Hugh Corbett 15 - The Waxman Murders Read Free Page A

storm; it was the ship that mattered! Blackstock had been well taught by the skilled privateers who prowled the Narrow Seas between Dover and Calais, as well as the trade routes to the wine city of Bordeaux and further south to the ports of Spain, or even – as he could do now, if he struck north-east – the frozen ports of the Baltic. Andit de Bodleck, master and captain of The Soul in Limbo , out of Brabant, had been his principal mentor. Yes, Andit had been the best teacher, despite being captured by two royal cogs of Edward I of England, his ship sunk and the life strangled out of him on a gallows overlooking Goodwin Sands on the eve of Reek Sunday. Blackstock had heard how Bodleck had refused the ministrations of the local parson; the privateer was a self-professed pagan who made offerings to an eerie war goddess called Nenetania.
    ‘Strange old life,’ Blackstock mused aloud.
    ‘What is, master?’
    This time Blackstock thought it tactful to reply. ‘How few people, Stonecrop,’ he shouted back above the creak of the ship, ‘truly believe in priests; they’d rather be thrashed than make their confessions to them.’
    Blackstock peered towards the prow. At least five of his crew were former clerics who’d committed some crime and were now dressed in serge leggings and leather jerkins, hair and beard matted, their tonsures long gone. He wondered how many of them, if captured, would plead benefit of clergy. Would Hubert do that? But of course, such dangerous living was going to end once they found that treasure ship and the precious hoard it contained. At first Hubert had been sceptical, but Blackstock had insisted that if a high-ranking Hanseatic merchant like Paulents and Sir Walter Castledene, merchant prince and knight, believed in it, there must be some truth to the story. Then, by mere chance, Hubert had been hunting a goldsmith out of Bishop’s Lynn, a collector of books and manuscripts. The man had killed a priest in a tavern brawl and been put to the horn as ultegatum – beyond the law. Hubert had eventually tracked the felon down and captured him in the small village of East Stoke on the River Trent near Newark in Nottinghamshire. He had bound the man’s hands, tied his legs beneath his horse and begun the journey back to Bishop’s Lynn. On the way the two men struck up a friendship. Hubert talked about a great treasure ship buried somewhere in Suffolk, and to his astonishment the goldsmith said he’d heard similar rumours and legends. He offered Hubert a manuscript on condition that he cut his bonds and let him go, and eventually Hubert agreed. They slipped by night into Bishop’s Lynn and the goldsmith returned stealthily to his house. They’d broken down the boards, forced the shutters, snapped the sheriff’s seals and opened a coffer of manuscripts. The goldsmith had collected other possessions then left. In a tavern the following morning, he’d handed a piece of parchment over to Hubert, who quickly realised that this extract from an English chronicle did indeed refer to a treasure hoard buried somewhere in Suffolk. He released the goldsmith, though much good it did the fellow, as he was later taken by the sheriff’s comitatus and hanged out of hand. Meanwhile Hubert used the manuscript to reflect on the Cloister Map and eventually concluded it would lead them exactly to where the treasure hoard was buried.
    Blackstock had kept such information, as well as the map, to himself. He’d not even shared it with the villainous Canterbury merchant Sir Rauf Decontet, one of his manucaptors, who’d advanced some of the money for him to buy The Waxman and who still took a share of whatever plunder he seized. Blackstock licked his lips. In fact he’d kept a lot back from Decontet. One day he and Hubert would settle their final account with that miserly rogue. Most importantly, the two brothers had made a compact that once they had the treasure there’d be no more hunting by land and sea. They