EQMM 1995-10 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Loaf of Quicksilver

by Clayton Emery

© 1995 by Clayton Emery

Like several other writers of mystery historicals, including Peter Tremayne (EQMM, May 1995), Clayton Emery also does work in the fantasy genre. This doesn’t surprise us given the subject matter he has chosen for his mystery stories: crime-solving adventures of Robin Hood. Yet Mr. Emery has obviously been painstakingly accurate in providing historical detail for his stories, and he’s given the characters a distinctive shape.

“Rouse, rouse!” Pounding at the door shook the cottage. Moaning on the sea wind came the doleful cry. “A boat’s come back empty! Rouse!”

Robin and Marian were off their pallets instantly — sleepy outlaws didn’t live long — with bows in hand. Their host, the fisherman Peter, unbarred the door. Sea wind, cold and salty, swirled in their faces and made the fire in the hearth gutter.

“What’s happening?” asked Sidony. A barrel-shaped woman with a face like a dried apple, she was bundled in wool with a scarf over her head. Five sleepy-eyed children clustered around. “Whose boat?”

“Gunther’s! Both him and Yorg are missing!”

“Oh my!” The fishwife put a gnarled hand to her mouth. “And Lucy and Zerlina so young to be widows!”

Robin Hood shrugged on his quiver, an instinct when trouble portended. He and Marian were dressed alike, in tattered wool of Lincoln green, laced deerhide jerkins, and soft hats sporting spring feathers. The outlaw chieftain and his wife stepped outside the tiny cottage.

With food lean in the Greenwood and a long winter over, they’d taken a holiday of sorts, walked from Sherwood east and then north, followed a Roman road through Lincoln, across the Humber, to the high cliffs at Scarborough, which Marian had never seen. They’d dawdled on the way back, followed the coast dotted with black wrecks, out to buy dried herring for Lent and “to smell the salt air.”

They had salt air aplenty, for the wind never quit. It pulsed and blustered and boomed and tickled, never still. Sea and wind and clouds were half the world for tiny Wigby, sixteen cottages almost overwhelmed by wide Humber Bay, roiling with waves driven from the turbulent North Sea, called the German Sea hereabouts. Behind the village lay sandy dunes with grass atop, and a forest, The Wolds, like a fog bank in the distance. A long way to haul firewood, the outlaw thought.

Against a cloudy red-streaked sunrise, villagers clustered at the high-tide mark, an undulating wave of seaweed. Men and women were almost identical in salt-and scale-streaked smocks, shabby wool hose, and pitchy half-boots. Hats were tied under chins to confound the wind. Amidst the fisherfolk slumped two new widows, teary but resigned, as if they’d expected this day. Children clung to their skirts and stared at an empty dory.

As the fishing family and their guests straggled down the shingle, Sidony muttered, “It’s their own fault. ‘If two relatives go out in a boat, one will drown.’ And sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

“Sneaking out?” Marian listened close, for the local accent was guttural and garbled.

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