The Nun's Tale (5 page)

Ravenser sat up, ‘Dead? Might that be why the grave has been disturbed?’

‘Or perhaps she lied about being with child. He discovered it. Rejected her.’

Ravenser smiled. ‘We spin a good yarn.’

Louth did not smile. ‘As I see it, Dame Joanna ran away to be with a lover, who may or may not be Longford, and something went wrong. Perhaps so wrong that he followed her back here to kill her.’

‘But why would he have raped Maddy?’

Louth closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘My men heard nothing ill of her. A hard worker, bit of a dreamer.’ He dabbed at his eyes. ‘The poor, sweet child.’

Old Dan took off his dusty cap and scratched his bald head. ‘A man buries so many as I have, can’t recall ’em all. But I remember Master Longford buryin’ someone, aye.’

‘Do you remember anything else about it?’

The old man wriggled in his ragged clothes as if the question made him itch. ‘Not as such, Sir.’

‘Is that a yea or a nay?’

‘I remember the ale, Sir. A wondrous brew, thick and strong. The kind you chew before you swallow.’ He grinned at the memory.

‘Someone brought it while you filled in the grave?’

Old Dan crushed the hat in his hands, stared down at his dirty boots. ‘I shouldn’t’ve touched it before ’twas done, but dear Lord, it was one of the sunniest days of that wet summer and steam come up at me with every spadeful of earth. It near boiled me. A thirsty man will drink.’

‘I am not judging you, Dan. Who brought you the ale?’

‘’Twas Jaro, Master Longford’s man.’

‘Do you remember filling the grave while you sampled the ale, Dan?’

A dirty hand crept back up to the bald head, scratching. ‘Now there’s the problem, you see. I can’t say as I remember the filling in, but I’ve been digging graves all my life and I’m sure I did it right.’

‘Did anyone help you? Longford, perhaps?’

Old Dan shrugged. ‘To speak truth, I can swear to naught once I tasted that wondrous brew.’

‘You know what you’re to do now, Dan?’

They spoke true, then? You want it dug up?’

‘It must be done. Have you the stomach for it?’

‘Don’t know till I do. But if it must be done –’ Dan shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I wouldn’t welcome company.’

‘I shall accompany you.’ Ravenser wished to keep this incident quiet if possible. ‘And Sir Nicholas, also.’

It had rained in the night. The morning was dry but overcast, the air heavy. Old Dan and his son fell to the task in silence, but soon they cursed the saturated earth. As they dug, water seeped in to fill the hole and make the soil heavy to lift.

Ravenser slipped into his own thoughts. What if they found the real Dame Joanna rotting in her shroud? Then who was the woman at Nunburton who claimed to be resurrected? The abbess of Nunburton had noted that the woman’s French was genteel and her clothes, though travel-stained and torn, were new, not mended, and of costly wool. She also noted that the supposedly ancient, sacred mantle looked like good Yorkshire wool. Why would someone claim to be a dead person? What was to be gained? Was she dangerous? Or just confused?

‘They have reached the body,’ Louth said quietly.

Ravenser apologised for his inattention. ‘I have been pondering this strange case.’

‘Here we are,’ Old Dan called out. ‘Knotted up in her shroud, just as I remember. Shall we lift her out, Sir Richard?’

Ravenser knelt down and slipped his knife through the upper knot, blinking back the tears the odour brought to his eyes. ‘I should think we can come to a conclusion with a peek.’

‘Lord ha’ mercy!’ Old Dan covered his mouth and nose with a dirty kerchief as Ravenser peeled back the sheet. ‘Don’t like the looks of ’em when there’s still flesh. Nor the stink.’

‘What have we here?’ Ravenser muttered. ‘Much too much flesh for a year-old corpse, and it is not Dame Joanna, but a man with a broken neck. A huge man.’

Louth held a scented cloth to his plump face and leaned down, examining the face and body. ‘Unmistakable. That is Jaro, Longford’s man.’ Louth pointed to an amulet on the chest. ‘The tooth of an animal he killed in the Pyrenees. Proud of it, he was. But his girth is enough to identify him.’ He turned quickly away.

Ravenser’s gut burned. How in God’s name had Will Longford’s man wound up in this grave? He rose. ‘Fill it back in, Dan, and say nothing to anyone. I must notify the mayor, the coroner, the bailiffs’ – he passed a hand over his eyes, sighed – ‘and the Archbishop of York.’

As they walked away, Louth asked what Ravenser meant to do with Dame Joanna.

‘I shall ask my uncle to allow me to escort her back to her convent. Perhaps she will be more coherent with her Mother Superior, someone familiar. But after all this, the escort must be well guarded.’

‘I shall attend you. With my men.’

‘You, Nicholas?’

‘I feel responsible.’

As well he should. Ravenser agreed.

F
ive days later, Ravenser, Louth, and company set off on a slow journey to York. Dame Joanna was still weak, so she rode in a cart with two sisters who would see to her needs along the way. Travelling with a cart slowed them, but June had begun with fair, mild weather that almost made Ravenser glad of the excuse to go journeying. As the sun warmed him and the smells and sounds of the countryside cheered him, he grew more confident that the prioress of St Clement’s would find a way to reach Dame Joanna and learn her story, and that the archbishop’s men would soon discover who had killed Maddy and Jaro. The mayor of Beverley had been relieved to hear that Archbishop Thoresby had offered his aid.

Ravenser fell back behind his companions, thinking about his uncle and the one-eyed spy he had met at Bishopthorpe. He wondered what sort of inquiries Archer made for a man as powerful as his uncle, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England. Was he watching Alice Perrers and William of Wykeham? Or would Archer consider helping out on a matter such as this? Ravenser gazed about him, focusing on nothing, until a movement off to the side of the track, in a stand of trees, caught his eye: two horsemen, riding neither towards nor away from the road, but pacing Ravenser’s company. Ravenser reigned in his horse. So did the horsemen.

‘Ho, there!’ Ravenser called. Two of Louth’s men turned at his cry. Ravenser nodded to the still figures in the trees and Louth’s men took off. So did the horsemen, who had the advantage of their own plan.

It was not long before Louth’s men came riding back to the shady knoll where the rest of the company waited. ‘We lost them,’ John, Louth’s squire, said, ‘but we did see that they had friends with them, waiting for them farther back. I counted five more. And well armed.’

Dame Joanna stared about her, agitated, clutching at the tattered blue shawl she insisted on wearing over her habit. ‘Who? Who follows?’

Louth lounged in the shade near her. ‘I thought you might tell us, Dame Joanna. Your lover, perhaps?’

‘My lover?’ She laughed, an odd, hysterical sound. Her eyes were wild, haunted. ‘Oh, indeed, if Death be now my lover. Yes. Death shadows me. Only my lover Death can come for me now.’

Ravenser raised an eyebrow in response to Louth’s puzzled glance. So Dame Joanna saw her dilemma as a moral allegory. It did no harm. ‘Shall we continue?’

Louth ordered his men to prepare to move on. They fell back to guard the rear of the party. It was a much subdued, anxious company, aware of the armed men behind them, unseen. The women did not protest the armed guard that accompanied them when they washed or relieved themselves.

*

The wind from the arrow’s flight ruffled Owen’s hair. Much too close for comfort. He’d seen the trainee’s aim go astray when the messenger entered the yard. Owen had stood his ground, wanting to make a point, that lives were at stake. But he had not meant to make it so dangerously – he had miscalculated the arrow’s trajectory. It had happened time and again since he had lost the use of his left eye.

Gaspare yanked the bow out of the trainee’s hands and hit him across the stomach with it. ‘What are you, a dog after a hare? Captain Owen comes all the way from York to teach you how to save yourself in the field and you’d be killing him? Because a messenger caught your eye? What manner of cur has Lancaster sent us?’

The young man clutched his middle and said nothing.

Gaspare crossed the castle yard to retrieve the arrow, slapping Owen on the back as he passed. ‘You’ve not lost your nerve, that’s clear.’ He grinned crookedly because of a scar that puckered the right side of his face from ear to chin, creasing the corner of his mouth. ‘So what am I doing wrong, old friend? Why can’t the cur resist gawking at the world?’

‘You’re right to call him a dog after a hare,’ Owen said. ‘If he cannot ignore everything round him and see only the arrow and its target, he cannot be an archer.’

Gaspare slapped the arrow shaft against his leg, a motion that the young man in question watched anxiously. Broad-shouldered and well-muscled, when Gaspare acted on his anger, he caused considerable pain. ‘I need to know. Is it me, or has Lancaster sent us a pack of fools?’

Owen said nothing. The messenger, now within earshot, wore the livery of John Thoresby, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England.
What now
? Owen wondered. Thoresby had encouraged Owen to take up his present task at the Queen’s castle of Knaresborough, helping two of his old comrades-in-arms, Lief and Gaspare, develop a strategy for training archers in a mere two weeks. The Duke of Lancaster was to sail for the Aquitaine in the autumn with one hundred trained archers if attempts at negotiating the restoration of Don Pedro to the throne of Castile failed. Meanwhile, Lancaster did not want to feed a hundred archers any longer than necessary; he sought a method for quickly training those already skilled with the longbow to fight efficiently in the field so that he might collect them in small increments. Thus this experiment in training seven men in a fortnight. They were to be presented to Lancaster at Pontefract after their training, where he would judge whether their skills were acceptable.

‘From His Grace the Archbishop, Captain Archer.’ The messenger handed Owen a sealed packet. ‘I’m to await your reply.’

‘Take yourself off to the kitchens. I’ll find you there.’

Gaspare noticed his friend’s clenched jaw. ‘Likely to be bad news, coming from the mighty Thoresby?’

‘More likely to be orders.’

‘You’ve no love for him, that I can see.’

‘I do not like being his puppet.’

‘You did much the same work for the old Duke.’

‘Henry of Grosmont was a soldier. I understood him. I trusted him.’

‘Ah.’ Gaspare glanced over at the waiting trainee. ‘So. What am I to do with this “archer” who shoots his captain by mistake?’

Owen scratched the scar beneath his patch with the archbishop’s letter as he thought. ‘We have not the time to change his character. Nor the one who swatted a fly earlier. Release them. Expend your effort on the other five.’

Gaspare nodded. ‘With pleasure.’ He tapped the letter. ‘Think you Thoresby means to call you back so soon?’

Owen looked down at the packet in his hand. ‘It is the sort of thing he would do. I had best go and read it.’

Knaresborough sat on a precipitous cliff over the River Nidd. The trees that grew on the cliff were oddly twisted and stunted by their lifelong struggle to cling to the soil and sink in their roots. Owen stood atop the keep gazing down to the rushing river, remembering another precipitous cliff, another river. He had climbed the mountain with his father and his brother, Dafydd. At the top, Dafydd had dared Owen to walk to the edge and look down. Their father had laughed. ‘To look down is nothing, Dafydd, for your eyes can see it is far to fall, and you will not be tempted.’ Owen’s father had made them sit close to the edge and look down, then told them to shut one eye and look down. ‘You see how God protects us? He gave us two eyes that we might see the depths of Hell and seek to move upward.’ It was one of Owen’s best memories of his father, a rare moment when he had had time to take a day with his sons.

But now Owen gazed down a precipice with but one working eye, and it looked as if he could reach down and scoop up the river water in his hands. Folk made light of his blinding, but as an active man, Owen felt the loss every day. Balance, his vision to the left of him, and judgement of depth, distance, and trajectory, were all crippled by it. And his appearance made people uneasy. Owen would like to teach his child things such as the value of two eyes. But hearing the words from a scarred and crippled man, would the child listen?

Irritated with his self-pity, he tore open the letter from Thoresby, read quickly. The runaway nun from St Clement’s had reappeared. Odd, but no more than that. He read on. The rape and murder of Will Longford’s maid, and his cook buried in the nun’s grave with his neck broken – now those were more troublesome. Thoresby expressed an uneasiness about the business and ordered Owen to return to York. Owen could finish training the archers on St George’s Field; the archers could stay at York Castle. Meanwhile, Owen could begin inquiries into the matter. Meanwhile? What did he think, training archers occupied a few moments of his day?