The sound of stealthy footsteps made him look up warily. He knew he must keep away from the men of the town – his mother had said so. She had always warned him to avoid the people who lived there, not that he had needed to be told. He had always known he was different. People looked at him, when they noticed him, with distaste, a kind of loathing. They scared him. He knew he was safe with his mother, but he was unsure of everyone else in Crediton – though he had no idea why.
Cautious, quiet noises approached slowly, and the boy’s eyes widened.
The man, the odd one with the giggle who had embraced his mother and then knocked this man down, he had moved slowly. Rollo had seen him. As the fallen man had reached out to him, the giggling one had hit him, and the nice one had fallen. Rollo had seen the face of the odd one, and it had scared him. He did not want to see him again. Turning, he stared round with wild fear. The walls crowded in on him, dark and fore-boding, but there was a hole at the base of one – the escape route for the rats that lived inside.
It took him but a moment to leap across the ground and lie down, wriggling round and shoving himself inside. A moment later a nervous group of men from neighboring houses appeared at the entrance.
Later, Baldwin peered in, his hand on his sword. He was perplexed – he could see little in the deeper darkness of the side-alley, and decided to investigate. Motioning to the others to stay, he carefully walked in. Without looking, he knew Edgar was close behind him. Edgar hardly ever left his master unprotected, always taking his place behind and to Baldwin’s left where he could protect the knight from a sudden assault. It had been so now for more years than Baldwin wanted to remember, ever since their time together in the Knights Templar, when Edgar had been his man-at-arms, and there was no one Baldwin would have preferred to have beside him in a fight.
The light from the stars gave a silver sheen to the trodden dirt of the alley. This was a poor area, and the town would not spend good money on cobbles for the people who lived here. There would be no point when none of the residents could afford a horse, let alone a cart. Rubbish lay around: old staves from barrels piled into a mound for firewood, tatters and rags of cloth too worn and threadbare to be of use, a mess of bones and reeds from a hall, and odds and ends of leather tossed aside from one of the tanners’ works.
Edgar wrinkled his nose in elegant distaste. “It astonishes me that people can live in such squalor.”
Glancing down at something he had stepped on, Baldwin nodded. It was a dead rat. There was more scuffling ahead, from a hole under a building, and the knight irritably wondered why people didn’t destroy the creatures – they caused such damage to houses and stores, chewing through sacks of grain and ruining the valuable food saved through the summer months. They should not be left to run free, doing harm wherever they went. He was tempted to go to the hole and shove his sword in, to see how many of the vile creatures were inside.
“Master!”
Edgar’s hissed exclamation made Baldwin whirl round, and he quickly forgot the rats. Running to the two slumped bodies, he crouched by them. He frowned at the skinny, gray-clad woman, and sighed. Feeling for a pulse, he bit his lip. He could recognize her now, the poor woman who had begged alms from Sir Hector. “Who did this to you?” he murmured. “Was it another man you had begged from? Another man who wanted revenge for some imagined slight? A man who had waited for a woman to meet him, and who then took his frustration out on you? You lived in miserable poverty, and you have died in it.”
“What, sir?”
Baldwin shook himself out of his reverie and moved on to the next figure. “God’s blood! Simon, what were you doing in here? And why,” his eyes moved to the woman beside him, “were you here with her?”
15
Hugh cursed as he tripped over a loose cobble. They were carrying Simon on a ladder filched from a yard nearby, and although it made a good stretcher, it was heavy – and the supports, formed from the two halves of a tree trunk which had the rungs hammered and pegged into its flats, were sharp and uncomfortable to hold. A man carried each corner, and Baldwin strode alongside, his gaze flitting to Simon every now and again.
The woman had been left with one of Peter’s men as a guard. She was past help; and they would send others to collect her body, but Simon still breathed, and Baldwin wanted him back at Peter’s house as quickly as possible.
For his part, Hugh had become aware how much his master meant to him; he was surprised by the strength of his emotions, seeing Simon lying flat on the ladder, an arm dangling at one side.
It was not the fear of unemployment. That was a concern for any man, but Hugh knew he could make his own living, even if it meant returning to his old village and eking out a life with relations, catching rabbits and game for his food and sleeping in a barn. There was always a place for him to live. That was not what made him silent, his eyes fixed on the still form before him, trying to avoid stumbling and tripping as he devoted himself to his master’s safe delivery at the priest’s house; it was the realization that the bailiff was more of a friend than a lord. For the first time, the servant understood that without Simon his existence would lose purpose. His being revolved around Simon and Simon’s family, and without the man, there was nothing.
Just then, Edgar faltered, missing his step on a loose cobble, and made the ladder pitch. Hugh barely managed to restrain an impatient curse at the man for being so clumsy. They were all feeling the weight.
Seeing his white face, Baldwin walked over to him and patted his shoulder. “He will be all right, Hugh,” he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “He’s strong, and he’ll soon mend.”
“But what’s the matter with him?” Hugh burst out. “He’s breathing, but he won’t wake. Was he stabbed, like that woman?”
“I don’t think so. He’s unconscious, so he must have been hit by someone.”
“Who?”
Baldwin gave him a tired smile. “When we have found out who murdered Sarra, and that poor woman there tonight, I think we’ll be nearer answering that.” They were at Peter’s gate now. “Someone must have hated the poor wretch to kill her and dump her there like that… but who? Who could have hated a beggar so much?”
Simon came to wakefulness only slowly, like a child woken after too little sleep, resentful and fractious. His head felt as if it had been scraped along the ground on one side and bumped over a series of cobbles, and his neck hurt as horribly as the time when he was a boy and had been playing at jousting with a friend. He had fallen off his horse, and the sharp crackle, like lightning exploding at the base of his skull as his head was jerked back in the fall, had shortly afterward led to the same kind of sore, red-hot sensation.
For a moment he enjoyed the comfort of the bed with his eyes shut. For some reason he knew that the pleasure would not last, but he had to force his mind back to think what was wrong, and when he remembered, his eyes snapped open. The woman, lying, her son staring, and then – nothing. Someone had hit him; must have knocked him out. Who?
His anger rose steadily. Somebody had attacked him – him – a bailiff! Had dared to strike him. Whoever had done that would dare anything.
“Are you well?”
He glanced to his side, and there he saw his wife. Margaret sat with her head resting against the back of her chair. She looked exhausted. Her head felt too heavy to lift, her neck too weak to support it after spending the whole night with her husband, hoping and praying that he would recover. Everyone knew how dangerous head wounds could be. Sometimes they looked little more than slight bumps, yet the victim could suddenly begin to have fits, and then might die. Simon’s wound was only a minor scrape apparently, but he had been so deeply asleep she had wondered whether he might ever waken again.
At the first break of dawn, he had begun to mutter in his sleep, calling for her, Margaret, and then for his son. Peterkin’s name was repeated over and over again, and if she was fanciful, she might have said he sounded ever more desperate, as though he was trying to call his son back from danger – or from the dead.
Then the mutters had changed. He still used Peterkin’s name, but had started to call out: “Get away! Boy, come here. You’ll be safe here, come to me. No! Come away from her!”
