Even Theresa seemed taken aback by her daughter-in-law’s vehemence. She hummed and hawed and spluttered a bit, but evidently thought better of renewing the subject. Instead, she filled her mouth with another spoonful of gruel, looked across at me and said thickly, ‘We shan’t be having the pleasure of your company at dinner, then?’ She added, ‘I still say you’re wasting your time. You won’t find out anything from Father Anselm. You should be sniffing around the rest of the Rawbones.’
‘I must do things in my own way and my own good time,’ I remonstrated, finishing my fried herring and oatmeal. I hoped it didn’t sound too much like a snub, but Theresa was beginning to irritate me.
She took it, however, in good part. ‘Oh, I know I’m an interfering old woman,’ she mocked. ‘It’s just … It’s just that I want to know what’s happened to Eris.’
There was a note of genuine pathos in her voice and I immediately felt ashamed of my spurt of annoyance. As I rose from my stool, I pressed a hand on her shoulder.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I promised. ‘But that’s all I can do. You must reconcile yourself, Dame Lilywhite, to the fact that we may never know for certain what’s become of your granddaughter.’
I left my pack at the Lilywhites’ cottage and set out with Hercules, encumbered only by my cudgel. It still being not yet half-past seven, and barely daylight, I went in the opposite direction to the village, climbing the slope past Dragonswick Farm to the wooded heights above. I was beginning to know my way by now, and had no difficulty, this time, in locating the ruins of Upper Brockhurst Hall. The place drew me to it as if by some enchantment. The silence this morning was almost total, except for the trees dripping gently in the early morning mist, their leaves unstirring in the windless air. A squirrel appeared, woken early from its winter sleep, and stopped in front of me. Its wary gaze, more full of bright-eyed intelligence than seemed natural in so small a creature, encountered mine for a fleeting instant before it scrabbled through a pile of last year’s leaves and vanished from sight. Hercules made no attempt to give chase. It had moved so swiftly and quietly, I doubted he had even noticed it, busy as he was about his own concerns.
For a while, I wandered around the ruins, trying to pace out the different rooms, attempting, without much success, to reconstruct the building in my imagination. But there was too little of it left, nature and the scavengers from Lower Brockhurst having done too thorough a job in either smothering or removing the ancient stones. The courtyard well was the only thing that remained intact; the well that had cost two men their lives and which had never had a chance to be of benefit to its owners before they were struck down and killed by the plague; the well that had dried up and lost its function when the bed of the Draco had been diverted; the well that had once nearly claimed the life of the young Ned Rawbone.
I sat down on the heavy wooden lid that had been fashioned by the village carpenter after that accident, carefully avoiding its handle, my legs sprawled out in front of me, and listened again to that silence which, in the countryside, is not truly a silence, but filled with a hundred tiny sounds, some of them barely audible to the human ear. The thin February sunshine slanted through the latticed branches of the surrounding trees, striking on a patch of dark ground-ivy in points of polished steel. I remembered what Lambert Miller had said to me the previous night; that Eris could be buried anywhere in these vast tracts of woodland, and it would be nigh on impossible to find her grave.
And yet … And yet … Why could I not believe that this was indeed the case? I felt in my bones that she was dead; murdered. The people who had known her in life were positive that she would not voluntarily have run away; that she would not simply have discarded everything that she had so obviously schemed for. Similarly, the idea of suicide was most improbable. Having accepted, therefore, that she had been killed unlawfully, why did I find it so difficult to believe that her body was buried anywhere other than here, in the ruins of Upper Brockhurst Hall?
There was no rhyme or reason for this feeling that amounted very nearly to a certainty. Any rational person would have laughed it to scorn. But it persisted and grew stronger the longer I sat there, refusing to be intimidated by any logical argument my brain put forward. In the end, angry with myself, I jumped to my feet, startling Hercules, and began a second detailed search of the ground, looking for some disturbance that might give the slightest hint of a recently dug grave. But of course, I found nothing. I returned and stared for a long time at the well, then lifted its lid and peered once more into its depths. Nothing. Nothing at all. It was as empty as when I had climbed down the ladder yesterday.
Hercules barked at me, plainly afraid that I was contemplating another descent. I thanked him for his concern and patted his head. ‘Not this time, lad,’ I reassured him.
Nevertheless, the feeling that Eris was somewhere close at hand persisted, refusing to be shaken off. It grew so strong that I began to sweat profusely, in spite of the morning chill, and I was suddenly aware of a mask-like face that stared at me from between two tree trunks. I froze with fear. It took a moment or two for me to realize that the face was indeed a mask, made from straw, the bulging eyes two black pebbles from the bed of the stream. When at last I could move, I approached it slowly and saw that it was hanging from the lower branch of an oak. There was other evidence, too, that someone had been here since my visit yesterday. There were fresh strips of cloth tied to neighbouring twigs and a corn dolly pinned to the trunk, the nail, as in the one I had seen on Wednesday afternoon, driven straight through the heart. Hercules was whimpering, lying flat on his belly.
‘Come on, boy,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’
He didn’t need a second invitation.
It was still too early, when I reached the village, to present myself at the priest’s house for dinner. Besides, I could hear that the morning service had not yet finished, so I decided to call on Alice Tucker to enquire after Tom Rawbone. If people saw me entering her cottage and drew the wrong conclusion, that was up to them. A clear conscience is all that matters in this life. (Do I really believe that? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. But it’s nice to dream.)
‘He’s gone home, dear,’ Alice said as soon as she saw me, guessing my mission. She beckoned me inside. ‘First light this morning. Mind you, he still looks a mess. Brother Ned’ll scold him, but I doubt the others will take much notice. They’re all used to Tom being in trouble. Been the same ever since he was a little boy. Comes of being so much younger than Ned, I reckon. Must have been like having two fathers. Enough to make any red-blooded young fellow rebellious.’
‘You’re sure he’s gone home?’ I asked.
Alice shrugged. ‘Can’t think where else he’d be. He isn’t going back to the alehouse, at least not yet awhile. Though I doubt he’s given up on Rosamund. A beating won’t deter Tom, not if he’s really set his heart on winning her back.’
‘He’d better watch out for Lambert Miller, then,’ I said feelingly.
Alice raised her eyebrows and I found myself telling her about last night’s encounter. When I’d finished, she pulled down the corners of her mouth. (By this time, we were sitting side by side on the bed, there being only one chair in the cottage.)
‘I wouldn’t be too sure it was a mistake, dear,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘Got a very nasty temper, has Lambert. How could he possibly think that you were Tom Rawbone? You’re much too tall.’
‘It was dark,’ I pointed out, ‘and Hercules was under my arm, beneath my cloak.’ Hercules, lying at my feet, thumped his tail at mention of his name. ‘The miller wouldn’t have seen him.’