A shriek of outrage soon confirmed the prediction.
“No, no, no, you dolt!”
They were fifty yards from the place but Juliana’s voice cut through the air like a scythe through dry grass.
“Put it there, man! Put it there, you imbecile!”
An unseen servant was mishandling blocks of salt and being reprimanded by his mistress. The loud, ringing tones were like the discordant chimes of a cracked bell. When they reached the salt-house, Reinbald went in to talk to her. An eerie silence fell.
Expecting some kind of monster to come snarling out of the building, Ralph was taken aback to see a trim woman of middle years sail out with poise and take up her position in front of him.
He looked at the full lips in the harsh beauty of her face and decided that one of the Faversham bachelors had lost a prime catch in his courting days. Juliana was a woman of some style.
She dropped the merest replica of a curtsey and smiled.
“My lord?” The voice was low, almost melodious. “Reinbald says that you wish to speak to me. If you have ridden all the way from Canterbury, it must be important. As you see, I am busy. I would not wish to be kept too long away from my work here.”
The priest had been brought as a guide and interpreter but he could now be relieved of the latter role. Ralph could understand the woman perfectly, not simply because she spoke with slow emphasis but because she accompanied her words with the most expressive gestures. Even had he been stone deaf, he would have had no trouble picking up the gist of what she said.
Dismounting from his horse, he escorted Juliana across to the comparative privacy of a beech tree. Though he had learned much of her language from his wife, he could still not speak it with fluency and wanted to be out of earshot of his men before he plunged into its tangled verbiage. The priest followed them but stood some yards away, detached from the conversation but ready to intervene if required.
“I want to ask you about Bertha,” said Ralph.
“My niece?” she asked guardedly.
“I believe you were at the funeral yesterday.”
“Yes, my lord.” She lowered her head. “The sorrow will always be with me. Bertha was a lovely girl. She was the only member of that family I cared about. They are worthless. Alwin is the most miserable of them all.”
“Why, then, did your sister marry him?”
“I warned her against it.”
“But she went ahead?”
“He talked her into it somehow,” she said bitterly. “No man would ever do that to me. Least of all, a sailor. They are the worst. I told her what she was taking on but she ignored me. My sister was a fool. She paid for her folly.”
“How did she die?”
“He killed her.”
“Alwin?”
“Yes,” she asserted, getting into her stride. “The doctor said that she was carried off by a fever but I talked with her and I know the truth. My sister died of a cracked heart. Her husband treated her abominably.”
“He beat her?”
“Not with his fists, my lord. But there are other ways to wound.
She was too soft and submissive with him. By the time she learned to strike back, it was too late.” She let out a screech of anger. “Ha!
He would not have found me soft and submissive. I’d never have let him touch me after that. If Alwin had come anywhere near my bed, I would have sliced his manhood off with a carving knife!”
Once started, there was no holding her. Juliana railed against her brother-in-law for several minutes, waving her hands as she did so and working herself up into such a temper that she was almost frothing at the mouth. Ralph recoiled before the torrent of abuse without really understanding what had provoked it.
“Clearly you have no love for Alwin,” he observed, drily.
“He is the most loathsome man alive.”
“Your sister did not think so.”
“She came round to that view at the end.”
“What about Bertha?”
“Poor child! She was left alone with him.”
“Was Alwin unkind to her? Violent?”
“He would not have dared to be either!” she growled. “Or he would have answered to me. I would have taken Bertha away from him. I told her that.”
“Yet she stayed with him.”
“He was her father.”
“Did she not respect him in any way?”
“Bertha was an innocent. She did not understand the ways of the world. I have lived longer and know the depths to which men can sink.”
“Some men, Juliana.”
“That is a matter of opinion.”
“I think I know yours.”
“It is honestly held, my lord.”
“And very forcefully expressed,” he said with a wry smile. “But there is something missing here. You tell me that you despise Alwin for what he did to your sister but I still do not know what it was.”
“Nor will you.”
“Is it, then, so shameful?”
“It is past. Let us forget it.”
“But it runs through everything you say. Alwin is your brother-in-law yet you bear him such ill will that you would wish him dead. Is that not so!”
“Yes, my lord. Drowned in the deepest ocean!”
“Why? What was his crime?”
“He is a man!”
“So am I. So is Reinbald. So are at least half of the population.
Would you condemn us all on that account?”
“Alwin was cruel.”
“In what way?”
Juliana shook her head to indicate that she would say no more on the subject. He turned to Reinbald to see if the priest could offer any enlightenment but the man had vanished. Ralph was mystified by the disappearance. He looked back at the formidable lady in front of him.
“Help me,” he said. “Your niece was strangled to death. I want to find the villain who killed her. Anything you can tell me about Bertha or about her parents may be of value. You loved your niece, Juliana. I sense that. And she loved you or she would not have walked all the way here simply to be with her aunt.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “There were some happy times.”
“When you and Bertha were alone together?”
“When she was away from the contamination of her father!”
“Is Alwin really so wicked? I have met him and he did not seem so to me. What is it that he did, Juliana?”
“He drove my sister into her grave.”
“But how?” pressed Ralph. “Tell me how!”
Lips tightly pursed, Juliana put her hands on her hips in an attitude of defiance. Her mind was a whirl of scalding memories that would be shared with nobody. Ralph withstood her fierce scrutiny with patience. She could never like him but there was a nobility in his bearing which she had to recognise, even if she could not bring herself to admire it. He seemed brave, honest and just, but those qualities were not enough to make her trust him completely.
“It is a long ride, Juliana,” he said, trying to coax her with a smile. “Do not send us back empty-handed. Think of your niece.
Surely, you want her death avenged?” He took a step closer. “Tell me about her father. What did Alwin do?”
Juliana folded her arms as she pondered. She had turned her back on her brother-in-law forever, but his shadow had followed her to Faversham. To make it go away again, she might have to confide at least some of what she knew.
“Return to Canterbury, my lord,” she said.
“And?”
“Speak with Helto the Doctor.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was incredible. Canon Hubert would never have believed that a time would come when he was glad to be rescued from Christ Church Priory. He had come to Canterbury with such high hopes and they had been systematically dashed. It was galling to be so close to Archbishop Lanfranc and yet so impossibly far away. Brother Simon immersed himself in the cloister with the deep joy of a true obedientiary but Hubert was finding it a distinct strain. Robbed of ecclesiastical status and deprived of function as a royal commissioner, he was at the mercy of Prior Henry’s beady watchfulness. When Gervase Bret offered him a chance of escape, he grasped it willingly.