by Jason Vail
“Rather distant, actually.”
“Well, he’s got enough pennies to spare for the likes of you, though I don’t know why he’d bother, seeing as you’re probably the black sheep of the family.”
The pack leader laughed at his little jest, and the soldiers chuckled with him.
“Well, you’re right about the black sheep part. I’ve so disappointed my mother. She expected a priest and look what she got. Anyway, is his house still where it used to be on . . .” Stephen left that part hanging, hoping that the pack leader will fill the void.
He was not disappointed. The pack leader nodded. “Yeah, right there on High Street and Kid Lane where it always was.”
Stephen touched his cap. “Well, I won’t detain you any longer, seeing as you’re such busy men. Good day to you.”
To a chorus of polite “Good days,” he turned the gelding south toward Clun.
Stephen did not look forward to slipping into Clun. He had done it once before in the autumn, but he had been recognized and nearly caught by the townspeople, who knew of the hatred the earl held for him. That hatred could only have got worse, if the events in Shrewsbury were any guide. For all he knew, even Blasingame might turn him over for the reward, although Blasingame owed him the debt of his life, since Stephen had saved him from burning to death in FitzAllan’s gaol.
As he rode south, up hills and down, he closed his eyes and tried to remember the layout of the town. Prior Philip of the Saint Augustine priory across the river from Clun had drawn him a map of the town and named all its streets for his last excursion. While Stephen’s memory wasn’t that good, after some effort he was able to conjure up the drawing and even recall Philip’s words, so that he had a firm idea where Blasingame’s house could be found. Clun was shaped like a box that had been sat upon so the angles were not properly square, the main streets running on the edges of the box along the lines of the town wall, with three small lanes running north-to-south through the middle. He recalled Kid Lane quite well, since he had visited a tailor’s shop at the top end of it in the autumn. A prosperous man’s house at the bottom of Kid Lane should be easy to find without having to ask for directions.
His approach to Clun was on a road he had never traveled, so it was a bit of a surprise when he rounded a bend and there it was, the castle on its motte and the roofs of houses showing above the palisade.
The day was only half gone, and he could not just ride up and ask to be admitted. So he turned back for a short distance to be out of sight of any watchman in the castle, and climbed the hill to the east of the road, where a dense stand of trees capped the summit. He would wait there for dark.
Stephen descended the hill after the last light of dusk had faded. He could hear the bells of Clun ringing the curfew, which meant that the only people allowed on the street were the watchmen. Anyone else out after dark would be regarded as a criminal and treated like one until the appropriate bribes were paid.
He had entered the town surreptitiously the last time by climbing the wall, and he figured he would have to do the same again this time. This worried him, since the watch in peacetime tended to be lax, but with the recent hostilities, he might expect a greater chance of detection. But he saw no other way in. Certainly, he could not just go up and knock on the gate and beg admittance, assuming there still was a postern gate.
As he came close to the town, houses reared out of the dark on either side of the road. If they had been burned, a most likely prospect, they had been quickly rebuilt, a fact Stephen confirmed as some smelled of fresh paint and sawdust. It had always amazed Stephen how you could knock down people in the lower orders and they would just pick themselves up, repair the damage, and keep going, no matter how bad things had been.
The rows of houses paused at the town ditch and the wooden bridge over it. Stephen stopped to look things over. The two wooden towers that had flanked the gate were gone, and in their place was a makeshift gate and for some distance on either side, planks had hastily been thrown up to repair portions of the wall that had burned as well. No voice called out to ask his business, probably because no one was on the wall to watch for approaching dangers. A rivulet of smoke on the left dribbled into the sky, visible as a smudge against the stars: no doubt that was the hut where the watch sheltered from the cold, for despite the warm days, the nights were freezing, and nobody liked to be out in that. Perhaps the watch would not be so dutiful after all.
Stephen turned into the ditch and rode eastward along the north wall toward the spot where he had climbed the last time. Although he was not normally a creature of habit, he thought that since he had got over there the last time, it was as good a place as any do to the deed again. But then, he caught a glimpse of starlight through the palisade above. He went to investigate and found a gap in the planks where some of the boards had rotted, leaving a space just big enough for him to slip through. He was glad to find this gap, since the last time he’d scaled Clun’s wall, he’d had to stand upon Gilbert’s shoulders to reach the top.
He tied the gelding behind a nearby shrub where it should be out of sight of anyone on the top of the wall, and returned to the gap. It was a tighter fit than he thought it would be and he had to take off his sword belt to get through, but by diligent worming, he managed it.
The look of the street below had changed considerably from his last visit, but Stephen recognized the very spot. Just across the street at the top of what had to be Kid Lane was the tailor’s shop he had come to visit a few months ago in order to question a witness to murder. Only the shop was gone, leaving an empty lot behind as if it had never been there. There were other empty lots as well where there should have been houses.
He lay prone on the top of the embankment for several minutes, breathing shallowly and listening for the sounds of the watch. There were faint voices of two men talking, and those of man and a woman locked in argument not far down the street. Otherwise, the night was quiet.
The impulse just to lay there and go no farther almost rooted Stephen to the ground. It had not seemed such a risk worming through the wall, but now that he had to stand up and step into the town proper, he could hardly move. Taking a deep breath, he got up and slid down the embankment to the street. The ground rose rather sharply to the left, where a house sat on the crest, seemingly all alone until he made out the shapes of tents in the field behind it where cows or goats ordinarily should be. The ground fell to the right toward the gate so that if anyone was on guard at the gate all they had to do was step out of their little hut and there he’d be, right under their eyes.
He entered Kid Lane. He stumbled on the ridges of a deep rut and nearly fell, the noise of the scuff seeming to echo through the darkness, announcing his presence to anyone outside. He froze in place, cringing at the prospect of a challenge, but none came and he continued up the sloping lane, walking carefully so as to make as little noise as possible, alert for any hiding place in case someone came along. Kid Lane was little more than an alley running across back gardens of the burgage lots on the right, where some houses had already been rebuilt. A field lay on the left, shielded from the road by a wattle fence. Where the alley bent left at the top of the rise, there was a partly built barn, fully framed and roofed but lacking fillings between the timbers of one wall, and beside it on the downhill side there was a tent where a candle cast the silhouette of a woman as she undressed. A man in the tent said something to her. She laughed and tossed her dress aside, and for a moment the outline of her naked body could be seen. He continued down the lane, envying the man in the tent.
The lane led downhill after the barn and tent, curving gently rightward. The roof of a house built smack on the lane loomed ahead, marking an end to the field that covered the highest ground. He was almost there.
A goat bleated in the field no more than thirty feet away, followed immediately by one voice uttering a faint curse and a second telling the first voice to keep it down. There was no mistaking the furtive nature of the whispers.
The grass rustled as the two men and the goat approached the fence not ten feet from where he stood. One man clambered over the fence and the other handed the goat across to him. Apparently the goat did not appreciate being taken wherever they were going, because it squirmed so much that the fellow could not keep it in his arms, but the boys had tied a rope to its neck so that it could not run away.
“Goddamn it,” the second fellow hissed as he jumped the fence to join his companion and the goat. “I said, keep it down! You’ll wake the whole fookin’ town! Cadwick is a light sleeper. That racket will wake him!”
“I told you we should have cut its throat first,” the other man said as he struggled to control the goat, which was attempting to flee.
“Makes too much mess. We want him to think the damn thing just got out.”
At that point, the fellow interested in quiet noticed Stephen. He froze and held up his hand for the other. The pair, one on his knees clutching the goat possessively and stroking it almost like a dog to calm it down, stared at him.
“What the fook do you want?” the one not holding the goat demanded. He stepped toward Stephen aggressively and pulled a knife.
Stephen drew his sword and even in the dark it was possible to see the fellow’s eyes grow large. “What are you boys up to?” Stephen asked.
“Nothing,” the man with the knife said. “None of your business.”
“I can see that.”
“What are you up to, wandering about like this after dark?”
“None of your business. I suggest you take your goat away from here before she wakes the neighborhood and someone finds out you’ve stolen her.”
“We ain’t stealing nothing.”
“Right. Shall we ask Cadwick about that?”
The thief had no good answer for that, and while he was thinking about what to say, Stephen edged by them, the sword point still between them.
“There now,” Stephen said as he stepped backward down the lane, hoping there were no ruts or holes to trip over. Not only would that be undignified, it might also be fatal if the thief was the murdering kind, which he could well be since goat theft was a crime only a tad less serious than manslaughter. “Off you go.”
The two gathered up the goat and disappeared in the other direction.
Stephen did not linger either, and hurried away with more haste that he might otherwise have done, in case this Cadwick had been aroused by the noise and discovered his goat was missing.
At the foot of Kid Lane where it ended at the road beneath the wall, there were two houses on either corner. Stephen realized he had not asked which one belonged to Blasingame. But one of them was only half finished and the other, newly built, had a large shed behind it. On a guess that the fully built house with the shed belonged to Master Blasingame, Stephen sucked a breath to calm his rapidly beating heart, and knocked on the front door.
He had to knock for some time before there was any sound of activity within, but after a while the door cracked open and Blasingame himself asked, “What the devil do you want at this hour?”
“Hello, Reggie,” Stephen said. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought it would be rude not to pay a call.”
“Good God!” Blasingame said, widening the crack so he could stick his head more closely to Stephen’s. Satisfied that it was indeed Stephen, he grasped Stephen shirt and pulled him into the house. “Get off the street before someone sees you!”
Although it was very rude for Blasingame to tug on his shirt, Stephen made no protest because he shared Blasingame’s sentiments about the danger and was glad to be off the street.
“Are you mad?” Blasingame demanded as they stood in the dark of what had to be his shop from the smell of wool.
“I’ve been accused of that,” Stephen said. “But no. I am quite sane. Just a little desperate.”
“What are you doing here? If FitzAllan finds out . . .” Blasingame’s voice trailed off but the anxiety in his tone lingered in the air like the smell of wool.
“I need a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” Blasingame asked cautiously.
“Information.”
“Ah,” Blasingame said, somewhat relieved that apart from putting his life in danger, the visit would not cost him any money.
“Who is it, Reggie?” a woman’s voice called from the back of the house.
“No one, dear!” Blasingame called. “Go back to bed!”
But the woman did not go back to bed. She entered the room and in the light of the candle Blasingame had left on the table, Stephen saw it was his wife, her hair down and free, the white widow’s peak visible like a blaze.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming here,” Anna Blasingame said.
“I was just telling him that,” Blasingame said.
“Apparently not forcefully enough,” Anna said. “He’s still here.”
“I can’t just toss him out,” Blasingame said.
“Why not?”
“Well, I just can’t.”
“I’ll have to do it then.”
“No, we can’t yet. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for him and his fat friend, and our fortune lost. We can at least hear what he wants.”
Anna crossed her arms. “All right. What do you want?”
“He said information,” Blasingame said.
“Even that’s not cheap,” Anna said. “Hurry up, what do you want?”
Where to start? Stephen reflected, trying to formulate his questions. “There’ve been many robberies on the Shrewsbury road and a number of barn burnings to the east of it. I’ve been asked to find out who’s behind them.”
“And you think there’re connected?” Blasingame asked.
“Yes.”
“Connected with someone here?” Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
“Why?” Stephen asked.
“Because we’d know about it.”
“I doubt that someone who makes his living in robbery would be prone to spread that about among good people such as yourselves. But I was hoping that you might have noticed someone doing much better than expected in these times. Someone with wealth, with goods, with wagons of grain, that you’d not ordinarily expect them to have.”
“That’s exactly why we would know about it,” Anna said. “You can’t keep that sort of thing secret in a little town like this. Come morning, everyone on the street will know that we’ve had a visitor in the night. That’s exactly why you should be going right away.”
“Wagons of grain,” Blasingame reflected as if his wife had not spoken. “Wagons of grain, you say?”
“Yes,” Stephen answered. “The raiders burned the barns and carried off the harvests, as much as they could, anyway, and burned what they could not take.”
“Savagery,” Blasingame muttered. “Pure savagery.”
“It was,” Stephen said.
“Those poor people,” Blasingame said. “They could starve.”
“Someone else facing starvation must be behind it,” Anna said. “But we’ve seen no evidence of wagons full of grain, except for the priory. They’ve plenty of grain, and houses in Lower Clun are going up like toadstools. Why, you walk across the bridge and you’d almost never know the Welsh had burned everything. Yet all they got were the buildings, not their grain. Now the priory sells to us at exorbitant prices.”
“Yes,” Blasingame. “Perhaps you should look to the priory for help.”
“I don’t trust the prior,” Stephen said. “He betrayed me to FitzAllan last time I visited there. I am not sure he might not do so again.”
“Yes, so you said. So you said,” Blasingame ruminated, recalling how they had shared FitzAllan’s gaol together before the coming of the Welsh.
; “So there is no one around here who fits the bill?” Stephen asked again.
“No,” Blasingame said. “I’m afraid not. Although they have plenty of grain at the castle, without having to pay the prior’s prices, too.”
“Where are they getting it from?” Stephen asked.
“Frankly, I’m not really sure. The south somewhere. One of the manors in the honor, I believe.”
“Do you know which one?”
“I cannot say I paid that much attention.”
Stephen produced the ring he had found beneath the body of the girl in the ice, with its dandelion mark. “Have you ever seen the like?”
Blasingame turned the band over and over, then stared at the mark. “I’ve seen this before, yes.”
“Where?”
“Here, of course. A fellow from the south had barrels of salt with this mark upon them. Gave some to the castle, in payment of rent, I believe, and sold the rest at market.”
“Who might that have been?”
“Let me think a moment. Ah, yes. A retainer of one of the Pentre’s.”
“Pentre? Warin Pentre?”
“The very one. There are quite a few Pentres around the southern part of the honor. A bothersome, grasping family, if you ask me. Do you know him? Poor fellow. He just lost his wife.”
“You don’t happen to know where his manor lies?”
“It’s at a village called Bucknell.”
“How to I find it?”
“Take the road to Knighton. At the River Redlake — you’ll know it by the crossroads just south of the stream — take the east fork. It’s about eight miles altogether. A decent morning’s walk. I’ve made it more than once myself.”
“Thank you.” Stephen touched his hat. “Mistress Blasingame, I won’t trouble you any further.”
“I wish you hadn’t troubled us at all,” she said.
He opened the front door and stepped back into the night.