The Turn of Midnight

by Minette Walters

  Most of what Ian knew of his father’s journey home with Sir Richard had come from his mother. She gave him answers in return for a promise that he wouldn’t pester Gyles for explanations. Better he be allowed to forget, she said, than relive his anguish in nightmares. Yet it was a strangely misdirected anguish. For reasons Ian didn’t understand, his father felt he should have died along with his companions and started out of sleep with shouts against God’s injustice. Sometimes, he muttered prayers for the men Sir Richard had chosen to forsake, feverish but still alive, inside his wagon on a woodland track.

  There was no honour in Sir Richard. He had discarded his men with as little care as he took the pestilence into Pedle Hinton. His intent was to secure a bed for the night, but he feared the doors being closed to him if there was any suspicion he’d been in contact with the pestilence. By then, just three of his retinue of eleven remained—his captain of arms, his bailiff and Gyles—and he ordered them to say they’d come from Develish, where all were well. To his host, he feigned good health, blaming the flush of fever in his cheeks on a surfeit of ale, and upon learning that forty of My Lord’s field serfs were already dead, had shamelessly requested My Lord to bar the rest from his house for fear they would pass the sickness to his guest.

  Martha said it was right and just that God had condemned so venal a man to die. Not content with infecting Pedle Hinton, he had ordered Gyles to drive the wagon, the dying soldiers and surplus horses to Develish, threatening him with a flogging if he failed. She had kinder words for the captain of arms and bailiff, who were as feverish as their master the next morning. Too weak to do anything but support Sir Richard in his saddle, they had begged Gyles’s pardon for leaving him to manage such an impossible task alone. There was no way of turning a heavily laden wagon in the narrow confines of a woodland track without assistance.

  Gyles wouldn’t have done it even if he’d been able; he’d rather be flogged for disobedience than take a killing disease to Develish. He told Martha of his relief to find the five soldiers dead, for it was easier to turn his back on corpses than it would have been to watch men suffer in the stinking Hell the vehicle had become. The stench of suppurating boils and putrid blood, made worse by the heat of the sun, had attracted blowflies, and the horses hobbled around it were near driven mad by their bites and stings. He had cut the horses free to find water and pasture. There was no better way to excuse his failure to drive a pestilence-ridden vehicle to Develish than to lack the means to pull it.

  His mind and flesh recoiled against climbing amongst the stiffening bodies to remove Lady Eleanor’s dowry, but he baulked at allowing thieves to enrich themselves at Develish’s expense. He gave the dead what dignity he could by closing their eyes and folding their hands, and took some comfort from the peacefulness of their faces. Had the chest been lighter and more manageable, he might have been tempted to carry it home across his saddle, but he was as wary of displaying it too openly along the highway as leaving it in the wagon. Instead, certain he couldn’t escape the pestilence himself, he chose to hide it in the woodland, pledging himself to live long enough to pass the secret of where he’d left it to Lady Anne, the one person he trusted to use Develish’s wealth to benefit her people before herself.

  Martha believed it was this unselfishness that had persuaded God to spare Gyles. For the same reason, she had faith that God would have kept the gold hidden from thieves. Neither conviction was shared by Thaddeus, who rarely saw God’s hand in anything, and yet he continued on, seemingly oblivious to the cold and the wet. His obstinacy made sense when they reached the river. On either side the banks were pushing into the stream as plants and rushes bent under a weight of snow, causing the waters to narrow and run fast across the slabs of stone that had been laid on the bed to provide secure footing to wheeled vehicles. The crossing looked dangerous now and would surely be impassable by the morning.

  Thaddeus chose to dismount and wade through the freezing flow ahead of his horses, advising his companions to do the same. ‘You’ll not get far if your animal slips on the stones,’ he said, removing his boots. ‘Better a few moments of discomfort than a mount with a broken leg.’

  ‘A few moments?’ Ian echoed sarcastically, sliding from his saddle and tugging at his own boots. ‘We’ve been in discomfort for hours.’

  ‘Not for much longer. The track we’re looking for is ahead on the left.’

  ‘Assuming this is Pedle Hinton.’

  ‘Assuming that,’ Thaddeus agreed dispassionately as he felt for safe passage with bare feet.

  They located Sir Richard’s covered wagon some two hundred paces inside the forest, half drawn into the trees at the edge of the track. Thaddeus halted twenty yards short of it, and motioned to the others to do the same. He was as surprised as the boys to see it there, wondering why the Pedle Hinton serfs hadn’t made use of it long since. There was enough oak in the structure to make a multitude of stools.

  ‘Could the dead soldiers have frightened them off?’ said Edmund.

  Thaddeus shook his head. ‘They’d buried forty of their own already, and all in the same state. Why cavil at another five? It speaks more to the wagon never being found than it does to fear of corpses.’

  Olyver glanced back down the track. ‘It’s not that far from the demesne. Women and children out looking for firewood couldn’t have missed it.’

  ‘If they were well enough,’ answered Thaddeus thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps the village was worse afflicted than Gyles realised. The sick wouldn’t have had the strength to walk a mile.’

  He examined the woodland to the left. The trees were largely ash and oak, and, though leafless, their tight canopies offered good protection from the falling snow. He gestured towards a high-domed, wide-branched oak which had a sizeable stretch of dry ground beneath it. ‘We’ll camp there tonight,’ he said, easing himself from Killer’s back and lifting off the leather saddlebags which had been crafted for him in Develish. He tossed them into the shelter of a low-growing hazel then unbuckled the girth and divested the animal of its saddle and harness. ‘You have spare clothes in your own bags,’ he told the boys as he looped a rope halter about the horse’s neck and muzzle before stripping the pack pony of its burdens. ‘Take off anything wet and dress in dry tunics and britches before you go looking for firewood. You’ll warm up soon enough if you put some effort into your search.’

  Olyver lowered his own saddle beside Thaddeus’s and replaced the reins with a halter. ‘What will you be doing?’

  Thaddeus waited while the others did the same and then took charge of the halters. ‘Feeding and watering these poor brutes. There was meadowland to the south of the river. I’ll hobble them there.’

  They watched him walk the horses down the track.

  ‘Doesn’t he feel the cold?’ asked Edmund.

  ‘He shuts his mind to it,’ said Ian. ‘He says a person can withstand anything if he forgets how much he’s hurting and applies himself to what he has to do.’

  They put the doctrine to the test in the collection of firewood, but the promised warmth never came. The frosts of winter had permeated the forest floor and nothing was dry enough to take a flame, not even leaves. The twins began paring away the damp outer layers of fallen branches to reach the unsaturated wood inside, but Edmund said they’d have more success if they looked in the wagon. Sir Richard had never travelled anywhere without chests of clothes, barrels of brandy and hessian sacks full of sweetmeats. All and any would be dry as long as they were still there.

  Ian couldn’t fault his logic. The wheels had kept the base from sucking water from the ground and the leather canopy had prevented rain and snow coming in from above. Nevertheless . . . ‘Have you forgotten what’s in there and how they died?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ll be bones by now.’

  ‘With fleas in their clothes.’

  ‘Not to mention rats,’ murmured Olyver. ‘There could be a whole colony of them feasting on Sir Richard’s sweetmeats.’

  Edmund
selected a six-foot long branch from the stack of firewood and trimmed it to form a sharp-pointed stave. ‘There’s no harm looking if we keep our distance. Most of the studs holding the roof to the sill seem to have rotted.’

  He approached the side of the wagon and used the pointed end of the stave to jab at the head of a carved wooden peg to the left of the opening flap. Protruding some two inches clear of the side, the peg served the double purpose of anchoring the main canopy to the sill and providing a knob for the loop of rope that fastened the flap closed. He remembered his father saying that Sir Richard would come to regret not choosing English oak for his embossed dowels but, even so, he was surprised at how few strikes were needed to knock the head from its shaft.

  Ian joined him a few moments later with a stave of his own, and between them they fractured enough of the studs to prise the canopy away from the side of the wagon. When the vehicle had been in constant use the wax coating which had kept the leather stiff was regularly renewed but, after being at the mercy of the elements for more than half a year, the fabric had become soft and pliable. Together, Edmund and Ian hooked their staves beneath the edges and flipped the cover up and over the wooden hoops that formed the supports.

  ‘Mary Mother of God!’ said Peter in disgust, staring at the tangle of half-chewed bones and ripped and stained livery on the floor. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Scavengers,’ said Edmund, pointing to a wide, splintered gap at the base of the far wall. ‘Probably badgers . . . they’re the only ones strong enough to claw through wood.’ He turned to the stack of boxes and barrels at the front, raising his stave to point at a smaller cask atop the pile. ‘That looks like a brandy keg. Will it start our fire?’

  ‘Should do,’ said Joshua. ‘You can set fire to brandy. My mother saw it done in the kitchen once.’

  ‘We’ll have to hook it out,’ said Olyver, kicking the stack of firewood apart and choosing a branch with a strong lateral spur at one end. He positioned the spur behind the keg and flicked it to the ground, but the ease with which he did it and the way it bounced told them it was empty. Joshua said it was probably for the best, since his mother had described the brandy flames as blue and unnatural. He took the branch from Olyver and skimmed a rag-topped torch some twenty paces clear of the wagon.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked the others, walking across to examine it. ‘Is it safe to touch? Do you see any fleas? Will it light?’

  ‘Should do,’ said Ian. ‘There’s still resin in the rags.’ With sudden decision, he stooped to pick up the torch and told Olyver to roll the keg towards the oak tree. ‘Who cares? We’ll die of cold before we ever catch the pestilence if we can’t make a fire.’

  Thaddeus returned with a dead sheep across his shoulders; he’d culled it from a flock in the meadow where he’d left the horses. He made a strange sight with his wide-skirted coat turned white by snow and his dark eyebrows and beard glittering with frozen flakes. As he passed the wagon, he paused to look inside and then heaved the sheep to the ground and changed out of his sodden clothes, remarking idly that more steam than heat seemed to be coming from the boys’ niggardly blaze.

  ‘Blame the logs,’ Ian told him, patiently paring wet bark from a branch.

  ‘We’d do better to burn the wagon except none of us fancies eating food cooked on dead men’s bones,’ said Edmund.

  ‘It’s the chests and barrels we want,’ said Olyver, ‘but there’s no way of getting them over the sill without climbing in, and none of us wants to do that in case the pestilence is still inside.’

  ‘Mm.’ Thaddeus knelt to open one of the sacks from the pack pony. He removed an axe and a coil of rope. ‘It’ll be easier with the side removed.’

  Rather than chop against the grain of the planks, he chose to strike through the mitred joints that held the sideboard to the front and tailgates, but cold and weariness caused him to miss his aim as often as find it. Edmund took the axe from him. ‘You’re not made of iron,’ he said gruffly. ‘Take what heat you can from the fire and watch us do it.’

  Given permission to destroy, the boys set to with a will. When enough of the sideboard had come away at both ends, they inserted the rope behind it and used their combined strength to tear it free of the joints which held it to the bottom. Thereafter they threw loops behind the chests and barrels that were stacked at the front beneath the driver’s perch and pulled them to the ground. The three barrels, all with broaching taps, had once held wine or ale. As he used Olyver’s branch to bowl them towards the fire, Peter said he hoped the soldiers had drunk them dry. Death would be easier to face if the brain was numbed.

  Still wary of touching anything, Edmund used the axe blade to prise open the metal clasps that held the lids of the chests closed. Some, which had contained dried food or sweetmeats judging by the dusting of detritus on their bottoms, were empty; others were packed with articles of clothing that had once belonged to Sir Richard. Certain they were flea-ridden, Ian and Olyver scooped out shirts, gowns and hose on the points of the staves and tossed them into the rear of the wagon before pushing the chests ahead of them.

  Joshua kicked the damp wood off the embers of the brandy keg and relit the torch. He motioned to Peter to push one of the barrels onto the glowing cinders and then held the torch to the staves to encourage flames. ‘Be ready with the next when it takes,’ he told Peter. ‘Once we have a goodly blaze, we can start feeding the damp firewood into the mix. We need the fire to last the night not burn itself out in an hour.’

  ‘More like seven nights,’ Thaddeus corrected as he ran the blade of his knife down the belly and breast of the sheep which he’d strung by its back legs from a branch of the oak tree. ‘The last time we saw snow like this it fell for three days and lay on the ground a week. I doubt we’ll see Develish tomorrow.’

  ‘We’ll not keep anything alight that long,’ said Peter.

  Thaddeus nodded. ‘We’ll look for shelter in the church or manor house tomorrow.’ He grasped the top left edge of the fleece in one hand and used the side of the other to chop at the membrane between the skin and the meat, pulling the coat away in one piece. ‘Our first task come daybreak will be to look for the gold.’

  Ian was performing the same actions as Thaddeus on the right-hand side of the carcass. ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘Your father built a cairn on the other side of the track. We begin with four hundred paces due south.’

  ‘I didn’t see a cairn.’

  Thaddeus gave a grunt of amusement. ‘It’s a bare foot high and he didn’t bargain for snow. I could just about make it out when we arrived but not when I came back. We wouldn’t have found it if the wagon hadn’t been here.’

  Ian eased the rest of the skin from the carcass then crouched to slice through the spine and sinews at the neck. ‘Or you hadn’t forced us to keep going.’

  ‘That too.’

  Peter levered another barrel onto the flames. ‘It’ll all be for nothing if the gold’s been stolen.’

  ‘Let’s hope it hasn’t.’ Thaddeus took the skin from Ian and laid it fleece down on the ground beneath the carcass before using his blade to split the sheep’s belly and breast to allow the still-warm entrails to drop. ‘I’ll have the skin back when your hounds have done feeding,’ he told Joshua. ‘I want something dry to sit on while the mutton’s roasting.’

  Joshua knelt to cut away the liver, heart and lungs. ‘What about the rest of us?’

  ‘Get your own,’ Thaddeus said unfeelingly. ‘There are plenty more sheep in the meadow.’

  They settled for the wagon’s sideboard, laying it on the ground across the fire from Thaddeus. There was some debate about whether fleas might be hiding in the joints between the planks until Thaddeus said they could never have survived half a year. Fleas lived on animals and humans, he said, not on wood. If it were otherwise, My Lord of Bourne’s furniture would have given them the pestilence.

  The air grew colder as the night lengthened, yet despite filling their bellies wit
h half-raw sheep, none of them slept. The sound of the wind in the trees dropped but the snow continued to fall in eerie silence, and the fire became increasingly difficult to keep alight. By dawn the tangled livery inside the wagon was hidden by a clean white shroud, and a two-foot drift covered the track beyond it. Peter glanced nervously at the translucent sheet that covered their oak and said it wouldn’t be long before the branches sagged under its weight.

  Thaddeus nodded. He was on his feet, moving the packs, harness and saddles against the trunk of the tree. ‘We’ll need the horses to carry these,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back when the weather improves.’ The damp clothes of yesterday were frozen stiff, but he told the boys to shake and pummel them to loosen the ice crystals and then pull them over what they were wearing. ‘With luck the inner layer will stay warm long enough to reach the manor house. Bring your weapons and tools but nothing else.’

  If they thought this meant he was planning to make shelter a priority, they were quickly disappointed. He stamped out the embers of the fire and used the tip of his sword to draw lines in the ash. ‘Gyles used the sun as a guide,’ he explained. ‘Due south, four hundred paces . . . due east, five hundred paces . . . and due south again, one thousand paces. At each change of direction, he placed a ring of stones beneath a tree.’ He drew circles around the points where his lines moved at right-angles to each other. ‘Here and here . . . and another halfway down the long stretch.’ He touched the tip to the centre of the last line. ‘We need to find the rings to have any hope of locating the chest.’

  ‘Why should that be difficult?’ asked Edmund.

  ‘We can’t predict due south with the sun obscured,’ said Thaddeus, marking another line which veered away from the first he’d drawn. ‘If we stray west . . . like this . . . we could spend all day looking for the first ring of stones.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to make the search when we return for our packs?’ suggested Olyver. ‘Won’t the sun come out when a thaw sets in?’