‘Sit down.’ Corbett gestured to the stool. ‘I believe you know Ranulf?’
The tavern wench looked for sarcasm but found none. This clerk’s gaze was not lustful or mocking but rather gentle and sad.
‘What do you want, Master?’
‘Just a little of your time. I am sorry about the game Ranulf and Chanson played with you, bringing you out of the tavern,’ he added hastily.
Adela shrugged one shoulder.
‘What harm can a man do in a busy marketplace?’
‘Has any man tried to harm you, Adela?’
She smiled sweetly. ‘Most men are babies: they think with their codpieces.’
‘Do we now?’ Corbett laughed. ‘But you are able to look after yourself?’
‘A swift slap and an even swifter kick, Master, is a good defence.’
‘You were the last to talk to the wheelwright’s daughter, Elizabeth?’
‘Aye, but I have answered this. She was in a hurry to get away. I thought she was going home.’
‘Did she ever talk of the Mummer’s Man or any other creature?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me, Adela, if you met a man out in the countryside, riding a horse, wearing one of those masks they use in a miracle play. .?’
‘I’d run and hide,’ she laughed.
‘And if this evening you were going home and a voice called “Adela” from the shadows?’
‘I’d stop, if there was someone with me.’
‘And if this voice said that you must go to such and such a place, where some admirer was waiting for you or a gift had been left?’
‘I wouldn’t believe it. I certainly wouldn’t stand there. I’d see who it was.’
‘And if that man was wearing a mask?’
‘I’d scream and run. Why these questions? I’ve learnt my lesson about-’
‘What do you mean?’ Corbett asked sharply.
‘Oh, about four months ago, that fool Peterkin — well, he’s not as dull-witted as he looks — he brought me a message.’
‘What did this message say?’
She closed her eyes. ‘ “A gift awaits for the one I love at Hamden Mere. After the market horn, it will appear.”
Corbett asked her to repeat it.
‘It’s doggerel poetry,’ he murmured.
‘Peterkin’s like that,’ Adela remarked. ‘Hurrying hither and thither like a little rabbit. Ask the taverner: even as a lad, Peterkin was used as a messenger by lovesick swains.’
‘And did you go to Hamden Mere?’
‘Yes. It’s a marsh in a copse of wood on the south side of the town. I was impatient. I wanted to know who it was: the tavern becomes busy after the horn is sounded and the market’s ended.’
‘Why Hamden Mere?’ Corbett asked. ‘Why not Devil’s Oak or Gully Lane?’
She smiled. ‘It’s where I used to play as a child.’
‘And where you take your love swain?’
‘Yes, but don’t tell Taverner Matthew: he’s always boasting how he runs a good house.’
‘And what happened?’ Corbett demanded.
‘I went and waited. I searched and I looked but there was nothing — a cruel jape — so I came back.’
‘Did you later question Peterkin?’
‘Yes I did, quietly. I didn’t want to make myself look as big a fool as he is. He just gaped at me, said it was a poem he had learnt and didn’t say any more.’
‘But you believed him the first time?’
‘He showed me a coin: said he’d been paid to deliver it.’ She shrugged. ‘That convinced me.’ Adela became all nervous.
‘You know what I’m going to ask,’ Corbett said softly. ‘Is that how Elizabeth was trapped?’
‘But I had no proof,’ she hissed. ‘I was frightened. I did not want to become a laughing stock. The taproom would never let me forget the day I believed simple Peterkin. Even if I had said something — who would believe me? What proof did I have?’
Corbett took a coin from his purse, went across and pushed it into the wench’s hand.
‘What’s that for, Master?’ she asked cheekily.
‘Your company,’ Corbett replied. ‘If I were you I’d go across to the church. I’d buy a candle and light it.’
The young tavern wench looked puzzled. Corbett opened the door. She slipped out, he closed and locked it behind her.
‘You danced with death,’ he murmured, ‘and were allowed to walk away.’
Corbett went to the window and stared down at an ostler cooling horses off in the yard below.
Of course, Corbett thought. Poor Peterkin! Frightened of being taken away, so easily terrified, so quickly bribed. Who would pay much attention to him? The man may be a dullard but the same doggerel would have been taught to him time and time again, only the place changed. Corbett wondered how many other young women in the town had received such an invitation? Some would ignore it, dismissing Peterkin as mad as a March hare. Others, like Adela, would go, perhaps at the wrong time, and find nothing. Poor Elizabeth was not so fortunate. Of course, she’d tell no one. She wouldn’t want anyone to know about the secret or, as Adela said, be made to look a fool if there was nothing there.
Corbett turned his back on the window. No one would ever connect the two: daft Peterkin and these murders. He was weak and helpless; a wench like Adela would find him no threat. Corbett smiled grimly. The killer was clever: love trysts, messages. .! As Adela had proved, young women did not like their elders to know about such things — a conspiracy of silence which the killer exploited.
Corbett picked up the Book of the Dead.
‘He didn’t strike twice,’ he murmured. ‘He just did it the once!’
Elizabeth was lured to some place where the Mummer’s Man was waiting. Peterkin, he concluded, would be the perfect messenger. Probably after a day or so, the message and the memory would fade and, if the simpleton realised there was something wrong, how could he proclaim what he had done? Corbett vowed to have words with Peterkin. In the meantime. . He opened the Book of the Dead and, going back twenty years, began to read. He recalled lines from a poem:
Amongst the dead I have walked,
And amongst the dead I have found the
truth.
Corbett closely studied the Book of the Dead and found what he was looking for: unexplained deaths. He closed it and sat back. Melford was truly a place of bloody slaughter! He recalled Beauchamp Place and that pathetic skeleton stowed away in the old chapel wall.
‘Some are left,’ Corbett murmured. ‘Some are buried, which means not all have been discovered!’
He recalled what Tressilyian had said about the poacher. Was it possible?
‘Two assassins!’ Corbett murmured.
He thought of Furrell and Sorreclass="underline" one a lecherous poacher, the other committed to what? Justice? Vengeance? Both knew the countryside, and what did Furrell mean about ‘the truth being plain as a picture’?
Corbett pushed back the chair, got to his feet and reached for his cloak and war belt.
Chapter 14
Sorrel stared at the paintings on the wall of the solar at Beauchamp Place. Now and again she would turn and listen carefully to the sounds outside. People, occasionally, came to buy fresh meat. She’d heard rumours of an important banquet at the Guildhall that evening.
‘Best time for a little poaching,’ she murmured.
Sorrel walked across to the niche where the statue of the Virgin stood. She reached behind it, plucking out the greasy scroll, a piece of vellum Sorrel had bought in Melford marketplace. She took this to the table, smoothed it out and studied the names scrawled there. Sorrel knew her letters. After all, she was a merchant’s daughter with book-learning who had the misfortune to fall in love only to be spurned by both suitor and family. The names were not correctly written, the letters ill formed but Sorrel could recognise them. She ran her fingers down: Tressilyian, Molkyn, Thorkle, Deverell, Repton. .
‘Aye,’ she whispered. ‘And a few others.’
She took her dagger and etched a rough cross beside the names of those who had been killed. She picked the vellum up. One name caught her attention.