That same afternoon, Mauger Rivelar went down into the streets of the town. He knew Roget had been questioning the citizens about their knowledge of Fland Cooper’s friends and wanted to listen to any gossip about the killing. Although Cooper had sworn that he had not mentioned his knowledge of Mauger’s presence in Lincoln to anyone, he wanted to make sure that the ale keeper’s son had been telling the truth. He had, after all, been begging for his life when he said it.
Mauger smiled inwardly at remembrance of his last meeting with Cooper. As he had feared at the time, Fland had recognised him on the day that Mauger had been in the lane behind Reinbald’s house, just after he had placed the poison in the merchant’s kitchen, but it had taken Cooper a couple of days to remember where he had seen him, and then a couple more before he realised that Mauger was using a false name and why. It had been then that the little whoreson had come to him with a demand that he be paid to keep silent and had foolishly expected Mauger would part with the money quietly and without a struggle. Cooper had been stupid and greedy as a child, and had not changed with the passage of years. It had not been until he was lying on the ground with his stomach ripped open that he had finally realised the pass to which his avarice had brought him. Cooper had deserved every second of the agony he had endured, and Mauger had enjoyed inflicting it. Lovingly, he patted the knife that he wore in a sheath underneath his tunic. He could hardly contain his longing for the day when he would do the same to all of those who had conspired in his brother’s death, but he knew he must be patient. Before he killed them, they must experience the same depth of anguish they had inflicted on him. Only then would justice be served.
Grief for Drue swelled anew in Mauger’s breast as he recalled the night he had left all those years ago. His brother had been just a boy then, only twelve years old, and Mauger could still remember the excited look on Drue’s face as he had watched his older brother pack a sack with food as he prepared to leave their home. When Drue had asked him where he intended to go, Mauger had answered carelessly that he did not know, but anywhere was preferable to being under the subjection of their father any longer. In all the years he had been gone, he had not once envisaged that he would never see either Drue or his father again.
If only he had returned a scant few weeks earlier he might have been able to save his little brother from the sheriff’s noose, but he had been too entranced with the charms of a compliant widow in Grimsby to come as quickly as he had intended. He had not heard of his brother’s and father’s fate until he was finally on his way back to Lincoln in the company of a party of travellers going in the same direction. Shortly after he joined the group, one of them, a cordwainer returning to Lincoln after collecting a shipment of Spanish leather at Grimsby, and not aware of Mauger’s identity, had told his companions about a band of brigands that had recently been hanged by the sheriff in his hometown, and how the father of one of them, a bailiff by the name of John Rivelar, had died shortly afterwards from the shock of his son’s death. Mauger had been horror-struck. He had kept a grim silence as the cordwainer embellished his tale with details of his brother’s hanging, wishing he could tear the man’s tongue out so that he could speak no more. When the travellers reached Louth he made an excuse to part from the others and took a private room in an alehouse. Only when he was finally alone did he allow his grief to engulf him.
At first he had tried to deny the truth of what he had heard, but he soon realised there could be no mistake. His father had been the last living member of his family, and there had never been any other people bearing the name of Rivelar in the Lincoln area. Besides, the cordwainer had said that the father of the boy who had been hanged was a Templar bailiff. He must have been speaking of Mauger’s father; it could be no other man. But how had it come about that Drue had turned to brigandage? John Rivelar had been a difficult man to live with, but he had never stinted on the comforts of a pint of ale or suitable clothing for either himself or his sons. What had made Drue join a band of outlaws?
It was then that he had decided to go to Lincoln and find out the truth of the matter, and realising that it would be easier to get the townspeople to speak more freely if they were not aware of his connection to John Rivelar and his son, he had taken a false name and identity. He had assumed, and rightly, that he would not be expected to be in the town, or recognised, after so many years away. It had not taken long for him to learn how his father had vehemently denied Drue’s guilt and had been thrown out of the sheriff’s keep for his protestations. Mauger knew that although his father had been a hard man, he had also been an honest one. If his father had insisted Drue was innocent, it must have been the truth. All of them-Severtsson, Gerard Camville and the prior of All Saints-had conspired to bring his brother and father to unjust and untimely deaths. They must all be made to pay for their actions.
It had taken him a long time to formulate a plan that would enable him to extract a suitable vengeance from those who had betrayed his family, but when he had done so, he found that the taste of retribution was sweeter than untainted honey.