Makepeace said nothing, sitting as straight as she could on the horse’s broad back. Being slowly digested by Symond sounded more like Hell than a cauldron of fire.
PART SEVEN: WORLD’S END
CHAPTER 36
On the long ride, Makepeace felt exposed, the ropes around her wrists and ankles drawing every eye. Thin, nervous rain trickled down her neck and nestled in her eyelashes, and she could not wipe them away. Before her, Symond’s gloved hands gripped the reins, and the horse’s neck bobbed.
After time, however, the motion started to lull her. Bear wanted to sleep, so Makepeace let him have his way. There was nothing she could do now, and she would need to be awake later. She let her eyelids droop, leaving her enemy with the task of keeping her on the horse.
Makepeace woke again at a little riverside village stuffed to the gills with troops, horses and tents amid the sloping woods. Her interrogator was talking to some of the soldiers.
‘We can spare a few men, but no horses,’ said one of the officers. ‘We’ve trouble enough. That truce is fraying like a slut’s hem. The King talks a good peace, but wise heads say he’s keeping us dangling till his queen can raise more troops and smash us to splinters. His promises aren’t worth a fart.’
Four soldiers joined their group. Two carried muskets and wore bandoliers strung with little wooden gunpowder bottles. Makepeace was helped down from the horse, and her ankles untied. From here, she was told, the journey would be on foot.
The little group stayed close to the hedgerows, one man moving ahead of the rest. Makepeace guessed that they were trying to avoid being seen.
At last she glimpsed ahead the cottage where the Axeworths had lived. She was relieved to see that the chickens were gone, which probably meant that the little family had left. The barrow was missing too, along with the sorry relic that had lain beneath it.
‘That is my friend’s house,’ Makepeace said.
‘It seems very quiet.’ The interrogator peered at the cottage, and seemed to be weighing his options. ‘Come — let us go to the door. You can talk to your friend.’
‘Like this?’ Makepeace held up her bound wrists. ‘She’ll see I’m a captive!’
With evident reluctance, he untied her hands. The two of them walked to the door, and the interrogator knocked. As Makepeace expected, there was no reply.
After a few more knocks, he opened the door, and entered with two soldiers at his back. A couple of minutes later, he emerged again.
‘This house is empty,’ he said.
‘Then she must be out,’ Makepeace said quickly. ‘If we wait, she’ll come back.’
He took hold of her arm, and pulled her in through the front door.
‘Will she?’ he asked. ‘This place looks abandoned to me.’
The little cottage had been stripped bare. All the portable furniture was gone, along with the pewter, the rush-light stand, and all the firewood and kindling by the hearth. Even the chair in which Makepeace’s patient had sat was missing.
‘I don’t know what’s happened!’ She looked at the interrogator with a prepared expression of bewildered innocence. ‘My friend said she would wait for me here!’
‘Did she hide the charter in the house, or take it with her?’ he demanded.
‘How should I know?’ Makepeace retorted.
‘Search the house,’ the interrogator ordered the soldiers. ‘I’ll have a man at the window, and another in that tree out there, to look out for trouble.’ The soldiers began taking up floorboards, knocking holes in walls and poking sticks up inside the chimney flue. ‘Don’t forget to check the rafters and the thatch!’
Makepeace stayed near the door, gazing out across the fields, looking for some sign of movement. Behind her she could hear smashes, and even the occasional swear word. The interrogator’s snapped insistence that the soldiers ‘mind their Billingsgate tongues’ sounded just as ill-tempered. There was anger everywhere, she realized, just under the surface. Somehow she had grown used to tasting it in the air.
‘Soon they’ll realize that you’ve been selling them a tarradiddle,’ Symond said in Makepeace’s ear. ‘How do you think they’ll all react when they know you’ve been wasting their time? Give me one good reason to stop them from shooting you in the yard.’
He was right. Time was running out.
Out across the fields, a hovering kestrel caught her eye. It tilted and fluttered in the air above a hedgerow, and she could almost imagine some small, oblivious creature below it. Then, instead of a straight swoop, it sped off in a long, low slant, as if its little quarry had suddenly raced away. At the same moment, she saw two small birds flit from the same patch of hedge in the opposite direction.
‘There’s something out there,’ she said under her breath.
‘What?’ Symond sounded sceptical. ‘What are you talking about?’
There was an angry thunder of steps and Makepeace was swung round to face the interrogator.
‘Mistress, we have bared this cottage’s very bones—’
‘There’s something out there,’ Makepeace said again, louder this time. ‘Behind that far hedge, near the meadowsweet.’
‘Ignore the crafty little baggage,’ Symond said with contempt. ‘She’s lying again.’
‘What did you see?’ The interrogator frowned.
‘Nothing,’ said Makepeace. ‘But the birds did. Something scared them.’ She saw his caution wrestling with his doubt and annoyance.
‘Make sure your muskets are ready,’ he muttered to his comrades, ‘and let’s get those matches lit!’
One of the men busied himself with flint and steel. When the match cords were smouldering, they were handed out to the musketeers in readiness.
‘I see something!’ called the man in the tree outside. ‘There, by the elm—’
There was a thud, and a thump as he fell from the tree, a gash in the back of his head. A heavy rock tumbled down beside him.
‘That came from behind the house!’ shouted someone, and then somebody else yelled, ‘There!’
There was a loud crack as one of the musketeers fired, and the room filled with smoke. Just before the gunshot, however, Bear had smelt something else. A familiar scent, from above . . .
‘Roof!’ was all Makepeace had time to shout. Half her companions heard her and looked up. Half did not. The latter had no chance when the Elder in James’s body crashed through the ragged thatch and landed in the middle of the room, sword drawn.
He was snake-fast, kestrel-fast. He lunged to impale the musketeer that had not fired, slashed across the throat of another soldier, and carved into the face of one of the men in black. Three men fell. They leaked thin, shimmering ghosts that rippled and faded.
But Makepeace’s warning had marred James’s perfect attack. The interrogator tumbled backwards, and the cut that would have blinded him knocked his hat off instead. His other colleague managed a desperate parry. The surviving musketeer dropped his ramming rod mid-reload and leaped backwards, reversing his weapon to use it as a club. Meanwhile, Symond swiftly stepped behind Makepeace. Reaching an arm over her shoulder, he fired his pistol at James’s head from close range.
James was darting to one side even as the trigger pulled. The bullet missed him, cracking the brickwork behind him, but he gave a snarl, clutching at a red powder-burn on the skin around his right eye. The smoke from the pistol blinded him for a fatal instant. Makepeace flung herself forward and lunged for his sword hand, jolting the hilt from his grasp. The musketeer struck him in the face with the butt of his gun, knocking him to the floor.
‘Kill him!’ shouted Symond, taking a step back.