The Novice's Tale (Oxford Medieval Mysteries Book 2)

by Ann Swinfen

  They were through the gate and fairly on the road to Oxford, when she caught sight of a party of mounted men preceded by hunting dogs riding toward the abbey, coming from the same direction as they had themselves come, two days earlier. It struck her as odd, for there was no hunting ground hereabouts, apart from the abbey’s private park. Perhaps they hoped for a day’s hunting there. The party – which also included huntsmen on foot with chained alaunts as well as the other dogs running loose – rode boldly up to the abbey gatehouse and were clearly demanding admittance, when two of the dogs – she recognised them now as lymers – veered away and began to run after the cart.

  The mounted men milled about, as if uncertain what to do. The huntsmen in charge of the tracking dogs began whistling, but the two lymers ignored them, and instead the rest of the tracking dogs followed them. One of the keepers of the lymers was holding a bundle of black cloth.

  There was a heavy built man at the head of the horsemen, who appeared to be shouting at the men on foot to call back the dogs. Then he jerked his horse viciously round until he was facing the retreating candle-makers’ cart, which was just reaching a bend in the road.

  ‘I can see Oxford Castle!’ Jak called from the front of the cart. ‘Over there.’

  Behind them, the big man seemed to make up his mind. He gestured to his men, set his heels to his horse, and began to gallop after the slow moving cart. The men with the chained dogs were stooping over their charges.

  Emma was suddenly afraid.

  That bundle of cloth. It looked like the habit she had left behind, thrust under a bush far back up the bank of the river.

  The killing dogs were loosed. The big man was drawing nearer.

  She knew him now.

  It was her stepfather, Falke Malaliver.

  Chapter Eleven

  The long rides of recent days must have tired me more than I had realised, for I overslept the next morning. My intention had been to ride out toward Osney Abbey early, as soon as I had settled Walter and Roger to their work, then pick up the riverside track on the far side of the many-branched Thames and work my way north. I was unfamiliar with the track, but knew of it by repute. Even allowing for the many diversions caused by the winding course of the river, I thought the total distance could not be more than eight or nine miles, perhaps a little more, before I would find myself opposite the island on which Godstow Abbey stood. Although originally I had discounted this as the way Emma might have left the abbey, our failure to find a single trace of her in any other direction was beginning to convince me that it was just possible she had managed to cross the river somehow. Besides, if Falke Malaliver carried out his intention of going that way, I wanted to make sure that there was at least one person to witness his actions. The more I had seen of the man, the less I trusted him.

  Therefore, it was with some shame that I dressed and descended to the kitchen long after the sun was up, to find it deserted and spotless, with no sign of Margaret or the children. When I went through to the shop, Walter and Roger gave me ‘Good day, master,’ with smirks of conscious virtue, both clearly busily occupied at their desks for some time. Rowan was with them, and bounced over to me, the only one to greet me without implied criticism of my slug-a-bed behaviour. She seemed not to be suffering any ill effects from her injury.

  ‘Mistress Margaret has taken the children to visit Mistress Farringdon,’ Walter volunteered, in response to my baffled look at finding the house deserted. ‘She said they would also go to the weekly market, and return in time for dinner.’

  He grinned. ‘If you were awake by then,’ he added.

  So much for my early start. In that case, I might as well break my fast before setting out. The kitchen was still filled with the intoxicating scent of Margaret’s new baked bread, so I cut myself generous slices, found fresh butter bought yesterday from Mary Coomber’s dairy, some soft cheese from the same source, and a pot of our own honey. A jug of ale kept cool in the stillroom completed my preparations, so I drew up a stool to the table and settled myself for an ample breakfast, a pleasure I had not been able to enjoy for some days.

  An expectant Rowan soon joined me in the kitchen. Her forlorn demeanour suggested that no one had fed her before abandoning her to the scriveners, which I did not believe, but I shared some of the bread and cheese with her. The bandage I had wound around her body was long gone, probably tugged off in irritation, but when I checked the gash in her side, it did not seem to have suffered. It was scabbed over, but dirt-free, and she seemed none the worse for it. Young animals, like young children, have fresh, clean flesh which heals quickly. It was fortunate the vile butcher had not cut more deeply, and I hoped that Rowan would have the sense to avoid his shop in the future.

  After I had eaten and explained my plans to the men, I set off up the street to the Mitre. It was indeed beginning to seem to me that it would be cheaper to buy Rufus outright, instead of constantly hiring him, although that did not solve the problem of having no stable. When I reached the inn, I found one of the stable lads in the act of removing Rufus’s saddle.

  ‘Why, Master Elyot,’ he said in surprise, ‘us thought as how ye’d changed yer plans.’

  ‘Nay,’ I said, ‘I still want the horse. I was delayed.’ I did not explain that it was due to my own slothfulness.

  As soon as the saddle was back in place, I mounted and rode out through the archway into the street, under a lowering sky which threatened rain before nightfall, but perhaps not yet. The streets of the town were remarkably busy, considering that most students had left for the summer. The weekly market in St Giles always draws in country folk to sell their produce, whether it be a cottager’s wife with a basket of eggs or a farmer with a bullock to sell to the butchers. Some had regular stalls, some merely spread out a cloth on the ground to display a row of cheeses or piles of beans and onions. Of course, some of these people came on other days, if they lived nearby, to sell small goods on the street – with or without a licence from the town – but the weekly market was a bigger affair. Afterwards, money earned would often be spent on goods which could not be made at home, but were to be found in Oxford, like a fine pair of gloves, or stout boots for the winter. Less provident young men had been known to spend the whole day’s earnings in the town’s taverns, reeling home to be met by the scoldings of mothers and young wives.

  Fortunately today I did not need to force my way through the buyers and sellers in St Giles. My way took me from Carfax west down the slope of Great Bailey and through the small rebuilt West Gate of the town, under the shadow of the castle walls. Glancing up at it, I wondered whether Cedric Walden had really had urgent business today, or whether he was growing tired of the fruitless search for Emma Thorgold. Circling the castle moat, which had been contrived by diverting part of the Thames, I crossed the Castle Bridge to the first of the many islands in the river. After reaching the island, the road ran north along the bank of the river to the Quaking Bridge. This bridge in turn led off on the right hand to another, smaller island, but I headed left, across the island to Bookbinders’ Bridge. I passed Henry Stalbroke’s bindery, calling a greeting to his principal journeyman, Tom Needham, and on the far side of Bookbinders’ Island, crossed the river again by the bridge known simply as the Small Bridge.

  Free of the Thames for a short distance, I rode past small houses on either side of the road. Probably built not long before the Great Pestilence, many were deserted now, although those which were occupied – about one in three – were clean and tidy enough, with long gardens behind them providing sufficient room to grow most food (except grain) for a family, and to keep a pig for autumn slaughtering. Beyond these houses there was just St Thomas’s Bridge. I skirted St Thomas’s itself and headed toward Osney Abbey. I had been here a few times, supplying parchment and inks, and even a few books, so I knew that the riverside track met the road somewhere near here. On previous visits to the abbey I had never thought about how many branches of the Thames one must cross to reach here from the tow
n, but now I realised just how confusing it must be for anyone making for Oxford from this westerly direction, and how baffling the skein of waterways must seem to strangers. It made matters no easier that the river had a disconcerting habit of changing direction from time to time, with some branches drying up and others cutting new courses through this low lying land. It was a veritable Minotaur’s labyrinth, only in water instead of stone.

  Mindful of Rufus’s wearisome travails on the previous day, I had kept him to an ambling pace, but after I had passed the group of houses lying between Bookbinders’ Island and St Thomas’s, it occurred to me that I should turn back and enquire there whether anything had been seen of Emma in these parts. There were few people about, for it was likely that most of them would have work away from here – many of the men probably plied the boats that carried goods up and down the reaches of the river round about the town and the nearby countryside. Such people as I met were courteous enough, but had nothing to tell me of a lost maid.

  ‘Nay, maister,’ said one old woman, sweeping dirt from the single step leading to her cottage. ‘There be no strangers hereabouts. Nobbut them as come and go every day ’cross the river and ’long the river. And he do be high this day, since that storm.’

  I could see that she was settling in for a long discussion about the weather, and was turning away when I remembered what John Barnes had told me of his borrowed cap and the likelihood that Emma had filched clothes from the laundry at the abbey, so I asked also whether any youth had been seen, a stranger in these parts, and I mentioned the small white dog, but the old woman and everyone else I spoke to gave a shake of the head and a polite but clear ‘nay’.

  As I turned back again toward Osney, I felt I had been wasting my time, but it was necessary to be thorough. I skirted round St Thomas’s Church and headed for Osney. There was farmland here, arable and meadow, bordered by stands of coppiced woodland and some taller trees left to grow straight to provide timber for building. All of this probably belonged to the abbey, which was generally said to be wealthy. I was uncertain whether this was the best way to pick up the riverside path leading north, or whether I should have turned the other way at St Thomas’s, the opposite direction from Osney. I was not familiar with this area, apart from the direct road to Osney, and the meanderings of the river are enough to confuse any man. I wondered whether the best plan was to continue on my way to Osney and ask the porter there to set me on the right road.

  On the other hand, I reflected, Rewley Abbey lay further north along the river, and although I had been there, I had never approached it from this direction. I had always gone the more direct way: out of the North Gate of Oxford, then immediately left, along the road between the town wall and Broken Hays. There were then only two bridges to cross, Hythe Bridge and little Hythe Bridge, followed by a turn north over the abbey’s own small bridge leading to its gatehouse. Like Godstow, Rewley stood on an island, but I had always supposed this to be a man-made one, since it seemed to have been contrived at some time in the past by digging a square moat around the abbey enclave, like the circular moat around the castle, which the Thames had also obligingly filled. Despite this appearance of a withdrawn and enclosed monastery, Rewley was in fact part college, a place for Cistercian monks to dwell while studying at the university. It could well be that the Rewley monks would be more familiar with the riverside path than the monks of Osney.

  I reined Rufus in and pondered which would be my best course. I knew that there must be a road through to Rewley if I went back to St Thomas’s Church, but I was not sure of the way, and might simply waste more time, even though I might be given better directions once I reached there than I would at Osney. Remembering my hesitation now, I still feel a moment of cold panic at what might have happened, had I made the wrong choice and gone to Rewley.

  In the end, I judged it best to continue with my original plan and head for Osney. I was just urging Rufus on from a walk to a trot, to make up for the time spent enquiring at the cottages and debating which way to go, when I rounded one of the clumps of coppiced trees and became aware of a disturbance and many people on the road ahead, coming toward me.

  In the lead was an exceptionally large cart, an extraordinary vehicle, covered with a colourful cloth and drawn by three horses harnessed one behind the other. I took it for some kind of mountebank’s vehicle, though larger than most. We see such things in Oxford at the time of St Frideswide’s Fair, although this was not the time of the fair, so that could not be the reason it was heading toward the town. An elderly man was driving the cart, with a boy sitting beside him, and two more men were walking along beside the horses.

  I paid little attention to the cart, for I was looking beyond it toward a large party of horsemen just rounding the bend further away, beyond which I could glimpse the roofs of Osney and the great tower of its church. I had ridden during two whole days with that company of riders. There was no danger of my being mistaken. Falke Malaliver had made unexpectedly good time to have reached this point from the north, even if he and his party had been set ashore at dawn to the west of the Thames, brought over on boats hired or (more likely) commandeered from Godstow.

  Malaliver himself was in the lead, as usual, except for his lymers which – unlike their behaviour on previous occasions – appeared to be following a clear trail. One of the curious things about these dogs is that they have been bred to be voiceless. Unlike other tracking hounds, they will follow a trail in total silence, an excellent attribute for any hunter who makes use of them to track deer or boar, for the quarry is unaware that it is being followed. However, I have always found it somewhat unnerving. It is natural for a dog to give vent to its feelings in sound. A joyous bark should signal the discovery of its prey. But these creatures padded after their prey in total silence, like hunting cats. It was unnatural.

  Their prey?

  Suddenly the figures before me took on a new significance. There was only one prey Falke Malaliver would be hunting with his lymers, and for the first time the dogs appeared to have found a scent. Then I saw one of the huntsmen thrust a bundle of black cloth at the nearest dogs, who smelled it eagerly, then leapt away from him with increased speed and enthusiasm. Oddly, they seemed to be pursuing the mountebanks’ cart.

  But wait! That dark cloth.

  Emma would have left the abbey wearing her black habit, but would have changed into secular clothes soon afterwards and had probably abandoned the habit somewhere along the way. It looked as though Malaliver and his men must have found the discarded habit, which had given the tracking dogs a fresh scent to follow. So his guess – and mine – had been right. Somehow Emma had crossed the river to the west bank and left her habit there.

  But why were they pursuing this seemingly harmless if bizarre cart? Unless it was merely blocking their way, so that both dogs and horses needed to force their way past it. And that meant that Emma must already have travelled this way, and was now behind me, between me and the town. Perhaps she was hiding in one of those abandoned houses this side of the Small Bridge. I should have searched those as well, not merely enquired whether anyone had seen her.

  I was on the point of turning Rufus about and heading back once again to the group of houses in search of her, when many things happened at once.

  The lymers did not run past the long cart, as I had expected, but began to circle it, some rising on their hind legs and resting their forefeet on its sides. The man at the reins twisted around and shouted something over his shoulder into the cart, although I was too far away to make out his words, then he whipped up the horses. Startled, they broke into a shambling canter, causing the cart to rock perilously from side to side, for it was too top heavy and too unwieldy to be driven at speed. Seeing their own danger of being run over or crushed if the cart went out of control, the two men who had been walking at the horses’ heads broke away and began to run in my direction.

  Behind the cart, Malaliver and his men, on their less burdened horses, were closing the gap be
tween the two groups. I saw that Malaliver was shouting and gesturing to a second group of huntsmen, who had come up from behind the riders. With a shock I realised that they were the men who handled the alaunts.

  And they were bending down to release the killing dogs from their chains.

  I let out an involuntary cry, waving my arm at the driver of the cart in warning, but I could not tell whether he understood.

  The men running from the cart had almost met me, with the cart itself careering crazily behind. I expected at any moment to see it topple over and crash into a ruin of broken timbers and ripped cloth. The alaunts were now galloping after the lymers, and unlike the tracking dogs they came on in full cry. They were huge dogs, heavily muscled, with strong jaws and broad chests, and the hunting cries that rang out from them, echoing from these chests, were deep and thunderous. Rufus shied suddenly in fear, and would have thrown me, had I not already been clinging tightly with my knees as I urged him forward. He shied again, dancing sideways, and no blame to him, being driven by me straight at those fearsome beasts.

  Suddenly someone leapt from the back of the cart, clutching something white and fluffy, and ran at desperate speed, zigzagging away from the pursuing alaunts and heading for a copse of beech trees, with thick undergrowth below. It looked like a slender long legged youth, but I knew at once it must be Emma.