CHAPTER TWO
At that moment, about sixteen miles west of the city, a group of men were huddled under a turf roof in what was virtually a hole in the ground. Like the king's coroner, they were waiting for their midday meal, though theirs was to come from a blackened iron pot that sat on three stones set over a small fire.
'What have you got in there for us, Robert?' demanded a burly young man whose nose and cheeks were reddened by the cold. He had a shock of bright ginger hair poking from under the pointed hood of his leather jerkin.
'A rabbit and a cock pheasant. And lucky to get those in this weather,' grunted their cook for the day, a gaunt fellow of part-Saxon blood. He stirred the small cauldron with a length of twig pulled from the roof, swilling round the onions and chopped turnips that simmered in the salted water.
'And bloody awful weather it is, especially for the likes of us,' grumbled a third man, clutching his soiled but expensive worsted cloak more tightly around his shoulders. Philip Girard had taken it last month from a fat monk he had waylaid on the Plymouth road, reckoning that it would be of greater benefit to him on Dartmoor than to the owner sitting in the warming room of Buckfast Abbey.
'Thank God we've got a better place than this to go home to,' grunted Peter Cuffe, the ginger-haired youth. 'Though some living rough on the moor have not even a burrow as good as this one, poor sods.'
He looked around their shelter, which was formed by a couple of drystone walls built at right angles to an overhanging rocky bank. The walls narrowed to an opening, outside which was another barrier of moorstones to stop the wind, rain and snow from beating directly into the den. The whole was roofed over with untrimmed branches supporting grassy turfs. From a distance of a few score yards, the whole place was virtually invisible, blending in with the uneven terrain of the moor, especially now that everything was covered with a powdering of snow. Long ago, it had been a shelter for the tinners who used to work a nearby stream, but it had been abandoned as the lode was exhausted. Last year, their gang had repaired the crumbling walls and put a new roof across them, providing another hideout to add to the others they had concealed across the central part of Dartmoor.
'Isn't that damned broth ready yet?' demanded the fourth member of the group, who had been squatting on a log at the back of the cavelike shelter. He had an air of authority which marked him out as the leader and though his clothing was plain, it was of a better quality than the jumble of garments that the others wore.
'It'll do, sir. At least it'll be something hot to pour down our gullets,' replied Robert Hereward. There was a general shuffling around as each of them groped in his small pack and drew out a wooden bowl and horn spoon. The cook had a stale loaf which he broke into quarters and handed round; then he dipped the bowls into the pot and speared some meat and bones into each with his knife.
He passed the first bowl to their leader, then they crouched again around the fire, as the shelter was too low for anyone to stand up.
'This is all we'll get until we reach Challacombe,' warned Hereward. 'God willing, Gunilda will have something better for us when we get back.'
There was silence for a time, broken only by the slurping of hot soup and the noise of small bones being spat on the ground. When the last drops had been scraped from the bowls and the crusts finished, Peter Cuffe produced a small wineskin with a silver neck and stopper, another prize obtained by highway robbery. He passed it first to the man on the log, who drank deeply before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and passing the bag on to Philip Girard.
'That was good stuff, these Exeter merchants do themselves well,' exclaimed Sir Nicholas de Arundell. The dispossessed lord of Hempston Arundell was a powerfully built man of average height, with a strong, handsome face. His close-cropped fair hair was a legacy from his Saxon mother Henneburga, but the rest of him was pure Norman, the first Arundell having arrived with William the Bastard. He was thirty-three, but the hardships of the last decade showed in his face, making him look older than his years.
As the men stuffed the bowls back into their shoulder packs, Girard questioned their chief. 'Are we going back in this weather?' he growled. A former huntsman, he was tall, with a weathered face pitted with cowpox scars.
De Arundell rose to his feet, stooping under the damp brushwood of the ceiling. 'Let's get out before the weather gets worse,' he answered in his deep voice. 'If it snows more heavily, we'll never cross the moor. I'm not going to starve for days in this rat hole.'
While the others gathered their few belongings and as Robert stamped out the embers of the fire, Nicholas thought longingly of the house at Hempston, his manor near Totnes in the south of the county. Though he had not been able to live in it for almost five years, he wistfully recalled sitting out-snowy weather there in the comfort of his own hearth and with his wife Joan to keep him company. Now here he was slinking from hole to hole across a desolate landscape, like a fox seeking its den. True, this place was merely a convenient refuge on the moor, but even their more permanent quarters at Challacombe were hardly an attractive domicile. If any determined sweep were to be made by the law officers, they would even have to flee from that and seek one of their other hideouts, which were little better than this crude shanty.
Hauling his heavy woollen cloak around him and pulling up the hood, he slung his satchel over his shoulder and grabbed a heavy staff, the top weighted with iron bands to make it a formidable weapon. Leading the way past the outer wall, he emerged into the open and stretched upright, scanning the leaden sky. The snow had stopped for the moment, but a keen east wind was whipping up wraiths of white from the uneven moorland and the pinkish-grey horizon threatened a blizzard to come.
'We've less than five hours of daylight, so let's get going,' he commanded and set off towards the south, guided by landmarks that had become all too familiar these past three years. The grotesque outlines of the tors, irregular columns of granite standing against the skyline, together with upright stones set up by men long ago, marked the tracks that only sheep and moor men could recognise. In single file, the four men trudged steadily onward, thankful that the snow was only up to the insteps of their leather boots, which had been greased with hog fat to make them at least partly waterproof.
They marched in silence to conserve their breath.
Though they had ponies back at Challacombe, they seldom used them for relatively short expeditions: on foot they could drop to the ground and lie invisible when either setting an ambush for unwary travellers or hiding from more powerful forces. With almost ten miles to go from where they had come up on to the high moor from South Tawton, they loped along steadily, occasionally stumbling on rocks hidden under the snow and plodding laboriously when they had to climb out of the sudden steep valleys that small tributaries of the Dart and Teign rivers had hacked deep into the moor.
As the shortest day of the year was only a week away, daylight faded early, especially with such a heavily overcast sky. By the time they came into the final mile of their journey it was getting dark, and though for a while their silhouettes against the whiteness of the snow helped them to follow in Nicholas's footsteps, soon only their familiarity with the turns and twists of the sheep tracks kept them on the right path. Eventually they descended into a valley where a tiny glimmer of yellow light guided them the last few furlongs. Their approach was soon heralded by the deep barking of a pair of dogs.