Bernard Knight - The Elixir of Death

'Not a damn thing to be seen, Crowner,' growled the Cornishman after they had covered almost a mile. 'Plenty of side tracks on to the heathland and into these bloody trees, but we can't explore them all.'

De Wolfe grunted his agreement. 'If it was wet, then we might see fresh hoof marks. But half-frozen ground like this is useless for such signs.'

He felt totally impotent and frustrated, knowing that Matilda and possibly Hilda might be in the clutches of these Turkish madmen, without any real notion of where they were.

Another mile brought them to Bigbury, the hamlet lurking at the edge of the forest that covered the plateau stretching from west of the chapel across to the banks of the Avon and up as far as Were Down, towards Aveton Giffard. As they rode down the track between the dozen tofts and cottages that made up the village, there was no sign of anything untoward. Across the road, an ox team was ploughing the hard soil to turn in the stubble of a meagre harvest, and at the side of the track a couple of men were repairing a dry-stone wall. De Wolfe reined in to ask them whether they had seen any strangers passing through that day, but received mystified shakes of the head.

'Few people come this way, sir,' said one, who recognised the coroner from his previous visit to Bigbury. 'The fisherfolk who go down to the river are all known to us. The only excitement we've had is that poor lady pilgrim who came and then disappeared a few days back.'

Thomas piped up for the first time since leaving Lucille. 'That means they must have gone either down to Ringmore or back towards Kingston.'

'Or vanished into the God-forsaken woods at any point,' muttered Gwyn, pulling ferociously at the ends of his bedraggled moustache. He was almost as worried about the situation as his master, even though he and Matilda could barely stand the sight of each other.

They rode on to the alehouse opposite the small church and confronted the clutch of people who came out to meet them, warned by the unfamiliar clatter of hoofs.

'Crowner, you're back again!' called Madge, the alewife. 'You'll be wanting food and drink?' she added hopefully.

There was nothing to be gained by refusing a short halt, as they had no definite plan of campaign. Inside the dim, smoky taproom, they drank ale and cider and chewed on some cold mutton chops, followed by bread and hard cheese. Urgently, John described the violent events at St Anne's Chapel that morning and explained that his own wife, sister to the lord of Revelstoke, had been abducted. Then he enquired about any strange events since the two ship-masters had come looking for Hilda.

Madge shook her head. 'Nothing at all, sir. Even our village scaremongers have seen no ghosts in the forest and we have neither seen nor heard anything strange in the woods.'

'Mind you, no one fancies entering there these days,' added the village smith, who sat watching them from a stool in the corner. 'Even the poachers have taken to going in the opposite direction, though the pickings are poorer there.'

'Where did the lady from Dawlish go, when she left here and never returned?' asked Thomas, sipping his cider cautiously.

The tavern-keeper held up her hands in bewilderment. 'I wish I knew, sir! I told her not to stray far, given the odd happenings here, but she was a wilful woman. She must have gone into the forest, for no one saw her on the roads.'

De Wolfe glared at Gwyn, as he slapped his empty pot down on the table.

'We'll just have to go in there ourselves and hope that we come across something. God knows when those men from Revelstoke will turn up, if they ever do. We need Ralph Morin and Gabriel and a posse of soldiers from Rougemont!'

'It would take at least three days to get them down here, if not four,' grunted Gwyn. 'It looks as if it's up to us, Crowner!'

The blacksmith, a large man in a leather apron scarred with burns from hot iron, stood up and offered himself. 'I'll go with you, sir. I know a few of the paths out there. A wife lost is a terrible thing. If the reeve was here, he'd come, but he's in Aveton today.'

Gratefully accepting his offer, John gave Madge a couple of pennies for the food and strode to the door. 'The sooner we get started, the better. It will be dark before long.'

Outside, one of the wall-repairers also volunteered his services and went off to get a hay-fork, a wicked-looking implement with two sharp prongs. The smith trusted to his hammer, a heavy-headed weapon with a long handle. John looked at these and then at his weedy little clerk, to whom non-violence was a way of life. 'Thomas, this may be a dangerous mission,' he said softly. 'You had better stay here and wait for the men from Revelstoke, if they ever come.'

The priest shook his head stubbornly. 'I will come with you master. I owe my life to you and will willingly give my own in exchange. I may be useless at fighting, but maybe I can stand in the path of an arrow meant for you.'

John felt an unfamiliar lump come into his throat and he put an arm around Thomas's skinny shoulders and squeezed wordlessly.

'Let's go, then! Smith, where do we enter these damned woods?

Jan the Fleming was an unusually strong and powerful man, but the effort of fleeing from the old ruins eventually reduced him to a gasping wreck, and he was forced to stop and sink to the ground, past caring whether he was recaptured. However, all was quiet behind him and he crawled behind a moss-covered tree to allow the bellows of his lungs time to calm down. He had hardly noticed the impact of the cross-bow bolt in the tempestuous panic of flight, but now he became aware of a sticky flow down the inside of his tunic and a burning pain in his left shoulder. It was the dragging of the short arrow against his skin which caused the most discomfort and when his heart had stopped pounding and he could breathe without gasping, he felt with his other hand and discovered that the missile had lodged in the skin at the extreme top edge of his shoulder. An inch or two lower and he would have suffered a mortal injury, but as it was, only the loss of blood was a danger. The ever present risk of suppuration loomed, but for now all he could do was tear off a strip from the bottom of his tunic and wad it under his clothing against the wound, to help stanch the bleeding.

Jan again listened intently for any sounds of pursuit.

All he could hear was a bird twittering and the soft sighing of the wind in the tops of the tall trees all around him. He had no chance of even guessing the direction in which he had been running. A trail of bent weeds and ferns told him how he had arrived at this spot, but that was of use only over a few yards. He might have been running in circles, and the danger was that he would go back towards the old castle and priory. Cautiously he got to his feet and started walking away from his former trail, looking back every few yards to try to ensure that he was at least going in a straight line.

He stopped every few minutes to listen for any Saxons or Moors crashing through the woods after him. Thankfully there was continued silence for the next half hour, then he heard something that made him freeze and crouch behind a fallen log that was slowly rotting under a tracery of thick ivy.

Ahead of him to his right, Jan heard a low voice calling out and an answering whistle from the left. He could not distinguish the words, but they were neither Arabic nor English. Then another voice came from farther to the left, more high pitched and certainly speaking Norman French. He shrank down even further to lie on the ground, ignoring the pounding throb in his shoulder in his fear of discovery.

A moment later, he was almost trodden on by a small priest, dressed in a black tunic with a short cloak around his shoulders. He sat up suddenly and the little man gave a shriek of terror at this ugly apparition that had bobbed up from under the ground.