‘Oh, there’s your caretakers, all right.’ She sniffed again, then suddenly her face lightened into a smile of genuine humour. ‘You’re not thinking, mate,’ she said. ‘Course there’s got to be someone inside, else how’d they raise the drawbridge?’
He grinned in response. ‘Aye. You’re right there.’
‘There’s any number of them,’ she continued. ‘Caretakers, like. But they ain’t going to come out all the while there’s food and water within. They’ll see the advantages of keeping themselves apart from the sickness, same as their precious lords and masters. You mark my word, there’ll be no comings and goings over that drawbridge till spring.’
‘I did have a faint hope of finding an acquaintance of mine here. I heard tell he lodged with the family…?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Unlikely. As I’ve already told you — ’ she was eyeing Josse suspiciously now, as if trying to decide if he had evil intentions or was just plain stupid — ‘the family’s away. If your acquaintance is in there, he must be a guest of the caretakers, not the Clares.’ Another assessing look. ‘And you’ll be a better judge than me, sir, as to the likelihood of that.’
‘No, no, as you say, he can’t be. I must have been mistaken.’ Keen to allay her curiosity — he didn’t like the idea of her passing on details of her meeting with a man nosing around outside the castle and asking daft questions — he said, ‘I’m for the tavern. A mug of ale and a spell of warming my toes by Goody Anne’s fire sounds just the thing for me. I wish you good day.’ He bowed, swung up on to Horace, and set off down the track towards the river.
When he risked a glance behind him, the woman had picked up her bundle and was striding away.
* * *
The inn was bustling. There seemed to be as many people milling around in the yard as within, Josse thought as he pushed his way inside. And there was a deal of animated chattering going on, too.
Goody Anne was in the tap room, sleeves rolled up to display her well-muscled forearms, handing out jugs of ale to a band of men.
‘How goes it, Mistress Anne?’ Josse asked when, catching sight of him, she nodded a greeting.
‘Rushed off my feet, as ever.’ She gave him a friendly grin. ‘Thanks to you, sir, people haven’t been scared off.’ She winked. ‘If you get my meaning.’
He did. Standing beside her now, he said softly, ‘Glad to have been of service.’
‘Any news as to who did for poor old Peter Ely?’
‘No.’
‘And now there’s this new business. I really don’t-’ A voice demanded service, followed by a chorus of others, and, interrupting herself, Anne said, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, sir, I’m that busy.’
‘Of course.’
He took his ale and went to lean against the wall. What new business? Tuning in to conversations around him, he tried to find out.
It didn’t take long.
‘… seems she’d been there for days!’ a man beside him said in an awed voice. ‘Well, ain’t no surprise, right out there in the wilds.’
‘Aye, you’re right there,’ agreed another, and his two companions nodded sagely. ‘Reckon she’d her own reasons for keeping herself apart, an’ all.’
A cold hand took hold of Josse’s heart. He said to the man nearest to him, ‘What’s happened? Who are you talking about?’
The man, fortunately, was too fascinated by the tale to worry about why a stranger should be so eager to know. ‘Why, they’ve found a body, in the woods. Dead, she is, found with her head in a foot of water.’
‘Who was she? Does anybody know?’ Josse looked wildly from face to face. ‘Come on, one of you must know something!’
‘Steady on, there, sir!’ one of the men protested. ‘No need to get agitated, like!’
‘It were that old biddy as does the spells,’ another man said, putting a hand up to his mouth and whispering from behind it. ‘Can’t say as I know her name.’
‘Nor I,’ said another.
But Josse wasn’t listening. Grasping the shoulder of the man who had first volunteered information, he said urgently, ‘Old. You said she was old. Can you be sure?’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’ The man gave an uneasy laugh. ‘She were old, all right. Not only my mam but my grand-mam an’ all used to speak of her and her potions.’
A huge relief was sweeping through Josse, so that, inappropriate though it was, he felt like cheering. Instead, he offered to fill each of the men’s mugs, then, having been given directions for how he might find the scene of the drowning — the information was pretty vague, but better than nothing — he was on his way.
* * *
He would not have found the pond so readily had it not been surrounded by a large group of the Sheriff’s men. Might not, even, have found it at all, for it was in a secluded spot deep in the forest, and it was the sound of loud voices that had drawn him to it.
He stood on the edge of the small clearing, surveying the scene.
The pond was about five paces by ten and along its far bank was a row of willows, now quite bare of leaves. On the near bank was a vegetable patch, showing evidence of regular and diligent care. Behind the vegetable patch was a little hut made of a sturdy framework of posts filled in with wattle and daub. The roof — made of reed thatch — looked well-maintained.
On the far side of the hut, in a place where, Josse judged, it had been put so as to catch what sunshine made its way into the clearing, was a herb garden.
The body lay half on its side, with its legs and lower torso on the bank. Its head, shoulders, arms and chest were in the pond.
Josse moved forward and approached Sheriff Pelham, whom he assumed to be in charge.
‘Good day to you, Sheriff,’ he called, still sitting astride his horse. ‘I heard tell of this death while I was at the inn, and came to-’
‘Came to poke your nose in, as usual. King’s man,’ the Sheriff finished. ‘Well, I don’t reckon there’s much to interest you here. She slipped, it seems, fell with her head under the water and she drowned.’
Josse dismounted, tethered Horace to a stout branch, and went to the pond’s edge. Crouching down, he realised straight away why nobody had yet removed the dead woman from the pond.
The water had frozen hard around her.
He said to the Sheriff, ‘Does anything strike you about her, Sheriff Pelham?’
The Sheriff glanced around at a few of his men to make sure they were listening. ‘She’s dead,’ he said, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘Or didn’t you notice?’ He was rewarded with a few guffaws. ‘People do die, with their heads stuck in ponds. They drown, like.’
Josse said, ‘People drown in water. This pond is covered in a thick layer of ice, and has been, I would guess, for — ’ he paused, calculating, ‘for the last three days, I’d say.’ Yes. That was right. It had been milder, the night he’d slept in Ninian’s camp. Then, the next night, the temperature had gone down sharply and Joanna’s pity had led her to take that great risk of bringing a strange man into the shelter of her secret hiding-place.
The Sheriff said aggressively, ‘So? What of it?’
Josse suppressed a sigh. ‘Then this woman must have been lying here for three days. At least.’
‘How can you be sure?’ demanded the Sheriff.
‘Because she must have gone in when the pond was water,’ Josse said patiently. ‘Which was either three days ago, when the weather relented a little, or some time before that.’ He glanced down at the body. ‘I would doubt, however, that she has been here long.’
‘Got a scrying glass, have you?’ the Sheriff asked nastily, raising a few more guffaws, although Josse doubted very much if many of the men knew what a scrying glass was; he was quite surprised that the Sheriff did.
‘No. I don’t need one,’ he replied. He pointed to the corpse’s abdomen, touching it gently. ‘There’s no bloating, whereas, if she’d been here much longer than three days, she would have begun to swell up.’ He had observed such things in battlefield corpses. It was one reason for burying your dead quickly; corpses became progressively more unpleasant to deal with if you delayed.