Michael JECKS - The Devil's Acolyte

‘None of us have much of that. If a mine is working, then all is well, but it only lasts so long. You dig and dig, wash away the rubbish, dig again, and then you have enough ore to fill a few bags. Melt them, pay the owner of a furnace, carry the ingots to Tavistock and pay your tax, pay your feed bills, have some ale, and suddenly you’ve got nothing left again, and you have to come back to the moors to try to dig out a load more tin or find a new claim.’

Simon interrupted. ‘I have been told that on the day of the coining, he had money aplenty. Where did he get it?’

Ivo shrugged. ‘Maybe he found it?’

There was a quiet comment, a miner suggesting that he could have sold his remaining asset, his body, to one of the rich women who were always passing by here, and some coarse sniggers were silenced only when the Coroner barked, ‘Shut up!’

Simon was still listening as the Coroner began asking about Wally’s sudden wealth, but standing at the edge of the miners, his eyes ranged over the men. Ivo was known to Simon, but then most of the men here were, by sight if not by name. It was natural that he should recognise them all, for there weren’t all that many miners, especially since the famine years when even places like Hound Tor had been deserted.

He stared fixedly at Hal. The man knew something. It was obvious in the way that he stood with his legs apart, as though preparing for a verbal sparring match. His arms were crossed over his chest, with a long staff hooked in one, and he was perfectly still, as though he was at his ease, but his good eye was sharp and moving swiftly from Baldwin, to the Coroner, to Simon, below his black brows.

Seeing the swift flash of Hal’s eye, Simon lifted his eyebrow, and he saw that his guess was correct. Hal looked away so fast, his head actually moved, and immediately the Coroner was on him.

‘You! What’s your name?’

Hal’s head dropped lower on his shoulders. He threw Simon a bitter look as though the Bailiff had betrayed him, then cleared his throat. ‘Hal Raddych, sir.’

‘You’re a miner as well?’

‘Yes, sir. I protected this body the first night and last as well.’

‘Very good. And tell me, did anyone come here and move the body while you were here?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What of the club that was used to kill him, Hal?’ Simon interjected.

‘The club?’

‘The blood is still there on the bush. It’s obvious that there was something there.’

‘Perhaps it was stolen away, sir.’

Simon stood and hooked his thumbs in his belt. ‘You take me for a fool?’

Hal looked away. ‘No, sir. But I don’t have the club, and I don’t know anyone who does.’

‘You don’t know anyone who does? You mean that your guard yesterday took it?’

‘I don’t know where it could have gone. Maybe a dog took it, or a fox, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, anyway. It was only a lump of timber.’

‘It matters how many nails there were in it,’ Coroner Roger said. ‘We have to know how much it was worth for the deodand .’

Simon smiled. ‘It must have been worth at least two shillings, Coroner, for someone to bother to take it away.’

‘I agree. Unless we find it, I shall value it at two shillings. Sheriff to come and collect and so on.’ He looked at the clerk. ‘You know the right words to use, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So it comes to this, then,’ the Coroner said. ‘We have a dead man, murdered by a man or men unknown, his head bashed in. He was a poor man, yet he somehow had collected money. We don’t know where from, but he splashed it around liberally. We know he was at the coining from what the good Bailiff has learned. Did he sell something? When he left his home to go to Tavistock, did he have a lump of tin to sell? Did he have a packhorse or anything? Did he look as though he was suddenly wealthy?’

Ivo answered. ‘No, he had nothing but a small wallet on his back. His purse didn’t rattle, either.’

‘Could he have had tin in his wallet?’

‘I suppose, but that much would be worth little. That was why he was so dependent on his rabbits. He used to sell the meat to other miners, the pelts separately. They were good on a winter’s day, those pelts. He knew how to cure them with salt. Took him time, but he was good at it.’

‘And yet he had enough money to buy drink?’ the Coroner asked.

Hal interrupted. ‘He was probably just looking to get some credit with a tradesman in Tavvie.’

Simon watched him closely. Hal looked deeply uncomfortable, as though he was trying to move the conversation on, afraid that something might be discovered.

‘Hmmph,’ the Coroner grunted. He was staring at the clerk, and Simon saw that he was taking Hal’s words at face value. He was surprised – then afraid that he really was losing his touch. If he thought that the man’s evidence was so clearly dishonest, perhaps it was because his own judgement was at fault, because Coroner Roger obviously didn’t share his misgivings.

Then he felt a shiver of resentment pass through him. He refused to believe that he was so incompetent that he didn’t understand his own miners. Simon had spent six years getting to know these men, and he’d cut his own cods off if Hal didn’t know more than he was letting on. Simon would speak to him separately. It would show that he still knew a trick or two. Maybe it would teach the Abbot that he was trustworthy still. It might even prove to Baldwin that Simon wasn’t burned out and only good for the midden.

There and then Simon determined that he would learn all that Hal knew, and if he could, he would discover the murderer of Wally before anyone else.

Nob belched as he finished the last of his ale and glanced up the road. The kennel was filled with mud and filth, and even as he watched, he heard the familiar bellow of ‘Gardy loo!’ from Tan the cobbler’s place up the road. There followed a minor eruption of green liquid from an upper window, narrowly missing a well-dressed merchant who stopped in the middle of the lane to roar and shake a fist upwards with fury.

This was such a small street, it was no surprise that pedestrians would often get spattered, but there was little choice for housekeepers. They had to empty their pots somewhere.

Ordering another ale, Nob wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and considered the place. It was only a little town, Tavistock. Not like other places he’d been. Mind, some of them weren’t so disorganised as this. The trouble was, Devonshire was so hard to get to. Most towns he’d been to, there was some sort of plan about them before the houses went up. Like Longtown in Herefordshire. Even newer towns in Devonshire had some thought invested in them; he remembered South Zeal as a pleasant place with a good broad road and pleasant plots set out regularly along it.

Tavistock was older, though. It had been a Burgh since the days of Abbot Walter, many folk said (although exactly how long that meant Nob didn’t know), and the lanes and streets wound their way untidily about the town. But there were advantages to it. Such as this, the quiet little alehouse not far from his pie-shop, hidden from the main roads by a bend where the lane was forced to curve around the back of Joce Blakemoor’s large house.

It was an imposing property, although Nob himself reckoned it gaudy. Joce was supposed to be a wealthy man, and this was one of the most impressive places in town. The front opened on to the main street, and there you could see that the owner was important. All Blakemoor’s goods were stored in the undercroft, a massive, stone-vaulted chamber that lay under the level of the road. Between the undercroft and the roadway was a large channel, like a moat, which must be traversed by a set of wooden steps, like a drawbridge, which led up to Joce’s shop, where he sold his bolts of cloth, everything from the coarse, cheap dozens to linens and fine wool materials. He even sold silks occasionally, the only cloth merchant to do that this side of Exeter.