C ecily mopped the sweat from John’s brow. He was deathly pale, and his breathing was irregular, panting one moment and taking long, slow breaths the next. His rudimentary first aid was unravelling. She had removed his headband already, and the splints he had so carefully constructed and bound to his leg were loose, and coming free.
Hearing the mad rattle of hooves and iron on the stones of the roadway, she was tempted to leave him and rush to the gate to urge the men on faster, but she swallowed hard and remained. The hand clutching at her own was enough to convince her that she was of more use here, holding onto the injured man, than outside getting in the way of the riders.
First through the gateway was her stableman, and he was off his mount as soon as he was through it, leaping to her side. Then the wagon came in at a gallop, and the driver had to haul on the reins to stop the two beasts before they compounded John’s hurts.
“Mistress, let me help you up.”
Cecily shook her head. She had no intention of letting go of the man’s hand while John gripped it. A monk came to her side, and gently felt John’s head before studying his posture and coloring. “The diagnosis isn’t difficult, at any rate,” he murmured. “It’s the prognosis that will be more complicated.”
“How is he?”
“How?” He was an older monk, with a fringe of whitening hair all round his head that only served to emphasize the lines of worry and confusion on his brow. “Why, with a beating like this, it’s hard to say. I should think he’s concussed, which means he would have been better employed lying in his bed, rather than getting up to these antics. The only effect of his moving around will be a severe headache.”
“But his leg!”
“Yes. It’s obvious he had to try to fetch help. The leg is in a dreadful state, but at least his pulse seems stable. Sometimes you find that a man will slide away quickly when he has had a bad accident. The pneuma, the life force which is manufactured in the heart from the air collected in the lungs, and carried about the body with the blood until it-”
“Can you cure him?” snapped Cecily.
“Why yes-I suppose so. I think that-”
“Where will you cure him?”
“At the hospital attached to the church, of course, so-”
“So you should hold your lectures until he’s installed there, shouldn’t you?”
She quickly had the men take John’s door off its hinges, and they carefully lifted him onto it, suffering the lash of Cecily’s tongue when she thought they might have failed in any way or made him uncomfortable. Soon John was on the back of the wagon, and Cecily rode in it with him, still holding his hand.
They set off down the hill, the driver standing warily, talking to his two charges as they began the descent, for this was a steep hill in places, and he didn’t want to be called to Cecily’s attention for careless driving. As they went, Cecily was surprised to feel her hand squeezed by the injured Irishman. She looked down and smiled at him.
At that moment, with the sun above lighting her head like a halo, John of Irelaunde was blinded. “Have I died? Are you an angel?” he asked querulously. Before she could answer, the cart hit a stone and jolted, beating his bruised skull against the boarded walls. “Jesus’ Blood!” he swore, and when he glanced upward again and saw her smile, he gave a pale grin in return. “Ah, Mistress Cecily. You must be an angel-almost the best angel I could have hoped to meet this morning. I hope you won’t mind taking a message to my sweet girl?”
“Poor John. Was this all because of me?”
“Well now, I think it was, but don’t speak of it to anyone, or he might be taken-and then all this would have been in vain. Just keep quiet!”
Simon rode slumped on his horse, grinning. “You must be losing your touch, Baldwin. This town used to be quite a calm and quiet place, and now you’ve got a nutter of a smith trying to rouse the rabble.”
“You think it is because of me?”
Simon smiled at the knight and Baldwin gradually relaxed, even giving a self-conscious grin. “All right, so I am a little prickly. But that idiot got under my skin.”
“It’s not just him, it’s the murder. We still appear to have little to go on.”
“No. We know so much, but none of it makes any sense. For example, I am not sure why the smith was at Godfrey’s house.”
“You want to go back and ask him?”
“Thank you for the thought, Simon, but I don’t think it would be productive. Still, I wonder if there is anything that could link the smith to Godfrey.”
“He was ugly enough-do you think he might be the killer?”
“Who, Jack?” Baldwin laughed. “Oh, who knows? He’s repellent, certainly, but I don’t like to judge everyone by their outer appearance. That is what people like Jack are guilty of when they look at lepers. I don’t want to commit the same crime as them.” Baldwin mused quietly a moment. “The difficulty I have is, Godfrey used him on the afternoon he died…”
“Yes. For a horse that had cast a shoe.”
“And they had kept the shoe so it could be refitted.”
“A sign of real tightfistedness.”
“True,” said Baldwin, but there was a faraway look in his eye. “Many would have thrown the old shoe away, surely, and had a new one made.”
Simon put his head to one side, considering. “And then come to the smithy to get a new one the right size.”
“Precisely what I was thinking. If they had asked for a fresh one, it would have meant they would have had to bring the horse here. But they kept the old one, and that meant they could have the smith go to the house. All he needed was a rasp, some nails and a hammer.”
“But why should they want him there?”
“Let me finish: taking a horseshoe off is easy enough. All you have to do is lever it. It could well be that someone wanted the smith out of here, so they took off the shoe and pretended that it had fallen off just so that Jack would go to the house.”
“That’s one explanation, Baldwin, but don’t forget there’s another possibility. What if someone wanted the smith there, at the house? It could easily have been done to make sure that he was in Godfrey’s hall.”
“True, but why? Why would they want Jack there? And again I come back to Putthe: he could have levered off the old horseshoe in order to give an excuse for Jack’s presence at Godfrey’s.”
“You’re thinking that they could both have been involved in the killing? But that doesn’t make sense! All they achieved in having Jack at the house was to make him a suspect. There was no witness to his departure, no witness to his return, no gain for him whatever. Effectively all he did was point to himself with a large sign saying, ”Look at me! I was there on the night Godfrey died!“ It only served to bring him to our attention.”
“Perhaps it also tied him to his accomplice? If he and Putthe were partners in this felony, perhaps Putthe didn’t trust his confederate enough, and wanted to ensure that equal risk was enjoyed by both?” He threw his hands in the air with disgust. “It’s no good, it’s all guesswork. All we really know is that this man was at the hall for some reason. Whether he was there for his own purposes or for someone else’s entirely we may never know.”
“There’s another factor, though. What if the victimization of the lepers has something to do with it?”
“What do you mean?”