[Stephen Attebrook 11] - Missing

by Jason Vail

  Missing

  Jason Vail

  MISSING

  Copyright 2021, by Jason Vail

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Hawk Publishing book.

  Cover design by Ashley Barber. Cover art by Tetrarubin at Dreamstime.com.

  ISBN: 9798528301709

  Hawk Publishing

  Tallahassee, FL 32312

  Also by Jason Vail

  The Attebrook Family Saga

  The Outlaws

  The Poisoned Cup

  Stephen Attebrook Mysteries

  The Wayward Apprentice

  Baynard’s List

  The Dreadful Penance

  The Girl in the Ice

  Saint Milburgha’s Bones

  Bad Money

  The Bear Wagon

  Murder at Broadstowe Manor

  The Burned Man

  The Corpse at Windsor Bridge

  Missing

  Lone Star Rising Stories

  Lone Star Rising: Voyage of the Wasp

  Lone Star Rising: T.S. Wasp and the Heart of Texas

  Viking Tales

  Snorri’s Gold

  Saga of the Lost Ship

  Martial Arts

  Medieval and Renaissance Dagger Combat

  Missing

  February 1264

  to

  March 1264

  Chapter 1

  “Stephen! Get up! Something’s wrong!” Ida Attebrook knelt by Stephen’s pallet in the corner of the bedchamber and shook his shoulder.

  “What is it?” Stephen Attebrook asked groggily. His head spun and his mouth felt like a herd of cattle had tramped over it. It was their fifth night in the manor house at Halton, also known locally as Halton Priors. They had been celebrating a bit with wine they had brought out from Ludlow when they took possession. They had drunk more than they should have last evening.

  “Hurry!” Ida said urgently.

  She pulled Stephen to his feet and dragged him toward the window. She was so upset, insistent and so surprisingly strong for a thin girl of seventeen, that he did not resist. In her haste to propel him to the window, she pushed him into a stool. He stubbed a toe painfully and cried out. But Ida did not let such a minor injury deter her, and forced Stephen to hop, ignoring his protestations of pain.

  The house was like many of its kind on the border of England and Wales. It had a central hall in the middle with chambers at either end. Their chamber was at the east end of the house on the second story, high enough to see over the eight-foot wall around the house to the village a short distance away.

  Even as Stephen bounded the final few feet to the window, however, he saw the orange glow of what had to be a fire. The pain in his foot, his good one, vanished in a blink, and when he attained the window, he could see the blaze plainly. Savage tongues of flame were writhing into the sky from the roof and one of the sides of a large building.

  “It looks like the barn,” Ida said, aghast.

  “Yes,” Stephen said, stunned and shocked in equal measure. The manor barn, which held all the manor’s grain, the harness for its animals, all their farming equipment, and all their stored food, was in the village, and now it was on fire. This was a major disaster.

  He threw on a shirt, pulled on stockings and boots and raced down to the yard well behind Ida, who stopped only long enough to wrap the blanket from the bed about herself. In times like this, modesty and decorum took second place to the crisis.

  Stephen’s intention had been to make for the gate, but when he came out of the house, Ida was standing frozen in the middle of the yard with most of the servants, jets of breath shooting into the air as she panted.

  “Oh, dear God!” she cried, pointing toward the wall to the left.

  Stephen’s eyes followed her finger and saw with horror the shapes of men climbing over the wall and into the yard. Starlight glinted on the swords in their hands. More armed men strode through the gate that other servants, in their haste to respond to the fire, had pulled open, saving the invaders the chore of breaking them apart.

  “Everyone! Back to the house!” Stephen shouted. He grasped Ida’s arm and they dashed to the hall. While Ida could run like a deer when she needed to, Stephen was slower, owing to his bad left foot, which was missing from the arch forward. His run was a stumpy, gimpy thing usually, but somehow he managed to keep up with Ida. Perhaps it was the fear.

  Stephen shoved Ida through the door and waited until the last of the servants ran by. He pushed the door shut just as four of the armed men reached the threshold. Stephen and three of the manservants pressed their shoulders against the door, resisting a massive push by the invaders, before Ida and another of the women slid the bar in place.

  “It won’t hold long,” Stephen muttered to himself. It was a stout enough house door. Yet although it was a few inches thick and studded with iron nails on the outside, a pair of axes and a pry bar could knock it apart before long.

  From the terrified expressions of those around him, Stephen instantly regretted saying anything. One role of a leader was to instill confidence in those who followed. He had just as much as said there was no hope.

  “Is it the Welsh?” several people babbled.

  Everyone had a great fear of the Welsh. Their strongholds in Wales were not far away, and every year brought fresh raids for cattle, wealth and captives, who were usually sold in the slave markets of Dyflinn. They weren’t above slaughtering those in the unfortunate villages that received Welsh attention, either. But February was not the normal time for Welsh raids. These usually occurred in the autumn when the barns were full of the harvest.

  Stephen heard men talking beyond the door. “No,” he said. “They’re English.”

  The fact that armed Englishmen were attacking his manor filled Stephen fury — at himself as much as at the attackers. It was not hard to guess who those men were — partisans of the rebellious barons who had coalesced about Simon de Montfort, who sought to wrest control of the country from King Henry III. Halton Priors was the property of Princess Leonor, wife of Lord Edward. So, the plundering of the manor was a blow against the Crown. He had thought the war was too far away to touch him, so he had not called for a watch during the night.

  “What are we going to do?” one of the manservants asked.

  Stephen peered through a crack in a window shutter before answering. The men outside were starting a fire with a brand brought from the village and wood gathered from the woodpile on the other side of the yard. The sight almost paralyzed him with fear.

  “They’re not going to break in,” he said. “They’re going to fire the house.”

  This set off another wave of panic and it took several moments to calm those in the house down enough that Stephen could be heard again.

  “We’re going to have to run for it,” he said. “Arm up.”

  There were twenty spears, a dozen old shields and some axes in a storeroom off the buttery, kept there against the possibility of a Welsh raid. The six men in the house ran for the storeroom while Stephen dragged Ida up to their bedchamber.

  “Get dressed,” he told her, as he bent to the strongbox under the bed. It held the manor’s receipts, which amounted to quite a good bit of coin. The lock did not want to yield to the key, which Stephen almost snapped with a vicious twist in his haste. Finally, the lock gave up its resistance, and Stephen pulled the bag of money out.

  Stephen looked out the windows while he struggled into his gambeson and byrnie. He was in such a hurry that he had a hard time of it, and Ida had to help, her hands shaking.

  “How are we going to get out?” Ida asked anxiously as she pulled
a woolen gown over her head.

  “Let me think,” Stephen said, as if that might dislodge the boulder of indecision in his head.

  He shoved the chest out of sight under the bed, and gave Ida the money bag. With his helmet under an arm and his shield on his back, he led Ida down to the hall, where the men and women had gathered.

  Fire, meanwhile, cracked at the front door and smoke began to leak through into the hall. Stephen realized that the enemy didn’t intend to burn the hall yet — they probably wanted what was inside — but apparently lacked the means to easily break down the door. They intended to weaken it with fire before battering it in. It was a clever idea, but it would take time.

  Stephen still had no clear answer to how they would escape. His mind seemed full of mud. He had to come with an answer, and soon, for the door would not last much longer, and then the enemy would pour in on them.

  The fear on Ida’s face forced the decision. He couldn’t let her fall into the hands of men excited by battle. Although she was a gentlewoman, her position might not protect her from ill-handling. She has no stranger to rape, and her expression told him she believed more of it lay only moments away. If they ran there was hope.

  “We’ll go out the cellar door,” Stephen said. The buttery and pantry were on the ground floor beneath the eastern bedchambers, and there was a cellar dug beneath the buttery for the storing of wine and ale barrels in the cool earth, where the ale wouldn’t spoil quickly. A small doorway opened from the cellar to the outside. The enemy wouldn’t know about it.

  Stephen led everyone into the cellar. As he descended the steps, Ida took his hand. It was unusual for them to hold hands. Although people thought they were married, their marriage was fake, a desperate ruse to get Ida — the stepdaughter of Stephen’s deceased brother — out of the hands of Percival FitzAllan, the earl of Arundel, who had planned to marry her to one of his unsavory subordinates. But circumstances forced them to keep up the pretense. She squeezed Stephen’s hand and he returned it.

  The cellar was protected by a double set of doors. The inner one was a normal wooden door; the outer one was a locked iron grate. A servant fumbled with the keys hanging by the door. The iron grate creaked open. Stephen padded up the stairs and stopped with his head level with the ground. He heard activity in the front of the house, but he saw no one here at the rear.

  He crossed to the wall only steps away, followed by everyone else. He held his shield toward one of the grooms, a strong boy of sixteen. “Wymar,” he said, “help me boost up the others.” Although the wall was not tall by the standards of most walls, being only eight feet high, it took the use of the shield as a step to get everyone over. At Stephen’s nod when the others had disappeared over the top, Wymar jumped and pulled himself up. He offered a hand to Stephen and hauled him up. Climbing eight-foot walls was not easy in mail, carrying a sword with a shield on your back.

  They jumped down into the ditch surrounding the manor house, and tumbled to the bottom, which was filled with icy water from yesterday’s heavy rain. The water saturated Stephen’s gambeson and made it seem double the weight, and when he clambered to the top on the other side, he was winded.

  Ida and Wymar waited at the top of the ditch. The others had run off into the wood behind the house.

  They could hear men shouting and laughing within the house, which meant the attackers had forced the door at last. The pounding of feet on stairs and floorboards followed, and then one of the shutters on a first-floor window banged open. Even in the twilight of an hour before dawn, the figure in the window was not visible. But whoever was there saw Stephen, Ida and Wymar across the ditch, and called to the others in the chamber, who shouted insults at them, followed shortly by a chest and bedding tossed out the window. Shutters opened on the floor above and other household items rained down.

  “Will they chase us?” Ida asked.

  “Yes, when they find we’ve taken the money,” Stephen said. “Come on. Let’s get away while we still can.”

  They had been landed gentry for exactly five days. Now the source of their prosperity stood in ruins. As they crossed the field to the wood, Stephen looked back to see every house in the village ablaze. It would not be long before the manor house joined them.

  Chapter 2

  It was three miles by road from Halton to Ludlow, and a bit less cross country. The sun was rising into a cloudy sky as Stephen and Ida plodded alone across the Dinham Bridge over the River Teme on the west of town — Wymar having left them in the forest to make for Bromfield, where his mother lived. The hill leading up to Dinham Gate seemed to have grown taller and steeper than they remembered, and they paused to catch their breath short of the gate and looked back at Halton, where smoke from the burning village could be seen, a series of black columns that combined into a single one as if they were skeins in a thread that billowed to a curiously flat top trailing off toward the north.

  “Come on,” Stephen said. “No use looking at it.”

  Ida nodded. She had been stoic until they reached the safety of the town, but now tears trickled down her face for the first time since they had fled the manor.

  She put a hand through one of Stephen’s arms and they trudged the last few yards to the gate.

  The gate wardens were talking about the smoke with the drivers of a wagon paused in the maw of the gate, when one of the guards spotted Stephen and Ida. He gaped at them, for they were a sight. Stephen had no surcoat over his mail, a thing not normally done, and grass projected from the links where it had been trapped during his tumble into the ditch. His shield was grass-stained and he had a helmet but no arming cap — it had come loose from his belt in the fall. Ida was no better. In addition to the blanket Ida had thrown about her shoulders, she had on a simple brown woolen gown, a work garment of rough material, and looked no different from any simple village girl. The hem of the gown and her cloak were wet and dirty from the walk, a good deal of which had been across fields and pastures, since Stephen had been too anxious about pursuit to use the road. She wiped her tears away with the blanket.

  “Are you all right, sir?” the guard gasped.

  “As well as can be expected when your house has burned down,” Stephen said.

  “That’s Halton Priors burning?” the guard asked.

  Stephen nodded. “The whole village is gone. Burned by raiders,” he said, provoking gasps of shock from the guards and the wagon driver.

  “The Welsh?” the wagon driver cried. He lived in Elton, a village to the west not far from Halton Priors, and if the Welsh were in the neighborhood he had as much to loose as the people there, which is to say everything he owned.

  Stephen shook his head. “I don’t know who they were, but they weren’t Welsh.”

  “Who then?” another guard asked. “FitzAllan?” All of Ludlow knew that Stephen had made an enemy of Percival FitzAllan, earl of Arundel, whose stronghold of Clun Castle was only eighteen miles to the northwest. The burning of a manor was the sort of vengeance one lord liked to visit upon another against whom there was a grudge.

  “Could be. I don’t know,” Stephen said.

  “And you’ve only just taken over there,” the other guard said, shaking his head. Ludlow was a small town and everyone here knew everyone else’s business. So, word that the Attebrooks had got married and been granted a manor from Lord Edward’s wife shot around town at the speed of gossip. Word they had lost it should be known by everyone in town within the hour.

  “Mind if we get by?” Stephen said, clenching his teeth so they didn’t chatter as much as they had been doing.

  “Certainly, sir!” the first guard said, edging out of the way so that Stephen and Ida could squeeze by the wagon.

  More babble broke out between the guards and the wagon men, in which the words Attebrook and Halton and “what a shame!” and “disaster!” could be clearly heard, as Stephen and Ida continued up the hill toward Bell Lane, which emptied out behind Saint Thomas’ Chapel. Two streets on, Bell Lane was a p
roper street with houses and shops, but here it was aptly named, a mere alley behind a series of back gardens. The lane was pitted with potholes and rutted by erosion with gullies deep enough to turn an ankle or pose a threat to any horse and wheeled vehicle. But it was the shortest way to Stephen’s town house and allowed them to avoid going through the market and becoming the object of stares and pointing fingers.

  Stephen’s house stood a couple doors down slope toward Broad Street and across from the Broken Shield Inn, the finest such establishment in Ludlow. One of the inn’s front windows was down and Edith Wistwode was selling a pie to Alric, a shoemaker whose shop was next door to the townhouse. Alric gaped at the sight of Stephen and Ida.

  “What happened to you?” Alric asked, his mouth open; it was unclear whether that was in preparation for the pie in his hands or at astonishment. He added hastily, “My lord!”

  Now that Stephen was a landholder, he was entitled to be called lord by ordinary folk, but he was not yet used to it and didn’t take offense that Alric provided it by afterthought.

  That open mouth had to be astonishment because Edith, a flinty-eyed woman of unshakeable practicality and not given to vapors, was gaping too.

  Edith said something to someone behind her, and in an instant, a short, keg-shaped man with an ample stomach, a fringe of prematurely grey hair and a pug nose, came barreling through the door. He skidded to a stop in front of Stephen and Ida.

  “Something happened,” Gilbert Wistwode, husband of Edith and co-proprietor of the inn, gasped. “What?”

  “The bed was lumpy,” Stephen said. “I missed my old one.”

  Gilbert hooked his fingers in his belt and tapped a foot. “Looks like you’ve been sleeping in the woods. And not properly dressed, either. Where’s your surcoat? And your horse?”