The Sticklepath Strangler (2001)

by Jecks, Michael

Joan bolted up the track as though the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. Splashing through the ruts and puddles, she could feel the mud spattering her calves and thighs underneath her skirts, the brambles catching at her sleeves.

  Gasping, she paused at the top of the steepest part of the hill, gripping her sides and facing back the way she had come. There, far below her, she could see her red-faced friend Emma panting and waving up at her. Soon Emma had recovered and set off again, pressing her palms on her thighs with each step as though it could ease her progress.

  Emma was too chubby, that was why she struggled to keep up with Joan, not that either minded. Joan was fond of her friend, and Emma was devoted to Joan. There were few other girls in the area and although with Joan’s fertile imagination she could populate the surrounding ten miles with different inhabitants, it was nice not to have to bother, and Emma had a similar sense of fun to her own. She was a good companion.

  It was terribly steep here – Joan could recall her father telling her that ‘stickle’ meant steep – but now that they had climbed the sharper incline at the bottom of Greenhill, the slope rose less cruelly, taking them through the trees to the scrubby land above the vill.

  From here she could see right over the clump of small cottages and the Reeve’s own larger house, to the river and then the hill which stood between Sticklepath and South Zeal.

  She loved this view. Below her she could just glimpse her own family’s home, a large cottage at the edge of the vill under the hill that led up to the moors, a good-sized house for her and her parents. Behind was the mill, whose crunching and rumbling could be heard even over the steady rushing of the river. A short distance away was the chapel, sitting in the broad loop where the river curled around the bottom of the hill’s slope with, beside it, the small cemetery with its twin defences: the hurdles enclosing it to protect the dead from scavenging dogs and wild animals, while their souls were protected from demons by the single large wooden cross planted like a tree in the middle.

  After that stood the inn, always filled with travellers. Sticklepath lay on the main road between Exeter and Cornwall, and pilgrims, merchants, fish-sellers and tranters of all kinds passed by here. Even now Joan could see a man leading a packhorse down the slope from South Zeal. He followed the muddy trail to the ford and stood there contemplating it, then ran across quickly, feet splashing the water in all directions. At the far side he turned, but his horse hadn’t followed him, and it stood for a moment, watching him with a kind of bemused surprise before wandering to the verge and nibbling at the grass. The man’s angry voice couldn’t reach Joan over the rumble and clatter of the mill, but she smiled to see him raise his fists in impotent fury before recrossing the river to fetch the beast.

  The men and most of the women were outside, working, their legs stained brown from the mud in the narrow strips in the communal fields. Each little half-acre strip was separated by an unploughed, grassy path called a landsherd, and the women were bending to pull out the straggling fingers of couch grass before they could invade and establish themselves in the strips and threaten the new crop of oats.

  It was a peaceful, comforting scene. Joan knew enough about poverty. It was hard not to, when everyone was struggling to make a living, when neighbours could scarcely find the money for grain to make bread and had to depend on the largesse of their lord, Hugh de Courtenay, whose serfs they were. Still, none of that could detract from the warmth she felt, surveying this serene little vill. It was her home.

  As she gazed down she could feel her heart swell. The picture before her represented safety and comradeship; it contained all she knew of life and love. She had no idea of the trials which would soon afflict her and her family – those troubles were in her future, so today she smiled happily at the sight. The sun was shining down, the rains all but forgotten, and the fields glowed with green health and promise, shot through with blue and silver silken threads to show where streams and rivulets fed the soil.

  All looked clean and pure, not like other places. Inevitably her attention moved beyond the fields, past the larger pastures and water meadows, all bounded by the river as it wound its way northwards.

  She gazed in that direction, feeling faintly troubled. From here she couldn’t see the hills. If she walked up to the warrens on the moorland nearer to Belstone, the long, low blue line on the horizon was plainly visible, but not from here. Her father had told her that it was far-distant Exmoor, and that beyond it was the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It was so far away, it was incomprehensible that it should in truth exist. She had seen far-off towns – she had been to Oakhampton many times, and had even joined her father when he went to market in Tavistock once, miles to the south and west – but to think that somewhere like Exmoor lay there, so distant that even massive hills were an indistinct smudge, was quite difficult to accept. It was scary.

  Sighing, she glanced down at Emma. ‘Come on! We’ll have to set off back home before we even get there, at this rate,’ she called imperiously.

  Emma grinned up at her. Her breast was heaving and she was plainly feeling the warmth. To Joan’s eye she panted like a dog. The sun was beaming down, almost directly overhead, and Emma’s face shone like a cherry. ‘There’s no hurry. Everyone’s out working. They won’t notice we’ve gone for ages.’

  It was rare that there was anything up here of interest. They both visited the moors often enough, sometimes to see the spoor left by the fox which lived up at the wall before the moor, or to steal eggs from the larks and other ground-nesting birds, but they were natural sights. Unusual sights, like the rotting corpse of the wolf which Emma had discovered last year, were unique; not that it stayed there long. The heavy springtime rains had dismembered the remains, washing them away as though they had never existed and the two girls couldn’t even find the skull, no matter how long they searched.

  What a spring it had been! Two houses down in the vill had been flooded and collapsed when their walls were washed away. Poor Ham, the son of William the Taverner, had died when a beam fell on him as he tried to help rescue the animals and belongings from the home of Henry Batyn. It was fortunate that the other buildings survived, and the houses built to replace the fallen ones were almost completed, but Joan still missed Ham. He had been a natural enemy, cat-calling and sneering at her, but sometimes even the loss of an enemy can be sad. His death had left a hole in her life.

  The rains had been terrible. Not so bad as the famine years, all the adults said, but Joan and Emma wouldn’t know that. This was the year of 1322, so the priest told them, when Father Gervase deigned to speak.

  Samson atte Mill said that Emma and Joan were only two and three when the great downpours started. Not that they spoke to Samson much. He was a huge, fearsome man with red, slobbering lips and a brutal expression. Joan had heard horrible stories about him, and she tended to avoid him, but he seemed to like to get close to her. Once he tried to persuade her to kiss him. Not when her parents were around, though, and Joan felt sure it was because he knew it was wrong.

  This year the weather had been worryingly similar to the famine years, everyone said. The rains began in March and continued for weeks on end. Farmers took to watching the skies anxiously, for if the grain they planted were to drown, or grew to produce only weak, spindly plants with feeble, non-nutritious grains which weren’t strong enough to bake into bread or brew into ale, they would starve again. Even the little ovens which the Reeve had persuaded the villagers to build in the communal bakery next to his own house, designed to slowly dry the sodden grain before using it to cook, hadn’t worked well. In Devon, many had died during the famine. All feared another, and their trepidation as they watched their crops being tortured by the torrential downpours was communicated to the children.

  But the rains had stopped, mercifully, in the early summer. Joan felt as though she would always remember that first delicious day when the clouds parted and the sun could at last break through, sending shafts of light to the ground. Bef
ore long the soil was heated, so quickly that there was a thin mist of steam. She could see it rising from the earth, as though there was a great fire beneath the land, a health-giving, invigorating fire that soothed and reassured, drying out the sodden fields and transforming people’s pinched grey faces into ones with fresh pink complexions and cheerful expressions.

  It certainly worked wonders on the poor serfs slaving in Lord Hugh’s fields. Joan’s mother, Nicole, declared that it was the first time in weeks that her own clothes had not been soggy. She looked happy, revelling in the sun’s heat, standing at the door of their tiny cottage with her face to the skies, moaning in pleasure, lifting her arms slowly as though in reverence, eyes closed, as though she was drinking in the warmth. She looked almost like a child again; it was odd to see her like that.

  That wasn’t the only great thing that day. The other was that Joan wasn’t told off or smacked once. It felt as though the whole vill was starting a new life together.

  If that had been a marvellous day, she thought happily, this was even better. The two girls shouldn’t really be up here, of course, not so close to the moors, not without permission, for the adults of Sticklepath were always fearful of their children becoming lost or, worse, falling prey to the wild animals or the many treacherous bogs. And there were always the rumours of the ghosts and spirits which inhabited the moorland far from humans. Joan’s mother was petrified by them. She had been brought up in foreign lands, and living in the shadow of the grim hill of Cosdon, the bulky mound that rose up behind Sticklepath and the first of the massive hills of Dartmoor, was awesome. To her the moors were not merely desolate, they were terrifying. She hated Joan going up there on her own or with her friends.

  Joan thought she was silly. Emma and she could look after themselves.

  The path was flatter now, curving with the line of the hillside, solid green banks on both sides like walls. They were passing through sparse woods, the sun overhead making the road’s surface of dark, dusty soil, stones and grass shimmer in the haze, while the ferns and grasses growing in among the banks were dappled with bright light and shadow, as the breeze ruffled their leaves.

  ‘How much further is it?’ Joan asked. Glancing back towards the town, she saw that the man with the packhorse now stood at the base of the sticklepath itself, looking up the narrow track towards them. ‘We’ll have to set off home soon.’

  Emma didn’t see her glance. She didn’t care about some silly man traipsing about the place with a packhorse. Tranters were two a penny during the summer when travel was less arduous. However, she was always easily offended and now, upset by Joan’s tone, she answered sulkily, ‘It’s just a little further on.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Joan said quickly, not wanting to spoil the mood. Yet for some reason she was feeling apprehensive.

  ‘There it is!’ Emma pointed a few moments later.

  Following her finger, Joan saw that a small section of the bank had been washed away. Loosened, perhaps, by the rains earlier in the year, it had yielded to the weight of a fox or a dog, and the wall of the lane had collapsed. An untidy mess of grey moorstone rubble had slithered into the lane, borne along by the tide of damp soil behind, although the trees and bushes on either side appeared to bulwark the rest of the bank from further disintegration.

  The two girls hurried to the rent in the wall. ‘There, see?’ Emma said, excitedly.

  They crouched side by side and peered. In among the roots Joan thought she could see some cloth, filthy from long immersion in the soil, but still recognisably material of some kind. How peculiar! Someone must have buried it here. Emma had been right when she’d begged Joan to come and see this, saying that it was even more weird than the dead wolf.

  ‘Do you think there’s something wrapped in it?’ Joan said at last.

  ‘Could be, but what would someone wrap in cloth and bury? And why would they have buried it here?’

  ‘It could be gold, stolen by a felon, and hidden here for safekeeping,’ Joan said, reaching out and touching it.

  ‘Careful! You don’t want the wall to fall on you,’ Emma cried, pulling her friend away.

  ‘It’s strong enough.’

  ‘Remember how the houses fell in? I’ll never forget seeing Ham when they pulled him loose. Ugh! Blood everywhere, and his arm dangling like that.’

  Joan sniffed unsympathetically. ‘If you don’t dare stay, leave me to it.’

  Emma bridled. ‘It was me found it! All I’m saying is, you ought to poke it with a stick first, just in case the lot tumbles down. It could trap you.’

  For all her boldness, Joan could see the force of the argument. The rocks which had landed in the road were some of them very large. One was over a foot deep; easily massive enough to crush her like a snail. Casting about for a stick, she found a thin branch about a yard long. Methodically stripping the twigs from it, Joan fashioned it into a pole, using her knife to sharpen the tip, cutting a barb into it. Then, while Emma waited below, watching with some anxiety in case her friend should be overwhelmed by a fresh fall, Joan stabbed at the cloth. The stick caught, the barb snagging in the cloth, but when she pulled, although there was a light scattering of soil, the stick pulled free. Poking again, she managed to pull a shred of the material away, and crouched to gaze closer.

  ‘What is it?’ Emma called.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ she returned. ‘It won’t come away, though. There’s another rock behind it. Maybe it’s trapping the cloth in there?’

  She squinted in, beckoning to Emma, who sighed with relief, and began the slow ascent to rejoin her. Behind her, the man with the packhorse was climbing stolidly up the slope. And then something odd happened.

  Joan had pushed her stick back into the cloth, trying to pull it away, and the stone behind had moved. It rocked, once, twice, and then the material tore. At the back of her mind Joan had been thinking that she might be able to rescue it to bind her hair or something, and now it was ruined. She screwed her face up with bitter disappointment. As she did so, the stone toppled out.

  It wasn’t the way that the stone fell from the hole, so much, although it bounced somehow more slowly than she would have expected, as though it was lighter than it should be; no, it was the hollow sound it gave as it rolled haphazardly towards Emma.

  At first Joan thought nothing of it, but then Emma’s horrified scream made her head snap around. ‘What?’

  To her astonishment, she saw that her friend had already turned tail, and was fleeing from the rock, screaming her way down the slope towards the vill. As Joan watched, her mouth gaping, Emma hurtled past the traveller and his horse, alarming the beast and making it rear and snort. The man swore loudly, yanking at the leading rein and smacking the horse on the nose to calm him.

  As he approached Joan, he glanced down and enquired, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ Joan was still staring after her friend, wondering what could have so scared her. She glanced down, at the rock which had rolled so oddly from the wall.

  But it was no rock. It was a skull, and it seemed to be gazing up at her as though in sardonic amusement.

  Nicole Garde felt a stab of fear when the figure appeared in her doorway.

  She hadn’t been expecting anybody. At that time of day, before noon, in the last hour before the sun rose to the highest point in the sky, visitors were the last thing on her mind. She had been preparing her family’s meal, squatting before the fire, teasing the embers into life with small quantities of wood chips and a lot of careful, steady blowing. Once she had the fire burning brightly, she would throw her large flat stone into the midst of the flames, getting it good and hot, while above it the pottage in her prized iron bowl began to bubble. When it was almost ready, she would drag out the stone, wipe it, and cook her bread.

  But today the process was taking time; the fire was reluctant. She had already used up much of her store of tinder, and was worrying that she would never tempt the fire into roaring life. The room was smoky, so she ha
d opened the door wide to release the fumes, and the sunlight streamed in, making everywhere look bright and cheerful when for so long the room had been dull and gloomy. That was how she knew someone had arrived, because the place was suddenly thrown into darkness again. Without even looking round, she felt the hairs on her neck rise, the breath catch in her throat, knowing it was him.

  Only one man merited such contempt, mingled with fear: her brother-in-law Ivo Bel, Manciple to the nuns of Canonsleigh. He lusted after her, had done so for years. Thank God he was not often here at Sticklepath, and his nasty little eyes could not fix upon her with that unpleasing gleam, as though he had already undressed her in his mind and was mentally entering her. He wouldn’t dare offer her an insult in front of her husband, of course. Thomas would avenge her honour without fear of the consequences. Ivo was here too often and if he attempted to rape her, she would be hard put to defend herself. He was wiry and powerful and a dangerous man. She had not forgotten his offer to have her marriage declared illegal, because he had some power over the Reeve, so he said. He had witnessd the Reeve killing a man.

  Sitting up, she rallied her thoughts. Her knife was resting beside the dough, where she had been tearing up leaves of orach and good henry and chopping garlic. She grabbed it and whirled to face him. If she had to kill him, she would; if she couldn’t, she would at least mark him. Only when she had risen into a crouch, the knife held out in front of her, did she see who stood in the doorway: Swetricus.

  He was a hulking great man, one of Lord Hugh’s serfs who worked the lands under Reeve Alexander, but he was no enemy of Nicole’s. His enemy, since his wife had died and his daughter Aline had vanished, was the ale barrel.

  ‘Oh, Swet. I am so sorry!’ she gasped as she set the knife down again.

  ‘You thought I was the miller?’ He shrugged. Broad and heavily built, although not tall, he was bent with work and worry. At thirty-eight he was one of the older men in the vill and his dark hair was already shot through with silver. Grey eyes, which in the right light could look blue, were turned watery since the death of his wife. Now he must look after their remaining three daughters on his own, with a little help from the woman next door. It didn’t leave poor Swet much time to relax, but he tried to with his ale. Often he had to be asked to be quiet, when his drunken shouting and weeping threatened the vill’s peace.