Price, a small sly man with a taste for cruelty, had been escorted to the factory by two riding officers, in case the crone had menfolk at her beck. She did not, but the trip was disappointment from the first, and failed. She saw them coming from the forest edge, as she had been forewarned. It was known by all the free trade men by now who Yorke and Warren were, and what had been their fate. Cruel though Price's reputation was, Ma Foster had been told what crueller men would do to her if she should speak too much. Reluctantly for she thought herself a match for a collector and two riding men she abandoned her cott and slipped into the Liberty, to watch.
The house a hovel rather, with turfed-over roof was empty, naturally. Inside it Adam Price found a pile of skins and rags (her bed), a wooden table, a stool, a water jug. In the shed next door, much better made of planks and thatching, he expected much more, and knew she'd tricked him. At the stone-clad hearth, where Ma Foster burnt the sugar to colour the natural spirit brought in from France at a dozen spots along the coast, there were no pans, measures, tun dishes anything to ply her trade. Similarly, the storage room was empty, not a barrel or a hogshead or a half-cask to be seen. No sugar, either, except in smears across the beat-earth floor. Ma Foster and her customers had thought ahead, and they'd acted. It was not a browning factory, it was a woodland hut.
"Outside," he ordered tersely, to the riding officers. "They can't have got it far into the wood. We'll find it if we have to work all day."
Beside his saddle, Price had lashed a sledgehammer and some crows, to smash the cooperage and the instruments the old dame would need for browning. There being none, he smashed her door and table, then, as an afterthought, scattered hot ashes from her fire into her bedding pile. Then he blew a brand until it was ready to ignite, gathered a handful of dry grass from beside the doorway, and took it into the factory storehouse where he piled the combustibles against the inside wooden wall. Lacking spirit by the hogshead, he returned to his saddlebag and got a bottle of his own also smuggled, but confiscated almost legally which he splashed freely down the rough wood of the wall. He blew the brand until the smoulder became a glow, then held the grass to it until it took.
Then, with a flash, the spirit flickered blue upon the wall, taking hold as real, red fire in the cracks and fissures. Price propped open the door to give it air, and watched the fire roaring up the inner wall. By the time his men returned half an hour later, there was nothing left but blackened stumps of planking, and a pile of turf where the hovel roof was in.
The officers, who did not know the Liberty, had discovered absolutely nothing. Neither they nor Adam Price had any interest left, were hardly even amused by what Ma Foster would discover when she came back to her home. As Price had brought the only bottle, and wasted it as kindling, they needed, anyway, to find themselves an inn or tavern. Price, who had done the hot work, favoured ale.
Ma Foster, who had watched it all from start to end, cursed them mildly as they rode away, and wondered idly if she could perhaps doctor some brandy up for them, and get her fellows to leave it outside the Custom House to be found and drunk, bringing on a slow, unpleasant death. Doubting it, she went to see if she could salvage any turf from her ruined hovel. She would need to build somewhere to sleep, as the nights were getting chilly.
It was two days later that the boy found Charlie Warren, on the day, by chance, that Sir Peter Maybold received the senior man's report from Hampshire that the best efforts of even Adam Price had turned up nothing in the Liberty. The boy was called Joe Simple, and he was thought to be a kind of idiot, from which the name. He belonged to a small tied farmer, who tended a straggle of poor fields that stretched north to south beside a Sussex wood. Joe Simple had been found, not born, but he ate little and his stupidity was not harmful. He had seen the burnt-out hayrick several times, and had even mentioned it to his father, although he did not talk much, in the way of things. Ricks did get burnt sometimes, usually for drunken reasons not malicious, often by drunk wanderers who'd come by some tobacco, so it was not interesting. This day Joe walked close, and smelled a smell he only recognised the half of. Burnt meat, yes, but also putrefaction. Burnt meat? In a hayrick? Perhaps some tramp had smoked himself to death.
So it seemed, when he got closer. The rick was quite burnt down, consisting of a shapeless low pile of black, with one side pulled out and scattered by dogs or foxes, or perhaps vicious brocks, that he had heard men talk of over beer, and which he feared. Certainly he saw a burnt-out boot, with a whitish leg bone sticking out of it into the charry mess. Above the bone a fatter-looking lump, with cloth burned into it, and rags of flesh teased down. This was the part that smelled, and the smell grew stronger when Joe poked at it with his hazel. Soft and hard, some flesh charred, some yielding, almost liquid. He knocked the hay-ash off, uncovering the area of the private parts, nothing natural to be seen there, though. The man had had a leather belt, with a good-sized buckle, which Joe Simple was hoping suddenly might be of silver. Whether of good metal or not, it occurred to him this was no tramp, there were remnants of real cloth there as well, and a waistcoat. It further fell into him that this man was buried in the hayrick, he must have thrust himself deep in its heart before he lit his pipe, which was very thoughtless, not to say Joe held the thought, a sick feeling creeping over him. This man had been thrust in the hay and murdered by the fire.
Joe Simple stood for some long time before he moved, pondering on what he ought to do. Most likely, if he told people he'd found a murdered man, they would hang him as the murderer. They might ask him first if he had done it, because he was liked well enough, but he knew he would not have the proper words to explain himself. Someone would ask awkward questions, or be tricky with their speed, and he would confess to some guilt and be strung up from the local gibbet. He had seen it done before, and not just once, despite they lived way out of any fair-sized town. The English were a hanging race, his mother said, and who could disagree? Joe thought of this until his mind was flooded with it, which by next day meant that he was gibbering, until his father knocked him over with a lath. It took a kicking to get the whole tale out of him, when to his surprise he was not blamed at all, but told to lead the way. They uncovered the full sad stiffened effigy, which made him cry, but which his father seemed to find not unexpected. Then he was cuffed some more, to make him keep his mouth shut, and the corpse was loosely covered up for time to think.
Later that night he heard his mother and his father talking long and low, and later still two men he thought, he did not see -came to the house for conference. Joe Simple heard nothing more of the matter after that, and in several days forgot it, almost. Except the black stick bones and purple, bitten bits of stomach that he'd seen and smelt. They stayed with him and never went away.
When dawn came to the Biter, the wind was fierce and bleak. Clear of the Essex coast and blowing truer, it had veered more northerly so their easy reach had given way to a bitter, lumpy plug. Through the dark hours, Gunning had snugged her down to head and close-reefed topsails, and as the east sky lightened there was little reason to increase her speed. There were ships aplenty up ahead of them, mostly hove to in the offing, some bearing off to make the estuary in time to catch the flood, but none of them was large or had the air of a foreign trader, homeward bound.