The Outlaws of Ennor: (Knights Templar 16) (20 page)

‘I have to do something. I am failing in my duty to God,’ Tedia said, and there was a mournful tone to her voice. ‘I used to love my man, but now?’ She disconsolately kicked at a pebble. ‘I don’t know. I think I could be tempted by any fellow with meat between his legs. It’s been so long …’

Baldwin heard little, fortunately. His emotions were confused enough as it was. Instead he was studying the ground. This, he felt sure, must have been the place where he had been washed up. There were so many prints in the sand. And then his mind caught on to Tedia’s comment and he felt a surge of trepidation. He looked up and surveyed the area. There was no one in sight.

She continued sadly, ‘I could be sorely tempted by almost any man, and that’s no way to live, is it? I want to cleave to my husband, yet I dream of other men all the time.’

‘Is this where I was found?’ Baldwin asked hurriedly.

She turned to him as though she had forgotten he was there. ‘Hmm? Oh, yes. You were just here – see? There’s no sign of a sword.’

Baldwin had to agree with her. Nothing marred the pristine sand apart from some few baulks of timber and the occasional piece of seaweed. Everything else was flotsam.

It was a terrible fact to face, that his sword was gone for ever, and he felt the full weight of the loss, as though this was a final breaking with his past. He hoped that the ship had survived. Other ships lasted
out the bad weather, and it was quite possible that Simon was still alive, and yet Simon was not here, and Baldwin was appallingly alone. He felt deserted, and to have lost that most important symbol of his power and position, his sword, redoubled his loneliness. It was as though he had not only lost his friend, but at the same time had lost his right to call himself knight. Had lost his own past. Without that sword, he felt as though his own Order had disowned him. Childish, yes; foolish, certainly – yet the feeling was there, a conviction that he could not shake.

‘Are you all right?’ Tedia asked.

‘Yes, but I …’ He felt emotional, close to tears.

‘What?’

‘I cannot believe that my sword fell from me. It could have fallen from the scabbard, but not the whole belt. I wondered, suppose someone found me, and left me there, thinking I was near enough to death already, and simply sought to steal my sword?’

‘That couldn’t happen,’ she said with certainty. ‘No one about here would leave a drowning man to die. We live by the sea: none of us could allow a shipwrecked person to die without help.’

Her conviction was reassuring, but Baldwin knew men could behave astonishingly badly when given the spur of temptation. However, the argument would only upset the woman. ‘I am a little thirsty. Could we find a place with ale or wine?’ he asked quietly.

‘What, here?’ Tedia asked. Then she gave a twisted grin. ‘There may be such a place, but only if you don’t tell.’

Fortunately
his purse was still fixed to his belt and when he had returned to the castle, Simon managed to bribe himself into the gaol without too much difficulty. Once there, he demanded to speak to Sir Charles and Paul, and they were brought to him, both in chains.

‘This is a fine welcome home to Britain,’ Charles said with a bright smile. ‘I would have preferred some other response to my arrival.’

The room in which they were allowed to meet was a small cell near the castle’s foundations. There was a black trickle at one corner that stank of urine, and all the walls were bare stone. It was lighted by a malodorous candle which sat in a pool of wax in the middle of the heavily boarded table, and the three men had to stand about it for lack of a stool or bench. Simon was comfortable enough in the cool room, but every time that Sir Charles moved, the links of his chains rattled annoyingly.

If Simon had been in any doubt as to the treatment which Sir Charles and Paul had received, the bruises on Sir Charles’s face, and the dried crust of blood over his temple, as well as Paul’s swollen jaw where he too had been knocked down, would have quelled it. Their clothing was filthy. Days at sea in a tarry, oily cog, sea-sickness and pirates, followed by the storm and then gaol, had all taken their toll on Sir Charles’s usually neat appearance. He had a rough growth of beard, which for some reason made him appear younger than usual, but the gaunt look of his face with its deep eye hollows, and the stains and tears in his tunic, made him seem like a beggar of particularly ill-repute.

Simon at once went to them. ‘I had thought you were both dead! How did you come to survive that last blow?’

‘It
was all very well for you to flee,’ Sir Charles said with a certain hauteur, ‘but not everyone knows how to swim, Bailiff.’

‘You should have told me! I could have helped you!’

‘To find a lingering death clinging to a spar?’ Sir Charles said with a faint smile. ‘Far better, I thought, to tempt fate and hope that the ship might survive.’

‘I thought we all agreed it was going to sink.’

‘Yet, as you can see, it didn’t. We arrived here safe and sound.’

‘In most ways,’ Paul grumbled.

‘I am deeply sorry,’ Simon said. ‘Why have they treated you in this way?’

‘Aha! That, I think, I can answer easily enough. It was probably,’ Charles said with a judicial consideration, ‘the way I held my sword to the back of Ranulph Blancminster. Apparently he is the local lord. I thought from his behaviour and arrogance that he was a mere official, or maybe even another pirate. Sadly, I now learn that he is the Lord of the Manor and demands full payment from any vessel which suffers damage about his shores.’

‘Can he do so?’ Simon asked.

‘He can from my master,’ Paul interjected bluntly. ‘His men saw my master shoving his sword-point at the man’s back. That was when they knocked him even more bloody stupid than he normally is.’

‘It was,’ Sir Charles confessed, ‘a rather extraordinary sensation, to be so beaten about the head that I collapsed on the spot. Yet it was interesting in its own way.’

‘As interesting as having an adder bite your arse,’ Paul said scathingly as his master gingerly touched his scalp.

‘No … there was nothing of the serpent about de Blancminster,’ Charles said thoughtfully. ‘He was less of a fighter, more of a merchant. I think all he was doing when he first appeared on our ship was assessing its value. He had no idea how many men there were on board at the time.’

‘He soon learned, though,’ Paul added, and then he spat. ‘And now he knows, he doesn’t want anyone who could cause him trouble to survive.’

‘What
do you mean?’ Simon asked.

‘He wants the full value of the ship for himself, doesn’t he? That means no survivors.’

‘I am sure he isn’t so cynical,’ Simon said, but with a hesitation in his voice as he recalled Blancminster’s features.

‘He wants what he can get, Simon,’ Sir Charles said. ‘I understand such men. I thought I had a pirate on the ship, which was why I pulled out my sword – and I was proved right. From the moment he arrived on board, he was looking at the value of the thing. Paul says that as soon as I was down, he went about the
Anne
from stem to stern, checking all the wines and goods in the hold, and he took the ship’s records with him when he left.’

Simon suddenly remembered the documents Thomas had been working on when he went into his room at the castle. The parchments spread over the trestle-table could well have been a ship’s manifest.

‘As soon as he realised how much the ship was worth,’ Paul confirmed, ‘he took the lot with him and ordered her to be taken into port.’

‘He could surely not leave her without mast or sail,’ Simon said reasonably.

‘He could have asked permission before taking her,’ Sir Charles said flatly. ‘And as soon as I am free of these chains, I shall ask the good Blancminster to meet me for a discussion of the rights and wrongs of his behaviour.’

‘It may be better not to,’ Simon said thoughtfully. ‘He is powerful enough here on his own territory. It would be easy for him to arrange for you to disappear.’

‘If he killed me, he would have to answer to the King’s Coroner soon enough. You and Paul would report his actions!’

Simon looked at him, but it was Paul who caught Simon’s expression and gave a low whistle. ‘You reckon he’d do that? He’d kill all of us to keep us silent?’

‘From his behaviour so far, I wouldn’t think him incapable of it,’ Simon said.

‘I don’t care!’ Sir Charles said. ‘He must be taught manners.’

‘He has many men here. He could easily kill you.’

‘The
King’s Coroner …’

‘He
is
the Coroner.’

‘So much the better. He must be a man of honour, then,’ Sir Charles said.

He stood and Simon saw that he was smiling again. It was a look which Simon distrusted. When the pirates had attacked the ship, Simon had seen Sir Charles. Beforehand, waiting for something to happen, he had been grim, a shadowy, angry man pacing the deck; as soon as the pirates’ grapnels had caught the ship’s side, Simon had seen him wielding his sword. He had been smiling, as happy and innocent-looking as a child, but this child was a berserker in knightly clothing. Sir Charles used his blade to take off one man’s hand, then was back, a club in the other hand, to beat at a second. He smiled as he fought, as though the whole of his soul was thrilling to the power and authority of the steel in his hand.

Seeing that same smile again, Simon left the cell and returned to the fresh daylight, unhappily convinced that if he wished to see his home and his wife again, he would have to ensure that Sir Charles not only escaped from the cell in which he was incarcerated, but that he was kept away from Ranulph de Blancminster until they were safely off the islands.

Simon’s concerns were nothing compared with those of Thomas who, once he returned from the inquest, spent the next hour sitting in his room with his records, assessing the cost of his latest venture should his ship not arrive.

If all was well, the
Faucon Dieu
should have arrived back at Ennor at any time over the last four days. True, sometimes the French port officials could be difficult, requiring a larger bribe than usual, or there could be a dispute with a clumsy dockyard worker – like last year. Then the master of the ship had arrived in port with a consignment of pottery, and because the lazy drunk had been abed when the dockers arrived, no one had shown them the ropes. When one snapped and a number of pieces were shattered on the hard stone flags, the dockers had accused the ship of maintaining poor ropes, as well they might. They wouldn’t want to have to pay for
their incompetence, would they? The master had suffered a large financial penalty for that gaffe. It was normal procedure for all ships always to display their ropes so that this sort of thing couldn’t happen.

To lose one load of pottery, that was one thing, but Thomas now feared that he could have lost much more. Of course, as he reminded himself every few minutes, it was more than likely that the ship was held up in port and couldn’t make the sailing he expected, so they were simply late, but somehow he didn’t feel reassured.

Pirates were always a problem, especially with shipping to and from the British ports in Guyenne, but things had been quiet for a while. Now, though, Thomas had heard that the
Anne
had been chased by what must have been a Breton ship, from the sound of things. Pirates didn’t tend to travel far: they preyed on ships close to their home ports. So, if the Bretons were up to their tricks again, no cargo was safe, and Thomas was unpleasantly aware that he had overextended himself on this voyage. It wasn’t insured, and if the vessel was caught, he would be in serious trouble.

It was curious the way that this affected him. After the first few anxious moments, he could almost study himself like an observer from a distance. The problem was one about which he could do nothing. Could he fly to the ship to see that she was all right? Of course not! The only thing he could do was sit and wait, and meanwhile ensure that his work was all done. Except he couldn’t. It was impossible to concentrate on anything while his mind was tormented with the fear that he had lost everything he’d built up over the last years.

Money was not important hereabouts, of course, but if he was ever to escape these islands and return to civilisation, he would need hard cash. No man without a lord could survive long in England without some money behind him. No, Thomas needed money, and lots of it … where
was
that ship? It should have arrived by now.

Then again, piracy was not the only threat to shipping. The
Faucon Dieu
may have been overwhelmed by the storm, just as the
Anne
had. Perhaps the master of the
Anne
had noticed it? Whether he had or not, the man called Gervase had died not long after the damaged vessel was boarded by Ranulph and the rest. Perhaps one of the other
survivors had spotted Thomas’s ship? They could have passed her, or … No. It was better to leave the men from the
Anne
out of it. Ranulph would wonder why he was so keen to speak to them, and Thomas had no desire to let his master find out what he was up to. Filling in customs forms was frowned upon in England, certainly, but the customs due were supposed to be paid to Ranulph, and if he learned that his own trusted Sergeant was taking the money and shovelling it straight into his own purse … life on the island would grow infinitely less pleasant. No, he must keep all that quiet for now.