‘The moors are evil. The more I see of them, the less I like them.’ Jeanne was truly upset.
‘It is only land,’ her husband said gently. ‘And yet I admit this year has been oddly unsettling. What with the tournament, and then the vampires.’ He felt his ribs gingerly. The great wound, which had felt like his death blow, which he had received during the Oakhampton tournament, had almost healed. The black and purple bruising had faded to a violent yellowish discolouration.
‘We have seen so many deaths there this year,’ she said and shuddered.
Baldwin walked over to her and placed both arms about her body. Although she resisted momentarily, soon he was able to pull her to him, and rest his head upon hers while she nestled into his shoulder.
‘My love,’ he said tenderly, ‘don’t fear for me. I am not afraid of the moors.’
‘You don’t understand!’ she declared, pushing him away with both hands on his chest. ‘I fear that because you don’t believe in the spirit of the moors, you will leave yourself open to danger.’
‘We have talked about this before,’ he sighed, and indeed they had. His wife had been fearful before he went to investigate the murders in Sticklepath, and had tried unsuccessfully to stop him going then.
She followed him now as he walked from the room and returned to his hall, picking up his jug and sipping at the wine. ‘The bailiff feels the same way as you do,’ Baldwin mused, ‘and I confess that I cannot laugh at Simon’s reactions any more, since witnessing how disorientated I became when the mist surrounded us at Sticklepath, l can sympathise with other people when they give respect to the moors – but they are only moors, not wild animals. I cannot pretend to be afraid when I am not.’
‘Baldwin, I—’
‘My Lady, I have spoken. I shall go with the good coroner, and I shall help, so far as I am able, to solve whatever little riddle he puts before me. What is the reason for this visit, anyway?’
‘He said it was a murdered miner.’
‘There you are, then. It is likely a man killed in a knife-fight near the abbey. There is no need for you to worry. It is probably nothing more than a quarrel over a woman in the middle of Tavistock, and no need to go near the moors. After all, that far south, in Tavistock, the moors don’t start until you travel half a morning eastwards.’
Her face was a little easier on hearing his words, but she still opened her mouth to speak again.
He held up his hand. ‘I shall be very careful, and I shall not take foolish risks, my love. But if the coroner says that our good friend Abbot Robert wishes me to help, I can hardly turn him down, can I?’ He gambled a final comment, watching her carefully. ‘After all, if it weren’t for the good abbot, you and I might never have met, might we? He has given me my most treasured possession – you. If I can ever help him, I must.’
Peter walked back to the abbey, scarcely noticing the urchins begging at the street corners, the boys and girls who pointed at him and called out names. He had grown all too used to the condemnation of others since that dread attack.
Those days felt so far-off now. An evil time, it was as though after the ruination of the Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, God had decided to punish the impious. Hexham had been destroyed in 1296, and the Scots grew braver at this demonstration of their might. They were always raiding, riding ever further into England. Nor was it only the Scots. The man who tried so hard to destroy Tynemouth was the foul murderer Sir Gilbert Middleton and his ally Sir Walter Selby, two notorious English men. They and their followers, the shavaldores, were nothing more than marauders, killers who robbed and kidnapped, fearless of punishment from men or God.
It was five years ago now, in 1317 when they had committed their most barbarous, daring act. The two cardinals, John de Offa and Luca de Fieschi, had been sent to England by the Pope himself in order to negotiate a settlement between the English King and the Scottish warrior, Bruce, the man whom the Pope himself referred to as ‘him who pretended to be King of Scotland’.
Except Sir Gilbert was furious still about the way that the English King was doing nothing about the devastation being wreaked upon his lands and upon those of the barons north of York. King Edward seemed to care nothing for the north country. He merely enjoyed himself with his singing and, acting like a peasant with his hedging and ditching, and bulling his favourites at night. Pathetic, puny man that he was. He was no King of a realm such as England.
When Sir Gilbert’s cousin, Hamelin de Swinburn, was arrested for speaking sharply to the King about the abysmal state of the Northern Marches, it was no surprise that the furious Sir Gilbert chose to take the law into his own hands. He met with the cardinals and their party riding northwards from York, near to Darlington, and robbed them of their money, their goods and their horses, and although he quickly released the two cardinals to continue, more slowly, upon their way, he took Louis de Beaumont, Bishop of Durham, and his brother Henry hostage and ransomed them.
That act was their last. Sir Gilbert was entrapped by neighbours shocked by his sacrilegious behaviour; they had him fettered and sent to London in his chains. There he was condemned, and in January of 1318 he was hanged, drawn and quartered.
No one would have missed him. Certainly not Peter. After all, it was Sir Gilbert who had caused Peter’s wound a little while before
