Bloodie Bones

by Lucienne Boyce

  His woman latched onto his arm, cursing and yammering at him to stick up for himself. He bloodied her nose and she let go. She prowled up and down, still cursing him.

  “You don’t need to go,” Singleton said.

  Mudge grinned. “But you want to, don’t you, Budd? We offered him a choice and he took it, ain’t that right, Mr Castle?”

  Castle pointed at the heap of gear at his feet: purse nets, wire snares, and an old gun that looked as if it had been used in Cromwell’s war. “This is illegal,” he said. “Budd’s had plenty of warnings. It’s transportation now, if he stays in the parish. But if he leaves, he can go free.”

  Singleton and Drake looked at Travell. He nodded. Transportation: that was the law.

  Drake asked Budd where he was going.

  “Kingswood. Forest is all I know.”

  “At least wait a day or two and we’ll get up a collection,” Travell said.

  “I don’t want money.”

  Budd called the children and their mother over to him, told them to carry what they could. They had to leave their bits of furniture. He cracked his whip over the cow’s head and they moved off, his mongrel dog trotting behind.

  Mudge jerked his head at the dog. “Mr Castle.” He would have shot the animal himself if Drake and the others had not been there, but after all the talk of legality, he did not dare. He did not have the right: that was the gamekeeper’s.

  Castle shook his head. “It’s enough.”

  *

  Singleton finished his story and fell silent. He stared into the wood. “It was enough,” he said softly, “to throw a man out of his home for wanting to feed his family a bit of rabbit every now and again. Budd was the only one who looked back. Not at the cottage. Into the wood. He knew every tree, every track, every warren in that wood, Dan. He knew where to gather mushrooms in autumn, where the reeds to thatch his roof grow, where to collect hazelnuts and herbs, where to send his children to gather blackberries and rosehips, cranberries and sloes, where to harvest acorns for his pig, where to collect furze, bracken and fallen wood for his fire. He knew where the deer hid and the pheasants roosted, where wrens sang and adders basked, which paths were quagmires in winter.”

  He looked at Dan. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?…They knocked the house down the next day. Wattle and daub. Caved in easily under hammer and axe. Two or three families who had also set themselves up close by didn’t wait to be told to move. They had nothing but rough hovels, no sense of belonging to the parish, wanting only somewhere wild and quiet where they can be left alone. They could have moved to the heath, which still has its wild spots. But they preferred to put plenty of distance between themselves and Lord Oldfield.”

  “A sad story,” Dan said, thinking that Kingswood was not all that far away. Budd could easily have come back one night to wreak his revenge, but why on Castle and not Mudge? Perhaps the gamekeeper, out and about in the forest at all hours of the day and night, was an easier target. But then he was armed, and Mudge too must spend a lot of time riding about the estate on his own. No doubt the steward was also armed. Dan would be if he was in his place.

  Perhaps Budd resented the gamekeeper’s part in the affair more than the steward’s. It was the gamekeeper who had the power to search his place, knowing full well he would find only a few old nets that could not have done much to deplete Lord Oldfield’s game, but which could be turned against Budd. Or perhaps Budd meant to come back for Mudge.

  While Dan was thinking all that through, a most peculiar figure stepped out of the wood.

  Chapter Five

  He was a wiry little man, swamped by a long coat tied at the waist with cord. The ragged cuffs of a jacket that had once been green but was now faded almost white poked out from his coat sleeves. His hobnailed boots were much repaired, and he wore thick gaiters over coarse woollen stockings. He was a dark, secretive-looking man, his age hard to guess. Dan put him somewhere in the middle years.

  “’Day. Who’s your friend?”

  “Good day to you, Tom Taylor,” Singleton answered. “This is Dan Fielding, who pulverised Bold Ben Jones yesterday.”

  “Don’t look up to it.”

  “He might not look it, but he’s the real go.”

  “Will you walk up with me?” the gypsy asked.

  The blacksmith winked. “That I will.”

  Something more than a walk on the heath had been agreed on, but Dan fell into line without giving any hint he had noticed. Taylor’s step was brisk and light. His eyes flickered from side to side, sometimes glancing skywards, sometimes raking the dense bracken as if he was following something moving through it, though Dan could not see anything. Suddenly he stamped his foot, stooped, and picked up a tiny brown scrap.

  “Field mouse,” he said, tossing the mangled creature aside.

  Dan had no idea why Tom had destroyed it. Perhaps it was a reflexive action with him to catch and kill whatever he could.

  They climbed towards the top of the heath through the browning fronds, which were criss-crossed with narrow paths. Sheep grazed on the green pasture on the lower slopes. The outline of a long, low mound appeared above them.

  “Barcombe Barrow,” said Singleton. “They say there were kings buried in it once, with gold crowns and jewels.”

  “If it’s true, I never found none,” said Taylor.

  The barrow was covered in smooth grass, though the end of the ancient structure was hidden by an impenetrable wall of briar. Underneath this the roof had caved in, exposing two or three stone-lined chambers. Great stone slabs lay in the grip of the thorns, their surfaces softened and stained by lichen and moss. Some had faded lines and whorls carved into them. Led by the smell of woodsmoke and stewing meat, they walked around the barrow, scattering the hens pecking in the short grass.

  Here a dirt path led through a short, roofless tunnel to a doorway covered with an old blanket. Between the tunnel walls a fire burned inside a circle of stones. A woman sat beside it, tending a cooking pot slung from a crook. She was fairer of skin than her husband, and wore a ragged skirt and jacket and an apron of sacking. Two boys with dirty hands and faces sat near her, carving spoons to hawk around the neighbouring villages. The younger one was wearing the elder’s cast-off breeches, untidily patched and too big for him. A little girl crouched beside the fire, throwing herbs and onions into the pot. They all wore heavy boots like Tom’s, but without stockings.

  “Dad!” the little girl squealed, abandoning her work and running to hug her father’s knees. Tom clouted her out of the way, though not roughly, and not before he had managed to hide his smile. He glanced about him then opened his coat and from a deep, stained pocket drew out a rabbit with its head crushed, the fur sticky with blood.

  “Nice and fresh. Still warm.” He grinned. “Found him dead on the road.”

  Dan thought this very unlikely, but being a mere townsman pretended to believe it.

  “Two?”

  “Two,” Singleton agreed, taking out his purse and counting out some shillings. When he produced a canvas bag from his pocket and stuffed the coneys into it, Dan knew he had walked this way on purpose to buy Sunday supper.

  “I wouldn’t like to live in a cold, damp barrow,” Dan remarked on the walk home.

  “You’d be surprised how snug it is inside.”

  “They look very settled there.”

  “They’ve been there for years. They used to camp here with their tribe every summer, then one year Tom and the woman stayed. I don’t know the whole of it, but it seemed her family didn’t approve of him for her husband. He goes off with them some years, but she never does.”

  “He goes off when things look hot for him?”

  Singleton laughed. “Maybe. The keepers are always sniffing around, but they never find anything on him, nor ever will. He doesn’t keep a dog and he hasn’t a gun
or any nets. They say he sings the hares and coneys to sleep, catches them that way.”

  Dan shot a glance at the blacksmith, but he was straight-faced.

  Back at the cottage, Mrs Singleton snatched the rabbits off him to prepare them for the pot. Dan did not have to pretend to enjoy the stew, illegal though it was.

  *

  On Monday morning, a hearse draped in black and drawn by horses wearing black plumes drove slowly along the High Street. Lord Oldfield’s carriage followed. The men of Barcombe vanished, slipping into houses, shop or inn rather than take off their hats to Castle’s coffin. The women continued with their errands, willing to pay a curtsey for the spectacle of the fine equipage. Singleton had gone to deliver a horse he had shoed to one of the farmers, and as Dan did not object to baring his head, he was free to join Mrs Singleton at the yard gate and watch the liveried men carry the casket into the churchyard.

  Lord Oldfield alighted from his carriage and Dr Russell got out after him. The rector, Mr Poole, waited by the lychgate. He was a freckle-faced, ginger-haired individual with colourless, anxious eyes. He bobbed and bowed to the aristocratic mourner.

  A young lady accompanied by an older, corpulent woman stood in front of one of the headstones. Lord Oldfield nodded politely as he passed, but Dr Russell stopped to speak to the young mourner, bending over her with a concerned expression, murmuring a few kind words while she struggled to put on a brave face. Her chaperone gazed vacantly about, her mind apparently on less solemn matters.

  “Who are the ladies?” Dan asked.

  “Miss Louisa Ruscombe and her aunt, Mrs Hale,” Mrs Singleton answered. “Poor young lady! She lives in Yew Tree House, about half a mile up the road, next to Mr and Mrs West. The Wests used to be in the theatre.”

  “Why do you say ‘Poor young lady’?”

  “Her brother Frederick died in February, leaving her all alone. She thought she’d have to give up her home and go to one of her father’s relatives, until Aunt Joanna turned up on her doorstep. Miss Louisa had no idea she had an aunt on her mother’s side. Very lucky for Mrs Hale it was too, finding her out just then, for she’d not long been left a widow with nothing of her own.”

  Miss Ruscombe and Mrs Hale moved off, the niece adapting her walk to her aunt’s waddle. The doctor watched them go. Dan could not blame him for his interest. The girl was a beauty in the fragile style, though her delicate features were blemished by tears.

  Russell rejoined the party at the graveside and Mr Poole began the service. Mrs Singleton remembered that he’d be back for his dinner soon, and Dan returned to his tasks.

  The afternoon passed quietly, if a forge can be called quiet. They did not go to the Fox and Badger, but Mrs Singleton fetched a jug of beer for her husband. Dan drank water. When they had finished work, he said he was going to the village shop to spend some of his prize money on new shirts. As he had hoped, Singleton was more interested in emptying the jug and did not offer to go with him. Dan’s plan was to get through his errand quickly, then go on to the keeper’s cottage.

  Travell was in the middle of sorting a delivery from his suppliers in Bath, so Dan had time to look about him. It was a typical village shop, crammed with a hotchpotch of goods: soaps, tea, umbrellas, teapots, knives, boots, cloth, seeds, bacon and much else. The only paper Travell stocked was a cheap ream sold by the page, and some pocketbook tablets. The paper on the Bloodie Bones dummy had not come from here.

  The door opened with a ‘ting’ of the bell and an old couple came in. The woman was small and fat with an enormous bosom, above which was a quivering, timid face. She had thick lips, pasty skin and dull, dark eyes. Her husband wore a smock and corduroy breeches coated with flour. He shuffled in and stood sag-kneed beside her, twisting his battered hat in his hands.

  “Are you the man from London?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m Dan Fielding.”

  “Have you seen our girl?”

  “Your girl?” Dan glanced at the husband, but there was no help to be had from his grimaces and twitches.

  “Sukie. Have you seen her?”

  “Should I know her?”

  “She’s in London. Have you seen her?”

  “Now, now, Mrs Tolley,” Travell said, coming to Dan’s aid. “London is a big place. How would Dan know your girl?”

  She switched her uncomprehending gaze to him, and with a peculiar wet, sucking motion of her lips repeated, “She’s in London.”

  “We don’t know that,” the shopkeeper said kindly. “And even if she was, Dan couldn’t have met her.”

  She did not seem to grasp this but turned back to Dan and said, “If you see her, will you tell her we asked? Will you tell her to come home?”

  Dan glanced at Travell for guidance. He nodded.

  “Of course I will, Mistress. If I see her.”

  “He says he’ll tell her,” Mr Tolley shouted into her face. “Come away, Mother.”

  He plucked at her arm and she allowed him to guide her out of the shop.

  “What was she talking about?”

  Travell shook his head. “A sad business. They had a daughter, Sukie. God alone knows how they managed to raise her. She was dropped on her head so many times as a babe she turned out as addled as her parents. You’ve never known a pair less able to look after themselves. The number of times we’ve had to haul him out of a ditch he’s tumbled into or run into the house to beat out a fire she’s started with her cooking. Tolley works for the miller. Shifting sacks is about all he’s fit for, and he’s none too bright at that.”

  “And their girl has gone to London?”

  “No one knows if she’s even alive. It’s nine or ten years since she disappeared and there’s been no word. There was no clue as to why she went either. Her parents doted on her and she had no reason to run away. Then a month ago, Lord Oldfield drained the old pool. He’s turning it into a lake.”

  “With a bridge over it and a temple.”

  “The workmen found a baby’s bones. They’d been wrapped in a cloak once, but all that was left was the buttons. They were so large that was how we knew it was Sukie’s. She couldn’t manage anything else, never learned to tie a ribbon or do up a pin. She’d always been a plump girl, so it’s no wonder no one guessed she was expecting, least of all her mother. Whether the infant was born alive no one knows, but we were supposed to think she’d had the baby, buried it, and run away rather than risk being hanged for child murder.”

  “Supposed to think?”

  “Sukie conceal a birth and run away? She hadn’t the gumption.”

  “So someone told her what to do. The father?”

  “Shut her up for good, more like.”

  “You don’t think she was murdered?” Dan whistled. “And no one has any idea who he was?”

  “Ah, as to that. Well.”

  “Well?”

  Travell glanced about him as if there might be eavesdroppers in the empty store. “Look at the evidence. The bones were found on Lord Oldfield’s land. And it was summer when Sukie disappeared, and Lord Adam was home from school. And Abe’s old dad remembers seeing the three of them, Lord Adam, Castle and Sukie, talking in the woods. In France they call it dwots de senna.”

  “Droits de seigneur?”

  “Yes. The aristos think they can take the village girls whenever they like.”

  “And you think Lord Oldfield…?”

  “Maybe both of them. Him and Castle were thick as thieves, did everything together, if you get my meaning. So perhaps they didn’t know which of them got her with child, but it was Castle who cleared up the mess. It was him who brought the bones down to the church, though Poole refused to put them in the graveyard because they were unbaptised. That’s the kindness of the church for you! Castle dug the hole himself on the other side of the wall and stood over it while the rector said a prayer. It’s said the keeper�
�s face was hard as nails as he watched them tiny bones put in the ground. And who knows if that’s the only grave he dug?”

  “But Mr and Mrs Tolley think their daughter is still alive.”

  “They can’t face the thought that the girl might be dead. That’s the trouble with starved minds, Dan. They cling on to irrational beliefs. I keep trying to tell them it’s what we’re up against in this world that matters, but superstition gets the better of them.” He shook his head. “There are some silly tales told. They say the discovery was engineered by Bloodie Bones himself to take place just before His Lordship’s marriage.”

  Dan could not imagine any tale sillier than the one he had just heard, but he reacted as if he thought it likely that a young, handsome lord who could afford to bed the finest ladies in the land would take a tumble in the woods with an unattractive village girl, then get his boyhood friend to commit infanticide and murder to cover up for him.

  “Now me,” Travell continued, “I abandoned superstition a long time ago. It’s the power and corruption of the aristocracy that’s at stake here.”

  If Citizen Travell believed that every member of the aristocracy lived by the code of the Hell-Fire Club, who was Dan to stop him? The point was not what he thought, but what the people of Barcombe believed – and what Travell said made it clear that they were prepared to believe the greatest evil of Lord Oldfield and Josh Castle.

  Old wounds had been reopened with the discovery of the baby’s bones. Even if the Tolleys’ daughter was still alive, she was lost to them as surely as if she had been murdered all those years ago. Were they singly or together capable of taking their revenge on Josh Castle?

  Dan did not think so. But perhaps someone might take revenge on their behalf. Someone like Travell, who saw himself as the champion of the oppressed.

  Chapter Six

  Dan bought two ready-made shirts, a scarf and some stockings, and left with the parcel under his arm. He waved at a group of boys kicking a ball around on the green. They were too shy to respond and gazed after him in awestruck silence. Barcombe had never had a fighting hero in its midst before.