“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
