Song of a Dark Angel

way? He stared at the scaffold, which rose at least five feet above his head.
    'I suppose she was murdered at night,' Corbett continued. 'But why here?'
    He looked down at the base of the scaffold and dismounted, throwing the reins at Ranulf, as something caught his attention. He knelt and picked up a bunch of decaying wild flowers from the bare ground beneath the gallows.
    'What's the matter?' Ranulf asked impatiently.
    'Who put these here?' Corbett asked.
    'Oh, for God's sake, Master, the poor woman's husband or her family.'
    Corbett shook his head. He sniffed at the brown, rotting stalks.
    'No, they have been here for weeks.'
    'Perhaps the relatives of an executed felon,' Ranulf hissed through clenched teeth. 'Sir Hugh, for the love of God, I am freezing! I have lost all feeling in my legs and balls!'
    Corbett threw the flowers down, wiped his hands on his robe, grasped his reins and remounted. 'Well, well, we can't have that, can we, Ranulf? What a loss to the ladies of London,eh?'
    He urged his horse on. Ranulf stuck his tongue out at him and quietly moaned to himself about the buxom little widow – brown-haired and merry-faced, with the sweetest eyes and softest arms he had ever known – left behind in London. He'd had to give her up just because old Master.Long Face, riding in front of him now, had been ordered north by King Edward.
    'Whose balls,' Ranulf muttered to himself, 'I hope are as cold as mine!'
    He followed his master, who had now slowed his horse to a trot, fearful that it might slip or lose direction. The mist had thickened and the angry sea still rumbled and crashed belowthem. The ruins of the old Hermitage came into sight, mostly hidden by a high sandstone curtain-wall. Corbett caught the smell of wood smoke and the sweeter scent of roasting beef, which made his stomach growl and wetted his dry mouth.
    'Shall we go in, Master?' Ranulf whispered.
    'No, no.'
    Corbett followed the path round, kicking his horse into a gallop. He did not want to stop until he had spoken to Sir Simon Gurney. Ranulf followed suit. He was sure he had heard a shout behind him, but Corbett waved him on and they trotted through the mist towards the lights of Mortlake Manor. At last the path turned inland, then slightly downwards. Ranulf could have shouted with joy as the gates of the manor, with fiery sconce torches lit above them, came into view.
    'Maltote had better be there!' he shouted. 'I hope the lazy bugger told them we were on our way!' 'He'll be there,' Corbett replied.
    Ralph Maltote, the clerk's messenger, may have nothing in his brains but he was a superb rider with a hunting dog's instinct for threading his way along the twisting roads and paths of England. Ranulf dismounted and hammered on the small postern door in the main gate of the manor.
    'Come on! Come on!' he muttered. I'm freezing to death!'
    The door swung open. A busy-faced porter peered out and beckoned them into the large cobbled yard that stretched before the fortified manor house of Sir Simon Gurney. Grooms hurried up and took their horses. A servant collected their saddlebags and the porter led them in through the main door of the house. They went down a sweet-smelling, stone-vaulted passageway past the busy kitchen, the smells from which whetted Corbett's and Ranulf's hunger, and into the solar where the grey-haired Sir Simon Gurney and his wife Alice waited to greet them.
    The old knight, one of the king's former companions, smiled and rose from his chair by the fire; his petite, sweet-faced wife stood smiling behind him.
    'Hugh! Hugh!'
    Gurney clasped Corbett's hand. He peered into the clerk's dark, saturnine face and noted the flecks of grey in the hair on either side of his temples and the furrows around his mouth and hooded eyes which had not been there when they had last met at Westminster.
    'You look tired, Hugh.'
    'A bad day, Sir Simon. Cold and hard. I have had pleasanter rides.' Corbett stared into the knight's weathered face, with its white, bushy brows above eyes that seemed still young, and neatly clipped moustache and beard. 'The king misses you,' he continued. 'He sends greetings and his good wishes to you and' – he turned to Gurney's wife – 'the Lady Alice.'
    Alice, who was at least twenty years her husband's junior, came up and offered one soft hand for Corbett to kiss. He brushed her fingers gently and felt a slight tinge of embarrassment as she took his hand and pressed it a little too firmly.
    'The same Hugh,' she