The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

A TRAVELLER’S TALE by Margaret Frazer

Margaret Frazer was originally the alias of two writers, Gail Frazer and Mary Monica Pulver, who between them produced the popular series of novels featuring medieval sleuth, Dame Frevisse. The series began with The Novice’s Tale (1992). Gail is now continuing the series on her own. The following story, whilst not featuring Dame Frevisse, is also set in the 1400s. It fits into that sub-category of the impossible crime, which is the “locked-carriage” story. Gail toldme an interesting aside. “Would you believe that the carriage would not have been called a carriage then? But better a little anachronism, I say, than the major confusion for readers if I’d properly called it a chariot!”

When that April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced to the root…

Then long folk to go on pilgrimages…

Damn. He hated that verse.

Not hated, Thomas amended. Was only brutally tired of it, having heard it a few too many times in his life to want it wandering through his head at odd moments. Besides, this wasn’t April and he was on no pilgrimage: it was definitely January and he was simply going home after rather too long a time at Westminster, where he’d only gone because he was needed to make a little peace between his cousins Hal and Gloucester, and if ever there was a thankless task in the world, that was it because the only peace either of them wanted was the other one out of his way – forever and in every way, for choice.

Ah, well. He had done what he could for now. They wouldn’t kill each other this month, likely, and he’d be home by supper if the weather held and nobody’s horse threw a shoe on the ice-set road.

Thomas eyed the grey, lowering sky and judged there was good chance the snow would hold off for the few hours more of riding he needed. January’s trouble was that the days were so short. And cold. He huddled his cloak more snugly around his shoulders and was glad of his fur-lined boots and that he had given pairs for New Year’s gifts to Giles and Ralph. They were riding behind him now without the displeasure that servants as good as they seemed able to make known without sound or gesture, when they did not approve of whatever their master had dragged them into – such as the long ride from London into Oxfordshire in a cold January with snow threatening – when there was no real need except that Thomas wanted to be home and with his books and family. And although whether those in service to him liked him or not, came second to whether or not they served him well, for choice he preferred to have people around him whom he liked and who, though he could live without it, at least somewhat liked him, too. Hal – otherwise my Lord Bishop of Winchester and son of a royal duke – had been known to tease him that such concern came from his somewhat low-born blood, to which Thomas invariably answered in return that it came from his good common sense and Hal ought to try it some time, thank you very much. Then they would laugh together.

Why was it he could talk and laugh and enjoy Hal’s company, and talk and laugh and enjoy Gloucester’s company, and all that Hal and Gloucester could do with each other was hate their respective guts? It was tedious of them and more tedious that they needed him to sort them out. Maud would say so over and over when he reached home, until he had given her kisses enough and her present from London – a pretty gold and enameled brooch this time – to make her feel she had been missed while he was gone, and then she would begin to tell him all that had happened the week and a half he’d been away and everything would be back to where it had been before he had left.

The road slacked downward and curved left and he knew that around the curve, beyond this out-thrust of trees, the Chiltern Hills fell steeply away to the lowlands that reached westward for miles upon miles, an open vastness that on a clear summer’s day at this hour would be filled with westering sunlight like a bowl full of gold, but today would be all dull shades of lead and grey. But Thomas had seen it from here in every season and weather and loved it every time and way, and besides, from here there were not many miles left to home, though it was further than it seemed because the steep, long drop from the Chilterns had to be managed first and…

With a slight sinking of spirits Thomas saw trouble ahead. A carriage stopped right at the crest above the first long downward drop of the road; and by the scurrying of three men around it and the woman standing to one side, wringing her hands and wailing, it was halted for more than the necessary checking of harness and wheels before the start of the treacherous way down.

With wanhope that it was not as bad as it looked, Thomas raised a gloved hand out of the sheltering folds of his cloak and gestured Giles to go forward and ask what the trouble was and if they might be of help, little though he wanted to be; and while Giles heeled his horse into a jog past him, Thomas put his hand back under his cloak, loosened dagger and sword in their sheaths, and then, as he and Ralph drew nearer the carriage, pushed back his cloak to leave his sword-arm free, on the chance this was after all a waylaying rather than simply someone else’s trouble.

Just for a moment then the possibility of robbery took stronger hold as Giles, after a brief word with the men there, drew his horse rapidly around and headed back with more haste than a carriage’s breakdown warranted, shouting well before he was back to Thomas’s side. “There’s some people dead here!”

Suddenly not minded to go closer, drawing rein and putting hand to sword-hilt openly, as Ralph moved closer up on his flank, Thomas asked, “I beg your pardon?”

“There’s people dead,” Giles repeated, stopping beside him. “You know William Shellaston? A merchant from Abingdon?”

“By name.” Thomas urged his horse forward. “It’s him?”

“And his wife and son, looks like.”

“All of them dead? How?”

“There’s none of that lot knows. It’s only just happened. Or they only just noticed. It’s odd, like.”

Thomas supposed it was, if three people were dead and their servants had “only just noticed”. But he was to them now, clustered beside the carriage, the woman still sobbing for the world to hear.

“I told them who you are,” Giles whispered at Thomas’s side. “That you’re a coroner and all.”

“In London,” Thomas pointed out, annoyed. For no reason anyone could explain, the office of Chief Butler to the King included the office of Coroner of London, and by that, yes, he was a coroner but, “I’ve no jurisdiction here.”

“They don’t need to know that,” Giles replied. “What they need is someone to settle them and tell them what to do.”

And here he was and had to do it Thomas supposed, and summoned up what he had heard of William Shellaston. A wine merchant whose wines were never of the best, a bad-humoured man, heavy-handed, not given to fair-dealing if he could help it, with a mind to join the landed gentry and the purchase of a manor lately near Henley to help his ambition along. Exactly the sort of man Thomas avoided like the plague because the only interest that sort had in his acquaintance was how much he could do for them.

Well, there wasn’t much to be done for him now, if he was dead, Thomas thought, dismounting beside the servants and the carriage that was of the common kind – long-bodied, with low wooden sides, closed in by canvas stretched over metal half-hoops, and high-wheeled to keep it clear of muddy roads. The richer sort were painted, sides and canvas both, but this was all brown wood and bare canvas, nothing to make it remarkable except, Thomas noted, it was solidly built, the only expense spared seeming to have been to decorate it for the eye.

The servants had all begun to talk as soon as his feet were on the ground. “Be quiet,” he said, so used to being obeyed it did not surprise him when they fell silent; then said to the man he had singled out as babbling the least at him, “What’s in hand here?”

“They’re dead. All three of them! We stopped to tell Master Shellaston we were about to start down. He hates to be surprised by the sudden drop and we’ve orders to always stop to tell him. Only when I called in, no one answered and when I looked in to see why, they were all…” He swallowed as if holding down his gorge. “… dead.”

“That’s all you know?”

The man nodded, tight-lipped over apparent gut-sickness.

“That’s all any of you know?”

More nods all around.

“No outcry? Nothing? No sign of how they’re dead?”

“Nothing,” the woman answered, her voice rising shrilly. “They’re just dead and it’s awful and…”

“I’ll see for myself,” Thomas said curtly, less because he wanted to see anything and more to stop her carrying on. He moved to the carriage’s rear, the usual way in. The chain meant to go across the gap to make falling out less easy had been unfastened at one end and looped aside, the last link dropped into the hook on the other side, and the heavy canvas curtain meant to keep draughts out strapped aside, out of the way, giving him a clear view of the long tunnel of the carriage’s inside. He stepped up on a chest that had been taken out and set down on the ground for a step – its usual use, to judge by its dried-muddy bottom and the footmarks on its top – and ducked inside. Or as clear a view as the shadows and grey light allowed him; the flaps over the window on each side of the carriage, meant for air and light and a sight of the countryside in better weather, were closed and it took a few moments for his eyes to get used to the gloom.

His sense of smell worked faster. There was a reek to the place that said death, and he pulled a fold of his cloak over his mouth and nose before he ventured further in, able to see well enough now not to tread on… anything… before he reached the windows. Thomas held his breath while dropping his cloak’s fold long enough to roll up and tie the window flaps out of the way to give better light and eventually, he hoped, better air.

In the meanwhile, pressing his cloak over his nose and mouth again, he looked around and saw he had been right: there was nothing here he wanted to see, though it interested him that the inside of the carriage was nothing like its outside. Close-woven green wool lined the canvas cover for colour and comfort, there was well-stuffed padding on the wooden side-walls and woven carpets covered as much of the floor as he could see, for the high-piled cushions of all sizes, meant to make for comfortable sitting against the jounce and lurch of travel, with willow-woven hampers, lidded and strapped to the carriage sides near the entrance, the only other furnishing because anything of wood would be an invitation to bruising in this small carriage.

It was what else the carriage contained he did not want to see, but he looked, God help him, because he was a coroner and there, at the man and woman he presumed were Master and Mistress Shellaston, slumped on their backs among the piled cushions in the middle of the carriage. Their clothing and jewelled rings went finely with the carriage’s furnishings and, living, they would probably have claimed they’d rather die than be seen in their present unclean disarray, lying with heads cast back, eyes shut but mouths gaping, arms and legs sprawled, and the place stenching with what their bowels and bladders had loosed in death.

Where was their son?

Stepping carefully, Thomas found him beyond his parents, near the carriage’s front. A solid bulk of a child, maybe twelve years old, burrowed into a pile of cushions and curled tightly in on himself like a small hedgehog into its nest. Or he had been tightly curled before his body went slack in – Thomas pressed fingertips against the side of the throat and found, as he expected, no pulse – death.

They were all, as he had been told, dead. Father, mother, son.

How?

As he made his way back to the carriage entrance, Thomas considered the possibilities. Not by a weapon, surely, though the bodies would have to be brought out into better light and looked at to be certain there were no wounds; but if there had been violence of any kind among them, there would have been some sort of struggle, enough to leave some evidence of it, and there was none, nor apparently any outcry the servants riding on either side or behind had heard.

A person could smother on charcoal fumes, always a winter danger, but even if Master Shellaston had dared to have a brazier among so much cloth – and Thomas had noticed none – a canvas-covered carriage with its constant draughts was nowhere anyone was likely to suffocate except by making deliberate effort.

Poison then? A possibility, Thomas granted but doubtfully. From what he’d heard of poisons, most tended to go about their business with a deal of pain, and people did not tend to suffer quietly, so if it had been poison, why, again, had no one cried out?

He ducked thankfully out of the carriage into the open air, stepped down onto the waiting box and from there began giving necessary orders. Since there was now no hope of him reaching home today and no point to staying where they were, growing colder, he said, “There’s a village and inn a half mile back. We’ll return there and do what needs doing.”

No one argued with him and while they went through the awkward business of turning the carriage around, Thomas learned a little more, beginning with the servants’ names – Battel, who claimed to be Master Shellaston’s body servant and in charge of the others; Jack, whose size had probably recommended him as a guard on the journey because it surely hadn’t been his wits out of which he was presently badly frighted; Godard, the carriage driver who just now had no time for anything but his horses; and Mary, a squawking chicken of a female who seemed more in horror than in grief, saying she was – had been, oh, God save her, what would happen now? – Mistress Shellaston’s waiting woman and sobbing harshly to Thomas’s question of why she had not been in the carriage, too, “Master Shellaston didn’t like to be crowded, didn’t like servants breathing down his neck and cluttering his way, he said. He made me always ride pillion behind Battel and cold it is, too, this time of year and…” And probably hard on Battel, Thomas did not say, dismissing her.

He learned something more from looking at the Shellastons’ horses. The servants’ mounts were all third-rate beasts of doubtful worth and dull coats, much like the servants themselves, now he thought of it, while the three pulling the carriage tandem, although a plain lot, shaggy with unclipped winter coats and their harness nothing to boast of- no dyed leather, brass trim, or bells to make the journeying more bright – were nonetheless, like the carriage, solid-built and not likely to break down. It seemed Master Shellaston had not been given to show, Thomas thought: he’d spent his money only on his own close-kept comforts and let the world think what it liked.

Did that evidence solid common sense, Thomas wondered. Or merely a contempt for anyone not him?

He was readying to talk to Bartel while watching Godard and Jack work the carriage and its horses around, when the clop of shod hooves on the frozen road warned that more riders were coming. Beside him, Bartel said with what might be disgust or maybe worry, even before the new-comers were in sight, “This’ll likely be Master Hugh. Thought he’d be along soon.”

“Master Hugh?”

“Master Shellaston’s cousin. He’s Master Shellaston himself, come to that, but to call him Master Hugh has kept things simpler over the years,” Bartel said broodingly and added, as three riders came round the same curve of the road that Thomas had, “Aye, that’s him.”

He looked to be a man of early middle years, well-wrapped in an ample cloak, riding a shiningly groomed, handsome bay, with two well-turned out servants behind him on lesser but no less well-kept mounts. They all drew rein for the time it took to understand what they were seeing, then Master Hugh came forward at a canter, raising his voice to ask as he came, “Bartel, what’s toward?”

There were explanations to be made all over again, Thomas keeping aside, leaving it to the servants, with Master Hugh saying angrily, part way through, “You’re making no sense. They can’t all be simply dead. I want to see them.”

At his order, Godard paused the horses and Master Hugh went into the carriage as Thomas had, though not for so long, and came out to go aside to the verge and dryly heave before, more pale than he had been, he came back to demand past Bartel to Thomas, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“I was on my way home when I overtook all this. I’m Master Thomas Chaucer of Ewelme.”

He watched Master Hugh recognize his name and inwardly back off into respect. Doubting he’d have trouble from him now, Thomas asked in his own turn, “How do you come to be here?” peremptory enough that Master Hugh accepted it was no light question.

His look slightly darkening, he answered, “I was following them.”

“Why?”

“Because William – my cousin Master Shellaston – told me to. He’d ordered me to come see him at his manor and we’d quarrelled, as always, over a piece of land he’d taken out of an inheritance of mine, and he finally said he wanted to be done with me once and for all, that if I’d go back with him to Abingdon, he’d hand over the deed I wanted and there’d be an end.”

“So why weren’t you riding with him?”

“Because, as always, my cousin wanted me no more around him than need be. He ordered me to keep well behind him. What business of yours is it to be asking all this?”

“I am a coroner,” Thomas said.

Master Hugh’s lips moved as if he might have been silently swearing but aloud he only said, jerking his head toward the carriage, fully turned now. “That’s your doing, too?”

“We’re going back the half-mile to the inn,” Thomas said for answer. “You’ll of course come with us?” He made it more invitation than order, though he would change that if need be, but Master Hugh merely nodded in agreement.

On his own part, Thomas regretted the need to go back. It would necessitate telling over yet again, to new folk, what was already certain – that the Shellastons were dead – when what he wanted was an answer as to why. He was already hearing among the servants a muttering of, “Devil come for his own”, and he knew that once the Devil or “God’s will” was brought into a thing folk were too often satisfied not to bother looking further. For himself, profound though his belief in God and the Devil might be, Thomas had never found either one dabbled so directly in the world as this: these deaths were devil’s work, right enough, but a man’s hand had done it, and as the carriage creaked forward, he rode away from Master Hugh and over beside Godard riding the middle of the three carriage horses, guiding them by reins and voice and a short-tailed whip. The man cast him a shrewd sideways look and said, before Thomas could ask it, “Aye, I’m near as anyone but I didn’t hear aught to make me think there was trouble.”

“What did you hear?”

“Naught but the usual and that was never much once we were under way. They always did their bitch-and-bellow before we started, then settled down to drink themselves into comfort. The lurch and jounce…” He twitched his head back to the carriage lumbering behind. “… unsettled their stomachs.”

“Why didn’t they ride, then?”

“Because he’d bought the carriage, damn it, and damn it, they were going to use it, damn it,” Godard said without heat, apparently giving Master Shellaston’s words and feelings in the matter rather than his own. “Besides, he didn’t like to be seen lifting the bottle as much as he did, and a carriage is better than horseback for hiding that.”

“He drank then?”

“Then and anytime. And she did, too, come to that, though maybe not so much.”

“And the boy?”

“Made him throw up.”

“Riding in the carriage?”

“No. The wine they favoured for drink. It made him throw up. Cider, that’s what he had to have.”

That would have made poisoning them all at once more difficult, with two drinks to deal with rather than one. If it had been poison. Thomas thanked him and swung his horse away and found Giles riding close behind and to his side. Surprised to find him there, Thomas raised eyebrows at him and Giles said, “The Hugh fellow was looking to ease in and hear what you were saying, so I eased in instead.”

Thomas nodded his thanks. “I doubt anything was said he doesn’t already know about his cousin, but I’d rather he not know how much I know.” Or don’t know, he did not add aloud. He and Giles were as alone as they were likely to be this while, riding aside from the carriage, with the three Shellaston servants riding behind the carriage, Master Hugh and his men gone on ahead, and Thomas’s Ralph bringing up the rear on Thomas’s quiet order to make sure they lost no one along the way, Thomas took the chance of going un-overheard to say, “He looks as likely a possibility as anyone for wanting Master Shellaston dead. But why the woman and boy, too?”

“Because he’ll for certain have it all, now they’re dead,” Giles answered. “There’s none others to the family.”

“Servant-talk?” Thomas asked, and when Giles had nodded that it was, asked, “How much is all?”

“The business in Abingdon and a good-sized manor Master Shellaston bought a few years back, and the land they’d been quarrelling over these past five years, too, but they’d nearly settled over that anyway, it seems.”

“How much does this Master Hugh have on his own?”

“He’s not hurting, as they say. He was Master Shellaston’s apprentice a while back, with it understood there’d be partnership when all was said and done, but they fell out and he set up on his own in Henley. Looked likely to rival Master Shellaston soon, by what this lot says.”

“But no love lost between them?”

“Not a drop.”

“Ride here and keep an eye ahead. I’m going back to see what they’ll tell me.”

“Just about anything you ask,” Giles said. “They’re starting to warm to the thought they’re done with Master Shellaston and his wife.”

With that to encourage him, Thomas slowed his horse to the side of the road, letting the carriage lumber on past him, and joined the Shellaston servants. Since he doubted anyone was thinking of anything except what had happened, he forebore subtlety, starting in immediately to them all, with a nod ahead, “So Master Shellaston and his cousin didn’t get on together?”

“Not for above the time it takes to spit,” Bartel readily agreed.

“Ordered him to ride behind, did he? The way Master Hugh said?”

“Did indeed. You always knew where you stood with Master Shellaston.”

“Usually in the bad,” said Jack. “Grudged a man the air he breathed and double-grudged Master Hugh any breath at all.”

Mary crossed herself. “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and them not even cold yet.”

“They’re cold and getting colder and so are we,” Bartel said bluntly.

“We should lay them out decently before they stiffen too much,” she sniffed. “It’s not good, them lying there like that.”

She was right, but Thomas wanted someone besides themselves for witness before anything else was done in the carriage, and asked, to divert her, “Had you served Mistress Shellaston long?”

“Three years last Martinmas.”

“A good mistress?”

“Not very. Nor not too bad, neither,” she hurried to add. “Just… a little too quick with her hands sometimes.”

“And sharper than ever, now she was childing again,” Jack said. “No pleasing her ever.”

“She was with child?”

“About five months along,” Mary said. “Glad of it, mind you, but it didn’t sweeten her any.”

Four deaths instead of three then to the credit of whoever had done this thing, Thomas thought grimly, but asked aloud, “Travelling didn’t agree with her, from what the driver says.”

“Nor did it,” Mary said. “She wasn’t happy with travelling or happy at Master Shellaston suddenly deciding they’d go back to Abingdon.”

“It was sudden?”

“Sudden enough. He and Master Hugh had been yelling at each other off and on since yesterday and then, late this morning, it’s up and on the road, let’s have this over with, says Master Shellaston, and here we are. Liked keeping folk off balance, he did. Whether he’d have given over the deed once we were home, that’s another matter.”

“Did Mistress Shellaston quarrel with him over it? The deed or leaving so suddenly?

“Bit snippy at first but nothing untoward.”

“They didn’t outright quarrel?”

“Nay. They weren’t much for quarrelling with each other. Saved all their ire for other folk.”

Thomas fell silent, considering what he had and asking nothing more until they had reached the inn yard, and while Master Hugh saw to telling the innkeeper what was the trouble, he went aside to his own men and, first, gave Ralph order to find someone to go to whoever was the coroner for this end of the county and bring him here, and added, seeing his look at the snow-heavy sky. “No need to hurry or risk yourself about it. The weather is cold enough, they’ll keep. All I want is to know is he’s on his way.” And turned to Giles to say, “This place is big enough, there should be an herbwife somewhere. Find her for me.”

He would have preferred an apothecary, but a knowledgeable herbwife – and, please God, this one would be – would do as well; and while he waited, he would have preferred to go inside the inn and be comfortable, the way Mary was gone, bustled away on a burst of the innwife’s sympathy and curiosity, and Master Hugh whose men and Godard were seeing to the horses while Bartel and Jack were still to hand, kept by a look and gesture from Thomas while he had sent Giles and Ralph about his business, because he had meant to set them as guard on the carriage. But he had also had a hope the cold and ending day would keep people indoors but that was gone along with hope of setting Bartel and Jack to guard. They were already at the centre of a spreading cluster of folk and eagerly telling all they knew – or didn’t know, Thomas amended, hearing Bartel saying, “Aye, there they lie, dead as dead and not a mark on them and never a cry. It had to have been the Devil, look you, come for Master Shellaston because he was a hellish master, sure enough.”

By tomorrow there’d likekly be a band of demons added to the telling, dancing in the road around the carriage with shrieks and the reek of sulphur, Thomas thought and said, “The Devil maybe came for Master Shellaston, but why for his wife and son, too?”

“They were just there,” someone among the listeners said, eager to help the story along, “and so Old Nick took ‘em, too.”

“I’ve never heard it works that way,” Thomas said dryly. “That the Devil can seize innocent souls just because they happen to be nigh a sinner.”

“Well,” Bartel put in, “she was only half a step not so bad as he was. They were a pair and no mistake.”

“But the boy,” Thomas said.

“Died of fright,” Jack promptly offered.

Bartel, openly enjoying himself, added, full of scorn, “Huh. Likely the Devil decided to save time by coming only once for all of them. They were a matched lot. Young William was shaping to go the same way as his sire and dam and no mistake.”

“Here now,” Master Hugh protested, come up unnoticed from the inn with a steaming mug of something warm between his hands. “Little Will was a good lad.”

“Praying your pardon, sir.” Though it was fairly plain Bartel didn’t care if he had it or not. “You spoiled him some and got on fine with him because you never crossed him. Some of us weren’t so lucky.” As if aside but not lowering his voice, he added to Thomas, “And it set Master Shellaston’s back up to see how well along they got.”

Dragging the talk back to where he needed it to be, Thomas asked, “Today, from the carriage, are you certain there was never any outcry at all?” because he could not believe three people had died without a sound.

“Well…” Bartel said.

He and Jack cast quick, doubtful looks at each other, and more forcefully, impatient, Thomas asked, “You heard something. What?”

“We heard… I heard and Jack with me, so Mary must have, too, we heard young William give a cry,” Bartel admitted unwillingly. “Just once and it wasn’t like we hadn’t heard such other times. See, Master Shellaston had a heavy hand and was ready with it, especially when he was drinking, which was mostly.”

“She could lay one along a man’s ear, too, when she wanted, come to that,” said Jack bitterly.

“When did you hear this cry?” Thomas asked and added, to their blank looks, “Before or after you passed through here?”

“Ah,” said Bartel, understanding. “Before. Wasn’t it, Jack?”

“Aye,” Jack agreed. “Quite a while before, maybe.”

And maybe it had been and maybe it had not, or maybe they were mistook or maybe they were lying – Thomas could think of several reasons, not all guilty ones, why they might be – because the more both men were coming to enjoy this, the less confidence he had in their answers.

“By your leave, sir, she’s here,” Giles said behind him, and Thomas turned away from the men and their eager listeners to find Giles standing with a firm-built woman, neatly aproned, wimpled and cloaked, her sharply judging eyes meeting his as she curtsyed and said, “Esmayne Wayn at your service, Master Chaucer. I’m herbwife and midwife here. Your man says there’s three folk dead and you want me to see.”

More happy with her directness than with anything else he’d encountered these past two hours, Thomas said, “Mistress Wayn, thank you for coming. Yes, if you’d be so good as to look and tell me what you think about their deaths…”

Master Hugh started what might have been a protest, but a glance from Thomas made him think better of it and he subsided. Meanwhile Bartel at Thomas’s nod went to pull the carriage’s end curtain aside and tie it back, and Jack hauled out the chest and set it down for a step. “Some better light would help, too,” Thomas said to Jack because the day was drawing in toward dark, then he offered Mistress Wayn a hand up.

He felt no need to ready her for what was there. As the village healer and midwife, she had surely seen enough of death in various forms and degrees of unpleasantness for this to be no worse. Besides, the cold was doing its work; the smell was none so bad as it had been, and Mistress Wayn went forward without hesitation, making room for him to follow her as she bent first over Master Shellaston, then over his wife, apparently able to see enough for now by the light from the opened window-flaps. The further jouncing of the carriage seemed not to have moved the bodies, already jostled into settled places between when they had died and when they were found, Thomas supposed. “The child is further on,” he said quietly.

Mistress Wayn nodded but took Mistress Shellaston by the chin, moved her head slightly back and forth, then prodded at her stomach and learned close over her face, seemingly sniffing. None of that was anything Thomas would have cared to do and he heard murmurs from the watchers outside and wished the door-curtain could be closed, but Mistress Wayn, ignoring everyone and him, repeated with Master Shellaston what she had done with his wife, before she straightened as much as the low curve of the ceiling allowed her, to look to Thomas and ask, “How long have they been dead?”

“No one is certain. At least three hours at a guess. It’s been maybe two since I first saw them and the bodies were cooling by then.”

“Best I straighten them, if I may? Much longer and we’ll have to wait until they unstiffen again.”

“If it will make no difference to what we might learn about how they died…”

“You’ve noted how they’re lying and can say so if asked? And that their eyes be closed. Nobody did that, did they?”

Thomas far outranked her in life but she had a greater skill than he at this, and they both accepted the equality that gave them. So her interruption did not matter and he said simply, “I’ve noted, and no, nobody closed their eyes.”

“That’s enough then. Cleaning them can come later,” and briskly, firmly, she straightened both bodies out of their sprawl, then moved on to young William, still curled into his nest of cushions. “You’ve noted him, too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.” She straightened the boy and rolled him onto his back, moved and prodded and did with him much as she had with his parents, before sitting back on her heels and saying up at Thomas, “His eyes be open, you see. That’s the usual way with dead folk that didn’t die easy.”

“You’re saying his parents died easily and he didn’t? That they didn’t all three die the same way?”

“Aye. Him and her, they died the same as each other, surely.” Mistress Wayn nodded to the elder Shellastons. “The boy, he went otherwise. I can smell it on him. He took dwale would be my guess, only I’m not much guessing. It’s good for some things, carefully used, but only outwardly. Taken inwardly, it takes not much to kill.”

“Poison,” Thomas said. “You’re saying the boy was poisoned. What about his parents? They had to have been poisoned, too.”

“You’d think it,” Mistress Wayn said. “It would seem the most likely but they’re chancey things, poisons.” She sounded almost regretful over it. “What kills one person only makes another sick and there’s no way to know beforehand which way it will be. That I can still smell on him -” She nodded at young William. “- tells me he had enough to be almost certain of killing him, being a child. Why he didn’t taste it as he started to drink it down, that’s a question I don’t have answer to. As for his parents and what they drank…” She shrugged.

“You don’t think it was the same thing?”

“There’s no smell of it and it would have to have been more than the amount that killed the boy to kill them quick and quietly. No, whatever they drank down was different, I’d say. I don’t know what. It’s that they made no outcry and show no sign of suffering I don’t understand. Poisons hurt. I’d guess by the way the boy was curled in on himself he was hurting when he died, but with them it’s more like they fell to sleep and died without waking up.”

“There are potions that do that. Bring on a sleep so deep it turns into death.”

“Aye.” She still sounded unsatisfied. “But why one kind for them and another for the boy? Why weren’t they drinking all the same?”

“Wine made the boy sick,” Thomas said absently.

“So two different bottles had to be poisoned.” She pushed a half-full, stoppered one lying near young William with her foot. “But still, why two different poisons? And he didn’t just fall to sleep, neither,” she added with a nod at the boy.

Thomas noticed there was no nonsense about the Devil from her. To her it was plain that poison had killed these three and, like him, she had no doubt that poison was a thing that came from a human hand.

Or poisons, it must have been, according to her.

Different poisons by different hands?

Three murders planned – Master and Mistress Shellaston’s separate from their son’s – by two different people with two different poisons, with it only being chance they happened together?

Or…

A sudden, ugly guess rose up in Thomas’s mind.

Something of it must have shown in his face because Mistress Wayn asked sharply, “What?”

He shook his head. “I need more questions answered first, before I say.”

But at least now he had a better thought of what the questions were.

An hour later, as the day drew in to grey twilight, when he had asked some of those questions and had answers, he gathered in a sideroom of the inn bespoken from the innkeeper for the sake of privacy with Master Hugh, Giles, the other servants, and Mistress Wayn, along with the innkeeper and a few village men for witness. Thomas had not put it that way but had merely asked the innkeeper if there were a few worthy men in the village who might care to join them for hot, spiced cider and talk this cold evening. That he meant to guide the talk he did not say.

After Mistress Wayn had overseen the moving of the bodies respectfully to her house for cleaning and shrouding, he and Giles, without asking Master Hugh’s leave – and by his expression he would not have given it if asked – had searched through the carriage, generally seeking, finding specifically, and now asking, “Bartel, the wine Master and Mistress Shellaston were drinking, where did it come from?”

“It was his own. Being a wine merchant, he could lay hands on good stuff when he wanted.”

“Was it a new bottle he had…”

“Bottles,” said Bartel. “Three at least.”

That accorded with what Thomas had found in a hamper in the carriage. Safely cushioned among various wrapped food bundles, there had been an empty bottle, a mostly empty bottle, and a full, tightly corked one.

“Could anyone have been at those bottles before they were put into the carriage?”

“Been at them? I filled them from a cask at the manor if that’s what you mean, and put them in the hamper and put it into the carriage.” Bartel straightened with sudden suspicion. “Hoi, hold up there. You’re not saying I put something in them, are you? There were folk around all the time can say I never had chance to.”

“Nor do I think you did. I just wanted to know that no one else had chance at them either.”

Bartel subsided, not fully happy.

“There was a bottle that had held cider beside young William and then there are these.” Thomas held up two pottery vials, slight enough to have fit in a belt pouch. “Do any of you know these?”

No one did, but Bartel’s suspicion had been catching. All the Shellaston servants looked wary now and Master Hugh was frowning.

Thomas held one of them higher. “This one held poppy syrup sweetened with sugar, Mistress Wayn tells me. Master Shellaston favoured sweet wine, I gather?” Heads agreed he had, and indeed it had been malmsey in the bottles. Thomas held up the other small bottle. “This one held dwale, otherwise called nightshade, enough of it to kill if drunk straight down. And young William must have, because there was half the cider left in the bottle and no dwale in it.’

Thomas regarded the empty vial sadly for a moment, then handed it with the other to Giles to keep. “We found it under young William. The other one was in the bottom of the box used for a step into the carriage. The box that has what’s needed to keep the carriage in good order on the road.” Spare parts for mending wheels and harness, grease for axles, tools and other odds and ends that might be useful. “It was Mistress Wayn who noticed and showed me the black grease smear on the back of young William’s hand that he had mostly wiped off- black grease he could have come by in the carriage nowhere else but in that box. From one of the rags probably, when he hid the other vial there, the one with poppy syrup, after his parents were unconscious. Or after he’d killed them. Before he drank the potion of dwale in the other vial, a potion strong enough it brought him to death almost immediately.”

“He killed his parents and then himself?” Master Hugh asked. “Is that what you’re saying? He’d have to be off his wits to do any of that!”

“Off his wits or misled,” Thomas said levelly. “But to go back to his parents. Let us guess he found a way to put the poppy syrup into one of the bottles of wine. It wouldn’t have been hard. They were packed in a hamper with food. He only had to pretend he was taking overlong getting out what he wanted to eat, while pouring the syrup into the wine. After that, he only had to wait until his parents guzzled it down, as it seems was their way with wine. Now, poppy syrup, if you give enough, brings on sleep and if too much is given, it can kill. There was never enough in that vial to kill two people but there was enough to make them both sleep so heavily, helped on by the wine, that they didn’t wake even when their son – and it had to have been him, there was no one else there to do it – pressed a pillow over the face of first one of them and then the other. He was a large, solid child, with weight enough to hold a pillow down and smother someone if they were heavily unconscious, the way his mother and father were. And then he closed their dead eyes, to keep them from staring at him.”

“But why would he go and do it? Kill them, I mean,” protested one of the village men. “It’s not natural.”

“I’d guess he did it for hatred. From everything I’ve heard, there was little love lost between him and them. Today, when he cried out in the carriage, probably from the unexpected pain of the dwale working in him, he was heard but no one thought anything about it but that he’d been struck by his mother or father, and that was too usual to take much heed of. Besides, I’d guess he thought – or maybe someone put it in his head – that if he were orphaned, rid of his parents and no one able to say how they died – he’d be given in ward to Master Hugh Shellaston, who got on with him far better than his parents did.”

“But then why would he kill himself?” Bartel asked.

“I don’t think he did. I think his death was Master Hugh’s doing.”

Master Hugh jerked up straight in his chair, his stare furious at Thomas before he gathered his thoughts and exclaimed, “That’s mad! I was nowhere near any of them when they died. You said yourself my cousin and his bitch-wife were smothered. I was never in the carriage or anywhere near it. And you said the boy drank that poison of his own will and died of it.”

“I said he drank it of his own will and died of it, yes. I didn’t say he meant to die of it. Why bother to hide the vial he’d poisoned his parents with if he was going to kill himself afterwards? He probably thought that what he drank was some light potion that would make him merely sleep and that when he and his dead parents were found he could claim all ignorance of their deaths and simply be weepingly thankful he was spared whatever had killed them. My guess is that you gave him the poppy syrup and dwale, told him the dwale was harmless, maybe even warned him there might be some pain and to keep from being caught he must fight against crying out, which he mostly did. He must have been a brave boy in his way. But he never meant to kill himself. You’re the one who’s guilty of his death. As guilty as if you’d poured the poison down his throat yourself.”

Master Hugh did not give way yet. Instead – with what he probably meant to be the outrage of innocence – he fell back on, “You can’t prove any of this!”

“Not at this moment,” Thomas said coldly. “But I’ll warrant that if question is made among apothecaries and every herbwife anywhere near where you’ve been of late, we’ll learn of rather many requests for poppy syrup and dwale potion from them.”

“No one is going to admit to making him a killing potion,” Mistress Wayn said quietly.

“No, and probably none did. But I daresay several will be found who’ll admit to making a non-killing potion. Dwale is after all good for some poultices. But put several lots together and they’d kill, yes?” Thomas asked at Master Hugh.

Boldly surly, the man tried, “My shit of a cousin had more enemies than me who’d probably like him dead. And how likely is it I’ve been wandering around talking to herbwives and apothecaries? I’ve a life to lead and people who notice where I go and why.”

“We’ll find out if other enemies had chance to give young William the poisons. We’ll see if anyone had as much to gain from their deaths as you do as the only heir. We’ll see who’s been asking for poppy syrup and dwale, and we’ll find, I’ll lay odds, that if not you, then some several of your servants have been, sent here and there without knowing what they were doing.”

With one of his men already looking at him with widening eyes and dawning alarm. Master Hugh suffused a slow, deep red, rose to his feet and looked around the room for a way out.

“The window is shuttered,” Thomas said mildly, “and my man is ordered to stop you going out the door by whatever means are needed. Nor do I think you’ll find anyone here, even your own men, ready to help you.”

That much Master Hugh had already read in the faces around him; and heavily he dropped back into his chair and said, from the heart, “Damn.”