A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 19
The darkness was so total that only the sure feet of the ponies knew the way down from the castle. Had it not been for this, Tom would have had to walk at his pony’s head, using the wildly guttering flambard to actually see the path. As far as Tom was concerned, they were riding with their tiny star of light at the black heart of the universe. The howling, sobbing of the wind could have come from amongst the icy, untuned spheres, straight from the frozen heart of hell. There was nothing at all to take the eye except the flambard in his hand, and that near blinded him with brightness every time he looked at it. Yet such was the fathomless ocean of dark upon whose bosom they were tossed, his eyes seemed sometimes to play tricks on him, bringing tiny glitters of brightness to the very corners of his eyes, there and gone like fireflies in southern climes, as beguiling as the wills o’ the wisp that tempted benighted travellers to their doom in the bottomless bogs.
Concentration was difficult, clear thought out of the question – and conversation a rank impossibility. It seemed to Tom that they had little enough to say for the nonce in any case. Tom himself could not conceive what work John would have done for Lord Robert up at Hermitage, for Lord Robert must have a smith of his own. What could John do that the smith of Hermitage could not?
Tom wasted a few moments on speculation – and the speculation was not ill-founded after all, for he had been brought up in a smithy and he knew well enough the range of work that a blacksmith might be asked to undertake; but what for the Laird of Hermitage that he could not – dared not – ask his own smith to do? Another question for the morrow, perhaps, but in the meantime, Tom was confident that his brother’s smithy would tell its own tale, had he the light and the eyes to see.
The door was locked and double-locked, a fact Tom had not noticed while passing the place with Father Little at his side so seeming-long ago in the final moments before Lord Robert, the Black Douglas, had entered the picture. He noticed now, however, as he held the flambard so that Eve could put her keys into each of the locks. ‘That’s new,’ he said. ‘‘Twas never so before I left.’
‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ she snapped and pushed the door wide.
He stepped in first with the flambard and was cast back into far memory in an instant. He had last seen this room at sixteen years, near half a life ago; but it seemed to him he knew every detail of eye, ear and nostril as though he had been here only yesterday. So overwhelming was the feeling that he forgot all his caveats to Eve and Hobbie about seeing childhood things with new eyes now that he was a man.
The place had been designed and built as a smithy and the focal point was the fire. In this, the domestic section, the door at which they lingered led into a living area floored with hard earth and furnished with one rude table and a scattering of chairs. Beyond, against the rear wall, stood the open grate under the bell-shaped chimney. The back of the grate, he knew, rose only a little up beyond the skirt of the brickwork bell of the breast. Beyond it, on the other side of the wall, out in the smithy itself, the great fire, with its bellows and open grate, would whoosh like the flames of hell itself up into the same great chimney, day and night, year on year. He had never seen it dark, he realized – never in all his life. Above, and reached by a ladder in the corner, the sleeping room had space for the smith and his wife and their family; and, as was common here – and not just with smithies – the whole was roofed with slates that would not burn rather than thatch that would.
Around the walls stood chests and dressers exactly as he remembered; an ancient wooden sideboard with a great metal ewer and a pail for water up from the river hard by. Out at the back, beyond the smithy and up on the hillside were the sink and the usual offices.
As he stood and gawped like a hempseed looking for the first time at St Paul’s or London Bridge, Eve brought a taper and used the flame of the flambard to ignite a couple of lamps. When that was done, she turned to him.
‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What is it that ye need to see? Be quick or we’ll be taken for ghosts. Or lovers.’
‘The smithy,’ he answered at once, and walked past the dead fire to the door that led on through. Eve let him pass through; for, again, the door was locked.
The sight, the very smell, of the cavernous smithy carried him back through time like a sparrow lost in the blast of a gale. Yet he could not waste precious moments on distant years. Roughly he dragged himself back to the immediate past – and the prints that it might leave upon the present: to St Thomas’s Eve, little more than a week since, in fact, and what John might have been doing here before he went agooding to collect his Christmas dues.
The smithy was as Tom remembered it, except that it was cold. The great fire gaped full of charcoal, wood and black sea-coal brought laboriously up from the coast. The bellows lay beside it, one pair on either hand, like dead birds awaiting stuffing. The anvil stood before it and the hammers, tongs and chisels hung serried on the wall to the right, for John, like his father before him, had always been a neat worker.
Along the wall on the left-hand side stood the work benches, cupboarded beneath, where the fine work might be done when the work of blacksmith and farrier began to overlap and John was called upon to do more than simply shoe the horses. There, indeed, above them hung the tack, the reins, harness and blinkers in various states of repair; and, beyond again, another area where John’s expertise with metals overlapped with others. For here lay bits and pieces of weaponry: jacks only half-covered with metal plates; armour bent and battered; bonnets broken and bruised – to the terrible damage, Tom had no doubt, of the heads that once had worn them. Here stood the great grindstone, and swords in various sizes, styles and states of repair; daggers, knives, axes – common axes for felling trees and Jedburgh axes for felling men.
At the end of all these workbench cupboards stood the big double doors, the equal of any in barn, byre or stable, where the horses were led in for shoeing, and various stock for marking or mending in various ways. These doors were locked, bolted and barred. The bolts in particular, fashioned no doubt by John himself, were new.
There, between the trailing tack, the battered armour, the half-sharpened weapons and the padlocked doors, was a little area of unexpected refinement. Tom’s eyes narrowed and his brow creased, for this area, too, was new. Here the massive hammers, tongs and chisels were replaced by balances and crucibles. There were solid metal moulds, a range of fine equipment, all neatly packed away. In place of the anvil, a mortar and pestle, designed to grind down... what?
‘What was John at work on here?’ Tom asked at once.
Eve shrugged. ‘The new passion for shooting – and with crossbow as well as guns. There’s a fletcher in Brackenhill, but he’s old and works with longbows only. Not that his arrowheads are up to much these days either. He’ll not fashion good steel quarrels. So my John does. Did. Then, you brought an arquebus and a matched pair of pistols yourself, besides whatever that monstrosity is in with Lord Henry’s letters...’
Tom frowned at her, still not quite following.
‘Carlisle is a good long way away, and that’s the nearest gunsmith, down in Botchergate. John would mend, for he could not make. He was in a lively way of supplying quarrels for the crossbows and shot for those that will not make their own...’
‘Hum,’ said Tom. He knew a gunsmith well: Ugo Stell, his closest friend; and there was something on this bench that did not quite fit with what Tom remembered from Ugo’s bench in Blackfriars. ‘Hmm,’ he said, as though satisfied. Perhaps the difference lay, as Eve suggested, in the fact that John was not a gunsmith, merely a mender of guns that others made; or that he fashioned quarrels as well as shot. Even so...
‘Had he any particular customers?’ Tom asked, crossing to the bench and lowering the flambard to bring the brightness closer.
‘None,’ answered Eve, again dismissively.
Tom touched the icy instruments as though they might tell his sensitive fingers what his mind could not yet frame or fathom; but it was his eyes not his fingers that gave the game away, and his memory, not of Ugo’s workshop at all, but of Master Panne the Goldsmith’s that he had visited on London Bridge six months before. Yes: that was it. These were not just the instruments of the gunsmith and the blacksmith – but of the metalsmith as well.
Above them, on the wall, stood a new cupboard Tom did not recognize. It opened under his absent-minded grasp and, sure enough, there stood several guns: an arquebus, clearly in need of a new matchlock; a new Dutch dunderbus, bell-mouthed and dangerous-looking, the screwheads holding its side-plates firm all gleaming and recently tightened; and a pistol, almost the match of his own beautiful pair, exquisitely chased in silver and gold. The gold chasing had clearly seen better days. It was dull, and the foil was beginning to peel off. One side was in far better repair: John had clearly been part-way through replacing that as well. Thoughtlessly, Tom brought the flambard lower. Eve hissed with fright.
‘What?’ he asked, without turning.
‘He has black powder over there. He grinds it himself.’
Tom did not raise the flame. Instead he pushed his finger into the bottom of the mortar and stirred the powder there; and his frown deepened. For he knew black powder well. He had helped Ugo Stell prepare it. He knew its form and formulation at every stage of its composition from rocks of ore and blocks of charcoal to the finest, most explosive grains; and no black powder he had ever made or seen had tiny flecks of gleaming metal within it – metal like the gleaming grains that lay in the mortar here. Without thought or calculation, Tom unloosed the top of his purse and pulled out the two rocks it contained. Lowering the light still further, oblivious to Eve’s strangled gasp, he put them down beside it and poured the glittering contents out. He saw at once that the gilded pebble fate had washed out of the Black Lyne into his boot was far too bright to bear comparison; but the other, on the other hand – the rock he had found in Janet’s cave up beside the oak – that rock was identical in colouring. Indeed, he thought, still far removed, almost in a world of his own, if he was to grind up this very rock, he might well get dust of identical colour, indistinguishable from this...
‘Where did you get that?’ asked Eve again, hitting his shoulder and making the flambard flicker.
Tom jumped awake again and the howling, stormy night crashed in on him like the waters of the flooding river. He realized Eve had been almost screaming at him and she was doing so again: ‘Where did you get that rock?’
‘This?’ he pointed to the bright pebble.
‘No! Not that! The other...’ But before he could answer, a massive crash came against the door beside them. Whatever had hit the wood struck with sufficient force to pull John’s new bolts free of their sockets – pull sections free of their planks.
Tom passed the flambard to Eve at once and reached up into the cabinet full of his brother’s latest work. A second great blow pulled hinges loose and ruined the seeming strength of the new bolts. So that at the third blow the door sagged, from floor to roof, and fell back, half-opened.
Tom pushed Eve back and stood before her as the brunt wind threatened to tear the flames of the flambard out and scatter the fire into the little house. Then the wind hesitated. The flame sprang up. Out of the darkness appeared a part of the darkness; a tall man on a tall horse, both as black as the night. A black-gauntleted hand pulled a black cloak back to reveal a pallid face framed with red hair at whose heart burned feverish eyes.
Eve gasped again – a very different sound from the one she had made when she was considering mere explosions. ‘Ye know me, woman,’ said the man, and Tom felt her nodding silently.
The wind came, stirring the black cloak so that Tom knew their visitor too, and his expression gave the game away. For though the horseman needed a gauntlet on his good right hand, he needed none for the bandaged stump of his left.
‘And you know me, sirrah. And I know you, Master Musgrave,’ hissed One-Hand Dand Kerr.
Twenty-three: Liddesdale
Tom swung the dunderbus up until the wide bell of its deadly mouth pointed at One-Hand Dand. ‘I know you, Dand Kerr,’ he said easily, ‘and I stand sure you have half of Stob and probably of Liddesdale at your back; but I warn you: if you make a move or say a word beyond my liking, your head at the very least of it will join your hand in hell.’
Dand eased himself in his saddle, the stirrups and girths creaking. ‘And after me,’ he answered, ‘it’ll be yourself sent hot to hell, Master Musgrave, and then the lady Eve, the Lord of the Waste and the rest; but I’ve a choice to offer ye before we fall to fighting here.’ The shallow eyes wandered apparently thoughtlessly away, past Tom himself and on to Eve.
‘And that is?’ pursued Tom, well aware of how little time he had in hand.
‘Come to Hermitage,’ said another voice, a new voice, cold and strange from the darkness – strange and yet oddly familiar.
There was a second of silence.
‘Hell or Hermitage,’ said Tom. ‘That’s not much of a—’
The blow took him smack across the back of the head at ear-tip level. It felt as though he had been hit with a Jedburgh axe, so piercing was the pain; but the feeling lasted less than the flicker of lightning that seemed to outline Dand. Then all was darkness, into which he pitched as though falling.
‘Don’t kill him,’ came an urgent, echoing voice that soared away up into the air as he fell. ‘It is he who keeps the Barguest alive.’
His forehead hit the hard earth floor and bounced. It seemed that the crown of his head must have broken off like the top of a roasted egg. The darkness was joined by a whirling, rushing roaring that sucked him down to its depths. All sensation vanished.
Except, from an almost infinite distance, a sudden and terrible pain in his hand. It was there and gone in the merest atomy of time, but it speared his unconsciousness for just long enough to release a terrible, fearful revelation. Dand and the Kerrs had taken Eve; and Geordie Burn was confederated with them, carrying her away to Black Robert’s lair. For the second voice had been Geordie’s – there was never any doubt of that.
The pain in his hand woke him first, though the pain in his head was likely to have done so soon. ‘Agh!’ he shouted. Then he whispered, ‘Eve!’ Of course, there was no reply. His whirling, stunned and sickened senses informed him he was face down on the floor. He stirred, automatically, tensing to push himself up – and regretted it at once, such was the agony in his right hand. It felt as though he had plunged it in a crucible of boiling metal. He remained where he was for a while, bathed in icy sweat and gasping fit to burst. Then he opened his eyes. It was full day. Dull, wet light was streaming in through the wreck of the smithy door across the hard-earth floor. The dry-mud surface was broken slightly by the sharply indented crescents of hoofprints; and so, saw Tom as he blinked owlishly, was the black leather stretched across the back of his throbbing right hand.
Ready for the stab of agony this time, teeth gritted and nostrils flared, he pushed himself up again. He made it on to all fours, then tore himself erect, lifting the agony of his broken hand off the ground as though the black Spanish glove had contained a great weight. He clutched it to his breast and cradled it in the crook of his left arm, forcing his mind to clear with almost superhuman swiftness. Only the circumstances gave him the strength; and the most potent element of the situation was the fact that they had taken Eve to Hermitage. Years as a soldier, student duellist, Master of Defence and courtier in some of the darker and more dangerous theatres of Europe had given him all too clear an idea of what Black Robert might be doing to her; and, the daylight told him, all too much time had been awasting since Dand and Geordie had carried her away.
He staggered to his feet, therefore, still moving as though his crushed hand were the same weight as the anvil that stood at the cold fire just behind him. He glared around the wreckage of the smithy, registering how the dunderbus and most of the guns were gone – how the mortar and pestle, with its powder – black or not – were gone; how any piece of weaponry, saddlery or equipment of even the faintest use was gone; except for his own guns and swords, which still hung miraculously safe about him. Mockingly left on the assumption that he could no longer use them, of course. Other than these it was all, like Eve, long gone. It was time to be gone himself.
Back through the wind-swinging doors that Eve had unlocked last night he stumbled, only to find that the light-fingered Kerrs could not resist hobbie horses any more than gold, guns, weapons and helpless women; but he knew from a wide range of sources, as well as from years of childhood experience, that Bewcastle fort was only half an hour’s walk up the hill from here.
It was a hard walk, one of the most difficult of his entire life, but he shambled on regardless of the weighty agony in his hand and the stabbing pains in his head until he had achieved his object and the great gate of Bewcastle fort seemed to swim in the air before him.
Tom staggered under the portcullis into the open square of the fort, his teeth still so tightly gritted that he could not even call for help. So it was fortunate that the Lady Ellen saw him weaving across the yard amongst the stable grooms who were sweeping aside the straw left over from the departure of the Lord of the Waste’s party as they answered the Laird of Hermitage’s invitation to a hunt that day.
‘Dear goodness,’ she said, rushing up to him. ‘What’s amiss? The whole of the fort is abuzz with speculation about whither you spirited Eve away to last night. Young Janet is almost out of her mind with rage and frustration. And now you return alone and like this.’
‘‘Tis a lengthy story,’ he warned. Then he asked, ‘How long ago did Sir Thomas and the others depart?’
‘Not long. Let me see to your hand while you tell me what’s transpired.’
