The Templar's Penance: (Knights Templar 15) Read online

  It took her almost an hour to get rid of the fool. Parceval was persistent, of course – well, she knew that – but really, the great dunderwhelp should have been able to see that she had other things on her mind. But no, he sat there languidly, ordering wine and trying to make her drink her fill, as though he was determined to get her so maudlin drunk she’d submit to another fumbling prodding when it grew dark.

  ‘I am not thirsty, and I must soon go to the Cathedral to pray,’ she said briskly at last, when all her attempts at subtle rebuffs failed – for she might want his companionship again later.

  Her bluntness made him blink, but then he gave a rueful grimace and stood. ‘I see I am not in your favour today, my lady. I am greatly sorrowed for that. My apologies. Perhaps you will permit me to see you again?’

  ‘I should be delighted,’ she said, unbending a little now that he was actually going to leave her. She gave him a warm smile. ‘I apologise, but I must have a little time to clear my head before praying.’

  ‘But of course.’

  His mildly aloof manner told her in no uncertain terms just how he felt, like a young swain who was rejected on the first attempt at wooing. He would live. In the meantime, Doña Stefanía had other things to occupy her mind.

  First among these, of course, was: how was Joana, and how had the rendezvous gone? She should know soon. Second, and a close second at that, was: where had the Fleming found his money? He was suddenly in possession of large amounts of gold, if the weight of the purse was anything to go by, yet when she had first met him out on the road, he had declared his absolute poverty. That was part of his attraction to her at the time. It was no smutty lust which had made her notice him, but the fact that he came from a different land, a completely different class and was therefore highly unlikely ever to meet her again; this meant that she could afford to take the plunge with the reasonable hope that she was safe from discovery. Only she and Joana had known that she had submitted to Parceval’s clumsy attempts at seduction, so far as she knew, until later, when the other man walked in, anyway: Señor Ruy.

  That damned knight had appeared at the chamber’s doorway and had stood there stock-still as though shocked; she had seen him. Her view had necessarily been confused, being upside-down at the time, but she had recognised him. Parceval continued bulling like an ox on his cow all the while, hoarse grunts bursting from his throat at every thrust, oblivious to any interruption – to be fair, she herself hadn’t stopped encouraging him at the gallop – and Señor Ruy stood there staring, drinking in the sight and sounds of their lovemaking. In a curious way, his silent presence stimulated her still more. It gave the Doña an especial thrill to think that she was exciting the knight while helping her lover to a climax. She had felt safe in the dark of the room, thinking that the man couldn’t recognise her. All he would know was that a couple had been rutting.

  Then he turned and marched away, just as Parceval gave a loud groan, called upon God in his guttural voice, erupted, and collapsed panting sweatily on top of her.

  In reality, she hadn’t cared much about the knight at the time, and soon after Señor Ruy left, Parceval recovered enough to tease her to a fresh bout and she found herself responding enthusiastically. That was then; now she was worried.

  The next day she saw Señor Ruy talking to another pilgrim out in the yard of the place, and realised with a jolt of horror that the man to whom he spoke was Gregory, curse his cods – the man she’d divorced; the man who knew she was a nun. Hardly the sort of fellow she wanted to hear about her nocturnal escapades. Just then Parceval appeared and saw her, all but shouting out to her, his face beaming, and she had hurriedly ducked away from him before Gregory could notice her. The little man had given her enormous sexual pleasure, true, but he was a scruffy churl, penniless and clad in worn clothing that would have shamed a mudéjar.

  It was immediately obvious that she must flee the group as soon as possible, and it was her good fortune that the others decided to remain at that village, to rest and visit a local shrine. All that day, Doña Stefanía had kept herself away from the others and the next morning, she, Joana and Domingo and his men all rode off long before dawn, their destination: Santiago de Compostela.

  In a way it was lucky that she had seen Gregory before he had seen her. Perhaps by now, Gregory had heard of Parceval’s nocturnal exercises – the two men might even have talked together! The Prioress cringed at the thought. She had concealed her real name to Parceval, but if she were to stay with the band of pilgrims, she would have been pointed out, and it would only have been a matter of time before Gregory heard the gossip. She knew enough about men to predict that Parceval would enjoy boasting about his conquest. The eager little fellow! she thought with some affection.

  Then that disquieting thought resurfaced: Parceval had been poor then. How had he suddenly managed to find so much money? Where had it sprung from? It was curious that he was suddenly in funds, just as she was losing her own.

  Joana – where was Joana?

  Joana had indeed reached the place chosen for the rendezvous, but at first there was no sign of anyone there.

  It was a pleasing spot, a quiet glade a little distance from the roadway, near to the river, and for a while she just stood on the bank watching the water drift past. Laughter came to her from upstream and she stood back, shadowed by the branches of a tree until she could see the source: some young women were approaching with baskets of laundry propped against their hips, probably heading for their favourite spot. Soon they had passed and Joana could relax again. She didn’t want anyone else to see her here. That could only lead to embarrassment.

  The bag in her hand was heavy and she stared at it wondering how he could carry it away without it being noticed. But then she reflected that he would have his own leather satchels to transfer the money to. A man who was used to travelling, he was bound to be accustomed to concealing money so that others wouldn’t notice it. Anyway, he was a knight. He must be used to fighting and protecting what was his. Heaven help the footpad who tried to pick his pocket!

  Joana took a deep breath and sighed. Her heart was pounding. Strange to tell, she was petrified. This was a new experience for her. After all, he wasn’t going to hurt her; she had the money, and that was a guarantee of her future. Yet she still felt nervous, in case her confederate, when he arrived, would be enraged.

  Doña Stefanía would be on tenterhooks by now. She would have drunk at least her first cup of wine, if not more. Suddenly Joana wished she was there, with her mistress. She could have killed for a taste of good wine, for a crust or two of bread dipped in olive oil. Her belly felt empty, as though she hadn’t eaten for a week, and yet she was well enough. Still, when she looked at her hand, she could see it was shaking.

  ‘So, my lady!’

  The hand on her shoulder made her squeak in alarm, but then the hand gripped her hair roughly, and she felt her head being pulled back and upwards until she was staring into his face, saw the fiercely smouldering eyes gazing down into hers.

  That was when she knew she was lost.

  Simon was first to hear the scream.

  It exploded into his mind and shattered his dream of lying in bed with Meg, his wife. He wasn’t in his bed, he was lying in the shade on a grassy riverbank in a foreign country. Shocked into full wakefulness, he shot upwards like a startled lark and stared about him.

  Baldwin stirred beside him, and Simon prodded him with an ungentle foot as he listened, utterly absorbed. Flies hummed near, a large black one aiming for his face, and he waved it away, frowning with concentration, his other hand hovering near his sword.

  They had been here for at least an hour, from the look of the sun’s shadows, sitting and eating their bread and cheese in quiet contemplation, drinking wine chilled by the river, the skin left dangling by a thong in the waters. Once they were done, both men lay back and chatted desultorily until they submitted to the warmth of the afternoon sun and fell fast asleep.

  ‘What is it?�
�� Baldwin grumbled.

  Simon was almost sure that the scream had come from farther upriver. ‘A cry – up there somewhere.’

  ‘Nothing now,’ Baldwin yawned.

  ‘Wait!’

  Shrill and terrified, the cry came again and again, shuddering on the still air like the call of a strange bird.

  Baldwin was on his feet, hand on his sword, already sprinting towards the sound.

  Simon hurried along behind him, his sword out, the blade flashing as it caught the sun. The blade had been so well-used over so many years, that there was nothing left of the high polish which it had once possessed, in stark contrast to Baldwin’s newer one. That flashed with a wicked intensity whenever the sun caught it, the carefully tempered, peacock-blue metal glinting like a well-cut and polished jewel.

  Their path took them through lank, straggling grasses, wild flowers of white and yellow, under great trees and through drying puddles, and although it was not a great distance, Simon soon found his heart was pounding more vigorously than he had ever known it do before. He put it down to the strength of the wine, and perhaps the fact that he had eaten too much cheese, but he was sweltering in his rough tunic and cloak and would have felt no damper had he thrown himself into the river.

  But all thoughts of his comfort disappeared as they ran through a small grove, past a donkey braying wildly, and some skinny chickens which fled, squawking, and found the two girls.

  Neither was more than fourteen, Simon guessed as he leaned down, both fists on his thighs as he tried to catch his breath. Both were plainly petrified, but as Simon began to find his wind, he realised that a large part of their terror might stem from the fact that two foreigners had suddenly burst through the trees and materialised in front of them with drawn swords. He tried a soothing smile, but was rewarded with a fresh screech of panic.

  It was Baldwin who calmed matters. He carefully thrust his sword back into its scabbard, motioning to Simon to copy his example, and then stared about him, ignoring the two girls. After a moment, they pointed and, to Simon’s mind, jabbered incomprehensibly. Baldwin appeared to understand, and strode off in the direction which they had indicated.

  The place was apparently the spot where some of the local women would come to wash their clothes. There was a broad sweep of the river in a loop, and because it was upstream from Compostela itself, the waters were clean and not befouled by the ordure thrown in by the thousands of inhabitants and pilgrims. The well-trodden path led down a grassy little bank to the water’s edge. There, some large flat grey rocks provided scrubbing boards while the branches overhanging the place gave drying facilities. From the look of the shards of pottery, many women came here, did their laundry and then supped wine while they waited for their washing to dry overhead. It must have been one of the few relaxing times of the day for them, Baldwin thought to himself.

  All this he took in with one glance, but then he smelled the foul odour of death. There was a loud buzzing, and he saw a small cloud of flies. He only had to go a short distance, a matter of ten yards. There he stood among some longer rushes and grasses, and Simon saw him stop and stare sadly down at his feet. For once, he didn’t instantly crouch and touch the body. This time he stood stock still before silently beckoning Simon to join him.

  Reluctantly, knowing from Baldwin’s stillness as much as from the obvious fear of the two girls that this must be a murder victim, Simon went to join him. He never could understand the knight’s objective approach to bodies. Baldwin was always, so he said, keen to learn as much as he could from a corpse, and after his experiences during a siege when he was a mere youth, he had picked up much about human bodies when sudden violent death was visited upon them. He had told Simon before that if an intelligent man could observe a body correctly, that body could speak of the murderer. There was more to be learned from a corpse than the mere number of wounds or their depth.

  When Simon reached his side, he saw that Baldwin was contemplating the body of a young woman with the figure of a Madonna lying at his feet, head nearest him, body pointing to the river. From her hands and trim figure, she had been well-born. Certainly her hands had not seen much hard work. The flesh was clean and pale olive, like a wealthy lady’s, with few calluses. Her dress was a blue tunic, very well cut, with expensive-looking embroidery at the neck, wrists and hem, but blood had soaked into it, turning it into a reeking, blackened mass.

  She lay in some long grasses a short way from the river itself. Her arms were at her side; the back of her right hand was scraped, as though it had been rasped with a rock. A nail was torn away. Her head was turned towards the right shoulder, and a thick puddle of blood surrounded her dark hair, in which the first strands of white showed at the temples even through the thick gobbets of gore. Her legs were spread in the unmistakable posture of lovemaking, the skirts thrown up and over her belly revealing the dark triangle at the junction of her thighs. Simon glanced down and saw the marks of blood on the soft inner flesh. He swallowed hard.

  This poor woman had not merely been raped; she had been bludgeoned to death, as though her attacker was enraged by her, as though he wanted to remove every sign of her. Her shoulders, hands and face were a mass of ruined flesh, as though the killer wanted to destroy her utterly.

  Chapter Six

  For Simon, the next half hour or so was disturbing in the extreme. The screams of the two girls had brought some farm labourers running from a field a short way off, and now five men stood scowling grimly at Baldwin and him. A sixth was retching near the river, and being comforted by one of the girls, who was still dreadfully pale, but seemed grateful for the opportunity of forgetting her own horror and concentrating on someone else’s. Another man had gone with her friend into the city to fetch help.

  In England, Simon would have known exactly what to do and say. He was not the First Finder, he was the fourth witness to arrive, after the two girls and Baldwin, and could be sure that he would be fined, but that would be the limit of his expense. But he wasn’t in England, he was in Galicia, and he wasn’t sure what the law said about the treatment of witnesses. However, he knew perfectly well that his neighbours in Devonshire, where he lived, would infinitely prefer to accuse a stranger than think that one of their own could have committed a foul murder such as this. If a local jury accused a local man, it was because he was possessed of a ‘common fame’ – an unenviable reputation for theft or robbery or simply mindless violence.

  Here, Simon had little idea how matters would stand. He believed in the superiority of the English legal system, in which a man was innocent until proved guilty. In foreign parts, so he had heard, that rule didn’t hold sway, and sometimes a man could be held until he had been tortured to seek the truth. Simon was appalled by the thought that an inquest could rely on the evidence of a man who had been systematically crippled, but he knew that it happened abroad. Baldwin himself was proof of that. The Templars had been tortured, generally one at a time in front of their comrades, so that each should know exactly what was in store for them, should they refuse to confess.

  Torture was not routine, apparently, but that was of little consolation, because all knew that the ways of foreign laws were flawed.

  Simon licked dry lips as he and Baldwin waited, trying to avoid the hard stares of the peasants. One in particular was holding his long-bladed knife at the ready as though wishing that one of the two would try to escape.

  Simon found he could remember some of the other things he had heard about the legal system abroad. Often, a court case was based on one man accusing another. If he could bring one other witness to support his contention, the case was decided in his favour – unless the defendant could bring more people to support him. From what Simon had heard, it all came down to numbers. Clearly it was a mess, because if two men were prepared to cook up a story between them, they could get an innocent man convicted. And then, if the latter refused to confess, he would be tortured until he admitted his guilt!

  In England the law was more eff
ective, because the jury itself determined the guilt or innocence of the accused. The jury would report offences to the judges and, if they knew who had committed the crime, the jury would accuse him. Then it was up to the Justice to impose the penalty. Thus all the folk of the vill were involved; the jury comprised all the adult males, after all. And Englishmen at that, he reminded himself, glancing at the man with the knife.

  It seemed hours before there was the sound of a crowd approaching, although Simon was sure, from looking at the sun, that it could only have been a short while. Then he saw a drifting of dust over the low trees towards Compostela, which gradually grew. At the same time, he was aware of his heart beating faster.

  This was a novel sensation. He shot a look at Baldwin and saw that his friend was frowning meditatively at the corpse, and although he glanced up a few times in the direction of the city, he was plainly unconcerned about his own or Simon’s safety. Simon wished he could feel Baldwin’s confidence. No matter that he was innocent as a newborn lamb, it was the mere threat of being caught up in the machinery that was so intimidating, especially if the victim was gripped in a foreign system. Still worse if he, the foreigner, did not have a grasp of the language. From now on, Simon swore that he would always treat any strangers at home with more than usual courtesy and kindness, explaining to any man who appeared before him the whole system in which the fellow was caught.

  The procession which at last came into view consisted of a man at the front with a broad hat concealing his face, while at his side walked a priest, also wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the sun. Behind them creaked a small cart, obviously prepared for collecting a body as a door was laid upon it. A fair group of onlookers were straggling alongside this makeshift cortège.

  The first man tilted his hat up as he reached them, peering at the peasants intently before turning his attention on Simon and Baldwin.