Elizabeth swung her hair and walked more purposefully. She crossed a ditch, slipped through a hedge but paused for a while. She must be early. She had learnt the time from the great capped hour candle in the marketplace so she should wait awhile. She stared up at the sky. To have an admirer, a secret admirer who’d paid to meet her! It was so good to be out under God’s sky, away from the busy marketplace and the close, rather oppressive atmosphere of her family, with Mother telling her to do this or that.
Elizabeth stared at the copse which stood on the brow of the gently sloping hill. Did adults know about love? All her father could talk about was Molkyn’s head and Thorkle’s brains. Elizabeth had never liked either man, Molkyn particularly — and that poor daughter of his, what was her name? Oh yes, Margaret, always so quiet and kept to herself. Ah well. . Elizabeth walked through the grass. She glanced to her right: in the trees far away she thought she had seen a movement. Was someone there? Perhaps a shepherd or his boy? Elizabeth felt a shiver; the weather was certainly turning. She wished she’d brought a shawl or coverlet.
Elizabeth entered the trees. She loved this place. She used to come here as a child and pretend to be a queen or a maiden captured by a dragon. She threaded her way across the cold, wet grass and sat at the edge of the small glade, on the same rock she used to imagine as her throne or the dragon’s castle. It was very silent. For the first time since this adventure began, Elizabeth’s conscience pricked at deceiving her parents. Her happiness was laced with guilt and a little fear. This place was so lonely — just the distant call of the birds and the faint rustling in the bracken. Elizabeth shut her eyes and squeezed her lips.
I’ll only wait here for a short while, she promised herself.
Time passed. Elizabeth rubbed her arms and stamped her feet. She shouldn’t have come so publicly, swinging her arms crossing that field. Perhaps her secret admirer had seen someone else and been frightened off? In Melford, gossip and tittle-tattle, not to mention mocking laughter, could do a great deal of harm. She should have come along Falmer Lane and slipped through the hedge at Devil’s Oak.
Elizabeth heard a sound behind her, the crack of a twig. She turned, her mouth opened in a scream. A hideous, masked figure stood right behind her: the garrotte string spun round her throat and Elizabeth the wheelwright’s daughter had not long to live.
Chapter 2
Punishment in the King’s royal borough of Melford always attracted the crowds, even more so than a branding at the crossroads or a fair on the outskirts. The good townspeople flocked to see justice done, as well as collect scraps of scandal and gossip. Which traders had been selling underweight? Which bakers mixed a little chalk with their flour or sold a load beneath the market measure? Above all, they wanted to discover what house-breakers had been caught, pickpockets arrested.
On that particular October day, the crowds had an even greater reason for flocking in. Word had soon spread, how the murders of Molkyn the miller, Thorkle, not to mention that of poor Elizabeth Wheelwright, whose ravished corpse lay sheeted for burial in the crypt of the parish church, had eventually reached the royal council in London. The King himself had intervened, not by dispatching justices or commissioners of enquiry but officials from his own chamber, a royal clerk, the keeper of the King’s Secret Seal, Sir Hugh Corbett and his henchman, Ranulf-atte-Newgate, principal Clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax. The people of Melford wanted to view this. Oh, they desired an end to the horrid murders. They also wanted to see a King’s man arrive, with all his power and authority, to enquire into this or that, to execute the royal Writ, bring malefactors to justice and publish the Crown’s justice for all to see.
And, of course, there was the mystery. Who had been responsible for the ghastly murders of Molkyn and Thorkle? Killings took place, even in a town like Melford, but to decapitate the likes of Molkyn and send his burly, fat head across the mere of his mill! Or Thorkle, a prosperous yeoman farmer, having his brains dashed like a shattered egg in his own threshing barn! Surely someone would hang for all that?
And those other heinous murders, the ravishing and slaying of young maidens? They had begun again. One wench had been slaughtered late last summer, her torn body being brought across this very marketplace. Now Elizabeth, the wheelwright’s daughter, with her flowing hair and pretty face. She had been well known, with her long-legged walk and merry laugh, to many of the market people. Such gruesome murders should never have occurred! Hadn’t the culprit been caught five years earlier and hanged on the soaring gibbet at the crossroads overlooking the sheep meadows of Melford? And what a culprit! No less a person than Sir Roger Chapeleys, a royal knight, a manor lord. The evidence against Chapeleys, not to mention the accounts of witnesses had, despite royal favour, dispatched him to the common gallows. Nevertheless, the murders had begun again and so the King had intervened. What was his clerk called? Ah yes, Sir Hugh Corbett. His name was well known. Hadn’t he been busy in the adjoining shire of Norfolk some years ago? Investigating murders along the lonely coastline of the Wash? A formidable man, the people whispered, of keen wit and sharp eye. If Corbett had his way, and he had all the power to achieve it, someone would certainly hang.
The day was cloudy and cold but the crowds thronged around the stalls. Those in the know kept a sharp eye on the broad oak door of the Golden Fleece tavern, where the royal clerk would stay. He would probably arrive in Melford with a trumpeter, a herald carrying the royal banner and a large retinue. Urchins had been paid to keep a lookout on the roads outside the town.
In the meantime, there was trading and bartering to be done. Melford was a prosperous place, and the increasing profits from the farming of wool were making themselves felt at every hearth and home. Silver and gold were becoming plentiful. The markets of Melford imported more and more goods from the great cities of London, Bristol and even abroad! Vellum and parchment, furs and silk, red leather from Cordova in Spain. Testers, blankets and coverlets from the looms of Flanders and Hainault, not to mention statues, candlesticks and precious ornaments from the gold- and silversmiths of London and, even occasionally, the great craftsmen of Northern Italy.
Walter Blidscote, chief bailiff of the town, loved such busy market days. He made a great play of imprisoning the vagrants, the drunkards and law-breakers in the various stocks on the stand at the centre of the marketplace. This particular day he proclaimed the pickpocket Peddlicott. Blidscote himself had caught the felon trying to rifle a farmer’s basket the previous morning. Blidscote was fat, sweat-soaked but very pompous. He drank so much it was a miracle he caught anyone. Peddlicott, however, was dragged across the marketplace as if he was guilty of high treason rather than petty theft. He was displayed on the stand and, with great ceremony, the market horn being blown to attract everyone’s attention, Peddlicott’s hands and neck were tightly secured in the clamps. Blidscote loudly proclaimed that they would remain so for the next twenty-four hours. If the bailiff had had his way, he would have added insult to injury by tying a bag of stale dog turds around the poor man’s neck. Some bystanders cheered him on. Peddlicott shook his head and whined for mercy.