Lost Innocents (A Servant of the Crown Mystery Book 3) (3 page)

As the thought of food and drink stirred Faucon's stomach to wishing, he nodded at Edmund's suggestion. "Alcester it is. Not that it matters to me where we stay. Nor do I care how long it takes to complete our task. Even if the girl in the well was only an orphan without a penny to her name, I'll remain in this corner of the shire until we've done our duty to her and our king."

His comment teased a strangled sound from the monk. It took Faucon an instant to recognize the noise as a laugh, the first he'd ever heard from his clerk. When Edmund lifted his head, the narrow-eyed look he sent his employer was definitely amused. Faucon watched in astonishment as his usually humorless clerk offered him a tight-lipped smile.

"Ah, the truth will out," Edmund said. "I say your pride was piqued when the bailiff flagged us down, asking for you by name. That's why you came here even though you knew his request for your attention was premature. I think me that's why you're determined to stay. You're savoring the experience. Never mind that it was Studley's prior who told him your name and that he should seek you out instead of the sheriff."

Despite himself and his worries, Faucon gave a quiet laugh. "I'll admit that it was a pleasant surprise when we're barely known in this place."

Barely known, but becoming better recognized daily, God be praised. The sooner folk stopped going first to Sir Alain before they came to their new Servant of the Crown, the better for Faucon's health.

Edmund's mockery of amusement faded as swiftly as it had appeared, his expression flattening into its usual emotionless mold. "As you will. We stay," he said, as if he were the one with the right to decide the matter. Then he gave another disgusted shake of his head. "All this for a girl child, and only a kitchen lass at that."

As if responding to the monk's final complaint, Gawne's hollow cry echoed up out of the well. "She's ready. Pull her up."

His voice broke in the middle of his call, sliding up a notch. Faucon wondered if this was a testament to his age or the effect of the cold well water.

"Nay, you must come first," his father commanded.

"Da, the ropes are wet and it's so dark down here I can't see to know if I'm knotting properly," his son countered impatiently, his voice piercing the stillness. There was a short spate of coughing, Gawne's reaction to breathing air he'd earlier remarked smelled strange. The lad continued when he caught his breath. "If she slides free, I'll only have to come back down and try again. Nay, take Jes first so I can be her guide as you raise her." This time when the lad's voice broke Faucon heard grief for his friend.

The smith's white-knuckled grip on the hempen lines relented not a whit. Still shaking his head in silent refusal, he looked across the well at the three villeins responsible for the ropes the boy had tied around the corpse. Like most of their neighbors, they wore tunics stained with dried mud. Their bare legs and feet were caked in heavy red earth. It suggested that despite the wet, the manor's gardens were being prepared for garlic, what with the day for planting it now at hand.

Although each man stood ready, his rope wrapped once around his wrist for security, his grip steady and strong, none of them moved. The man nearest the smith lifted his brows. "What say you, Ivo? If you want to raise your son first, you should do it." There was more than a hint of disapproval in his voice, no doubt born out of the smith's meek reaction to a rude retort from one of his children.

Ivo hesitated. His elder son, who stood closest to him, touched his father's back without releasing his hold on the ropes that connected him to his youngest brother. "Don't do it, Da. You've heard our Gawne this day. This is his to do and he's proud to do it. If we ignore his command, you'll but prove him right about us always making a child of him when he is child no longer," he warned quietly.

The smith's shoulders slumped in defeat. "Bring her up, Rob," he told the farmer, "but be swift and sure about it, knowing that my heart won't cease its trembling until my boy is once more safe in my arms."

Ivo let his grip relax just a little, so his youngest son could maneuver as he would around the rising corpse. There was a dull thud in the well as the boy hit the side of the shaft, followed by a quiet grunt. At that same instant, the three serfs put their backs into their work. Born from long habit and intimate knowledge, they matched each other pull for pull, doing so without word or sign.

As the watching folk saw something at last happening at the well, they dropped into a tense quiet. Even the children and dogs ceased their play. Within an instant, the only sounds in the demesne were the pleased grunting of the sunbathing hogs and the distant steady ring of a small bell. Its tone was of the sort worn by a bellwether, suggesting some villein's sheep were on the move.

A few of the youngsters pushed their way closer to the well. Following them came a gray-haired oldster who didn't stop until he stood at the forefront of the crowd. This rustic was wrinkled of face and bent of posture. Twiglets and bits of dried leaves were tangled in his white beard and the long thin strands of hair that escaped his torn hood. His tattered green tunic and faded brown chausses, even his rough hempen purse, were held together by layer upon layer of patches. Given his ragged appearance, the plain but slightly worn leather shoes upon the old man's feet were unexpected.

"Hold a moment! She's swinging," the boy called in warning from the watery depths, his voice echoing into the new stillness around the well. "Da, pull me up a bit so I can steady her."

As the farmers and the smiths responded to Gawne's commands, Faucon leaned against the well's surround, intending to grab the girl if they were able to bring her high enough. There was yet nothing to see in the depths save inky darkness.

When the boy called that the men could again haul on their lines, Faucon watched the ropes shift and tug. Another quiet thud echoed in the shaft, again the sound of flesh contacting with stone. No reaction followed, saying that it was the one beyond all earthly complaint who hit the wall this time.

Then the corpse rose into the first reaches of this day's hazy light. The girl had already grown stiff in death, or so said the rigid way she hung in her bindings. Beneath the long dark hair that streamed across her torso, the bare skin of her back and legs gleamed a pearly white.

That brought Faucon upright with a start. He shifted swiftly from side to side, eying the area around the well. There wasn't so much as a discarded head scarf in view. What child stripped before accidentally plunging into a well with a waist-high surround, then floated in the tight space of this shaft as if she'd died abed?

None, that's what.

With that, the joy of the hunt overtook him, only to depart as swiftly as it had arrived. His trail began with the one who had directed his neighbors to look in the well for the girl, and there it ended. There was no hunting to be done here. He would ask two simple questions, both of which had equally simple answers, and then call the jury. Faucon sighed in disappointment and once more braced himself against the surrounding wall.

"What were you looking for?" Edmund asked, yet speaking their native tongue.

"Discarded clothing," he replied, stretching downward to curl a hand around the dead girl's nearest arm. As always, the strange sensation of soft, still-yielding skin over death-hardened tissue startled him, and this lass's skin was even softer than usual, what with her having spent time in the water.

"Why? You knew there was nothing around the well," Edmund said. "If there had been, we would have seen it when we first arrived, and you would have asked me to note it."

"And so I wished to reconfirm," Faucon said as he pulled the girl's cold and dripping corpse over the surround. He grunted in surprise. She was heavier than he anticipated considering her slight form.

Only then did Edmund notice the child's lack of attire. "You didn't say she was unclothed!"

As the villeins closest to the well also noticed this lurid detail, the news became a rumbling mutter in the quiet ward, passing from mouth to mouth. Faucon made his clerk no reply as he stepped back to give the smiths room to work.

Immediately, Ivo the Smith cried "Pull!" to his sons and they began to raise their kinsman.

With Edmund following, Faucon moved a little distance from the working smiths. Dropping to one knee, he laid the corpse face-down on sod warmer than she, then leaned back a little to eye her. As he'd already noted, she lay as if she'd died abed, legs outstretched but slightly bent, arms close to her. That, alone, guaranteed she'd died elsewhere and been put into the well after the fact. Her head was turned a little to the side, not quite resting on one cheek.

Clearing the lass's hair off her back to expose the knotted ropes, he paused in pity. The half-healed crisscrossing marks of a viciously plied switch cut into her from shoulders to midsection, with bruises of about the same age laid atop them. The villeins who'd hauled her out of the well also noticed the marks. Shifting uneasily, they whispered between themselves, the one called Rob muttering that they should never have agreed to give her to someone they knew had so harsh a hand and merciless a disposition.

Edmund crouched on the opposite side of the corpse. "May our Lord have mercy on her," the monk whispered, crossing himself. "At least she's at peace now, and beyond all pain."

"Indeed," Faucon agreed, still lost in his inspection.

The girl's back had that unnatural red color that said she'd rested face-up for a time after her death. That surely hadn't been near the well or any place within this hamlet's bounds, else she'd have been discovered before she went into the well. What purpose was there in putting her into the shaft after she was dead?

Opening the last knot, he rolled the girl face up. Her dark wet hair fell like a sheet across her face. Sweeping aside the sodden mass, he breathed out in appreciation. Despite that her skin had a faint greenish tinge, a hue given to those who had been dead for more than a day, she'd been a beautiful child, with a perfect oval face, narrow nose, and a mouth that still owned a sweet curve even in death.

The shape of her torso and gentle roundness of her budding breasts said she'd been rapidly making her way into womanhood, even though Ivo had said she owned but a dozen years. Not that a woman's age or the maturity of her body had any bearing on the sort of trauma Faucon suspected this girl had suffered prior to her death. There were some men for whom a female of any age could be used and discarded after.

One eye, blue in color, was partially open. Faucon pried up its lid until he saw what he expected to find—the cloudy line that proved she hadn't drowned, but had instead lain in a dry place for some time. But also in that orb and on her face was a bloody tracery that he recognized, one that told the true tale of her last moments.

Clearing her hair from her throat, he found the marks he sought. As he stretched his hands across the slender column of her neck, he matched his fingertips to the bruises left behind by the one who had ended her life. A set of hands around the size of his own, neither overly large nor overly small, judging by the placement of his fingers.

"Holy Mother!" Edmund breathed as he understood the meaning of his employer's actions. "She did not drown." The monk looked at Faucon, his eyes wide. "My pardon. You were right to insist that we remain here instead of riding for home. What if, when she'd come to light on the morrow, these marks had been too faded for you to read? You might have missed the trail that leads to the one who did this horrible deed."

Faucon gaped at his clerk. A jest, a laugh, and an apology all on the same day! It was too much to be believed.

That ringing sheep's bell was almost upon them now. A woman shrieked from the back of the crowd. "Aaiye! Don't touch me! Look out, stand back! She's making her way to the well!"

Of a sudden, men and women scattered, crying out as they leapt this way and that. The dogs barked and snarled at the unexpected activity. Squealing, the sow and her brood fled, adding to the chaos.

Faucon came to his feet. It was no animal that came. Instead, a cloaked woman drove through the crowd, racing straight toward him, ringing the bell in her left hand while she whipped the staff in her right from side to side to clear the way.

There was no need. No one, Faucon included, wanted to make contact with a leper.

"Mary save me! Jessimond! My baby," the leper cried as she neared the well and saw the girl's corpse.

Faucon staggered back, stumbling into the three men who'd brought no orphan, but Jessimond the Leper's Daughter out of the watery darkness. The three were also on the move, retreating from potential contagion.

With a womanish shriek, Edmund started to rise only to slip on the wet turf. He fell back to sitting as the leper dropped to her knees next to him. As the panting monk scooted crab-like away from her, the smith's older sons shifted swiftly around the well until they stood opposite the diseased woman, releasing their ropes as they went.

Those same ropes hung loosely from Ivo's fingers as he stood frozen, his gaze locked on the leper's hooded face while a dripping Gawne hung over the stone surround, half-in, half-out of the well. That was too close to drowning for Faucon's comfort. The linked metal rings of his mail tunic jingling, he darted around the leper and grabbed the lad by the back of his apron sling. Hauling Gawne with him, he retreated until he felt they were beyond any chance contact.