XXX. Rufford Abbey
The band set off early the next morning. The two Waits remained behind in the King’s Houses. They must shortly return to Nottingham, but until then would ensure no further visitors intruded to hunt for the dights. To add to that confusion, Thomas carried the empty tool bag with him, fully on display across his horse’s rump. Lady Isabella and her son rode up front. Thomas and Little John rode behind them, followed by Will and Maurin.
The River Maun road to the King’s Great Way was strange in the morning fog, but not so strange as the Way itself. Seemingly overnight, breaking wheels had been erected on poles along the wider road. These emerged like giants out of the fog. Most displayed the broken bodies of outlaws fitted to the wheels. Between them, the Keepers and Little John were able to identify some of the dead.
“Being very methodical about depopulating the forest,” Thomas said after they’d encountered their fourth breaking wheel. “Do they truly believe all of the outlaws in Sherwood know who is in possession of their devices? Or do they just enjoy torture? This will only ensure that everyone flees.”
“But this suggests,” said Will from behind, “the one we killed last night shared none of his information with any others of his kind. I mean, if ‘Mary of Clipstone’ knew you have those spinners, why attack these innocents instead of the King’s Houses?”
Over his shoulder Adam called back, “To scare them?”
“They’re doing what they’re told to by their murderous queen,” Thomas said darkly.
John pointed out words cut in one of the poles. “What’s it say, then?”
Isabella read off, “It’s in Latin. ‘Return what you stole.’ You’re right, Will.”
Thomas said, “John being an excellent example, that will only threaten people who know how to read. I do not imagine there are many outlaws with that skill.”
“Those killing them make no such distinctions,” she replied. “Yvag?”
“Murderers and torturers who take reading for granted? Undoubtedly. Even Sheriff Passelewe would have known better.”
“Educated walkers, then,” said Will.
Maurin added, “Monks, priests, poets, and councilmen.”
Thomas laughed. “I’ve never trusted any of those.”
“You don’t feel terror in the face of these wheels?”
“Terror? No. Regret, certainly. Regret that these innocent people have been harmed because of”—he glanced at them all—“what some or all of us have done. That is what they want us to feel, what these wheels are for. Enough regret that we willingly give back—”
“Why don’t we give them back, then?” asked Adam. “These . . . these things.”
“The answer of the moment is, we do not have them to return.”
Silence followed, until Little John suddenly clapped his hands and laughed. “You hid them!”
“I did, yes, and the less specific your knowledge is, the better. Broken on one of these Catherine wheels, there is not one of us wouldn’t tell them all they want to know and then make up more answers.”
“You’re all horrid,” Adam proclaimed, “and your keeping them hidden is the cause of this. People dying needlessly.”
Thomas replied, “Not so, and I wish I could make it easy for you to understand, Adam. It’s been us dying needlessly at least since Warin’s death. If he died for nothing, if Osbert died for nothing, then we should by all means return to the elven their devices, and let them get on with coring out more Passelewes. Which is what they intend. But what does it matter, so long as we don’t have to witness it nor learn of the victims, hmm?” He rode up beside the young man, but spoke gently. “And what if your mother is an intended target? Or both of you for that matter. That might easily be the case. You are exactly the sort of well-placed influential patricians the Yvags prefer to occupy. And if not you, it’s sure you know one who would be. Will you trade their lives?”
With no counterargument, Adam muttered under his breath, kicked his horse, and galloped on ahead. Isabella did not look at Thomas, but rode after her son.
Thomas let his horse drop back. He kept his own counsel on the matter; he agreed with Adam it was unfair for innocents to die over this. That was how it had all begun for him—with innocent Onchu as their sacrifice, with drowned Baldie hollowed out and possessed, with Innes tricked and obscenely used. That wasn’t his, that was the Yvags’ cruelty, random and uncaring. And no matter his or the others’ submission on any front, the elves would go right on killing as suited them.
Rufford Abbey was less than a century old. It had displaced an entire town in order to be erected. A few thatchless stone houses remained as testament to the church’s dominance, ghost dwellings in the fog. Most of the village stones had been repurposed as part of the abbey itself.
White-robed monks met them near the north transept and took their horses away. Another one led them inside, and across the nave to the central cloister, where more Cistercians scurried about. The monks seemed, one and all, to be attending to injured local persons who were either sitting or lying upon cloister benches. Thomas counted eight of them, and all appeared to have been assaulted. Most were bloody in some part; one had a severely broken limb as if he’d almost been attached to one of those wheels before escaping or being let go. The cruelty of the Yvags was playing out again, and he hoped the example wasn’t lost on Adam. The campaign of terror deserved a response.
The abbot came up and greeted Isabella. His name was Godwin. He was a squat and barrel-chested man, and jovial. He recommended they go to the lay brothers’ frater for a meal while he and Isabella spoke in private. The two of them strode off before anyone could even think of something to say. Another monk offered to lead the way to the frater.
Meanwhile, Maurin had walked over to the people being treated. Thomas patted John on the shoulder to go on without him—“I’ll catch you up”—then turned and followed Maurin to the nearest wounded townsman, who looked as though he’d been bashed in the forehead.
“Who attacked you?” Maurin asked.
The man, in shock, only then fastened upon him, and then upon Thomas behind the lad. It was as if the man sought the familiar in their different faces.
“Them knights. Come outta the dark, the swamp where there ain’t no place, come outten it like off a battlefield.”
Thomas thought, You’ve been a knight yourself. He did not interrupt.
“All dressed for like the last crusade, like the Templars had sailed up our river. An’ all they wanted to know was who stole the dice? Not one us knew what they spoke of, didn’t while they cracked and hoisted ’em, still don’t now.”
“We do,” said Maurin.
“Well, then they shoulda talked ta you all and not ta us.”
“They want to,” Thomas said, but the man wasn’t listening, lost in reliving the event.
“They cracked Ealar’s knees, elbows, bent ’em all wrong ta fit ’im to the wheel.” The man’s eyes suddenly found his. “Their arms was bent wrong already, them knights. Them terrible, terrible knights.” The townsman lowered his head, shaking it.
Leaving Maurin and Will to continue speaking to the wounded, Thomas walked off. He could hardly remain unmoved by the poor man’s plight and that of others. He determined that before leaving here, he was going to pay a visit to the abbey’s crypt. Maybe he would get lucky.
The monks looked on while the visitors indulged in bread, eggs, and ale. By the end almost all of the locals had been sent home to recover. Only one was going to lose a limb. There were far worse situations every day, provided you didn’t count the dead men hung from wheels.
Isabella’s business with the abbot concluded, and she joined the rest of the Keepers in the frater. Thomas asked what the abbot had wanted.
The abbey, she said, had requested and received approval for its own private forester to tend to its holdings. As Warden she was to select one of her Keepers to take on that role. Thus she had to choose someone who would no longer dwell among the Keepers but live instead in the abbey surrounded by monks. She suspected her husband’s hand in this—stripping away a confrère reduced the number of Keepers she could rely upon. Sherwood Forest might be the King’s preserve, but she admitted to a very personal relationship with the land and a cold determination regarding poachers. She was more suspicious than ever that her husband was “like Passelewe.”
From her abrupt silence then, Thomas could tell that wasn’t all.
“Also, my husband requests that I return to Laxton Castle immediately rather than delaying until we’ve resolved our business in Retford.” The reason for this change of plans had not been provided to Abbot Godwin although it seemed clear he thought no woman should be entrusted with leading a group of foresters in the first place. She asked that Thomas say nothing to the others for the moment.
“Of course,” he promised. Instead he asked one of the serving monks where the entrance to the abbey’s crypt might lie.
“Dorter Undercroft, you mean?” the monk replied.
“I—I suppose I do. ‘Undercroft,’ most definitely.”
The monk led the way. Thomas caught John’s eye, gestured with his head for him to follow.
From the frater behind him, Isabella called out.
Thomas turned back.
“Don’t stray far, you two. We leave shortly for Retford,” she told him.
Emerging from his chambers, the abbot said, “Don’t you mean—”
Isabella cut him off. “No, I do not. My appointment is at the Moot Hall of Retford while the forty-day court is in session. We’ll go to Laxton when our business there is concluded, and not before.”
The abbot glared at her. “‘Wives should submit in everything to their husbands,’” he quoted.
“What a meaningless string of words coming from one who’s known only celibacy,” she told him. She matched his glower until he finally marched back into his chamber and slammed the door.
“In the end, not the friendliest sort,” Thomas observed.
Isabella said coldly, “We’re leaving for Retford.”
“Of course. And unfortunately that exchange poisons the request I was going to make that you take an extra day and join John and me. There’s someplace I need for him to show me, and we have Robert Hodde’s body to bury, which, whatever you thought of him, is overdue. As the Warden of the Keepers, it does concern you.”
“In your hut?”
“Presumably he’s still there. It will be brief. We would be in Retford tomorrow, but it concerns me to leave you alone here, when—”
“I think you forget who fired a crossbow last night that brought down the demon at King’s Houses,” she told him angrily. “I am more than capable of rescuing myself, Master Hoode. If you need to make this side trip, then do so and join us in Retford when you can. But I won’t wait for you. As I told the damned abbot, I will not be delayed.”
Again he said, “Of course.”
She turned to leave, but hesitated, and faced him again. “However, when I face D’Everingham,” she said, “I should very much like your company. He is pulling the threads of this, I’m certain, and you know more than the rest of us about these matters.”
He thought of their time together last night and this morning in the darkness of her chamber, her fierce passion and joy, matched now by her fierce anger. “We’ll be there,” he said.
He watched until she was lost from sight in the cloister.
Thomas and Little John followed the Cistercian, who showed them the steps down into the crypt. Thomas asked if the monk would by chance have a winding sheet they could have—he’d noticed some in the cloisters, and there was someone, he explained, who hadn’t survived the attacks in the forest. The monk nodded and hurried off.
Thomas drew his dagger and Little John gripped his staff as they started down the steps.
Was there a spell, a repulsion at the top of the steps? Thomas thought he sensed it even as Little John walked a complete circle down two steps and back up without seeming to be aware and then said, “I don’t know, Woodwose, should we e’en go down there?”
That answered the question. Thomas pushed through the spell, and suddenly it vanished. Would that alert the monk who had cast it? That might be the abbot. He had sensed nothing odd or otherworldly about the man. But then they had spent two minutes in each other’s company. No doubt any Yvag could maintain a silence longer than that.
Little John charged right past him, went straight down the steps, came to the first tomb and without hesitating lifted the lid with its effigy of a knight. Hurrying after, Thomas hissed, “No, we start at the far end! Oh . . . Never mind.” Because the nearest tomb was empty, containing no remains at all. But the space looked as if it was prepared to accommodate someone or had done until recently.
Thomas said, “I think someone has been installed here.”
“Passelewe?”
“Him, or possibly the one in your prelate. Would the bishop have stopped here if he’d come this far? It’s not out of his way, and you confronted him well north of here.”
Little John shrugged. “How’s it matter?”
“Someone among the monks here is not what he seems. Someone put that dissuasion spell in place.”
“What dissuasion spell?” asked John.
“You didn’t sense it, but it was there at the top of the steps, running you in circles.”
“Nah, I never. But here, would take two men ta carry body outta this hole.”
“True, but if it’s the bishop or the sheriff, then whoever it was awoke on their own and probably jumped straight back to Ailfion. Didn’t even disrupt the spell.”
“I say there were no spell.”
“I understand that. For right now, since we’re already here . . .” Thomas said, and circled the second tomb. He pushed at the lid. John caught a corner and lifted it. The moldering corpse within remained undisturbed, exactly what a normal death should look like. He thought of the tombs in Melrose. “They were only using the one, then, for someone special.” It was possible they’d taken to keeping all of their voja separate. He would be the cause of that. “They’ll be keen to replace both losses. With Passelewe’s death, they may be reconsidering just where to apply the dights, and if anything more urgently.” The bishop of Leicester and Simon de Montfort might have gained a reprieve. He still didn’t know who the third device was for.
“We shouldn’t give them demons the chance then, hey?”
He nodded. “We’ll do well to revisit this undercroft at some unannounced point.” They reset the tombs and quickly left. If any monk was watching them emerge, he hid himself well. The young monk who’d led them there reappeared with a bundle of plain linen for them. Thomas thanked him for his hospitality, and he and John walked through the cloisters, across the nave and out. They had a long ride ahead of them. He only wished that Isabella Birkin was riding with them.