Murder at Broadstowe Manor Read online

  The front doors opened and an imposing, square-headed man with gray hair came out onto the porch. He wore an expensive blue button-up tunic, checkered stockings, and low pointed boots that were the emerging fashion; obviously a well-to-do fellow. His expression was dignified with a hint of anxiousness. His green eyes fastened on Stephen’s and he motioned Stephen to approach.

  “Sir Stephen,” the fellow said, “I thought I recognized you. My name is Geoffrey Curthose. I am Sir Rogier’s steward. Do come in.”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” Stephen said, shaking Curthose’s extended hand.

  “We haven’t but you’ve been pointed out to me and I know your reputation.”

  Stephen followed Curthose into the great hall. Mapuleye stood near the hearth in the center of the floor surrounded by a gaggle of men who had the look of jurors. One of them was showing Mapuleye a purple cord laced with silver thread, a noose fashioned at one end. Mapuleye stopped the explanation of what it was at the sight of Stephen.

  “What are you doing here?” Mapuleye demanded. “You are relieved. You have no business here.”

  “Sir Stephen is here at my request,” Curthose said.

  “Your request. Why?”

  “That is none of your affair.”

  “This is my affair now.”

  Curthose shrugged. “Perhaps the deaths are. But who enters this house is my business. Do you care to dispute me? Shall I summon her ladyship?”

  Mapuleye gritted his teeth. “Just stay out of the way, Attebrook.” He turned his attention to the juror holding the cord, who resumed what he had been saying.

  “I suppose I must have a look,” Mapuleye said to the jurymen. “You wait here.”

  Mapuleye ascended the stairs to the top and disappeared. He was gone a long time. When he returned he wore a troubled and thoughtful expression. His eyes swept over Stephen and Curthose, who had retreated to the raised stone dais at the west end of the hall so as not to antagonize Mapuleye any further. He seemed about to speak but thought better of it for some reason. He came down the stairs and resumed questioning the jurymen.

  While Curthose and Stephen lingered on the dais, Stephen watched Mapuleye with a professional interest. The way things worked is that the jurors usually conducted the investigation, questioning witnesses, examining the body to take measurements of the wound and assess it, and the like. The jurors, who were local people, knew those involved, and the coroner often did not arrive for a day or more. As dead bodies could putrefy rapidly, especially in the warm days of summer, they were buried quickly.

  “You are resolved as to the manner of the deaths?” Mapuleye asked the jurors.

  “We are, I think,” the noose holder said. He glanced at the others and the nodded. “Death by hanging for Sir Rogier, and murder for the boy.”

  “And it is your verdict that Sir Rogier killed the boy?” Mapuleye asked.

  There were expressions of agreement from the jurors.

  “All right, then,” Mapuleye said. “Let it be so written. We will assess the rope and, I think, the bed as well. Two pounds should do it. Or do I hear a dissent?”

  Again there were noises of assent rather eagerly given perhaps because FitzHerbert’s estate would have to pay the fine and not their neighbors in the hundred, as was the usual case.

  “Good,” Mapuleye said. He headed toward the doors followed by his retinue.

  “I’ll take that, Ben,” Curthose said to the noose holder.

  Ben handed the noose over without looking Curthose in the eye.

  Then he and the other jurors filed out, leaving Stephen and Curthose alone in the hall.

  “Deaths, the fellow said,” Stephen said. “There was more than one?”

  “Yes, a servant also has died.” Curthose did not provide any further explanation and Stephen did not ask for one.

  “It does not seem that your lord was popular,” Stephen said.

  “There were rumors about him, things the neighbors did not approve of.” Curthose sighed. “I’m afraid now they will know that the rumors were true.”

  “You did not invite me in just to hear all this.”

  “No. We need your help.”

  “For what?” Stephen asked, although he knew the answer.

  “I do not believe that Sir Rogier killed the boy, or himself. He loved that boy. He couldn’t have killed him. Nor do I believe he took his own life. He was a contented man with important business to conduct and such men do not turn to suicide.”

  “You want to save his reputation?”

  “His lordship deserves to be buried in sacred ground. That cannot happen if his death is judged a suicide. As for the other?” Curthose shrugged. “The facts are the facts, and we will have to live with them.”

  “Why appeal to me?”

  “I know your reputation for ferreting out the truth. It is said that you will not stop until it has been teased out, no matter the danger and difficulty.”

  Stephen, who just that morning had thought he was done with the business of death, gazed sightlessly across the hall to the tapestries on the far wall. He should just say no, but instead he said, “There will be expenses.”

  “I understand,” Curthose said. “Whatever it costs. I will pay them even if her ladyship will not.”

  Chapter 3

  “Ah … ahem,” Gilbert ventured after Stephen had fetched him and explained what they had been asked to do, “may I ask if the bodies have been moved?”

  “Who is this?” Curthose asked.

  “My assistant,” Stephen said.

  “Hmm, well, no. I have left them in place,” Curthose said.

  “We should see them, and the place where they died,” Stephen said.

  “Very well,” Curthose replied.

  He led them up the stairs behind the dais table to the lord’s living quarters that occupied the second story above the west end of the great hall.

  There were two chambers off a brief hallway. Stephen heard voices in the one to the right: a woman’s, which stopped speaking at the sound of their footsteps. Then a baby cried, and the woman spoke again soothing the child.

  Curthose went to the other door, which had been battered open with an axe.

  “What happened here?” Stephen asked.

  “We had to break in,” Curthose said. “His lordship had bolted the door.”

  “Did he often do that?” Stephen asked.

  Curthose sighed. “Yes, I am afraid he did.”

  “Most unusual,” Gilbert murmured, for it was out of the ordinary. Bolts on doors usually were there in case of attack to provide a last line of defense. Lords did not make a habit of bolting their doors because servants needed to gain access all the time.

  “Yes,” Curthose said dryly.

  He pushed the door open for them and they all entered the chamber. Stephen’s first impression was how magnificent it was — dark burnished wood panels carved at the tops and bottoms covered the walls. A stone fireplace occupied the far wall, no doubt the chimney shared by the other chamber. Fireplaces were rare but becoming more commonplace in the houses of the rich for the comfort they afforded within a chamber; otherwise, one shivered during the winter in unheated rooms, a reason why the servants slept around the hearth fire in the hall. There was a long table, chairs with cushions, and a carved wardrobe. Two tattered and well-worn cloaks with muddy hems hung from pegs off the wardrobe, common and out of place in such an elegant room. A large bedstead stood beside a window that admitted the sunlight through the open shutters and rendered the chamber comfortable and inviting. However, the dead — one upon the bed and the other slumped over at the foot — made the chamber less so.

  The body at the foot of the bed was that of a large man lying on its side and covered with a woolen blanket. A hand with a ruby ring on the thumb and another with a yellow stone on the little finger and the feet, the legs yellowed in death with the underside a purplish color, protruded from beneath the blanket. Above the body a section of that purple an
d silver rope dangled from a crossbeam of the bedposts. There was a knot near where the cord had been cut, as if two segments of rope had been lashed together. It appeared to be the cord that had bound the bed curtains, for they were hanging loose and no other binding was in sight. The bed itself was a marvel of workmanship that Stephen’s friend, Harry the former beggar and now a woodcarver, would have killed to get a look at: the posts were a series of animals — elephants, lions, dragons, rabbits, wolves and such in profusion — from top to bottom, with an eagle spreading its wings perched at the top of each post.

  The other body, that of a young man about seventeen or eighteen, lay naked across the bed, visible only because some of the bed curtains had been tied back with plain rawhide rope.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Stephen noticed a pile of clothing lying against a wall as if it had been tossed there, the large man’s garments mingled with those of the boy.

  Gilbert removed the blanket from FitzHerbert’s body and laid it across a chair. He and Stephen knelt down beside the body, which was naked as well and lying upon the right side. There was a wet spot beside the body.

  “Have you disturbed anything?” Stephen asked. “Other than cutting him down and removing the noose?”

  “No,” Curthose said. “I thought that prudent.”

  “Good thinking,” Stephen said.

  “Except for …” Curthose hesitated.

  “Except for what?”

  “There was a mess beneath his lordship. His bowels had moved.”

  “I see,” Stephen said. “That’s all?”

  Curthose nodded.

  FitzHerbert must have been a handsome man in life, the face narrow, the chin strong and jutting, the nose large and narrow but not out of proportion on that large head, the brows prominent, the forehead wide; the face of a man used to getting his way, but slack now in death, the mouth open, the lips pursed and reddish from what looked like wine, the tip of the tongue protruding. The eyes were closed as if in sleep. Stephen guessed he was in his late thirties. He brushed the dark brown hair away from cheeks that could have used a shave. There was a purple abrasion upon the throat that ran around the side of the neck and climbed to the base of the skull.

  “No doubt he was hanged,” Gilbert said.

  “How can you tell?” Curthose asked sharply as if he expected another opinion. “I am certain he was strangled. I cannot believe he killed himself.”

  Stephen traced the line of the abrasion with a finger. “We’ve seen this like before. It is characteristic of a hanging.”

  “The mark of a strangulation is different,” Gilbert said, rising and bending over the dead boy’s head. He moved the boy’s brown hair aside to reveal the neck, where there was a purple abrasion similar to that upon FitzHerbert’s neck, except that the mark ran straight around the neck and did not angle upward at the back. “Here, you can see. The boy was strangled.”

  Stephen turned FitzHerbert onto his stomach. The body was as flaccid as a bundle of rags, but he was a burly, well-muscled man and Gilbert’s assistance proved to be necessary to get him stretched out. Stephen’s objective was to look for other wounds or marks that might have contributed to the death. He examined the dead man’s head to see if he had been struck there, but found nothing. The corpse was unblemished apart from that yellow waxy color on the back and chest and the purplish hue upon the buttocks and the backs of FitzHerbert’s legs. Stephen, of course, was well familiar with these markings. A body which lay undisturbed for some time developed these different colors; the purple indicated the side that was or had been down.

  The arrangement of these markings struck Stephen as curious. He stood up and fingered the length of rope dangling from the crossbeam. The end where it had been cut was at about the height of Gilbert’s shoulder. Stephen held the end of the noose to the end of the rope. The noose itself was only three feet or so from the floor. This was very odd. FitzHerbert had died, apparently, with his buttocks only a few inches from the floor.

  “You found him almost sitting,” Stephen said.

  “Yes,” Curthose said. “I’ve never seen a man die like that. It made me wonder. Am I wrong? Is it important?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes what you think is important at first turns out to mean nothing, and what you dismissed as insignificant turns out to settle the matter.”

  The examination of FitzHerbert completed, Stephen said, “Let’s see to the boy.”

  Stephen and Gilbert performed the same diligent search for other wounds on the boy, but found none. They turned him over. Gilbert brushed the hair away from his face. He was a beautiful child with the face of an angel except for a broad jaw and overlarge mouth, yet it must have been sweet and sunny in life and was now composed as if he were asleep.

  “What’s his name?” Gilbert asked gazing down at the boy.

  “Martin,” Curthose said.

  “Just Martin?” Gilbert said.

  “He had no father. He lived with his mother and brood of siblings in a hovel on Grope Lane before his lordship plucked him from poverty. A band of beggars and thieves, they are, all the brats begat by different men. Sir Rogier found him begging outside a bathhouse.”

  “Indeed,” Gilbert said as if to himself. “A bathhouse, was it?”

  Stephen shot him a look to say no more about bathhouses. They were known with good reason as dens of prostitution, gambling and other forms of iniquity. The Church opposed them and occasionally went on campaigns to shut them down, but these efforts always met with failure, generally because the alderman of that area of the town received payments under the table to keep them open.

  Stephen and Gilbert continued the examination. They found nothing untoward.

  Stephen noticed a clay pitcher on the side table large enough to hold about a full gallon. It was almost empty. He sniffed the contents, which smelled of wine, but with an odd flowery fragrance that he had never detected in a wine before. But it was not unusual to flavor wine with herbs.

  “Did his lordship like a tipple at bedtime?” Stephen asked.

  “He often indulged himself,” Curthose said.

  “Quite a lot of indulgence for two,” Gilbert said.

  “Perhaps,” Stephen said, “assuming it was filled to the top.”

  He carried the pitcher to the window so that the sunlight could reveal how far it had been filled. There was a stain about halfway up.

  He rested the pitcher on the windowsill to consider whether this was important, and only then noticed the dark spots of something that had spilled upon it. And then as he leaned close to see what it might be, he saw below upon a pile of roofing slates left over from repairs what looked to be evidence that someone had poured something out the window. Wine perhaps? He could not imagine why anyone would waste wine in that way. He scraped one of the spots on the windowsill with the point of his dagger on the theory it was a blood spot and not wine. But it was not blood.

  Stephen looked about for wine cups. One was on the long table. It was half full. The other was out of sight between a bedpost and the wall. It was a third full.

  He strode out of the chamber and almost bumped into three servants clustered about the door so that they could overhear what was said and report it to the rest of the household.

  He brushed by the servants and would have taken the stairway he had come up, but he spotted another to the right. “Where does that go?” Stephen asked Curthose.

  “To the pantry and buttery,” Curthose said.

  “Is there a back entrance down there?”

  “There is. Wait — can I have his lordship’s body tended to now?”

  Stephen glanced at Gilbert, who had just made it to the doorway. Gilbert nodded.

  “Yes, and have a cup of wine fetched from the same barrel as last night,” Stephen said and sped away down the back as fast as his bad foot would allow: he was missing half his left foot, which a Moor in Spain had cut off with an ax. Much of the time it did not bother him, but moving quickly could be difficult.
He came down to the pantry and spotted the rear entrance. He went out the door which opened to a covered walkway leading to a kitchen a short distance away. He leaped over the rail bordering the walk and went around to the back of the hall. He was sniffing the spill on a roofing slate when Curthose caught up. The substance on the slate looked like a wine spill, dark red, but it had dried and there was no odor.

  A servant bearing a wooden cup came around the corner. “You asked for a cup of wine, my lord?” He held it out to Curthose.

  “Give it to Sir Stephen,” Curthose said.

  Before taking the cup, Stephen cut a mark on the stained roof tile in his hand with the tip of his dagger. Then he sniffed the cup. The wine lacked that odd fragrance. He poured the wine onto clean roof tile.

  “See that this tile is not disturbed,” Stephen ordered. “I’ll be back when it has had time to dry.”

  “I don’t understand,” Curthose said.

  “Neither do I, but it means something. I just don’t know what yet. We’ve done all we can here. Please have the servants assemble in the hall.”

  Chapter 4

  Stephen entertained his batch of servants at one end of the hall while Gilbert handled another batch at the other, with those awaiting questioning clustered about the hearth. It was a boring exercise but had to be done.

  The only moment of interest came when the servants brought down FitzHerbert’s body. There was silence in the hall, and those occupying the benches stood up and all watched respectfully as they bore out the body shrouded in a linen sheet.

  Stephen and Gilbert, meanwhile, learned nothing: no one had seen or heard his lordship return from the city, for it had occurred after dark. Later there was a call for a pitcher of wine, and Martin had cracked the door to accept it.

  “That sounds a bit unusual,” Stephen remarked to the servant.

  “It was,” he said. “But I did not think anything of it at the time.” He hesitated, and added guardedly, “His lordship and Martin often entertained themselves in his lordship’s chambers during an evening.”