Maureen Ash - Death of a Squire

“Osbert should keep his mouth shut,” Renault drawled.

Alinor drew herself up, anger sparking from her. “As you do, you mean? The Templar was not told of this, was he? Nor my aunt?”

Now the squire let his own temper flare. “And why should they be? Neither Alain nor I had anything to do with that bog-spawn’s murder. Hubert was warned. By both of us. To have challenged him outright would have made the matter known, and damaged Alys’s reputation beyond repair. He knew well enough not to repeat attempting to inflict his loathsome attentions on Alys. If he had…”

“…either you or Alain would have been incensed enough to kill him,” finished Alinor. As Renault’s mouth set in a grim line, she went relentlessly on, “And he was killed, wasn’t he? Secretly. Perhaps to protect Alys?”

“And your father, lady?” Renault spat at her. “If he is involved in some plot against the king and Hubert was privy to it, would that not be a much greater reason to kill him, in order to stop up that loathsome cretin’s babbling mouth?” He looked at her askance, his lip curling slightly in disdain. “But then I suppose that Alain and I, both sons of knights of low station, are more expendable than a baron who comes of such high lineage as the constable of Normandy.”

Alinor, furious now, rounded on him, her voice rising so that passersby looked at the pair curiously and made a wide berth around them. “How dare you accuse me of such baseness? Alys is my friend, betrothed to my brother. I only want to find the truth so that the innocent may not suffer from misguided slander.”

But Renault’s words had struck home. Alinor knew that her father was a fussy, fretful man who suffered from being compared with the paladin who had been his relative, but she loved him. For all his faults, he was not an unkind parent, solicitous of his ailing son and indulgent to his wife and daughter. But at the back of her mind she feared he may have been tempted into some intrigue, if only lured by the possibility of gaining lands and honours from being an adherent of any who might successfully overthrow the king. If that were so, even if he were not personally responsible for the death of the squire, he might be privy to the identity of the murderer.

Renault, seeing the conflict of emotions that flitted across her face and caused her to barb her words, took pity on her. “Alinor, do not get tangled in the strands of this riddle. Whoever murdered Hubert will not hesitate to kill again if knowledge of his identity is threatened. Let it alone, lest you put yourself in danger. Leave it to the Templar. He has the ability to defend himself. You do not.”

Alinor, despite herself, heard the wisdom in his words of caution, much as she was loath to admit it. She nodded her head and when Renault offered her his arm, she took it. Belatedly they resumed their walk in Baldwin and Osbert’s wake.

At about the same time that Alinor and her companions were en route to the cathedral, Bascot was also leaving the castle bail. Mounted on the grey gelding, he left by the western gate, riding in the direction of the sheriff’s chase. He rode fully armed with sword and mace, and wearing a conical helm and dark surcoat over a hauberk of mail to ensure he would not be vulnerable to another attack by a stray arrow. It was his intention to talk to the charcoal burner and, from there, revisit the village where Bettina lived. He felt sure that the core of the mystery that had led to Hubert’s murder was to be found in the forest, but he was at a loss as to how to discover it.

Crossing the Fossdyke, he barely felt the coldness of the morning or noticed the random snowflake that dropped and melted on the warmth of his horse’s flank, except to reflect fleetingly that Hubert’s lust must have been high to have sought a tryst with Bettina in such dank weather, even though it had been reasonably mild on the night he was killed. Still, he thought, ardour does not cease when winter throws its blanket over the earth, and the young are robust. A warm cloak and a bed of leaves would be just as snug as a cold secluded cranny within the castle walls. As he entered the chase, he bent his mind to his task, trying to envision the forest as it would have been on the evening when Hubert had met his death. The woodland was alive with movement at all times of the year, not only with wolves, deer and boar, small animals and birds, but with men as they chopped and hewed, hunted and gleaned, reaped a harvest of meat and berries for the pot or gathered wood for building and burning. Most of these activities were lawful, carried out either by agents of the lord who held the land or by peasants given permission from their master. But there were many in the forest that were not there by right, men and women judged by society as outside its law, forced to steal in order to keep hunger at bay.

Although it was late in the year, there would still be a few peasants grazing a goat or a pig in the forest, or collecting bracken and wind-felled wood. This was a territory they knew, all the tracks and pathways as familiar as the lumps of straw in their beds. Their own livelihood and health depended on such knowledge and they would be well aware of any intruder, be it four-footed beast or two-legged man. Unless Hubert had possessed the skill to move through the denuded branches of the trees with the stealth of a spectre, someone must have seen or heard him. It was Bascot’s task to find out who.

As he neared the site of the old hunting lodge, the snow began to come down a little harder, still in tiny delicate flakes, but swirling now, drifting in circles as it was driven by a slight wind that had arisen. At the ruins of the old hunting lodge, the ground had hardened with the drop in temperature. The churned-up tracks made by the passage of the hunt were hard with rime, the mud glistening with frozen moisture. Bascot passed them by, heading in the direction of the thin trails of smoke from the charcoal burner’s fires that were visible above the tops of the trees.

Bascot travelled only a short distance before he came to a large clearing. In it were three huge turf-covered mounds, each about nine feet high. Built up from the inside of a shallow pit, they were a construction of wood piled about a central tripod of tall branches, which was then covered with a thick layer of soil and sod. At the top of each was an iron disk, covering the hole through which the stacks were lighted by means of dropping in a handful of burning embers. Ventilation slits were carefully placed around the perimeter of each mound, at intervals of approximately three feet. When the smoke from these slits turned a clear blue it signalled that the charcoal was ready. The whole process took about three or four days, and constant attendance was needed to monitor the fire and repair any cracks that might appear in the outer covering of turf.

One of the stacks in the clearing had apparently already served its purpose, for it had been allowed to go out and was dismantled. Some charcoal still remained in the depths of the base, waiting to be put in bags and taken for sale. Both of the other mounds were still burning, the nearest one emitting smoke that was an almost translucent haze. At this one, a tall gaunt man clad in a rough goatskin jerkin was on a ladder placed against the side of the stack, carefully blocking the vent holes so that the lack of air would extinguish the fire. At the next stack a young man, similarly dressed and enough alike the other to be his son, was engaged in filling in cracks in the turf covering. Both looked up at Bascot’s approach, but only the younger one looked startled.

The Templar dismounted and tethered the grey to the branches of a tree at the edge of the enclosure, near to where a crudely built cart with iron-plated wheels stood. In a small pen a donkey peered inquisitively at the newcomers. Bascot’s horse snuffed discontentedly at the acrid smell of burning but, being a reasonably placid animal, chose to ignore it and began to push his nose hopefully at the rough grass near his feet. The Templar walked over to the mound at which the elder of the two men still kept to his task and approached the bottom of the ladder. As he did so, another boy, a younger version of the other two, appeared at the doorway of a roughly constructed shack, a dog at his side, and stood watching.