Hugh Corbett 15 - The Waxman Murders (2 page)

Blackstock clung to the ropes of the rigging, letting his body sway with the surge of the sea tossing his ship backwards and forwards. He was used to that and betrayed no fear. Some people claimed he had a hangman’s face, dark and sombre, furrowed, with dead eyes and a sharp nose over bloodless lips. Others said the face reminded them of a monk, an ascetic, a man dedicated to the service of God and the love of his brethren. In truth Blackstock cared for no one apart from his beloved half-brother.

As he stood at the rigging, Blackstock reflected like some monk in his stall on how it all had begun. His father had married twice. Hubert’s mother, a Fitzurse, had died in childbirth so Blackstock’s father had married a local girl, a wench from one of the outlying farms. Hubert was six years Adam’s senior, yet they’d spent their childhood, as their father often remarked, as if they were twins, peas from the same pod. From an early age Hubert had proved himself able with the horn book, a clever scholar, so he was sent to St Augustine’s Abbey to be taught by the Black Monks. When he returned home, however, he and Adam had enjoyed a veritable paradise of a childhood. Happy days fishing and boating along the River Stour, helping their father on the farm, journeys into Canterbury visiting Becket’s great shrine and attending the busy city fairs and markets. In 1272 their paradise had descended into nightmare. In that year old King Henry III had died, mumbling and feverish, at Westminster. His eldest son and heir, Edward, was on crusade in Outremer. In the absence of a strong ruler, the king’s peace had been violated in many cities and shires by marauding gangs of rifflers and robbers who attacked isolated manor houses to ransack and loot. The Blackstocks’ manor near Maison Dieu was one of these.

On that fateful evening Blackstock’s father had come running up the stairs, forcing Adam out of an upper casement, virtually throwing him out on to the hay-filled cart below, shouting at him to flee and shelter in the nearby woods. A time of nightmare! Blackstock had hidden beneath a bush, watching his father being cut down, his mother and her maid raped before they too were killed, throats slit, bellies opened. Of John Brocare, his father’s kinsman, there was no sign. At the time Adam believed Brocare had also been murdered, his corpse consumed by the conflagration. The following morning, the sheriff’s men arrived to view the devastation and found Adam. Hubert had been in Canterbury at the time, sleeping with the other boys in the scholars’ dormitory at St Augustine’s. The brothers were taken to the Guildhall, where some grey-bearded, sombre-eyed man had told them the full extent of the tragedy. They’d sat in that dusty room and realised how their lives were to be drastically changed. ‘Sombre-eyes’, perched behind the table, stared at them sadly as he described how their home had been destroyed, their father and mother murdered, the corpses of other victims burnt beyond recognition. He explained how their parents would be buried in God’s acre at St Mildred’s, beneath the old yew tree where they’d first met at the giving of church-ales. He tried to soften the blow, but Blackstock, sitting beside Hubert and holding his hand, just stared at the mullioned window behind the old man’s head, watching the sun-motes dancing in the light piercing the thick glass. Afterwards, it was like a dream. The merchant had taken both boys downstairs, introducing them to other men who explained how their father had been not only a successful yeoman farmer but a member of the powerful Guild of Furriers and Skinners in the city, which meant that they had a solemn duty of care towards both Hubert and his younger brother. Hubert seemed to understand and later explained it all to Adam, adding in halting sentences what was to happen in the future.

The next morning they’d attended their parents’ requiem mass in St Mildred’s and watched both coffins, specially purchased by the Guild, being taken out to God’s acre to be buried. Wooden crosses were immediately thrust into the freshly dug mounds of earth. The Guildsmen solemnly promised that, within a year and a day, these would be replaced by marble crosses cut by the finest stonemasons. Adam didn’t care. All he could remember were his mother’s screams, the flames shooting up through the roof of the house and his father lying on the cobbles, legs kicking, clutching his stomach. He tried to explain all this to Hubert but his brother didn’t seem to understand; he would just stare, shake his head and press his fingers against Adam’s lips as a sign to keep silent.

After that, they were like ships becalmed after a fierce storm. Hubert continued with his studies and proved himself to be an adept scholar in theology, philosophy, grammar and syntax, a young man with what one magister called ‘the gift of tongues’, not only the classics, Latin and Greek, but Norman French and German. Adam, in the mean time, had been apprenticed to the trade of a skinner and leatherer. He proved himself skilful but soon won a reputation for being distant and aloof, keeping himself to himself. The only person with whom he would relax was his brother on his infrequent visits back to the city from the halls of Cambridge. Hubert eventually entered the Benedictine order, while Adam became a tradesman in his own right, a citizen inheriting what was left of his father’s money and estate. Never once did he ever go back to the family manor farm, and through the Guild he salted money away with goldsmiths in the city.

Adam always felt as if he was separate from the rest of mankind, even here on the ship; it was as if a great gulf yawned between himself and God’s other creatures. Now and again he had visited his parents’ graves in St Mildred’s but never once went inside the church. He found the mass and other ceremonies boring, and where possible he excused himself from the mysteries of the Guild: their annual ceremonies, parades, festivities, the offering of votive candles, what Adam secretly called ‘their empty mummery’ at the various churches in Canterbury or its great cathedral. On occasion he visited Becket’s magnificent shrine, but even then he was more interested in how much it was worth. He’d stare greedily at the great jewels gleaming in the gold sheeting and wondered how easy it would be to steal them.

At other times Adam felt a seething anger which he couldn’t express until one night, just after Michaelmas, he’d been gambling in a tavern in the Mercery. A quarrel broke out and his opponent had called Adam ‘a whoreson’. Adam couldn’t really remember what happened next; all he could recall was his opponent’s slobbering mouth in his unshaven face. The man leaned across, repeating those foul curses, those awful words about his parents, then Adam’s knife was in the man’s throat and Adam was fleeing for his life. He eventually sheltered in London, but found it difficult as he wasn’t a member of a Guild to secure any meaningful employment, so he drifted down to Queenshithe and secured passage aboard a wool ship sailing for Dordrecht. There, amongst that foreign port’s inns and shabby alehouses, he discovered his true calling. He was a natural-born seaman, a sailor. He loved the sea and studied its ways, its cruelty, the fury of the winds, the management of a ship and the organisation of its crew. At first he applied his skill with a coven of river pirates operating off the mouth of the Scheldt, but due to his cunning, ferocity and bravery soon won the attention of others and became a privateer sponsored by the powerful merchants of Hainault to sail out with letters of marque to intercept, pillage and destroy enemy ships.

Some years ago Blackstock had bought
The Waxman
, selected his crew and declared war against all men, having no fear of God or his own kind. At the same time news came from England that Hubert had abruptly fled the Benedictine community at Westminster and urgently wished to meet his half-brother. One August night Blackstock took
The Waxman
up the River Orwell and met his brother at the deserted hermitage. They had embraced, clasped and kissed each other. Hubert had confessed that he had little time for God and certainly none for the Benedictine order. He declared that the death of his monastic calling had been due to a visit from Brocare, their father’s kinsman. Brocare had survived the massacre by fleeing, and out of shame and fear had kept himself hidden until remorse and a desire for revenge had driven him back into what he called the daylight of their lives. Brocare was full of guilt, desperate to do something to avenge the great wrongs perpetrated. No one had ever discovered who was responsible for the attack on the Blackstock manor and the bloody massacre that followed, but Brocare had his own suspicions. He had produced a list of possible suspects which he shared with Hubert, and the monk realised he had been living a fool’s life in a world where cruel rapacity was the order of the day. He and Adam agreed that the night their parents died, their own souls had also died. God had taken everything from them so they would give nothing to God. Hubert explained how he was now hired by mayors, sheriffs and bailiffs as a
venator hominum
, a hunter of men, tracking down outlaws, bringing them to justice and claiming the reward. He had even hunted members of the coven who had murdered their parents, though in the main, death had placed most of these beyond his reach. He confided to Adam that some had been Canterbury men, which only deepened the brothers’ hatred and contempt for that city.

In the end, Hubert and Adam spoke little about the past but planned for the future. They agreed to meet more often. Both men realised that what had happened so many years ago outside Canterbury had scarred their lives and only vengeance could purge their anger. Taken up by the surge of life, they could do nothing but go with it. Over the succeeding months they grew even closer. Hubert would often share information with his brother, who would reciprocate by handing over plunder for Hubert to sell to the denizens of the underworld in London, Bishop’s Lynn, Bristol and Dover, where goods could be moved and sold without any questions asked . . .

Blackstock hung grimly to the rigging ropes, straining against the sway of the ship. He glanced over his shoulder at Stonecrop, his lieutenant and manservant, a dour man who stood hunched, head and face almost hidden by his deep-cowled cloak.

‘You are sure of this, master?’

Blackstock turned. Stonecrop approached, pushing back his cowl to reveal black hair closely shorn over a lean, spiteful face. Blackstock had met him in Dordrecht some years ago and saved him in a tavern brawl. Stonecrop had proved to be his man, body and soul, in peace and war. He had eyes as dead as night, black and lifeless. Hubert didn’t like him, adding that he certainly didn’t trust him. Blackstock did. He recognised himself in Stonecrop, a man who cared for nothing and no one.

‘I’ve told you.’ Blackstock turned away. ‘I met Hubert in Wissant; he confirmed the treasure must exist.’ He pointed through the grey, misty drizzle towards the coastline. ‘We will soon make landfall at Orwell and thread our way up to the hermitage. Hubert will be there.’

‘Why didn’t he come with us?’

Blackstock laughed. ‘Hubert doesn’t like the sea. Anyway, he had other business to do, a matter between him and me, not you.’

Stonecrop pulled his cowl back over his head and turned away whilst his master stared up at the great mast, its canvas sail furled back. Once again Blackstock looked round, making sure all was well, lookouts posted in the prow and stern vigilant for rocks.

Now his thoughts turned to the Cloister Map; that was what its owner, the German Merchant Paulents, had called the ancient manuscript. The map had been sketched in the form of a cloister and marked an area of wasteland in Suffolk around a cluster of ancient barrows near the River Denham. According to the map, one of these barrows contained the vast treasure hoard of some barbarian king buried in a longship packed from prow to stern with gold, silver plate, precious jewels and costly armour, a king’s ransom waiting to be claimed.

‘A ship on land, buried near a river,’ Blackstock pondered the riddle posed by the map, ‘but out of the swing of the sea.’

‘What was that, master?’ Stonecrop called.

‘Nothing.’ Blackstock grinned to himself. There’d be time enough, he reflected, to inform Stonecrop and the rest of the crew.

He moved as the ship swayed, buffeted by the powerful north-easterly wind which raised curtains of misty salt-edged spray. Blackstock looked up once again at the raven’s nest on the mast, then around at the men slopping water from the bulwarks. He strained as he always did to hear the music of the ship. Never mind the storm; it was the ship that mattered! Blackstock had been well taught by the skilled privateers who prowled the Narrow Seas between Dover and Calais, as well as the trade routes to the wine city of Bordeaux and further south to the ports of Spain, or even – as he could do now, if he struck north-east – the frozen ports of the Baltic. Andit de Bodleck, master and captain of
The Soul in Limbo
, out of Brabant, had been his principal mentor. Yes, Andit had been the best teacher, despite being captured by two royal cogs of Edward I of England, his ship sunk and the life strangled out of him on a gallows overlooking Goodwin Sands on the eve of Reek Sunday. Blackstock had heard how Bodleck had refused the ministrations of the local parson; the privateer was a self-professed pagan who made offerings to an eerie war goddess called Nenetania.

‘Strange old life,’ Blackstock mused aloud.

‘What is, master?’

This time Blackstock thought it tactful to reply. ‘How few people, Stonecrop,’ he shouted back above the creak of the ship, ‘truly believe in priests; they’d rather be thrashed than make their confessions to them.’

Blackstock peered towards the prow. At least five of his crew were former clerics who’d committed some crime and were now dressed in serge leggings and leather jerkins, hair and beard matted, their tonsures long gone. He wondered how many of them, if captured, would plead benefit of clergy. Would Hubert do that? But of course, such dangerous living was going to end once they found that treasure ship and the precious hoard it contained. At first Hubert had been sceptical, but Blackstock had insisted that if a high-ranking Hanseatic merchant like Paulents and Sir Walter Castledene, merchant prince and knight, believed in it, there must be some truth to the story. Then, by mere chance, Hubert had been hunting a goldsmith out of Bishop’s Lynn, a collector of books and manuscripts. The man had killed a priest in a tavern brawl and been put to the horn as
ultegatum
– beyond the law. Hubert had eventually tracked the felon down and captured him in the small village of East Stoke on the River Trent near Newark in Nottinghamshire. He had bound the man’s hands, tied his legs beneath his horse and begun the journey back to Bishop’s Lynn. On the way the two men struck up a friendship. Hubert talked about a great treasure ship buried somewhere in Suffolk, and to his astonishment the goldsmith said he’d heard similar rumours and legends. He offered Hubert a manuscript on condition that he cut his bonds and let him go, and eventually Hubert agreed. They slipped by night into Bishop’s Lynn and the goldsmith returned stealthily to his house. They’d broken down the boards, forced the shutters, snapped the sheriff’s seals and opened a coffer of manuscripts. The goldsmith had collected other possessions then left. In a tavern the following morning, he’d handed a piece of parchment over to Hubert, who quickly realised that this extract from an English chronicle did indeed refer to a treasure hoard buried somewhere in Suffolk. He released the goldsmith, though much good it did the fellow, as he was later taken by the sheriff’s comitatus and hanged out of hand. Meanwhile Hubert used the manuscript to reflect on the Cloister Map and eventually concluded it would lead them exactly to where the treasure hoard was buried.