A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 24
Tom and Sir Thomas crushed side by side on the narrow way so that the Master of Logic could continue with his explanation to the Lord of the Waste. ‘Let us return to the beginning. Eve was nearly certain that John was murdered, then, and likely murdered for the land they owned, because there seemed no other cause great enough to create such a terrible consequence; but in her heart also she feared the work that he was doing – in secret I should judge – on the strange ores that had been brought down from Hermitage to him. Eve is a woman who will not trust what she does not understand. John no doubt felt lowered by this grubbing with metallic, smelly dirt and would not discuss the matter with her. She brought enough of her fear to you, however, on the night after his death so that you held swift inquest and then despatched her with Hobbie to the Council, to the Lord of the North and, ultimately, to me.
‘In the meantime, however, she had sufficient leisure to turn to the method of John’s murder, leaving aside the reason for it. She reasoned thus: if he was not killed with terror by the Barguest, then she must at once consider poison. Knowing nothing of secret mines and deathly airs, she thought of herbal lore. Mayhap she consulted Lady Ellen, but she had no real need to do so, for she heals with the same mastery as Ellen and that bespeaks equal knowledge.
‘There are poisons – poisons close to hand – that might have killed anyone in the way John seemed to have been killed – certainly with much the same effect. Even Fenwick’s white arsenic left a corpse in Archie Elliot bewilderingly similar to that of both John and Father Little: the rictus, the straining muscles, the look of tortured agony that might be mistaken for terror. She had a wide variety of possibilities but only limited time for investigation, however, for no sooner were the inquest and the funeral done than you warned her to prepare for the journey south with Hobbies but the possibility was ever in her mind.
‘Then the fear arose that whoever had poisoned John would be as quick to poison the man looking into his death. The elder brother being murdered, therefore, the younger brother might well stand in mortal danger in his turn. The younger brother: to wit, myself. But poisons have antidotes. Indeed, it is a common proof that if a man is to taste the antidote before he takes the poison, then the poison may not touch him at all. So it was that Eve herself stabbed a dagger into my side at Ware.’
‘What are you saying?’ Sir Thomas came near to steering his hunter off the cliff edge in surprise. ‘It was Eve herself that wounded you?’
‘Aye. Then, as she tended to my hurt,’ shouted Tom to reassure him, suddenly aware of how the wind was strengthening at their backs, ‘so she put into the wound, and my medicines, all the antidotes to the poisons she feared might be used on me. The treatment gave me a fevered, dream-filled night as we sped northward in the coach; but it was all to good effect, for I have been poisoned and I have survived!’
At this moment they rode out on to an outward curve of the path where the whole thin road seemed to hang in very air. Here they came across the first of the great horrors of the night. It was a gallows, recently built into the jutting cliff under which they rode, which reached across their narrow track so that the body hanging from it must needs obstruct their way. A hooded man dangled from it, faceless, but with a body that twitched and writhed in faint but lively agony, aswinging in the wind. The hanging man had been hooded with a bag then bound on to the gallows in such a manner that he could hardly breathe, for there was a rope tight across his throat. Yet there was another rope that held his arms behind him and ran upward as well, taking just enough of his weight so that he should choke but never faint and not quite die until thirst or famine clung him; and, given the quantity of rain of late, it was likely to be a lingering wait before he gained his peace.
Tom and Sir Thomas came up against this unfortunate creature first, for they were in the lead. Had Sir Thomas been alone, he would likely have pushed past with his men. The Master of Logic was given pause and slowed them both, however. At the very least, thought Tom, his enemy’s enemy, here displayed, might make a lively friend, as Sagres had done. So he looked up at the jerking body and tried to figure what the face would look like behind the hood; but the form itself was swift to tell its own story.
‘HOBBIE!’ called Tom, urging his horse forward until Hobbie’s pendant feet could rest upon the withers and Tom could reach up in an unconscious echo of the men that had clawed the oak beneath the corpse of his murdered brother. Standing in his stirrups on a steady, patient horse, he reached up with the longest of his sharp-sided daggers and cut his old friend free. Sir Thomas had ridden onward. The rest of the command perforce remained behind.
Hobbie slid down on to Tom’s horse, swung wildly out over the sheer drop, then swung in again to bang his hooded head against the sheer wall beside him. ‘That you, Tom?’ he whispered.
‘Aye,’ affirmed Tom. ‘It is.’
‘Should never have warned ye to hold your breath. That devil Lord Robert heard me...’
‘But then I wouldn’t have been here to cut you down; and he would have found you out sometime.’
‘True enough,’ croaked Hobbie.
A little more dagger work released Hobbie’s hands and allowed the removal of the bag and all the ropes.
‘Who did this to you?’
‘Need ye ask?’
‘Not Lord Robert himself? No. Fenwick, more likely, as proof of loyalty after the flapping of his big, loose mouth...’
‘Ye’re in the right. And Tam Burn joined in for the pleasure while that whoreson de Vaux looked on and laughed. ‘Twas de Vaux suggested the running knots and the slow strangulation – bad cess to him.’
‘Is he strong enough to come with us?’ bellowed Sir Thomas over the gusty roaring of the wind, rendered impatient rather than sympathetic by this new proof of Black Robert’s devilish perfidy.
‘Needs must,’ sang back Tom. ‘There’s no one here to take him home.’
‘Besides,’ choked Hobbie painfully, ‘there’s the matter of revenge now. So I’ll come along with you until we meet the several men I’ve to settle with.’
For the next few minutes, as they shared Tom’s horse, Hobbie and he brought each other up to date with their thoughts and plans. Then Sir Thomas’s patience ran out and he demanded the explanations include him.
‘Tom’s right,’ said Hobbie. ‘Eve stabbed him then swore me to silence as she tended him with all her cunning. Her object was to make the treatment of a slight hurt at Ware into an armour of fitness against any other poisons that might be fed to him.’
‘On the way north she tested my belief in the Barguest too,’ continued Tom, ‘and found I believed in it as little as she did herself; but she would not confide all of her fears to me – or, perhaps, it was not so much a reluctance to tell me what she feared as a wariness to do so in front of Hobbie, whom she has good reason not to trust.’
‘Has she?’ demanded Hobbie and Sir Thomas in unison. ‘What good reason is that?’ completed Sir Thomas, while Hobbie choked on a cough.
Tom answered his uncle directly: ‘The fact that you have not told her that Hobbie is your spy in Lord Robert’s ranks. Or was, rather. She sees only the double game he was playing, not the single purpose behind it.’
‘A fair point,’ allowed Sir Thomas, and Hobbie nodded too – once, painfully.
‘But in any case, she had good reason not to share all her doubts and suspicions with me, for I was here expressly to find out the truth of the matter, and that truth, she feared, might reveal some ignoble dealing between John and Lord Robert to echo what she feared of Hobbie. For had not John secret contacts with Hermitage over the matter of the ores? Was he not on his way there for his gooding when he disappeared and died? Better by far to watch what I uncovered and to see then how well it fitted with what she believed.
‘But that is all irrelevant now, for Black Robert has taken her.’ He held up his hand at Sir Thomas’s expostulation. ‘I know, you believe what Lord Robert said this morning: that she has gone to Hermitage so that he will bring her the Barguest; that she has given her word and he has given his. But he took her by force, and I believe she has demanded the Barguest as a last, desperate ploy – not out of a desire for revenge for John’s death, but as a way to slow events. She does not believe the thing exists, therefore she does not believe anyone can bring it to her. Therefore she is safe until we can work out a way to rescue her; but Lord Robert holds one final ace, and if ever a man was born to play it, that man is himself.
‘Black Robert knows that the Barguest is real. Janet certainly knows this, because it took her horse, poor Selkie. News of that will have come to him recently, but I am certain Black Robert already had some knowledge of the thing. Perhaps he has even seen it in the wild woods of Liddesdale, as John and I saw it a little further south, when we were young. So if the monster is real and he knows where it lives, Lord Robert can now have Eve and the Black Lyne whenever he wants, all legal and in the full light of day, after all. For Eve has trapped herself: he has only to bring her the Barguest and she must bow to him as she has sworn; and he will take her, body and soul, with all she stands possessed of. Then he will kill her when he tires of her, and all his fortune will be made.
‘That was designed to be today’s business: to rid himself of all his problems at a stroke; to kill me, in the same way as he killed Father Little and brother John; to keep my body back for display tomorrow; to hang up Hobbie as a suspected spy and leave him as a warning to anyone approaching Hermitage; to kill the Barguest, which he is certain haunts the wild woods of Liddesdale; to win Eve and to lay legal hold of the Black Lyne.
‘Things have not worked out that way, however. For the first time since John discovered what was afoot in Liddesdale when he went agooding unannounced on St Thomas’s Day and met his end and began all this, Lord Robert’s plans have gone awry. He will have them back on their destined road by the morrow, I have no doubt; but tonight belongs to us, and we have the chance, now and only now, to upset these evil schemes of his and bring this all to a happy ending.’
The light was almost gone now and they had not brought torches with them that would only advertise their presence further to the Armstrongs and their master. Torches would never have survived the wind, in any case.
As he spoke, however, so something buzzed between himself and Sir Thomas to spatter and spark off the rock beside his head, and a shot echoed through the gusty shadows. The first shot was followed at once by a second, and the man behind Geordie Burn was hurled off his horse, his bonnet shattered. ‘Sir Thomas, we must go down!’ bellowed Tom, and the good old soldier swung his horse towards the edge of the slope at once. Even as the rest turned to follow suit, Hobbie leaped off Tom’s horse and ran to the suddenly vacated spare mount. Then, fifty-four of them, abreast, set their horses straight down the slope and went sliding into the depths of Liddesdale.
This was what Tom and Sir Thomas had planned and, except for the acquisition of an extra companion, they had covered every eventuality. Sir Thomas took the fifty riders and went straight into the attack. It was a feature of the place that it was deep, dark and thickly forested, full of ambuscadoes where Armstrongs could hide and snipe, particularly at this time of day. The main attack was designed to use the terrain and their own activities most effectively against them, however. Sir Thomas’s men went at once for the charcoal fires. Each of these stood ten feet high, a palisade of inward-leaning logs at whose heart was a slow fire, choked of air where the wood was rendered not to ash but to charcoal; but the fires, when toppled with line and long spear and scattered across the ground, exploded into great balls of flame like the fire invented by Archimedes for the Greeks. So intense was the burning of the charcoal when the air of the strong southerly gale breathed new life into it, that it set even the frozen trees of the forest around it alight. There were scores of charcoal fires ranged at the outskirts of the forest between this and Black Robert’s haunted lair. The southerly gale funnelled up the valley and blew the wildfire northwards before it, straight towards Hermitage itself. Thus Tom and his uncle’s bold plans at once robbed the Armstrongs of shadow and shelter and Lord Robert of his means to roast his arsenic – as well putting his woods and his stronghold at risk. The attack was unexpected, fearsome and effective beyond measure. In seeming minutes Liddesdale was ablaze, a river of fire running true to its element and surging uphill along the valley where the River Liddle ran ever down.
Twenty-nine: The Barguest
Down, indeed, went Tom and his companions, but down and away from Sir Thomas. Led by Sagres, they ran into an upper cave mouth leading into the older sections of the mine. Far to the north of the present workings and the pit of death, they followed the glimmer of the torch Sagres had brought from Bewcastle along old, deserted passages that led across the head of Liddesdale and through the slopes immediately below Hermitage itself. Tom had known these tunnels must be here, for had not Janet talked of the haunted sounds issuing from the fort’s foundations and echoing through the hillsides? Sagres had suspected them and indeed had explored the castle end of some that led out of the dungeons. As well as that, he had noted every tunnel entrance along the valley – those of the old mines as well as those of the new. He was a useful guide, therefore, though Tom was glad he had thought to instruct him to add torch and tinder box to his weaponry.
The four of them ran out into a dungeon under Hermitage hardly realizing they had done so. The chamber they so suddenly stood in was little more than a cavern chopped out of the hillside whose ice-bound walls were supplemented with roughly dressed stone sections higher up. There was a mess of boulders and scaffolding on the floor, little better tidied than the foot of the church tower at Blackpool Gate. Rough steps were carved in the far wall, visible only as glitters of icy light in the flicker of Sagres’s torch, and they led up to a little open-sided balcony, where a rotting door gaped.
‘This explains why Black Robert’s so desperate for gold,’ said Tom as his long sword hissed out into the steady grip of his good left hand. Then, with Sagres still holding the torch aloft, they were off. The door took them to a higher level of dungeons, slightly better walled but no warmer and in little better repair. They were, blessedly, deserted, for no one secured within them would ever have lasted long. Chains and fetters hung from the walls, rust-red and rotting in the torchlight. Only in the torture chamber was there evidence of anything recently used and new.
Through the silence of the deserted place the little band ran on. Tom was not alone in finding the mouldering, icy silence disturbing, he observed, though he alone had been expecting something of the kind. The other faces in the torchlight wore the same expression of half-fearful bemusement that he knew was expressed on his own as he tested his logic once again. He thought back to the band of guests that Lord Robert had brought to his uncle’s hunt. It had been that band that had caused this plan, for they had all been men – hardly a social group, though Lord Robert had meant it to be, as a cover for his darker plans at the very least. Had there been women worthy of note in the place, he would have brought them too. Therefore there were none: servants and captives; otherwise men – a front-line command on a war footing. Like Bewcastle on Christmas night – except that the Douglas was prepared for battle, so he had emptied his rotting shell of a castle of everyone except his warriors and the least number of servants needed to see to them. Most of the servants, indeed, were likely to be Armstrongs and able to double as foot-soldiers too.
Now Liddesdale was under attack – down in the valley, currently, with no obvious danger to Hermitage, as had been planned as well. Therefore it was hardly surprising that the garrison was up and out. So logic dictated that the place would be near-deserted – which was why he had been prepared to come with Sagres alone to find Eve and Janet, but was glad to have Hobbie, if not the sickly Geordie.
Sagres led them up to a closed door and then, at Tom’s order, he fell back again lest the light of his torch should show through the grille to which Tom pressed his eager face. He found himself looking across the castle’s little courtyard towards the keep. They were in the lower sections of the gatehouse, therefore, and there must be men here if nowhere else. The portcullis was either up or down – whichever one, it would needs be moved when Lord Robert rode back again. ‘Silently,’ he breathed, and they tiptoed away from the door across the tiny chamber towards a second, narrow, inner portal. Tom put his ear to this and heard beyond it the quiet conversation of two guards tensely on watch. He looked speakingly at Hobbie, the door handle and his swathed right hand. Hobbie nodded stiffly and replaced him with his shoulder to the wood. A beat of time and the reiver kicked the door wide. All four of them boiled into the little guard chamber. The work was swift, silent and bloody.
Their weapons thus supplemented and their expedition still secure, the four returned to the door that looked out into the castle yard. They had to compromise their secrecy now, for they could only go out or back. Out they went, therefore, at Tom’s back, across the broad way behind the closed portcullis and into the guardroom at the other side, which doubled as the winch room. The inner door that only opened into the safety of the castle yard was unlocked, of course, and the three guards sitting watching the fast-approaching fires were never prepared for danger so close behind. Two minutes later, Tom came back out, thoughtlessly wiping his blade on his bandage. ‘Black Robert may knock until hell freezes over,’ he said, ‘but he’s not coming in here again unless I let him.’
Even as the smoke-tainted wind whipped in through the bars of the portcullis and stole the words from his lips, so a scream came echoing out of the keep. The voice belonged to Janet, and Tom could think of only one thing other than the Barguest that could have wrung such a sound from her. At full tilt he ran towards the keep, only to find his steps faltering. There seemed no way into the place other than across that strange balcony three storeys above their heads, where Eve had stood to promise herself to the man that killed the Barguest; but once again Sagres proved his worth, for he led them across to an apparently unimportant little doorway that seemed to pierce the outer wall. This led to a short passage and a long flight of stairs. Up these they rushed, led by Janet’s screams that flowed like Ariadne’s thread through the compact labyrinth of the place. The keep was massive in construction but small enough in space. This was a border fort, not a great castle like Carlisle. It was not long before they burst into an upper chamber and found the girl tied tightly to a bed, screaming fouler and fouler invective at the man who had stripped her clothes to near rags and was preparing to ravish her. With his breeches round his ankles and his shirt tail up, there was only one part of the man’s rear clearly on view. So when Hobbie croaked, ‘I’d know that face anywhere,’ Fenwick the Factor rounded on him in understandable rage.
