The Holy Innocents
- Автор: Sedley Kate
- Серия: Roger the Chapman #4
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Canelo
- ISBN: 9781800326026
- Жанр: Исторические детективы
Электронная книга - «The Holy Innocents». Краткое содержание книги:
A town paralysed with fear, two children gone missing. Roger’s most difficult case yet…
April, 1475. As Roger approaches the thriving village of Totnes, danger crackles in the air. A pack of cutthroats wanders the forest after a night of pillaging, and Roger barely manages to hide from them in the brush.
He soon learns that the marauding band has been terrorizing the countryside for weeks. And worse, they are believed to be responsible for the disappearance of two village children.
But how did the children get out of the house unnoticed in broad daylight? And would the outlaws really kill just for the sake of killing? Roger cannot rest – or rule out the possibility of more violence – until he solves the puzzle.
It was growing dark, and suddenly I shivered.
Chapter Twelve
I came slowly to my senses from the depths of a deep, untroubled sleep. Something had woken me, but as yet I was unsure what it was.
Before turning in, I had eaten well at the castle ale-house, free of Jacinta’s conversation, as she was visiting a neighbour who had just been delivered of twins. This much I prised out of her taciturn son, who answered all my questions with a series of grunts and a few grudging phrases. There were a half-dozen other men present: a couple of guards from the castle garrison, a stout and respectable burgher of the town and three travellers who had obtained lodgings at the Priory guest-house for the night. I was grateful for the landlady’s absence, and while I ate my boiled bacon and peas, washed down with a cup of Rhenish wine, I turned over in my mind the events of the day and tried to sort out my impressions.
But I was too tired to do them justice, and by the end of the meal, I was nodding over my empty platter, the wine spilling from the cup in my hand. I paid what I owed and left.
I decided that I could not endure another long and wakeful night, like the one before, so I dragged the flock mattress and two woollen blankets downstairs from the smaller bedchamber, and made myself comfortable. Too comfortable, perhaps, for, having stripped off my outer clothing and cleaned between my teeth with my strip of willow bark, I was sound asleep almost before I had rolled beneath the covers…
And now, for some reason I could not immediately fathom, I was wide awake, sitting bolt upright, my hand already reaching out towards my cudgel. I listened intently, but the house was silent except for the slight nocturnal groans of settling timber. Yet something had disturbed my rest, penetrating the veils of sleep which still clung about my eyelids. Or was it simply the echo of a dream?
After a few minutes, I lay down again, pulling the blankets around my ears, finally convinced that I was mistaken. A finger of moonlight silvered the floor as it probed its way between the shutters.
I was drifting on a cloud of pleasant dreams, a child again, back in my home in Wells. My mother had sent me out of doors to play, while she swept the cottage floor with a broom she had made from stems freshly gathered that morning.
These stems had been carefully stripped of their flowers, which made a good yellow dye, or, when mixed with woad, a green one. She was a thrifty housewife, my mother, but she had need to be since the death of my father. As she sent dust and old rushes flying through the open doorway, she began to sing, her voice very faint, high-pitched and far away…
I was wide awake again, the hair beginning to rise on the nape of my neck and droplets of icy sweat breaking out all over my body. I propped myself on one elbow, straining my ears, suddenly realizing with horror that this was no dream, but reality. The sound came from above me, a child’s voice, very thin and reed-like, some way off, but the words clearly audible in the stillness. I recognized them as part of a lullaby my mother used to sing on those many nights when, as a young child, sleep proved elusive.
I shivered, aware of a coldness in the room. I battled against the impulse to burrow down into the mattress and throw the blankets over my head, to block my ears with my fingers until that eerie keening had ceased. The wraiths of darkness seemed, to my fevered imagination, to be circling all around me: hobgoblins, spectres and phantoms of the night, unhappy spirits rising from yawning graves.
The voice came again, still clear and high, but this time with a slight quaver in it, like a child who is comforting itself and trying to be brave. A boy’s voice or a girl’s? It was hard to tell. I only knew that the sound was piteous, that it was asking for help, drawing me on like the sailors of old who heard the sirens’ call, only to be dashed to pieces against the rocks…
I forced myself to rise from my lowly bed and, with trembling fingers, sought for the tinder-box which I had left on the parlour table. Twice I tried to rub the flint against the steel, and twice failed, but the third time, I managed to steady my hands long enough to strike a spark. The tinder flared and I held it to my candle, the flame illuminating the room and bringing the shadows creeping stealthily out of their corners. I must have dragged on my hose and shirt and laced up my tunic, but I had only a hazy recollection afterwards of having done so. Then I picked up the candle-holder in one hand and my cudgel in the other, and began to mount the stairs.
The voice continued its singing, enticing me forwards. Just for a moment, as I reached the top of the flight, it wavered and broke, the final notes of the verse sounding louder and closer at hand. I spun round on my heel, raising my candle above my head, letting its pale radiance play across the walls and furniture of the upper parlour. The carved saints at the end of the roof-beams stared down with sightless eyes, the reds and blues, greens and yellows of their robes leaping out at me, jewel-bright, before subsiding back into shadow as the light slithered over them and passed on. The tapestry Judith, holding up the head of Holofernes, was transfixed in the moment of her triumph, the embroidered gouts of blood, dripping to the ground of the Assyrian’s tent, looking almost real in the glow from the candle…
There was no one there: my ears had tricked me. And now the singing started again, in the distance. I stepped through to the tiny, airless landing. The door of the children’s room was shut, but the one leading into the larger bedchamber stood ajar, and I could hear the words of the lullaby with even greater clarity.
I entered the room, once more raising my candle aloft, and looked around me. With a jolt of fear, which made me tremble from head to foot, I saw that the further door, leading to the courtyard gallery, was open, letting in a blast of cold night air. Almost certain that I had locked it the previous day, and not having been up here since, I knew an overpowering impulse to turn and run downstairs and out into the street, to seek sanctuary in the Priory from whatever restless spirit haunted this unhappy house. I was shivering violently, my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth, my hand shaking so much that drops of hot tallow spattered the red and white walls. And beneath the horror ran a more mundane fear that I might let the candle fall, setting light to the old, dry and brittle rushes which remained scattered across the floor.
The voice soared to a high, pure note, like the pealing of a silver bell, then ceased abruptly. In the moments of utter silence which followed, I waited, my heart thumping in my chest, for it to begin again. Nothing happened. The stillness became first oppressive, then menacing. Finally, summoning every ounce of courage, I crept towards the paler oblong set in the blackness of the wall and stared out into the moonlit night.
Shadows filled the inner courtyard. I could make out the shapes of well-head and pump outside the kitchen door, which, I noted with relief, appeared to be shut. The windows, too, were closed, displaying no chink of light. Immediately ahead of me stretched the covered gallery, and the door at the further end also presented a blank and shuttered face. My candle-flame paled into insignificance against the beams of the waxing moon, and I snuffed it out. I could find my way downstairs sure-footed now that my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. I waited, unmoving, my ears alert for any resumption of that ghostly singing, any last echo, however faint, of the childish treble whose sex I still could not determine. The beating of my heart had quietened a little, making it easier to breathe, and I drew in a mouthful of the early morning air. For surely, I decided, it must have long gone midnight. It was the dead time of darkness when nothing stirs. No noise, not even the cry of the Watch, disturbed the town which slumbered all about me.