The Sticklepath Strangler (2001) (47 page)

‘You know me too well, Wife. Yes. I have received a message from Simon.’

‘Oh?’

‘In it he says he agrees with you that the moors are too dangerous to treat without care. He says that superstition is a useful precaution.’

Jeanne smiled. ‘I am glad you have a nagging friend as well as a wife.’

Richalda gave a great cry from the solar and Jeanne hurried indoors to see to her daughter. When she was gone, Baldwin took out the sheet of paper once more.

According to Coroner Roger, the curse appears to have been laid at last
, he read.
Drogo and Alexander have escaped the court. They were both riding on the moors last month,
illegally, after a fox which had attacked some piglets, when a mist came down and they fell into a bog. Serlo was at his warren and heard their screams. He tried to get to them, but the mist was
too thick. He shouted, and they responded, but he could not reach them and had to listen while they drowned. He was very upset – but perhaps this means that Athelhard’s curse has now
been fulfilled. Certainly the people of the vill hope so
.

‘Superstition!’ Baldwin muttered, gazing at the dark, grim line on the horizon that showed where Dartmoor began. The only evil in Sticklepath came from one family. A father who was
perverted, with his lusts for young flesh, a wife who was simple, and a daughter who was insane.

He read on:
Gunilda has adopted Meg, and both appear content in each other’s company. Not that many of the vill were happy to learn that Meg had moved into the mill. Some still look
upon her with dread, but she and Gunilda seem to have found comfort and Serlo looks in on them regularly, chopping their wood and helping tend to their animals.

The letter ran on, but Baldwin put it away, musing on the violence and cruelty that lay at the heart of the murders: the brutality of Samson not only to Felicia’s victims, but to his
daughter as well.

Hearing another cry from the house, he murmured, ‘Keep happy, Richalda. I shall never do anything to cause you such grief. That I swear.’

And then Sir Baldwin Furnshill stood and stretched. The accursed bruises along his flank were healed now, and as he inhaled a deep breath of the shimmering summer air, he decided to take his
horse out.

The evil was gone. Life was for the living.