Blood Runs Thicker by Sarah Hawkswood (best electronic book reader txt) 📗

‘We have, Father, and we need to see the body, though we interrupt your prayers.’ Bradecote spoke gently enough but would clearly not brook demur.

‘God hears the silent prayer as much as the one that is voiced, and from any place. Would you have me leave you?’

‘It is your church, Father.’

‘It is God’s church, my son, and in a way Osbern de Lench’s, for he spent much to make it as you see, resplendent, honouring the Creator. The colours are barely dry upon the stone, but there, in comparison with the Glories of Heaven it is but a hogcote, and I pray that the soul of the lord Osbern might, in time, reach them.’

‘What sort of man was he, Father? Do not answer to praise the dead but to be honest with us. It helps us, I promise.’

‘Not an easy man,’ the priest sighed, ‘for he was afflicted with a temper and of recent years a leaning to the heart-sick. It was as if sometimes he hated his own person but took it out upon others. Love of self to excess is sinful, for it means ignoring others, but hating self can be as bad. The only thing that truly delighted him, always, was the land. He would go up to the top of the hill every day if he could see the manor below and the weather was not foul, and just look down on it and be eased. He always seemed less angry upon return.’

‘His family pleased him though?’ Catchpoll crossed himself before the altar and began to draw back the cloth that covered the body, giving silent thanks that the body had not been shrouded by the widow. He sounded almost casual, as if the answer would be just a pleasantry.

‘Yes, but … like an ebb and flow of tide, not all the time. Of course the lord Baldwin is too alike to his sire for them to have been always in amity. There were ravings from both sides, much stamping and roaring, like stags before the rut, but they respected each other. The lady, she is the second wife, and I think it hard sometimes to fill that role if the first was loved. The lady who bore Baldwin and his sister died when he was but a boy of six or seven, and those who were here then will tell you the lord Osbern grieved mightily, but wed again three years later, taking a very young wife. I think he feared having only the one son to inherit, life being always out of our own hands. I came to the parish that year and christened the child she bore him, messire Hamo, but the travail was difficult and she was barren thereafter.’

‘And this younger son was rejected?’ Bradecote frowned, listening, but whilst watching the silent interrogation of the body by Serjeant Catchpoll, who would undoubtedly have spoken out loud to it had the priest not been hard by. Walkelin stood beside the body also, but might have been mistaken for a respectful mourner, his woollen cap gripped in his hands and his head bowed. ‘It seems unlikely unless the boy showed some marked imperfection. If a man wanted another son and got one, would he not rejoice and dote upon him?’

‘What might give you …? Oh, the lord Baldwin accusing his brother … that is, I am sure, just their dislike and jealousy.’

‘So you are saying Hamo was preferred, then?’ Bradecote’s frown became more pronounced. He looked away from the body and straight at the priest, knowing that he would hold the man’s gaze. Catchpoll was now getting Walkelin to help him turn the body over. It was not dignified.

‘No. But … it is hard to explain, my lord. The lord Osbern liked to command and be obeyed, yet despised those who submitted to him. The lady de Lench learnt the lesson, I fear painfully, early in the marriage, and the meeker she became the more he railed at the slightest failure. She would not stand up for herself, only her child, but she also taught the boy not to annoy his sire. Messire Hamo is a quiet lad, watchful, careful. He does not trust, I think, and you can see why. He is clever, for I taught him to read and even write a little, which is more than his sire or brother could ever do, and he learnt to get what he wanted by only ever asking when the moment was propitious. The lord Baldwin just asked when the idea hit him and was thus often rebuffed. So the lord Baldwin, who hates the lady who took his mother’s place, not least because she is beautiful and young, also hates her son who seems to get what he wants and be favoured. This is so even though he knows his sire loved him for being his firstborn, and in his own mould and that of his mother. She was, they say, a raven-haired, headstrong woman. Rare fights they had, according to the woman who nursed the two babes, but always ended in another sort of passion, if you understand me.’ The priest blushed. ‘Perhaps that is why he picked the opposite second time – he could not bear someone so like unto her.’ He paused. ‘It is one thing I think a priest can never quite understand, the many tangled bonds of man and wife in the flesh and in the heart. I have found in my life the love that is compassion, not passion.’

The undersheriff said nothing. He felt he had enough tangled bonds in the family of the dead man without adding the influence of a long-dead wife, though the past so often bore down upon the present.

‘My lord,’ Catchpoll’s tone meant that he did not need to say ‘come and look’.

‘Excuse me, Father.’ Bradecote went to join his men and positioned himself between the corpse and the priest.

‘Several knife wounds, my lord, but