"There," Grenville said.
He'd brought a small spyglass, which he'd been lifting to his eye from time to time. He stopped his horse now, pointed, and held the spyglass to me.
I peered through it, roving it around until I found what he'd seen. A windmill, standing alone on a headland. I nodded as I handed the glass back to him. It was worth investigating.
Grenville volunteered to ride back and tell Bartholomew and Matthias where we were going, while I went on. Generous of him, because I knew his curiosity was as whetted as mine.
Most windmills stood near villages, on streams that also served the village. This windmill stood by itself, probably at the end of a creek or fresh, with a house next to it. It was a large windmill, very modern, with glass windows, which meant the windmill keeper had probably set up lodgings inside it. Perhaps the house standing beside it belonged to a miller who used the windmill to grind grain.
As I drew closer, I saw, to my frustration that our path would not take us there. The windmill lay on the other side of a fairly wide river, and only by riding back to the coast road and finding a bridge could we cross, unless we had a boat. A scan along this side of the water showed me no handy rowboats, though I saw two tied up on the far bank.
I had no way of knowing how deep was the stream. It looked deep-the water was dark, and small eddies spoke of rocks a long way below the surface.
I put my hands around my mouth and called out to whoever might be in the house or windmill. The house looked abandoned, now that I was closer to it.
No one answered my call. Through Grenville's spyglass, I saw that the house had lost windows and shutters. Winters had been hard and harvests light of late-perhaps the miller had given up and moved on.
The windmill's windows, however, were whole and sound, the door and roof solid. The arms of the windmill cranked around, the pumps working.
I was still on the bank when Grenville returned on his horse, with Bartholomew and Matthias jogging behind him. I hadn't been able to get a rise out of the windmill keeper. Either he was hard of hearing, or he didn't like visitors.
"I could swim it," Matthias said, eyeing the water. "Grab one of the boats for you."
"You'd catch your death," Grenville said. "This wind is fierce, and the water will be cold. I don't have time to nurse you back to health."
Matthias shrugged, not ashamed of his idea.
"Nothing for it," I said. "We find a bridge. Keep an eye out, though, in case the keeper tries to leg it. A man who so guards his privacy will be worth speaking to."
We had to ride west beyond Wells until we found a bridge across the stream and another path that led to the windmill. A helpful farmer pointed the way-it was a fairly new windmill, he said, built about ten years ago. A miller tried to have a go grinding grain with it, but gave up and moved on. The windmill keeper, a man called Waller, was still up there. A taciturn man, but not a bad sort.
Grenville thanked him, sweetening the thanks with coin, and we rode on. The path petered out before we reached the windmill, but we were able to cut across a dry point in the marsh to the windmill's front door. The view from here was nothing but sky, grasses, and wet sands. When the tide was in, this place would be an island.
The windmill keeper wouldn't open his door, though I saw movement in an upper window. The miller's house next to it, two stories and made of brick and flint, had indeed been abandoned. I found a lone cow in the yard behind it, chewing hay and looking utterly uninterested in us.
I knocked again on the door, to no avail, so I asked Matthias and Bartholomew to break it open.
The keeper came barreling down the steps inside as the brothers slammed into the door. We heard locks scrape back, and then the door was flung open before the two could back away for another strike.
"Here," the keeper said in indignation. "What the devil be ye doing?"
His northern Norfolk dialect was decidedly pronounced, and Grenville and the town-bred brothers looked blank. I understood him but answered without bothering with the dialect.
"We're looking for a gentleman," I said. "He would have come here three, maybe four days ago. Possibly hurt."
"Don't have time of day for anyone." The man said, switching to common English, not to be polite, but so he could tell us we were bothering him. "Pumps don't keep themselves working."
"Then you won't mind if we have a look."
The windmill keeper growled. "I do mind. Who be you?"
"Captain Gabriel Lacey," I said, giving him a truncated version of a military bow. "From Parson's Point."
The man squinted up at me. "Lacey? Son of Mr. Roderick?"
No surprise that he had heard the name. "I have that distinction."
"You should have said right away. A fine man he was, old Mr. Lacey."
I hid my surprise. To me, the man had been a martinet and a bully. I'd been too young to notice what others had thought of him.
The keeper opened the door hospitably wide, and we squeezed into the foyer. A ladder-stair, much like the one in Easton's abandoned windmill, led upward, but this one was solid and fairly new. I introduced Grenville and the brothers, and the man told us he was Jonathan Waller. Born and bred in Stifkey, family going back generations.
"I'm looking for a man," I repeated, once we'd gotten the niceties out of the way. "He would have come this way in the last day or so."
"I'd have been here."
"And was he?"
Waller shook his head, pressing his lips together. "Do you see anybody here?"
"Perhaps I could…" I gestured to the ladder with my walking stick.
Mr. Waller, to my surprise, stepped out of the way. Bartholomew and Matthias seemed to make him nervous, so I told them to look through the miller's house next door while Grenville and I searched here.
The windmill was five stories high, the lower floors wider than the upper as the windmill tapered to its smooth roof. The huge paddles swung slowly past the windows, which looked out to the sea on one side, to green land and huddled villages on the other.
Grenville followed Mr. Waller into his living quarters, while I explored the mill rooms. I found a room in which gears would turn the huge wheels, but the millstones leaned against the walls, grain no longer being trundled here for grinding.
Back on the ground floor, I found a trapdoor. Pulling this open, I saw that it led down to a damp space beneath the windmill, and there I found the blood.
Not the huge quantity I'd seen on the marsh, but definite dribbles of it under the light of the lantern I'd borrowed from the keeper's kitchen. Enough blood to make me climb out and shout for Waller.
He came down, with Grenville, and I pointed at the blood, holding my lantern nearly on top of it. Waller at first looked blank then guilty.
"He begged me to keep quiet. Said someone was trying to find him, and to kill him." Waller shot me a frightened look. "Did he mean you?"
"No, I am a trying to help him." I flashed the light about, but the room was so dark, it seemed to drink in the lantern's flame. "You patched him up? Down here?"
Waller nodded. "He didn't want to risk being seen in a window. I told him we were a long way from God himself, but he insisted. Strong chap, to lose a hand like that and not be half dead."
"He rested here, how long?"
"A night and a day, then he was gone. He paid me good coin to say nothing, so nothing I said."
Waller's expression told me he expected more good coin from us for the information. Grenville, used to such things, already had a few crowns jingling in his hand.
"We agree that silence is best," he said, pressing them to Waller's palm. "We're the man's friends and are trying to help him. If you see him again, tell him to stay put. Send word to Lacey's house if you can."