The Wayward Apprentice Read online

  The Wayward Apprentice

  Jason Vail

  THE WAYWARD APPRENTICE

  Copyright 2010, by Jason Vail

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Hawk Publishing book.

  Cover illustration copyright Can Stock Photo Inc./Elena Elisseeva

  ISBN: 978-1452876818

  Hawk Publishing

  Tallahassee, FL 32312

  The Wayward Apprentice

  September 1262

  Chapter 1

  The messenger of death arrived in the form of a boy dripping wet and covered with mud.

  He slipped into the Broken Shield shortly before noon, bringing with him a blast of cold air and rain unwelcome in the warmth and conviviality of the inn. The shock reached all the way to the rear, where Stephen Attebrook contemplated his mutton pie with relish.

  Anguish twisted the boy’s face almost as much as he twisted his shapeless wool cap. Stephen noted that the inn’s proprietess, Edith Wistwode, happened to be near the door, and as it was obvious the boy had not come for the custom and had dirtied her well-swept floor to no profit, she was about to speak sharply, no doubt to send him on his way. But the expression on his face stayed her tongue long enough for him to ask a question.

  Edith’s response was a solemn glance in Stephen’s direction, followed by a finger picking him out of the crowd.

  The boy nodded his thanks and made his way around the congestion of tables and benches. Stephen monitored his approach out of the corner of his eye with mounting apprehension. He was comfortable here by the fire with his pie, sheltered from the cold and wet. At times like these, it was almost possible to forget the world’s propensity for suffering — or at least to pretend that bad things only happened to other people in faraway places.

  The boy, who was in fact sixteen or seventeen and small for that age, reached Stephen’s table at last. “Sir,” he stammered, “your honor . . . could you please come? He’s been found.”

  Stephen’s spoon settled back to the safety of the bowl. It was what he had dreaded. Such a request had only once been put to him, but not on such a dreary, wet morning in the middle of dinner. He wished he could say nothing. But of course that was not possible. He had his duty to do.

  Stephen’s clerk, Gilbert Wistwode, said not unkindly, “Who’s been found, boy?”

  “My father,” the boy said. He said this flatly, his face rigid. But the slight tremors on his lips told Stephen that he was fighting back tears. Public tears from a man were shameful. One was expected to bear up under adversity, even this.

  “And where would we find him?” Gilbert asked.

  “South of Ludford on the road to Richards Castle.”

  “Ah,” Gilbert said. “That’s too bad.”

  “Could you come now?” the boy asked plaintively. “I’ll show you the way.”

  “I think we can find the road to Richards Castle without anyone’s help,” Gilbert said. “You need to get warm and dry, or you’ll catch your death.” He called one of the inn’s girls over and directed her to provide the boy with a towel, a spare shirt and hose, as well as a blanket and a stool to sit before the fire. “Go on, now,” he told the boy. “No use going out again in that wet straightaway.”

  Stephen’s reluctance must have showed on his face because Gilbert said drily after the boy had been led away, “He’s right, we’ll have to go soon so there’s hope the finders haven’t moved him. Easier to tell what killed him that way. Especially if he was alone.”

  “Right,” Stephen had said, affecting unconcern. Being forced to view a dead man at any time was not something he particularly relished, but even less so right after the day’s biggest meal. But duty could not be ignored, and Gilbert made sense. This was only his second corpse, and he had a lot to learn.

  As Stephen was about to throw down his napkin and rise, Gilbert grasped his forearm and said, “No need to sacrifice this excellent pie. The fellow will keep long enough for us to finish dinner.” Gilbert turned to order mounts saddled for them while they ate so they could be off as soon as they put down their napkins and swilled the dregs of their cider.

  Still, the mutton pie didn’t taste as good after that.

  It had been raining for the last several days and the streets in Ludlow were rivers of mud, churned to a gooey paste by the passage of pedestrians, carts, horses, pigs, cattle, and dogs. These muddy streams were cris-crossed here and there by planks merchants and householders had laid down to avoid having to step in the muck. The hill down Broad Street did not seem so steep in normal times, but in this wet horses’ feet often slipped from under them. So Stephen and Gilbert dismounted to avoid the risk of falling and waded down to the town gate.

  They walked their mounts across the bridge over the River Teme, up the slope on the opposite bank, and through the little village of Ludford. Although it was the middle of the day, not a soul was about, and the village huddled under the wet like a poor man beneath his cloak.

  Despite the fact that the rain had discouraged traffic, the road was little better beyond the village, where it was a sluggish stream with pools in the ruts that reflected a sky so low that Stephen felt he had only to reach up to touch the clouds. Stephen led his Spanish mare onto the verge where the footing was surer on the grass and remounted. The mare pranced, eager for the exercise after having been cooped up in a barn for half a week.

  He glanced back at Gilbert, who smiled and waved. He was a short round man with a round face and a short round nose and very little in the way of hair. But he had a quick smile filled with good humor and he didn’t seem to care that he was probably one of the worse riders in all of England. He bumped along on his mule, occasionally leaning one way or another as if in danger of falling off, yet he seemed to be enjoying himself. How he could hum a happy little tune on his way to see a dead man in this miserable weather mystified Stephen, whose mood was dark and angry. But it was either this or starve. You had to do what you had to do, as grandfather, who had seen nasty times in his day, had once told him.

  They had not gone far when his foot began to itch. It was odd how a foot that wasn’t there could itch or feel pain, but it often did. His left foot was missing from the top of the arch forward, yet there were maddening times when the missing parts lanced with pain or itched wildly between ghost toes. He tried imagining that he was scratching the foot. Sometimes that did some good, but not today.

  A hundred yards south of Ludford, they came upon three women and a man huddled by the roadside. They were peasants by their dress, thick homespun wool dresses and coats, their reds and blues and greens faded with long wear. One of the women was sitting at the edge of a deep ditch. She looked as though she had been crying. A dead man floated in the ditch beneath her.

  “Ah,” Gilbert said as they drew up and halted. “We’ve arrived.” He began muttering a prayer in Latin under his breath.

  “It seems we have,” Stephen said softly. He had seen death before in Spain, mainly in battle. You got used to that kind of death somehow. Dead people became objects, like stones or lengths of timber, and you didn’t think about them unless they had been your friends. But he was finding that the solitary useless death that was becoming his unfortunate business left him solemn and sad.

  He dismounted, drawing startled glances because he did so to the right rather than the left because of his lost foot.

  “No jury yet,” Stephen said.

  Gilbert slipped his hands into his sleeves. He had forgotten his gloves. “Nobody’ll be eager to travel in this wet.”

  Stephen forgot that he hadn’t wanted to come out either. “I don’t want to travel in this wet, but that’s what we’re paid for.”
>
  Gilbert smiled. “So we are.”

  Stephen said to the villagers, “Who found him?”

  “Molly here did,” the man said. He was short and stocky and smelled like wet manure. He indicated the sitting woman. “He didn’t come home last night and she went out to look for him this morning. Found him here.”

  Stephen knelt by Molly. “Is this true?”

  Molly shrugged and nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen said.

  Molly snorted, as if she didn’t care about his condolences.

  “What was his name?” Stephen asked.

  Molly regarded him a moment with unfriendly eyes. What does she have to be angry at me about? Stephen wondered.

  She said, “Patrick.”

  “God bless his soul, then,” Stephen said standing up.

  “What he had of one,” Molly said. “Can’t be sure about that.”

  “Easy there, now, Molly,” one of the women said and patted Molly on the shoulder. “It’s over. He’s gone to his reward.”

  “Hope it’s to the devil,” Molly said. “Hell’s where he belongs, the bastard.”

  “Hush, girl,” the woman said. “Don’t talk about the dead like that, ‘specially not in front of his honor.” The woman glanced nervously at Stephen.

  “The son-of-a-bitch’s good as killed himself — left me and the babes, and his cart’s still not paid for!” Molly said with sudden rage. “Left us to starve!”

  Stephen understood her anger then. It grew out of fear of the future, of the prospect of poverty and doom. The family’s main wage earner was gone and had left debt hanging over them. He wished there was something he could say to her but he couldn’t think of anything that would make a difference. Overcome with a sense of his own awkwardness, he brusquely turned to the dead man floating in the ditch.

  The body bobbed face down in the muddy water. He wore a tatty brown coat. There was a patch made of green material on one elbow and the fabric on the other was almost worn through. The coat was puffed up in places as if trapping pockets of air. Perhaps that was why he had not sunk out of sight, and in water that muddy it would have been days, maybe even weeks, before he floated to the surface to be found. One hand lay on the far bank as if in a dying effort to reach safety. Even from this distance Stephen could see the nails were dirty and needed cleaning. The man’s hair, also brown, floated around his head looking for all the world like a dirty rag in a bucket. A clay tankard bobbed in the water next to the man’s head, reminding Stephen absurdly of a fishing float.

  A spray of rain suddenly needled his face. He glanced up and down the road, then across the field to Ludford. There was no sign of the jury men. “Wish they’d hurry up,” he muttered. “I’d like to get this over with.”

  Gilbert nodded. “Miserable day for an inquest,” he said.

  Stephen grinned humorlessly. “Can’t write in this wet. Makes the ink run, doesn’t it.”

  Gilbert tapped his temple. “I’ll keep it all up here. Don’t you worry.”

  “Every word?”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’ll be sure to test you then.”

  Another spray of rain forced Stephen’s decision. He handed his cloak to Gilbert — no sense in getting it soaked — and slipped down the bank. The ditch was not so wide that he couldn’t have jumped across it, but since he had lost part of his foot, he didn’t trust that he was as nimble as he used to be.

  Gilbert gasped in surprise. “Stephen . . . your honor . . . you don’t . . . you could wait till the jury get here . . . they could . . .”

  “I’m tired of waiting. I want to get this done,” Stephen said through gritted teeth, throttling a gasp at the icy water. Water this cold should have brought any drunk rapidly to his senses. But obviously it had done nothing to awaken poor Patrick. To Stephen’s relief, the water proved only to be crotch deep at the middle, but that was bad enough. Stephen stayed clear of the body and paused at the opposite bank. Despite the rain overnight, the marks where Patrick had made his descent were still visible as gouges in the wall.

  Grasping handfuls of grass, Stephen pulled himself up on the other side. He knelt and scanned the ground as he had often done when tracking Muslim raiders in Spain. Even with the rain, there might still be a sign of his passage. Fortunately, the ground in the field was muddy and a single set of eroded footprints that even a blind man with a cane could have followed zig-zagged over the field toward Ludford.

  Stephen pointed to the village. “What was he doing over there?”

  Molly’s mouth turned down in disgust. “He fancied the tavern.”

  “Johanna’s brewhouse,” one of the women offered.

  Molly shot the woman a nasty look.

  “You live there?” Stephen asked.

  “No.”

  Stephen grew exasperated. Prying information from this woman was like snatching lands from an abbot. “Where do you live?”

  “Across the river. Off Frog Lane.”

  So, outside the Ludlow walls. It was a good place for a poor carter to live. Rents were cheaper than in the town. But if Patrick was heading home from the tavern last night when he fell in the ditch, he was going in the wrong direction, south and west rather than north. Drunkenness, though, might explain why he had lost his way. Stephen had a vision of Patrick stumbling along in the dark, thinking he was heading one way when he actually was going another, toward the ditch, unsuspecting, when abruptly in the dark Patrick put a foot out into space expecting it to meet solid ground . . . and died. Stephen shivered.

  Satisfied that there was no sign of anyone at the lip of the ditch who might have helped Patrick take a swim, he eased himself back down the bank. First he retrieved the floating tankard. He sniffed the contents. There was still ale in the bottom, just enough to keep the tankard upright as it floated but not enough to sink it. He handed the tankard up to Gilbert.

  Then Stephen turned his attention to Patrick himself. When he touched the corpse, he found it was as stiff as a plank of wood. Stephen turned Patrick to get a look at him and to move him toward the far bank. Patrick proved to be a big, beefy man, solid and muscular, undoubtedly from lifting barrels and sacks. His brown eyes were open and the lips were parted and slack, which gave him a rather stupid expression. There was no sign of horror or struggle as you might expect from drowning.

  Stephen motioned to Gilbert and the peasant man to help him lift the body up to the roadside. Gasping from the effort, Stephen squatted by the dead man, who now lay on his back, one hand projecting in the air to the right, the other reaching above his head.

  It was Gilbert who found the wound. The mark was just above the right ear. Patrick’s thick hair had concealed it, and ditch water had washed away the blood.

  “Foul play?” Gilbert asked professionally.

  Stephen looked at the older man sharply. “We’ll see.”

  He slipped back down the bank and crossed the ditch to the spot where Patrick had tumbled in. There was a stone protruding from the side of the bank to the right of where Patrick had fallen. It seemed like an ordinary rock, dark and slick with the rain. Stephen ran his fingers along the stone, which was cold, hard and unforgiving. His fingertips came away tinged with an orangish hue. But this was not the residue of a stone or old paint. Stephen clambered back out of the ditch and showed Gilbert his fingers.

  “Hmm,” Gilbert grunted. “Amazing there’s still any sign of it. Death by misadventure, then?”

  “I’d say so, although we’ll have to wait until the jury shows up to make a final decision.” Stephen turned to the women. “Who’s Johanna besides a brew mistress?”

  Molly remained sullenly silent. One of the women answered. “Let’s just say that Patrick fancied more than her beer.”

  Stephen and Gilbert exchanged glances as Gilbert helped him into his cloak. It was a story sad in its ordinariness. He could see the outlines of it clearly. Patrick had got drunk, dallied with Johanna, and then set off in the middle of the night for home and l
ost his way in the dark. They’d know for certain when the jury turned up and filled in the missing details. It was a relief to know that he probably didn’t have a homicide on his hands. Just a tragic accident.

  From the direction of Ludford, a party of horsemen appeared following a single-horse cart, and across the field a party of men on foot emerged from the trees surrounding the village.

  “Ah, at last,” murmured Gilbert. “I think our jury has arrived.”

  “About time,” Stephen said, pulling his cloak around him. His stockings and the hem of his shirt were sopping and clammy. He wished he could wring out the stockings, but that would have to wait. He would be glad when he was in dry clothes out of the wet. “I wonder if that’s Patrick’s cart.”

  “It would be ironic, wouldn’t it — him carted off dead in his own cart?” Gilbert said. “More to the point, I wonder what the value of that rock is. Not enough, surely, to make our trouble worth while.”

  For a moment, Gilbert’s rumination did not make an impression. Then Stephen caught his meaning with a start: the deodand, the fine levied against the instrument of a death. The amount went to the crown, but a small part of it funded the office of the coroner. “It’s not worth spit,” Stephen said.

  “I daresay, probably not even that.” Gilbert sighed.

  The riders drew up and the cart stopped. The riders dismounted.

  “Where’s Sir Geoff?” asked one of them, a tall man with reddish hair and beard.

  “Sir Geoffrey won’t be coming,” Stephen said. “I’m his new deputy. You’re the jury for this township and parish?”

  The tall man spat into a water-filled rut. “Yeah, we are. Wondered when we’d catch sight of you. We heard Old Bucky’s gout finally got the better of him.”

  “He has other business,” Stephen said, but the men just laughed.

  Gilbert had no need to take down their names, since he knew them all, but he made introductions for Stephen’s benefit, adding the names of the last group after they had leaped the ditch with some difficulty to join the meeting.