“You must know, Richard, that after this night, I can offer you no further help. If you stay—if you agitate—they will capture and kill you, be assured. And they are ruthless. For the sake of your children, go back to France. I will see that they do not want. You have my oath upon it.”
“And Arabella... and the babe. They need your protection too.”
“And they shall have it. Fear not.”
I managed a smile. “I will not tell you my plans, brother. It would be unfair to hazard you so. You are free to believe what you wish as to my destination. And, one last request... I have need of a blade, a dagger.”
He swore under his breath, looked to give an objection, but then turned and walked to his cupboard. He came back holding a weapon more suited to a surgeon—or an assassin.
“Here. A Venetian whore’s toothpick. I would tell you to not to be rash with it but that would be a waste of breath.”
I took the stiletto from him and placed it in my girdle where my lost Scots dirk had been secreted.
“Richard, I beg you to think again,” he said. “Stirring it all up will only serve to push us over the abyss. Go back while you can.”
I pulled out a leather purse with the coin I had stolen the previous night. “Take this,” I told him, throwing it on the table. “Consider it blood money... Give it to the grammar school. For Thomas.”
“If this is Israel Fludd’s money, Richard, I cannot take it.”
“Sir Richard, brother.” I watched his eyebrows lift and I nodded. “Aye, I am still a king’s man. God protect you and the family.”
And I was gone.
Chapter Seven
I HAD MORE strange and vivid dreams that night at the inn in Plympton. The kind of dreams that roll around your skull long after waking, daring you to think it was something real. In the first, Israel Fludd stood before me, his long hair matted black with dried blood. He was handing me back my Scottish dirk as casually as a passerby would hand you back the hat blown off your head. I took the dirk from him and saw that the blade had my name etched the full of its length in elegant script. That vision alone brought me to wakefulness, covered in sweat.
The second was stranger still. I was back in Germany, sitting in the gypsy camp I had wandered into as a very young and very foolish soldier. And Anya, Anya the black-maned, blue-eyed seeress, was with me again. Never the hag I had told Maggie she was, Anya in rags had been more beauteous than any woman at the French court. It was she who had made me a gift of the talisman I had worn these past twenty-five years. But now, in this dream, she was handing me something different. It was the silver ring. The curious ring with the five-pointed star that I had taken from Israel Fludd. Yet her words to me were the same as spoken all those years ago in the deep of the forest.
“Wear it upon your person always and it will keep you from harm...”
And as I had taken it from her soft, browned hand, I was once again jolted to wakefulness. Out of my rack and rigged at dawn, I soon found that the quest for vengeance had begun sooner than I had expected—or was ready for. The landlord at the inn told me that the hand of Major Gideon Fludd had spread out to cover the town like the angel of the Lord against the Egyptians. The militia was rounding up every wastrel they laid eyes on between Plymouth and the Dartmoor—vagrants, peddlers, sturdy beggars—every man jack who ought to be doing honest labour. And, as some farmer had told him, word was that you could hear the screams of the wretches in the old stone gaol in town. Fludd was determined to find who had murdered his brother and if a hot iron would hasten the finding of the truth, then so be it.
I paid up my bill, slung my satchel and retrieved my mount from the stable. It would be a long ride to Exeter with every chance of being stopped and interrogated by the army.
Yet my luck held all that day, past Ivybridge and up to where the Exeter Road skirted the moorland. The sun had been warm comfort most of the day, but now that it was late in the afternoon, the wind picked up off the Dartmoor and low cloud rolled in. I could feel the chill settle down fast, blowing down my neck, even as the sun sunk low, obscured by grey mist. The road began to narrow and I was soon very near the town of Brent. I could just see a church tower in the distance and ahead of me, crossing my path, lay the river Avon. All along the bank, the oak and ash grew up thick and tall, the never ending winds of the moorland bending and twisting their branches into tortured forms made more visible in the barrenness of late winter.
I was now quite alone upon the road. Perhaps it was because I was tired, but I failed to look into the wood that lay either side as I approached the span. Before I saw anything, I felt the horse flinch beneath me. Looking to my left, I glimpsed a figure bounding from the trees close by, arms outstretched. Before I could kick the poor beast forward, the man had grasped the bridle to stop me. And he was aiming a long cavalryman’s pistol with his other hand, centred on my chest.
I raised my hands and contemplated the brigand. He wore countryman’s clothes and a battered hat and his face was nearly full hidden by a white cloth he had tied about his neck, leaving only his eyes visible. I slowly dismounted and spread my hands out to either side. With the muzzle barely a foot from me, he could have blown a fist-sized hole through me with no chance of a miss.
“Your purse! Give it over.”
I reached up to my belt and began to unfasten the clasp that held it, all the while watching his eyes, bulging with the excitement of his capture. “There’s little in it for you, sirrah,” I said to him, softly.
“That’ll be for me to decide, Fellow Creature. Even so, your horse will make up for the lack of coin, won’t it?”
I hesitated, and then I closed the catch on my purse. “Billy? Billy Chard?”
The man said nothing, but his head tilted to the side, like a blackbird contemplating a crust of bread as he puzzled at my ability to pierce his disguise. I then saw that the hammer of his pistol was lying already down upon the wheel—spent. The trigger had been pulled some time before, loaded or not. This the buffle-head had failed to notice in his eagerness to rob me. I reached up and gripped the barrel with my right hand and stepped forward and clouted him with my left. He quick enough let go and clapped a hand to his smarting ear, much too surprised to do all else. I yanked down his mask and looked into the face of my drinking companion from the Bell and Tun.
“Beg your pardon, Mister Eff, sir! I had no blessed idea that it were you, I swear to the Lord!”
I held him by his jerkin and shirt, the pistol poised to pummel his brains if he tried to fight.
“You followed me up from Plymouth,” I said, shaking him. “Then you rode ahead to take me here at the narrows!”
“Never, sir, I swear it!” He stood and pleaded, more embarrassed than eager for escape. “I’ve been in the wood there for hours—no horse—waiting on a lone traveller who looked to have a bit of money. It was God’s will that brought us together!”
“And for all your godly words, you’re nothing but a highwayman.” I lowered the pistol butt, disgusted, but also amazed that we had indeed crossed paths again.
“There is no such thing as sin in the eyes of God. We are all in His image,” said Billy, somewhat meekly.
I let go of his shirt and grasped the reins of my horse. “A neat argument, sir, and one you have told me before. But I’m sure the magistrate would be willing to dispute it on several points of the law.”
“You’re going to turn me over?” His flat voice said he was resigned to it already.
I looked him in the eye. He had suffered a hard few years of late and it showed upon him, from his scrofulous skin to his scrawny neck. He might be a poor recruit but I had to begin building the king’s army sometime. Besides, he had shouldered a pike once and that alone made him brethren.
“No. I’ll not turn you over to face the assizes—or the noose. I need a companion on my travels and you’re in need of a legal vocation. What do you say, Billy Chard?”
He blinked a few times. “Are you in earnest—or
in drink, Mister Eff?
“Just don’t you run off on me now, and I shall make it worth all our whiles. If you leg it, I promise you I shall swear out a warrant.”
He nodded his agreement. “I give you my word, sir,” he said, the snot running down his prominent upper lip.
“Then let’s get us to Brent town to make our supper. I’ll tell you what I need of you and you can tell me what you know about King Jesus and the end of the world.”
The light was failing fast but I could see his brow crease. “You don’t follow those Fifth Monarchy folk? What do you want from them?”
I shoved the hand-cannon under the satchel on the cruppers and then turned Billy around to face the road as I tugged the mare to follow us. “No, I don’t follow them but I am curious to know more. If it will set your heart at ease, I think I can say that I have more sympathy for the Ranting creed. What was it you call yourselves again? ‘My one flesh’?”
Billy Chard looked back over his shoulder and flashed a grin at me. “Aye, that be it, Fellow Creature!”
We were soon halfway across the old stone bridge, the sound of the river tumbling furiously below. Suddenly, as if someone had laid a cold blade on my back, I felt the urge to look behind me, back down the long road. In the grey gloom and sheep’s wool mist that floated past the highway, pooling into the ditch on either side, I saw a black creature standing at the road edge, though still some distance away. It was a big shaggy cur the size of a pony, the largest dog I had ever seen. And it stood there, unnaturally stiff, gazing at Billy and me.
“What do you see down there upon the road?” I said.
Billy stopped, looked back, and then looked over to me. “I see nothing but the fog settling down.”
And then I turned and looked again. The black dog was gone.
“We must find an inn before it gets too dark,” I told him quietly. And Billy looked at me queerly, confounded at my strange and sudden unease. Old memories were stirring again in me. The memories of a young soldier once lost in a great, dark forest in the German lands.
BILLY CHARD WAS a Dorsetman, born and bred. As we wolfed down our supper at an inn on the edge of Brent, he told me of his sorry misadventures in the late war and what followed after.
He had dodged a musket ball or two in the Parliamentary forces and had his helm knocked off his head more than a few times. But after Cromwell’s victory at Worcester, he had wandered off, hungry and without pay, working as a farmhand or drover where he could. And then, he joined a Ranter group that met near Saltash until they were finally sent packing by the Puritans a year later.
“They called us godless men, they did,” said Billy, loudly scraping his spoon on the last morsels of his bowl. “But those of our creed make a damn sight more sense of the Lord’s word than most of those army preachers, the sods.” He shook his head. “Why did I bother to trail a pike? For what good? We’re no longer free men, Mister Eff.”
“Billy, I told you I need a travelling companion, someone to watch my back for me,” I said.
“Oh, understood, sir,” he said, breaking into a grin. “These roads ain’t safe for no man.” He then squinted and leaned towards me over the trestle top. “And what was that trade of yours again, Mister Eff?”
“I’m a wool merchant, bound for Exeter to meet with some other men of business. I could use your help along the way and while I’m there.” I pushed two silver half-crowns across the table. “There’s five shillings to see you right for a time. There’ll be more if you keep the bargain—and if you keep thievery out of your plans.”
He gawped a moment, then palmed the coins. “Aye, it’s all the same to me so long as you’ll not be asking anything that breaks the law of the kingdom,” he said, all mock solemn. And then he let out a short laugh and reached for his beer. “So I’ll be an assistant of sorts to you, the fine foreign merchant gentleman? You did say you was foreign, didn’t you?”
I suppose my stage accent was wearing thin. Before long he would no doubt guess the truth. “And you can tell me about these strange countrymen of yours who preach of the end of the world and the coming of the saints.”
Billy chuckled and spoke into his tankard. “For another shilling or two, Mister Eff, I’ll tell you which hand they wipe their arses with!”
“There’s more,” I said. “I will compel no man to be my companion against his will. The truth is, you’re free to go this night if you wish. The choice is yours.”
“Very good, sir. Here’s to goodly commerce in Exeter... and for you taking on an old soldier the likes of me.”
We bedded down in the ground floor of the clapperboard ell of the tavern, the last free room. The wind blew in everywhere between the boards of the little place. The clay-tiled floor was strewn with fresh straw but the stink of the last occupant still lingered. There were two low bedsteads with dubious linen and I flung myself into one, fully clothed. Billy did the same and after a few of his stories about his wandering life I drifted off with a warm head full of ale and cider.
I was awake as soon as I felt the hand upon my arm. In one movement I clasped the thin iron grip of the stiletto at my side and thrust it out in front of me at the crouching figure. In the moonlight, I could see Billy’s pale terrified face and I checked my blow.
“By Jesus, Mister Eff!” he whispered, pulling back. “It ain’t me! Look out the window. There’s a great beast in the yard just a-staring at us as cold as hell.”
I approached the large, rotting casement and looked out into the courtyard of the tavern, the moonlight illuminating all with a crisp blue tinge. It was standing several paces from the window, and by God, its head was as high as the sill. It was the same black dog I had seen earlier on the edge of the road. But now, this close, I could see it was something more. Its eyes were monstrous huge, like those of a frog, and totally unblinking as if they were painted on its skull. But it stood unmoving as if frozen to the ground, upright as a post, steam pouring out of its long muzzle, dew glistening on its shaggy fur.
“It ain’t goddamn natural,” said Billy. “It be Old Shuck or nothing else, I swear it.”
When I realised that it was watching me through the glass, I felt the hairs rise up on my nape. And then it took a pace forward, its great maw now grinning bared fangs. I heard Billy behind me shuffling further back into the room and I knew that if this fell creature leapt forward that it might well take the whole window and rotten frame with it into us. And without realising it, my feet too had moved me backwards. My left hand still clutched the stiletto—nothing more than a pinprick to this black thing should it lunge—but my right hand I placed upon my chest and felt the silver locket of my talisman. Then, the memory of that dream flew into my head. I plucked the ring from my pocket, the large, crudely fashioned silver signet in my balled fist. A man will clutch at any foolish charm in distress, but somehow I felt compelled to seize Israel Fludd’s ring, not knowing whether it be for good or ill. The beast outside was even closer now and I watched in horror and amazement as the window panes began growing sharp fingers of frost. They started at each corner of the window and began reaching towards the centre, crackling loudly as they splayed inwards.
And even as Billy swore a stream of oaths, I raised the ring up to the window and the black dog. I gripped it twixt my thumb and forefinger, the seal pointing outwards, and touched the metal to the glass. I could not take my eyes from the creature’s huge head, its gaping mouth, its lower jaw curving upwards into a hideous crooked smile. My legs shook as I stood my ground.
Billy finally yelled, “We’ve got to get out of here!” and made for the door.
Yet even as those words left his mouth, the hellhound stopped dead in its tracks, closed its jaws, and in one prodigious leap bounded across the courtyard and out of sight. Billy had by now tripped over the bedstead and lay sprawled on the floor, so terrified that his curses poured forth in a high-pitched squeal. I fell back away from the window, paused a moment in disbelief, and then sat down hard upon the bedstead op
posite, my heart thumping against my ribs so hard my ears rang. “It’s gone,” I breathed. “It’s gone.”
Fludd’s ring had somehow settled up to the knuckle of my forefinger. I pushed it down firmly and seated it upon my hand. I sat staring out the window, watching as the frost fingers slowly receded. At some point I became aware that Billy had risen from out of the straw and seated himself on the other bedstead, silent as a monk. Finally, he managed to find his voice again.
“We told tales as boys, but by God’s precious blood I never... not in all my days, never did I see such a thing with my own eyes. That creature was straight from the Pit, I swear it.”
I kept watching the courtyard, still bathed in moonlight. “I confess that I’m in agreement with you, Billy Chard.”
Neither of us said anything else for the next few hours. The moon sank away, its light dying into pitch, and after a while more, the first glimmer of day appeared, purple in the east. I sat the whole of that night, my blade in one hand, the thumb on my right worrying the strange ring I now wore.
It was Billy who broke the silence. “What are you running from, Mister Eff?”
I didn’t give him an answer.
“Come on, now. I’m no clodpoll and I’ve bought only about half your story since we met. Been a soldier long enough to know when a man is running from something.”
I smiled and dropped my stiff and aching shoulders. “Aye Billy, you’ve foxed me. I was once a soldier too. For a long, long time. And my eyes have seen a fair few terrible sights, like you. And I’ve seen things no man should see. Strange, unnatural things.”
Billy made a grumbling noise in his throat and shook his head. “Here now, Mister Eff, when I signed on with you I didn’t expect to be chased by a beast like that one. That... that fucker was no farm dog, I tell you... I’m in sore need of some truth, Fellow Creature.”
I nodded. “I’ll tell you this. I killed a man the other day—in my own defence mind you—but I think this black dog is seeking revenge upon me. How it’s found me I know not.”
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