will allow you to remain in the lodgings you have secured, but Bailiff Thorson will keep watch over all of you.”
With that, Camville strode to the back of the hall and called loudly for Eudo. When the steward appeared, the sheriff gave him an order to have some wine sent up to his private chamber and left the hall. Lady Nicolaa rose from her chair and Bascot did the same.
“You have heard my husband’s judgement,” the castellan said to Sven and Joan Grimson. “If you are wise, you will obey his command and not cause him further irritation.”
As the pair departed, the two seamen trailing behind them in a disconsolate fashion, Bascot took care to notice the manner in which each of them walked. If their story was a cover for a more nefarious purpose, they could still be guilty of the murder of the two prostitutes and the attack on Terese. A glance at Roget told the Templar that the captain was also watching all of the party, including Joan, carefully. But there was no hesitation in the steps of any. Sven paced the length of the hall without a falter in his long-legged stride, and Joan glided over the rushes on the floor of the hall with her head held high. The two sailors followed them with the swaying gait common to seamen. Whatever any of them might be guilty of, it seemed it had not been one of them that had attacked the former prostitute in the street outside Verlain’s bawdy house.
Twenty-two
Bascot and Roget decided that it was still early enough for them to make the trip to the Roulan property at Ingham. The village was situated just a little over eight miles northwest of Lincoln, a distance that would take them barely an hour on horseback. As they rode out of the bail, Roget asked Bascot what he thought of Joan Grimson’s story about the reason she and her husband had gone to Hull.
“It seems to me,” Bascot said, “that she is lying by omission. Just as we were not told all the facts in the first tale Sven gave us, there are still some details that have been left out.”
Roget snorted his agreement. “I do not believe that if they had discovered the name of the Templar that killed her brother, she would have meekly told the sheriff about him. If the knight has returned to Lincolnshire, she would have ensured he was dead before she denounced him. She is a determined woman, that one, and does not intend to be thwarted.”
Bascot nodded. The Templar remembered the besotted look on Askil’s face as Joan had courageously faced Gerard Camville’s threat of imprisonment. The steersman would do anything to please her, Bascot was sure, even commit murder.
As the pair rode out onto Ermine Street and headed north, they passed many other travellers. Some were on foot-tinkers with packs slung on their shoulders, charcoal burners carrying sacks secured by a heavy band around their forehead, and the occasional tradesman walking alone, carrying a sack of tools. There was wheeled traffic too, a few small carts and a couple of men pushing barrows, along with a small number of affluent merchants on horseback. As they exited Lincoln through Newport Arch, they found a large dray laden high with sacks of grain in front of them. The iron shod wheels on the cart must have been new, for the metal glistened in the early summer sun but, as the wagon began its journey up the dusty road, grime began to film the shiny circles and within a few moments, their brightness started to become tarnished. The rhythmic glitter of the turning wheel was hypnotic and Bascot found his attention drawn to it as they overtook the wagon and passed it.
It was not long before they came to the turnoff for Ingham. As they slowed to ride onto the track, Roget gestured to the east, where the rolling terrain stretched northeast towards the Humber estuary. “If, as Bailiff Thorson suggested, Grimson’s two seamen did come down the Ancholme in a small skiff, we are not far from where their journey would have ended at Bishopbridge.”
Bascot turned his head so his sighted eye had a better view of the landscape. Sheep were scattered over the grassland, some partially hidden by the occasional clump of trees or bushes. There were many small villages in the area, and tracks would lead from all of them to join up with the highway, including Bishopbridge. It would not have taken the seamen many hours to walk to Lincoln, just as Thorson had said.
The path to Ingham was a dusty trail that led west towards the Trent River. Urging their horses into a trot, they rode down the track and through a small village. Beyond the hamlet the road ended, its terminus the large manor house owned by the Roulan family.
The residence was a solid structure of two stories encircled by a stout fence of wooden palings. Nicolaa de la Haye had told them that after Jacques left to join the Templars, his father had died, and the eldest brother, Gilbert, had inherited the estate.
“The property mentioned in the document that Gianni was given to copy is not far from Ingham, near a village called Marton. It was part of the dower Gilbert’s mother brought to her husband on their marriage day,” Nicolaa had told them before they left. “Both Ingham and Marton are part of the demesne I inherited from my father, and held in fee, but it is the property at Ingham that brings in most of their revenue, mainly from sheep. Originally, Jacques was named as beneficiary of the Marton property in his mother’s will, but when he left to join the Templars, she changed the document and named the youngest brother, Herve, as the son that will inherit Marton after her death. Besides Gilbert and Herve, there is also a sister. I seem to recall her name is Julia.”
Nearly all of the Roulan family were inside the capacious hall of the manor house when Bascot and Roget were shown in by a manservant. The eldest brother, Gilbert, a man of about forty years of age with greying hair and weary eyes, was seated with two women at a large oak table in the middle of the room. Slumped in a chair beside an unlit fireplace was a younger man, the aquiline curve of his nose and set of his jaw enough like Gilbert’s to proclaim that he was the youngest brother, Herve. At his feet was a wine jug and in his hand a full cup. His mulish expression and slack jaw suggested he had been drinking for some time. Leaning against the far wall, alongside an open casement, was a man of an age somewhere between that of the two Roulan brothers. He, too, possessed the same beak of a nose as Gilbert and Herve, but the rest of his features were more softly cast. He stood with arms folded and a solemn expression on his countenance. The top half of his face was tanned to a copper hue, but the flesh about his mouth and chin was much paler, as though he had recently shaved off a beard. There were no servants present in the room and a faint aura of tension hung in the air, giving the impression that a heated argument had been in progress, which the arrival of Bascot and Roget had interrupted. When the servant announced the name of the visitors, Gilbert rose from his chair and came forward to greet them.
“The sheriff has sent us to ask you a few questions concerning the recent murders that have taken place in Lincoln town,” Roget told Gilbert when he enquired the reason for their presence.
A wary look came into Gilbert’s eyes, but he bade them be seated and directed the elder of the two women, who he introduced as his wife, Margaret, to bring wine for their guests. She was a few years younger than her husband and had a wan comeliness in her pale blue eyes and small shapely mouth. A few tendrils of blond hair showed at the rim of a linen coif which covered her head in a haphazard fashion, as though she had donned it hastily. Bringing cups from an open-faced cupboard at the end of the room, she poured a full measure in each and then set them before the two visitors.
The other woman, much younger and with the same dark hair and hazel eyes as Gilbert and Herve, but without the unfortunate prominence of the family nose, also rose from her seat and went to stand beside the man standing by the window. Her figure was plump, and the set of her shoulders seemed defiant.
“My sister, Julia,” Gilbert said as she moved away from the table. He then gestured to the man seated by the fireplace. “And that is Herve, my younger brother.”
“And this,” Herve proclaimed in a slurred voice and throwing his arm up and pointing to the man beside his sister, “is Savaric. He is also a relative, a half brother, a baseborn offspring of my father’s lechery, but a member of our family all the same.”
A look of disgust crossed Julia’s face. “Have another cup of wine, Herve. Perhaps it will make you incapable of speech, for which we will all be truly thankful.”
“Enough, both of you,” Gilbert said and turned to Bascot and Roget with a look of apology on his face. “I am sorry if we seem inhospitable. A private matter we were discussing has caused some dissension between us but”- here he gave a stern glance at his siblings-“it will be put aside for now.”
Returning his attention to his visitors, Gilbert said, “We have heard about the murder of two prostitutes in Lincoln. But I do not understand why you have come to ask us questions about these crimes. I can assure you that
