The Death Ship of Dartmouth

Chapter Fourteen

Hamund was feeling remarkably easy until he saw the two men stare at him. Seeing them walk towards him, he shivered and said beseechingly to Gil, ‘Shall we leave now?’

‘You!’ said a stern voice. ‘I am the Representative of the Keeper of this Port. I don’t recognise you. Who are you, and why are you here?’

‘Sir, I am Hamund Chugge. A miserable, but penitent sinner. I have committed a great crime, but I have abjured the realm, and all I do is seek a ship to take me away.’

‘What was your crime?’ Baldwin pressed.

‘I killed a man.’

‘Who, and why?’

Hamund sighed, and told the story: how his master was killed in the war, and Flok arrived with his little cavalcade to demand the manor for himself. ‘I was very angry. I struck Flok down with my knife and killed him, and then struck Guy de Bouville down too. De Bouville was his guard and man-at-arms. Because of these offences I’m being sent away. I arrived here today, and this kind sailor has offered me a place with his crew.’

‘You found him here, Gil?’ Simon asked.

‘Yes. And he’s already walked into the sea in proof of his ambition to leave.’

‘See to it that he does,’ Simon grunted. He had not seen the man about the town before, it was true, and he looked an unlikely murderer of a fellow so much taller than him.

There was a sudden stillness in the room. The door had opened, and now a tall, slim, fair man walked in, stooping under the lintel, and remaining just inside the doorway, eyeing the men in the room for a few minutes. He pulled off his fine gloves and slapped them on his forearm before crossing the floor to the innkeeper.

‘A jug of your best wine, landlord.’

‘Sir.’

The man turned from the bar and addressed the men in the room. ‘I have money for those who would aid the King.’

As he spoke, he rested his left hand on his purse and hefted it a couple of times. The leather bag rattled with the weight of coins, and Simon could almost hear every head in the room swivel to that magical sound.

‘There is gold and silver here for those who would help me find a traitor, a foul Frenchman who is guilty of raping an English lady. I will pay well for any information.’

Moses swept the floor to clear the old rushes. There were few things in life that would always make him feel more comfortable in himself, but one was the smell of fresh reeds on the floor, and he reasoned that what made him feel better might work for his master too; so he swept enthusiastically, while the dust rose in clouds and danced in the light streaming in through the great barred window.

He pushed the mess out through the door and into the street, where he would pay a scavenger later to clear it up, and returned with a couple of bundles of new reeds. He cut the ties with his knife and began to strew them about the place.

‘Please, Moses, come and sit,’ Pyckard called faintly.

Moses hurried to his master’s couch.

He looked worse than ever, Moses thought. There were lines of anguish on his brow, but although his eyes were bright and feverish, when he looked at Moses he was clearly rational. The pain was surely all but unbearable, yet his mind still functioned as efficiently as it ever had.

‘Moses, you have been like a son to me. Of all that I have enjoyed in this world, it is you I shall find most grief in leaving.’

‘Perhaps …’

‘You know I’m almost dead, Moses. I could see it in your eyes, even if I didn’t feel it already myself. Ach! It burns me from within! I shall die happy to know I will meet my Amandine again. It will be a delight to find her in heaven.’

Moses nodded tearfully.

‘I would have you protect this Frenchman,’ Pyckard went on. ‘He is dear to me. He is so like her, in so many ways. The same face, the same accent … Serve him as you may.’

‘I will, master.’

‘That is good,’ Pyckard gasped, and his head fell back onto the pillow with a grunt of pain. ‘Oh, God. Take me to Your bosom soon!’

Baldwin and Simon left the tavern as soon as they had finished their drinks, and made their way up the street to Simon’s house, only to find that Sir Richard de Welles was already awake and sitting in Simon’s favourite chair in the hall, drinking from a large cup of wine.

‘Where have you two been?’ he rumbled. ‘You look like conspirators.’

Baldwin explained what he was doing here in Dartmouth, ending his story with his suspicion about the identity of the corpse in the road.

‘So you understand,’ he finished, ‘that this Frenchman must escape so that we don’t give the French king a pretext for further action. Last time a French sergeant died, it cost us Gascony. If a French knight from the household of the sister of the French king was taken and punished for rape, it would have dire consequences.’

‘You think so, hey? Right. I’ll have a messenger sent to Exeter to have a full description of the man and see whether there are any distinguishing features. Let’s hope it’s not the Stapledon lad, though. It’s always a bad business to have a famous stiff. No, I’d be happier if he was an unknown cleric or something. So, sir, you have been concealing things from a Coroner who’s trying to do his best to uncover a murderer, is that it?’ He waved aside Baldwin’s protestations with an easy gesture. ‘A joke, Sir Baldwin. If you kept something from me, I’m sure you had good reason. Suggesting that there was a foreign rapist in town who was killing people would not be the best way to keep the peace, I daresay. The question is, what do we do about it now?’

‘For my part,’ Baldwin said, ‘I would like to investigate both dead bodies. First I think we need to speak to this strange fellow Cynegils and see what he has to say. Then I’d like to go and meet John Hawley and ask him about the body found on the ship, and question the master of the ship too.’

‘The one that matters surely is the fellow in the roadway? The sailor’s death was at sea, so it’s hardly our affair,’ Sir Richard pointed out. A Coroner’s duties only extended to deaths on land or within sight of land.

‘I hope so, and yet my heart tells me otherwise. In your experience, Coroner, how many murders are actually concealed efficiently?’

‘Next to none! You know that yourself. Whether there’s an ancient feud between them, or one or other has given offence for some reason, or a man dislikes the look of another’s face. The fools tend to pull out a sword and whop anyone who takes their fancy. I never find that murder has been covered up.’

Baldwin reflected that this could simply mean that the Coroner had failed to notice efficiently concealed murders in the past. However, he replied politely, ‘In the main, I have found that too. A murder that seems planned and suspicious is a rarity. And yet here you appear to have two such murders. One planned and most efficiently put into force at night in the roadway; the second planned and executed, if you will pardon the word, on board a ship.’

‘You realise what you are suggesting,’ Simon said. ‘The man on the ship — if he was killed in port before the loading of the cargo, he would have been seen by the stevedores.’

Sir Richard shrugged. ‘So? He was killed at sea, then.’

‘If so, the killer knew that the body would be discovered at sea or when the ship docked. If he was on board the ship, he would have been at risk of discovery.’

‘It was a risk, I suppose. But he could have run as soon as the ship arrived.’

‘No. The ship’s master would have all the crew remain on board until the cargo had been unloaded, and when the body was found, I daresay any master would want to see who was responsible. But if the murderer knew that there was going to be an attack on the ship, he wouldn’t have had to worry.’

‘You mean that there was a pirate spy on the ship?’ Baldwin demanded.

‘More likely that a man killed this sailor and dumped his body in the ship before it sailed,’ the Coroner grunted. ‘If he was killed on the ship, someone would have heard something.’

‘Perhaps. Yet if the rest of the crew thought his death justified …’ Simon began.

The Coroner shook his head with certainty. ‘They’d have thrown him overboard. Sailors who think one of their number is bad luck, or is putting them in danger some other way, generally give him short shrift. The fastest way to be rid of him would be over the side, not knifed and thrown in the hold.’

‘True. I had not considered the ways of sailors,’ Baldwin mused. ‘I wonder if that could help us?’

‘I doubt it. Sounds like a marvellous excuse for running about the town like headless chickens and missing the point entirely. No, Bailiff, I think that there is one murder that matters here, and that is the death of the nephew of the Bishop of Exeter. The other fellow was a mere sailor. He can be mourned by his wife, but he needn’t concern us. Now, are you two going to come and see this disreputable and so-called “spy” Cynegils?’

Baldwin glanced at Simon and nodded. However, his mind was not on the ‘spy’, but on the fair-haired man in the tavern.

When Walter Stapledon had been so determined to keep all news of the rape secret, Baldwin was curious to know how it was that, within a few days, a man could be here in Dartmouth bruiting news of it abroad.

The best thing, he determined, was to find the man and make sure that he escaped as quickly as possible, no matter how repellent the concept.

Bill and Alred had been hard at work in their hole. The gravel was laid and tamped down as best they could, and now, as the two stood up on the road, Law was down in the hole spreading the damp and heavy sand about the place.

‘Looks like something’s going on over there,’ Alred said, watching the comings and goings from the inn.

‘There’re more folks there than I’ve seen this last week,’ Bill agreed. ‘Should we go and see what’s going on?’

Law looked up and peered between their legs. ‘I’ll go. You two’ll just get thirsty as soon as you get inside there.’

‘Meaning you wouldn’t?’ Alred scoffed. ‘You finish the work in there, Law. I’ll go and see what it’s about.’

Ignoring the comments hurled at his back by his disrespectful apprentice, the paver set off for the tavern, determined to have at least one pint of ale in peace.

Law would have to learn that he was still an apprentice. He wasn’t a full, equal partner in business, just as Bill wasn’t. The pair of them were as much use as a chalk chisel. Hopeless. If only they had kept their traps shut, they would have avoided those two men questioning them. He had nothing against the Bailiff, he’d seen enough of Simon Puttock to know he was a decent fellow, but this Keeper was a stranger, and Alred didn’t know what to make of him. The paver had a healthy contempt for most men involved with the law, whether they were lawyers, bailiffs, Keepers or Coroners. All of them were in it for their own benefit, and that would rarely, if ever, accord with the common man’s interests.

The inn was full, and as he tried to squint over the shoulders of the men in front, he could see little but a multitude of backs. Even when he managed to get a glance inside the tavern, it was so dark compared with the bright sunshine outside that he could make out nothing.

Remembering the night they had rescued the foreigner, Alred made a quick decision. Leaving the gathering crowd, he made his way round to the back lane behind the inn. At the break in the wall, he quickly clambered into the garden beyond, a noisome place that reeked of piss. A rat scuttled away as he strode past a compost heap, and he aimed a desultory kick at it, disgruntled with the world.

The back door was open, and he entered the corridor, walking past the sleeping chamber and out into the inn itself.

‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded of a man leaning against the wall.

‘This man says he’s been sent by the King,’ he was informed. ‘There’s a Frenchman here abouts, he says, who raped a noble lord’s woman. He wants to hear from anyone who knows where this rapist is. There’s a reward in it for someone.’

Alred’s face wore the fixed smile of a man who has paid top price for a horse only to hear it bray. ‘You say they think he’s French?’ he asked, recalling that heavy accent.

‘Someone saw him in here, apparently. They say he would have been caught if some idiots hadn’t knocked down the man who was trying to catch him.’

Alred nodded and turned back to the door. His eyes unblinking as he went, he kept the smile fitted to his lips as he left the inn, strolled across the garden, and climbed out over the wall. Only when he was in the back lane again did he close his eyes tightly, clench his fists, and offer up curses to all those who sought to confuse the poor, honest pavers of England.

‘Lads, lads, I’ve got an idea,’ he said as he reached the hole in the roadway again. ‘I think we have to find that man we saved the other day. Um.’

The street to which they had been directed would have been a foul alley in Exeter, full of excrement and garbage, waiting until the autumn rains would wash all away down into the Shitebrook. In some areas there were scavengers who would come along with heavy brooms to clear the worst of the mess, but even in the most sanitary of cities, the heavy accumulation outside stables and barns in poorer areas would lead to drains being blocked.

Here in Dartmouth, though, people appeared to have more pride in their street. The kennel in the middle of the road was clean, with only a very few deposits that did not merit investigation, and Baldwin was impressed. Even the dogs appeared to be healthier than he would have expected. Perhaps it was the ready availability of food. Fish were abundant in the seas all about here, and their harvesting was a source of great benefit to the local population.

They had been directed here to the alley in Hardness by Simon’s clerk, who had to consult Simon’s servant Rob. The fellow seemed to have some interest in the mariners, as though he might one day choose to throw off his servile duties and offer himself to one of the shipmasters. Many youngsters dreamed of leaving England and finding adventure abroad, and Baldwin could understand that very easily. It was what he himself had done when little more than a boy, after all, when he joined the defence of Acre in 1291.

‘This it?’ Sir Richard boomed.

‘Stephen said it was where there was a green door,’ Simon agreed. He rapped loudly on it.

There was a moment of silence, and then the latch lifted and the door opened slowly to show a young girl of perhaps eleven, thin from malnutrition, her cheekbones prominent in her pale face. Her hair was caught up neatly under a coif, but her clothing was ragged and threadbare, her feet unshod. She clutched the door as a drowning man might cling to a timber, peering around it at the three men.

Sir Richard smiled in what he fondly considered to be a kindly manner, and bent down to her, saying, ‘Where’s your father, girl?’

His voice, although muted in comparison to his usual bellow, was enough to bring panic to her eyes. She shrank back, and for a moment it appeared that the door was about to be slammed in their faces.

As Sir Richard bared his teeth again, Baldwin quickly drew the Coroner away and squatted before the child. ‘Is Master Cynegils here? We would like to speak with him.’

‘Who wants him?’

This was from an older girl, perhaps of fifteen, who appeared now from the darkness, a child of two or so on her hip. She had similar looks to the first girl, and Baldwin was persuaded that the two must be sisters, with similar slanted brown eyes that were sunken and over-bright. It was the same look Baldwin had seen so often before, in the faces of those who were perpetually hungry. All too often children and women held that look, as though to be young and female was itself a cause of starvation. As it was. He knew full well that there were peasant women on his lands who would intentionally eat less than they needed when money or food was scarce, so that their husbands could go to their work with full bellies. When a family depended on a man’s labour, others must go hungry so that he could work.

From behind her there came a cracking sound and a loud wailing started, while a fresh young voice shouted angrily. The girl at the door showed some tension, bawling at them all to, ‘Shut up!’ before turning back to Baldwin with a questioning look.

‘I am the Keeper of the King’s Peace, this is Sir Richard de Welles, the King’s Coroner, and this is Simon Puttock, Keeper of this Port under the Abbey of Tavistock. We are learning all we can about the man who was killed.’

‘What’s my father got to do with him?’

‘I think we should discuss that with him, maid,’ Simon said.

She looked at him measuringly, then at Baldwin again. ‘I’ll take you to him.’