Searcher of the Dead Read online

“Bess is right, Dorothie,” said Robert. “Let us wait another hour. You shall see—”

  “‘Bess is right,’” she mocked. “Elizabeth is always right, is she not? You have always sided with her, Robert. Ever since she was born. Well, I do not wish to wait another hour. It shall be too late by then.”

  “Too late for what?” Bess asked.

  “I am not being foolish, Elizabeth, about my concerns,” she answered crossly. “Fulke said he would return by now, and he has not. He is never late.”

  Bess did not correct that statement, counting in her head the many times a visit to a tavern or an inn had delayed her brother-in-law. But Dorothie’s fear was palpable. Bess had a thought of Martin. It cannot be. It cannot. Not again.

  “The rain has detained him,” said Robert. “That is all. You know how the roads are in such weather.”

  “I do know how the roads are, Robert,” she snapped. “Why will not either of you listen to me? Harm has befallen Fulke. I know it!”

  Robert’s frown deepened. “What was his business in Devizes, Dorothie?”

  “He went to meet a solicitor. About a suit he planned to bring. I feared no good would come of his intentions, had a frightening dream …” Dorothie resumed strangling her fingers. “My mind did not calm when my servants remarked this morning upon Fulke’s mistemper as he prepared to depart.”

  “Perhaps he decided to stay the night in Devizes,” said Bess.

  “He would have sent a message.” Dorothie scrambled to her feet. “We must go to the constable and have him search for Fulke. We have to find him. For the sake of our boys! What will I tell our poor boys?”

  That she did not fret for Margery, Dorothie’s daughter from her brief first marriage, was sadly telling. Bess had never sensed deep affection in Margery, though, for the man who’d replaced her own father after his death in a horrible farming accident. Mayhap she would not be as distraught as the boys.

  “The constable will not go,” said Robert. “It has grown dark, and the rain is even heavier than it was before. Sit down and sup with us, Dorothie. By the time you have finished and returned home, you will find Fulke there with your daughter, missing you.”

  “Margery is with Fulke’s sister, freshly delivered of a child, and will not return until the morrow. So do not think to cause me guilt over her feelings, Robert, in hopes of convincing me to meekly go home.” Her cheeks flared red. “If neither of you will search with me, I will go on my own. To save Fulke before it is too late!”

  She fled the hall, slamming the front door behind her. Bess made to follow.

  “Bess, wait!” shouted Robert.

  She paused in the passageway with her hand upon the latch. “But Dorothie—”

  “Will not convince the constable to gather up men to look for Fulke. Not in this weather. He will tell her to wait until the morrow.”

  Bess snatched her cloak from its hook. “Robert, you know her as well as I do. Once she gets an idea in her head, she persists. She will take to the highway on her own to look for Fulke.” Dorothie had already lost one husband. How might she fare were she to lose another?

  Robert strode across the room and took Bess’s cloak from her hand. He replaced it on its hook. “I will go after her. Stay here. I will return with as much haste as I can.”

  “Joan,” Bess called out. “Set a lantern outside.”

  Robert buttoned his doublet, and Bess offered him his broad-brimmed hat. “She will not have gotten far. It is too muddy to run fast in the cork-soled shoes she was wearing.”

  Robert kissed Bess hastily upon her cheek; his beard tickled. “I will knock her on the head if that is what is required to keep her from hying off to wherever Fulke has gone.”

  Bess smiled and let him out, a burst of rain wetting the patterned rush mat beneath her feet. Joan hurried out behind him and hung a lit lantern by the gateway to the rear courtyard. Its sputtering flare cast Robert in light before he disappeared down the street.

  “What has happened to Master Crofton?” Joan asked.

  “He is delayed on his return from Devizes,” said Bess, wrapping her arms tight about her waist. “Mayhap my sister frets needlessly.”

  “Think you so, Mistress?”

  Bess could not answer honestly.

  Peace.

  How short-lived it had been.

  CHAPTER 2

  “You are joining us this fair evening, Constable Harwoode?” The alehouse keeper’s wife greeted him at the door.

  “Not so fair this evening, Mistress,” Kit replied.

  He slipped his hat from his head to shake off rainwater, which scattered across the rushes on the floor. The space, which had once been the house’s hall, was more crowded than usual. Pipe smoke hung heavy in the air, and men clustered in groups, drinking their ale and laughing. A band of apprentices, freed from their labors for the day, stood near the hearth singing a ballad. The foul weather had encouraged the alehouse keeper to shutter the window through which he sometimes served drink, forcing customers inside.

  “I’ve come for your freshest ale,” said Kit, replacing his hat.

  “Pardy, how you jest, Constable,” she said. “’Tis certain you saw the ale-stake we set above the door. Our ale has been tasted by the aleconner and is most fresh.”

  Kit had the power to see them fined if the ale was not. And though the woman grinned, she did watch him warily.

  “As it ever is, Mistress.” Kit located the man he sought. A thick-chested husbandman, he hunched on a bench set far from the blazing fire and the light of a lantern suspended from a beam. “Serve up more for my friend there as well.”

  The woman eyed the fellow. “He is your friend?”

  “He is for tonight.”

  Kit snaked his way between the stools and benches scattered about, greeting those who raised their eyes to watch him pass. Some of those gazes were friendly; others were not, as they hid the cards they’d been playing with before he had walked through the door. Not long ago, he had been one of them, at the alehouse for a night of drink and companionship. But then, as a jest, his cousin Wat had put forward Kit’s name for constable, expecting him to refuse. Or to fail. But Kit was no longer an unruly lad in need of a lesson, time having worn away the sharpest of his rough edges, and he had not refused the appointment nor did he intend to fail. Leaving him, for now, more than just another alehouse customer.

  “No gittern tonight, Constable?” a grizzled fellow wearing a red cap called out.

  “When was the last time I brought it to play?” Months. No, a year. Before he’d accepted this role. “Besides, you have those fellows singing there for music.”

  The red-capped man smirked. “Aye. We do. What great fortune.”

  Kit reached the husbandman’s bench and took a seat alongside him. Kit’s booted foot encountered the alehouse’s ratter. The cat hissed and scurried off. “Good even.”

  “Constable,” the man grunted.

  “You wished to speak with me.”

  “I’ve had a pig stolen.” The man’s eyes darted about, as if he thought the thief might be in the alehouse. “That animal is worth four shillings, Constable. Four shillings lost!”

  A great deal of money for a man with patched tunic sleeves and bug-eaten hose.

  “A goodly sum,” said Kit.

  The alehouse keeper’s wife arrived with a large blackjack of ale and a tankard for Kit, who’d not brought his own drinking vessel. After she poured out the drink, Kit made payment and waited for her to depart.

  “No need to skulk in a dark corner of this alehouse to report it, though,” he said. “There is no shame in having a pig stolen.”

  “’Tis not all I need tell you.” The husbandman’s eyes darted about again, and he gulped down half his ale. “There be a curious fellow hiding in the ruins of the old priory.”

  “You suspect that some man taking cover in a pile of rubble has stolen your pig?” Kit asked. He sipped his ale; it was indeed fresh. He could enjoy it more if he and his companio
n were not being stared at by nearly everyone in the room. Kit glared at the inquisitive individuals until they determined the company of their mates was more interesting. “A man living among stones could not butcher and cook the creature without detection.”

  “He may have done!”

  “There are others to more reasonably suspect.” Such as the cordwainer’s son. The lad was regularly accused of every petty crime committed in town, and on occasion, he’d even been guilty. Or the son of the cottager who lived hard by the priory ruins, almost as much a nuisance as the cordwainer’s boy.

  “No one else.” In one great swallow, the fellow finished off the ale and smacked his lips. Kit poured the remainder of the ale into the man’s tankard. “It is the fellow hiding in those ruins. Mark my words. A vagrant, in violation of the law.”

  “I will search him out. Tomorrow, should the weather lift.” If such a man existed. This sighting was the first Kit had heard.

  “My thanks. And if he has my pig, hang him.”

  “Should I find him in possession of your pig, I shall leave the assessment of his guilt to the manor court.”

  “He is guilty. But you take care with him, Constable.” The fellow leaned nearer. “He is a dangerous one.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He be one of them soldiers come back from the fighting in the Low Countries. The ones who cannot fight any longer because …” He tapped the side of his skull.

  Kit cocked his head; the story was becoming intriguing. “You’ve seen him well enough to determine this?”

  “Others have.”

  “No one has informed me,” said Kit.

  “They are afraid.” He nodded, convinced of his story.

  “If the vagrant is a soldier, he would have a pass and not need to lurk among the ruins,” said Kit. “It surprises me that these ‘others’ who have seen him haven’t claimed the fellow is a Jesuit come to kill the queen.”

  The man considered for a moment. “He may be.” His thick eyebrows jigged up his forehead. “For there are men hiding in the shadows, Constable. And we’re none of us safe.”

  * * *

  “Did Master Crofton return from his journey, Mistress?”

  In the light of a single beeswax candle, Joan eased an ivory comb through Bess’s hair, the teeth encountering knots among the curls. Bess, seated upon a cushioned stool, stared out the window of her chamber, jettied above the kitchen and overlooking the dark street. The neighbors across the road had set a candle in their deep window, and it cast a pale light onto the rain-slicked gravel. A tiny four-legged creature snuffled in the shadows.

  “No. He did not,” Bess answered, wrapping her holland night rail close about her shift.

  Joan noticed the motion. “Should I bring a chafing dish to heat the room?”

  “The cold I feel has naught to do with any chill in this room, Joan.”

  Robert had located Dorothie and convinced her to return to her house, where they had been met with no further news of Fulke’s whereabouts. Robert had stayed with her long past the ringing of the curfew bell before coming back home in low spirits. They could do nothing until morning. Meanwhile, sleep would prove elusive for all the family.

  Joan set down the comb and began to braid Bess’s hair. “The weather has delayed him.”

  “I have tried to persuade myself of that as well. I fear I do not succeed.” She twisted upon the stool to look up at her servant. Joan’s coif had slipped, and the scar that carved a path along her chin showed in the yellow flicker of candlelight. Bess had asked only once about the man who had inflicted it. “I cannot help but suspect the worst. Tell me I am not foolish.”

  Joan’s fingers did not slow in their steady movement through Bess’s hair. “You are never foolish.” She completed the braid and tied the end off with a strip of lockram.

  “Tell me also that I have not brought some sort of curse with me from London,” said Bess. The curse that had struck down Martin.

  “We know he has not followed us here, Mistress. He remains there yet.”

  Bess knew that to be true; they paid a London friend to keep an eye on the man who’d murdered Martin and alert them should he leave the city. Dangerous work. “I sometimes dream that his evil can spread like fingers of fog to touch us here.”

  “Laurence is but a man. Not a fiend of hell that can reach us in distant Wiltshire.”

  “You are right,” said Bess. Laurence had been false, wicked, a traitor to the trust and affection Martin and Bess had bestowed upon him, but he was just a man. “I know you are right.”

  Joan closed the serge curtain at the window, its rings rattling across the iron rod, and withdrew. Bess stripped to her smock and climbed onto the bed, the linens cold against her legs. She huddled beneath them and stared at the shadows that danced with the movement of the candle’s flame. She dreaded that morning would bring them no resolution, no peace. The shadows presented no answer to what had happened to Fulke, however, and no wisdom was to be found in the plop of rain dripping onto the muddy gravel beneath the bedchamber window.

  She managed to doze off, a fitful sleep. Pounding on the house door roused her, followed by Quail’s frantic barking. Bess sat bolt upright and hunted for her night rail and her slippers in the near darkness. The pounding continued, and she ventured out of her chamber and down the corner stairwell.

  Robert had come down the stairs from his chamber and strode into the hall, Quail darting about his feet. “Joan, let them in,” he called out, knowing she would have risen and run to the door.

  Indeed, she had already gone to the door, for soon Bess heard Dorothie’s panicked voice.

  Bess hurried across the hall and into the passageway. Dorothie stood framed in the doorway, the sky beyond her purpling. The rain and clouds had lifted. From the courtyard behind the house came the crow of Robert’s cockerel, and across the way, a neighbor’s joined the chorus.

  “Dorothie, what is the news?” Bess asked, dread pinching her stomach.

  “Fulke’s horse!” she cried, her face eerily pale. Robert reached for her, and she clutched his arm, support that kept her propped upon her feet. “His horse! It has returned without him. I came here as fast as I could.”

  “We must search,” said Robert. “I shall have Humphrey ready my horse.”

  “I want to go with you, Robert,” said Dorothie. There would be no dissuading her; she had dressed for a journey in her wool riding hood, low boots, and a fustian gown she wore while tending her knot garden.

  “As you wish.” He handed her off to lean upon Joan. “Take my sister into the lesser parlor and light the fire to warm her while I prepare to depart. I shall make haste.”

  “I shall come also,” Bess announced.

  Robert sighed. “Bess—”

  “I insist.” He had to know she would not back down.

  “Then I shall have Humphrey go to the inn and rent a horse for you,” he said and hurried off to prepare.

  * * *

  There were few roads in and out of town and only one that made the most sense to search if Fulke had gone to Devizes.

  Dorothie rode out with Robert, seated behind him on his gelding and clinging to his waist. The sway-backed palfrey Robert had rented snorted, its breath clouding the air, as Bess hooked her knee around the saddle’s pommel. She encouraged the animal to bob along at as rapid a clip as it could manage through the streets of an awakening town. The clang of the smith fashioning a harrow rang out, and the aroma of bread from the baker’s shop drifted on the air. Servants and goodwives bustled along the streets, attending to their early morning chores.

  Soon, the cobbled and graveled surface of the town lanes gave way to paths of clay and muck, bogging down their horses’ hooves as they descended into the valley. The bar that blocked the roadway had been raised for the morning. After a short while, the road became a causeway above the damp fields, herds of sheep and cattle dotting the countryside. Several neighbors had agreed to scour the lanes and underbru
sh, and they spread out in sets of two or three. Their passage attracted the attention of a handful of cattle grazing near the roadway, the animals staring after them. The barley had long been harvested and the fields furrowed and ridged to await the sowing of the winter wheat, their emptiness providing broad vistas. It would be easy to search for any sign of a body.

  They neared Goodwife Anwicke’s cottage. The child Bess had treated yesterday had already arisen to sit upon the doorstep. She scrubbed soiled swaddling cloths in a wooden bucket of water. Her infant sibling rested atop a tattered square of canvas at the girl’s side, restrained by its bindings. The bandage Bess had wrapped around the girl’s burns was still in place, and the linen appeared, she noticed thankfully, clean enough. The washing was hard work, however, with only one good hand.

  Bess nodded at her. The bruise upon her cheek had gone a dark purple. “Good morrow, child.”

  The girl blinked up at Bess as she slowly rode by. Her eyes were large, but the emotions and thoughts so easily read in other children’s eyes remained as concealed as a gentlewoman’s face behind a velvet traveling mask. The girl’s demeanor was unsettling, and Bess urged the palfrey along.

  They passed the grim remains of a cottage that had been burned in a zealous desire to thwart the plague when it had swept through these parts the previous year. Across the road stood the tumbled walls of a ruined priory. The structure was reduced to a handful of walls, some with the outlines of windows. Pointed arches graced empty doorways, and a large portal marked what had once been the entry. Most of the townsfolk avoided the ruin, thinking it was haunted by the men who’d once lived there. Margery believed likewise. She never accompanied Bess when she came to collect yarrow and wild carrot, which yet bloomed in the remnants of the garden planted in the days before King Henry. Bess had insisted there was naught to fear from piles of rocks. Nonetheless, the rubble was a mournful reminder of death, and Bess looked away.

  Robert reined in his horse. “Bess, do you want us to wait for you?” She had fallen behind.

  “I am too slow.” Bess kneed the palfrey, which stubbornly responded to her urging by easing up. “You go ahead. At the crossroads, I will head in the other direction for a short distance and catch you up later.”