Season of the Fox (A Servant of the Crown Mystery Book 2) by Denise Domning Page A

appearance before the justices when she is called?”
    “We will,” said Master Gerard, speaking first, the sweep of his hand including the two men who wore the red and green colors of his house.
    “Your names?” Edmund asked without lifting his pen or his head.
    The wool merchant looked askance at so brusque a command and rude a manner aimed at him by a mere monk. Although the alderman’s bearing and the arrangement of his features suggested he was by nature a congenial man, being portly and bald to a fringe of hair around the back of his head, Faucon doubted the merchant was accustomed to such rough treatment.
    He smiled at Master Gerard, seeking to soothe the feathers that Edmund had just ruffled. “If you please, master. My clerk and I are ordered by king and court to note all the details of every oath on pain of accruing our own fines. This attention to detail occasionally causes my clerk to be overly rigorous in his routine and his manner.”
    At Faucon’s pretty speech, Edmund lifted his head. The clerk blinked rapidly. “Aye, so it does. My pardon, masters, if I insult. If you will proceed, Sir Faucon? Oh, and don’t forget we must yet send men to fetch Elsa of Stanrudde’s body.”
    Faucon swallowed his surprise. Earlier it had been a smile and an attempt to spare his master a fine. Now, a backhanded apology, albeit followed by a command. It was a day for miracles, indeed.

Chapter Eight

    With November upon them, the sun’s journey across the sky had shortened as winter loomed. Although there was yet another hour before darkness fell and the city gates were closed, around the hour for Vespers, light was already slanting across the courtyard. By the time Edmund had recorded the names and oaths of their witnesses, as well as the facts of Bernart’s ancestry, shadows were piling gently around the corners of the merchant’s house. At Faucon’s command, Bernart’s servants found torches, in case the sun set before the jurors had completed their viewing.
    One of Master Gerard’s journeymen agreed to warn Garret the Weaver, who arrived at Bernart’s home soon after, he and his stocky neighbor bringing his mother’s body. Elsa was yet wrapped in her tattered blanket. Bernart’s servants proved as unwilling to risk fleas as Edmund had been, and claimed no suitable table could be found. At last, Garret laid his mother’s body beneath Bernart’s bier, then pulled back her blanket to expose her body to God’s light against the possibility any juror wished to examine her remains. The two masters sent their other journeymen to carry the call to the parish, alerting the men and all boys over the age of twelve to come.
    Unlike peasants in rural villages, who tended to make more solitary treks to the place of a hearing, coming as they did from toft or croft, barn or work shed, these city men arrived as households, some groups as many as thirty strong. Masters strode alongside ancient manservants, apprentices trotted beside those scullery lads who might be of age. Each household pronounced its identity by the color of their garments. There were homes where only blue tunics and red chausses were worn, some where it was green chausses beneath yellow tunics. Faucon eyed one household, garish in its parti-colored tunics of orange and brown, the chausses worn in the opposite arrangement of colors, one leg brown, the other orange.
    Households they were and men as well, but that didn’t stop them from gossiping like old women. The lurid manner of Bernart’s death was shared, man to man and group to group, with everyone along the lane positing his own ideas as to why the merchant might have been killed. As the crowd grew, so did the volume of these suppositions until some men resorted to shouting.
    Nor did what should have been a somber gathering prevent the boys from being boys. From one end of the lane a ball, no doubt a sack of dried beans or peas sewn shut, arced its way into the sky. It disappeared into the crowd