by Maureen Ash
Twenty-six
BASCOT’S MOOD AS HE RODE BACK DOWN MASONS Row was one of disappointment. His questioning of the stonecutters had not gained any information, and Cerlo’s passionate words made it seem unlikely the mason had robbed the clerk’s corpse. He felt frustrated. It was as though the elusive facts he sought had been buried with Brand and Fardein’s bodies underneath a screen of swirling snowflakes.
He slowed his horse, an even-tempered grey, as he approached the gate, trying to place the little he knew of the sequence of events on the night of December twenty-first in some sort of order. As he did so, a pile of refuse caught his attention. Comprised of pieces of broken stone, old shards of timber and leafless branches of dead trees, it was about thirty feet from the gate into the Minster and heaped against the high stone wall that encircled the cathedral ground. As Bascot looked at it, he could have sworn he saw one of the branches move. The quarryman’s remark about only homeless beggars being out on a night of such terrible weather as the one when Brand was murdered came into his mind and he guided the grey towards the pile. As he approached it, the horse tossed its head slightly and gave a soft whicker.
Bringing the grey to a halt, Bascot sat regarding the pile and, after a moment or two, thought he could see an eye watching from the depths of the debris. Dismounting, he walked towards the heap. He felt, rather than saw, the presence of something living within it. It was probably only an animal—a feral cat or even a rat—but he decided it was worth investigating and, as he drew close enough for his feet to almost touch the edge of the discarded material, he caught sight of a fringe of dirty blond hair above an eye that could only be human.
“Come out,” he called softly. “I mean you no harm.”
There was no response. He hunkered down so as to be on the same level as the person who was hiding, putting his weight on his right foot to take the strain from the old injury in his left ankle. Reaching into the scrip at his belt, he extracted a silver penny and held it up in plain view. “If you show yourself,” he said quietly, “you may have this.”
Slowly the screen of dead tree limbs parted and a head came into sight. It was a young girl, her hair a dirty blond mat above an equally filthy face. She looked to be no more than six or seven years of age, and her fear was palpable, only overcome by the lure of the shining coin Bascot held in his hand.
Reaching towards her, the Templar held out the penny. The child’s hand, the fingernails torn and ragged, darted out and snatched it from his grasp. Before she could retreat into her hiding place, Bascot took another coin from his purse. “You may have this penny as well if you will talk to me. I promise I will not hurt you.”
Slowly the child pushed her head and shoulders into view. She was pitifully thin and reminded the Templar of the time he had first seen Gianni. Like the boy, this little girl had sores on her face and her eyes were devoid of hope. Compassion flooded through Bascot. There were many such children in every town in England and, indeed, all over the world, but their desolation never failed to instil a deep pity in him.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Whatcher want to know fer?” the child said, her eyes suspicious.
“So I may call you by it,” Bascot replied. “But if you do not want to tell me, it doesn’t matter.”
“Me name’s Mary,” the child said grudgingly, her eyes still on the penny the one-eyed knight was holding.
“Do you live here all on your own, Mary?” Bascot asked.
The girl’s eyes grew hard. “No, I doesn’t. My bruvver lives here, too. He’ll be back any minute. And he’s bigger than me, much bigger.” Her voice faltered as she took in the solid muscular build of the man in front of her and the sword that hung from his belt. No matter how much larger her brother, he would be no match for the strength of a grown man trained to arms. Bascot had thrown back his cloak as he crouched down and the child’s gaze slid to the Templar badge on his tunic. It seemed to reassure her a little, but not much.
Not wanting to alarm her further, Bascot edged back a space. “If your brother returns while I am here, there will be a penny for him, too,” he said. “I only want to speak to you, Mary, nothing else.”
The small face relaxed slightly, but her eyes remained wary. “Whatcher want to talk about?” she asked.
“I want to know if you and your brother sleep here at night.”
Mary gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “Most times we do. We ain’t breakin’ no law when we does,” she added defiantly. “The guards only chase us away if we stays inside the wall, not outside.”
Regrettably, what she said was all too true. There was a fair number of beggars in Lincoln, just as in most towns, but unless they could find a sheltered spot within the city walls where they would be safe from discovery by the town guards, they were forced to go outside.
“I know you are permitted to stay here,” Bascot said. “That is not why I wish to speak to you. I want to ask if you, or your brother, were here on the night of the snowstorm, just a few days before Christ’s Mass.”
“What if we were?” Mary retorted.
“Then I would like to know if you saw anybody down there, on the track by the shed.” As he spoke the Templar gestured behind him, toward the path that veered off Masons Row. From this vantage point, the top of the cliff face above the quarry could just be seen, as could the shack that sat atop it.
“We might o’ done,” Mary said, her confidence growing and her eyes still fixed on the penny.
The Templar extracted another coin from his scrip. “I do not want any lies, Mary. If you do not tell me the truth, then the pennies will go back in my purse and not into your hand. If you did not see anybody, then say so, and the pennies will still be yours.”
The child gave him a measuring look and, after a few moments she nodded. “We did see some men,” she said slowly. “The first one came just before it got dark. I was by myself then, my bruvver didn’t come back ’til later, just after the second man come.”
“What did he look like, the first man?” Bascot asked, holding his breath as he waited for her reply.
“He were as tall as you,” Mary said, “and wore a brown cloak. It were a good one,” she added wistfully. “He weren’t riding a horse, nor was the man who came after. The first man walked down the track to the cliff top and just stood there, like he was waitin’ for someone.”
That must have been Peter Brand, Bascot surmised. “And the second man; was it light enough for you to see what he looked like?”
“Not much,” Mary said. “There were a little bit of moon, but all I could see was it gleamin’ on his shoulders. Looked like he didn’t have as fine a cloak as the first man what come.”
Roger Fardein, Bascot thought. Tasser had been correct in his assumption that his apprentice had been following the clerk. “And the second man, did he go and speak to the other man?”
Mary shook her head vehemently. “No. He hid, crept up behind the shack that’s down there when the other man wasn’t lookin’. That’s when my bruvver come. We stayed in here close and tight, in case one of them saw us, and watched.”
“Were both of them there a long time?” Bascot asked.
Mary nodded. “The wind came up and we couldn’t see right well, but we was scared to go to sleep for fear one of them might find us. The first man kept pacin’ up and down for a bit and then he walked towards the shack.”
“And what happened then?”
“I dunno,” Mary replied with a shrug of her thin shoulders. “We couldn’t see good enough. But they was both there for a little while before the other man came.”
This must have been the one who murdered the clerk, Bascot thought. At last he had found a witness.
“Did you get a look at the face of the other man as he came through the gate, Mary?” he asked.
“He didn’t come from the Minster, he come from down there,” Mary replied, having gained enough confidence to extract her hand from the pile of rubbish and point in the d
irection of Masons Row. Bascot saw that her arm, bare except for a torn fold of some ragged material, was as thin as one of the sticks of her makeshift nest. The skin was ingrained with dirt.
“Did you recognise him?” Bascot asked.
Mary looked at Bascot as though he were an idiot. “’Course not. It were too dark by then. He was carrying a horn lantern, but it was hooded and he held it down low so as to cast a glim where he trod.”
Suppressing a smile at her insolence, Bascot realised the other man must have been Cerlo. He had lied when he said he had not come to the quarry that night. Had it been he, after all, who killed Peter Brand?
“Did the man with the lantern speak to either of the first two men?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, ’cause we didn’t hear no voices. He just walked up to where the first man had been afore he went over to the shack, on top of that bit where the ground drops down, and stayed there for a bit. We could see the light from the lantern alongside o’ him and it never moved. Then he went back down the road.”
“And he didn’t come back again?”
Mary gave a negative shake of her head.
“And the first two men—did you see either of them again?”
“Only one of them. It was a little while after the man with the lantern had gone. He passed us as he went out through the gate. I don’t know which one it was ’cause it was too dark to see more than his shape. We never saw the other man again, even though we stayed awake for a long time in case he come by. Then my bruvver said he must have gone to sleep in the shack and so we didn’t watch no more.”
The man who had not reappeared must have been Peter Brand. Mary’s brother had been right about him sleeping, but it had been the long sleep of death, not the natural one of slumber.
“The man with the lantern—are you sure he didn’t walk over to the shack where the first two men went; or speak to one of them?”
Mary was positive in her denial. “No.”
“Did either you or your brother hear any sounds of an argument while the men were there? Voices raised in anger, or perhaps the noise of a fight?”
Again, the child was positive in her response. “’Tweren’t no sounds at all, not voices nor nuthin’ else.”
“And you saw only those three men; no one else came through the gate or up the road to the quarry?”
Again, the beggar child gave a definite “no” to his question.
Bascot felt his mind whirl. As he had thought, there had been a third man in the quarry that night and it had been Cerlo. But if the child’s tale was to be believed—and he thought it was—the mason could not have killed Brand for, according to Mary, he did not appear to have spoken to the clerk, or even been aware of his presence by the shack. That left only Fardein. He had already been behind the shed when Brand walked over there and, since the clerk never appeared again, it must have been the apprentice who killed him. Instead of being a witness to the crime, as the Templar had thought, Fardein had committed it.
Whether his motive had been fear of discovery or greed, Fardein had used the cudgel found amongst his belongings to hit the clerk over the head and then used his knife to administer the deathblow. Once Brand was dead, it would be the work of a moment to remove the clerk’s scrip and push his lifeless body over the edge of the cliff face. Had that been when Cerlo appeared?
It must have been the mason that Brand had come to meet, but Cerlo had been delayed by the need to attend to the burns on his wife’s hand and arm. When he finally arrived, he had waited atop the cliff face in vain, for by that time the clerk was either unconscious or dead. But what had been the purpose of their assignation? The two were unlikely associates—one an educated clerk and the other a man who laboured with his hands. Did their connection with each other involve, as the sheriff believed, the discovery of a trove?
And who, in turn, had murdered Fardein? Had it been Cerlo, or was there yet someone else involved, someone who had not come to the quarry but had known the secret the mason and the clerk shared; someone such as Tasser?
The myriad of unanswered questions chased one after another in the Templar’s mind until he realised that Mary was watching him with anxious eyes, fearful that the tale she had told was not enough to merit the two pennies the knight had promised.
Bascot gave the destitute child, who was shivering with cold, a reassuring nod and handed her the coins. “Your words have helped me greatly, Mary,” he said.
“So much so that you deserve a greater reward.” Pulling off his cloak, he bundled it up and handed it to her.
“That should keep you and your brother warm at night until the milder days of spring arrive,” he said gently.
Mary’s eyes grew round with wonder as her fingers touched the heavy material. Lovingly she stroked it with her thin hand as though she could not believe it was real. She did not say a word of thanks, but Bascot did not need any. The look of joy that flooded her face was reward enough.
Twenty-seven
BASCOT RESISTED THE TEMPTATION TO RETURN TO THE quarry and confront Cerlo. Before he did that, he needed to think through what he had learned. Reining his mount to slowness, he rode back through the gate in the city wall and entered the grounds of the Minster.
There were more people about now than there had been earlier. A queue of people was seeking admittance to the Priory of All Saints to obtain remedies from the monks in the infirmary for a variety of winter ailments. And, around the perimeter of the grounds, customers patronised stalls selling hot roasted chestnuts and thin wine. Among the throng were quite a few clerics, a complex mixture of priests, monks, vicars and secondaries, all hastening in and out of the cathedral as they carried out the duties entailed in their service to God.
At a corner on the western front of the church, some sixty or seventy feet above the ground, ladders had been set up and two workmen were atop them inspecting the spot where the water troughs along the eaves debouched into the garish face of a gargoyle. One of the workers was pushing a metal pole into the mouth of the carved-stone face, trying to dislodge debris that was blocking the gutter. Even though the ladders were sturdy—short lengths securely tied, one to another, and supported in the middle by scaffolding—it was not a task for the fainthearted. The Templar admired the seeming nonchalance of the men perched on the roof, both of them standing easily atop the great height as they went about their task.
As Bascot rode along a path in front of the church, he tried to sort the known facts into a logical order, using reasonable supposition as a guide. Brand had taken expensive old-fashioned jewellery to Tasser and sold it to the silversmith. Fardein had known of the sale and followed the clerk, probably hoping to learn if Brand was in possession of more valuables. In the course of doing so, the apprentice had followed the clerk to the quarry and subsequently killed him. It might have been to prevent Brand from finding him lurking nearby, but it could just as easily have been for the contents of the clerk’s pouch. If Brand’s scrip had contained silver pennies from King Stephen’s reign identical to the one Gianni had found, it would have been reasonable for Fardein to guess the coins were part of a trove. But, once Brand was dead, the apprentice had no way to determine the cache’s whereabouts. His only recourse was to try to gain that information from whomever the clerk was meeting.
According to the tale Mary had told, Fardein had stayed by the shack as Cerlo—if it was he—had come to keep his appointment with Brand. As the apprentice had been much nearer to the mason than the beggar child, Fardein had likely been able to identify him. Had Fardein’s suspicion of an unreported trove prompted him to confront the mason and try to coerce Cerlo into parting with some of the hidden wealth? If so, had Cerlo then killed Fardein to keep the secret safe?
Bascot recalled the lump hammer the stonecutter in the workshop had been using. There had been an iron cap fitted over one end and, as the image of it flashed across the Templar’s mind, he realised that the hammer, used as a weapon, could easily have caused the indentation he
had found on the back of Fardein’s head. And the ragged wound left by the implement that had stabbed the apprentice in the heart—it, too, could have been made by one of the implements that were part of a stone worker’s trade, such as a punch or straight chisel. Both would be clumsier to use than the knife found among Fardein’s belongings, but just as effective, for the ends of a mason’s chisel became razor sharp from constant contact with stone surfaces. In the hands of a man accustomed to work with such tools, they could be wielded with deadly efficiency.
Bascot recalled Cerlo’s emotional outrage at being unable to prevent Brand’s death. If the mason had discovered it was Fardein who murdered the clerk, it was quite possible he had meted out what seemed to him a justifiable retribution. Killing the apprentice in the same manner as Brand—by a blow to the head and a fatal thrust to the heart—would have achieved his revenge. But if all of this was so, the root cause had been Cerlo’s collusion with Brand in the discovery of a trove. Where had they found it?
Bascot remembered the master builder, Alexander, saying he had given Cerlo permission to carry out small jobs around the town to earn extra money. Then the Templar recalled de Stow mentioning how the mint had needed repairs to one of the outside walls. Had Cerlo done the work? Had the mason, while carrying out the repair, discovered a cache hidden there by a moneyer during the turbulent times of King Stephen’s reign? And had Cerlo then confided in Brand, perhaps prompted by hearing the employees at the mint mention the clerk was desperate for money to wed his sweetheart? Did the two of them subsequently conspire to keep the contents of the cache for their own gain? It would explain the excitement the guard had noticed in Brand’s behaviour in the days before his death and also the unlikely acquaintanceship between the clerk and Cerlo. The reason Brand had gone to the quarry that night could have been to give the mason his share of the treasure.
