Baynard's List (A Stephen Attebrook mystery Book 2)

by Jason Vail

  The box was filled with velum sheets and parchments, over which trickled writing in an unexpectedly neat hand. It was the casual writing learned in church school and not the clerk hand Valence was used to, but elegant nonetheless. He lifted the documents out of the box one by one, examining each one closely. Some of them were barely more than scribbles and appeared to be reports from Baynard’s informants. Others looked like notes taken of oral reports or drafts of messages Baynard planned to send to whoever was his superior. Valence reached the bottom of the box without finding anything that looked like a list of names.

  “I don’t see it,” Valence said, unable to keep the alarm and disappointment from his voice. “You look. Show me which one it is.”

  Clement spread the documents on the table.

  “Well?” Valence demanded.

  “It’s not here,” Clement said.

  “You assured me it was!” Valence shouted. Clement’s letter had been emphatic about this detail, and he was incensed to find the promise was untrue. “What happened to it?”

  Clement flinched as if he had been struck. “I don’t know, sir. I swear. I saw it. It was here after Attebrook got in the box. Now?” He shrugged helplessly.

  Valence had a vision of the royal reaction at this news. It might be possible to conceal the disaster, but Valence didn’t believe that. King Henry would find out somehow. As soon as he heard of Baynard’s death, he’d be sure to dispatch an agent to put together the scattered threads of Baynard’s network. The agent would learn of Valence’s involvement. There’d be no concealing it. The servants had seen him and they’d talk. Instead of the rewards Valence anticipated, Henry would be angry. He might even blame Valence for the loss. The thought frightened him.

  “I must find it,” Valence said grimly. “I must.”

  Chapter 2

  “Waste of good salt if you ask me,” said Harry the legless beggar.

  “Nobody’s asking you,” said Stephen Attebrook, impoverished knight and part time deputy coroner. He watched as Jennie Wistwode poured salt into the steaming bucket of water at his feet and then stirred it with a big wooden spoon. The dissolving salt gave the water a gray, slate-like sheen, then the water cleared as the whirlpool in its center dissipated.

  Jennie straightened up and said, “Careful, that’s hot.”

  “Hope you cook yourself, you idiot,” Harry grumbled. He looked up at Jennie and held out his bowl of Edith Wistwode’s famous mutton pie, which Jennie had brought out to the pair of them shortly before she had fetched the bucket of water. “You wouldn’t have any left to spare, would you?”

  “You’ve got all you’re entitled to,” Jennie snapped. “The dish is spiced enough.” Then her round, plain face lightened up with a great smile for Stephen. “Go ahead, your honor, you don’t want to wait too long. It only works when the water’s hot.”

  Stephen pulled the boot from his bad foot, reluctant to let the others see the stump, for half the foot was missing, chopped off by a Moor during an assault on a castle in Spain, where he had spent nearly the last ten years fighting a war on the borders that never seemed to end. He had made a fortune in Spain, but in the end he had lost the fortune, his woman, and all his friends. Now he had nothing but his armor, three horses, and some tatty clothes.

  He eased the foot into the bucket, wincing at the heat, which was fairly scalding. He had been training with soldiers from the castle garrison, and his bad foot felt as though he had been pounding it on rocks. He also had a blossoming bruise on his cheek where one of the castle squires had landed a good blow with a wooden practice sword — just when the bruises from his duel a few weeks ago had begun to disappear.

  “How’s that?” Jennie asked.

  “Good,” Stephen said, forcing a smile over gritted teeth, which caused her smile to grow even larger. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. It appeared that she would have stood there longer, but her mother, Edith, called from a side window of the Broken Shield Inn, and reluctantly, with a backward glance, Jennie took her leave and returned to work.

  Harry looked disgusted even while he filled his face with mutton pie. “She’s sweet on you,” he said with a full mouth. “She come to your room yet?”

  Stephen lived in a small room at the top and rear of the inn, the open window of which was visible from their position, Stephen on a bench and Harry on the ground, at the door to the stables.

  “None of your damn business,” Stephen said tartly. Harry was right; he was liable to cook himself in this water. It hurt so that he could barely keep his foot in the bucket. He had to admit, though, it did seem to make a difference. The heat eased the knotted muscles. He could almost feel it seeping around the toes which weren’t there. Often he could still feel those missing toes. Sometimes they itched, sometimes they hurt, often sharply. But now the missing toes, and the rest of his foot, seemed to relax, as if the foot was dissolving in the hot water along with the salt.

  Harry grunted in reply and absently picked a leaf and then a twig from the matted mass of beard of his, a gross tangle of brown hair that hung like a bib to his chest. The thing, in fact, was even useful as a bib, as Harry proved when he wiped his lips on the end of the beard.

  Stephen noticed that Harry’s eyes had followed Jennie as she disappeared through the side door to the inn. For a moment, Stephen thought he saw Harry’s eyes alight with wistfulness. Stephen had the sudden inspiration that Harry was sweet on Jennie. Could he be jealous of her attentions to him? It was an astonishing notion. It had never occurred to him that Harry might be interested in Jennie. Unlike some men, Harry never talked about women as regards to himself, although Stephen was aware that he had once had a wife who had vanished after his accident, which had taken his legs above the knees a few years back. His lord had thrown him out because he couldn’t work, and now he was a beggar.

  Stephen was painfully aware of how women were disgusted with deformity, and his own was comparatively small and generally concealable. It was bad enough for Harry that he had no legs, but to be a beggar besides made him the least desirable of men, not to mention the fact that he lived in the stables, even though behind that matted beard Stephen suspected there lurked a very presentable face. Stephen felt sorry for Harry, but didn’t dare show it. Harry had nothing but scorn for pity, and Harry in a scornful mood was a dragon.

  So Stephen said, “But no, if you must know. She hasn’t.”

  “Probably thinks she can do better,” Harry sniffed as his spoon went into his mouth.

  Probably she can, Stephen thought but did not say so. He had lost the best woman he had ever had — had ever hoped to have — to a fever in Spain, and he felt as though he would never be able to fill the yawning chasm that her death had left. The truth was, Stephen himself was not much of a prize. Although he had been born into the gentry, a family that held lands not far from Ludlow, he had fallen pretty low. He had nothing now but his arms — such good as they did since he wasn’t much up to soldiering these days — three horses, and a position as deputy coroner of this part of the county and the town that barely paid enough to keep the horses in fodder, and winter was on its way and he needed new shoes and a coat. He had nothing now that would interest a decent woman. He wasn’t so bad looking, except for the foot, or so he had been told, nearly six feet tall and lean and muscular with jet black hair, but decent women didn’t pick their men on how they looked but on what they had.

  “Look at you, holes in your stockings,” Harry went on after gulping his spoonful of pie. “Boots all worn out. Shameful, I’d say.”

  “That’s enough, Harry.”

  “What’s wrong, can’t stand the truth?”

  “You know, Harry,” Stephen said mildly, “I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t bothered to cut off your head to match your legs.” Talking to Harry was like fencing, only with tongues. If you didn’t defend yourself, he’d cut you to ribbons.

  “Oh, they’ve tried, but I’m too fast for them.” Harry put his
empty bowl on the bench and indicated Stephen’s, which sat barely touched beside him. “You done with that?”

  “I reckon so,” Stephen sighed. “Go ahead.”

  Harry eagerly snatched up Stephen’s bowl while Stephen removed his foot from the bucket, as the water had already begun to cool. The shock of the autumn air on his wet foot almost made him gasp. He toweled off his leg with his stocking, which he drew on. He turned for his boot to find Harry poking a finger through a hole in the sole. “Here, Harry,” Stephen beckoned.

  Harry tossed the boot at him then climbed onto his board, a flat piece of wood with rockers on the bottom that Gilbert had made for him some time ago. With padded gloves on his knuckles, the board helped him move about more easily. Harry flexed his fingers inside the gloves. “That hits the spot, wouldn’t you say? No, you can’t, since you didn’t eat enough to feed a bird. Too bad for you. Well, back to work. See you this evening.”

  And Harry began to swing himself across the back yard toward the gate with a speed that had not yet ceased to astonish Stephen.

  “See you, Harry.”

  Stephen settled back down on the bench and took up his bread, which Harry had not asked for. He tore off a piece and put it in his mouth. It was good bread, baked this morning, and still soft enough almost to melt in his mouth. But it seemed tasteless. Jennie and the conversation with Harry had provoked memories of Spain and loss, and Stephen felt heavy with melancholy. Lately, he had been able to go a full day, or even two at a time, without thinking of Spain and Taresa and all that was gone and would never be regained.

  A commotion at the inn broke into his thoughts — someone talking loud and excitedly, although he could not make out what was being said. Stephen was about to rise to see what was the matter when the side door to the Broken Shield burst open, and Gilbert Wistwode emerged and rushed across the yard in his distinctive waddling trot. His round face under its fringe of gray hair was grim.

  Gilbert skidded to a halt before Stephen. Stephen opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but Gilbert spoke first. He said, “There’s been an accident.”

  Stephen had begun to shrink at hearing those words because it meant that someone had died. Death was a common thing in this world, and Stephen, like most people, was fairly hardened to it. But death still managed to fascinate, to frighten, and to sadden, and if you didn’t stare at it as though a carnival had come to town, you just passed it by with a wag of the head and a prayer and tried to forget about it because it wasn’t someone you loved. But Stephen could not just pass it by. His very job was about death. It had, he once thought in a quiet moment under the blankets in his room upstairs, been about death since he was seventeen and become a soldier, ten long years ago, although at the time he had not seen it that way — it had seemed then about excitement and glory and the prospect of plunder. Now it was about death in another way. He had to look death in the face as he had never had to before and to pronounce the manner and the reason for it, so that there would be an official record and the death could be properly assessed, because no man, woman, or child was supposed to pass into the next world without giving fine to the king for the misfortune.

  “Where?” Stephen asked.

  “On Corve Street by St. Leonard’s,” Gilbert said.

  The little chapel of St. Leonard’s lay not quite a quarter mile north of Corve Gate. He could ride, but in the time it would take to curry, brush, and saddle the mare, they could be at St. Leonard’s doors. “Close enough to walk, I suppose.”

  “Does your foot feel up to it?”

  “I’m all right. Jennie’s tonic was a charm.”

  Gilbert smiled, pleased. Jennie was his daughter. “She’s a good girl.”

  “It’s a good thing she takes after her mother and not you.”

  Gilbert grinned ruefully and rubbed his short round nose that looked like a cork sticking out of an ale barrel. It had been Jennie’s good fortune not to be blessed with that nose. He said, “So it is. The boys wouldn’t pay a wit of attention to her if she did.” He shook his head. “A constant worry that is, though. You have no idea how much trouble a daughter is.”

  “How can I not know? You keep reminding me.”

  As they turned toward the gate, Gilbert said, “One of these days, God willing, you’ll find out. Then you’ll rue the day you ever said a cross word to me.”

  Fat chance of that, Stephen thought sourly. “I? Speak crossly to you? When have I ever done so?”

  They passed through the gate into Bell Lane, a narrow street wide enough to allow passage of one cart at a time. The ground was muddy from last night’s rain.

  Gilbert said, “How did you get that bruise? Run into a door again?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You ought to be more careful. You’ll break your head one day.”

  “My mother used to tell me that.”

  “Wise woman, your mother. I never knew her, of course, but she clearly was passingly wise. Especially having turned you out before you burned down the house.”

  Stephen laughed. “I almost did that once.”

  Gilbert’s eyebrows arched and his mouth formed a questioning Oh.

  Stephen had no choice now but to go on. If he didn’t, Gilbert would wheedle the story out of him. “My brother dared me to climb onto the roof. It was thatched then and gave way under me. I fell by the hearth and a large bundle of thatch came with me and landed in the fire. It burned a hole in the floor before the servants put it out.”

  “Oh, my,” Gilbert chuckled.

  Stephen frowned slightly at the memory. It sounded rather funny now, but at the time there had been nothing funny about it. Father had been furious with him, but then, father had been angry at just about everything Stephen had done, as if there was nothing he could do right. “I think my father was more angry at the hole in the roof than the one in the floor. He’d been resisting mother’s demands for a new slate roof, you see, and since something had to be done about the hole, he found his position weakened. So we got a slate roof out of the mishap.”

  “And you got a beating.”

  “Yes.”

  “Served you right.”

  “It paid for the roof.”

  Despite the easy talk, they had been walking fast, and by this time had reached the wide crossroad where Old Street and Draper’s Row came together. The cattle market was held here, but today the crossroads was deserted except for a couple of carts creaking through, one piled with hay and the other holding several barrels and a few odd sticks of lumber.

  They nodded greetings to the warden on his stool guarding Corve Gate and passed through into the suburb beyond. Years past, the land here had been largely in field, where townspeople had grazed sheep and cattle or grown hay, but now the street was lined with houses, their fronts smack on the verge and planted close together so that they almost seemed to form a solid wall of prosperous looking buildings.

  As they rounded the curve of the street toward St. Leonard’s, a crowd of twenty or so people came into view clustered in front of a timber-framed house on the right. It was a fairly quiet crowd, which was not unexpected, most people either gawking at a spectacle that only they could see or talking to each other in low voices, although, oddly, a few people were actually smiling and one or two laughing.

  “Make way, make way,” Gilbert said loudly as they reached the rear of the crowd. “Make way for the deputy coroner.”

  The crowd edged apart as Gilbert and Stephen came forward. They paused at the head of an alley so narrow that a man could spread out his arms and practically touch both neighboring buildings at once. A substantial rain barrel blocked the entrance. As Stephen squeezed around it, he glanced into the black water and thought for a moment he saw a fish in its depths. But that was silly. No one put fish in rain barrels.

  Once he got by the barrel, he came upon what people had been gawking at. It was a crumpled thing that had once been a small man. He lay at the foot of some stairs running up the side of one of t
he houses in such an impossibly awkward position that there was no doubt he was dead. He could have been sitting against the wall, except his chest was toward the wall rather than away from it. His legs were crossed above the knees, and the knees themselves bent at sharp angles. One arm was under him and the other crooked behind his back but because of his position appeared as if it was in his lap. It was the man’s head that was the worst. Instead of facing the wall, as it should have done, it had been turned clear around and hung down as if the back had become the chest and he was merely resting.

  Stephen knelt by the body but did not touch it. Graying hair streaked with black hung down like ratty curtains, concealing the face. Stephen’s mouth went suddenly dry. Although he could not yet see the dead man’s face except for his rather pointed chin, Stephen guessed at his identity. Stephen gingerly parted one wing of his hair and pushed it out of the way behind an ear. The dead man’s face, never known to have much color in life, had even less now — a grayish waxy pallor that reminded Stephen of a Roman statue he had seen once in Spain. The eyes were open, their natural deep brown dimmed by the odd film that always seemed to form over the eyes of the dead a short while after they had died. The eye lids were slightly down and, in cooperation with a open but slack mouth, gave the dead man a rather stupid expression that he had never worn when alive. There were cuts upon the face: through an eyebrow, across the nose, a split lip, upon the cheeks and chin. The split lip was particularly nasty, as if someone had parted it with scissors or a knife, and there was blood between the teeth. But altogether, the dead man had not bled much.