The Elixir of Death (42 page)

'Few people come this way, sir,' said one, who recognised the coroner from his previous visit to Bigbury. 'The fisherfolk who go down to the river are all known to us. The only excitement we've had is that poor lady pilgrim who came and then disappeared a few days back.'

Thomas piped up for the first time since leaving Lucille. 'That means they must have gone either down to Ringmore or back towards Kingston.'

'Or vanished into the God-forsaken woods at any point,' muttered Gwyn, pulling ferociously at the ends of his bedraggled moustache. He was almost as worried about the situation as his master, even though he and Matilda could barely stand the sight of each other.

They rode on to the alehouse opposite the small church and confronted the clutch of people who came out to meet them, warned by the unfamiliar clatter of hoofs.

'Crowner, you're back again!' called Madge, the alewife. 'You'll be wanting food and drink?' she added hopefully.

There was nothing to be gained by refusing a short halt, as they had no definite plan of campaign. Inside the dim, smoky taproom, they drank ale and cider and chewed on some cold mutton chops, followed by bread and hard cheese. Urgently, John described the violent events at St Anne's Chapel that morning and explained that his own wife, sister to the lord of Revelstoke, had been abducted. Then he enquired about any strange events since the two ship-masters had come looking for Hilda.

Madge shook her head. 'Nothing at all, sir. Even our village scaremongers have seen no ghosts in the forest and we have neither seen nor heard anything strange in the woods.'

'Mind you, no one fancies entering there these days,' added the village smith, who sat watching them from a stool in the corner. 'Even the poachers have taken to going in the opposite direction, though the pickings are poorer there.'

'Where did the lady from Dawlish go, when she left here and never returned?' asked Thomas, sipping his cider cautiously.

The tavern-keeper held up her hands in bewilderment. 'I wish I knew, sir! I told her not to stray far, given the odd happenings here, but she was a wilful woman. She must have gone into the forest, for no one saw her on the roads.'

De Wolfe glared at Gwyn, as he slapped his empty pot down on the table.

'We'll just have to go in there ourselves and hope that we come across something. God knows when those men from Revelstoke will turn up, if they ever do. We need Ralph Morin and Gabriel and a posse of soldiers from Rougemont!'

'It would take at least three days to get them down here, if not four,' grunted Gwyn. 'It looks as if it's up to us, Crowner!'

The blacksmith, a large man in a leather apron scarred with burns from hot iron, stood up and offered himself. 'I'll go with you, sir. I know a few of the paths out there. A wife lost is a terrible thing. If the reeve was here, he'd come, but he's in Aveton today.'

Gratefully accepting his offer, John gave Madge a couple of pennies for the food and strode to the door. 'The sooner we get started, the better. It will be dark before long.'

Outside, one of the wall-repairers also volunteered his services and went off to get a hay-fork, a wicked-looking implement with two sharp prongs. The smith trusted to his hammer, a heavy-headed weapon with a long handle. John looked at these and then at his weedy little clerk, to whom non-violence was a way of life. 'Thomas, this may be a dangerous mission,' he said softly. 'You had better stay here and wait for the men from Revelstoke, if they ever come.'

The priest shook his head stubbornly. 'I will come with you master. I owe my life to you and will willingly give my own in exchange. I may be useless at fighting, but maybe I can stand in the path of an arrow meant for you.'

John felt an unfamiliar lump come into his throat and he put an arm around Thomas's skinny shoulders and squeezed wordlessly.

'Let's go, then! Smith, where do we enter these damned woods?

Jan the Fleming was an unusually strong and powerful man, but the effort of fleeing from the old ruins eventually reduced him to a gasping wreck, and he was forced to stop and sink to the ground, past caring whether he was recaptured. However, all was quiet behind him and he crawled behind a moss-covered tree to allow the bellows of his lungs time to calm down. He had hardly noticed the impact of the cross-bow bolt in the tempestuous panic of flight, but now he became aware of a sticky flow down the inside of his tunic and a burning pain in his left shoulder. It was the dragging of the short arrow against his skin which caused the most discomfort and when his heart had stopped pounding and he could breathe without gasping, he felt with his other hand and discovered that the missile had lodged in the skin at the extreme top edge of his shoulder. An inch or two lower and he would have suffered a mortal injury, but as it was, only the loss of blood was a danger. The ever present risk of suppuration loomed, but for now all he could do was tear off a strip from the bottom of his tunic and wad it under his clothing against the wound, to help stanch the bleeding.

Jan again listened intently for any sounds of pursuit.

All he could hear was a bird twittering and the soft sighing of the wind in the tops of the tall trees all around him. He had no chance of even guessing the direction in which he had been running. A trail of bent weeds and ferns told him how he had arrived at this spot, but that was of use only over a few yards. He might have been running in circles, and the danger was that he would go back towards the old castle and priory. Cautiously he got to his feet and started walking away from his former trail, looking back every few yards to try to ensure that he was at least going in a straight line.

He stopped every few minutes to listen for any Saxons or Moors crashing through the woods after him. Thankfully there was continued silence for the next half hour, then he heard something that made him freeze and crouch behind a fallen log that was slowly rotting under a tracery of thick ivy.

Ahead of him to his right, Jan heard a low voice calling out and an answering whistle from the left. He could not distinguish the words, but they were neither Arabic nor English. Then another voice came from farther to the left, more high pitched and certainly speaking Norman French. He shrank down even further to lie on the ground, ignoring the pounding throb in his shoulder in his fear of discovery.

A moment later, he was almost trodden on by a small priest, dressed in a black tunic with a short cloak around his shoulders. He sat up suddenly and the little man gave a shriek of terror at this ugly apparition that had bobbed up from under the ground.

'Thomas! Thomas, where are you?' came a deep bellow from near by. A moment later, a red-headed giant appeared, wielding a great sword. The sight of this apparition was almost enough to frighten the Fleming to death. With a roar, the new arrival dragged the priest out of harm's way and pointed the sword at Jan's throat.

'Who the bloody hell are you?' boomed the giant, as yet another figure appeared, this time a tall man dressed in black, also with a broadsword uplifted.

'He's no Turk, that's for sure,' snapped John, lowering his sword when he saw that the man was no threat. 'What an ugly bastard, though!'

The Fleming was used to such insults and was too glad to see someone other than his previous captors to take offence. He gargled his usual noises and pointed to his mouth.

'The poor fellow must be dumb,' said Thomas, always the most sympathetic to his fellow men. 'And he's wounded, too!'

The clerk dropped to his knees and gently lifted the end of the cross-bow bolt, which was hanging down behind Jan's shoulder, sticking out of the blood-stained fabric of his jerkin.

'He's been shot!' grunted Gwyn, now suddenly solicitous. He moved to bend over the man, but Jan held up a hand and, without help, climbed to his feet, grimacing now that the pain killing panic was wearing off.

'Hold on there, fellow,' said de Wolfe. 'We need to see how bad that wound is.'

They gently pulled down his jerkin and drew aside his tunic to expose the injury. Just caught under the skin, lucky chap,' announced Gwyn. 'This will hurt for a moment!'

With a quick snick with the point of his dagger, the coroner's officer cut through a small bridge of skin that was holding the head of the bolt and pulled it out. Even without a tongue, Jan gave a howl of agony, but the worst was over and Thomas slapped the bloody pad from the Fleming's tunic back over the wound to stem the fresh bleeding.

'Have we anything to hold this in place?' he demanded. Gwyn groped in the scrip on his belt and pulled out a length of red silk cord, which had been used to tie old Joel to the tree. As he gave it to Thomas to use to bind the pad around the shoulder and under the armpit, Jan became excited. Pointing to the cord, he motioned behind him, indicating distance, then pointed to the arrow that Gwyn was holding.

'The poor bugger is trying to tell us something! Thomas, you have the best brains here. Can you get some sense out of him?'

The clerk got the Fleming to sit on the tree trunk and perched alongside him.

'Can you understand what we say in French?' An eager nod led to the next question.

'You cannot speak?'

Jan pointed to his mouth and opened it to reveal the loss of his tongue. Then he performed a mime of running away and someone loosing a cross-bow at him.

'Ask him who did it,' snapped John impatiently, forgetting that Jan could understand him perfectly without Thomas's intervention. The man then went into a more complicated pantomime which left John and his officer bemused, but the sharp-wined clerk picked up the meaning.

'He's pointing to his head and winding it around, then at your sword and making a curving action. That could be a turban and a scimitar, eh?'

He looked at Jan, who nodded energetically, then did the turban mime again and held up three fingers. 'Three Saracens, is that it?' Again a nod, then he held up two more fingers, but shook his head while making the turban sign and pointed to them.

Three Turks and two English?' The query was met by another wag of the head.

De Wolfe looked almost triumphant at this unexpected news. 'Where are these people? How far away?'

This was a tougher proposition for Jan's miming powers. He pointed vaguely behind him, then shrugged when he found he had no means of conveying time or distance. He saw a patch of bare earth near his feet, however, and with a stick, he used his good arm to scratch a crude sketch in the dirt, of a castle with a battlement on a mound. Then he mimed it falling down.

'Some old ruin, I would guess, Crowner,' ventured Thomas, and the Fleming nodded.

By now, the smith and the other villager with the pitchfork had closed in on them and were staring in wonder at the apparition sitting on the log.

'Where the hell did you find him, sir?' grunted the smith. 'His face is enough to curdle milk!'

'Never mind that, the poor man is hurt,' snapped de Wolfe. 'Get him back to the alehouse and ask Madge to dress his wound and give him some sustenance.'

As the second villager led the Fleming away, the coroner threw one last question after him.

'Wherever this place is, did you see any women there?' Jan nodded and held up two fingers, then mimed the slamming of a door and the dropping of a bar. As a bonus, he also pantomimed by pointing at John and Gwyn, then at his bushy moustache to establish the sex, followed by the two fingers and the locking-up gestures.

'Two women and another two men, all imprisoned!' divined Thomas, unnecessarily.

'That's good enough for us!' shouted John. 'Come on, let's find this damned place. I don't know who that fellow was, but he was a godsend!'

The light was starting to fail in the women's prison chamber, as the short autumn day came to an end. The narrow shaft that was their only indication of the outside world was darkening, and Hilda roamed restlessly about, reluctant to sit while she could still see the dim shapes of the crates that littered the room. Matilda was slumped on the mattress, her head in her hands. She had been praying for several hours, but now seemed to have abandoned even that solace.

Hilda had already been through the contents of the boxes, looking for anything that might serve as a weapon. All she could find were bottles of strange-smelling powders, a crock of quicksilver and some scraps of metal, together with strange utensils that looked as if they belonged in an apothecary's shop. There were no knives or even heavy rods that could be used as bludgeons. In despair, she even tried to wield a glass vessel, a round flask with a long narrow spout, presumably used for distillation. It was far too light to be of any use as a club, especially as she then dropped it and it smashed on the floor. In the remaining light, however, she saw that one jagged fragment of the spout was at least as long as the span of her fingers and had a needle-sharp point at one end.

Tearing a strip of linen from the bottom of her kirtle, she wrapped this around the blunt end to form a crude hilt, so that she could grip it without cutting her fingers. Then she folded the whole thing in another piece of cloth and hid it in a pocket inside her cloak. Hilda was not sure what use this might be, beyond the half-formed thought that she might use it to kill herself and Matilda if they were threatened with rape or torture.

She went over to the older woman and put a comforting arm around her shoulders. 'Maybe they will let us go tomorrow,' she said, with a conviction that she did not feel in the slightest.