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
“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
