Tombland

‘I expected her to burst out crying and weeping but she didn’t; she only slumped in her chair. I asked Mistress Blanche to show her out. As she led her to the door I put my hand to my purse – I was going to give her a few coins – but Mistress Blanche shook her head. She was right, we cannot encourage liars. The woman left the house as she came, by the back door.’ He paused, then looked at me. ‘Yet, as I was to discover, though Edith Boleyn was a liar where her personal circumstances were concerned, what she said about being related by marriage to the Lady Elizabeth was quite true. And that is why, Master Shardlake, we are in trouble.’

‘Trouble made by her?’ I asked.

Parry gave a humourless laugh. ‘Only if you consider getting yourself murdered in the foulest way imaginable to be making trouble.’

I said quietly, ‘So it is a murder you wish me to investigate?’

‘It is, I fear.’ He looked me in the eye.

People in high places had made that request of me before. It usually provoked a clutch of anxiety at my heart. But in Parry’s office in Hatfield Palace I felt, unexpectedly, a quickening of excitement. I glanced sideways at Nicholas. His face was alive with interest too.

‘What happened to her?’ I asked.

Parry opened a drawer in his desk, took out a folder and removed a sheet of paper. It was a deposition, a witness statement for a court case. He looked at it. ‘I told you that Edith Boleyn – and that was her real name – came here on the fourth of May. Eleven days later, early on the morning of the fifteenth, a shepherd named Adrian Kempsley left his cottage in the parish of Brikewell, south of Norwich, to go and tend his master’s sheep. The master’s name is Leonard Witherington, and he is one of those who has been building up flocks of sheep on his lands, and, yes, encroaching on common land. He is unpopular with his tenantry, and with his neighbour, another landlord.’

I nodded. ‘As I said, if they are not quarrelling with their tenants, the Norfolk gentlemen fight with each other.’

Parry continued. ‘Between them, Witherington and his neighbour had purchased a large parcel of monastic land when the abbeys went down ten years ago. Apparently, the old monastery deeds were unclear about the boundary and Master Witherington recently claimed a good portion of his neighbour’s land.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘The neighbour’s name is Master John Boleyn, he is Edith’s husband, and he is not, as she told us, dead. Though he may be, within the month, dangling on the Norwich gallows.’

Nicholas’s eyes widened. ‘She had a husband living! Then why come here?’

Parry raised a hand. ‘Wait, young man. To continue, according to Adrian Kempsley, whose deposition this is, Witherington’s sheep were kept on a large meadow, which slopes down to a stream, which forms the boundary between Witherington’s land and that of John Boleyn, though as I said, that boundary is disputed.’

I said, ‘There have been many such cases since the monastic lands were sold off, title documents often centuries old and plans faded, or unclear.’

‘Indeed,’ Parry agreed. ‘There has been much rain this spring, as you know, and the stream was full, a good deal of mud around it. Kempsley saw something white sticking out of the stream, and in the early light thought a sheep had got itself trapped. When he came closer, though, he got the shock of his life.’ He paused. ‘I warn you, this next part is, as I said earlier, depraved and revolting. It was no sheep that Kempsley saw but, sticking up from the water, the naked body of Edith Boleyn. She had been shoved into the stream head first, her head and the upper half of her body buried in the water and the mud beneath. Her lower half stuck up in the air, her legs pulled apart so that her private parts were displayed to the heavens.’

There was a moment’s silence. ‘Someone must have hated her very much to do that,’ I said quietly. ‘What was the cause of death?’

‘No question about that,’ Parry answered. ‘She had been struck on the head with something very heavy. Kempsley says the top of her head fell to pieces when they pulled the body out. It must have been placed in the stream the night before. And yet Edith Boleyn had, according to law, already been dead for two years.’

Nicholas had been taking notes, a paper on a wooden board on his knees, but now his quill skittered across the page, dropping blots. ‘What? ’