Edgar had seen slaves testify in Combe, though not often, and he said: “That’s not the law.”
“I’ll tell you what the law is and is not,” said Degbert. “You can’t even read.”
He was right, and Edgar had to give in. He said: “In that case I call Mildred, my mother.”
Mildred put her hand on the pyx and said: “By the Lord, the oath is pure and not false that Edgar swore.”
Degbert said: “Any more?”
Edgar shook his head. He had asked Erman and Eadbald, but they had refused to swear against their father-in-law. He had not even bothered to ask Leaf or Ethel, who could not testify against their husband.
Degbert said: “What does Dreng say to the accusation?”
Dreng stepped forward and put his hand on the pyx.
Now, Edgar thought, will he risk his immortal soul?
Dreng said: “By the Lord, I am guiltless both of deed and instigation of the crime with which Edgar charges me.”
Edgar gasped. It was perjury, and his hand was on the holy object. But Dreng seemed oblivious to the damnation he was risking.
“Any oath helpers?”
Dreng called Leaf, Ethel, Cwenburg, Edith, and all the clergy of the minster. They formed an impressively high-status group, but they were all dependent in some way on either Dreng or Degbert. How would the villagers of the hundred weigh their oaths? Edgar could not guess.
Degbert asked him: “Anything else to say?”
Edgar realized that he did. “Three months ago the Vikings killed my father and the girl I loved,” he said. The crowd had not been expecting this, and they went quiet, wondering what was coming. “There was no justice, because the Vikings are savages. They worship false gods, and their gods laugh to see them murder men and rape women and steal from honest families.”
There was a hum of agreement. Some of the crowd had direct experience of the Vikings, and most of the others probably knew people who had suffered. They all hated the Vikings.
Edgar went on: “But we’re not like that, are we? We know the true God and we obey his laws. And he tells us: Thou shalt not kill. I ask the court to punish this murderer, in accordance with God’s will, and prove that we are not savages.”
Degbert said quickly: “That’s the first time I’ve been lectured on God’s will by an eighteen-year-old boatbuilder.”
It was a clever put-down, but the onlookers had been rendered solemn by the horror of the case, and they were in no mood to laugh at witticisms. Edgar felt he had won their support. People were looking at him with approval in their eyes.
But would they defy Degbert?
Degbert invited Dreng to speak. “I’m not guilty,” Dreng said. “The baby was stillborn. It was dead when I picked it up. That’s why I threw it in the river.”
Edgar was outraged by this blatant lie. “He wasn’t dead!”
“Yes, it was. I tried to say that at the time, but no one was listening: Leaf was screaming her head off and you jumped straight into the river.”
Dreng’s confident tone made Edgar even angrier. “He cried when you threw him—I heard it! And then the crying stopped when he fell naked into the cold water.”
A woman in the crowd murmured: “Oh, the poor mite!” It was Ebba, who did laundry for the minster, Edgar saw. Even those who depended on Degbert for their living were shocked. But would that be enough?
Dreng continued in the same sneering tone: “How could you hear him cry, with Leaf screaming?”
For a moment Edgar was floored by the question. How could he have heard? Then the answer came to him. “The same way you can hear two people talking. Their voices are different.”
“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 own account, 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.
When those who had testified for Dreng walked past Edgar, as he worked on building the new brewhouse, they looked shamefaced and avoided his eye. One day on Leper Island, as he was delivering a barrel of ale to the nuns, Mother Agatha went out of her way to speak to him and tell him he had done the right thing. “Justice will be done in the next life,” she had said. Edgar had felt grateful for her support, but he wanted justice in this life, too.
In the alehouse Dreng was more bad-tempered than ever. He slapped Leaf for giving him a cup of ale with dregs in it, punched Ethel in the stomach when his porridge was cold, and knocked Blod to the ground with a blow to the head for no reason at all. Each time he acted quickly, giving Edgar no chance to intervene; and then, after the blow was struck, he directed a challenging look at Edgar, defying him to do something about it. Unable to prevent what had already been done, Edgar would just look away.