Earl Hugh made the trap more deadly. After taking advice from Dickon, his shrewd falconer, he insisted that they ride on to another part of the forest. Malbank’s bird was a high-bred Norwegian gerfalcon. In open country, it would be seen at its most effective. In more wooded locations, however, its long wings would put it at a severe disadvantage. Hugh’s short-winged hawk would be able to manoeuvre much more easily among the trees.
So it proved. The gerfalcon was a fine bird of prey but it had been principally trained to hunt waterfowl on a lake. The hawk, by contrast, was in its element and showed the greater speed and accuracy throughout. Regretting his rash wager, Malbank soon conceded defeat and shuddered as he imagined how tearfully his mistress would react when he told her that her favours had been surrendered to Hugh the Gross.
The earl was delighted at the outcome and sent his hawk up into the sky for one last celebratory kill. It rose, searched with a ruthless eye, observed its prey and hovered menacingly. Hugh looked up at it with the beaming delight of a father watching a child at play, but that delight soon changed to gaping horror.
Before the hawk could make one more murderous descent, an arrow suddenly came hurtling up through a gap in the trees and knocked it out of the sky. One feathered weapon of destruction was itself summarily destroyed by another.
Hugh d’Avranches watched in disbelief as his beloved hawk came spinning downwards with the arrow embedded in its breast.
He let out a roar of fury which mingled with the shouts of dismay and indignation from his companions. Recovering quickly, he issued a curt command.
‘Silence!’
The tumult ceased at once. There was no sign of the archer but Hugh hoped that sound might betray his position. It was a long wait but it finally yielded bounty. Dickon the Falconer was the first to detect them. He had the keen ears that were vital to his trade and had learned to sleep lightly so that he would pick up the faintest sound of a falcon’s bells in the night. What he heard this time was the muted crackling of bracken under foot.
‘Over there!’ he hissed, pointing to some wild hedgerow. ‘There are two of them. Trying to creep away.’
‘Catch them!’ ordered Hugh.
Four of his knights kicked their horses into life. Pursuit was short and arrest was brutal. Terrified that they had been discovered, the two figures who had been sneaking away in the ditch behind the hedgerow now took to their heels in a mad but doomed dash for freedom. Before they had gone more than thirty yards, they were kicked violently to the ground and swiftly overpowered. Stripped of their weapons and dazed by the assault, they were dragged unceremoniously through the undergrowth.
Both were Saxon peasants in the rough garb of men who tilled the soil. The older of the two was in his forties, a solid, broad-shouldered man with a thick beard covering most of his face. His companion, barely half his age, bore such a close resemblance to him that he had to be his son. They were lifted upright to face the ire of the Earl of Chester.
‘You killed my hawk!’ he thundered.
The father recovered enough to shake his head and gabble his innocence, but his Saxon tongue was incomprehensible to Norman ears. Earl Hugh was, in any case, not in the mood to listen. Sentence was passed without the refinement of a trial.
The quiver of arrows slung across the older man’s back was all the evidence that the judge needed. After giving himself the pleasure of buffeting each of them viciously to the ground, Hugh indicated a tall tree with an overhanging bough.
‘Hang the rogues from that!’
‘My lord!’ bleated the younger man piteously.
But they were the last words he ever spoke. Snatching a lance from one of his knights, Hugh used the end of it to knock him unconscious. Rope was brought, the men were pinioned, then both were hauled up high by the neck to the derisive cheers of the huntsmen. The victims turned and twitched helplessly in the wind as the rope slowly choked them to death. The father tried to plead their innocence to the last but no words came out of his parched mouth.
Even that grim punishment was not enough to satisfy the bloodlust of the Earl of Chester. He drew his sword and lashed at both men indiscriminately until they were dripping carcasses.
When his anger had run its course and the mutilation was complete, his voice was cold and peremptory.
‘Cut them down and throw them in the ditch!’ he decreed. ‘Let them rot among the vermin where they belong. Leave them unburied so that their offence can stink to heaven.’
Chapter One
Ralph Delchard was in an unusually tetchy mood.
‘What are we doing here?’ he said with irritation. ‘Why did we have to come to this God-forsaken part of the country?’
‘To serve the King,’ Gervase Bret reminded him.
‘The King! He’s had more than enough service out of me. Twenty years of it, Gervase. Loyal and unquestioning devotion. It’s high time the King started serving me for a change. Why am I always given the most boring assignments?’
‘Try to see it as an honour, Ralph.’
‘Honour!’ snorted the other.
‘You were chosen because you are trusted.’
‘It is completely unjust.’
‘Nothing could be more just,’ said Gervase reasonably. ‘Ralph Delchard was appointed as a royal commissioner yet again for one solitary reason.’
‘Nobody else was fool enough to take on the work.’
‘You were the best man for the task in hand. Doesn’t that make you feel proud? Are you not pleased that the King has shown such confidence in you?’
‘No, Gervase.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have had my fill of riding the length and breadth of England on royal business. I am weary of travel — and so are my buttocks. They are smarting like raw wounds. I need a rest. I yearn for the pleasures of retirement.’
Gervase Bret smiled indulgently. What his friend really yearned for was the company of his wife, Golde, but she was visiting her sister in Hereford and would not be joining the party until later in the week. Ralph missed her. Genial and buoyant when she was beside him, he became moody and irascible whenever they were apart. The further north they rode, the greater distance they put between man and wife.
Ralph lapsed into a brooding silence. The two commissioners were at the head of the cavalcade as it followed a meandering 7
Edward Marston
track through woodland. They were eighteen in total. To ensure safe travel on the long journey, fourteen knights from Ralph’s own retinue acted as escort and their presence in Chester would emphasise the importance of the embassy. In helm and hauberk, they were fretful after hours in the saddle.
At the rear of the column, ambling reluctantly along on their mounts behind the sumpter horses, were the portly Canon Hubert and Brother Simon, the spectral scribe. They were even more unhappy about their latest assignment than Ralph Delchard. It was stretching their duty of obedience to the absolute limit.
Simon shivered so violently that his bones rattled. ‘Are the stories about Earl Hugh all true?’ he asked.
‘Alas, they are!’ sighed Hubert.
‘Is he really such a monster of depravity?’
‘Yes, Brother Simon.’
‘But I understood that he was married.’
‘The state of holy matrimony has not, I fear, imposed any restraint on his carnal appetite,’ said Hubert sonorously. ‘It is common knowledge that the Earl of Chester has numerous mistresses and a large brood of illegitimate offspring.’
Simon shivered afresh. ‘And this vile creature is to be our host in the city?’
‘Happily, no. We will be the guests of Bishop Robert.’
‘But we are bound to come into contact with Earl Hugh.’