Hugh Corbett 11 - The Demon Archer

by Paul Doherty

  Ranulf was now walking up and down like a man taken by shock.

  ‘Where was your daughter? Had she taken a horse?’

  Verlian just blinked. He was now staring at Ranulf.

  ‘Had she taken a bow and arrow?’ Corbett added. ‘Alicia is the daughter of the verderer. She can draw and loose. Hadn’t she once threatened Lord Henry with that?’

  Verlian opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘Don’t lie,’ Corbett warned him. ‘If you lie, Robert, I cannot help you or your daughter. So, don’t say you didn’t know where she was. Alicia has visited you here. You must have asked her and she must have told you.’

  ‘Tell them, Father!’

  Alicia, shrouded in a brown cloak, stood at the entrance in the rood screen; in her hand she carried a linen bundle tied with a piece of string. She pulled back her hood and glanced quickly at Ranulf, who blushed and looked away.

  ‘I’ve brought you some oatmeal cakes, Father.’ She thrust these into the Franciscan’s hand. ‘You can share them with whoever you wish.’ She went and crouched beside her father, put a protective arm round his shoulders and stared defiantly at Corbett. ‘You are a dangerous man, Sir Hugh. You know they are talking about you at the Devil-in-the-Woods. How you sit and brood like a cat.’

  Corbett smiled. ‘In which case, mistress, you have nothing to fear from me. I am the King’s cat. I only hunt those who disturb his barns.’

  ‘My father is frightened. He’s a verderer, Sir Hugh, and a good one.’ She gently stroked her father’s hair. ‘He’s used to the forest. The people who live there; the animals, their tracks, their secret pathways. And then, in what must have been the twinkling of an eye, his lord turns to lechery and that lord is killed.’

  Verlian raised his head, his cheeks soaked in tears.

  ‘What could I do?’ he pleaded. ‘If I was turned out where could I go? I was born in these parts, sir! Ashdown is my world, my life.’

  ‘And you know that, master clerk, don’t you?’ Alicia demanded. ‘You are a cat, you sit and you think.’

  ‘So, you’ve visited the Devil-in-the-Woods tavern again?’ Corbett asked.

  ‘I did this morning.’ Alicia didn’t look at Ranulf. ‘I wanted to see someone but he’d already left. One of the pot boys, however, said that he woke long before dawn. It’s his job to kindle the fire. You, Sir Hugh, were already in the taproom, wrapped in a cloak, contemplating the white ash in the grate as if you had been there all night.’

  ‘I need little sleep.’ Corbett held her gaze. ‘I came down and read some letters. I studied a Book of Hours but I could make little sense of it. I sat and brooded about Lord Henry’s death and your father, whom I now wish to question. I wondered why the hunt had gone wrong? Why he took so long to return? Why he didn’t flee back to your house?’

  ‘And what else did you think?’

  ‘I will tell you that, mistress, when you tell me where you were.’

  ‘There’s a cemetery behind this church. My mother lies buried there. It’s the one place in this forest I felt safe from Lord Henry and his henchmen. I took a horse, a small palfrey, and I rode there. I collected some wild flowers, left the horse at the lych-gate and put the flowers on my mother’s grave. I sat and talked to her for a while.’ Alicia ignored her father’s muted sobs.

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘I left the cemetery and rode back to our house but I did so slowly. I wondered what Father and I should do for the future. By the time I reached Ashdown, isn’t it strange, master clerk, the future had been decided for me. Lord Henry was dead and my father was in flight.’

  ‘And do you often take a bow and a quiver of arrows to your mother’s grave?’

  Alicia’s face suffused with rage.

  ‘Yes!’ she hissed through clenched teeth. ‘And I tell you this, clerk, if I had met Lord Henry on the way, I would have put an arrow in his heart!’ Her eyes glittered with hatred. ‘But God disposes and someone else did that!’

  Chapter 10

  Corbett rose from his stool. ‘Brother Cosmas, I thank you for your help. Sir William’s soldiers will be arriving soon . . .’

  ‘Master!’

  Corbett felt Ranulf touch his sleeve. If Alicia’s face was red with anger, Ranulf’s was white. He was gnawing the corner of his lips, his fingers tapping the dagger in his belt.

  ‘Master, a word with you?’

  Corbett bowed coolly to the rest and followed Ranulf out of the sanctuary to a small side chapel dominated by a large statue of the Virgin and Child. Ranulf thrust his face close to Corbett.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Your brain clatters and turns like a wheel of a busy mill. I may be your servant but I am also a Clerk of the Green Wax: the King’s commission bears my name.’

  Corbett went round him and, taking a taper, lit one of the small night-lights on the iron rail which ran beneath the statue of the Virgin.

  ‘One for Maeve,’ he murmured. He took another. ‘One for baby Eleanor! One for my unborn child.’ He took a fourth and put a coin in the box which, he noticed with some amusement, was cemented into the floor near the statue. ‘And one for my lovelorn Ranulf!’

  ‘I do not think it’s amusing, Sir Hugh!’

  ‘Murder never is, Ranulf. I didn’t tell you because I knew.’ He came back to his clerk. ‘I knew,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘what you would do. But, yes, I sat in the taproom this morning. I thought about Verlian, the hunt, his later flight. It’s a matter of logic, Ranulf. Sometimes, God forgive me, love and logic clash. I am no threat to you or to Alicia. But murder is murder. The King’s law is the King’s law. Justice must be done: that’s why you are a Clerk of the Green Wax, to enforce that. Otherwise we are no better than the animals in the forest where only the swiftest and most powerful survive.’

  ‘Lord Henry was powerful.’

  ‘And, Ranulf, Lord Henry was vulnerable. Think about it. If a great lord can be cut down with impunity, no matter what he was, or what he did, then no one is safe. You know that, be he a lord in his manor or a clerk on the streets of Oxford.’

  Ranulf smiled ruefully.

  ‘But you do not think Alicia is the assassin?’

  ‘I’ll be honest, Ranulf, I don’t know.’ Corbett ticked the points off on his fingers. ‘She hated the Lord Henry. She was in the forest when he died. She was riding a horse. She carried a bow and quiver in the use of which she is skilled. Finally, there are no witnesses to where she was or what she did. So, like it or not, at this stage of the hunt, Mistress Alice is much suspected but nothing is proved.’

  He looked over his shoulder; Brother Cosmas was now standing over the verderer and his daughter. Corbett gently pushed Ranulf deeper into the shadows of the side chapel.

  ‘There’s more to this forest and its people than meets the eye.’

  ‘Such as?’ Ranulf asked.

  ‘Use your logic, Ranulf. You’ve been through Ashdown Forest and what did you see? I know,’ Corbett held a hand up. ‘Miles and miles of trees and dark lanes, swamps and marshes. You could hide an army there and no one would know. Really the forest is like a deserted street, long and dark, houses on either side. Despite the dark tunnel which runs between them, the inhabitants of those houses know when someone goes along that street, particularly if it’s time and again.’

  ‘And?’ Ranulf asked.

  ‘The same is true of the forest. There may be trees as far as the eye can see but remember, Ranulf, what it was like? The dark, tangled undergrowth; those light green patches which may be marshes or swamp. Now, when you walk through a forest you are forced, whether you like it or not, to stumble through the undergrowth, crashing about like a wounded boar and blundering into God knows what danger, as well as being seen and heard by anyone who may be passing.’

  ‘Or,’ Ranulf intervened quickly, ‘you will seek certain paths and trackways where, again, you are likely to be seen or heard.’

  ‘Now there speak
s a good and studious observer. So, let’s return to the questioning and, if you can, my noble Galahad, my knight of the moonlight, curb your passion and use your mind.’

  Corbett left the side chapel and walked back into the sanctuary. Ranulf sighed, fished a coin from his purse which he put in the box, and lit a candle.

  ‘And that’s for Master Long Face,’ he muttered. ‘And his damnable logic!’

  He followed Corbett into the sanctuary, where the clerk had already taken his stool.

  ‘Master Verlian?’

  ‘I did not like the way you questioned my daughter, Sir Hugh, or what you implied.’

  ‘If your daughter is innocent she has nothing to fear. And neither have you. True, my questions may bite.’ He half-smiled at Alicia who was now sitting on the floor, her back resting against a pillar. ‘But your answers are logical and you do not have the eyes of a murderer.’

  Now Ranulf smiled to hide his anxiety. If they had been alone, he would have asked his master what the eyes of an assassin looked like, bearing in mind some of the sweet-faced villains they had crossed swords with over the years. When he caught the pleading look in the young woman’s eyes he glanced away. Did she have anything to hide?

  Corbett, however, was now rubbing the side of his face, a sure sign that his sharp brain was hunting an idea.

  ‘You have questions for me, clerk?’ Verlian asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s not about Lord Henry’s murder. It’s about the forest. You know it well?’

  ‘As well as my child’s face.’

  ‘You are a skilled huntsman?’

  Verlian shrugged. ‘Lord Henry said as much.’

  ‘You can track a deer?’

  ‘I can track anything which walks the face of God’s earth,’ Verlian replied proudly. ‘Be it man or beast.’

  ‘And your companions, the huntsmen and verderers, are people who live in and use the forest?’

  ‘Some are very good. Others have got a great deal to learn.’

  ‘So, what about the outlaws?’ Corbett asked abruptly.

  Verlian looked guardedly at him.

  ‘The wolfs-heads, the outlaws?’ Corbett insisted.

  ‘Many of them don’t survive. They flee from the towns and villages. They do not last long in the forest. I have discovered many a corpse frozen in a snowdrift or the edge of some swamp. I’ve even found those who’ve hanged themselves, their wits disturbed. If they have any sense they do not stay long but travel on to another town.’

  ‘And the rest? Those who do stay? The peasants who kill the deer? Or who’ve fled a cruel lord?’

  ‘We leave them alone and they leave us. And we turn a blind eye to the little things they take.’

  ‘So, you do see them?’

  Verlian nodded. ‘If they don’t interfere with us, as I have said, we don’t interfere with them.’

  ‘I can say the same,’ Brother Cosmas interrupted.

  ‘Ah yes, I was going to ask you that.’ Corbett smiled at the Franciscan. ‘You live here, Brother. You describe Ashdown as your parish. You must know all the forest people, as well as those poor unfortunates who have to flee?’

  ‘That’s true,’ the Franciscan replied proudly. ‘I am a friar, not one of the King’s officers. If a man snares a hare to put in his family pot, why should I object?’

  ‘And Mistress Alicia here? You who ride through the forest armed with bow and arrow?’

  ‘My father has answered for me. What are you implying, clerk?’

  ‘My name is Sir Hugh Corbett.’

  Alicia shrugged her shoulders prettily.

  ‘I’d call you all lords of the forest,’ Corbett said humorously. ‘You probably know its pathways and trackways better than Lord Henry ever did. Nevertheless, that puzzles me because, in the forest, we have the Owlman, an outlaw different from the rest. Indeed, he intrigues me. When I was sitting in the taproom this morning I thought about him. He is an outlaw who does not prey on travellers, at least, there’s no proof that he does. He does not hunt the King’s venison. Indeed, his only quarrel seems with the Fitzalan family. He sends them threatening messages tied to a yard shaft but no one ever sees him! No one ever hears him! No one even knows what he looks like.’

  He glimpsed the puzzlement in Verlian’s eyes, glanced quickly at Alicia then swiftly up at the friar. Brother Cosmas had turned away as if distracted by the candle spluttering on the altar. Corbett got to his feet.

  ‘Now this is truly a conundrum.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it,’ Verlian declared. ‘It’s now autumn and the Owlman has been in this forest since spring. I have never seen anything suspicious nor have any of my verderers or huntsmen.’

  ‘Are you saying that he’s someone else?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘That’s one possibility,’ Corbett agreed. ‘He might even be one of you three. But, I tell you this . . .’

  ‘Sir Hugh! Sir Hugh Corbett!’

  Ranulf went to the mouth of the rood screen. The door of the church was flung open and archers wearing the Fitzalan livery stood in the entrance, a woman behind them. She had her arm round someone’s shoulder. Ranulf couldn’t see clearly because the figure was cloaked and cowled.

  ‘Ah, our guests have arrived.’ Corbett smiled. ‘Brother Cosmas, if you could help us?’

  ‘And you will reach your conclusions, clerk?’

  ‘In time, but, if I could use that as my desk?’ Corbett pointed to the offertory table.

  Brother Cosmas helped Corbett and Ranulf move the table and place it at the top of the nave. He then brought benches from the transepts and a stool for himself. Corbett made himself comfortable. Ranulf opened his writing bag and laid out his sheaf of parchments, an ink pot carefully sealed and a velvet pouch of ready-sharpened quills.

  ‘Who have you there?’ Corbett called.

  The archers shuffled their feet.

  ‘The woman Jocasta, her daughter and the hermit who calls himself Odo.’

  ‘I would be grateful if you would bring Jocasta forward. No, no!’ Corbett got to his feet and leaned over the table. ‘You stay in the porch, Brother Cosmas. Bring another bench for the lady to sit on.’

  Ranulf was already writing down the woman’s name and that of her daughter Blanche according to Chancery regulations.

  Jocasta took her seat on the bench opposite him, one arm round her slack-jawed, wary-eyed daughter. Corbett quietly cursed the poor light. Jocasta’s face was hidden in the shadow yet there was strength in those high cheekbones, the sharp, slightly slanted eyes, the strong mouth and firm chin. Her black hair was unveiled and slightly tinged with grey. Corbett noticed the strong fingers and clean nails. The woman wore a dark-brown smock; a silver chain with a small gold crescent moon hung round her thick brown neck.

  ‘You are the woman Jocasta?’

  ‘And who are you?’ The voice was low and throaty.

  ‘You know who I am, mistress: Sir Hugh Corbett, King’s clerk, and Ranulf-atte-Newgate . . .’

  ‘By what authority am I brought here?’ she interrupted. ‘Am I on trial?’

  Corbett took the King’s commission from his pouch and spread it out on the table.

  ‘You are not on trial, mistress, but I have the right to question you as my commission attests.’

  ‘I cannot read, clerk, but I know letters bearing seals are important.’ She glanced at Brother Cosmas. ‘Good morrow, priest.’

  ‘Good morrow, Jocasta. It is good to see you here at last.’

  Ranulf’s pen was moving across the page; when its tip broke, he quietly cursed, took another one out and dipped it in the ink pot.

  ‘You are not one of Brother Cosmas’ parishioners?’

  ‘She is most welcome here,’ the Franciscan interrupted.

  ‘I do not come to St Oswald’s,’ Jocasta replied sharply, her arm protectively round her daughter. ‘They say,’ she closed her eyes, ‘this is the House of God and the Gate of Heaven: a terrible place.’

  ‘Why do you not come?’

/>   ‘I am unworthy and my daughter becomes frightened.’

  ‘Is that the truth?’

  ‘Do you know any different, clerk?’

  ‘They say you are a witch.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘So, you don’t deny it?’

  ‘Don’t play words with me, clerk!’

  Corbett raised his head. ‘I am sorry, mistress. I tease rather than question. Let me begin again. Why do you not come to church?’

  ‘I have led an unworthy life. My daughter is witless so I keep her away from others who might point the finger.’

  ‘And these gossips who say you are a witch?’

  ‘They are liars, as Brother Cosmas will attest. I know cures, I can distil potions, fashion a poultice, but I am no witch. I don’t dig up the mandrake root or pay bloody sacrifice to the midnight moon.’

  ‘So, why do you live in Ashdown?’

  ‘It’s the place I call home.’ The woman sighed; she whispered softly into her daughter’s ear and withdrew her arm. ‘You’ve kind eyes, clerk, no malice in them. You are here because of Lord Henry’s death, yes? Well, I shall tell you about Lord Henry. He is the father of this child.’ She ignored the Franciscan’s gasp of astonishment. ‘Oh yes, Lord Henry in his youth was known the length and breadth of the Cinque Ports, not a brothel or house of whores was left untouched by his presence. In my youth I played the role of a Magdalene.’ She half-smiled. ‘Before that great saint’s conversion. I have Spanish blood in me. I was married to a sailor, who got himself killed in a tavern brawl. The captain would not let me back on board, not even after I had favoured him with my body. So I became a streetwalker, a whore in the town of Rye. In my youth, clerk, I was considered beautiful.’

  ‘I would say the same now,’ Corbett commented. He caught the glint of amusement in Jocasta’s eyes.

  ‘Golden-tongued, eh clerk?’ She lowered her head, placing her hands in her lap. ‘Lord Henry Fitzalan was that. Oh, in many ways he had a soul of steel, locked and closed, with a heart of stone. But, when the fancy took him, he was generous with his praise and lavish with his purse. He came tripping into Rye. And bought my favours.’ She nodded at her daughter. ‘I was still unskilled. I became pregnant. Some kindly sisters took me in, not like the high-stepping ladies at St Hawisia’s!’