Hugh Corbett 15 - The Waxman Murders

by Paul Doherty

  At other times Adam felt a seething anger which he couldn’t express until one night, just after Michaelmas, he’d been gambling in a tavern in the Mercery. A quarrel broke out and his opponent had called Adam ‘a whoreson’. Adam couldn’t really remember what happened next; all he could recall was his opponent’s slobbering mouth in his unshaven face. The man leaned across, repeating those foul curses, those awful words about his parents, then Adam’s knife was in the man’s throat and Adam was fleeing for his life. He eventually sheltered in London, but found it difficult as he wasn’t a member of a Guild to secure any meaningful employment, so he drifted down to Queenshithe and secured passage aboard a wool ship sailing for Dordrecht. There, amongst that foreign port’s inns and shabby alehouses, he discovered his true calling. He was a natural-born seaman, a sailor. He loved the sea and studied its ways, its cruelty, the fury of the winds, the management of a ship and the organisation of its crew. At first he applied his skill with a coven of river pirates operating off the mouth of the Scheldt, but due to his cunning, ferocity and bravery soon won the attention of others and became a privateer sponsored by the powerful merchants of Hainault to sail out with letters of marque to intercept, pillage and destroy enemy ships.

  Some years ago Blackstock had bought The Waxman, selected his crew and declared war against all men, having no fear of God or his own kind. At the same time news came from England that Hubert had abruptly fled the Benedictine community at Westminster and urgently wished to meet his half-brother. One August night Blackstock took The Waxman up the River Orwell and met his brother at the deserted hermitage. They had embraced, clasped and kissed each other. Hubert had confessed that he had little time for God and certainly none for the Benedictine order. He declared that the death of his monastic calling had been due to a visit from Brocare, their father’s kinsman. Brocare had survived the massacre by fleeing, and out of shame and fear had kept himself hidden until remorse and a desire for revenge had driven him back into what he called the daylight of their lives. Brocare was full of guilt, desperate to do something to avenge the great wrongs perpetrated. No one had ever discovered who was responsible for the attack on the Blackstock manor and the bloody massacre that followed, but Brocare had his own suspicions. He had produced a list of possible suspects which he shared with Hubert, and the monk realised he had been living a fool’s life in a world where cruel rapacity was the order of the day. He and Adam agreed that the night their parents died, their own souls had also died. God had taken everything from them so they would give nothing to God. Hubert explained how he was now hired by mayors, sheriffs and bailiffs as a venator hominum, a hunter of men, tracking down outlaws, bringing them to justice and claiming the reward. He had even hunted members of the coven who had murdered their parents, though in the main, death had placed most of these beyond his reach. He confided to Adam that some had been Canterbury men, which only deepened the brothers’ hatred and contempt for that city.

  In the end, Hubert and Adam spoke little about the past but planned for the future. They agreed to meet more often. Both men realised that what had happened so many years ago outside Canterbury had scarred their lives and only vengeance could purge their anger. Taken up by the surge of life, they could do nothing but go with it. Over the succeeding months they grew even closer. Hubert would often share information with his brother, who would reciprocate by handing over plunder for Hubert to sell to the denizens of the underworld in London, Bishop’s Lynn, Bristol and Dover, where goods could be moved and sold without any questions asked . . .

  Blackstock hung grimly to the rigging ropes, straining against the sway of the ship. He glanced over his shoulder at Stonecrop, his lieutenant and manservant, a dour man who stood hunched, head and face almost hidden by his deep-cowled cloak.

  ‘You are sure of this, master?’

  Blackstock turned. Stonecrop approached, pushing back his cowl to reveal black hair closely shorn over a lean, spiteful face. Blackstock had met him in Dordrecht some years ago and saved him in a tavern brawl. Stonecrop had proved to be his man, body and soul, in peace and war. He had eyes as dead as night, black and lifeless. Hubert didn’t like him, adding that he certainly didn’t trust him. Blackstock did. He recognised himself in Stonecrop, a man who cared for nothing and no one.

  ‘I’ve told you.’ Blackstock turned away. ‘I met Hubert in Wissant; he confirmed the treasure must exist.’ He pointed through the grey, misty drizzle towards the coastline. ‘We will soon make landfall at Orwell and thread our way up to the hermitage. Hubert will be there.’

  ‘Why didn’t he come with us?’

  Blackstock laughed. ‘Hubert doesn’t like the sea. Anyway, he had other business to do, a matter between him and me, not you.’

  Stonecrop pulled his cowl back over his head and turned away whilst his master stared up at the great mast, its canvas sail furled back. Once again Blackstock looked round, making sure all was well, lookouts posted in the prow and stern vigilant for rocks.

  Now his thoughts turned to the Cloister Map; that was what its owner, the German Merchant Paulents, had called the ancient manuscript. The map had been sketched in the form of a cloister and marked an area of wasteland in Suffolk around a cluster of ancient barrows near the River Denham. According to the map, one of these barrows contained the vast treasure hoard of some barbarian king buried in a longship packed from prow to stern with gold, silver plate, precious jewels and costly armour, a king’s ransom waiting to be claimed.

  ‘A ship on land, buried near a river,’ Blackstock pondered the riddle posed by the map, ‘but out of the swing of the sea.’

  ‘What was that, master?’ Stonecrop called.

  ‘Nothing.’ Blackstock grinned to himself. There’d be time enough, he reflected, to inform Stonecrop and the rest of the crew.

  He moved as the ship swayed, buffeted by the powerful north-easterly wind which raised curtains of misty salt-edged spray. Blackstock looked up once again at the raven’s nest on the mast, then around at the men slopping water from the bulwarks. He strained as he always did to hear the music of the ship. Never mind the storm; it was the ship that mattered! Blackstock had been well taught by the skilled privateers who prowled the Narrow Seas between Dover and Calais, as well as the trade routes to the wine city of Bordeaux and further south to the ports of Spain, or even – as he could do now, if he struck north-east – the frozen ports of the Baltic. Andit de Bodleck, master and captain of The Soul in Limbo, out of Brabant, had been his principal mentor. Yes, Andit had been the best teacher, despite being captured by two royal cogs of Edward I of England, his ship sunk and the life strangled out of him on a gallows overlooking Goodwin Sands on the eve of Reek Sunday. Blackstock had heard how Bodleck had refused the ministrations of the local parson; the privateer was a self-professed pagan who made offerings to an eerie war goddess called Nenetania.

  ‘Strange old life,’ Blackstock mused aloud.

  ‘What is, master?’

  This time Blackstock thought it tactful to reply. ‘How few people, Stonecrop,’ he shouted back above the creak of the ship, ‘truly believe in priests; they’d rather be thrashed than make their confessions to them.’

  Blackstock peered towards the prow. At least five of his crew were former clerics who’d committed some crime and were now dressed in serge leggings and leather jerkins, hair and beard matted, their tonsures long gone. He wondered how many of them, if captured, would plead benefit of clergy. Would Hubert do that? But of course, such dangerous living was going to end once they found that treasure ship and the precious hoard it contained. At first Hubert had been sceptical, but Blackstock had insisted that if a high-ranking Hanseatic merchant like Paulents and Sir Walter Castledene, merchant prince and knight, believed in it, there must be some truth to the story. Then, by mere chance, Hubert had been hunting a goldsmith out of Bishop’s Lynn, a collector of books and manuscripts. The man had killed a priest in a tavern brawl and been put to the horn as ultegatum – beyond the law. Hubert had
eventually tracked the felon down and captured him in the small village of East Stoke on the River Trent near Newark in Nottinghamshire. He had bound the man’s hands, tied his legs beneath his horse and begun the journey back to Bishop’s Lynn. On the way the two men struck up a friendship. Hubert talked about a great treasure ship buried somewhere in Suffolk, and to his astonishment the goldsmith said he’d heard similar rumours and legends. He offered Hubert a manuscript on condition that he cut his bonds and let him go, and eventually Hubert agreed. They slipped by night into Bishop’s Lynn and the goldsmith returned stealthily to his house. They’d broken down the boards, forced the shutters, snapped the sheriff’s seals and opened a coffer of manuscripts. The goldsmith had collected other possessions then left. In a tavern the following morning, he’d handed a piece of parchment over to Hubert, who quickly realised that this extract from an English chronicle did indeed refer to a treasure hoard buried somewhere in Suffolk. He released the goldsmith, though much good it did the fellow, as he was later taken by the sheriff’s comitatus and hanged out of hand. Meanwhile Hubert used the manuscript to reflect on the Cloister Map and eventually concluded it would lead them exactly to where the treasure hoard was buried.

  Blackstock had kept such information, as well as the map, to himself. He’d not even shared it with the villainous Canterbury merchant Sir Rauf Decontet, one of his manucaptors, who’d advanced some of the money for him to buy The Waxman and who still took a share of whatever plunder he seized. Blackstock licked his lips. In fact he’d kept a lot back from Decontet. One day he and Hubert would settle their final account with that miserly rogue. Most importantly, the two brothers had made a compact that once they had the treasure there’d be no more hunting by land and sea. They would quietly disappear and re-emerge in some other town, perhaps some other country, as prosperous wool merchants. No more filthy bilges, dirty taverns, vermin-infested alehouses; no more water or wine from clay-lined tubs or hard bread alive with weevils or sea biscuit which stank of rat urine.

  ‘Land, land to the west!’

  Blackstock whirled around. He could make out the faint outlines of cliffs and hills before the mist closed again. He smiled and fingered the charm, a gargoyle, an imp with one leg crossed over the other, nailed to the mast. Soon they would make landfall.

  ‘Master! Master!’

  Blackstock stared up as the horn wailed the alarm from the raven’s nest above him.

  ‘What do you see?’ he called.

  The ship felt silent. No slap of bare feet against the sea-salted deck; no timber creaking or waves crashing. Some demon cloaked in the mist seemed to trail its fingers along Blackstock’s flesh.

  ‘What is it?’ he bellowed.

  ‘Ship to the north-east, an armed cog.’

  ‘What device?’

  ‘I cannot see.’

  ‘Damnation to you!’ Blackstock shouted back.

  Stonecrop needed no second bidding. Ram’s horn already to his lips, he blew three wailing blasts and the crew scrambled for weapons: bows, quivers, long pikes, swords, daggers and shields, whilst small pots of burning charcoal were brought up from below. Those who had them donned helmets, hauberks and other pieces of armour. Blackstock hurried up into the prow and stared through the mist boiling above the grim grey sea. Some distance away, sails billowing, a war cog was using the easterly wind to bear down on them. It was a ship very like his own, though slightly bigger, with raised stern and jutting poop. Again the horn wailed from the raven’s nest.

  ‘Master, south-east another ship.’

  Blackstock could hardly believe it. He went down the slippery steps from the prow and slithered across the deck, pushing and shoving his crew aside, up into the stern where the rudder men fought to keep the ship on a straight course. By the face of Lucca! Blackstock tried to quell his surge of fear. Another ship was heading out of the mist like an arrow. A cog of war, surely? Merchantmen would not be so bold. A king’s ship perhaps, but why now, on a freezing October day? They were here deliberately, they’d come to trap him! They must have left the mouth of the Thames and stood far out to sea, knowing the planned time and date of his landfall at Orwell. He had been betrayed!

  Blackstock screamed at Stonecrop to bring his war belt. He strapped this on and gazed wildly around. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisaged this, being trapped by two cogs of war, fully armed, against the English coast! The east wind was against him; it would be futile to try and slip between his opponents. He could run for land, beach his ship on the rocks, but what then? This had all been well plotted. The local sheriff and his comitatus would be waiting. Blackstock realised he had no choice but to fight.

  ‘Master!’ the lookout shouted. ‘The first one to the north is The Segreant; its pennant shows a green griffin rampant.’

  Blackstock clawed his face. Paulents! That powerful merchant of the Hanseatic league had decided to take his revenge.

  ‘And the other?’ Blackstock shouted back, though he already knew the answer.

  ‘The Caltrop,’ the lookout shouted back. ‘It flies the silver wyvern.’

  Blackstock staggered to the taffrail and held it; staring down at the swelling sea, he felt sick. Von Paulents the German and Castledene the Canterbury merchant, the Kentish knight with fingers in every pie cooked in England, had plotted to trap him.

  ‘They are flying the Beaussons,’ Stonecrop yelled.

  Blackstock, peering through the haze, could now see both ships clearly as they closed, sails billowing, poop and stern crammed with fighting men. From the masts of both cogs floated blood-red ribbons, a sign that it would be a fight to the death, no quarter given, no terms, no mercy offered.

  Throughout that grim grey afternoon, Blackstock used every trick, every device he knew, but it was futile. The two ships were intent on a fight à l’outrance, to the death. Blackstock was beside himself with fury; it clouded his mind and dimmed his wits. He had certainly been betrayed, but by whom? Somebody on board? His brother? Had Hubert been taken, had he been arrested and tortured? The pursuers closed mid-afternoon, eager to bring their prey to battle before darkness fell. Blackstock’s only hope vanished. Despite rallying his crew, he knew it would be a futile fight. He swiftly clattered down to his small, narrow cabin to collect his armour before being summoned back by the cries of Stonecrop. The Segreant was now approaching rapidly, sails furled; it was trying to swing alongside. The Caltrop was still some way off. Blackstock donned his mailed hauberk and his helmet with its broad noseguard. He drew both sword and dagger, steadying himself against the sway of the ship. All around him massed his crew, attired in the most grotesque collection of rusty armour and animal pelts, the heads of dogs, wolves, foxes and bears still attached to them.

  The Segreant approached, turning slightly under the watchful eye of its rudder men; Blackstock realised these must be skilled seamen. The cog was broad-bellied but swift, and slightly higher than his; the men on board were dressed in dark brown or Lincoln green. Blackstock suppressed a shiver of fear as he glimpsed longbowmen amongst the enemy; Paulents must have the support of royal troops. Blackstock turned. The Caltrop was doing a broad sweep to pass The Waxman’s stern and approach from the other side. Something was wrong! Castledene was taking his time. The Segreant was closer. Blackstock stared across. The enemy were all hooded and masked; they looked like a horde of sombre, ghostly monks. Why were they wearing those masks across their faces? Then he saw one of the enemy urinating on to a piece of cloth before putting it over his face. Immediately he recalled what old Dieter had told him, about how the great privateer Eustace had been captured and defeated during the minority of the present king’s father. Blackstock gazed wildly around.

  ‘Lime!’ he screamed. ‘Lime!’

  Already the archers on The Segreant were leaning back, yew bows bent, yard-long shafts notched. They loosed and the arrows fell like a deadly rain amongst The Waxman’s crew; some of these staggered back or twirled round as the goose-quilled shafts thudded into face, neck and ches
t. Blackstock ran forward, turning his face away. Too late: men-at-arms on The Segreant now released small sacks of lime. They’d taken careful note of the wind direction and the powder flowed across to sting the eyes and clog the mouths of The Waxman’s crew. The lime caused chaos. More arrows fell. The Segreant drew alongside, crashing into The Waxman, its men pouring across. Blackstock, eyes sore, mouth burning, ran to the other side as The Caltrop closed the trap, its captain using the powerful surging tide to come alongside, shattering the side rails of the enemy ship. Boards were lowered. Men-at-arms and archers poured across from both sides. The deck of The Waxman soon ran with blood from the vicious mêlée of hand-to-hand fighting with club, mace and dagger which ensued. The enemy, screaming and shouting, pushed Blackstock and the surviving members of his crew back towards the stern. Blackstock, standing on the top steps, stared down at the enemy pressing close. Paulents was there, small and balding, his smooth round face wreathed in smiles as if already savouring his triumph. Beside him was Castledene, in full armour except for a helmet, his chest covered in the livery of a silver wyvern couchant against a green background. The merchant prince’s sallow, pointed face beneath a mop of wiry grey hair was splattered with blood. He was already directing his men to finish off the enemy wounded with a swift thrust across the throat with a misericord dagger.

  Blackstock watched all this as he and what remained of his crew were forced back up on to the stern castle. At last the fight petered out. The Waxman’s crew were exhausted; eyes streaming, their skin blighted by the lime, they threw down their weapons and were dragged away. Blackstock, armed with sword and dagger, remained alone on the deck of the stern castle. He glanced around. Both rudder men were dead, arrows deep in neck, chest and face. Castledene and Paulents approached, the German slipping on the blood-soaked deck. Castledene shouted at his own men to sluice the lime from the boards. He came to the bottom of the steps and glared up.