Paul Doherty - The Magician

‘Ranulf!’

Mistress Feyner swung the door open and Corbett followed in pursuit, only to realise Ranulf wasn’t there, but at the foot of the steps. He came pounding up, alarmed by the noise and the crash of the door. Mistress Feyner turned right, fleeing further up the spiral staircase. Corbett and Ranulf followed. The steps were steep, twisting sharply as they followed the line of the wall. Corbett felt a little dizzy whilst Mistress Feyner, light on her feet, raced ahead. On the storey above she stopped to send some wood, stacked in a window embrasure, rattling down, impeding Corbett’s progress. He and Ranulf kicked the obstacle aside, and by the time they glimpsed her again she had reached the top, bursting through the door on the roof of the tower. She tried to bolt it from the outside, but in her haste was unable to draw across the rusting iron. Corbett paused, gasping for breath, his sweat-soaked hand slipping down the mildewed wall. The reek of this ancient place made him cough and splutter on the dust swirling through the air.

‘I want her alive, Ranulf.’ He put his hand on the latch. ‘There is no place for her to flee. I want to know why she attacked me.’

They opened the door to be buffeted by the icy wind. Mistress Feyner had reached the battlements and stood with her back to one of the crenellated openings. She seemed all composed, a smile on her lips. Corbett edged gingerly across the hard-packed ice.

‘Surrender!’ he called out. ‘Give yourself up to the King’s justice.’ He beckoned with his hand as he moved forward.

Mistress Feyner climbed up into the gap, holding the stone either side, bracing herself against the wind which sent her hair and gown billowing.

‘Please,’ Corbett begged, ‘there will be mercy as well as justice.’

‘What does it matter, King’s man?’ Mistress Feyner called back. ‘What does anything really matter now?’ And spreading her arms as if they were wings, she fell back.

Corbett and Ranulf, slipping on the ice, strode across. Steadying themselves against the battlements, they peered over. Mistress Feyner lay below, black and twisted against the snow. Already a dark puddle shrouded her head like some sombre nimbus. People were hurrying across, shouting at each other.

‘God have mercy on her,’ Corbett whispered. ‘God give her peace.’

They went back down the steep stairwell. Corbett stopped to secure his chamber before continuing down into the yard. Sir Edmund and Bolingbroke were already waiting.

‘I told them what had happened,’ Ranulf whispered. ‘Sir Edmund went looking for further proof.’ Corbett stared down at the bundle at the Constable’s feet: a dark-stained sheet, an arbalest polished and clean, next to it a leather pouch of crossbow bolts.

‘We found them,’ Sir Edmund declared. ‘The crossbow was in a hole beneath her cottage floor. The cloth was folded neatly in the cart. So evil.’ He turned and spat.

‘No,’ Corbett disagreed. ‘A poor woman, driven witless by grief, revenge and hatred. Anyway,’ he gazed up at the snow-laden sky, ‘this bloody work is finished; we have other things to do.’ He patted the Constable on the shoulder. ‘Give her body an honourable burial. She sinned but truly believed she had been grievously sinned against.’

Already a crowd was beginning to gather, eager with questions; Sir Edmund waved them away whilst Corbett took his two companions up to his chamber. For a short while he sat hunched in front of the fire, warming himself, wondering if he could have done things differently. Mistress Feyner had killed, and killed again. The castle folk would have demanded justice and she would have received little mercy, being thrust in some dungeon then tried before the justices in eyre, before being dragged on a hurdle at a horse’s tail to be hanged on some gibbet or, even worse, burnt alive outside the castle gate.

Ranulf brought Corbett some watered wine. He sipped it carefully, calming his mind.

‘We will not meet de Craon today. So, let us draft the pardon letters for the outlaws.’

The two clerks muttered in protest, but when Chanson arrived they began the laborious process. Sheaths of vellum were smoothed with pumice stone. Corbett dictated the words, Ranulf and Bolingbroke writing them down before copying them into formal letters, dating them on the eve of St Nicholas, the thirty-first year in the reign of Edward the First after the Conquest. The hard red wax was melted, Bolingbroke carefully ladling it out on to the prepared parchments. Corbett opened the secret Chancery box and carefully made sure his own ciphers were there before taking out the precious seal and making the impressions. Certain places in the document were left blank to insert names of individuals, but they all read the same, ‘that X be admitted, with full pardon and mercy, into the King’s peace, and that this pardon was for divers crime, poaching, housebreaking, robbing the King’s highway . . .’

‘I must go,’ Ranulf declared. ‘I promised I would meet them, to assure Horehound and all his followers that all would be well. I also offered to bring supplies.’

When Ranulf had left, taking Chanson with him, Corbett replaced the secret Chancery box and, trying to forget that black figure, head soaked in blood, sprawled out in the snow, took out the Secretus Secretorum of Friar Roger and began leafing through the pages. He found it difficult to concentrate. Despite what justice would have been meted out to her he regretted Mistress Feyner’s death; even more that he had failed to question her about the murderous assault on himself.

Corbett eventually composed himself and became engaged in a fierce debate with Bolingbroke over the value of the Secretus Secretorum and the cipher Friar Roger had used. The more he studied the strange Latin words, the more convinced he became that the Franciscan had invented a most cunning code. He and Bolingbroke tried every variation they knew, and Corbett had to check himself lest he inadvertently gave away his own ciphers used in the letters and memoranda issued to his agents across Europe. They tried position codes, code wheels and the most complex multiplication table codes, studying the vertical pattern with the letters forward or backward. Bolingbroke confessed to being almost certain that Friar Roger’s cipher was based on one of these. Corbett, however, remained unconvinced and kept returning to the key Magister Thibault had found on the last page, ‘ Dabo tibi portas multas ’ – ‘I shall give you many doors’. He realised how the letters of this phrase were separated, transposed and confused by blocks of other letters which somehow gave the words a Latin ring, and isolated what he called these alien obstacles, but when he applied them to other lines and sections of the manuscript it failed to resolve the mystery. He and Bolingbroke must have argued for an age, and when Ranulf returned drenched in melting snow, Corbett welcomed the break.

‘Yes, I met Horehound and his lieutenant Milkwort. They have agreed to come into the castle the day after tomorrow and accept the King’s peace. Strange,’ Ranulf sat on a stool to remove his boots, ‘they were full of mumbles about the taverner Master Reginald, who drove them away, whilst Father Matthew was ill, claiming he was too weak to congratulate them on the good news. Sir Hugh?’ He glanced across. Corbett had been half listening, staring intently at the copy of the Opus Tertium de Craon had lent him. He placed this on the bed and went to get his own copy, one finger on the text comparing the two pages.

‘I’ve found it,’ he whispered and glanced up. ‘At least I know that!’