without remembering anything? And yet she could vividly remember standing behind him, feeling the panic as he yelled out, his hands groping for hers as she twisted tighter and tighter. She could remember feeling his dead weight sagging from her arms as he swung forward. All of that she could picture with painful clarity, as if his body was lying right here beside her in Ma's chamber.
The image had been as clear as when she saw herself murdering her own child. But she hadn't done that, had she? She pressed her hands to her eyes. She wasn't sure of anything any more. One thing was certain, Raoul was dead. The man who had raped her was dead. If she could kill him and not remember how she got there, then maybe Joan had been right all along and she really had murdered her baby. Perhaps she had only imagined she'd given him to Gytha. She didn't know what was real and what was the dream any more.
Footsteps echoed again on the floor above, and she shrank into the corner of the bed, but the trapdoor didn't open. Then she heard voices as if they were next to her. She slid over the furs and tiptoed to the opposite wall.
One of the carvings in the corner was set lower than the others, placed just above Elena's head. It was like a mask. But it was turned around, facing into the wall, so the hollow back was open to the room. A dim, pale light was streaming into the chamber through the pupils of its eyes and open mouth. There was a wooden shutter to one side of the mask, and a set of steps in front of it, like the ones Ma used to get into her chair. Elena stood on the bottom of the steps and pushed her face inside the stone mask. She could see right through the eyes into the room beyond and realized she was looking into the guest hall where Talbot had taken her that first night.
Three men were swigging the last gulp from beakers of ale, and one by one handing them to Talbot, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands in appreciation.
'You'll keep your ear to the ground and let us know if you hear any gossip that might give us a lead.'
'Aye, you'll be the first to know, if I hear aught,' Talbot answered. 'What do you reckon this Raoul was doing at the Adam and Eve? Not the place for a gentleman.'
The leader shrugged. 'Maybe your girls were just a dish of dainties to him and it whetted his appetite for stronger meats. He fancied sinking his teeth into the juicy fat haunch of a street whore.'
One of the other men clapped his leader on the back. 'If you think these girls are dainty, you ain't had fat Alice here sit on your face. I warrant her haunches are meat enough for any man.'
All four men laughed.
'Besides,' the man continued, 'a noble like that would take a whore to his lodgings. He was no pimple-faced apprentice who had to have a girl against a wall for fear of his master.'
The leader nodded. 'There's something in that, but it's my guessing we'll not know till we find his killer. God's blood, I wish it had been anyone but a man in Lord Osborn's retinue. Any other man and we could have simply hanged the first knave we came across and called it justice. That would have been the end of the matter. But Osborn's already blaming us for not finding that runaway serf and felon. Any murderer we catch he'll want to put to the hot irons himself to be sure. Osborn will see me put out of my post for this, unless I bring him someone's head on a pike.'
Talbot eased the men towards the door. 'I'll keep an ear open, never you fear, though if I were you, I'd be asking around the moneylenders or the dog-pits. From what I hear, this Raoul liked a wager on the fighting dogs and the cocks too, but some men don't take kindly to a man who can't or won't settle what he owes.' He tapped the side of his nose.
The men nodded seriously to one another, as if Talbot had just given them the information they were looking for, and hurried away.
'Thank the star your mother birthed you under that Talbot's a good liar,' a voice said quietly behind Elena. She