Suzanne Robinson (25 page)

Alice came to stand in front of her and clasped her hands while she grinned. “He be in love.”

“I have a terrible ache in my head. Don’t babble foolishness at me.”

“It’s true, mistress. As you say, it be an unequal match, and therefore he must want you for yourself.”

Juliana shrugged off Gray’s cloak and scowled at it. “Great barons don’t marry for such reasons. If they want a woman of lower rank, they find some illicit way to have her and marry for power.”

“And since His Lordship hasn’t done such a thing, he must truly want you for his wife.”

Still staring at the cloak, Juliana barely listened to the maid. “He plots something. I know it. He was so mindlessly enraged at what I’d done to him, he couldn’t want marriage, so what does he want …?”

Love of God, he wanted to shame her as she had shamed him. Hadn’t he said so? Which meant he’d most likely devised some scheme of humiliation. It was as she first surmised. He was going to shame her at the wedding, before everyone. As his cousin had. And she would have to endure it for the sake of her men.

Shaking her head, Juliana became suddenly aware of how her body ached. “Bring a tub and water, Alice. I must bathe.”

“Oh, mistress, in all the excitement of your return, I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“Edmund Strange has been found.”

“Between the legs of a shepherdess?”

Alice drew near and dropped her voice. “No, mistress, in a barrel of sand, dead, stabbed to death.”

“Dead?”

“Aye, mistress.”

“In a sand barrel?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“No wonder he couldn’t be found,” Juliana said. To rid armor of rust, it was rolled in barrels of sand.

Edmund Strange dead. Juliana couldn’t seem to summon any response to the news. Perhaps she was too weary and too disturbed by this tumultuous day.

“Who stabbed him?” she asked.

“That be the quandary, mistress. No one knows, and your father has been ranting and bellowing for nigh onto an hour. And me, I’m scared.” Alice bent and touched Juliana’s sleeve. “There be a murderer about the castle, mistress, a murderer, and none of us be safe.”

JULIANA HAD TO FORGO HER TUB OF STEAMING water in favor of a rinse in a basin. Donning an old gown, she ran her fingers through her snarled hair and rushed from her chamber, her hair and Alice streaming behind her.

Edmund Strange dead, murdered. Such a thing had never happened in Wellesbrooke. Not to a nobleman, that is. Her father had hanged criminals. A peasant woman with thirteen children had killed her fourteenth newborn. A shepherd had once killed a bandit trying to steal his pig herd. These were the unhappy and rough events of life. But no knights got themselves stabbed and stuffed in barrels.

Rushing down the keep stairs, Juliana hurried to the practice yard between the east gatehouse and the armory. The sand barrels were kept in a shadowy enclosure formed by the walls of the gatehouse and armory, and a high stack of firewood. She and Alice found a crowd still gathered there. Her father’s men held them back while they craned their necks to watch the torchlit proceedings.

Juliana shouldered her way to the front of the group that surged into the gap between the firewood and the gatehouse wall. In the space before her rested five barrels, one of which had been tipped on its side. Sand spilled from the open mouth of the container, and with it, a man’s body. Some of the sand had been discolored by blood. Behind the barrel sat a stack of others like it. Beside
these lay shovels and a stack of wooden practice swords.

Hugo and Gray de Valence were talking to a boy, one of the Wellesbrooke pages who must have found the body. The guard nearest Juliana began to argue with several curious onlookers. She took advantage of the distraction and slithered over to the group by the body. Hugo was accompanied by Richard and his steward. Gray seemed to be there in support of Edmund’s brother Arthur. Hugo was expressing his sympathies to the young man.

Horrified curiosity drew Juliana to study the body of the man who almost had become her husband. When she first heard he was dead, she hadn’t believed it. Seeing the body now gave her a jolt. Edmund had been a cruel and selfish churl, and she’d hated him. But even she wouldn’t have designed so ignominious an end for the man—cut open and poked in a barrel like dried fish.

Edmund was dressed in a long robe, soft boots, and hose, the costume of a nobleman at leisure. His body was covered in sand, and there were several piercing wounds in his chest and one in his throat. Blood discolored the robe and its trim of gold braid. He still wore his signet ring, a silver brooch, and a fine leather belt. Beyond the corpse, Juliana could see a circular impression where the barrel must have rested. She glanced up and saw that a portion of the gatehouse tower projected out over the enclosure, thus limiting the view of anyone on the walls.

Someone had lured Edmund here, killed him, and stuffed him in the barrel unseen. A secluded spot secure from the eyes of the castle guards. Still, the murderer had risked being heard. Juliana frowned and drew closer to Edmund’s body. She noted the wound to the throat and decided that it must have come first, preventing him from crying out for help.

Shuddering, she drew back as the foul scent of death reached her nostrils. Nausea caused her to swallow and wrap her arms around her waist. Someone had hated Edmund Strange much more than she. Someone had dealt him a fatal blow and yet kept stabbing him. Shaking her head, Juliana averted her glance. She’d seen people die, of wounds, of disease, from hanging, never from such malicious violence.

She deliberately turned her back on the body, returning her attention to the men around her father. Gray’s voice rose above the others.

“I agree with you, Welles. We must think of who would want to kill my cousin and why. Neither I nor Arthur will rest until his killer is found.”

“I’ve already questioned his squire,” Hugo said. “The lad attended Edmund at bedtime last night and slept on a pallet in the chamber. But he’s a heavy sleeper, and Edmund had shared an entire flagon of wine with him. When he woke this morn, his master was gone.”

Gray glanced at Edmund’s body, then at Arthur, who had said nothing and appeared to be dazed. “A foul crime, Welles. This isn’t some brawl, some challenge over a slight or a feud. It’s a crime of deep hatred. Only hatred makes a man attack the throat with a knife and then keep stabbing after the death blow has been struck.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Hugo said. “I’ve questioned all my guards and knights, everyone who was about last night. No one heard anything.”

“Then we must think upon who hated Edmund enough to want to murder him.” Gray paused to glance around the small group of his knights and Hugo’s. “Of those here, I can think of two with such cause—you, Welles, and your nephew.”

Hugo sputtered. Richard drew himself up and launched into angry denials.

“If I had wished him dead,” Richard said through his teeth, “I would have challenged him openly and run a lance through him.”

Hugo pounded his chest. “Yes, I too. I should challenge you for such an insult, de Valence. If I quarrel with a man, I do it with honor.”

“I know that, but who else had cause?” Gray asked.

Turning crimson, Hugo bellowed, “What cause?”

“It’s one well known,” Gray said, “but one about which I don’t wish to speak before others.”

Juliana shoved between two of her father’s knights. “He means me.”

“What are you doing here?” Hugo cried. “Get you back to your chamber, foolish daughter.”

“Very well, Father, but you’re forgetting the most important question.”

Hugo vacillated between ridding himself of her interference and his curiosity. Curiosity won.

“What question? Tell me and then go.”

“Who gains most by the death of Edmund Strange?”

Gray moved to stand beside Hugo and stared at her with a frown. She refused to look at him and continued.

“Who profits by his death?” she asked. The men around her were silent. “The one who becomes heir in his place.”

Stunned silence filled the air. Arthur gawked at her, his mouth working. Hugo and Richard appeared intrigued, while Gray’s entire body seemed to cloak itself in ice. A resentful mutter arose from the knights attending him.

Hugo cleared his throat and growled. “Juliana, you go too far, accusing a knight of such evil. Get to your chamber, girl.”

Narrowing her eyes, she was about to refuse when Gray captured her arm.

“With your permission, Welles, I’ll escort my own dear sovereign lady and return.”

He put an arm around her shoulders with all the appearance of an attentive betrothed, and under the guise of sheltering her from sight of the body, shoved her out of the enclosure.

“God’s blessing,” he hissed as she resisted him, “I’ll have a word with you, mistress thief. Remember our bargain.”

An angry glance at Alice sent the maid scuttling in the opposite direction. Juliana yanked her arm free and marched back to the old keep. Before she reached the outer stairs, he caught her arm again and pulled her around the side between the walls of the tower and the kitchen. Losing what little patience she had, Juliana knocked his arm away and rounded on him. It was then that she noticed his expression. He was looking at her with the gravity of a priest hearing a confession he wished he could forget.

“What ails you?”

“What was in that concoction you tried to give Edmund when he first arrived?”

Avoiding his eyes, Juliana began to run her fingers through the masses of black locks that had fallen over her shoulders. “Naught.”

“You and I reason alike.”

Startled, she glanced up at him.

“You asked who gains from Edmund’s death,” he said. “I asked who had reason to wish him dead. There are profits other than riches. Revenge is one of them.”

Her fingers contorted in her hair, and she whispered, “Thunder of God. You think I did it.”

“Tell me you didn’t, my joyance. After this day I’m not sure what you wouldn’t do if you thought the cause just.
He did treat you evilly, and I know what you do to men who offend you.”

He really thought her capable of this bloody violence, the fool. Let him. Offended, still furious at him for his earlier transgressions, Juliana grasped her skirts and swished away from him without a word. He ran after her, snagging her sleeve and pulling her up short.

“Damnation!” She jerked the fabric from his fingers.

“Give me an answer, Juliana, and I’ll believe you.”

“Oh, thank you, my sovereign lord, O great and omniscient judge of hearts. Thank you for promising to believe me if I tell you the truth.”

“Now, Juliana—”

“Mother of God, you’re a presumptuous arse.” Breathing hard with the force of her indignation, she heard her own voice crackle with loud fury. “Of everyone in this castle, I hated Edmund Strange the most. He was a scheming bastard whose inconstancy and dishonor exacted a horrible cost from me. I wished a gut-rotting disease upon him. I hoped his man’s parts shriveled. If he’d been drowning, I would have put anvils in his tunic. Make what you will of that, Sir Judge, and damnation to you.”

Picking up her skirts again, Juliana noted with satisfaction the openmouthed dismay written on Gray’s face. Sneering at him, she swept around the corner, up the stairs, and into the keep. Alice was waiting for her in the hall.

“Mistress, be you well? What happened?”

Juliana stomped down the hall and to the stairs of the Maiden’s Tower. “Slavering devil’s wight. False accuser. Witless troll.”

“What’s wrong?” Alice cried.

“He suspects me,
me
, of killing Edmund Strange.”

Alice covered her mouth as she hurried at Juliana’s side. “Oh, no.”

At the dread in the maid’s voice, Juliana stopped on the landing outside her chamber.

“What’s happened?”

“That’s why he—oh, no.” Alice covered her mouth with her fingertips.

“Out with it,” Juliana said. “By the reverence of God, I’ve no patience with quibbling.”

“While you were looking at the—the …”

“Body, Alice, the body.”

“Yes, mistress. While you were looking at it, he asked me if you’d been in your chamber last night. I said you’d been in your herb chamber. Then he asked if I was in the herb chamber too, and I said no.”

“The sneaking, piss-ridden churl.”

Juliana shoved open her chamber door with such violence that it banged against the wall. Stalking inside, she stopped in mid-curse to find the room inhabited by her sisters and Yolande. All three turned when she burst into the room and studied her in silence. Juliana stared back at them, her dark brows nearly meeting over her nose, foot tapping. Fixing Bertrade with a look that would have frightened a mad bear, she grew even more impatient when her sister quickly knelt before the small altar beside Juliana’s bed and began whispering prayers.