Death of a Radical (13 page)

“He smelt like what?” he queried.

“Me gran's box,” she repeated clearly. Rolling her eyes at his backwardness, Hester tugged his hand and pulled him back up the stairs. She marched into a bedroom. Looking about he realized belatedly it was her parents'.

“I should not be in here,” he protested, but Hester was standing by a table.

“Me gran's box,” she repeated, pointing to a polished oysterwood box standing on it. She opened the lid. He crossed over to her. The box was lined with sandalwood.

“Oh!” he said, light dawning at last. “He smelt like your gran's box.”

It had been raining upstream. The river was opaque and implacable, pushing rusty foam frills around the rocks
in its path. He followed the bank as the winter daylight faded until he could sense more than see the curves of the open land around him. Walcheren picked his way down the pale path. A bridge came into view and above it a neat stone folly. A rosy warmth glowed through the shutters fastened against the night.

His knock was greeted by a bark. He lifted the latch and entered to be met by a yellow dog with a pointy muzzle and large, upstanding ears. The hound reared up on its back legs. Catching the forepaws with one hand, Jarrett rubbed its head. He nodded to the stocky figure who sat on a stool by the fire mending a rabbit net.

“A damp night.”

“That it is,” Ezekial Duffin responded peacefully.

Seven months previously, when fate had first brought Jarrett to these parts, he had taken refuge in this folly. Then it had been spartan and neat. Now the pungent warmth of the room wrapped itself around him. Racks of drying rabbit skins leaned against the walls. A rope was stretched across one corner. On it hung a water-marked coat and a dingy shawl half obscuring a couple of cages. Jarrett caught the lithe line of a ferret behind the mesh.

“Drink?” Duffin jerked his head in the direction of a small tapped barrel.

“You?” Jarrett asked, helping himself to what proved to be small ale. Duffin produced a mug from the floor beside him.

“I'm set,” he said. Jarrett sat down on a pile of sacks and made himself comfortable.

“So what's the crack at the Bucket and Broom?” asked his host.

Jarrett had grown used to it, but it was quite surprising the things that the countryman knew. Had Duffin been with him when he was scouting in Spain, the allies might have been in France by now. He had rarely met a man with a better nose for intelligence on his own ground. Duffin chuckled.

“Wench that does for old George, the tollgate, she was full of as how one of Dan Teward's special guests had passed in the night.”

“A Mr. Pritchard. So, it's up and down the Dale already.” Jarrett took a draft of ale. It was refreshing. A “special” guest, he noted. Duffin stretched out the section of net he was mending and checked his handiwork.

“Oh aye! And how as the duke's man was there on't spot keeping bonny Meg Teward company while her man were off fetching magistrate.”

“What!” exclaimed Jarrett.

“There, there,” Duffin soothed facetiously. “Many a man would be flattered. You've got a reputation—ladies consider you an 'andsome man.”

“Damn and blast it!”

“Don't tell me you've never been talked about before.”

“Maybe,” Jarrett admitted with a wry twist of the lips, “but in the past I've rarely lingered long enough to hear it.”

The poacher's eyes were acute under the bushy bar of his eyebrows as they scanned his visitor.

“What's got you started?”

“This Mr. Pritchard was an unusually considerate man. He laid himself out decently before he died.” Jarrett swilled the liquid gently around in his mug. “Then there's an open window in the dead of winter with marks on the ground beneath it and a convenient sleeping draft.”

“And what does the magistrate say?”

“Natural causes. Dan Teward fetched Ison and he brought his pet physician, Parry, along to agree with him …” His mind touched irritably on his brief encounter with the colonel. The man was a pompous ass!

“And you think someone climbed in through the window in the night and did for this Pritchard? But who let him in? Someone had to open the window.”

“I have my suspicions as to that—but …” Jarrett shook his head as if seeing off a wasp. “Motive. That's the rub.”

“And why lay the bugger out? It only attracts attention.”

“Does it? Only mine, it would seem. No evidence of anything save God's will, according to the magistrate. The colonel assures me he has many in his wide acquaintance who sleep straight as a board on their backs.” Jarrett gave way to his impatience. “Only an idiot would sleep that way and he'd choke!” he exclaimed.

“Mayhap that's the answer.” Duffin paused as he tightened the last knot on his handiwork, snapping the line tight between meaty balled fists. “He supped his draft,
laid down straight and, a bit fuddled like, he choked.”

“I wish I could believe it,” said Jarrett in a discontented tone.

Duffin got up and went to his cages. He fetched out a pale cinnamon-colored ferret and brought it back to sit by the fire. The creature made a clucking sound as he stroked it.

“Good rabbits this season. We're planning a visit up over Grateley Manor way. You like it up there, don't you?” he addressed his pet. “She's a quick one Queenie is.” Queenie bumped him under the chin with her sleek head. “More loving than a woman is a good ferret,” Duffin commented fondly. Jarrett shot him a quizzical look. “And that thought's beneath you,” the poacher added deadpan. “Thought you had breeding.”

“His eyes had those brownish specks I've seen before in a strangled man,” Jarrett remarked.

“But this one wasn't strangled?”

“Smothered, by my guess. I fancy Pritchard was drugged. I caught a whiff of laudanum on a pillow.” But the smell had faded along with the drying stains. The echo of the colonel's lofty dismissal mocked him. “And where is the
evidence,
sir, for this extravagant speculation?” Ison, of course, had taken straight away to Mr. George with his civil service deference, his official seals and delicate speculations about Mr. Pritchard's poorly heart. Duffin was pulling a face.

“There'd still be some thrashing about.”

“So the murderer tidied him up—laying him out as
he was found. I'd say it happened around midnight or before,” Jarrett reasoned out loud. “It takes a man half a day to stiffen completely and rigor was only half set when I saw him.”

“And no one heard nothing?” Duffin produced a teasel and began to groom his pet, his big hands light and gentle. “She likes this; it settles her—don't it?” he cooed to the ferret. Queenie looked up at him and made her clucking noise, as if in response. “Who had reason to want this passing stranger dead?” the poacher asked.

“His traveling companion?” Jarrett thought of the mark outside the second unshuttered window and Mr. George's complacent, self-indulgent face. “He wasn't just any stranger, Duffin. As you said yourself, a special guest. He and his partner came to buy cloth for the army. There's plenty of money to be made on those contracts and where there's money …”

Queenie turned on the poacher's lap, watching the visitor with glassy black eyes.

“Anyone been seen about?” asked her master. “You can't be thinking on Dan and Meg Teward? They're good people.”

“No. There were two men came to see Pritchard and his colleague the night they arrived.” Jarrett pulled a discontented face. “But the bar was busy and no one recalls anything much about them. It's winter,” he admitted. “It's not unusual to be muffled up. Mrs. Teward says she was called away. She took the slighter one for a local man, though she did not know him; the other she wasn't so
sure about—she can't recall why. The only impression was of a sweet-smelling man with a dark beard.”

Duffin cocked his head at that, but he let it pass, his attention focused on the animal between his hands. Jarrett stood up restlessly and walked over to stare into the fire.

“What you got there?” asked the poacher.

Jarrett looked down and opened his fist. Two buttons lay on his palm, one white metal stamped with numerals—68—the other silver gilt and embossed with the insignia of the 16th. He hadn't noticed he had taken them out.

“These? I usually carry them with me in some pocket.”

Two regiments. Two fragments of his life. He circled the buttons in his palm.

“Lucky charms?”

Jarrett closed his fist and shook the pieces of metal gently. The movement shifted the hair bracelet he always wore on that wrist. He could feel it slipping against his skin. “Remembrances,” he said. He put the buttons back in his pocket.

“Word must have got out if there are military buyers in the neighborhood,” he resumed. “Have you heard anything?”

“There's been some gathering in corners—and weavers too, now you mention it. With the fairs coming up, I didn't think twice on it.”

“And the fairs open tomorrow. There's something coming, Duffin, I feel it. The colonel's all fired up about agitators and now this.”

“What's up with the colonel?”

“He's enacting the Watch and Ward.” Jarrett cast a side glance at the man sitting beside him. “It's a newish act. It gives our magistrate the means to call in a troop of regulars. Their lieutenant arrived yesterday—but you'll know that already.” He watched the poacher calmly grooming his pet. “Is there to be trouble at the fairs, Duffin?”

“There's always trouble at t'fairs. It's tradition. The hee-landers—wild men that works the lead up over the tops—they come down for a set to with the townsfolk every fair. It's tradition. But anything more—nay.” Duffin's negative was derisive.

“Colonel Ison claims there are foreign agitators at work. He says he's been given information.”

The poacher shot him a sudden look. His eyes dropped.

“That's fanciful. Dale folk don't like foreigners.” Duffin put the ferret down. “You know that.”

Indeed he did. When he had first arrived in the neighborhood he had found himself accused of murder principally because he was a foreigner with no one to vouch for him. Duffin had helped him out of that tangle; the countryman had become a firm friend in the process.

Moving like a piece of quicksilver Queenie jumped up onto the pile of sacks and curled herself into a smooth ball in the imprint left by Jarrett's recent presence.

“Settled folk don't like incomers,” Duffin elaborated. “When you're settled you know your neighbors from
cradle to grave—or you're kin with someone that does. If nobody knows a man, how can you weigh what he is?”

“Like me, you mean?”

“You?” There was a glimmer of mischief somewhere in the countryman's unsmiling face. “Well now, I'm not so settled I can't take a risk. What's the hour?” he asked. Jarrett checked his pocket watch.

“Just past eight. Why?”

“Just past eight on a Wednesday.” The poacher got to his feet. “There's a song club meet up at the Red Angel Wednesday nights; there's weavers among 'em. Not that you're to go suspecting them,” he added severely, scooping up his ferret and returning Queenie to her cage. “I fancy a drink in company.”

Collecting a disreputable-looking garment that proved to be a bottle-green coat from a pile on the floor, Duffin pulled it on. His yellow dog rose up and moved to the door.

“Comin'?” the poacher asked without looking back. “It's near an hour's walk.”

“Quicker if you ride up behind me,” responded Jarrett, following him out.

“That'll have folk talking,” the poacher's lugubrious voice rose out of the shadows beyond the door. “Ezekial Duffin riding up behind the duke's man.”

The track climbed up into the wind. The sky had cleared and the waxing moon threw its light on the moving grasses that rustled portentously in the expanse around
them as if pregnant with some secret. Duffin's bulk was warm and solid at his back. Walcheren took the extra weight stoically.

“Fine strong beasts these chapman horses,” the poacher remarked.

“Chapman horses!” Jarrett protested, stung. “I'll have you know that Walcheren's veins flow with the blood of the Byerley Turk—a true Arab!”

“Told you that, did he, the one that sold him you?”

Up ahead the black density of walls and roofs rose stark and misplaced against the moorscape. Once there had been a medieval manor on this wild moor. Four centuries past, houses had grown up around it to form a small village of dressed stone. But times had changed. The lords of the manor had died out; people drifted away until only a couple of families remained eking a living from sheep and poaching on the richer lands in the valley below. The buildings, weathered and battered by the elements, still retained ghosts of their former decencies in odd wind-bitten fragments of carved stone. At night, with the wind pulling at shutters and loose timbers, it was an eerie place. Approaching from the eastern side, it was hard to tell which buildings were abandoned and which were not. Indeed, with the wind whistling between the walls, a fanciful man might wonder if the remaining inhabitants were still of this world.

“Up there.” Duffin's arm advanced into his vision, pointing to the right.

Jarrett saw a lantern hung above a door. It illuminated
an old swinging sign painted with a figure obscured in layers of red varnish. The Red Angel.

The door opened and two men stepped out. They lingered, talking. Through the lit space behind them a melodic male voice slipped into the night, carrying an air that caught the heart.

I've seen snow float down Bradford Beck
As black as ebony.
From Hunslet, Holbeck, Windsey Stack, good Lord deliver me.

They entered by a side door. Turning the elbow of a short passage they encountered a hard-hewn woman in a man's shirt over a dark red cloth skirt, with a collection of tankards gripped in each fist.