“No, lad.” Dreng shook his head. “You made a mistake. You thought you saw a murder when you didn’t. Now you’re too proud to admit that you were wrong.”
Dreng’s voice was unattractive and his attitude arrogant, but his story was infuriatingly plausible, and Edgar feared that the people might believe him.
Degbert said: “Sister Agatha, when you found the baby on the beach, was it alive or dead?”
“He was near death, but still alive,” said the nun.
A voice in the crowd spoke up, and Edgar recognized Theodberht Clubfoot, a sheep farmer with pastures a couple of miles downriver. He said: “Did Dreng touch the body? Afterward, I mean?”
Edgar knew why he was asking the question. People believed that if the murderer touched the corpse it would bleed afresh. Edgar had no idea whether that was true.
Blod shouted out: “No, he did not! I kept my baby’s body away from that monster.”
Degbert said: “What do you say, Dreng?”
“I’m not sure whether I did or not,” Dreng said. “I would have, if necessary, but I don’t believe I had any reason to.”
It was inconclusive.
Degbert turned to Leaf. “You were the only one there, other than Dreng and his accuser, when Dreng threw the baby.” That was true: Ethel had passed out in the alehouse. “You screamed, but are you now sure it was alive? Could you have made a mistake?”
All Edgar wanted was for Leaf to tell the truth. But would she have the courage?
She said defiantly: “The baby was born alive.”
“But it died before Dreng threw the body into the river,” Degbert persisted. “However, at the time you imagined it was still alive. That was your mistake, wasn’t it?”
Degbert was bullying Leaf outrageously, but no one could stop him.
Leaf looked from Degbert to Edgar to Dreng, with panic in her eyes. Then she looked at the floor. She was silent for a long moment, and then when she spoke it was almost a whisper. “I think”—the crowd went quiet as everyone strained to hear her words—“I might have made a mistake,” she said.
Edgar despaired. She was obviously a terrified woman giving false evidence under pressure. But she had said what Dreng needed her to say.
Degbert looked at the crowd. “The evidence is clear,” he announced. “The baby was dead. Edgar’s accusation is not proved.”
Edgar stared at the villagers. They looked unhappy, but he saw at once that they were not angry enough to go against the two most powerful men in the neighborhood. He felt sick. Dreng was going to get away with it. Justice had been refused.
Degbert went on: “Dreng is guilty of the crime of improper burial.”
That was clever, Edgar saw bitterly. The baby had now been buried in the churchyard, but at the time Dreng had, by his ownaccount, disposed of a body illicitly. More importantly, he would now be punished for a minor offense, and that would make it a bit easier for the villagers to accept that he had got away with the greater crime.
Degbert said: “He is fined six pence.”
It was too little, and the villagers muttered, but they were discontented rather than rebellious.
Then Blod cried out: “Six pence?”
The crowd went silent. Everyone looked at Blod.
Tears were streaming down her face. “Six pence, for my baby?” she said.
She turned her back on Degbert eloquently. She strode away, but after half a dozen paces she stopped, turned, and spoke again. “You English,” she said, her voice choked with grief and rage.
She spat on the ground.
Then she walked away.
Dreng had won, but something shifted in the hamlet. Attitudes to Dreng had changed, Edgar mused as he ate his midday meal in the alehouse. People such as Edith, the wife of Degbert, and Bebbe, who supplied the minster with food, would in the past have stopped to talk to Dreng when their paths crossed, but now they just spoke a brief word and hurried on. Most evenings the alehouse was empty, or nearly so: Degbert sometimes came to drink Leaf’s strong ale, but others stayed away. People were polite to Degbert and Dreng, to the point of deference, but there was no warmth. It was as if the inhabitants were trying to make amends for their failure to insist on justice. Edgar did not think God would consider that sufficient.
