On previous occasions, Will remembered, Robard’s manner had been one of extreme self-confidence, bordering on arrogance or bumptiousness. Those traits weren’t in evidence today, however. After letting the young man sit before him in silence for several minutes, Will finally set down the pen he had been using to make totally meaningless notes on the sheet of paper before him. The sheet was one of several he had borrowed from Arald’s secretary and it detailed the contents of the castle granary in the first quarter of the previous year. Robard wasn’t to know that, of course, and now Will covered the sheet with a leather folder to obscure its real contents. He looked up and threw back the hood of his cloak.
“You’re Robard,” he said. He kept his voice quiet, below the volume of normal conversation. He had found that this technique often caused discomfort among guilty people under questioning. They had to strain to hear what was being said and often became fearful that they might miss something important. Shouting and blustering right from the outset, on the other hand, often served to put a person on the defensive.
Robard leaned forward slightly. “Um . . . yes, sir. That’s right.”
“And you know why you’re here.” It was a statement, not a question. But now a trace of a frown formed on Robard’s smooth, closely shaved face. That and a flicker of uncertainty.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Don’t waste my time, Robard.” The voice was still low pitched and quiet. But the lack of volume somehow made it seem more ominous, more threatening. Robard shook his head and raised his hands in a defensive gesture.
“No. Really. I—”
Will suddenly slammed the flat of his hand onto the surface of the desk. Several of the items there jumped in the air, then rattled back into place again. The unexpected, sharp CRACK! made Robard flinch, and now Will’s voice was no longer quiet.
“DON’T . . . WASTE . . . MY . . . TIME!” he shouted.
Robard shook his head helplessly. “But I . . .”
Will stood, leaning forward over the desk and thrusting a finger at the hapless trainee. Framed against the full glare of light from the window, he was a black silhouette, faceless and expressionless. He shot out a series of rapid accusations.
“The battlements. The quintain. The curtain,” he said, stabbing his forefinger on the desk to emphasize each point. “You might have gotten away with them. But you made a big mistake with the trestle. You were seen.”
Robard began to protest, but Will allowed him no chance to answer and, more importantly, no time to think. “Two members of the kitchen staff saw you! They have identified you and they will swear it was you who weakened the trestle. Big mistake, Robard. They saw you! And they’ll testify against you! You’re looking at ten to fifteen years hard labor in the fields.”
“No! I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Are you stupid? Are you not listening to me? YOU WERE SEEN! We have witnesses who saw you cutting through the trestle! We won’t even need a trial. There are two of them. We have their sworn statements!” He rapped his knuckles on the leather folder that contained the documents he had been pretending to study.
“You’ll be sent to the fields. In chains! Baron Arald is furious. He’s ready to pass sentence right now! Your only hope is to confess and beg for mercy.”
Having taken in Robard’s slightly overweight physique and soft, unmarked hands, Will had shrewdly guessed that the prospect of unremitting hard physical labor would be the greatest threat he could make against him. He was right. He could see the panic in the other man’s eyes.
“But they couldn’t have . . .”
“They did! I told you! They saw you! You were careless! You should have checked there was nobody in the kitchen!”
“But I did! I—”
Driven by panic and Will’s relentless badgering, the words had left Robard’s mouth before he had time to consider them. Too late, he realized what he had said as Will sat back in his chair, his head tilted to one side as he studied the trainee steward.
“You did?” he repeated. “You did what?”
“I . . . I . . . mean . . . I didn’t. I didn’t do it.” Robard tried to recover, but he knew it was too late. He seemed to collapse, to shrink in the chair as he slumped down.
Will continued, in a calmer, more reasoning tone, “Just admit it, Robard. Things will go easier on you if you come clean. Why did you do it?”
“I tell you I didn’t . . . ,” Robard began, trying to recapture his former appearance of indignation. But it was a sorry attempt and Will dismissed it with a short movement of his hand.
“It’s a strange way to repay the people who cared about you,” he said quietly.
Robard raised his eyes to meet the Ranger’s steady gaze. “Cared about me? They humiliated me. The Baron demoted me so that I was being ordered about by people who’d been junior to me. And didn’t they enjoy that!” he added.
Watching him, Will suddenly had an insight into his bitterness. As assistant steward, Robard had undoubtedly thrown his weight around. His sense of self-importance would have seen to that. Then, in a flash, he was answerable to the very people he’d been bossing around. It couldn’t have been easy.
“Why couldn’t they have just fired me and been done with it?” he said now, and Will shook his head sadly.
“They didn’t want to fire you. They planned to punish you, then reinstate you when they thought you had learned a lesson.”
Robard’s jaw dropped. “Reinstate me?” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “You mean I could have . . . ?” He paused, not sure what to say next.
Will nodded. “If you’d just waited a month or two, you would have been back in your old position. And you might have learned a little about how to treat those under you.”
“I didn’t know. They should have told me!” There was a flash of the old indignation and anger once more—a sign of Robard’s arrogance. Everything that happened to Robard would always be somebody else’s fault, never his own, Will realized. He was that type of person.
“So you decided to teach Baron Arald a lesson,” Will said. “You arranged for a series of ‘accidents’ to occur around the castle, just to get revenge?”
Robard opened his mouth instantly for an immediate denial. Then he seemed to grasp the hopelessness of his situation. He closed his mouth, paused, then answered in a small voice, “Yes.”
His eyes dropped. He couldn’t meet Will’s steady, accusing gaze. There was a long silence in the room.
Will let it continue. Then, when he judged the silence had gone on long enough to be uncomfortable, he asked, “Was there anything else?”
“Anything else? How do you mean?”
“Besides the quintain and the curtain and the other things. Have you done anything else we ought to know about?”
Just for a second, Will saw a flash of something in the servant’s eyes. It looked suspiciously like guilt, but before he could be sure, Robard dropped his gaze.
“No,” he muttered. “There was nothing else.”
“You’re sure?” Will pressed.
But Robard continued to stare at his hands in his lap as he said in a barely audible voice, “I’m sure. There was nothing.”
“Hmm,” Will said. Very deliberately, he reopened the leather folder and scratched a note on the file inside. The noncommittal sound and the action were intended to convey his disbelief concerning Robard’s last answer. He closed the folder with a snap. “We’ll talk more about that tomorrow. Remember, things will go better for you if you tell me the entire truth. And I don’t believe we’ve reached that point yet.”
Let him sweat on it overnight, Will thought. Tomorrow, he’d question him further. He had no doubt there was something else and he was determined to discover it. Tomorrow’s session, he promised himself, would make today’s interview seem like a friendly chat. Finally, Robard was disconcerted by the Ranger’s steady, unblinking stare.
“What will happen to me?” he asked misera
bly.
For a second or two, Will didn’t answer. “That’s not for me to say,” he replied. “I’ll report to Desmond and the Baron and they’ll decide. Possibly a term in the dungeons. Perhaps hard labor in the fields for five to ten years. Who knows?” He was exaggerating, of course, but he wanted these dire possibilities to weigh on Robard’s mind overnight.
“But at best,” he concluded, “I imagine you’ll get your wish.”
Robard’s eyes came up then. “My wish?” he said. “What wish is that?”
“You said they should have fired you. I’m guessing they will.”
2
SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. FEET POUNDING ON THE SOFT earth under the trees.
Tug’s muted nicker of warning sounded from the stable behind the cabin and Will was instantly awake. Someone was running through the trees, toward the cabin.
He rolled out of bed and slung the belted double scabbard over his left shoulder so that his two knives were easily to hand. The running feet were closer now. One person, he thought. A man, probably, judging by the weight of the footsteps. He glanced at the cloak hanging by the door and rejected the idea of donning it. Dressed in the loose trousers and overshirt he wore as sleeping clothes, he padded barefoot to the door of the cabin. Ebony was already there. She’d risen from her blanket by the fireplace and was sniffing the gap under the door for some sense of the person outside. She looked up at him, her ears pricked and alert, heavy tail sweeping slowly. He put a finger to his lips, signaling her to remain silent.
Tug’s call had not carried any sense of danger. It was merely an alert that someone was coming. Will put his eye to the peephole in the door—so tiny that it was virtually invisible to anyone on the other side. He saw a servant in castle livery mounting the steps to the verandah. The man paused, holding his sides and breathing heavily for several seconds, then moved to the door and raised his clenched fist to knock on the hard wood.
He stepped back, startled, as Will opened the door.
“Oh! Ranger Will! You’re awake!” he said, nonplussed.
“Apparently,” Will replied. It was the sort of dry reply that Halt had made to him over the years when he stated the obvious. Unconsciously, he had grown to mimic his former teacher’s manner.“What can I do for you?” he asked.
The servant—Will could tell by his uniform that he was one of the dining hall servants, answerable to Desmond—pointed urgently through the trees in the direction of the castle. “You’re to come to the castle,” he said. He was still flustered. First he had run all the way from Castle Redmont to the cabin, and then had the door snatched open just as he was about to knock. And now he had forgotten the right form for passing on a message.
Will raised an eyebrow. “I am?”
The man shook his head and made an apologetic motion with his hand. “My apologies, Ranger Will. Master Desmond has asked if you will please, please come to the castle just as soon as you can.”
“And is there a reason for all this haste?” Will asked mildly.
The servant nodded several times before replying, “It’s Robard, sir, the former trainee. He’s dead!”
Robard’s body was lying faceup by the window in his small room. As he had fallen, it seemed that he had clutched desperately at the heavy drape masking the window. The thick material lay over his midriff and upper legs. Shattered wooden curtain rings littered the floor around him.
His eyes were wide-open, giving his face a look of startled surprise.
“Has the body been moved?” Will asked, on one knee beside the still form.
“This is how he was found,” Desmond told him. He was craning to look over Will’s shoulder. The thought struck him that they had adopted similar positions the day before when they’d examined the trestle.
Will leaned closer to Robard’s slightly open mouth and sniffed experimentally. He thought he could catch a faint trace of something—something sickly sweet. He glanced around the room. There was a water jug on the small bedside table, but no glass. He looked further. No sign of a glass or beaker anywhere. Unless . . .
Carefully, he lifted an edge of the tangled curtain and heard something rattle briefly on the floor. He raised the curtain farther and saw the beaker where it had fallen from Robard’s hand. The drape had hidden it. There was a small damp patch on the floor. Gingerly, Will retrieved the horn beaker and sniffed it. The same sickly sweet smell greeted his nostrils.
“Poison,” he said briefly, and there was a stir among the servants who had crowded into the doorway of the room. He glanced at Desmond. “Do you think you could clear these people away?” he asked.
Desmond complied, stepping toward them and making shooing gestures with both hands. “Come along now. There’s nothing for you here. You’ve all got work to do, so be about it!”
Reluctantly they dispersed, and Desmond closed the door behind them. He turned back to Will, who was weighing the beaker in his hand.
“Is it suicide, do you think?” he asked.
Will shrugged. “Could be. Was there any note? Suicides usually leave a note. Who found him, by the way?”
“One of the dishwashers. Robard was rostered on for early duty and hadn’t turned up. The chef sent a junior staff member to wake him. He found him like this and called me. He didn’t touch anything—I asked. And he said nothing about a note.”
Will looked around the room. There was no sign of a note. In one corner was a plain wooden desk with a straight-backed pine chair placed in front of it. Will checked the desk and found several sheets of paper scattered haphazardly on the top. One was a list of ingredients for a soup recipe. Another was a note of Robard’s on-duty hours for the next four days. There were several other sheets, all crumpled, and each one containing variations on the beginnings of a letter of apology to Baron Arald and Desmond. He was about to turn away when he caught sight of another scrap of paper—just the corner torn off a larger sheet, in one of the pigeonholes at the back of the desktop. He retrieved it and studied it. There were two words on it, apparently names: Serafino and Mordini. Toscan names, he thought. Very exotic. He handed the scrap of paper to Desmond. “These names mean anything to you?”
The head steward shook his head, his face blank. “Never heard of them. We use some Toscan providores from time to time, but I don’t recognize these names.”
Will took the paper back and slipped it into an inner jacket pocket. He looked around the room and sighed. “It’s sad, isn’t it? I’ll never understand suicide. I suppose you can let your people back in here to take him to the infirmary. There’s nothing more to see.”
“So you think it was suicide?” Desmond asked him.
Will pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I think it looks like suicide. But I don’t like the fact that there was no note. I think I’ll ask around the village and see if anyone’s heard of these two Toscans.” He tapped the breast of his jacket where the small piece of paper lay.
“I remember them,” Jenny said. “They had dinner here twice while they were in the village. They had a room at the inn but said they preferred my cooking.”
“Most people do,” Will said, and she smiled at the compliment.
“A girl does what she can.”
“Any idea what they were doing in the village?” Will asked.
Jenny shook her head. “I don’t ask people their business. Just what they want to eat. They might know at the inn, of course,” she added.
Will nodded. “That’s the next place I’ll ask.”
Making a small farewell gesture to his old friend, Will trudged up the main street of Wensley Village to the inn—one of the few two-story structures in the high street. It was late morning and the innkeeper, Joel, was resting in a back room before the lunchtime rush started. His assistant scurried off to fetch him at Will’s request. Will suppressed a smile. Even after all these years, he was still surprised at the way ordinary folk—people he had known all his life—leapt to do his bidding. He assumed it was a result of the aura of myster
y and power that surrounded the Ranger Corps. He was unaware that in his case, and with his reputation, that aura was intensified many times over.
Joel emerged from the back room. His hair was disheveled and he was buckling a wide belt around his equally wide waist. Will guessed he had been snoozing. He shrugged mentally. Why not, he thought. Innkeepers kept late hours, often tending to the needs of their clientele till the wee hours of the morning. It was good sense to catch up on sleep whenever a chance offered itself.
Joel snapped his fingers at the taproom servant and ordered fresh coffee. He knew how fond the young Ranger was of the beverage. They sat at one of the pine tables in the taproom. Its planks had been rough sawn originally, but years of service in the inn, with elbows, tankards, plates and sometimes heads rubbing on it, had rendered the wood smooth and slick.
“What can I do for you, Ranger Will?” he asked after they had exchanged pleasantries. Will glanced up as the servant placed a mug of coffee in front of him. He spooned honey into it and sipped. Then he leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Your coffee is still the best in the village, Joel,” he said. “I know Jenny would love to find out where you source your beans.”
Joel smiled. “I’m sure she would. But I keep my supplier secret. There aren’t too many ways I can best Jenny’s restaurant, but my coffee is one of them.”
Will knew that Joel traveled some distance from the village each month to meet the trader who supplied his coffee beans. The man’s identity, and the blend of beans, was a strictly guarded trade secret. Once, years earlier, Will had toyed with the idea of trailing him and revealing the coffee merchant’s identity to Jenny. But he decided that it wouldn’t be fair to use his skills against the innkeeper. If Jenny wanted to track him, well and good. He realized that Joel was still waiting for an answer to his question.