XXV. Winding Sheets
Early the next morning in the Chandler’s Lane gaol, Thomas sat glumly beside Little John, looking on while Geoffrey and Benedict washed the bodies of Warin and Osbert with wine and balsam. The two were laid out on two boards across Orrels’s trestle table. All was conducted solemnly and in silence.
Poor Osbert had been found alive in one of the oubliettes by some of Passelewe’s men, but was by then already in shock. He lasted only briefly as the barber attempted to sever his shattered leg. The added weight of his loss felt powerful enough to extinguish the candles and torches in the gaol.
Geoffrey wrapped the bodies in their winding sheets, and Benedict made sure Osbert’s severed leg was properly bound where it should be, below his knee, so that he didn’t have to go hobbling along without it in the next life. “Be just like ’im to forget it,” he commented.
They were the first words spoken in over an hour and were followed by further amused jibes at their dead friend, culminating in Elias saying, “At least he has Warin with him, so he might not get lost.” That led to more stories about them both, good stories of decent men, which warded off the strangeness they had experienced. For the Waits and the Keepers the world had now become unnatural.
Sheriff Orrels and Elias had already set out to inform their families: Warin had just a mother left alive, in Holme across the Trent River; Osbert had a wife and two children living on Wheelwright Lane.
Once the families had come and had time with their men, the Waits picked up the boards and carried the two down Stoney Street to St. Mary’s burial ground where a section was maintained for them. Orrels had already informed and paid two gravediggers to make the plot ready to receive the bodies.
Representing the Keepers, Will Scathelock joined up with the procession on Stoney Street. Thomas carried his mason’s bag with him.
It all seemed surreal. People on the street stepped back and watched them pass by—people who only yesterday had cheered on Benedict in a contest or spoken with Osbert and Geoffrey as they tallied the contestants. The world of yesterday was like a dream. Nary a trace of it remained.
The Waits plot of burial ground had barely seen use before this. Arriving there, Elias muttered, “I can’t recall the last of us who fell in anything like battle.”
Gathered around the two boards, they listened while the priest said a mass over the bodies and mother and wife bid their respective men farewell. At the end they lowered their comrades into the ground, with the gravediggers waiting in the shadow of the church to finish up. Then they returned in silence to the gaol—all save Thomas and Little John.
Those two unobtrusively followed the priest into St. Mary’s. They knelt and prayed until the priest left them to preside over another, unrelated burial. Once alone, they picked up their bows and descended into the crypt.
It was decidedly smaller than the crypt of Melrose Abbey, containing three covered tombs. Thomas led the way to the tomb farthest from the steps. He made to grab hold of the lid.
Little John asked, “You sure if we open these the ghosts of the dead won’t follow us out?”
Thomas leaned on the lid. “We find sleepers in one or more of these, any ghosts about will thank us for ridding their tombs of the villains.” John looked undecided. “Well, would you want someone making use of your tomb?”
After a moment John stepped up and grabbed the other side of the lid. Together, they lifted it half off, enough to see that no sleeping Yvag occupied the space below. The condition of the corpse suggested none ever had.
They closed the lid and repeated it on the other two. No Yvagvoja inhabited those either.
If the creature operating Sheriff Passelewe had hidden in Nottingham, it hadn’t lain in the tombs of St. Mary’s. There were two other churches to investigate, and Lenton Priory of course, and who knew how many hundreds of caves pockmarking the landscape from there to Mansfield, any one of which might disguise a sleeping place for an Yvagvoja, caves dug behind caves. They would have to keep looking. Little John glanced nervously around.
Thomas reached into the mason’s bag. He contemplated dropping the dights into the tomb, but decided it was too risky. The Yvags might commandeer it at any point, and having loitered here it was possible he and John were already being scrutinized. He would just have to carry them a little longer.
“John,” he said, and together they replaced the carved lid on it, then made sure everything was the way they’d found it.
Upon leaving the church, Thomas said to John, “After we get to the King’s Houses, I would like for you to show me the spot where you beheld the Queen of the Fairies.” John gave him a quizzical look. “They opened a gate in that spot from their world three nights ago by your reckoning. They might have done so more than once, and it might have thinned the barriers between our worlds. Such openings—it’s useful to know where they are.”
Little John sullenly agreed to show the way there. “I’m sorry I e’er set eyes on them spinners. Wish we could go back to the split oak tree and stop Much and Robbie from trying t’ rob anybody. Broke the world, tha’ did.”
“I wish I had that power.”
“Make tha God then, wouldn’t it?” John weakly tried a smile.
At the gaol, a keg had been opened and ale poured, a wake of sorts begun for the two fallen heroes. With all of the Waits there along with Warin’s mother and Osbert’s family, it was a crowded space. Thomas and John cracked dour mugs with Geoffrey and Benedict, the latter of whom asked where they’d gone off to.
“Church,” said Thomas. John nodded.
Orrels came up to him. “So now to our list of those who are neither alive nor human, namely the Bishop of Doncaster, we must add Sheriff Passelewe. If that long-deceased body in the castle cell belongs to the real Passelewe—”
“It was no one else,” insisted Geoffrey. “We’ll all swear to it.”
Orrels frowned. “Then ’twas his doppelgänger rode north out of town, identified by our own Calum. And no mistaking him.”
Thomas said, “The doppelgänger was called Kunastur. Not that it matters.”
“Ah, well, it matters in that they are not selecting another to replace him just now, as they expect him to return to the castle.”
“It will prove most interesting if . . .” The words he’d intended to speak evaporated. The seizure had snuck up on him. Thomas realized he was thinking there were fifteen people in the gaol, and seven columns supporting the ceiling, and eighty diamond-shaped quarrels in the mullioned front window through which the bright sunlight was pouring in—light both intense and shimmering colorfully. Cold filled his head and crackling electricity caught him off guard. He stumbled forward, tried to hand off his mug to Little John, then crashed into Will and fell.
When he woke, he was laid out on the floor of the gaol with Little John. Will and Orrels knelt with him. He could feel the tickle of foam on his cheek, where it had churned out of his mouth. He lowered his head, squeezed shut his eyes. Behind his eyelids the darkness still sparkled lightly. “I had a fit, yes?”
“Yes,” said Orrels. “Do you have them frequently?”
“I have them . . . sometimes. I’ve no way to judge if that is frequent or not. Thought I was quit of them, fool that I am.”
“You know that you speak while you’re laid low,” the sheriff said.
He opened his eyes again and looked at Will. “I said something?”
“Yes,” Will told him. “A sort of riddle from the sound of it.”
They helped Thomas to his unsteady feet. He leaned against one of those seven columns. “Sure,” he said. “It’s always a riddle, and half of them make no sense. What did I say this time?”
“I believe you said, ‘Another Janet for your bed, short-lived the love, though steep the climb to voice it.’” Will asked what it meant.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Most of what comes out are crazy things. Sometimes they only make sense much later, as though I’ve seen things that have yet to occur. But even I don’t believe it.” He pointed at the front window. “Eighty diamond quarrels,” and laughing, added, “I sound like the idiot of the village.” He let out a sigh. “Another mug of ale would wash away the taste. I’ll try not to shatter this one.”
Later that afternoon, the Waits were called by the priest of St. Mary’s because someone had disturbed every tomb in the crypt.