Hugh Corbett 12 - The Treason of the Ghosts Read Free Page A

she was going: the messenger and the sender.
    Elizabeth swung her hair and walked more purposefully. She crossed a ditch, slipped through a hedge but paused for a while. She must be early. She had learnt the time from the great capped hour candle in the marketplace so she should wait awhile. She stared up at the sky. To have an admirer, a secret admirer who’d paid to meet her! It was so good to be out under God’s sky, away from the busy marketplace and the close, rather oppressive atmosphere of her family, with Mother telling her to do this or that.
    Elizabeth stared at the copse which stood on the brow of the gently sloping hill. Did adults know about love? All her father could talk about was Molkyn’s head and Thorkle’s brains. Elizabeth had never liked either man, Molkyn particularly - and that poor daughter of his, what was her name? Oh yes, Margaret, always so quiet and kept to herself. Ah well . . . Elizabeth walked through the grass. She glanced to her right: in the trees far away she thought she had seen a movement. Was someone there? Perhaps a shepherd or his boy? Elizabeth felt a shiver; the weather was certainly turning. She wished she’d brought a shawl or coverlet.
    Elizabeth entered the trees. She loved this place. She used to come here as a child and pretend to be a queen or a maiden captured by a dragon. She threaded her way across the cold, wet grass and sat at the edge of the small glade, on the same rock she used to imagine as her throne or the dragon’s castle. It was very silent. For the first time since this adventure began, Elizabeth’s conscience pricked at deceiving her parents. Her happiness was laced with guilt and a little fear. This place was so lonely - just the distant call of the birds and the faint rustling in the bracken. Elizabeth shut her eyes and squeezed her lips.
    I’ll only wait here for a short while, she promised herself.
    Time passed. Elizabeth rubbed her arms and stamped her feet. She shouldn’t have come so publicly, swinging her arms crossing that field. Perhaps her secret admirer had seen someone else and been frightened off? In Melford, gossip and tittle-tattle, not to mention mocking laughter, could do a great deal of harm. She should have come along Falmer Lane and slipped through the hedge at Devil’s Oak.
    Elizabeth heard a sound behind her, the crack of a twig. She turned, her mouth opened in a scream. A hideous, masked figure stood right behind her: the garrotte string spun round her throat and Elizabeth the wheelwright’s daughter had not long to live.

Chapter 2
    Punishment in the King’s royal borough of Melford always attracted the crowds, even more so than a branding at the crossroads or a fair on the outskirts. The good townspeople flocked to see justice done, as well as collect scraps of scandal and gossip. Which traders had been selling underweight? Which bakers mixed a little chalk with their flour or sold a load beneath the market measure? Above all, they wanted to discover what house-breakers had been caught, pickpockets arrested.
    On that particular October day, the crowds had an even greater reason for flocking in. Word had soon spread, how the murders of Molkyn the miller, Thorkle, not to mention that of poor Elizabeth Wheelwright, whose ravished corpse lay sheeted for burial in the crypt of the parish church, had eventually reached the royal council in London. The King himself had intervened, not by dispatching justices or commissioners of enquiry but officials from his own chamber, a royal clerk, the keeper of the King’s Secret Seal, Sir Hugh Corbett and his henchman, Ranulf-atte-Newgate, principal Clerk in the Chancery of the Green Wax. The people of Melford wanted to view this. Oh, they desired an end to the horrid murders. They also wanted to see a King’s man arrive, with all his power and authority, to enquire into this or that, to execute the royal Writ, bring malefactors to justice and publish the Crown’s justice for all to