Cathedral of Bones Read online

  Cathedral of Bones

  An Ela of Salisbury Medieval Mystery

  J. G. Lewis

  Stoneheart Press

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Author’s note

  Author Biography

  Copyright 2019 by J. G. Lewis

  For my mother, Mardie Gorman, who instilled in me a love of books and history from a very early age.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe many thanks to Mark Armstrong, Betsy van der Hoek, Anne MacFarlane and Judith Tilden for their careful readings and excellent suggestions. Thanks also to my wonderful editor Lynn Messina. All remaining errors are mine alone.

  Chapter 1

  Salisbury Cathedral, Sunday March 8, 1226

  My deepest condolences!

  Cut down in his prime!

  Such a horrible shock!

  Our most heartfelt sympathies!

  Dazed and weary from three sleepless nights, the newly widowed Ela Longespée, Countess of Salisbury, heard their words and even managed to murmur the appropriate response as she traveled through the crowd of barons and knights. Most were damp from the insistent rain, some having ridden hard all the way from London to be here this morning. Their furrowed brows, wan faces and the occasional red rimmed eye reminded her that some of them would take his loss almost as hard as she did.

  The service was over. He’d been laid to rest. And now she had to endure the rest of her life alone.

  This is what the aftermath of a battle must feel like.

  Smoke from censers thickened the air and stung her teary eyes. All the whispered words—we’re so sorry!—rose high into the stone vaulting of the new cathedral where they seemed to multiply before descending again like a fresh rain of arrows.

  The first person to be interred in our cathedral!

  Ela felt like a traitor leaving William in that wooden box. If this were a battle they’d at least carry him home, but his flesh and bones would remain here forever and ever. Tomorrow she’d meet with the stonemason about the likeness on the lid. A stone carving befitting a king’s son, another king’s brother.

  Her own dear husband.

  Ela wished she could lift her head and wail like a Saracen. Just once she’d like to let the ear-piercing shriek of her pain travel up to those high vaults and ring hard enough to shatter the high glass windows.

  But she knew her duty too well. She stepped out of the scented smoke and back into the drizzle.

  “Your horse, my lady.” Gerald Deschamps, deputy commander of the garrison troops, held the reins of her big gray mare. Rain hung like tears in Freya’s long mane. Deschamps helped her up into the saddle, and she turned to ride the grim road home.

  She’d never felt so alone. She wasn’t alone, of course. Not with eight children and countless attendants and servants and the king’s garrison stationed around her castle. A procession of a thousand people she must now lead back to the castle.

  She turned to make sure her children were being suitably mounted behind her. The youngest might need their ponies to be led if they were too distracted with grief.

  Her eldest son, Will, rode up beside her. On the brink of manhood, he was named for her husband and bore his impressive height and handsome countenance. “Did you see how the candles stayed lit the whole way, despite the rain?” His taut lips quivered slightly as he closed them.

  “Did they?” She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Like the time Papa saw a light at the top of his mast before he was saved from the shipwreck.” She could tell that he too was trying not to cry, and it made her chest ache. “It’s too cruel, Mama. Why was he saved from the shipwreck and then home with us only a month before he was taken from us?”

  She’d asked herself that question a thousand times. And that just in the past hour.

  “Your father stands with God now and we must be brave without him.”

  “I am brave, Mother.”

  “I know, my heart.” Her son was fearless in the hunting field and on the tournament ground. Her pride in his valor often mingled with fear for his safety. A mother’s lot. “Come up here, my love, and lead the procession with me.”

  People lined the streets of New Salisbury. Shop owners, servants, apprentices, young and old. Most of them likely just here to watch the pageantry of the knights and their fine horses. They stared, silent mostly, some whispering among themselves.

  Was this how it felt to lead a defeated army back home?

  She saw the edge of the town and the open fields with relief, glad to leave the gawpers and the smoke and barking dogs behind, when a man came galloping across the field to her left. She tightened her grip on the reins as her horse stirred in response.

  He reined his horse to a spattering halt, hastily bowed to her. “My lady—I—there’s been—” His red face and wide eyes alarmed her. Had he just seen her husband’s ghost?

  “What?” she demanded, panic flaring in her chest.

  “A body, my lady.” He glanced about, as if looking for someone more suitable with whom to share his urgent news. Deschamps was riding back behind her children.

  “A human body?” She recognized the man as a local baker.

  “A dead woman,” he spluttered. “Frozen into the ice near How’s Bottom. All this rain has melted the ice and…and—” He looked back at Deschamps, who was already leaving his place in the procession and riding toward them.

  As sheriff her husband would have taken charge. In his absence—he was often away fighting or on other royal duties—Deschamps would take command in his stead. But things were different now.

  Her husband wasn’t coming back. As countess, she was now the castellan of Salisbury and acting sheriff of Wiltshire. “I’ll come at once.”

  “But—” He looked behind her at the growing funeral procession making its way back from church to castle, which was now bunching up behind her.

  “My husband is with his creator now. Sir Deschamps will lead the procession back to the castle.” She shot Deschamps a look intended to silence any protest. “Where’s the coroner?” She glanced at the crowd behind her, searching. A knight, he would have attended the service and was sure to be in the procession. “We’ll need a stretcher and cart to remove the body to the castle.”

  “Yes, my lady.” Deschamps’s countenance revealed no emotion. He turned and called out for the coroner in a booming voice.

  Some stirring farther back in the crowd led to a man on a bay horse riding up alongside. “At your service, my lady.”

  “Please attend us, Master Haughton. A body has been found.”

  “Lead the way.” She urged her horse away from the procession and up to the interloper’s roan pony, which steamed in the rain.

  “I’ll come, too.” Her son Will followed. She didn’t have the strength to argue with him.

  The baker led them across the soggy field and up the old track toward the river at a brisk trot. “I’m so sorry about your husband,” he called, face still red as a beet. “My lady.”

  She could tell he felt awkward and had no idea how to address her now that her husband was dead. No doubt he wished Deschamps was with him. “You’re Peter Howard, the baker, aren’t you?”

 
; “Indeed I am, my lady. I was on my way to town to stand with the crowds and pay my respects—” Most likely he was seizing the opportunity for a little Sunday morning fishing, but no matter. “Then I saw her there in the water. I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.”

  “You did the right thing. Did anyone stay with the body?”

  “My apprentice. I told him to watch her—the corpse—while I went to raise the hue and cry.”

  Ela could already hear the thudding hooves of others coming behind them. She’d heard the coroner call for jurors to attend, and no doubt there were some at hand in the crowd outside the cathedral. She spurred her horse, wanting to see the scene before it was disturbed.

  At the riverbank, the baker gallantly jumped down and held her horse while she dismounted and handed him her reins. Will was already clambering down the riverbank and out of sight. The baker’s apprentice, wide-eyed at the sudden arrivals, held his horse.

  “She’s young,” Will called from below.

  Ela approached the riverbank with trepidation. The water was swollen with spring rain and the ice from the recent cold snap almost fully melted. She suppressed a gasp as a sodden, rust-colored garment came into view. The body lay tangled in a thick stand of rushes that wove into the woman’s dark hair.

  Will was already in up to his knees, pulling her garments away from the grasping stems.

  The coroner half-stepped, half-slid down to the gray water. “We must get her up onto the bank,” he said to Will. “You take her arms.”

  He and Will freed the woman’s sodden garments from their marshy tomb. With considerable effort, and no little backsliding, they managed to heave her wet and heavy form up the muddy riverbank and onto the thin spring grass.

  Ela swallowed a wave of revulsion at the odor that rose from the woman’s body. The corpse was not fresh. She didn’t have a lot of experience with dead bodies, but she had enough to know that this woman had been dead at least a few days, maybe longer given the preservative qualities of ice.

  She approached, half-holding her breath. The dead woman’s gray eyes stared up at them, unseeing as a stone effigy. Her lips were mauve and seemed stuck in a ghastly cry for help. Her dress was made of good wool, not torn or ragged at the hem. One foot was bare and one still encased in a water-shriveled leather boot.

  “She’s pregnant,” Ela breathed as poor girl’s swollen belly registered in her mind. “Hail Mary, blessed art though amongst women…” She raised her hands to her mouth as she muttered the familiar prayer, shocked at herself that it took the evidence of this poor woman’s dead baby to remind her that a human soul needed their urgent help.

  “Amen,” murmured the men gathered around her.

  “She might have fallen in,” said Will.

  “Or there might be foul play.” Ela leaned in to peer at the dark bruising that bloomed out of her hair near her left ear. “She bears signs of force.”

  “She could have banged her head on a rock in the river after she fell,” said Howard.

  Ela looked at the coroner, who silently closed the dead woman’s eyes. Questions crowded her brain. “Can a body bruise after death? Once the blood had stopped flowing?”

  “No, my lady.” Giles Haughton’s quiet response told her everything she needed to know.

  “Do any of you recognize her?” The young woman’s face didn’t look familiar, but her features were swollen and misshapen so it was hard to even tell what she’d looked like in life. Young, though, as Will had said. Not yet five and twenty, with her face unlined and no silver in her hair. Poor girl. Someone must be missing a daughter, a sister or a wife.

  She turned to the group of soldiers now gathered around the body.

  “Bring her to the castle and have her laid out in the armory.” She didn’t want this body whisked away and hurriedly buried before all evidence had been examined. How had she been dead for days or even weeks with no word reaching the sheriff? Did she fall in or did someone drown her?

  It was her duty to make sure this girl’s death was investigated with the same thoroughness and care as if her husband were still alive.

  Ela studied their surroundings for hints of what might have happened. Any traces of footprints or activity on the bank had unfortunately been obliterated in their rush to remove her, but Ela had a feeling the girl had entered the river somewhere upstream. The clump of rushes grew in a lazy bend of the Avon and might have held the body fast during the ice and snows of February. Every puddle and stream had been frozen since late January.

  The soldiers fashioned a crude stretcher out of woven branches, and they heaved her sodden form onto it as gently as possible. Ela said a silent prayer as they carried her up from the riverbank. The drizzling rain grew more persistent as they remounted, and Ela led this small, grim procession back to the castle.

  The funeral party from the cathedral had reached the castle before Ela did, and she arrived at the gates into a flurry of horses and attendants and gifts being unloaded from pack animals. She rode in and climbed down from Freya. The porter swept her cloak from her shoulders, which was a relief since it was damp through to the fur lining and heavy as lead.

  The great hall was abuzz with voices. How William would have loved to see his friends gathered here altogether!

  “Wine, my lady?” Sibel, her personal lady’s maid thoughtfully hurried over with a silver cup. Ela took a small, bracing sip. How was she to play hostess to half the knights and barons of England when all she wanted to do was retire to her solar and sob into her pillow?

  Ellie and Nicholas, her littlest ones, hurried toward her through the crowd, Ellie holding fast to her brother’s tunic. Bright eyed and flushed, they looked relieved to see her. She’d lost her own father at age nine and knew that sense of terror that something—anything—could happen to your remaining parent. “I’m here, my loves.” She bent down and embraced them.

  “Was there a dead lady?” Perceptive Nicholas always asked the hard questions.

  “Yes, my love.”

  “Is her soul resting with God like Daddy’s?” asked Ellie.

  Ela hesitated. She had a policy of not lying to her children, not even a small fib. The poor girl had no doubt died unshriven. A tiny shiver of despair roamed through her. “We must pray for her. Remember her in your prayers tonight.”

  “I will, Mama,” said Nicholas. She knew he would, too. He never forgot anything. “I’ll pray for her and Papa every day this week.”

  “Me, Mama,” said little Ellie, pulling her tiny bone-bead rosary from her sleeve and pressing it to her pink mouth. “I’ll pray for her every day for a month.”

  “With so many prayers she’s sure to be welcome in heaven.” Ela kissed the top of Ellie’s curly golden head, still damp from the rainy ride back from her father’s burial.

  “Do come close to the fire, my lady,” urged Sibel. “You’re shivering. You’ll catch a chill riding out in the wet like that. And after such a shock on an already difficult day, too.” She ushered Ela past the children—and past the clamor of barons looking to offer their condolences—to a chair within the heat of the great blaze.

  “You’re a treasure, Sibel.” Sibel had cried longer and harder than she had at William’s death. She’d been with them since before Ela’s children were born and loved them all like family. Ela sipped her hot spiced wine and the heat of the fire began to stir some warmth back in her limbs. Her daughter Isabella came and wrapped her arms around her neck. “I can’t believe he’s gone, Mama. We only just got him back.”

  “I know, my sweet. It’s too cruel.” He’d spent much of Isabella’s life—and hers—away on one adventure or another. “At least he arranged your betrothal before he passed.” She was engaged to one of William’s wards, thus ensuring that the ward’s estates and income would stay in the family. Ela intended to plan the wedding as soon as possible before another earl or baron could petition the king for the wardship now that her husband was dead.

  “I don’t w
ant to leave you.” Isabella clung to her mother. “And you need my help with the little ones.”

  “It’s your duty. We must all do our duty.” She sipped her wine. Many would think it her own duty to marry again as soon as possible. Ela’s mother was currently with her fourth husband.

  But right now she had other concerns.

  She rose from her seat and handed her cup to Sibel. The hall was thick with nobles from the funeral procession who’d returned here to share her grief or perhaps just to drink at someone else’s expense. And a feast would soon be served on the trestle tables set up for the occasion.

  Some of them turned to look at her as she rose. What did they see? A tragic widow? A forlorn mother of eight fatherless children? A great heiress with a fortune ripe for the plucking? She was all and none of those things.

  She made polite conversation with several of her husband’s close companions, then cornered Deschamps. “Is the young woman laid out in the armory?”

  “She is my lady. The coroner went home to change his wet clothes, but he’ll be back to attend her as soon as possible. I’ve sent for a shroud. She’ll have to be buried outside the walls, of course.”

  Ela bristled. He assumed the girl had no right to a Christian burial. “She won’t be buried until we’ve determined who she is. We don’t know the circumstances of her death. Perhaps she has every right to a burial in the cathedral churchyard.”

  Every person no matter how low—or how high—had a right to justice.

  Her husband had a right to justice. She drew in a breath and steadied herself as a wave of anger shook her. His killer was beyond the reach of justice—since he dispensed it.