Free Silent Court by M. J. Trow

aloud. Mildmay didn’t answer and Gammer Harris didn’t either. He rummaged at the foot of the bed to find the dead woman’s clothes. Her shift was covered with dark blood. Her shawl was folded on top of her pinafore; both were stiff and dark with drying and clotted blood. Hawkins unpacked the neat parcel that Mother Moleseed had made of the thin, worn fabric. Inside, the blood was brighter red, still sticky and wet; Gammer Harris had lost almost all of her lifeblood to whatever weapon had cloven her head in two. He barely recognized her cap because what was once white was a ripped shred of crimson, the ties stiff with blood.
    So the woman was fully clothed when she died. Mother Moleseed must have stripped the corpse as she laid the woman out with all that keening and nonsense. Hawkins wanted nothing to do with that. That was the vicar’s job. He looked at the pillow and the headboard, all of it dark and bloody. Whoever had killed Gammer Harris had hit her as she stood by the bed, or perhaps as she sat on it.
    He could do no more for the woman in that room and he left the priest muttering over her and made for the fresh air. ‘Where’s Jem Harris?’ he asked the knot of neighbours. ‘Does he know of this?’
    ‘In the Lammas Field,’ someone told him. ‘He’s been sent for.’
    ‘And what about the Egyptians?’ Hawkins asked, ‘Has anybody seen them?’
    The tent had gone up in lightning time, even for the accomplished Egyptian camp-builders. No one had to give an order, everything just seemed to happen by itself. The teeming children – eight in all but sometimes seeming like eighty as they swarmed around the onlookers, dipping in the odd pocket here and there to keep their hands in – had disappeared to a quiet wagon. The tale of the child crushed to death by a falling tent pole was true enough. It hadn’t happened to a child in this troupe, or to any child known to anyone there. It had probably not even happened to a child in this cold and frosty land, but that it had happened to a child somewhere, somewhen there was no doubt at all and so they instinctively kept out of the way. As the tent rose, to the rhythmic cries of the men, the women started the cooking fire and the bread making. The next thing that would happen, they all knew, was that the locals from Reach and Burwell would come skulking round, not making eye contact, not even being civil. The person you hate the most is the one who knows where the bodies are buried and ten minutes in a smoky tent with Balthasar Gerard was enough for him to know the innermost turnings in your very soul.
    The camp was a tiny huddle of civilization in the vast unforgiving sweep of the lonely fens but within easy reach for superstitious country folk who needed their ten minutes with Balthasar. Since the caravan had passed through the town, people had been quietly falling into step behind and so by the time their camp was complete, with the single domed living tent in the middle, the smaller ones for cooking and for Balthasar’s secret work around it, the crowd was considerable, although thinly spread around the perimeter, no one wanting to catch the eye of anyone else. Hern got his tumblers together; townsfolk who were after a potion or a reading could justify their presence there if they were watching a show. The men called the children out of the wagon. They could all tumble almost as soon as they could walk and with their ribbon-covered clothes looked like tattered butterflies spinning through the air as the two strongest men threw the children from side to side of the area they used in lieu of a stage. Boys and girls, curled into tight balls, flew so fast the colours merged and the crowd soon grew, pollarders, hedgers and shepherds, lured away to the tune of the pipes and the thump of the drum. And if some of them melted off from the edges at a gentle touch on the arm from one of the women, it was a secret no one had to share.
    The group of Egyptians that had got