The Chapel of Bones: (Knights Templar 18) (18 page)

‘I think that there are many issues for Simon in a good port like Dartmouth,’ Baldwin murmured. ‘Both to guard against men who would leave the country, and to prevent others from entering.’

‘Hmm, I see. Well, at least
you
are here,’ the Dean said as he grabbed his black tunic and hoisted it up over his lap before sitting. ‘Please, take a seat.’

A servant entered and brought wine and bread with some cheeses. Only when he was gone did the Dean look at Baldwin seriously again.

‘Well, Sir Knight, this is a pretty mess which I have had arrive before me. I am not sure what to do about it.’

The Dean was a lean, ascetic-looking man, once he allowed that habitual expression of amiable confusion and his bumbling manner to drop. This was a man in control of vast estates, as well as one of the largest building projects in the country and many hundreds of men. The Bishop was theoretically in charge, but Bishop Walter was a politician, and he spent most of his time with the King. No, it was the Dean who dealt with all day-to-day matters.

‘Who was the murdered man?’ asked Baldwin, cutting some cheese. ‘Was he to do with the Cathedral?’

‘No. He was a saddler.’

‘And he was found in the Charnel Chapel? How was he killed?’

‘Stabbed. Anyone can find a knife during a dispute.’

Baldwin nodded. ‘And you think that might be what happened?’

‘It’s the only explanation I can think of.’

‘When was he found?’

‘Last thing at night. The porters had locked their gates, and an Annuellar happened to notice that the door to the chapel was open. He tried it, found the body, and called for help.’

‘Did anyone see the saddler enter the Close? You have many gates here.’

‘Janekyn up at the Fissand Gate reckons he might have seen the man enter, but he must see hundreds every day. He couldn’t swear to Henry having passed him yesterday.’

Baldwin ruminatively chewed at a piece of dry bread. ‘There appears little for me to go on. If a tradesman is murdered, any number of men could have killed him – a fellow who felt that he had been unreasonable in a negotiation, a man who wanted to remove a competitor, perhaps a simple cutpurse whose theft
went wrong … the possibilities are endless. I don’t honestly know that I can be of much aid.’

‘I should – ah – be most grateful if you could look into the matter nonetheless,’ Dean Alfred said. ‘This body was found on Cathedral land. I don’t want a Coroner to come blundering about my Close, accusing all and sundry of murder, without my trying to discover the truth first.’

‘I should be pleased to do all I can to help the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral,’ Baldwin said with an inclination of his head.

‘Thank you. It would be an unpleasant thing, to have a heavy-booted Coroner galumphing about the place,’ the Dean mused, picking at a chip on his cup. ‘They are – um – rarely conducive to prayer, in my experience.’

William made his way back from the Talbot Inn to the Priory, slipping on a small turd at the entrance to an alley as he cut through towards Water Beer.

‘Damn all brats,’ he muttered, scraping it off, and had to stand still a moment while the shaking overtook him.

He hadn’t always been like this. When he had first gone into battles, he had been scared. Of course he had! No one without a brain could first enter the fray without appreciating his danger. It was one thing to stand face to face with some bastard whose sole desire was to shove an eight-pound lump of sharp metal into your face when you were alone in a road or field, and quite another when the two of you were yelling and screaming at each other with thousands of others on either side. It was only worse when arrows and crossbow bolts rained down on you from the sky, and the roar of massed destriers’ hooves could be felt through the thin leather of your boots and you wondered whether the fuckers were behind you or in front, and you didn’t
care, you couldn’t take your eyes off the wanker in front, because as soon as you did, his sword would open you up like a salmon being gutted.

War wasn’t fun. Will could talk a good story, but at the end of it all, a winner was the man who ideally lost marginally fewer men who were still capable of chasing after the enemy and slashing and cutting them to pieces as they tried to flee the field. That side was the winner. And to them went the spoils – which were usually a couple of boxes of coin, which would go nowhere towards satisfying warriors who’d lost their mates in the last mêlée.

Still, after a while, when Will got to be in charge of a small force, it became safer, and anyway, he got used to it all. And it was fun. And Christ’s Balls, it was a good life. All that time in taverns and alehouses and pillaged halls, drinking until everyone was fit to burst. Yes, those were times worth living for. There was nothing like it. The rush as you realised that your side was victor again, the thrill of finding the wine and the women and taking them both until you were sated; that was living, boys. That was life.

He’d had many good times, and even when there was a disaster, he’d invariably managed to be safe from real danger. The only time he’d been close to harm was when the Queen had been left to her own devices, and the Scots had invaded again, sneaking round behind the King’s men and threatening to cut off their defeat.

Will had been with the King during that campaign in the summer after Boroughbridge. For some reason, Edward II, who was intelligent and brave enough in his own right, was an abject failure whenever he tried to attack the Scots. Will couldn’t understand it at all. Still, there it was. When Edward was flushed with his success at Boroughbridge, and all thought
he couldn’t fail so long as he had his men at his side, just then, the Scots surprised him at Blackhow Moor, and the King and his favourite fled. Isabella, Edward’s wife, was deserted at the Abbey at Tynemouth, and she had to make her own way past the Bruce’s men to escape. Luckily, Will had been there with her, and he had been able to join her on her boat which threaded its way past the blockading Flemish craft there to support the Scots.

The Queen lost two of her ladies-in-waiting during that flight. It was a sore grief to her, and Will saw her weeping over them long into the night, but that was nothing compared to what might have happened had they been captured. When Edward I, the King’s father, had invaded Scotland, he captured the Bruce’s sister and his mistress. Both were held in wooden cages for three years, on the walls of Roxburgh and Berwick Castles. Isabella knew, as well as any of the men and women with her, the sort of fate she could expect, were she to be captured by the Bruce. At the very least she would be humiliated and shamed.

William knew that she had seen how little her husband cared for or about her during that flight. That he made no effort to save her was shameful, and it proved to her beyond doubt that her man considered her as nothing more important to him than a chest of gold with which to buy influence. She was, after all, the daughter of a French King.

It was soon after that war that Will had developed this strange malady. He’d been bled for it often enough, but still it would come back. It was a weakness that sometimes affected him when he had taken a shock. The first episode occurred after a brisk fight just before he boarded the ship with the Queen, when a mace caught him on the helm, and he was felled like an ox. Another man from his force found him and
took him off to the boat, throwing him aboard, still stunned. It saved his life.

But since then, and he assumed it was caused by that blow, he found that if he had a sudden shock, his heart started to race, his breath grew short, and his head felt light – dizzy. It was damned strange and inconvenient, but he must learn to cope with it.

That had been the first motivation for him to consider leaving the King’s service. A warrior with such a handicap must surely die. There was no possibility of his surviving.

Not if slipping on a child’s turd could make him feel so weakly.

He bared his teeth and forced himself to carry on along the alley. Only a short while ago he had been a warrior who could instil fear into the heart of any opponent, but now he was just a sad old man, no good for anything.

The alley stopped and he walked out into the street, along to North Gate Street, and thence to Carfoix. As twilight took over the city, it grew astonishingly dark between the tall houses, and he slipped again on half-seen obstacles. Soon, though, he was approaching the main entrance to the Priory. He should hurry, he knew, because the gate there would soon be closed and barred, and if the corrodian was not there, that was no concern of the gate-keeper.

Hurrying his steps, Will found himself limping a little on his bad leg. He could see the open gateway, and was about to call out, when there was a tinny clatter to his side. As soon as his mind registered the noise, he had just enough energy to hurl himself sideways as the next arrow flew at his throat.

He crashed to the ground, tasting the bile of fear once more, crawling to the relative safety of a rotten barrel and pulling his
cloak about him. In a moment the street disappeared, and he was back on the miserable bogs of Scotland.

In his ears he heard again the shrieks and agonised cries. Arrows wailed and hissed through the air, to strike flesh with a damp slap, or to pock at steel armour. Mail rattled and chinked, men fell, hiccuping or screaming, and William waited for the next bolt to strike him, pushing himself into the edge of the lane as though he could re-form his body to fit the cobbles and hide. Appalled, terrified, he expected to die, and he
wasn’t ready
!

There were no more arrows. Only the rasp of his breath, the smell of terror in his sweat and the sound of footsteps running away on the cobbles; and then, as the noise faded, so too did his petrification, and he found his soul swamped with vengeful rage.

He would find this would-be assassin, no matter who it was, and he would see him sent to hell with as much anguish as one man could inflict upon another.

Simon awoke early enough, but his mind was fuzzy after the wine and ale of the night before, and he lay back in bed, his eyes resolutely shut, demanding that sleep should once more overtake him.

Yesterday had been another day much like all the rest. He had woken, got up and dressed, walked to the hall to meet that pale reflection of a human, Andrew, and continued with his work.

God’s Bones, but it was tedious. They added figures, checked the tallies of tolls taken compared with the ships that had come to dock, and more or less busied themselves with little problems all the long day. It was detailed, painstaking work, and Andrew was as meticulous as he could be.

Halfway through the morning, Andrew looked up with a smile to hear the hail falling outside. ‘It sounds as if God is throwing His pebbles again, does it not? A terrible time to be out on the moors in this weather. Are you not glad to be indoors with a good fire roaring?’

Simon could not speak. He had listened to the hail with the lifting spirits of a man who remembered that there was a real life out there, beyond the walls of this dreary chamber. He had crossed the moors more than a hundred times, often feeling those icy balls striking his face with the fruitless desperation of a toddler beating at an older sibling. Yes, sleet and hail and
snow could grind a man down and put him in his grave, were he unlucky enough to succumb, but Simon thought of hail as only a mild threat. He knew all the places to which he might run in the event of the weather closing in, and all the safe paths which would lead him to a warm fire and spiced wine or ale.

He couldn’t even look at the happy clerk who sat scratching with his damned reed all day. Instead he had muttered an excuse and left the room. There was an alehouse three doors away, and Simon entered to find some refreshment. He had a couple of good, meaty pies, with three quarts of strong ale to wash them down, but even that didn’t improve his mood. The town was fine; in reality it was moderately more comfortable and pleasant than his last home, with access to food, drink and luxury items which were never seen in Lydford, and yet the work was dull in the extreme, his companion was a pedantic, boring old woman, and …

No. It wasn’t Andrew’s fault. Simon knew that before he’d started his second quart. Rather, it was Simon himself and Simon’s family that were worrying him.

Meg was a good, loyal wife, and she’d never have held Simon back, but she was most unenthusiastic about moving all the way down to the southern coast. She had taken a while to get to know anyone in the small, insular community of Lydford, because the folk there had viewed her as a foreigner, and worse, the wife of the stannary bailiff. Nobody would trust a woman who possessed the ear of the man who could have any of them thrown in gaol. It had taken all her skills of diplomacy to wheedle her way into the homes and some hearts at Lydford, and the idea of having to do so again here in Dartmouth was daunting.

His son was no trouble. Peterkin, or Perkin, depending upon Simon’s mood, loved the idea of living by the sea. Any boy
would want it! What, turn up the chance of meeting men who’d been abroad, who’d seen strange monsters and endured all that the sea could throw at them? They were romantic, exciting men, these sailors. That was what Peterkin thought. Given the chance, he would have been leaping about on boats, chatting to sailors, learning all the crafts to do with the port and generally getting under everyone’s feet in the process. Sadly, though, his sister Edith hated the thought of coming here. She was a young woman now, and her fiancé, Peter, a young apprentice, lived not far from Lydford. She had no wish to be farther away from him than necessary. That was why she’d wailed and moaned and complained about the prospect of being sent into exile so far from her home. Peter couldn’t go with them – he was apprenticed to a successful merchant, Master Harold – so that was that.