Nightshade by P. C. Doherty Page B

Some people claim Lord Scrope’s ancestors sowed the earth with salt so the survivors had to move away.’
    â€˜And you?’ Corbett asked.
    â€˜Oh, I think the village lay too deep in the forest. Its inhabitants lacked the means to fell the trees and plough the land. So they simply used the war as an excuse to move away.’
    â€˜Lord Scrope allowed the Free Brethren to shelter there?’
    â€˜Why not?’ Claypole declared. ‘Others have. There is very little we can do about it: wandering tinkers, traders, even the occasional outlaw, moon people. Lord Scrope allows them to shelter and snare the occasional rabbit for the pot. As long as they don’t start poaching or hunting venison, he leaves them be. In the summer it’s different, the children go out there to play. When I was a lad I used to follow Lord Scrope there with his sister Marguerite and their cousin Gaston.’
    â€˜This cousin,’ Corbett asked, ‘what happened?’
    â€˜Wounded at Acre,’ Claypole replied, ‘taken into the infirmary. Sir Hugh, if you read the accounts of Acre, or if you know anything about the fall of that fortress, it was every man for himself. Gaston died. There was little we could do.’
    â€˜How do you know he died?’ Corbett asked.

    â€˜I followed Lord Scrope when we decided to leave. He was determined to take his cousin with us, but when he entered the infirmary, Gaston was dead.’
    â€˜And the Templar treasure?’
    â€˜Why not, Sir Hugh? We’d fought hard, the infidels had breached the walls. Why should they have what we could take? So we seized what we could and fled.’
    â€˜And Jackanapes?’ Corbett asked. ‘What did he say before he died?’
    â€˜Oh, babbling as usual. How the Sagittarius had returned, something about claiming a reward. Nothing but nonsense.’
    Corbett reflected on what he had seen and heard in the marketplace.
    â€˜I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘I truly do!’
    The conversation died as they entered the line of trees. A different world of tangled, snow-covered gorse that stretched like a chain linking the stark black tree trunks, their bare branches laced against the sky. A secret, furtive place of swift movement in the undergrowth, the ghostly wafting of bird wing, the sudden call of an animal or the crack of rotting bracken. Corbett’s hands slid beneath his cloak. He understood Ranulf’s fears about such a place. In the cities and towns, the Chancery of Hell dictated its villainy from narrow runnels or darkened nooks. Here it would be different. A shaft loosed from a knot of trees, a knife or axe sent whirling through the air or a cunning rope or caltrop to bring down a horse. A landscape of white menace harbouring God knew what evil that had crawled across the threshold of hell. Here the Sagittarius could hide cloaked by nature. To still his fears, Corbett thought of Maeve and smiled as he recalled
the lines of a romance she’d read to him over the Christmas holy days.

    A woman in whose face more beauty shown.
Then all other beauties fashioned into one.

    â€˜This village, Mordern?’ Ranulf, riding behind Corbett, spoke up.
    â€˜Haunted and devastated,’ Claypole replied. ‘As I told Sir Hugh …’
    His words trailed away as they broke from the forest into a broad glade with clumps of snow-covered trees and straggling gorse under its icy pall. Corbett reined in and stared across at the derelict buildings, their roofs long gone, the wattle and daub walls no more than flaking shells. Here and there an occasional stone dwelling. On the far side of the glade rose the tumbledown, weed-encrusted wall of the cemetery; beyond this the memorials of the long-forgotten dead circled the ruined church. Corbett studied this, an ancient chapel probably built before the Normans came, with its simple barn-like nave, jutting porches and squat square tower. Once an impressive