“It must have been a large hand,” says Anne Rogers. “Someone big and strong. A man, of course. A man who might’ve done this sort of thing before. A man horses trust …” She hesitates because she does not want to say what she hopes each of us is thinking, that Willowjack will have known her murderer. How could a stranger get close enough to hold a prong against her head and drive it home, even if it took only a single blow? It was never easy to get close to Willowjack; even unplugging a blood tick from her ear was rewarded with a nipping. Anne Rogers means us to suspect our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, a second cousin of my wife and a man she once set her heart upon — until he married. Then he was despised.
“It might be anyone who’s similar, of course,” she adds, seeing the look on my face and then nodding at my hands.
“I have my alibi,” I say, pointing at the bed and seeming for the women’s benefit to make light of what is already upsetting me and will be insufferable for Master Kent. The knots that tie us to this tranquil place are loosening. “Besides this one hand’s not entirely mended.” I show the healing wound. The scab has darkened and is flexible. If I’m not careful I’ll be put to work again. “It’s painful still,” I promise, not quite certain why both are laughing. “I couldn’t squash a fly with this.”
“Or even strip a bit of barleycorn,” she says.
So now there are two bodies to be taken down to Turd and Turf, the master’s cherished mare and the abandoned man from the pillory. I do not know whom we should hold responsible for the horse’s death. My first suspicion lays its eggs beneath the skin of Master Jordan’s groom. I was not impressed by him when, yesterday, I showed him where his horses could be tied. He looked at Willowjack with a narrow lip, I thought. “She’d benefit from brushing down,” he said, though by any rule she was twice as fine a horse as any of his mounts. Envy can be maddening. Perhaps she’s nipped him, and he’s taken his revenge.
I could as well make out a case that lays the blame again at the feet, well, at the hands, of Brooker Higgs and the Derby twins, all three of whom are known for their great fists. Perhaps word has already leaked out — from outraged Mr. Quill, or possibly the cousin’s sidemen — that the village as we know it and our employments are to be surrendered to the yellow teeth of three thousand sheep. We’ll be outnumbered fifty to one — and soon. Our trio of bachelors would once more have cause for anger and indignation, though no more cooing doves to vent their outrage on. And no bleaters yet. They might have listened to the lovemaking last night and grown restless, naturally, wanting trills and carols of their own. They might have eaten the remaining fairy caps from the visit to the woods on what seems a thousand evenings ago. And only then they would have found the wicked pluck to hammer Willowjack, a horse that everybody loved and so the creature most deserving of their blows. But I have seen how Brooker and the twins have slunk around like chastened dogs these past few days, fearful that their dove-baiting will catch them out. The roasting of the birds was bad enough, though it was warranted to some degree. But the newcomers were punished unjustly because of our men’s deceit and silence, and now the smaller one is dead, strangled at the pillory. No, there’s not a mushroom strong enough to make these young men kill the master’s horse. They’re frightened of the shadows now. In any other place but here, they would be frightened for their lives.
Another possibility: I blush even to name my neighbor, dear John Carr. He is a placid man, greatly loved by his fellows and close to animals. John Carr can stop a drove of running cattle in their tracks, even ones made frisky by the company of bulls or young. I’ve seen him root a maddened dog to the ground with just a fingertip: one firm touch on the nose to stop the barking, and another to set the tail wagging. It’s a gift, and one that he is called upon to use whenever we’ve an animal to butcher. It was John who dispatched the little calf we feasted on the other night at Master Kent’s expense. Its skin is still soaking in brine under the rafters of the barn, though today it is among my challenges to lift it out before it’s entirely fit and attempt to fashion some serviceable vellum for Mr. Quill’s shape-shifting chart. Yes, John Carr is the village slaughterman and more than anyone I know possesses all the skills and speed it took to execute Willowjack with the calm efficiency Mistress Rogers describes. But neighbor Carr has small and stubby hands, a pair of how-to hands, worn short with work. And he is kind.
Anne Rogers will not be the only one to count our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, as a suspect, that’s for sure. One of his hands is big and strong enough to hold a hoof completely still while he’s shodding it with the other. But I discount that idea straight away, as Abel Saxton has been too intimately involved with Willowjack — her welfare and her tack, her clobber and her shoes — to wish her dead under any circumstance. The master rewards him well for his leatherwork and smithery. The man’s a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat.
I’m mystified, to tell the truth. It does not take me long, once Mistress Rogers has run off to spread the gossip of where “old Walter Thirsk” has labored overnight “again,” to mutter a rosary of names between my lips — the twenty or so men in the neighborhood tall enough to level with a horse’s ear — but still not find a likely candidate.
“It will’ve been the short one did it,” offers Kitty Gosse as she prepares our porridge for the day. I have forgotten how hare-brained and vexing she can be.
“You mean the little man that died? Yes, that does seem likely, doesn’t it?”
“Who else? If you’ve been throttled in the pillory for burning doves, and half devoured by pigs, murdering a horse is just the sort of mischief you’d enjoy,” she says with certainty. “There’s motive, isn’t there?”
“The man is dead.”
“The dead men are the ones to fear. A soul can’t rest until it’s satisfied, until the fellow is revenged.”
“He’s far too short to reach the horse’s head.” I’m trying to be reasonable.
She stares as if I am the world’s buffoon. “Everybody’s short, when they’re kneeling down,” she says, and looks at me cock-eyed. Of course, she’s right. I’ve been half-witted. The horse wasn’t standing; it was down and sleeping when it died. It was in the hollows of the night. What does a horse do, then, other than to fold itself into the straw and sleep? The killer didn’t have to be familiar. The killer didn’t have to reach. The killer didn’t even have to lift that finger-stretching rock far from the ground. The killer might have used two hands. Far from being the work of a hefty, muscle-fisted man, the killer could have been a woman or a child. Not counting widow Gosse’s ghost and his pilloried companion but including Mr. Quill and Master Kent’s six manor house guests, there are more than sixty sons and daughters of Cain who might have crept back to their cot last night with horse blood on their hands and clothes.
Indeed, that is the stain that Master Jordan wants to chase, once everyone is gathered in the threshing house ready for another day of barley work. Horses have enormous pumping hearts. A loop of blood fountained out of Willowjack’s head the moment that the prong went in. The straw is black and sticky with its splash. Whoever was responsible for this death will not have escaped entirely dry and unspoiled. All the masters need to do is find the pile of red and sodden clothes. The cottagers are told, therefore, that none of them must stray a step beyond the barn today. Their dwellings and their gardens will be searched. And we must prepare ourselves, in the absence of a lawful gibbet, to see a neighbor hanging from an oak before the end of day.