The Death Ship of Dartmouth: (Knights Templar 21) (30 page)

‘Good. You do that. In the meantime, I have work to be getting on with,’ the clerk said. He left Cynegils and trotted hurriedly towards the alley that would take him back down to Lower Street, where he worked.

Cynegils hunched his shoulders, for it seemed to him that the sun was chilly today, and set off towards the lower town. He had made it down past the main thoroughfare, when he suddenly thought that his daughter would be wondering what had happened to him. In order to prevent her and the other children from worrying, it might be best to tell them he was going on board ship again. Edith would be pleased to learn that he was employed again.

It was with a spring in his step that he moved on. On the way, he passed a tavern and looked longingly at it, thinking of the ales inside waiting to be bought. But he had no money and they would lend him none. No one would believe him if he said he was to be sailing again.

Once back at the house, he found the door open, and he
peered in, a little wary of his reception. He hoped that the wind was blowing from the right quarter in his daughter’s disposition. Women!

‘Edith? I’m home.’

There was no answer, and he walked through the house to the little yard at the rear; no sign of the children. They were probably out helping mend nets, he told himself, and he walked back to the front of the house, standing in the roadway while he considered what to do. Perhaps one of the neighbours would help? He knocked at the house next door and spoke to the mistress. From her he learned that all the men locally had been called to repel a force attacking a cog, and he stared out to sea, wondering if this was yet another attempt by Sir Andrew on his life.

He thanked his neighbour, left a message to explain that he had a job again, and wandered away.

It would put Edith in her place, to hear that he had won a sailor’s work again. She’d said some hurtful things yesterday – for instance, that no one could trust him – but he’d soon show her. There wasn’t much he could be taught about sailing. He had a wealth of experience, unlike some of those little arseholes who were half his age and who refused to listen to a man like him who had been sailing these waters for many years. They thought they knew it all, the fools!

Striding back across the dam again, he was almost at the far side when he caught sight of a young man, and nodded at him civilly. Continuing, he suddenly stopped, turned and stared after the man, and then he shivered with alarm.

‘No! He’s dead!’ he said. He set off again, and this time there was no desire to drop into the tavern. He walked
straight past and didn’t stop until he had reached the jetty and could sit and wait for a rowing boat to take him out to the
Saint Denis
. His thirst had completely left him.

Simon saw his friend gape and enjoyed the sight for a good few moments before bursting out in laughter.

‘What, may I ask, is so amusing?’ Baldwin demanded coldly.

‘Your face, old friend! There you were, fully anticipating a dreadful scene, when you learn that the dead man is nothing at all to do with Bishop Walter!’

The Coroner too could see the funny side, and he slapped his thigh with delight at the thought that lumbered into his mind. ‘Ha! A good thing you didn’t jump into action and have the man’s body sent straight back to the bishop, eh? What then? He would have been alarmed to learn that you were collecting stiffs for him in case one suited him, eh?’

‘Most droll,’ Baldwin said coolly as he slipped a coin into the messenger’s hand and gave him directions to a stable. ‘Wait in the Bailiff’s hall until we return,’ he instructed him. ‘Rest and prepare to return, but I’ll have a message to take back, I expect.’ Then he turned to face Simon.

‘It’s good news that the nephew’s alive,’ Simon said.

‘Yes, but it does not help us. The man on the ship was killed here on shore, I am fairly certain of that. But he died
before
the fellow in the street. The ship sailed the day before our unknown died, surely. If only we knew who he was.’

‘No one recognised him at the inquest,’ Coroner de Welles shrugged. ‘I had thought that it was because the fellow was the bishop’s man, but of course if he wasn’t …’

‘Precisely.’

‘Could there have been a second man watching this Frenchman?’ Simon asked. ‘Perhaps the Frenchman noticed him and killed him, just as we thought had happened with Stapledon’s nephew?’

‘Perhaps,’ Baldwin muttered, unconvinced.

Coroner Richard put in shrewdly, ‘There’s one man who is bound to have more news on this – that wily little sodomite, Sir Andrew de Limpsfield.’

Baldwin nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that would make sense. He seems to have an unhealthy interest in the town.’

‘And he could well have had something to do with the capture of the cog,’ Simon mused. His eyes turned to the haven and the wreckage, and then he frowned. ‘What’s going on there?’

Baldwin and the Coroner followed his finger and took in the sight of the boats clustering about the cog.

‘Isn’t that the
Saint Denis
ship which was about to sail?’ Baldwin asked.

Simon’s face was darkening, and now he shifted his belt about his waist and glowered as he set off towards the shoreline. ‘Some bastard’s been trying to capture a ship at anchor in my harbour! I’ll have his balls for that!’

Pierre de Caen watched surreptitiously as Hamund sidled away, trailing after Sir Andrew and his henchmen. The abjurer looked like any other bystander in the crowd, just a scruffy churl clad in salt-stained woollen tunic with holed and patched hosen that flapped rather loosely about his thin legs, and Pierre was confident that he would be all but
invisible in the throng. It would be interesting to know what Sir Andrew was doing here. How he knew that Pierre had come this way was a mystery to him. And it was a shock to learn that Sir Andrew had spread malicious rumours about him: to think that the man could accuse him of rape! It was an outrage!

There was no time for righteous indignation just now, though. Pierre joined the tail-end of the procession, head down, and made his way up the hill to the chapel at the top. He must pay his last respects to Paul Pyckard, the man who had saved his life.

‘Lads! Lads! Someone’s tried to catch the
Saint Denis
!’

Pierre heard the shouts, and was in time to see the last of the men scrambling up the ropes on board the great ship in the haven. He saw blades flash in the sun, and then the spray of blood from a man’s throat, and heard the angry growling from the men all about him.

‘It’s the men from Lyme again!’

‘Pirates!’

‘Murderers!

‘They’re taking Pyckard’s ship when he’s not even cold!’

The procession was diminished as men began to leave, hurrying down the hill, some men darting off down alleyways, returning a few moments later with a heavy-bladed sword, or an axe, or a long-bladed knife. Sailors were hastening along the shore towards the larger rowing boats, while others made for smaller ones, and soon there was a whole naval force making its way over the water towards the cog.

Up in front, Pierre saw Moses waver. The servant clearly
wanted to go with the others, but he had a duty to see his master buried decently. Then Moses made a decision. He snapped an order to the pall-bearers and pushed the boy with the bell onwards, before running at full pelt down the hill to the shore. Pierre desperately wanted to join him. It would be so good to draw steel again, especially in the defence of the property of his brother-in-law, but he dared not. He couldn’t risk exposure, not now that everyone believed he was a rapist.

Instead, he thought to take advantage of the departure of the others. It would give him time to light a candle and pray for Paul in peace.

Hamo clouted Ivo over the shoulder, and in a few moments, his horn was sounding, and with it, men began to gather. Hamo explained what he had seen, and the sailors immediately grasped the seriousness of the situation. Axes, knives, cudgels and hammers appeared, and there was a general movement down towards the water’s edge.

Every boat in the area was grabbed and thrust into the river, and men tumbled into them, oars being shoved out and lustily pulled. In a few minutes there were almost fifty men in the river, pulling strongly for the cog.

On the
Saint Denis
there was a cry, then a couple of snapped orders. Hamo could hear them distinctly over the rush and hiss of water at the boat’s keel. He had his axe ready, and as the boats approached the three which were already tethered to the cog, he prepared himself to leap. His boat thudded heavily into one of them, and he sprang out and into it. There was a stout line running up the side of the
ship, and he grasped it a few moments after another man, who shinned up it with natural agility, as though running across flat, level ground, Hamo holding it taut as the man went. Then he shoved his axe into his belt and climbed.

‘Hey, who are you!’

He heard shouting and then a scream, cut short, and then he was over the sheer and on the deck. Over to his left, he saw Dicken, who lay with his throat cut, rolling in the scuppers. Another man was sitting beside his body, his arm savagely wounded with a slash that began near his shoulder and finished a scant two inches above his elbow. He was trying to hold this immense flap of ruined flesh in place with his left hand, glaring balefully at the men before him, while beside him Cynegils stood with an expression of hatred twisting his features.

There were twenty or more of the intruders about the ship, and it looked as though they were searching for something or someone. None of them noticed Hamo or the first four others to arrive. Then a man stumbled and fell, dropping his sword with a clatter, and they were seen.

Their leader, a heavyset man in mail coat and wearing a steel cap, bellowed an order. Immediately eight of the men took up their swords and approached Hamo, one wearing a fixed, sneering grin, the others eyeing Hamo and the men with wary expressions. These changed to surprise, then alarm, as more and more men piled over the ship’s side to defend it.

Another order, and now the men rushed forward to drive Hamo and the townspeople over the side, swords waving wildly as though they could intimidate free-born Dartmouth
sailors. As the first reached Hamo, he swung his axe, the heavy blade shearing through the man’s cheap mail at his shoulder, and burying itself in his neck and collar bone, and Hamo grabbed his wrist, snatching the sword from him as the dying man sank to his knees. Hamo placed his foot on his chest and pushed him away, keeping the sword in his left, the axe in his right.

‘Remember the
Saint John
!’ he bellowed, and the cry was taken up by the others as they reached the deck. ‘
Saint John
!
Saint John
!’

There was another order, and the enemy began to withdraw into a huddle about the mast in the face of this terrible threat. As the Dartmouth men approached, weighing their weapons in their hands, Hamo stood determinedly in front of them, his axe bloody, tapping the head against the sword’s blade.

As though aware that they were to blame for the bloodshed and could expect no mercy, the attackers looked nervous. Pirates could only expect the rope. At least they were not contesting the recapture of the
Saint Denis
. Hamo was glad to see that all fight seemed to have left them.

By the time Ivo arrived, they were thoroughly chastened. The sergeant pointed at them. ‘You – put down your weapons. You’re all arrested for trying to take this ship.’

It was the sneering man who spoke now. ‘We were only obeying our orders. We are here on the command of the King.’ He was scowling, as though wondering whether to run for the ship’s side and leap over. His neck was so short his chin seemed to rest on his chest, and Hamo told himself
that if he fell headfirst onto one of the boats that lay bound to the cog, it could hardly make his neck shorter.

‘You tried to capture a vessel here in the haven of Dartmouth. That’s piracy,’ Ivo said nastily. ‘Drop your weapons, or we’ll take them from you and you’ll join your dead friends.’

‘We’re only here to arrest the felon. The Frenchman.’

‘What Frenchman?’

There was a pause.

‘He doesn’t seem to be here,’ the man admitted at last.

‘Doesn’t seem to be here?’ Ivo bawled. ‘And you’ve committed murder to learn that, eh? You’re all arrested. Put up your weapons.’

There was a short discussion among the men, then the first weapon rattled to the deck. Soon there was a low pile of knives and heavy-bladed swords at their feet. As Ivo ordered them all to be collected and the men to be bound at the wrist, Hamo gazed about him and pondered on the spokesman’s words. If they didn’t find him here, where
was
the Frenchman? he asked himself.

Simon was glad to find a boat in short order. ‘Take me to the ship,’ he commanded to the old fisherman who sat on it, a bone needle in hand as he mended a net. He was short, with a round face as brown as the boat’s timbers he sat on, and his beard was a thick, grizzled mass that spread from ear to ear and entirely obscured his mouth.

‘What?’

‘You heard me! Take me to that ship.’

The sailor looked him up and down, lingering on his smart new boots. ‘Go piss yourself. I take orders from no one.’

‘You’ll bloody take this one, man,’ Simon spat, and put his hand to his sword.

Instantly the old fisherman whipped out a short, ugly knife and flicked it up. It stayed in his hand, poised to throw. ‘You try it, you’ll be marked right where it hurts.’

Baldwin already had his hand near his hilt, and the old man shot him a look and said, ‘I can hit you too, just as easy.’

‘Perhaps. But I was reaching for this,’ Baldwin said, opening the draw-strings of his purse. He withdrew a penny. ‘For your trouble, Master Fisherman.’

‘Ah. That’s different!’ the old man said and spat. ‘Give it me. Jump in, then. Look lively!’

The three men stepped in, Baldwin with alacrity, Sir Richard with a stern look about him as though gauging the quality of both boat and shipmaster, and Simon with a wary expression. He had been sick too often in ships of all sizes to be enthusiastic about setting off in so small a craft.