back with a pensive glower. What had made him react like that? It was almost as if he himself was a criminal, the bailiff thought to himself.
Chapter Seven
They left Black at the inn after questioning him, standing grave and silent as he watched them leave, whipping their horses and making their way back to Crediton. He could not help them much beyond the statement he had already given. Returning home late he had seen the flames and raised the alarm. There had been no one around then, at least no one he had seen.
Simon was apprehensive, worrying about his new friend. He watched Baldwin covertly as they rode, aware of the unblinking gaze of Edgar, as if anxious that the bailiff might attack his master, that he might add to the damage that he had already done, however unwittingly, by mentioning the rack.
Riding stiffly, his mind obviously on other matters, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead, Baldwin seemed far away, so far that Simon felt instinctively that even if he were to call out his name he would not hear. He was back in his past, his expression fixed and hard, his hand a tight fist where he grasped the reins, and the muscles of his jaw clenching fitfully.
The bailiff let his eyes drop to the neck of his horse. No doubt when he was ready the knight would tell him about this horror, this evil memory. Until then he would have to wait and hope that the vividness of the apparent nightmare would fade. Then, glancing up, he saw that the knight had lost his haunted expression, had recovered some of his previous good humour.
The knight’s eyes met and held his for a minute, and the two stared at each other, until the knight grinned, said, “Come on, we’ll be all night at this rate,” slapped his horse, and the three cantered off towards Crediton.
Simon had left the other two just before Crediton. The road forked as it came into Crediton from Blackway, one arm leading east, to Exeter and thence to Tiverton, passing Furnshill on the way, the other leading to Crediton and north to Sandford. It was here that the three parted, Simon going on alone to the left.
The route took him into the centre of Crediton, and he had to turn off by the ancient church. Passing it in the street, he wondered whether to stop and beg a drink from Peter Clifford, but even as he passed the open doors, he heard the voices singing in praise and realised that the rector would be too involved to talk, so he carried on past. Carefully avoiding the open sewer, and wincing at the fetid stench, he went along the narrow lane that bordered the old graveyard, past the cottages where the church workers lived, and so up to the hill that led out of the town.
In daylight he always found this road slow, relaxed and pleasant. It curved gently up the hill, winding like an old stream, with a wall on one side that protected the church estates. On the other side the road gave directly on to fields, a sweep of narrow strips that led to the forests on the hill above. It was a rural scene of tranquillity, a pastoral picture, in green where the grass and crops grew, and in red where the dark earth had been ploughed, that never failed to please him. When he was upset or peevish, a ride along this road would inevitably calm him. It was the sight of how man could change nature, bend it to his will and manipulate it to provide him with his food and protection. He felt the same whether he was looking at the strips of the fields or the coppices. Both seemed to him to be proof of the mastery of mankind over the anarchy of wild nature.
But now, as he crested the peak of the hill and followed the lane down into the valley on the other side, the road seemed to change. Now, as darkness came on, he was into the other part, and like the scenery, his feelings changed too. Here the wild had never been pushed out. Here the woodcutters had not wanted to go, it was too far from the town. The farmers would not clear the trees here, the fields would be too far to bring seed to. Animals would be kept nearer the town where they could be seen and protected.
No, here the land was still wild and untamed, here nature still ruled and men walked cautiously. The dark and threatening woods crowded closer at either side of the road, as if struggling to reach the humans that travelled along it so that they could squeeze the life from them. The brambles sprawled from the edge of the trees in an attempt to colonise the packed dirt of the lane, catching and ripping at the clothes of any passer-by unwary enough to walk too close. In between the trees, he could sometimes hear the tick and crack of the wood settling, but to his fearful ears, raised from the cradle to be scared of the various spirits that haunted the moors and hills of Devon, they sounded like the voices of the unspeakable, ghostly horrors as they hunted for humans. In the dark, this road reminded him of the most fearsome of all: Old Nick and Old Crockern.
These two characters were well known in Devon, their fame was boundless in the countryside, and Simon found himself unwillingly considering each with a degree of trepidation he had not felt for many years. After the death of old Brewer – he still found it hard to believe that it was a murder; easier by far to consider it one of those sad but all too common accidents, a stray spark in the thatch, and, by all accounts, a man too drunk to wake – the stories and legends seemed to crowd in on him as he wound his lonely trail home.
Old Nick was the devil himself. The tales told of him riding a horse, a headless horse, all over the moors and beyond in his search for souls. At his side was a pack of hounds, evil, wild eyed creatures whose baying showed that they had the scent of a human spirit ready for taking. The wild hunt was reputed to be a regular event, not requiring fogs or mists to cover its cruelty as the horde swept after its quarry.
The other was a more understandable spirit, if just as unpleasant to meet. Old Crockern was the ancient soul of the moors. He was everywhere, but on occasion would make himself appear to those who threatened his lands, and would destroy them. It was true that he would normally use simple methods, like bankrupting a farmer who decided to take more of the moors than he needed, by ensuring that he could grow nothing on the ground he stole, but if Old Crockern found someone intentionally affecting the life and security of the moors, it was rumoured that he would come and take the perpetrator away, to a hell more evil than ever Satan could devise.
As Simon passed by, the lanes were darkening. The sunset had been a warm, orange glow on the horizon, promising another dry and clear day ahead, and he had been momentarily pleased to reflect on the fact before his mind drifted back to consider the ancient superstitions. It was not that he was overly credulous himself, but the lanes leading up to Sandford were narrow and lined with dark ranks of trees, standing silent like accusing monsters from a far-distant past. The great twisted, primeval boughs loomed grey and foreboding on either side, reaching upwards into the swiftly gathering darkness as if trying to block off the light, as if trying to strangle any remaining glimmer before it could reach the road. Simon could almost fancy, as he rode along, that the branches were attempting to touch over the road, and that when they did their gnarled and tortured limbs would drop, plummet down, to smother any passer-by…
He shook himself vigorously. A mist swept silently, malevolently, across the road in front of him, and he shivered. “God’s teeth!” he thought. “How old am I?” And he spurred his horse faster.
But he still looked over his shoulder occasionally.
By the time he arrived home the dark had settled heavily over the land like a grey velvet carpet, and his fears retreated at the sight of the orange glow from the windows of his house. Taking his horse round to the stables, he gave it a quick rub down and settled it for the night before going in.
It had been costly, but he was pleased that he had paid, as Margaret had suggested, for the wood-panelled passageway. It cut the hall off from the kitchen area, the buttery and servants’ quarters, and stopped some of the more vicious drafts from the front door that had whistled around the hall and disturbed the rushes.
At the other end of the hall was his solar, the family room, blocked off from the hall itself by the huge curtains. He had intended, when he had been able to afford it, to have that panelled off too. His lip curled into a self-mocking sneer. Too late for that now. There would be little point in spending money on the place with the move to Lydford coming up.
His wife was sitting in the hall with Edith, both on the large bench in front of the fire. His daughter seemed to be asleep, lying down in her light dress, her head resting on her mother’s lap. Margaret was sitting and stabbing at a tapestry with quick, vicious thrusts, looking as if she was trying to kill the cloth.
Simon stared at her. She did not look up, but said, as if through gritted teeth, “There’s stew for you in the pot,” without looking up from her needlework.
He quietly stepped over to the fire in the middle of the room. The stew sat in its small cauldron, hanging from the steel tripod, and he could see that it had been ready for some time – the meat had all but collapsed in the liquid.
