Ranulf re-sheathed his dagger, pushed by the taverner and, walking across the trackway, entered the tavern. Talbot came hurrying behind him, bleating and protesting. As soon as Ranulf entered he threw back his cloak, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He stared around the taproom at the tinkers and chapmen, traders and farmers, but then he found his quarry: a group of men in the far corner. They sat huddled round the table, hoods back, war belts on the floor beside them. They were sharing a jug of ale and a large platter of bread and meat. Ranulf walked slowly across, his gaze held by a cold-faced, thickset man who sat in the corner. Ranulf had only glimpsed him during the ambush but he recognised the face. Scaribrick muttered something to his companions and they turned, hands going for sword and dagger. Ranulf walked closer. Scaribrick’s fleshy face was well fed. A bully-boy, Ranulf thought, used to filling his belly and not so quick on his feet.
‘Don’t touch your weapons!’ Ranulf ordered. He opened the wallet on his belt and drew out a document bearing the King’s seal. ‘I am Ranulf-atte-Newgate, senior clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax. You,’ he pointed to the outlaw leader, ‘are Scaribrick. You must consider yourself under arrest. Your list of crimes reads like a litany but, at the top, stands treason!’
‘Treason?’ Scaribrick half rose. ‘Who are you? A madcap?’
Ranulf was pleased that the other outlaws kept their hands well away from their war belts.
‘Where are the rest of your weasels?’ Ranulf jibed. ‘Nice and warm in some cave in the forest? They are all under arrest too and they can hang.’
Ranulf watched Scaribrick’s eyes, but the outlaw’s gaze had shifted. He looked at the outlaws and saw that Rat-Face wasn’t there. Ranulf heard a sound and, whipping out his dagger, turned round. Rat-Face stood behind him, knife in hand, ready to spring. Ranulf struck first. Moving slightly to one side, he thrust his dagger straight into the man’s belly, pulling it out and kicking him away. Stools shifted behind him. Ranulf whirled back, drew his sword and stood, feet apart. The outlaws were clumsy, tired and much the worse for drink. The first almost stumbled on to Ranulf’s sword. The clerk thrust deep and stepped away, up the tavern until he felt the barrels against his back. The outlaws, ignoring the cries of their wounded companions, now scrabbling on the floor, fanned out with Scaribrick in the centre. The rest of the customers hurriedly moved away, almost clinging to the walls on either side.
‘Two down,’ Ranulf jibed. ‘Like skittles, eh?’
The outlaws were frightened. They were used to secret attack, the sudden ambush, but a fighting man, sword and dagger ready, his back protected, was a different prospect. The screams of the wounded outlaws only unnerved them further. One of the outlaws on the far right stepped away and, ignoring Scaribrick’s curses, headed straight for the window. He jumped on a table, pulled back the shutters and was through.
‘I’m not here for all of you!’ Ranulf smiled. ‘Just your leader!’
That was enough. The outlaws broke and fled in many directions. Scaribrick tried to follow but Ranulf blocked his path.
‘I killed four of your companions,’ Ranulf taunted, ‘and we beat you off this morning.’ His voice rose. ‘By the time I’m finished, you’ll be a laughing stock-’ He broke off.
Scaribrick, snarling with rage, his sword and dagger out, came rushing forward. Ranulf stepped swiftly to the left. He parried Scaribrick’s weapon, forced his arm up and thrust his sword deep into the outlaw’s belly.
QUASI NIX TABESCIT DIES
THE DAY MELTS AWAY LIKE SNOW
Chapter 11
Corbett sat in the Abbot’s chamber, where Perditus had lit a fire and pulled the shutters close. The room was cold as if it had lost its very soul. The clerk gnawed his lip in frustration. His visit to the library had been fruitless. His mind was puzzled, his wits slightly dulled by the journey to Harcourt and that ferocious ambush on the lonely forest trackway. Corbett stared up at a gargoyle carved in the corner of the room: the face of a jester, staring, popping-eyed, mouth gaping to display a swollen tongue.
‘If only the stones could talk,’ Corbett murmured.
What had happened in this chamber? he wondered. This is where it had all begun. Corbett still nursed deep suspicions that the solution to all these mysteries lay in the very fabric of the abbey: its manuscripts, Bloody Meadow, that haunting, lonely burial mound. Corbett shuffled together the Abbot’s papers. He’d ordered them to be kept here and was searching through them again. He sifted them with his fingers and picked up a piece of paper, a draft of a letter to a merchant in Ipswich. At the end was the usual scribbled sketch of a wheel with its hub, spokes and rim. Corbett pulled across the piece of vellum on which he’d copied the Abbot’s quotations. The first came from the letter of St Paul, or rather the Abbot’s own interpretation of it: ‘For now I see through a glass, darkly: the corpse candle beckons.’ The other was a quotation from Seneca: ‘Anyone can take away a man’s life but no one his death’. Undoubtedly the Abbot had scrawled these words shortly before his death but what did they mean? What was their significance? Why had Abbot Stephen been so fascinated by the symbol of a wheel? Corbett pulled across the psalter and looked down the list of names at the back. He recognised Salyiem, the Watcher by the Gates’ real name, and Reginald Harcourt. Others were probably knights the Abbot had served with in his days as a soldier. Finally, that enigmatic name which pricked Corbett’s memory and teased his wits, Heloise Argenteuil! Corbett took his quill and wrote down the other interesting scraps: the Abbot’s fascination with Rome and ‘the Roman way’. What did that mean? Why had he considered changing his mind about Bloody Meadow? What about Brother Dunstan’s enigmatic remarks about his abbot’s compassion and his attitude towards sin.
A knock on the door roused him from his studies.
‘Come in!’ Corbett shouted.
Ranulf slipped like a cat into the room. Just from the way he stood, war belt in one hand, cloak in the other, Corbett knew his henchman had been bloodily busy.
‘You went searching for Scaribrick, didn’t you?’ Corbett accused. ‘You didn’t have my permission. When I returned to Norwich I would have issued warrants for his arrest.’
Ranulf dropped his cloak and sword belt to the floor.
‘Aye and he would have hidden like a rabbit in the forest. He’d have waited until the sheriff’s men became tired of the hunt and returned to his villainy. You know the law, Sir Hugh! Scaribrick feloniously and traitorously, with malice in his heart, assaulted and tried to murder three royal emissaries, clerks bearing the royal commission. The King would have had him hanged, drawn and quartered.’
‘Did the King order this?’ Corbett asked wryly.
‘No, Master, Lady Maeve did.’
Corbett glanced up in surprise.
‘I swore an oath, Sir Hugh, as I do every time we leave, that I will bring you back safely Master, they deserved to die. One day we will have to leave this benighted place, and travel down lonely, snow-frosted lanes. I don’t want Scaribrick and the others waiting amongst the trees with bows bent and arrows aimed.’
Corbett glanced down at a scrap of parchment in front of him. According to the law, particularly the statute of Winchester, Ranulf had acted legally and correctly. Malefactors had assaulted them on the King’s highway. As they were royal clerks, the law stringently instructed ‘all loyal servants of the Crown to hunt such malefactors down and mete out summary execution’. Corbett just wished that justice could have been carried out by the King’s Justices of Assize.
‘You met him fairly?’ he asked.
Ranulf grinned. ‘I even asked him to surrender. He refused and compounded his offence by drawing a sword and attacking me.’