“So they would know when you got in?”
“Oh no, sir. They were all asleep by then. No, I came in quietly and went to my bed without disturbing them.”
Baldwin nodded and looked over at Simon. “Do you have anything to ask?”
“Yes,” said Simon, leaning forward and fixing a glowering stare on the man. “Where is Hollowbrook from here?”
“Where? It’s over there, sir,” said the man, pointing back down the road, to the south.
“So you wouldn’t have passed Brewer’s house to get home?” When he shook his head, Simon gave a dismissive gesture. “Fine, that’s all I wanted to know. You may go – for now.”
They watched him leave, slouching away to the lane and up the road toward his house, then, “Well?” said Baldwin enquiringly.
“I have no idea. They all seem so damn scared. It’s probably no more than the fact that we’re not villeins like them. We terrify them. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way to get the truth out of most of them would be to put them on the rack!”
“Don’t!” Baldwin’s short, anguished cry made Simon stop in horror, shocked at his friend’s pained expression. Seeing the concern and anxiety in Simon’s eyes, the knight reached towards him, an arm falteringly held out as if in supplication – or was it to hold him at bay? The bailiff took the proffered hand, fleetingly feeling the agonised, convulsive strength in the knight’s grip. After a moment, the knight’s fingers relaxed, but Simon was shocked at the way that the misery and depression remained in the dark eyes.
To Black it seemed as if the world had stopped with that single, agonised, cry. He felt, rather than saw, Edgar move forward a little, then stop as if undecided, his hand on his dagger hilt, his gaze fixed on the two men in front. Clearly he was in two minds, the hunter could see that. It was as though he wanted to leap forward to defend the knight, but was held back by the fact that he knew there was no real danger near. Black looked from the knight to the bailiff, and then quickly back to the servant, and relaxed as he saw the servant’s hand drop from his hilt. Licking his now dry lips, Black let his own hand fall from his skinning knife. He liked the bailiff and was not going to see him killed without defending him.
Baldwin was breathing quickly, not from exertion but in an attempt to regain his composure, as he held Simon’s hand. “My friend,” he murmured, “don’t think that the rack or other tortures would help. I have seen them, and the effect of them. They do not work; all they do is destroy a man. They cannot force him to tell the truth, but they can force him to tell a lie, just to stop the pain. They do not help us to find the truth, all tortures can achieve is the breaking of a man so that he is destroyed, ruined.” His eyes held Simon’s for a moment, as firmly as his hand had grasped the bailiff’s, and the fear and disgust was there again, together with… what? Pleading? Was this knight begging for him to understand, or was he asking for forgiveness? Simon felt nervous, unsure of how to react, concerned that he might upset his friend even further, but certain that Baldwin needed reassurance.
“Baldwin, we’ll not use any torture in this matter,” he said, and that seemed to be enough.
The knight slowly took a short pace backwards, as if he was unwilling to lose contact with the bailiff, his eyes fixed on Simon’s face. There was no denying it, the knight knew he was still too badly affected by his experiences in France. To have erupted like that! When it was obvious that Simon was only joking, too. It was ridiculous.
Turning, he began to lead the way back to the inn, but as Simon followed, his eyes were fixed on the knight’s back with a pensive glower. What had made him react like that? It was almost as if he himself was a criminal, the bailiff thought to himself.
Chapter Seven
They left Black at the inn after questioning him, standing grave and silent as he watched them leave, whipping their horses and making their way back to Crediton. He could not help them much beyond the statement he had already given. Returning home late he had seen the flames and raised the alarm. There had been no one around then, at least no one he had seen.
Simon was apprehensive, worrying about his new friend. He watched Baldwin covertly as they rode, aware of the unblinking gaze of Edgar, as if anxious that the bailiff might attack his master, that he might add to the damage that he had already done, however unwittingly, by mentioning the rack.
Riding stiffly, his mind obviously on other matters, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead, Baldwin seemed far away, so far that Simon felt instinctively that even if he were to call out his name he would not hear. He was back in his past, his expression fixed and hard, his hand a tight fist where he grasped the reins, and the muscles of his jaw clenching fitfully.
The bailiff let his eyes drop to the neck of his horse. No doubt when he was ready the knight would tell him about this horror, this evil memory. Until then he would have to wait and hope that the vividness of the apparent nightmare would fade. Then, glancing up, he saw that the knight had lost his haunted expression, had recovered some of his previous good humour.
The knight’s eyes met and held his for a minute, and the two stared at each other, until the knight grinned, said, “Come on, we’ll be all night at this rate,” slapped his horse, and the three cantered off towards Crediton.
Simon had left the other two just before Crediton. The road forked as it came into Crediton from Blackway, one arm leading east, to Exeter and thence to Tiverton, passing Furnshill on the way, the other leading to Crediton and north to Sandford. It was here that the three parted, Simon going on alone to the left.
The route took him into the centre of Crediton, and he had to turn off by the ancient church. Passing it in the street, he wondered whether to stop and beg a drink from Peter Clifford, but even as he passed the open doors, he heard the voices singing in praise and realised that the rector would be too involved to talk, so he carried on past. Carefully avoiding the open sewer, and wincing at the fetid stench, he went along the narrow lane that bordered the old graveyard, past the cottages where the church workers lived, and so up to the hill that led out of the town.
In daylight he always found this road slow, relaxed and pleasant. It curved gently up the hill, winding like an old stream, with a wall on one side that protected the church estates. On the other side the road gave directly on to fields, a sweep of narrow strips that led to the forests on the hill above. It was a rural scene of tranquillity, a pastoral picture, in green where the grass and crops grew, and in red where the dark earth had been ploughed, that never failed to please him. When he was upset or peevish, a ride along this road would inevitably calm him. It was the sight of how man could change nature, bend it to his will and manipulate it to provide him with his food and protection. He felt the same whether he was looking at the strips of the fields or the coppices. Both seemed to him to be proof of the mastery of mankind over the anarchy of wild nature.
But now, as he crested the peak of the hill and followed the lane down into the valley on the other side, the road seemed to change. Now, as darkness came on, he was into the other part, and like the scenery, his feelings changed too. Here the wild had never been pushed out. Here the woodcutters had not wanted to go, it was too far from the town. The farmers would not clear the trees here, the fields would be too far to bring seed to. Animals would be kept nearer the town where they could be seen and protected.
No, here the land was still wild and untamed, here nature still ruled and men walked cautiously. The dark and threatening woods crowded closer at either side of the road, as if struggling to reach the humans that travelled along it so that they could squeeze the life from them. The brambles sprawled from the edge of the trees in an attempt to colonise the packed dirt of the lane, catching and ripping at the clothes of any passer-by unwary enough to walk too close. In between the trees, he could sometimes hear the tick and crack of the wood settling, but to his fearful ears, raised from the cradle to be scared of the various spirits that haunted the moors and hills of Devon, they sounded like the voices of the unspeakable, ghostly horrors as they hunted for humans. In the dark, this road reminded him of the most fearsome of alclass="underline" Old Nick and Old Crockern.