The Medieval Murderers - Hill of Bones

The bigger man came across to see for himself. ‘Two abbey horses hidden in a forest! It’s those two thieving, murdering swine from the cellarium! And now they’ve got our Eldred!’

After an agitated discussion, they had to accept that there was nothing the two of them could do alone, as they had no idea where to look for the fugitives and their captive.

‘You ride back to Bath as fast as you can, Selwyn,’ suggested Riocas. ‘That search party was supposed to be leaving early. If you can find some of them, raise the alarm and bring them back straight away.’

‘What about you?’ demanded the steward. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll follow with these two animals on head ropes. We can’t just leave them here,’ replied the cat-catcher, though he was lying about his intentions. When Selwyn had left to hurry back to their own horses, Riocas untied the tethers on the two abbey rounseys and hitched them up where they could crop a fresh patch of grass.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t forget you’re here,’ he reassured them, and then slipped into the trees, heading for the top of the hill.

Gilbert reached it a good twenty minutes before the furrier, in spite of having to march his captive in front of him. He took a diagonal path up the incline to lessen the gradient, steering Eldred between the trees and bushes, his knife still prominent in his left hand. Maurice stumbled after him, clutching the precious bag with the valuables and mumbling a litany of anxiety and fear as he went.

The trees thinned, and almost abruptly they found themselves at the lower edge of the grassy rampart and ditch that encircled the top of Solsbury Hill. The renegade monk shoved Eldred over the rim and down into the gully beyond, a good ten feet below the level of the flat summit.

‘Keep going or I’ll skewer your kidneys,’ he snarled, pricking the small of Eldred’s back with the point of his dagger. With Maurice trailing behind, they hurried along the flat bottom of the ditch until they had reached a point almost halfway round the circuit. This was the furthest point away from the ‘nose’ of the hill that looked south over the Chippenham road far below and was nearest to where the forest came along the ridge from the north. Here the trees were in a small valley, their tops almost level with the crest of the hill. Gilbert used a break in the lower rampart to climb out again and pushed his captive across to the forest edge, forcing him to stand with his back to a slim birch, just inside the tree line.

‘Our habits are in that bag,’ he snapped at Maurice. ‘Take the girdles from them and tie this fellow up.’

The plaited black cords that had belted their robes were now used to lash Eldred to the tree, one from wrist to wrist around the trunk. At Gilbert’s direction, the other was passed around his neck – firmly, but not enough to strangle him unless he struggled. Satisfied that the lay brother was now immobilised, Gilbert used his knife to cut a strip of cloth from one of the habits. He gagged Eldred with it, the material cutting between his lips to produce a maniacal grin. Frightened and exhausted, the captive’s head dropped on to his chest and he seemed uncaring as to what happened to him. After all the panic and exertion, there now seemed to be a sense of anticlimax, as the two criminals regained their breath and stared at each other.

‘Now what do we do, brother?’ demanded Maurice, with a fragile show of defiance. ‘We have no horses, no food and we are stuck on top of a hill, miles from anywhere – especially Southampton!’

Gilbert had his own ideas about solving this dilemma, but he had no intention of sharing them with his former assistant.

‘We get away from here as soon as possible, before they come searching for us. We’ll keep to the forest and aim north towards Sodbury, then go east, giving Chippenham a wide berth.’

He dipped into the bag and retrieved a few handfuls of silver pennies, which he stuffed into the pouch on his belt.

‘I’ll hide the rest, we can’t lug it all across England. Then we can creep back here in a few weeks to collect it, when all the hue and cry has died down.’

He lifted the leather sack and began walking back to the ditch, Maurice following him uneasily.

‘What about Eldred?’ he whined. ‘You can’t just leave him there!’

‘Why not? He’ll either be found by the searchers – or he’ll die of starvation, I don’t care which,’ Gilbert grunted callously, striding along the deep cutting. He scanned the sides of the ditch as he went and stopped opposite a patch of loose earth where a rabbit had kicked the soil out while digging a burrow. It was one of many such excavations around the top of the hill, where conies, foxes and badgers had dug shelters for themselves.

Gilbert squatted in front of the hole and thrust his arm inside to check that it went deeply into the ground. Satisfied, he pushed the bag inside as far as he could reach, then kicked earth back into the burrow and tamped it firmly with his fist to hide all trace of the treasure.

As he peered into the hole to satisfy himself that the bag was completely hidden, a sudden sound behind him made him wheel around to find Maurice looming over him with a knife held high in his hand. With a yell, Gilbert threw himself sideways as his clerk lunged desperately downwards, aiming to bury the blade between the cellarer’s shoulder blades.

The puny Maurice was no match for the other man, who grabbed his ankle and pulled him violently to the ground, the knife skittering away out of reach. Leaping to his feet, Gilbert gave the clerk a vicious kick in the belly to keep him down, then unsheathing his own knife, drove it deep into Maurice’s chest.

‘Stab me in the back, would you, you bastard!’ he hissed. ‘I was going to kill you anyway. Did you think I was going to share any of my hard-won spoils with you?’

His former assistant made no reply as he was already dead, the long blade having sliced through the root of his heart. Gilbert pulled it out and wiped it on the grass, then stood quivering as he regarded the corpse.

‘Now I’ve got to hide you as well, damn you!’ he muttered.

He climbed the outer bank and looked around cautiously, but the hill top was deserted, apart from the still figure of Eldred tied to his tree.

Going back down to the body, Gilbert seized one hand and unceremoniously dragged it along the bottom of the ditch, looking for a large enough hiding place. He wanted to get away as fast as he could and this further encumbrance was highly unwelcome. He staggered along for a few hundred paces without finding any suitable grave for the clerk, so went out through a gap in the outer rampart and walked until he found a gaping hole under the roots of a solitary beech tree, which grew on the edge of a depression half filled with dead leaves. It must have been an old badger sett, but was large enough for him to push Maurice’s body inside. Thankfully, the former monk was small and skinny, and when Gilbert had pulled down a small avalanche of earth from the upper lip of the hole and liberally scattered armfuls of leaves, nothing was visible. As he did so, he wondered why he was bothering to hide Maurice’s corpse, as one more killing would make no difference to his final penalty if he was caught. The act was an almost instinctive one, to hide all traces of his most recent felony.

Then, almost exhausted by his recent efforts, he trudged back towards the ditch in order to get his bearings, as he had become disorientated and urgently needed to set off along the ridge that led northwards through the forest. Deciding that the clearest view would be from the flat top of the hill, he clambered up the inner bank of the dyke – and came face to face with a very large and very angry man!