The boots of the Duke’s cavalrymen made a wet, heavy sucking sound as they trudged through the black peat marsh fifty paces north of the ruined chapel lychgate. Their iron breastplates clinked against their sword-belts. Their curses were bitter and sharp as they stumbled over hidden willow roots in the freezing dark.
“Hold the lantern higher, Brandon!” an officer’s voice barked through the sleet, crisp with high-born arrogance. “The tracks from the hand-cart lead straight to the porch! The old crone with the wagon claimed she was gathering elderberry bark. But she had two coils of naval rope under her canvas tilt! They’re inside the chapel!”
Inside the ruined north vestry, Tomas Reed didn’t look through the lancet. He stood three paces back in the shadows, his ash-wood pack frame strapped tight across his shoulders, the leather chest-strap buckled two notches tighter to distribute the thirty-pound weight of the Master Sovereign Ledger and the twenty evidence metal bars evenly across his hips.
Beside him, Sile Rook was kneeling at the mouth of the south drainage under-road drain. A low, arched channel of mortared Pennine brick, four feet wide and three feet high, that drained runoff from the chapel garth into the deep river marsh.
