The Death Ship of Dartmouth: (Knights Templar 21) Read Free

fact.
    He hurried along the darkened street, then down a side alley, and thence back up to Lower Street and to a second alley. This he bolted down at full speed, hoping against hope to rush the man from behind. He would have managed it, too, if some lazy householder hadn’t left a pile of trash lying in the middle of the alley. He saw it at the last moment andtried to leap it, but his foot caught, and he was sent sprawling. The noise wakened a dog, and he heard it barking furiously. Footsteps hurried towards his alley, and he made a swift decision to go on, racing at full pelt back up to the top road.
    At the alley’s entrance, he stood panting, his sword already in his hand as he cautiously set his shoulder to the wall and peered round, but there was nothing.
    The silence was broken by rumbustious singing, and he saw a group of tattily dressed sailors half shuffling, half rolling in that curious manner they had when on firm land. They were all plainly more than a little drunk, from the songs they were singing and, as they passed him, Pierre was assailed by a gust of warm, ale-sodden breath. He thrust the sword back in its scabbard and slipped in behind them, trying to copy their gait. As they passed by the entrance to an inn, he left them and walked inside.
    It was a poor enough place, with the thin scattering of reeds on the floor barely covering the packed earth. In the middle sat a smoking fire, with a trivet set over it, while at the farther end of the room were five barrels of ale.
    Pierre made his way to the host, who stood with a thick apron over his enormous gut, and asked for a pint of ale. While he fingered a few pennies, he enquired whether there was a room available.
    These Englishmen were pigs! In France, a man of quality might assume that if an innkeeper had no single room adequate that was free, a lesser fellow would be evicted. Here, he was told, and the man kept a straight face while he said it, there was only one room with two large beds, and allthe clients could use them. However much Pierre fiddled with his cash, increasing the sum eventually to a shilling, the response was the same. It was unnerving to find a man like this innkeeper prepared to challenge a knight’s instruction. Heaven forfend that such arrogance could come to the French peasantry!
    It was surely a reflection of the trouble between France and England. A war made for bad manners.
    He had hoped for a quiet room alone, but if that was impossible, he had other options. He agreed loudly to the room, paid up the full sum and then wandered to a table, his ale in his hand, and waited.
    Three men soon entered one after the other. The first, clad in faded green tunic and worn hosen, with a knife hanging from a cord about his neck, was so plainly a sailor, from his horny hands to the weather-beaten face and grizzled beard, that Pierre could disregard him instantly as a spy. A paid assassin, perhaps, but not a spy. The second looked more the part: he was oddly clad in a good red jack over a fine woollen tunic, with a hood sitting far back on his head to show an eye with a devilish squint. Short and hunched, he looked desperate and dangerous, but as Pierre eyed him covertly, the newcomer roared sociably in welcome at a group of men near the bar and was soon engaged in raucous conversation.
    The third seemed unlikely to be a spy. He wore a thick leather apron like a joiner or mason, and Pierre heard several men mutter something that sounded like ‘paviour’. He strode past Pierre without a glance in his direction, to a table at which two others sat, one older, one apparently an apprentice.
    Pierre was beginning to wonder whether he
had
been followed at all, for here it was at least thirty miles from Exeter alone, and surely he would have noticed someone on his trail … when a fourth man appeared in the doorway. He was an older fellow, and well used to rough living from the look of his shabby hosen and jack.
    ‘Ho, Cynegils, are you coming in?’