too credulous in his deceit.
Thirteen
At Riseholme, all of the children, even the reluctant Willi, marvelled at the comforts they were experiencing. The refurbished old barn was snug and secure, with lime-washed walls and a dirt floor that was clean and hard packed. A fire blazed in the middle of the large space, the smoke escaping through a hole in the newly thatched roof, and over the embers hung a huge cauldron filled to the brim with an appetising broth thickened with barley and root vegetables. Each child had a pallet stuffed with clean straw and, best of all, a blanket to cover them at night. Twice a day they were each given a cup of milk-a rarity that some of the children had never tasted before- and three small loaves of coarse bread to share. In their short and desperate lives, they had never before been so well fed or warm and each of them revelled in their good fortune. Even the youngest, little Annie, had stopped grizzling and her older sister, Emma, was beginning to blossom at being relieved of the little girl’s demands. The other girl, Joan, although still maintaining her near silent demeanour, now accompanied her monosyllabic responses with a tremulous smile.
After they had first arrived, the bailiff, a stern-faced man who, despite his intimidating demeanour, spoke to them kindly, had shown them around the property and told them where they were allowed to roam and where they were not. All of the buildings-a small and sturdy stone-walled manor house, a newly built barn used for storing grain and root vegetables, a large byre with a dozen milch cows, an enclosure with a few pigs and a shed where cheese was made-were out of bounds for the present, he explained. Once they had become used to their surroundings, the boys would be expected to muck out the cowshed and pigsty and the girls to tend a vegetable plot at the rear of the main building. He also told them that, when the summer came, they would help to gather apples and plums from the fruit trees in a large orchard that abutted the inner compound and assist with gathering the harvest from the fields of wheat and barley to the south. But until then, he said, and while they put some “meat on their sparse bones,” they would be expected to keep the barn in which they were living clean and tidy; their pallets were to be rolled up neatly every morning and the boys were to fetch fuel from the woodshed and tend the fire while the girls were to empty their slop bucket once a day and sweep the floor.
As the bailiff, a man named Stoddard, looked at the thin little faces of the youngsters, his heart swelled with pity. Lady Nicolaa had promised all of the Riseholme servants a bonus each Michaelmas for the extra work the children would cause but, even if that had not been so, Stoddard would have welcomed the chance to help these poor unfortunates and he knew the rest of the servants felt the same.
Now, on their third day at Riseholme, as the children rolled up their pallets and were looking forward to breaking their fast, Mark motioned to Willi to come a little aside and said, “It’s a good place here, inn’t it?”
Willi was forced to nod his head in agreement, and Mark, who felt he owed it to his new friend to dissuade him from a foolish course of action, said, “You knows as how you’d be a right silly beggar to leave and go back to Lincoln, don’t you? We’s got everything we needs here. Why go back there and be hungry and freezin’ cold again?”
Willi set his mouth in a stubborn line. “ ’Cos I’se got to go and find my da, that’s why. How will he know where I am? Only orphans is allowed to come to this place and I ain’t one, so he’ll never think to look for me here, will he?”
“But what if that murderer sees you?” Mark asked. “’Spe-cially if your da ain’t come back yet and you got no one to protect you. You could be killed stone dead like that man up on the ramparts.”
“I’ll have to take my chances,” Willi replied stoutly, but despite his brave words, the young boy was fearful. The person he had seen near the tower had looked straight at him as their glances met and was sure to know him if their paths chanced to cross again. Mark was right; it would be more sensible to stay at Riseholme, but Willi was desperate to find his father who, if he had chanced to earn a few pence, might spend it in an alehouse if Willi was not there to dissuade him. His father had not always been a tosspot. They had lived in a village not far from Lincoln until last spring when Willi’s mother had died of a fever. Up until then, his father had worked hard at his trade of thatching and they had a little cot to live in, provided by the high-ranking cleric who held the land in return for the fee of his father’s labour for two days a week. But when Willi’s mother died, his father had taken to drinking all his hard-earned pennies away in the village alehouse and had not turned up for work. When the cleric had threatened eviction if the terms of the fee were not met, Willi’s father decided he would go to look for work in Lincoln, and so they had come to the town. But thatched roofs were not, due to the town’s bylaw, in common use within the town and prospective employers had not been plentiful. On the few occasions that his father had been fortunate enough to earn a few pennies repairing thatch on small buildings such as barns or outhouses in the suburbs, the coins had been squandered in an alehouse before Willi could persuade his father to spend them on food and shelter. Finally, they had been reduced to begging in the street or lining up with other indigents for alms from the church. It had been then that his father had declared he would go back into the countryside to find work and told his son to wait in Lincoln for his return. Willi knew he had to be in the town when his father came back for him; if he was not, they might never see one another again. He would rather take the chance of being murdered than losing his da forever.
As the two boys parted company to attend to their chores, neither of them noticed that Joan, maintaining her usual silence, had crept up close to them and listened to their conversation.
It was almost midday when Stephen Wharton arrived at Lincoln castle. His horse and that of the groom who had accompanied him were flecked with foam from the hard riding they had been put to that morning. After stopping overnight in the guesthouse of an abbey a few miles north of Grantham, Wharton had decided they would start out before first light and the pair had spurred the horses hard for the remaining twenty-odd miles. Wharton was anxious to get his unpleasant errand done with.
After instructing his groom to tend to their mounts, he walked wearily up the steps of the keep’s forebuilding and, upon entering the hall, asked the servant in attendance at the door to inform Lady Petronille that he wished to speak to her urgently.
A little over an hour later, while Richard and Bascot were ensconced in Gerard Camville’s chamber discussing the paucity of information that had been obtained from re-interviewing all of the servants, there was a knock at the door and the Haye steward, Eudo, entered.
“Lady Nicolaa has sent me, Sir Richard,” he said, “with a request that you and Sir Bascot attend to her in the solar. She told me to tell you that the matter is most urgent.”
Fourteen
When Richard and the templar entered the solar they found Nicolaa, Petronille and Alinor seated at the far end of the room in the company of a man who was a stranger to both of them. He appeared to be of middle age and, by the sword he wore at his belt, was of knight’s status. On his face was an expression of apprehension. A little behind Nicolaa’s chair, Gianni sat unobtrusively on a stool, his wax tablet and stylus in his hand, glancing apprehensively at the company around him. The strained look on the countenances of the two sisters bore evidence of tension and Alinor’s delicately arched brows were drawn down in a glower. In her hand, Nicolaa held an unrolled sheet of parchment.
“This is Stephen Wharton, a friend of my brother-by-marriage,” Nicolaa said, introducing the man to her son and the Templar as they approached. “He is also the person, Richard, who recommended that your uncle Dickon give Aubrey Tercel a post in his retinue.”
She paused for a moment as the men all nodded at one another. Then, her voice taking on the determined note that Bascot knew so well, continued, “Wharton has come to tell us a very strange tale about the background of the murdered man. While there is no proof of anything he will relate, the important aspect is that Tercel believed it to be true and, in so doing, may have given someone reason to wish him dead.”
After Richard and Bascot had got over their surprise at Nicolaa’s words, they looked towards Wharton
