‘And you’ve heard no whisper of his whereabouts?’

  Moxon shook his head. ‘Only what I’ve told ye, and that came to me direct from Tallon on Quantock.’

  ‘What about the girl – the potter’s daughter?’

  ‘Vanished likewise it seems.’

  Francis picked up one of the mugs from the counter and turned it over abstractedly in his hand. ‘So what can you advise, Mr Moxon? Where should I go to seek him?’

  The shopkeeper plucked a straw from his apron and set it between his lips. Then he took the charcoal stick from behind his ear, cleared a space on the counter and drew a rough outline of the Blackdown coast. ‘My guess is that he’d try to slip across to Dartmoor hoping to ship out to Brittany from Tavistock or Buckfast. He’d surely have guessed that Sidbury would be sealed off. So he might well be making for one of the coast villages over here to the west – Broadbury, say, or Orway. There’s Kinsfolk in both. Most likely Broadbury because the coasters call there regularly.’

  ‘And how would I get there from here?’

  ‘Ye might find a boat to take you, but I doubt ye’d get passage till tomorrow. Your quickest way would be along the high road to Yarcombe, then on to Upottery and from there due west to Dunkeswell. From Dunkeswell it’s even-stevens to Broadbury or Orway.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Ye’ll not have much change out of thirty kilometers. But the Brass Bells , hard by the West Gate, will hire ye a nag to Upottery and like as not ye’ll get another from there on to Dunkeswell. With luck that’ll see ye in Broadbury afore curfew.’

  ‘Ah, the curfew,’ said Francis. ‘I had forgotten that.’

  ‘Your garb will surely shield ye from any trouble of that sort,’ said Moxon. ‘Now when you come to Broadbury seek out Saul Jenkins the shipwright. He’s Kin like I said and maybe he’ll have heard something.’

  ‘Saul Jenkins,’ Francis repeated. ‘Very well. You place me in your debt, Mr Moxon. I am truly grateful for your help.’

  As he turned to the door the shopkeeper laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Before ye go, Brother,’ he murmured, ‘would ye allow me just a glance at the true pipes?’

  Francis unshouldered his satchel and laid it on the counter. From it he withdrew the leather case that Gyre had given him. He untied the laces and folded back the tooled flap to expose the gleaming instrument lying within.

  Moxon wiped his hand on his sleeve and laid his forefinger reverently on one of the stops. He held it there for a few seconds then removed it. Gazing upon his fingertip with a look of wonder he raised it slowly to his lips. ‘Thank ye, Brother,’ he murmured. ‘I am deeply beholden to ye.’

  Francis smiled, retied the laces and restored the case to his pack. ‘Is it far to the West Gate?’ he asked.

  ‘ ’Tis scarce a hundred paces past the church,’ said Moxon. ‘Come with me. I’ll set ye on your road.’

  A kilometer beyond Yarcombe Francis encountered an improvised barrier of hurdles drawn up across the road. He reined in his horse and awaited the approach of the helmeted soldier who glanced from the priest’s cowl to the post horse and back again. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said civilly. ‘May I ask whither ye’re bound?’

  ‘For Upottery,’ said Francis.

  ‘And your business?’

  Francis stared at him coldly. ‘By whose right do you ask?’

  ‘Lord Simon of Leicester’s,’ returned the soldier.

  ‘Know then that I travel on the personal service of Archbishop Constant. His business is no concern of Lord Simon’s.’

  ‘Your clapper, priest.’

  ‘What? ’

  The soldier opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue and pointed to it as though he were making signs to an idiot. ‘Show us yours,’ he said, ‘or your journey ends right here.’

  Francis gazed across at the grinning Falcons who manned the barrier, then protruded the tip of his tongue between his lips.

  ‘Further, man! Are ye shy or something?’

  ‘Your name and rank, soldier?’

  Their eyes met and the soldier was the first to look away. ‘Open up for his reverence!’ he yelled and sauntered back to his post while the hurdles were dragged apart and the priest rode through.

  The experience was repeated once more with minor variations before Francis eventually topped a rise and looked down upon the narrow creek which separated him from Upottery. His sole consolation lay in the reflection that Thomas of Norwich must still be at large. Gazing across at the hills he would have to cross before he reached Broadbury he saw sunlight winking from polished steel as a mounted patrol combed through the wilderness of gorse. The far off yelping of dogs was carried to him on the back of the breeze. He shivered involuntarily and breathed a prayer for the Kinsman’s safety.

  As his horse clip-clopped over the wooden bridge at the foot of the hill Francis saw a posse of mounted troopers, uniformed in gray leather, cantering toward him. In their midst rode a red-bearded monk clad in a gray habit. He drew in to the side of the road and waited for the troop to pass, but as they came abreast the monk reined up his horse and raised his right hand in greeting. ‘Whither away, Brother?’ he called, then, screwing up his eyes cried: ‘Francis! By the holy powers!’

  Francis raised a hand to shadow his brow. ‘Andrew?’

  ‘Who else? And what brings you to Blackdown of all places?’

  ‘Do you need to ask?’

  ‘What? Has his Lordship sent you scampering all the way from York?’

  ‘Is Leicester so much nearer?’

  Brother Andrew grinned and shrugged. ‘And how was it up in Cumberland?’

  ‘Wet,’ said Francis concealing his astonishment as best he might.

  ‘You stay in Upottery?’

  ‘Passing through only. And you?’

  ‘I have some Edict business to conclude here. It won’t detain me long. Which way are you headed?’

  ‘Dunkeswell, if I can get horsed.’

  ‘We’ll meet again for sure then, Francis. I ride that way tomorrow. A safe journey to you.’

  ‘And to you,’ responded Francis, lifting his hand in farewell .

  Brother Andrew laughed, slapped his horse’s hindquarters with his looped reins and clattered off in pursuit of the soldiers.

  Francis stared after him conscious of a coldness lingering like an invisible eddy on the sunny air. For a moment he was moved to wonder at the notion of a man being condemned to dwell for ever in a strange, silent world of his own where he read men’s speech from their lips. Did that perhaps help to explain Brother Andrew’s passionate persecution of the Kinsfolk to whom music and song were the very key to life itself. And how, in Heaven’s name, had the monk known of his mission to Cumberland? Could it mean that Constant himself was under secret surveillance? Or had his interim report from Kentmere been intercepted on its way to York? If that were so then he himself must surely have been picked out as suspect by the Secular Arm.

  The tomb-like chill left by Andrew’s presence found a lodging in Francis’s bones and made him shiver. For the first time since leaving Black Isle he saw the path he had been chosen to follow stretching out before him in an unwavering line direct to the inquisitorial rack and the martyr’s pyre. But even as he contemplated it stonily he was suddenly overwhelmed by a flood of wholly irrational happiness whose life giving springs welled up from a candle-lit death chamber far away on a rocky islet on the Western Borders. He laughed aloud, shook up his horse into a lumbering canter and headed for the town gate.

  ELEVEN

  Jane never hueshed her father’s murder. The news of it was gleaned by the Magpie. After lying low in Dunkeswell for forty-eight hours he had gone down to Broadbury in the afternoon to seek out a fisherman who could be trusted to carry a confidential message to Tallon telling the potter that Jane was safe and would be returning in a day or two. It so happened that the first likely man he set his eyes upon in the waterfront tavern was ‘One-Eye’ Jonsey, skipper of the Kingdom Come .

  The Magpie paid for two mugs of ale and carried them over to the high-backed settle where Jonsey was sitting gazing despondently out across the harbor. He set a mug down in front of the coaster. ‘What’s up, old friend?’ he asked. ‘You look as if you’ve bought yourself a bellyful of vinegar.’

  Jonsey’s one eye swiveled round and focused on the Magpie. ‘Oh, it’s you, Patch,’ he grunted .

  The Magpie eased himself down into the settle at Jonsey’s side. He touched his own tankard against the one he had set before the coaster and raised it to his lips. ‘Well met, One-Eye,’ he murmured. ‘Fortune’s kind to me.’

  ‘Then you’re the only one,’ responded Jonsey morosely.

  ‘I’m sharing it with you. Drink up, man. Your health.’

  Listlessly Jonsey lifted the mug and swallowed a token mouthful.

  The Magpie glanced around then put his lips close to the coaster’s ear. ‘Dos’t make for Tallon, friend?’

  Jonsey shook his head. ‘We were there yesterday. Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘The Grays hanged Pots Thomson on Tallon quayside.’

  The Magpie’s hand descended on the coaster’s wrist and gripped it like a steel vice. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true, Patch. They swung him for harboring a heretic – a poor, drowned bugger of a Kinsman Napper and me fished out of the Reach last week.’

  The Magpie felt as if his skin was shrinking all about him: ‘Are you sure of this?’ he hissed.

  ‘Sure?’ echoed One-Eye. ‘Man, we found the poor sod dangling there when we docked. I’ve not slept a wink since. It’s like I noosed his neck myself.’

  ‘And Susan? What of her?’

  ‘They fired the cottage with her in it. It was still smoking when we tied up.’

  The Magpie groaned aloud in an agony of impotent rage. ‘Who blabbed?’

  ‘They screwed it out of some youngster who’d gone down to tip Pots off that the birds were on the way.’

  ‘They didn’t find their Kinsman then?’

  Jonsey shook his head. ‘The whisper is he’s here on Blackdown. And the wench too.’

  ‘What wench?’

  ‘Pots’ lass.’

  ‘Pots told them that?’

  ‘He told them nothing,’ said Jonsey. ‘He kept them stalled for six hours till they gave it up as a bad job and strung him up. They’ve bought themselves a load of hate on Quantock by that day’s business. He was a real good man was Pots, as brave as they come.’

  The Magpie nodded while his thoughts darted off in all directions. Only the knowledge that Jane had hueshed him with the Kinsman had kept him chained to Blackdown. Now that her own life unquestionably depended upon his getting her away, Thomas would have to take his own chance. ‘Where’s your next port of call, One-Eye?’ he asked.

  ‘Buckfast. But we’ve missed our tide. There should have been a cargo of cider waiting for us in Todd’s warehouse but it isn’t there. Napper’s away now trying to find out what’s become of it.’

  ‘Have you steerage room for a passenger?’

  ‘Aye. Of a sort. What of it?’

  ‘Hold it for me, old friend. And set a steel lock on your tongue.’

  Jonsey turned his head and scrutinized the Magpie’s face with his single, shrewd eye. Whatever he read there he kept to himself.

  The Magpie raised his tankard, touched it once more against Jonsey’s and murmured: ‘To Pots Thomson and his lass.’

  Jonsey stared at him hard and long. ‘Aye, Patch,’ he responded, ‘I’ll drink deep to that. I’ll hold passage till flood tide tomorrow eve. Will that do you?’

  ‘It’ll have to,’ said the Magpie. He swigged off his ale, gripped One-Eye by the shoulder and slipped out of the tavern by a back entrance.

  On his way back to Dunkeswell the Magpie glimpsed a Falcon patrol riding down to the port he had just left and he made a wide, looping detour which took him up through the hanging woods and out over the brow of Windhover Hill. It was an area of scrub land, of gorse, brambles and bracken, with a scattering of wind-twisted thorn trees which somehow contrived to cling to the thin soil despite the ceaseless efforts of the prevailing westerly gales to uproot them. Hundreds of years ago a priory had stood there but it had vanished long since and most of the stones had been pillaged for sheep shelters. A few obstinate scraps of ruin still remained providing nesting sites for the buzzards which circled high in the turbulent air currents above the hill crest.

  The Magpie was about to stride on past when something made him pause. He stood still for a moment, peering uneasily about him and then, without quite knowing why, began moving toward the most substantial fragment of the ruins. As he did so he suddenly knew what it was that had reached out and drawn him to this desolate spot. ‘A pile of stones,’ he murmured. ‘Gray stones.’

  No sooner had he recalled Jane’s huesh than he was gripped by it. At that moment he could no more have turned and gone back than he could have willed his own heart to stop beating. He ghosted forward to where a patch of brambles all but concealed an opening in the crumbling masonry and called out softly: ‘Are you there, Kinsman?’

  A jackdaw squawked from a cranny high up in the ruin; the wind droned fitfully round a broken corbel; but that was all. He tried again. ‘It’s the Magpie, Kinsman. The potter’s daughter hueshed you with me.’

  A dislodged pebble rattled faintly in some invisible cavern and a voice whispered hoarsely: ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Aye, man, there’s no one but me. ’

  A hand appeared at the opening, gripped the lichened stone, and then the Kinsman’s apprehensive face was peering out at him.

  ‘Come on out, songster. I’ll not harm you.’

  Thomas dragged himself up and crawled out from under the brambles. ‘The dogs,’ he muttered. ‘Where are the dogs?’

  ‘Drawing the woods away below Cotleigh,’ said the Magpie, reaching down and pulling the Kinsman to his feet. ‘How came you to hole up here?’

  ‘I doubled back and swam the creek below Upottery last night. I hoped to throw them off my scent. I’ve been here since before dawn.’

  ‘Did you not make Sidbury, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Thomas and shuddered.

  ‘They’d have nailed you for sure if you had,’ said the Magpie cheerfully. ‘Your only chance now lies to the west. God man, you stink like a rutting polecat!’

  ‘So would you if you’d bedded where I have,’ retorted Thomas with a flicker of spirit. ‘I’m sorry if it offends you.’

  The Magpie laughed. ‘We’ll find you a change of garb presently. Till then I’d hold it a kindness if you’d keep downwind a pace or two.’

  As they emerged from the shelter of the ruins the Magpie called out softly: ‘Hey up! Hold still, man!’

  Thomas dropped to all fours. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

  The Magpie edged past him and stared down the eastward slope of the hill to where a solitary, black-robed figure was riding up the dusty road from Upottery. ‘A lone blackbird,’ he said. ‘He’ll not harm us, but we’d best keep our heads down till he’s past.’

  He made his way back to Thomas and, squatting down beside him, plucked a long grass stem and chewed at the stalk. ‘My lighting upon you will maybe help to ease the burden I’m bearing back to Jane,’ he murmured. ‘That lass thinks the world of you.’

  ‘Jane?’ echoed Thomas. ‘Is she not on Quantock?’

  The Magpie shook his head. ‘The crows were lying in wait for her at the cove. Had I not hueshed it she’d like as not be as dead as they are by now.’

  Thomas made a low moaning sound deep in his throat. ‘What happened?’

  The Magpie recounted it without embellishment and then added: ‘But there’s worse to follow,’ and told him what he had learned from Jonsey.

  The Kinsman sat completely stunned with horror. ‘I am to blame,’ he groaned. ‘It was I who killed them. I carried their deaths within me.’

  ‘Nay, Thomas,’ said the Magpie. ‘Take it not upon yourself, man. What will be, will be. The pattern is drawn and none of us has the power to alter it. ’Tis Jane we must be thinking on now.’

  Thomas raised his bowed head and stared bleakly up at the buzzards wheeling below the high, thin tissue of cloud. ‘The pattern was altered,’ he said dully, ‘and now the innocent are being called upon to account for it. Had I been left to drown none of this would have happened.’

  The Magpie glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘She told me she’d hueshed you washed up in the Jaws,’ he said curiously. ‘I thought she must have dreamed it. It does sometimes happen that way.’

  Thomas made no response. With a shake of his head the Magpie rose to his feet and ascertained that the coast was clear. ‘Come, Thomas,’ he said. ‘Bestir yourself. We’ve half an hour’s brisk legging ahead of us.’

  Jane was helping the Magpie’s ancient mother to prepare a meal against her son’s return when she heard the sound of voices coming down the track toward the cottage. The old woman cocked her head on one side and grinned. ‘ ’Tis my boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t fesh yourself, pet!’

  ‘There’s someone with him.’

  ‘What of it? But ye’d best set out another bowl and scrape a few more tatties.’

  Jane nodded, picked up a basket and turned toward the door. As she opened it she saw the Magpie and Thomas walking toward her down the garden path. The basket dropped from her hand and she flew into the Kinsman’s arms like a bird to its nest. ‘I knew he’d find you!’ she cried. ‘Didn’t I say so? Didn’t I?’

  ‘You did, Jane. It all came true just as you said it would.’

  ‘I prayed to the White Bird to bring you safe back,’ she said.

  ‘And here I am.’

  ‘But what happened, Thomas? Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh, scampering about like a fox. Up hill and down dale.’

  ‘Was there no boat from Sidbury?’

  ‘I never got to Sidbury. There were Falcons everywhere. I all but ran head first into a patrol an hour after we parted.’

  He felt her shiver against him. ‘We’re both safe now,’ she said. ‘That’s all that matters.’