Bascot returned to the preceptory in a dispirited mood. The Haye bailiff had confirmed what Gilbert Roulan had told them; that, to the Ingham servants’ knowledge, none of the family had gone to Lincoln during the days in question, nor left the property at all except to travel to their holding at Marton on a few occasions. As Lady Nicolaa had told him to be thorough, the bailiff had then gone to Marton to ensure the proclaimed reason for their absences had been a true one.
The property at Marton was about eight miles southeast of Ingham and close to the Trent River. It was small, its income mainly derived from a herd of pigs that was raised there and fed mainly on mast that fell from a large stand of oaks growing on the perimeter of the property. Under the guise of making a routine inspection for Lady Nicolaa, the bailiff had spoken to the swineherd who lived there and looked after the pigs.
“In answer to my question about whether any of the Roulans had lately visited the property,” the bailiff reported, “the swineherd confirmed what the servants at Ingham had said, that some of them had been there recently. He said that none of them had used to come very much in the past, but lately Savaric had been there at least three times that he knew of, although Sir Gilbert and Sir Herve had only come once, accompanied by Lady Julia. It appears the reason they went is that they are intending to make Savaric the steward of the place and there is need to sanction repairs he has suggested be made to the small dilapidated manor house on the property. At any rate, lady, they did go to Marton just as the servants at Ingham told me and aside from the times they went there, have gone nowhere else.”
After Nicolaa thanked her bailiff and dismissed him, she, Camville and Bascot had discussed what, if any, direction the investigation into the harlots’ murder should take.
“Roget has made enquiries in the town to see if anyone has lately seen Julia Roulan or Savaric about the streets of Lincoln,” Camville declared. “A couple of merchants-a cutler who supplies the Roulan household with spoons and other household utensils, and a draper from whom they buy cloth for bed linen-recall Julia, in the company of Gilbert’s wife, Margaret, making purchases last autumn, but none since then. It is the same with Savaric. Before he left to join the Templars with Jacques, he would, on occasion, carry out errands for Gilbert’s father in Lincoln, but no one remembers seeing him since he returned from Outremer.
The sheriff shifted his restless frame in his chair as he went on. “As far as I can see, if neither the Grimsons nor the Roulans are involved in these crimes, there is nowhere to look for this murderer except in the Templar preceptory.”
He had looked directly at Bascot as he spoke and the Templar felt compelled to give a response. “Preceptor d’Arderon has investigated all of the men that are in the enclave, lord, and, as far as we can determine, none are guilty, either of giving cause for the murderer’s enmity, or of committing the crimes.”
Camville nodded his acceptance of the statement and added, “Then, de Marins, much as it grieves me to say so, I fear we must accept that we may not find this miscreant.”
When he returned to the preceptory, Bascot told d’Arderon what had passed and then resumed his regular duties, but his mind was not on his tasks as he went to check on his destrier and, afterwards, join the men at practise on the training ground. By the time Compline had passed, he was more than ready to retire but found, when he lay down on his pallet, that sleep took a long time in coming. When it finally did, it was filled with fragmented dreams of his childhood, and of the years he had spent with the monks in the monastery to which he had been given as an oblate-a gift to God-before his sire removed him to fill the place of an older brother of Bascot’s who had died.
He tossed and turned on his pallet, trying not to disturb the men who were sleeping alongside him on two long rows of pallets in the dormitory. Even though he was accustomed to the rush lights that were kept burning all night long in the chamber, their glimmer disturbed his peace and he flung his arm over his sighted eye to block the light. Eventually he fell into a doze but his rest was soon invaded by a vivid dream involving the elderly monk who had taught reading and writing to the novices in the monastery. He could see the monk’s face clearly. Above his former tutor’s head was a halo and around him, whirling so fast they were almost a blur, were spinning discs of light. The sensation made Bascot feel as though he were falling even though he was lying flat on his back and he woke with a start. As he opened his eye, the dream receded but, as it did so, the sound of the monk’s voice instructing him in a lesson echoed in his mind-“and you will conjugate the verb in Latin and French.”
He knew that the tutor’s words had not been spoken in his dream, but came from some deep well in his memory of the actual days he and the other novices had been sitting at their lessons. But the words had been extremely clear, just as though the monk was sitting at his bedside. The intense reality of the experience left him fully awake and he knew that it would be useless to again seek rest, so he quietly pulled on his boots and, leaving the dormitory, went outside into the open air.
There had only been a few brief showers over the preceding days and the hard-packed earth of the training ground was dry and dusty. Above him stars wheeled in the sky, pin-pricks of light that formed a bright background for a half-full moon. As he walked from the dormitory out into the open space in front of him, the guard on the gate did not hear his steps and he realised how easy it would have been for Elfreda and her killer to have stolen through the shadows around the perimeter of the walls and gone into the chapel. The duty of the sentry was to keep out intruders, and his attention would be focussed outward, beyond the walls, not towards the inhabitants of the preceptory.
He judged it was now just about an hour before dawn and the service of Matins. Feeling a need to find a quiet place to think, he walked across the training ground to the smithy. The door of the small building housing the forge was usually left open unless it was raining, and was now pinned back by a wooden wedge. Bascot went inside and sat down on a large block of wood. Beside him was a wheel that needed the iron rim repaired and he rested one elbow on its edge and let his gaze roam around the interior.
The forge was built on a stone standing, its fire banked down low so as to be ready for morning with bellows ready to hand. The smith’s tools were neatly arrayed with the smaller ones-tongs, hammers, rasps and files-hanging from large nails on the walls, while anvils ranging in size from small to large stood on the floor, the largest one next to a barrel of water that the smith used for cooling the red hot metal. Atop the anvil lay a pair of heavy gloves and the leather apron the smith wore while he was at work. From the fire in the forge came a comfortable warmth which removed the chill from the night air, and the tangy smell of metal filled his nostrils in a comforting fashion.
As Bascot sat on the block, he thought back over the dream that had been the cause of his wakefulness. Aware that it was common for a dreaming mind to throw up bizarre images of objects and happenings experienced while awake, he made an attempt to clarify the ones that had appeared in his dream in case they should have some relation to the mystery he was trying to solve. The whirling orbs reminded him of something, but of what he could not discern. And why had his old tutor had a halo above his head? A kindly man he had been, most certainly, but not a candidate for sainthood. And, if the instruction that had come into his mind as he had awoken did, in fact, bear some relation to recent events, what verb was he meant to conjugate? Although the dream had been a powerful one, nighttime illusions were often capricious. It could simply be that the image of his tutor had been caused by recent thoughts of Gianni and the lessons the boy was learning. He wished Gianni were with him now, the lad’s recent studies might give him some insight into the echo of scholastic instruction he remembered from his childhood.
The Templar returned his mind to yet another review of the scant evidence they had managed to obtain, and recalled Agnes’s description of the cloak clasp worn by the man she had seen knocking on Adele Delorme’s door. On it had been a picture of St. Christopher. Was this the saint to which his dream referred? But, if so, how was the saint linked to the circles of light whirling around the figure of the monk?
Suddenly, Bascot held his breath and retuned his gaze to the wheel, recalling how he had been attracted by the motion of the rolling wheels on the dray that he and Roget had passed on their journey to Ingham. The turning discs in his dream had been very like wheels, spinning in the brightness of the sun as the driver urged the horses to a faster pace on the stretch of road. The Latin word for wheel was rota; the French, rouet. But these were nouns, the directive had been to conjugate a verb. Mentally he ran through verbs describing the spinning motion of a wheel. In Latin-versare, volvo…, in French tourner, rouler… He stopped. If he conjugated rouler-to roll-he came to ils roulent-they roll, which was almost identical phonetically to the name of the family to which Julia and Savaric belonged-Roulan.
He held his breath as he let the essence of the dream carry him to further suppositions. Many people’s names indicated their appearance, but often it was a habit or possession, or their family’s role in society. His own name-de Marins-denoted, in French, a maritime connection because his family had always held a castle protecting the seashore. Robert Scallion’s name was derived from the onions in which his sire and grandsire, and Robert himself, had traded. Was it the same for the Roulans? Had the wanderlust that seemed an integral part of Jacques’ character been inherited from forbears whose inclination to rove had earned them their name? It could be so-rolling wheels meant travelling and that was certainly what Jacques had done. Herve had said his brother had “roamed far and wide to take his pleasure.” And the patron saint of travellers was St. Christopher, the very image Agnes had seen. It would be an obvious saint for a family with such a cognomen to adopt. Were these the connections that the dream had been attempting to convey?
If he accepted the validity of the thought, he must reconsider Julia and Savaric as suspects even though they had not been seen in Lincoln during the pertinent times. Sitting completely still and silent in the dark, that is what he did. Was it possible that one, or both of these two people, had embarked on a horrific plan of extracting revenge for the death of Jacques in the Holy Land? Mentally, he shook his head in negation. The idea was implausible. Jacques had not been killed by either a harlot or a Templar brother. He had not even died in battle, but simply from a wound inflicted by his horse, an injury that could happen to a man in any walk of life, and had no connection with either prostitutes or the Templar Order. Why would either of them, if they felt the need to expunge their grief, commit these murders as a means of doing it? But he could not dismiss the idea, it was the only lead he had. Doggedly he carried on, thinking carefully back over Dunny’s description of the dead knight.
He recalled the sailor describing Jacques’ apparel and the conversation with Robert Scallion that had evolved into an argument with such deadly consequences for the boat owner. He then reviewed the visit he and Roget had made to the Roulan manor house and what had been said by the members of Jacques’ family. One of the most memorable instances was how Julia had reacted when the drunken Herve had slighted his brother’s character. What had she said? “Have you no compassion for our brother? I wish it was you who suffered-” Gilbert had cut his sister off at that point, interrupting her flow of speech. In retrospect, Bascot thought she seemed to speak of Jacques as though he was still alive, but both Savaric and Gilbert had said he was dead. Had they been telling the truth? Had Jacques, as Joan Grimson believed, escaped retribution for the crime of killing Robert Scallion and returned to England? Was he even now hidden somewhere at Ingham, or in the deserted building the Haye bailiff had spoken of at Marton, shielded from the outside world by the rest of his family? If so, it was a plan doomed to failure. He could not stay hidden indefinitely. Sooner or later he would be seen, if only by a servant, and the news would spread. When that happened, and because of Joan Grimson’s accusation, he would eventually either be brought to answer for his crime or, at the very least, shunned by everyone who knew him.
But the Roulan grief had appeared too intense for it to be false. There had been real sorrow mixed with the anger in Julia’s voice as she had castigated Herve. It could not be doubted that, as his family asserted, Jacques was dead.
Bascot leaned back against the wall behind the wooden block on which he sat, trying to find a comfortable position that might help compose his leaping thoughts. As he did so, his hand fell on the blacksmith’s gloves and apron that lay on top of the anvil beside him. Almost simultaneously, he dislodged some wooden planks that had been laid to rest vertically between two nails hammered into the wall. They fell with a loud cracking noise onto the stone of the floor, reminding Bascot of a sound he had heard recently. The small incident caused his thoughts to coalesce and, with a simplicity that now seemed devastatingly obvious, the last piece of the puzzle surrounding the murders fell into place.
He stood up quickly, ignoring the sentry who had been alerted by the noise of the falling wood and was coming across the training ground to investigate. With haste, the Templar retraced his steps to the dormitory, intent on rousing d’Arderon.