A Play of Piety (23 page)

If there was any snap to the neck breaking, Joliffe did not hear it. What was heard was the sudden quiet where Kydd’s pain had been, and as Master Hewstere took his hands back from the lifeless body, Mistress Thorncoffyn cried out with hope. Solemn-faced, the physician turned, held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness, and said, “It was all too late, my lady. He died as I touched him.”

Well, that was true enough, Joliffe granted. More than that, the killing was a kindness in its way, the death a mercy to both poor Kydd and Mistress Thorncoffyn. What was unsettling was how Hewstere had done it with as little care as a housewife snapping a chicken’s neck. Almost as unsettling was how he had not minded that Joliffe saw him do it, expecting a servant would know it was not his place either to exclaim or say what Hewstere had done.

Hewstere was right in that, of course: it was
not
Joliffe’s place to say anything. But Hewstere had brought him along to help with the dog. With the dog dead, Joliffe chose to decide he would not be needed, and as Hewstere went to Mistress Thorncoffyn, adding his sympathy to Geoffrey’s and Idany’s, Joliffe slipped out of the room and away.

When he had passed through the kitchen with Hewstere, he had hardly given the women a look, too busy with his thoughts about Aylton. Going now the other way, he caught their curious looks but only said as he passed them, “I’ll be back directly,” and went out.

Credy and Borton were standing outside the shed, looking very thoroughly away from where Denton was still at his work. Joliffe was equally careful not to see accidentally past as he asked, “Was Aylton’s neck broken?”

“What?” said Credy.

Borton, catching the question more quickly, said, “No. Why?”

“I just watched Master Hewstere snap a dog’s neck.”

The two men’s startled looks made him add, “It was dying and in pain. He helped it die more quickly, that’s all. But it was deftly done.” And hardly something taught in any medical school, Joliffe supposed.

“No neck snapped here,” Borton assured him. “Why wonder?”

“Nor any skull broken,” Denton called cheerfully from inside the shed. “Bruises and a lump are all there were on his head.”

Answering Borton, Joliffe shrugged and said, “A man is dead unexpectedly. Just thinking of possibilities.”

“That he fell and broke his neck on that little slope?” Borton asked.

“Only bruises otherwise,” Credy said, holding to the apparent point. “No ribs or other bones broken. That much we could tell. Along with not the neck.”

Behind him, Denton said, “Right then. I’ve the lungs open. You’ll want to see for yourselves, to tell the crowner when he comes.”

Credy and Borton looked at one another, each seeming to wish only the other need go in. The yearly autumn butchering of hogs and cattle, or gutting a snared rabbit for the spit, were one thing. Seeing a man laid open in something of the same way was something else, and they liked it no more than Joliffe did, it seemed. They had already moved the body, though, and so had both best be able to give clear testimony when the inquest came, and they went into the shed together. Joliffe had seen too much in Paris, knew more than he wanted about the inside of men’s bodies, and stayed where he was, willing to be told what the others saw.

Credy came out. He seemed to have his mouth shut tightly over more than words—holding his gorge down maybe. Behind him, Denton was asking, “I’ll sew him closed now?”

Joliffe, on a new-come thought, said, “Best check his stomach if you haven’t.”

“His stomach? Why?” Denton asked.

Borton joined Credy in the doorway. With both their questioning looks on him, Joliffe followed along the stray end of his half-thought and answered, “To see what’s there. Or isn’t.”

“I’ll look,” Denton returned cheerfully.

It was good when a man could that much enjoy his work, Joliffe thought with far less cheer, and offered to Credy’s and Borton’s still questioning looks, “It just crossed my mind he might have eaten something he shouldn’t have. What did you see in there?”

Letting go by that feeble reasoning, Credy said, “There was water in his lungs. He drowned, just as it looked.”

“That makes it all simple,” Borton said, openly pleased and eased. “He was trying to take himself away before Mistress Thorncoffyn could bring the law in on him, but he misjudged his strength after her beating of him, collapsed into the stream, and didn’t have the strength to pull himself out again.”

Credy was not so eased, pointing out glumly, “That means there’s no getting around that the Thorncoffyn woman assaulted him yesterday. Beat him soundly. Maybe this Aylton wouldn’t have brought charge against her for it, but if he died because of what she did to him, that’s manslaughter.”

“She’s not going to like to hear that,” Borton said, matching Credy’s glumness.

“Stomach is out and open,” Denton said. “Who’s going to look?”

Borton said at Joliffe, “This was your thought. Best you come look with us.”

Seeing no way out of it, Joliffe went into the shed with them. Inevitably, it had a slaughterhouse smell but Denton was good at his work: there was no widespread mess and Joliffe took care to see only the dark mass that was the stomach laid out and open beside the body. Denton was prodding inside it with various implements, lifting bits out with a small pair of pincers and taking closer look at them than Joliffe ever intended to.

“Bread,” the barber-surgeon said. “Not much digested, so eaten not long before the body stopped its work. He’d had something to drink, too. Not wine, surely? You treat your folk that well in this place?”

“New ale is the best we give,” Joliffe said.

“Must not be wine then. Didn’t much chew the bread. Gulped it more like. See?”

He held up something at the pincers’ end. Everyone seemed willing to take his word for it, and Denton grumbled, “You might as well have stayed outside if you’re not going to look.”

“Right you are,” Borton agreed and went out.

Credy and Joliffe followed him, Credy saying as they came into the sunlight, “Here’s Father Richard come to pray over him some more.”

“Hold him back a time, will you?” said Denton. “Doesn’t like to see a body all to pieces, he doesn’t.”

“Who does?” muttered Borton.

Rather than prayers, Father Richard had come to say Sister Ursula wondered if Joliffe would come help with the men’s dinners. Taking his new thoughts with him and ready to apologize to everyone in the kitchen for leaving off his duties the whole morning, Joliffe went immediately, only to find that none of the women wanted apology from him, only to hear everything he knew of what was being said and done. He answered readily that Aylton had indeed drowned.

“Master Hewstere and Denton, too, say there were yesterday’s bruises and bumps and no sign of trouble on him else.”

“Mistress Thorncoffyn will have to answer for his death then,” Sister Margaret said.

“Seems likely,” Joliffe agreed, keeping to himself that the sign of trouble had not been
on
Aylton but
in
him. That bread. Busy setting the men’s dinners on the trays and keeping any great interest out of his voice, he asked, “Aylton ate no supper at all last night, did he?”

“Nothing,” Sister Margaret said. “I tried to have him eat even a little, but he would not.”

“And nothing was missing from the kitchen,” Joliffe said, rather than asked, but Sister Ursula answered, “Nothing.” Then added rather too quickly, “Why?”

Picking up the first trays, Joliffe shrugged. “It’s just that if he had taken something, even a bit of bread, to eat on his way, he might not have fainted and fallen as he did.”

He left the kitchen to a general nodding of heads agreeing that pain and hunger were assuredly bad companions when setting out on an escape.

When the men had been fed, he put his dinner and Jack’s on a tray and made for the gatehouse. Passing Mistress Thorncoffyn’s open doors, he heard Mistress Thorncoffyn declaring feebly but stubbornly, “Not if there’s chance she was anywhere near it, no! She hates me. They all hate me! Don’t you know that?” Then there was the dry retching of someone being ill on an empty stomach.

Crossing toward the gatehouse, Joliffe had the sorry thought that if Mistress Thorncoffyn was now adding heavy self-pity to her arrogance, the mix was going to be dismal for anyone caught in it. Not least for Mistress Thorncoffyn herself, he added and was surprised by an odd twinge of pity as he wondered if she found it
easy
to be as utterly centered on herself as she was. Surely it must take a wearying amount of will to be so constantly demanding this, that, and everything for herself from everyone around her.
Let the world be her way or let the world be damned
was how she seemed to see life. Or feared it.

That last thought brought him to a stop at the foot of the gatehouse stairs.

Could it indeed be fear that had her throwing constant demands and commands at the world? Assuredly there was enough and plenty in the world to be afraid of, and although with her wealth and all, she had less to fear than many folk, some people were more cowards than others. Was that it? Were her demands and her great bulwark of flesh attempts to wrap herself against the world’s buffeting?

Or was she just what she seemed—a shallow woman given over to self-indulgence, cruel because, at least for her, cruel was easier to be than kind?

Did that mean the hospital’s sisters were kind because, for them, kindness came more easily than cruelty?

Joliffe doubted it was that simple. Knowing himself, knowing choices he had made, he could more readily believe that kindness and cruelty were equally possible in any person. He equally knew that to be kind often took more courage than to be cruel. So . . . did that mean cruelty was a form of cowardice?

He welcomed going up Jack’s stairs to put an end to that turn of his thoughts. Jack of course wanted to talk about Aylton’s death and hear whatever more Joliffe could tell him. While they ate, Joliffe obliged him, even to the matter of the bread there should not have been in Aylton’s stomach.

At the end Jack said, “No wounds on him except the bruises from yesterday, and nothing of those would kill him?”

“That’s what Denton and Hewstere both say.”

“Tom Denton knows his work. Pulls a tooth with a sure hand. Gives good shaves and haircuts. Even took himself off to Cambridge for a time, to learn what he could pay a surgeon there to teach him. Knows his business inside out, as it were.” Joliffe groaned as that “jest” deserved while Jack went on, “So if he says there’s no sign but that Aylton drowned, I’ll believe him. It’s the bread in his belly that’s the trouble, isn’t it? If you can’t find that he ate anything here, that means he was somewhere else.” Jack paused, then went on slowly, seeing the same trouble with that as Joliffe did. “Then he came back and was going away again and fell into the stream and drowned.”

“This place is far too easily come and gone from,” Joliffe complained. “The gate and wall here makes good show but the wall doesn’t even go all the way around the place.”

“It used to,” Jack said, sounding amused by Joliffe’s indignation. “Back when it was built, this was a properly defended manor and all. When Mistress Thorncoffyn’s father was founding the hospital, he decided to gift the parish with a stone bridge over the river a mile or so on for good measure.”

“And used the stone from the wall here for it,” Joliffe guessed.

“You have it. The story runs that he pointed out this was to be a hospital, with no one to defend the place but sick old men and cripples, and why bother to pretend they could, wall or no? Besides, here is too far from the coast for the French or Bretons to come raiding, and nobody has stirred armed trouble hereabouts since who-remembers-when. So away went the stone. We’re just in fortune that Mistress Thorncoffyn hasn’t decided
she
wants something built or I might have nowhere to live.”

“So Aylton was easily able to go away, get something to eat, come back, and start to leave again. Can you make that make sense?”

“What if we leave the stream out of it for a time and just follow the question of where he went?”

“To the inn for his horse and maybe his belongings. There would be food there, too. Your constable will have to ask if he was seen there.”

“Neither belongings nor horse were with his body,” Jack pointed out.

“Umph,” Joliffe granted. “Unless they were there and were stolen by—” He saw his own hole and finished, “—whoever did not strike him down and leave him in the stream. Damn. I wish he had some extra hurt to his head or somewhere.”

“Of course he may not have gone to the inn straight off. He had to have been in pain. Maybe he went to Master Hewstere. His house is close.”

“Who did what? Gave Aylton something that sent him senseless, then hauled him to the stream and put his head into it?”

“It’s possible,” Jack said, less as if he would insist on the thought and more as if he was simply playing with the possibility. “Master Hewstere would have next to no chance of being seen carrying him into the orchard by the gate from the road in the dark, dark time of night.”

“There’s the small problem of Hewstere being busy all the night here with Mistress Thorncoffyn.”

“Ah,” said Jack. “There is that.” Then he asked with disconcerting sharpness, “Why do you sound so regretful?”

“I just don’t much like Hewstere,” Joliffe admitted. “The way he lords it over the sisters and keeps his distance as best he can from the men in the hall. Then there’s the way he broke Kydd’s neck just now.”

“He did? What for? Not but what I’ve wanted to do as much to one or another of the little beasts when the pack has come yapping around my ankles.”

Driven to be fair, Joliffe said, “The dog was sick, in pain and dying. Mistress Thorncoffyn wanted Hewstere to at least stop the pain.”

“So he broke its neck.”