Searcher of the Dead Read online

  “Fulke was headed toward Devizes. He would not go that way,” insisted Dorothie.

  “Indulge me, Dorothie. My search shall not take long. Look, there are men checking rabbit traps.” Bess pointed up the lane. Three men moved among the furrows of a dormant field, bending down every few yards to check the snares placed along the rabbits’ runs. They moved so confidently that they had to be men of worth. Otherwise, they would fear the game laws. “I will ask them if they saw Fulke yesterday.”

  “Do not venture too far before you turn back. I do not wish to have to search for you as well,” said Robert. She did not wish that either. “Let us continue on, Dorothie. We will make greater progress if we go separate ways.”

  They trotted off, and Bess steered the palfrey along the path as close to the verge as possible, where grass mingled with the mud and provided sturdier footing. Wisps of fog rose from a rivulet of water snaking alongside a stand of beech, the foliage already turning autumn’s golden brown. A cascade of leaves blanketed the ground and covered the lane, knocked down by yesterday’s heavy rain. The air was thick with the musky scent of decaying leaves, and Bess inhaled deeply. Some medical men warned that breathing in the smell of decay damaged a body’s humors. She dismissed the idea that anything so pleasingly fragrant could be injurious.

  The fellow nearest the road paused in his occupation when he saw she had reined in the horse.

  “Good morrow, Mistress.”

  “Good morrow. I search for a man who is missing and may have come this way yesterday. I wondered if you had perchance noticed him.”

  Beneath his wide-brimmed hat, his pale eyes scanned her. “A runaway husband, mayhap?”

  Bess blushed at his forwardness. “He is not my husband, sirrah. God called my husband to Him this past year.”

  “My apologies—”

  “The man I seek is my brother-in-law, and his wife, my sister, is afraid for his life,” she said.

  “I see.” He tilted back his head and considered her. “Do I know of you and this family of yours? Are you from this area?”

  What gave him cause to ask such a question? “If you do not wish to help me, I shall speak to another of your companions.”

  She prodded the palfrey, and the fellow cried out for her to halt.

  “Whoa, whoa, there,” he said, clambering onto the causeway. They had drawn the attention of one of the other trappers, who was watching them from the field, a rabbit dangling from his hand. The third man had vanished. Perhaps to go make water in the copse of trees in the distance. “I will help you.”

  “He is a merchant named Fulke Crofton,” Bess said. “When he travels, he wears a fox-furred green cloak and a tall hat. He is short in stature and would have been astride a fawn-colored Spanish horse.”

  “I know of Merchant Crofton,” he said. “But I still do not recognize you.”

  “Does my name matter so greatly?”

  “It does to me.”

  She eyed him. His padded doublet and trunk hose were of good material, but naught else marked him as a man of particular importance. “I am Mistress Ellyott. Some call me Widow Ellyott. My brother is Robert Marshall, with whom I live.”

  “Ah.”

  “Satisfied?”

  He inclined his head. “My thanks, Mistress Ellyott. I must remark, however, that one attired in such fine clothing as your brother-in-law has likely been accosted by a highwayman.”

  A dispassionate assessment of Fulke’s fate.

  “He was bound for Devizes,” Bess said. “You can see the road from here. Did you notice him upon it yesterday? Were you and your fellows checking your snares?”

  In the heavy fog, Bess? Not likely. She was on a fool’s errand.

  “We were here for a very short while yesterday. The weather did not favor us,” he replied. “What time might Merchant Crofton have gone past?”

  Bess thought back to what Dorothie had said. “Around sunrise.”

  “Hm.” He buffed the backs of his fingers against the short dark beard growing along his chin. “Earlier than I was out here. And the fog was quite thick. His passage could have been unnoticed.”

  “Perhaps one of your friends …?”

  “Of course. Gibb,” he called out to the fellow with the rabbit, which was now strung from his leather girdle. “Did you notice a man dressed like a merchant riding on the Devizes highway yester-morn? Headed away from town around sunrise?”

  “No, Kit. I was still abed at sunrise.”

  Kit. She had a name for the stranger who, at that moment, rested his gloved hand upon the palfrey’s flank.

  “It appears we cannot help, Mistress,” said Kit. “But why does your sister fret for her wool merchant husband?”

  “He was to come home last evening and did not. Furthermore, his horse returned early this morning. Without him,” she added unnecessarily.

  “Good cause for concern, then.”

  Sudden shouts echoed across the field. The source of the noise was crashing through the underbrush toward them, yelling as he worked on the laces that closed the front of his breeches. “Kit! Gibb!”

  “Stop squealing,” chided the fellow named Gibb.

  “Come quick! Both of you. Now!” he said.

  “Excuse me.” With that, Kit sprinted away.

  His friend gestured wildly at the trees behind him. Kit did not converse long with him before running for the copse. The urgency in their actions caused Bess to unhitch her knee and hop down from the horse. After tying the animal to a nearby hedge, she hoisted her skirts and chased after them, the stubble in the field crunching beneath her thick-soled shoes. The cut stalks snagged her petticoats, and she stumbled over soggy furrows, but she had to reach the trees. All she could think was that she simply had to reach the trees.

  At the edge of the thicket, Bess stopped to catch her breath, her lungs laboring against the restriction imposed by her pair of bodies. Up ahead, the three men moved through the shadowed underbrush. She heard a cry—one of shock, it seemed—and hurried forward.

  It was then she saw what she did not wish to see, dangling from a sturdy branch of a great oak just beyond the far edge of the woods.

  She must have screamed, for the men turned as one.

  Kit ran back to join her. “This is no place for you, Mistress Ellyott.” He grabbed her arm and tugged her away.

  “But it is Fulke! We must cut him down!”

  “Gibb will attend to that. You should come away.”

  She was weeping now. Dorothie. Poor Dorothie.

  “We must send for the constable. To fetch the coroner,” Bess cried out, tripping over fallen branches as Kit pulled her along, tears clouding her vision. “To find the man who did this to Fulke. We must send for the constable now!”

  “No need, Mistress,” the man at her side said calmly. They broke into the sunlight at the other side of the stand of trees. “I am already here.”

  The pounding of approaching hoofbeats gave Bess no chance to respond. Her sister and brother had heard her and hastened back.

  “She cannot see this.” Bess struggled to release Kit’s hold on her arm. Her feet slid beneath her, yesterday’s rain making a mire of the fallen leaves and dirt. “She cannot!”

  Dorothie’s frightened gaze met hers, and she tumbled from the horse before Robert brought it to a halt. “Fulke!” she cried, ripping her skirts from the stirrup where they had tangled. “Fulke!”

  She ran toward them and the copse of trees at their backs.

  The constable comprehended who she was. “Stop her!”

  His friends, though, were distracted by their efforts to cut down Fulke, and she evaded their belated attempts to prevent her from reaching the woods.

  “Dorothie!” Bess shouted, at last wrenching free her arm and rushing to where her sister had gone. “No! Do not!”

  Her warnings came too late, though.

  For Dorothie could not hear over the sound of her own shrieking.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dorothi
e had ventured as far as to where Fulke had been cut down before collapsing upon the ground at his side. She wept with no care for the mud caking her clothing.

  “Dorothie, come now.” Bess gently took her sister’s arm. She was as limp as a child’s poppet made of scraps of fustian, and her eyes were as empty and unseeing as those painted upon such a toy’s face as well.

  “Fulke. Fulke.” Dorothie’s wailing had turned her hoarse, and her voice grated. She reached for her husband’s hand, slack against the trampled damp ground and tinged gray with death. A fallen leaf clung to his skin. Bess thought of another hand belonging to another man and felt sickness churn.

  “Come now,” Bess repeated. “Robert, prithee, help me lift her.”

  In one motion, her brother hoisted Dorothie to her feet. As he led her away, Bess glanced back at Fulke, his bare head face down in the dirt. The red line around his neck where the rope had bruised the flesh was visible above his sodden cloak’s fur collar. She could not fathom it possible that Fulke, arrogant Fulke, had chosen such an end.

  Their progress was a slow crawl to the roadside where the horses waited, their breath steaming in the damp morning air.

  “This should not have happened,” Dorothie muttered, her chin drooping over the embroidered edge of her cambric partlet. “I warned him … stupid man. Oh, Fulke.”

  “Do not blame yourself for what has happened, Dorothie,” said Robert. “He would have thought your dream gave him no cause to cancel his plans.”

  “This time, he should have done.”

  The constable had sent the man named Gibb to town to fetch the coroner. His apparent haste through the streets had spread the news of Fulke’s death faster than an announcement proclaimed in the market square. People scurried from the village to gather along the roadside. Plowmen abandoned their oxen. Farm laborers ceased their sowing. That they did not plunge across the field to gawp at Fulke’s body was a surprise.

  As Dorothie and Robert neared the roadway, those gathered upon it whispered behind their hands. In truth, some did not whisper but spoke aloud to one another. Bess wished not to hear them, imagining that if she pretended to be deaf, then Dorothie would not hear them as well. The unkind words spoken about a harsh and prideful man. That Fulke could no longer bear the burden of his sins, a comment that caused one fellow to howl with laughter.

  “Stop!” Dorothie screamed, extinguishing the murmurs and tittering as rapidly as two fingers closing about a flame. “Stop this now!”

  “Dorothie,” Robert soothed, “ignore them.”

  “No. They hated him.” Her gaze swept over shocked faces. “You are happy he is dead. Are you not? All of you!”

  Robert gave Dorothie a firm tug toward his gelding. “We must go. You benefit Fulke naught with this outburst.”

  The constable had followed them, and he overheard the exchange. When he met Bess’s gaze, she could see speculation in his eyes.

  “Should the coroner have need to speak with you, Mistress Crofton, where might you be found?” he asked.

  “Why would he have need to speak with me?” she asked, trembling. “I am no witness to this crime!”

  Her words encouraged a brisk wave of murmuring to fan out across the crowd.

  Constable Harwoode’s eyes narrowed. “Crime?”

  “The coroner may find her at my house today, Constable,” said Robert calmly, clasping Dorothie around the waist and hoisting her onto the saddle of his horse. “Please send news of the jury’s finding to us there.”

  The constable nodded and proceeded to instruct the males of the assembled crowd to await the coroner. Once he arrived, fifteen would be selected from among their number to act as members of the coroner’s jury. Given that none budged—for this was better entertainment than a traveling company of actors—the coroner would have sufficient jurors at hand once he arrived. They would examine the body for other wounds, search for footprints or hoof marks in the soft ground among the trees. Seek out witnesses and question them. Determine if it was suicide or murder.

  Robert retrieved the rented palfrey and helped Bess onto the saddle. She glanced at her sister, softly crying, her tears dripping onto her gown. This crime.

  Dorothie’s words reflected a suspicion, a hopeful belief, perhaps, that Fulke’s death was not suicide. The punishment for the unforgivable sin of self-murder was harsh. All of their movable goods would be forfeited to the Crown, every last coin, every last piece of linen, every last pot and spoon. As if the loss of husband and father was not punishment enough.

  She noticed Bess watching. “Do not pity me, Elizabeth. Pity shall not return Fulke to the living.”

  “I well know that, Dorothie.”

  Wiping her eyes, she turned away. “I cry for our boys. Our dear, fatherless boys. They will have to be brought home from Cambridge. And Margery, bereft of a father again—” Her words were overwhelmed by a fresh wash of tears.

  “Hush, now. The time to decide your sons’ futures will come later. For now, let us speak no more of this matter,” said Robert, climbing onto the gelding behind Dorothie and holding her close.

  Robert clucked to his horse, and it trotted off. Bess made to follow them, but Constable Harwoode stopped her.

  “Mistress.” He cast a hasty glance toward the stand of trees. Leaves and branches obscured any view of Fulke’s body. “You have my sympathy.”

  “I am not the one who suffers most here, Constable.”

  “Your sister, then.” His gaze flicked to where Robert and Dorothie slowly made their way along the road. “Your sister should realize that the coroner will not likely rule a death by hanging a homicide.”

  “Should I tell her so to comfort her?” Bess knew she sounded like a scold. She gripped the pommel of the saddle to steady herself. “A ruling of felo-de-se would destroy my sister’s and her children’s fortunes. Surely, you understand the consequences of deeming his death suicide.”

  His light eyes went hard as glass. “I will allow the coroner and his jury to make their ruling. They will be just.”

  His response angered her. “And you will not consider otherwise,” she said. “My brother-in-law was not the sort to do this awful act. He was too proud.”

  Kit Harwoode’s eyes went harder still. “The coroner rules, not I.” He removed his hat and bowed over it. “I bid you good day, Mistress Ellyott.”

  Without returning the pleasantry, Bess yanked the palfrey’s reins hard, turning the horse toward town. She left the constable to stand in the road among the curious townspeople, her shoulders held as motionless as possible despite their shaking from anger and grief.

  And from fear.

  * * *

  Bess let the palfrey pick its way back to town. She had no heart for returning to the house to share in Dorothie’s grief. Her sister’s heartache would only make Bess relive the moments after Martin died. Feel afresh the distress upon realizing that she would never hear his voice again or enjoy the brush of his fingertips against her skin.

  She glanced back over her shoulder to where the coroner and his jury were assembling. The coroner had passed her upon the road, his long black gown flapping about his legs as he strode toward the copse of trees. She could not see him or his jurors though; the intervening ruins of the priory obscured her line of sight even more than the distance. Bess squinted to search for what she could not discern. All that was visible were the rolling fields bathed in milky sunshine and the wisps of fog steaming above the nearby stream. How peaceful the setting was, as though another day like any other had risen with the sun. Appearances, though, could deceive. And she had been misled by outward prettiness before.

  Subdued, miserable, she shifted on the saddle, facing straight ahead. The Anwickes’ cottage stood just ahead on the side of the road. The road that Fulke had traveled upon. Someone at the cottage might have seen him pass. Witnessed if he had encountered anyone who might have caused him harm.

  Bess reined in the horse, unhitched her knee, and hopped down. Her young patient
no longer sat upon the doorstep, her bucket and infant sibling vanished with her. The door was closed firm, and the shutters were set in the lone window that faced the highway. No smoke curled from the hole in the roof. Bess rapped on the door nonetheless.

  “Ho!” she called.

  She heard a faint noise, like the scuttling of a mouse. Bess leaned nearer the door and rapped again. The response was silence.

  Bess stepped back to scan the cottage as if another window or open door might appear. Of course, none did. Perhaps the news of Fulke’s death had enticed the Anwickes to rush into town to collect the gossip like a windfall of acorns.

  She remounted the palfrey and rode the rest of the way into town. Eyes followed her passage, as did whispers. The chandler’s apprentice, who’d been hurrying across the market square before her arrival, came to an abrupt halt, his eyes wide.

  “Good morrow,” Bess said to him, since he was staring at her with obvious interest.

  “Is it true? He’s dead in the woods?” the teenage boy asked.

  How abrupt boys could be. How very accurate as well. “Aye.” Bess would not deny what everyone must already know.

  “Zounds!” he replied. He turned on his heel and ran back to the chandler’s. “It’s true!” his voice echoed from the depths of the building. “It’s true!”

  “Mistress Ellyott!” cried a female voice.

  “Mistress Stamford,” she said to the woman hailing her. Amice Stamford stood before the windows of her husband’s shop. The red kirtle showing through the opening of her flaxen-yellow gown’s skirt was as vivid as a blot of blood against a scrap of parchment, drawing the eye. A morbid comparison. At Amice Stamford’s back, her eldest daughter leaned across a stack of scarlets and broadcloths to peer through the window. She nearly knocked over the woolens in her eagerness to spy.

  “Is it true?” Mistress Stamford asked. She must not have heard Bess’s exchange with the chandler’s apprentice; Bess could not fathom how the woman had not.

  “Do you mean Fulke?”

  “Yes.” She stepped into the road and walked up to the palfrey. It was brave of her to wish to speak to a member of Fulke’s family when, if he had indeed hanged himself, they were all disgraced.