence broken only by the rustle of women's skirts and the low rumbling of muttered conversations as members of the household forgathered either in the kitchen or the great hall, according to their rank. The body of Lady Cederwell, her identity confirmed by her husband, had been carried home and now lay on the bed in her chamber, still locked into its unnatural pose. No laying out could be done, and therefore no proper mourning begun, until the rigor had passed.

Both Simeon and I had been offered shelter for the night which we had thankfully accepted, for the nearest habitation, the boulder house, was at least half an hour's walk distant.

'We'll leave early tomorrow morning,' the friar muttered, as we warmed our chilled bones at the kitchen fire. 'We must not intrude upon a house of grief.'

I said nothing, but in my private opinion there was precious little of that commodity on display in the wake of Lady Cederwell's tragic fall. Only two people had so far shed any tears in my presence, my lady's half-brother, who had been summoned in from the stables when Simeon and I first returned with our terrible news, and her personal maid, Audrey Lambspringe, cousin, as I recalled, to young Bet at Lynom Hall. The housekeeper, Phillipa Talke, the sister-by-marriage, Mistress Empryngham, and, above all, Sir Hugh himself, were either remarkably adept at hiding their sorrow or were indeed as unaffected by the calamity as they appeared to be.

There seemed no doubt in anyone's mind that Lady Cederwell's death had been accidental.

'She would often clamber on to the parapet,' Sir Hugh had confirmed in answer to a question from Simeon. He had shrugged and spread wide his hands. 'I've warned her- we've all warned her - of the danger, but she refused to listen. She would only reply that by doing so she could get still nearer to God. It was why she liked the tower, why she spent so much of her time there, why she set up a private chapel of her own in the topmost storey.'

He had gone on to explain that the tower was an ancient Saxon dwelling, built by one Eadred Eadrichsson, who had fought for King Harold at Senlac.

'My forebear, Sir Guy de Sourdeval, was granted the property five months later when Eadred was dispossessed, as recognition by King William for his valour in that same battle.'

A poor recompense, I thought, this blighted tract of land on the edge of nowhere. Sir Guy de Sourdeval had evidently been of little importance; probably an impoverished knight who had followed in the wake of his overlord to see what modest pickings could be gleaned in a conquered country, if Duke William should prove successful. And in the 400 years since, I judged, little had altered. The name of Sir Guy's descendants, together with that of the house which he had built, had been mangled by the English tongue into Cederwell, but other than that no great change had taken place. No increase in fame and fortune had accrued to the family, no dynastic marriages had been contracted, no resounding feats of arms had been performed. And Sir Hugh, like those before him and in common with so many others of his kind, was content to live out his days on the periphery of events, the sole and sufficient source of his pride being his Norman ancestry.

Friar Simeon and I continued warming ourselves at the kitchen fire while Martha Grindcobb and the little maid, whose name I had learned was Jennifer Tonge, started to prepare the evening meal.

'It'll be late. It's already well past four o'clock, but that can't be helped, I suppose,' the cook observed, before suddenly recollecting herself and raising one comer of her apron to wipe away a non-existent tear. 'Poor lady[ Poor lady!' Her voice rose sharply. 'Watch that broth, you stupid girl! It's boiling over!'

There was a loud hissing sound as the liquid ran down the sides of the pot and extinguished some of the flames. A cloud of steam rose towards the blackened ceiling where it hung, bringing tears to the eyes, until it found its escape route through the smoke-duct in the outside wall. I smote Friar Simeon on the back as his narrow chest heaved with a paroxysm of coughing, and Martha Grindcobb flung wide both window shutters just as Phillipa Talke entered the kitchen.

The housekeeper paused in the doorway, her long nose wrinkling in disgust.

'What a smell!' she exclaimed. She glanced at the shrinking figure of Jennifer Tonge, then at the fire, now beginning to burn up again, and rightly interpreted the situation. She shrugged helplessly. 'Why don't you keep a better watch on that child, Martha? You know she's next to useless.' Ignoring both the cook's sullen rejoinder and Jennifer's sniffling, she turned to Simeon. 'Brother, Sir Hugh requests that you will join him and the rest of the family in the great hall for supper. He would like to question you more closely about your discovery of Lady Cederwell's body.'

'Why?' the friar demanded angrily. 'Does he think that I have been guilty of concealing information from him?' The housekeeper looked shocked. 'Of course not. It's just the natural wish of a grieving husband to glean all the facts he possibly can in order to reassure himself that.., that...'

Mistress Talke hesitated before continuing, 'To reassure himself that...' Again she faltered, reluctant to state openly what had plainly not yet crossed Simeon's mind.

'What are you talking about? Reassure himself about what?' the friar asked with growing irritation. I could see that our unhappy find had shaken him more than he cared to admit, so I rose from my stool and went to stand behind him, gently pressing his shoulders for comfort.

'Sir Hugh,' I told him, 'is afraid in case it might prove that his lady took her own life. Anything you can tell him which will set his fears to rest on that score will, I fancy, be welcome.'

'Why should it be thought that Lady Cederwell would do such a thing?' Simeon demanded angrily. But I saw his hand go to the plain wooden cross which he wore on a leather thong around his neck. 'She had sent for me, requesting me to visit her here as soon as I could. Would she have done so had she intended herself a mischief?'

Neither the housekeeper nor I made any reply, but both of us were able to envisage a despair which might have been assuaged by talking to so holy a man, but which had not, in the end, been able to tolerate the delay of his arrival. The friar, I guessed, although I could not see his face, must be following the same train of thought, but guilt would prevent him from accepting such an intolerable conclusion.

At last, I said quietly, 'There is no reason to think that Lady Cederwell's death was other than a tragic accident. Sir Hugh himself has told us that she often used to stand on the parapet in order to get closer to heaven. From even the little that I have heard tell of the lady, I suspect she was not one to be deterred by icy weather when she felt the need to communicate with God.'