A man passing in homespun, a pair of rabbits slung over his shoulder, heard her and laughed.
‘What’s the fella ever done to you, to send him to Mittelbach, Maud?’
‘Keep your nose out of others’ conversations, Georg, or expect to have it snipped off!’ Then she turned back to Michaels with a blush. ‘Though he’s right enough. It’s a mean little place. Their pastor does nothing but drink and their head man’s a devil.’
Georg did not seem to be over-worried about his nose. ‘The blacksmith has an amulet — you know, got the hair in it of that robber who killed three travellers in Gottingen in seventy-nine. Means he can’t be vanquished by any man. He deals out the beatings the headman prescribes. Almost killed a woman there last year.’
‘Did kill her!’ Maud replied. ‘A chill like that would never have carried her off if he hadn’t knocked the health out of her. And she was no adulteress, just had a jealous husband and a friendly disposition. There, you see? We all know each other’s business round here.’
‘Why don’t they complain to the Duke?’ Michaels asked.
‘Not his people. It’s the land of one of the Imperial Knights, surrounded by Maulberg, but not Maulberg, you know? There are a few up that way. A big house, some land, some grand fella who acts like a king and spends all that can be dragged out of the soil on silks to wear in another man’s palace. They don’t care what happens to the people as long as their stewards roll up with a bag of coins once a quarter.’
Michaels thanked her and offered her a coin from his own bag. She laughed at him. ‘No charge for a chat, brother. Keep your money and buy one of May’s cheeses with it; you’ll get nothing worth eating in Mittelbach.’
Harriet was becoming accustomed to spending time with the dead, but that was not the same as being unfeeling in their presence. Countess Dieth was much her own age, and in her interviews with Krall about the death of her friend, she had answered like a woman of passion and intelligence. Harriet remembered her expression when she had understood the effect of the mask — her fear — and suddenly the death of this woman seemed to fall hard on Harriet’s shoulders. What could she — should she — have done yesterday? It seemed to her now that she had spent half the day wandering the palace grounds. She had not pushed.
The doors closed behind them, and Harriet hesitated halfway up the short aisle. It was not a large chapel, but beautiful in its light and proportions even if the floor was messy with dust and wood shavings. Harriet was flanked by carved stalls; she saw the small organ, its pipes freshly gilded, on the south wall, the pulpit to the right, and there the Countess lay, like a sacrifice, on a table covered with white linen set before the altar. There were candles at her head and feet, but the day was bright enough now to make them unnecessary. She was lit by the morning sun coming through the stained glass of the east window. Her plum-coloured dress was patterned with the red, blue and yellow of the Arms of Maulberg. Pushed against the walls were a pair of scaffold frames. Harriet looked up to where the frescos on the ceiling had been abandoned partway through their painting. Christ in the centre, fully coloured and robed. Around Him, any number of angels faded into outlines and bare plaster. Harriet noticed that the colour of Christ’s robe was the same as the Countess’s dress. He had His arms held out wide.
She took another step forward and watched as Crowther opened one of the Countess’s eyes with thumb and forefinger. Krall took a seat in the stalls.
‘Was she suffocated with the earth in her mouth?’ Harriet’s voice sounded hollow, and loud to her in the empty space.
‘Suffocated, I think,’ he answered, without looking up. ‘The earth may have been placed in her mouth after death however. If, when I open the body, I find there is soil in her stomach and throat, then we may conclude …’
‘I understand.’
Crowther moved to the other side of the body and stooped, apparently examining the left wrist. As she watched him, he became suddenly still, frowning, then he let out his breath and turned away. She had never seen him give any sign of distress or discomfort in the company of the dead; his normal attitude was a quiet curiosity.
‘Crowther, what is it?’
He stood aside.
Trying not to think of the living woman, Harriet finally stepped forward and looked carefully at the body. There were lines around the eyes, across the forehead that Harriet recognised from her own mirror. Then she examined the skin around the throat, the uninjured wrist, the nails on that clean right hand. No bruising she could see at all. No nails broken, no sign of restraint. It was just as they had been told of Lady Martesen’s body. She thought of Kupfel’s drug. The soil in the mouth. There was unlikely to be a ready supply of soil in the temple any more than there had been a convenient method of drowning Lady Martesen in the haberdasher’s back room. Whoever had done this had brought his tools with him. So he had planned these embellished killings; he did not slice the wrist, then change his mind.
She stepped round the Countess’s head to her left side, feeling like a traveller ordered by her guidebook to examine the peculiarities of a certain effigy, and turned her attention to the injured wrist. The deep slash had let the flesh separate to expose the meat and matter below. The hand was blackened with blood. It had run from the wound and across her palm, then travelled along the fingers. Its course was easy to read. The thumb was clean. She spoke as she thought. ‘The blood on the hand suggests the heart was still in motion when the injury occurred, does it not? This is a flow, a wound in living flesh.’ She glanced up at him and Crowther nodded. ‘We had thought the lack of blood might mean these wounds to the wrists were made after death, but it cannot be so.’ She remembered what Krall had said about the place where Bertram Raben had died. That there was not enough blood. And no mention of any blood at all at the scene of the death of Herr Fink.
‘That footman talked of blood in the room where she was found. You translated the word he chose as “drops”, if I remember.’ Crowther nodded again. ‘That does not suggest the quantity of blood that would result from this wound. It must have poured out. There should have been pools of it.’ The wound must then have been inflicted, and allowed to give forth a profusion, before the victim’s mouth and nose were sealed and her heart ceased to beat. So where in the name of God was the blood?
It came to her like knowledge remembered, a simple fact she had always known, but had forgotten momentarily. She felt her own blood begin to roar in her ears, and thought of an account Crowther had given her of an execution he had attended in Germany, of people crowding round the trunk of a freshly executed criminal with their cups held high to catch the blood that flowed, outpourings of the final beats of a heart that did not yet know itself dead.
‘Oh God, Crowther. Whoever did this collected their blood.’
Turning away, she walked quickly into the darkest corner of the chapel and put her hand against the wall. For a moment she hoped she might be able to control the clenching in her stomach, but as if it wished to taunt her with a separate will, her mind filled with every incident of blood-letting she had ever seen. With the eyes of a child she saw the door to her father’s room open and the local doctor emerge cradling a bowl of bright red from his regular spring bleeding; she found herself on the red-painted orlop deck of her husband’s ship assisting the ship’s surgeon among the shattered and struggling victims of a surprise attack from privateers; she was watching blood pool on the floor of the Great Chamber at Thornleigh Hall; she was bent over her husband while her skirts soaked in his blood; she was watching some man, a bowl in his hands, patiently collecting the flow from Countess Dieth’s unmoving, pliant fingertips. She struggled for the door, wrenched it open and stepped in to the courtyard, panting hard.