The Death Ship of Dartmouth: (Knights Templar 21) (21 page)

The inn was full, and as he tried to squint over the shoulders of the men in front, he could see little but a multitude of backs. Even when he managed to get a glance inside the tavern, it was so dark compared with the bright sunshine outside that he could make out nothing.

Remembering the night they had rescued the foreigner, Alred made a quick decision. Leaving the gathering crowd, he made his way round to the back lane behind the inn. At the break in the wall, he quickly clambered into the garden beyond, a noisome place that reeked of piss. A rat scuttled away as he strode past a compost heap, and he aimed a desultory kick at it, disgruntled with the world.

The back door was open, and he entered the corridor, walking past the sleeping chamber and out into the inn itself.

‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded of a man leaning against the wall.

‘This man says he’s been sent by the King,’ he was informed. ‘There’s a Frenchman here abouts, he says, who raped a noble lord’s woman. He wants to hear from anyone
who knows where this rapist is. There’s a reward in it for someone.’

Alred’s face wore the fixed smile of a man who has paid top price for a horse only to hear it bray. ‘You say they think he’s French?’ he asked, recalling that heavy accent.

‘Someone saw him in here, apparently. They say he would have been caught if some idiots hadn’t knocked down the man who was trying to catch him.’

Alred nodded and turned back to the door. His eyes unblinking as he went, he kept the smile fitted to his lips as he left the inn, strolled across the garden, and climbed out over the wall. Only when he was in the back lane again did he close his eyes tightly, clench his fists, and offer up curses to all those who sought to confuse the poor, honest pavers of England.

‘Lads, lads, I’ve got an idea,’ he said as he reached the hole in the roadway again. ‘I think we have to find that man we saved the other day. Um.’

The street to which they had been directed would have been a foul alley in Exeter, full of excrement and garbage, waiting until the autumn rains would wash all away down into the Shitebrook. In some areas there were scavengers who would come along with heavy brooms to clear the worst of the mess, but even in the most sanitary of cities, the heavy accumulation outside stables and barns in poorer areas would lead to drains being blocked.

Here in Dartmouth, though, people appeared to have more pride in their street. The kennel in the middle of the road was clean, with only a very few deposits that did not
merit investigation, and Baldwin was impressed. Even the dogs appeared to be healthier than he would have expected. Perhaps it was the ready availability of food. Fish were abundant in the seas all about here, and their harvesting was a source of great benefit to the local population.

They had been directed here to the alley in Hardness by Simon’s clerk, who had to consult Simon’s servant Rob. The fellow seemed to have some interest in the mariners, as though he might one day choose to throw off his servile duties and offer himself to one of the shipmasters. Many youngsters dreamed of leaving England and finding adventure abroad, and Baldwin could understand that very easily. It was what he himself had done when little more than a boy, after all, when he joined the defence of Acre in 1291.

‘This it?’ Sir Richard boomed.

‘Stephen said it was where there was a green door,’ Simon agreed. He rapped loudly on it.

There was a moment of silence, and then the latch lifted and the door opened slowly to show a young girl of perhaps eleven, thin from malnutrition, her cheekbones prominent in her pale face. Her hair was caught up neatly under a coif, but her clothing was ragged and threadbare, her feet unshod. She clutched the door as a drowning man might cling to a timber, peering around it at the three men.

Sir Richard smiled in what he fondly considered to be a kindly manner, and bent down to her, saying, ‘Where’s your father, girl?’

His voice, although muted in comparison to his usual bellow, was enough to bring panic to her eyes. She shrank
back, and for a moment it appeared that the door was about to be slammed in their faces.

As Sir Richard bared his teeth again, Baldwin quickly drew the Coroner away and squatted before the child. ‘Is Master Cynegils here? We would like to speak with him.’

‘Who wants him?’

This was from an older girl, perhaps of fifteen, who appeared now from the darkness, a child of two or so on her hip. She had similar looks to the first girl, and Baldwin was persuaded that the two must be sisters, with similar slanted brown eyes that were sunken and over-bright. It was the same look Baldwin had seen so often before, in the faces of those who were perpetually hungry. All too often children and women held that look, as though to be young and female was itself a cause of starvation. As it was. He knew full well that there were peasant women on his lands who would intentionally eat less than they needed when money or food was scarce, so that their husbands could go to their work with full bellies. When a family depended on a man’s labour, others must go hungry so that he could work.

From behind her there came a cracking sound and a loud wailing started, while a fresh young voice shouted angrily. The girl at the door showed some tension, bawling at them all to, ‘Shut up!’ before turning back to Baldwin with a questioning look.

‘I am the Keeper of the King’s Peace, this is Sir Richard de Welles, the King’s Coroner, and this is Simon Puttock, Keeper of this Port under the Abbey of Tavistock. We are learning all we can about the man who was killed.’

‘What’s my father got to do with him?’

‘I think we should discuss that with
him
, maid,’ Simon said.

She looked at him measuringly, then at Baldwin again. ‘I’ll take you to him.’

Telling her sister to keep an eye on the other children, and not to open the door in case they ran into the lane, the older girl passed the smallest child to her sister and pulled the door to behind her, eyeing Baldwin and the others suspiciously all the while.

She led them along the alley and the river, until the road curved sharply westwards again, up the hill to Tunstal. Here there was a grassy lane that led to a little beach. Here they found him.

‘Thank you, maid,’ Simon said grimly.

Cynegils was lying in a broken boat, one leg cocked over the thwarts, the other over the side of the craft. Near it lay a leather wineskin, and from the heavy snoring that made the timbers of the boat shake, it had only recently been emptied.

‘Father is a good man,’ the girl said defensively. ‘He was a good sailor, too, with his own boat – until it was wrecked in a storm. He was on shore, but the winds caught it and pulled it free of the anchor. Now he does what he can, but how is a man to earn enough for all his children when his trade’s gone?’

‘He could find a new master and work for him.’ Simon was unsympathetic. From the look of the man he had a
strong conviction that the anchor was loose because the drunk hadn’t taken time to tie it off securely.

‘What do you think he’s been doing?’ she snapped. ‘How many round here will pay a man to fish for them when they can fish themselves?’

Sir Richard was unconcerned by the troubles of others. He stood beside the boat staring down at the slack-mouthed figure snoring in the foul water at the bottom of the rotten craft, then kicked the side heavily. The boat rocked under the buffet, a timber cracking, and the man inside jerked awake. He tried to spring up with his alarm, but the leg dangling outside the boat prevented him. It flapped and waved, and the man rose to the height of his knee, his face red with wine and exertion, eyes popping as he took in the sight of the three men, before giving a loud gurgle and belch, and falling back with an audible crunch as his head struck the timbers. He wailed.

‘Get up, man!’ Sir Richard called, and reaching down to grasp Cynegil’s shirt, he hauled him up and over the boat’s side, then let him drop. ‘This boat’s rotten. Someone should burn the damned thing.’

‘It’s all we have left!’ the girl retorted. ‘Some day, perhaps, we’ll be able to mend it and start fishing again.’

‘Child, that boat will never sail again,’ Simon said as gently as he could.

‘What do you know!’ she flared.

Sir Richard listened to none of this. He was shaking his head at the sight of the man on the ground before him. ‘You are Cynegils? I should ask you why you didn’t appear before me at the inquest, man, but looking at you I can only feel a
sense of relief. Christ’s ballocks, you cretin, will you stop that moaning?’

‘Don’t hit him!’

Simon turned to the girl again. ‘What is your name?’

‘Edith,’ she replied after a moment’s hesitation.

‘That’s a good name,’ he said. ‘I named my own daughter Edith. Listen, now. Your father may be able to help us to learn more about a man who was murdered. We aren’t here to hurt him in any way, but we have to talk to him, so if you can persuade him to sit up and stop that infernal whining, the sooner we can leave you both. Is that clear enough?’

She stared at him. ‘Father, please, just listen to them and help them,’ she said.

Cynegils, who appeared to have persuaded himself that the three were angels or demons (his precise conviction was hard to establish), had tried to burrow himself under the boat with his bare hands, whimpering like a whipped cur all the while.

Sir Richard had been aiming his boot at Cynegils’s posterior, but on hearing Edith’s words, he pulled his foot away again innocently.

‘Father?’

‘Leave me alone! What are you doing here, Edie? Get back away home. What’ll the childers do with you here?’

‘Millie can look after them,’ Edith said, walking to her father and sitting beside him, taking his hand in hers. ‘I think you need me more than they do just now.’

He stopped his attempts at tunnelling and sat back, blinking warily. ‘Who’re all these?’ he slurred.

‘I am the Coroner, man!’ Sir Richard boomed. ‘And we
want to learn all about the man you trailed inside the inn. Who told you to go there, why, and how much were you paid to find him?’

Cynegils’s face fell. ‘All I did was watch a fellow, like the man told me. He said he’d pay me three shillings if I’d go inside and keep an eye on him. That was all. The man stood up and went out to the back, and I went to make sure he was there …’

‘What did you do first?’ Baldwin asked. ‘Did you go straight out?’

‘Well, I had an ale, if that’s what you mean. And then I went out front to talk to the man who told me to go there, to tell him. He said to make sure where the fellow was, so I went out and listened at the door, and while I was there, someone clobbered me. I woke up in the yard behind the inn with a sick headache and a lump the size of a duck’s egg. Look, it’s still here. And it’s giving me grief.’

‘Shut up!’ Sir Richard said unsympathetically. ‘Who was this patron? Did he tell you why he was following the man?’

‘He said he was from the Bishop of Exeter and that the man he followed was a traitor to the King. That’s what he said. And he promised to pay me three shillings if I found a stranger arriving here. Told me to follow him and let him know. He was staying in the Dolphin, I could find him there. Three shillings, Edie. It would’ve been enough to keep you lot in food for a month or more.’

‘He didn’t pay you?’ Simon asked.

‘I was going to be paid when I was done. But I was knocked out cold. Don’t know what happened to him, but I never got a penny.’

‘Describe the man you followed,’ Baldwin said.

‘Tall, well made, with rich clothes, all crimson and blue, really expensive-looking. He had a French sort of face – dark and swarthy, you know? Eyes close together, too. I wouldn’t trust a man like him.’

‘What of the man who told you to trail him?’

‘He was younger, and a pleasant-sounding gentleman. Perhaps twenty-two or -three, with dark hair and a bit of a nervous manner. I think he was unused to this sort of work.’

‘Did he say what he intended to do?’ Baldwin asked.

‘No. I thought he’d be off to call the Hue and Cry, but he didn’t while I was there. He was just watching to see what the man did.’

‘I wonder why?’ Baldwin said.

‘What?’ Sir Richard demanded.

‘I should have expected him to call the Watch and have the man arrested if he thought that this was the French traitor whom he was seeking. Why leave him in a tavern and wait?’

‘Because he wanted to make sure it was the right man?’ Simon hazarded.

‘Or he wished to see who the fellow would meet with?’ Sir Richard said.

‘That is perhaps more likely,’ Baldwin agreed, wondering whether the bishop could have held back some detail which could be useful now. He gazed out at the river, his brow lined with thought. ‘But why should he care who the man was going to meet here, if all he intended was to leave the country and get to France?’ he added in a low voice to himself.

Yet he already knew the answer. If this Frenchman
was
meeting someone here, then that someone could well be a traitor to the King … and any spy watching the Frenchman would soon learn the identity of that man.

Baldwin felt a sinking sensation in his belly as he realised that he was being hurled into a quagmire of political intrigue against his will.

The sun began to sink behind the hills, throwing Clifton and Hardness into that early twilight that lasted so long each day. Pierre had been left up here in the hayloft for the whole day without any more food or drink, and the tedium was making him fretful. When he heard footsteps approach, and the gate squeaking open as Moses pulled it wide, he slipped quickly down the ladder.

‘My friend, you are most welcome,’ he said.

‘I have some more bread and meat, and a little wine. I hope it will be enough for you,’ Moses said.

‘It is better than I could have hoped.’

‘There is a ship which will be finishing victualling tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow night, or the day after, I can get you to her. The ship’s one of my master’s, so you will be given a safe passage.’

‘That is marvellous! I am most grateful.’

‘There are men looking for you all over the town, though, you know?’ Moses continued. ‘The man you killed in the road was found, and now people are talking about you and the fact you killed him. They don’t know your name yet, but they soon will. If you are found you will be arrested and hanged, and so will I, probably.’