Read Online Ashes of the Elements by Alys Clare - Free Book Online Page A

moving beneath the smooth surface. Currents that would, she feared, bring trouble.
    *   *   *
    Josse had discovered, in the first few days of his homecoming, that his impression of work on New Winnowlands being all but finished had been an illusion.
    The builders were still busy on the kitchen, and there was a problem with the solar, which, apparently, only the master builder himself could put right. It was entirely Josse’s fault, was the implication, for being so daft as to want a solar in the first place.
    Josse tried to help, making suggestions, rolling up his sleeves and offering his strong arms and back.
    But it was made quite obvious that he was not wanted; the builders, who never actually said so, managed to imply that, by hanging around where they were working, Josse was offending against some unwritten but unbreakable rule.
    So he retired to his hall.
    But there was nothing to do!
    The long summer days drew him outside, yet, once there, he had to keep dodging workmen. In desperation, he remembered the Hawkenlye murder.
    And thought, damnation and hellfire, I’ll see if I can do better than that sheriff fellow!
    *   *   *
    He arrived in Tonbridge, where, enquiring for Sheriff Harry Pelham – bless the Abbess, for informing Josse what the man’s name was – he learned that, it being the midday hour, the sheriff would likely be taking his dinner.
    Fortunately for Josse, the sheriff’s preferred inn was the one where Josse had himself once put up; leading his horse into the yard, he met the innkeeper, Goody Anne, hurrying across from one of her storehouses with a side of ham under one strong arm.
    ‘Well! Good day to you, stranger!’ she cried, giving him a broad smile. ‘And just where have you been all this time?’
    Grinning back, Josse said, ‘Here and there, Anne. How are you?’
    ‘I’m well. We’re very busy, but that’s how I like it. Are you eating? I’ve a side of beef just broached, and this here ham’s in its prime.’ She gave the haunch a friendly slap.
    ‘I’m ravenous,’ Josse said. ‘ And I’ve a thirst on me like a man lost in the desert.’
    Anne batted her eyelids at him. ‘You’ve come to the right place to see to your appetites,’ she said. With a seductive swing of her ample bottom, she disappeared through the door into the kitchen. Faintly her voice reached him: ‘ All your appetites!’
    In the taproom, Josse ordered beer and food. Then, casting his eyes round the company, he tried to guess which man might be Sheriff Pelham.
    He was in luck. A newcomer entering the room shouted out, ‘Sheriff? I’ve a message for you!’ and a stout, strongly built man in a battered leather tunic stood up and said, ‘Here!’
    Josse waited until the newcomer had given his message and left. Then, casually, he sauntered across to where the sheriff was tucking into his meal and said, ‘May I sit beside you?’
    The sheriff waved a knife on whose point was speared a leg of chicken. ‘S’a free country,’ he said, spitting out small pieces of pale meat which landed, like minute snow flakes, on the front of the already stained tunic.
    Josse tucked into his own dinner. Observing the sheriff’s progress as he did so, he waited until the man had finished, wiped his greasy mouth with an even greasier sleeve, burped, taken a draught of beer, said, ‘Ah! That’s better!’ and relaxed, leaning back against the wall.
    Only then did Josse say, ‘I was visiting Hawkenlye Abbey recently. They tell me a man was killed, and that you, Sheriff, went to investigate?’
    ‘Aye?’ the sheriff said warily. Josse could almost hear the silent, and what’s it to you, stranger?
    ‘I’m known to the good people of the Hawkenlye community,’ Josse went on. ‘I hear there’s a suggestion of some weird forest tribe being involved in this death? They say that someone cleverly put two and two together, and virtually solved the crime there and then.’
    His vanity thus appealed to, the