The Tolls of Death: (Knights Templar 17) Read Free Page A

Athelina had been widowed some while before. Her husband Hob had contracted a wasting disease that killed him within a fortnight. Now she had nothing: only a rented, tumbledown cottage, insufficient food for herself and the boys, not even the solace of a man. It was very sad. She depended utterly on the generosity of others.
    Yes, Nicholas had cause to be proud. His own wife would never be a beggar – he’d see to that. Anne would never want for anything while he lived.
    Nor yet, he hoped, when he died.
    To the west of the vill, Serlo the miller scratched first at his beard, then at his groin. The last of the flour was trickling into his sacks while the rumbling of the great wooden water-wheel continued behind him. He glanced at the deeply engrained bloodstains on it, then at the bright white oak of the four new teeth.
    Milling was not the easiest of jobs when the harvests were poor, and Serlo had much to do to make up the losses of last year. Damn all apprentices! The idiots! They were none of them worth their upkeep. Danny, the last one, had never worked as hard as he should, and then, last year, the miserable churl had slipped as he passed by the machine.
    Serlo kept reliving it in his nightmares. For months afterwards he had a sickly fear of going to his bed. When Danny had stumbled, his left hand was holding a full sack at his shoulder. As he toppled, Serlo could read the thought in his startled, fearful eyes: If I drop this, he’ll thrash me to death!
    Serlo was furious when he kept dropping the sacks. Dan had wasted so much good flour, it would have been cheaper to tip away a twelfth of all his millings than to keep the apprentice on. The next time Dan let a sack slip, Serlo warned him, he’d thrash him until there was no flesh left on his back. And so poor Danny had kept a good hold as he went over, and this was his undoing. His right hand grasped the first thing that came to him – the moving, toothed wheel – and before he knew what was happening, his arm was caught by the great teeth and crushed between the upper and lower wheels.
    Serlo had tried to prise the lad free, to slow the wheels and save his life … but he was fighting against the power of the milland the river. He could do nothing, and Danny was chewed inexorably into the machine, his face contorted in a final scream of terror. Then a great gush of blood spewed upwards, covering the miller, his apprentice and the wheels which had destroyed him.
    At least his body hadn’t ruined the mill. Four teeth had to be replaced, which cost some money, but the seven-year-old bones weren’t hard enough to do much damage to the machinery.
    The real expense came from that interfering old git, Sir Simon of Launceston, the Coroner. He’d hurried there at the first sniff of money, and fined Serlo instantly for removing the body from the machine, then fined him again for not calling the Coroner personally. Finally, and punishingly, he had fined him the
deodand
. Whatever the material or animal that had caused a death, it was always
deodand
, its worth forfeit for the crime of murder. If a man killed with a knife, if a maid was crushed by a bull, if a mill killed a boy, the knife, the bull or the mill were assessed so that their value could be taken. The mill had crushed the boy: the mill-wheel, the water-wheel, the two great cogs – all had led to Danny’s death, so all must be
deodand
.
    That was the Coroner’s argument, and it took all of Serlo’s eloquence to persuade him that it was only the wheel which was at fault. You couldn’t blame the water-wheel or the shaft or the building, it was just the cogged wheel. The Coroner countered that it was both cogged wheels at least, for the lad was crushed between the two, and although Serlo tried to point out that one had captured Dan and dragged him in, so only one was guilty, the Coroner would have none of it. If Serlo wanted to argue further, he said, Serlo could do so in the King’s court.
    Not that it was