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Overview
Ordered to investigate the deaths by his liege lord, Prince Tancred, it is not long before Sir Geoffrey finds himself drawn into dire straits involving some of the most dangerous men in the city—and learns that his closest friends could also be his deadliest enemies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847514950 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Severn House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
| Series: | A Sir Geoffrey Mappestone Mystery , #1 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 639,425 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Lexile: | 1080L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Murder in the Holy City
By Simon Beaufort
Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2014 Simon BeaufortAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84751-495-0
CHAPTER 1
JERUSALEM, JULY 1100
The small band of soldiers glanced around uneasily as the scream rent the air a second time, clear and piercing. One or two fingered the hilts of their swords as they marched, and all were tense and wary. Although the street was deserted in the blazing midday sun, whispered voices and flickers of movement came from the huddle of houses that stood in an unruly line along the side of the road. Further ahead, a babble of hysterical voices exploded into the silence, and a dog began to bark furiously. Sir Geoffrey Mappestone exchanged a glance with Will Helbye, his sergeant at arms, and raised his hand to bring the soldiers to a halt. Nervously, the men shuffled to a standstill behind him, and Geoffrey heard the discreet rasp of steel on leather as weapons were drawn.
"I suppose we should investigate," muttered Helbye, not looking at Geoffrey, but scanning the street with eyes alert for the signs of an ambush, "although I would sooner head straight back to the citadel. The men are exhausted after two weeks of desert patrol, and so am I."
Geoffrey nodded in agreement, but led the way toward the cacophony of voices, his men falling in behind him. Their feet kicked up small clouds of dust as they walked, adding to the layers of yellow-white powder on their boots and powdering their faces and hands with a familiar grittiness. Geoffrey reached the end of the road and stopped a second time.
To the left, a small alley ran downhill, disappearing into the deep shadow of shabby buildings that had been built so close together that they almost met to form an arch overhead. To the right was a wider street, where larger, grander houses suggested that this area had once been home to some of Jerusalem's more wealthy citizens. In the middle of the road, a woman stood, swathed in black from head to toe and clutching a long curved dagger in both hands. The dagger, Geoffrey noticed immediately, was bloodstained. Other people had formed a circle around her and were chattering in loud, excited voices.
Gesturing for his men to remain where they were, Geoffrey strode forward, with Helbye at his heels. Seeing heavily armed soldiers bearing down on them, the crowd parted quickly to allow them through, and the babble of voices died away.
"What has happened?" asked Geoffrey in Norman French, addressing his question to the woman, since she was obviously the cause of the incident.
She gazed at him with frightened eyes until someone in the crowd translated the question into Greek. She glanced at the interpreter and forced herself to look at Geoffrey again.
"There is a dead knight in my house," she said, her voice low and unsteady. She looked down at the knife in her hands, as if seeing it for the first time, and flung it away from her in horror. It clattered at Geoffrey's feet. Someone relayed her response to the onlookers, and a thrill of excitement rippled through them. All eyes turned expectantly to Geoffrey.
"Oh Lord!" breathed Helbye in Geoffrey's ear. "The woman has done away with a knight, Sir Geoffrey. Now what do we do? After two weeks of chasing infidel robbers in that hell they call the desert, you would think we could go home quietly to rest and drink cool wine. But no! We are confronted with a killer of knights. Is it a trick? If we arrest her, will we be attacked?"
Geoffrey did not answer, but looked beyond the crowd to see whether he could detect any telltale signs of activity that might forewarn him of an ambush. Helbye was right to be suspicious and reluctant to become involved. It was only a year since Jerusalem had fallen to the Crusaders, and thousands of its people had been massacred in a way that still made Geoffrey—a hardened and experienced soldier—sick with disgust. The city, despite so few of its inhabitants having survived the sack—or perhaps because of it—was uneasy, and there were pockets of resistance to Crusader occupation everywhere.
"What is your name?" Geoffrey asked the woman in Greek. She looked startled to hear him speak to her in her own tongue, and it was some moments before she replied.
"Melisende Mikelos," she replied in a low voice.
"Show me this dead knight, Mistress Mikelos," he said, fixing her with a hard stare. He gestured with his hand that she was to precede him back into the house. Her eyes opened wider still, and she backed away from him in terror.
"No! Please!" she cried. "Please don't make me go back in there!" She looked as though she might run away, but the spectators hemmed in close and allowed her no escape.
"Do you live here?" asked Geoffrey, watching her closely. Warily, she nodded. "Then you will have to go back inside at some point. Unless you wish to abandon your house to looters."
She gazed at him pleadingly. "I would rather wait here until you have removed the ... body from my home," she said. "I will enter again when it is gone."
"You must enter now, with me," said Geoffrey, his patience beginning to fray. The longer he stood negotiating in the street with this woman—who may well have committed murder—the longer he put his men in unnecessary danger. When she did not move, he stepped forward and took her firmly by the arm. She struggled automatically, but he was strong, and she desisted as soon as she realised she could no more escape from him than fly.
Helbye motioned for three of the soldiers to enter the house with Geoffrey, while he stayed outside with the remainder, arranging them in two groups to make an ambush more difficult. Geoffrey's fat, black-and-white dog found a patch of shade and flopped down in it, its sides heaving vigorously and its long pink tongue dangling out of the side of its mouth.
It was cool inside the house after the intense heat of the sun, and dark, too. Geoffrey paused to give his eyes time to adjust, and looked around him. The house was no different from many he had visited since arriving in Jerusalem, where the luxury of even the poorest houses provided a stark contrast to the hovels on his father's manor in England. The floor was paved in stone of attractively contrasting colours, and furniture was sparse, but elegant: a narrow couch, some stools, a large table. A large jug of water stood near the door, and a shelf revealed cooking utensils of pewter and pottery, all spotlessly clean. But there was no dead knight. He turned to Melisende Mikelos with raised eyebrows.
"Upstairs," she said in a whisper.
Still maintaining his grip on her arm, Geoffrey propelled her toward the stairs and pushed her in front of him. Slowly, after throwing a tortured glance at him, she began to ascend. The house was simple: just one room below, and a second, for sleeping, above. The upper room had wide arched windows, draped with patterned cotton to allow a cooling breeze in and keep the burning sun out. The floor was of pale wood, and the only items of furniture were a bed, strewn with brightly coloured covers, and shelves on which various items of clothing were neatly stacked. Like the lower room, it was perfectly tidy—except for one thing.
The dead knight lay on his stomach, and the back of his grimy grey shirt was red with the clotting blood that had trickled to form a dark, irregular circle on the wood beneath him. Melisende inhaled sharply and turned away. Geoffrey saw her begin to cry. He looked back to the body, recognising with dismay the fair hair and delicate features of Sir John of Sourdeval. Geoffrey's stomach knotted painfully, and he found himself unable to move. Then the moment of shock passed, and Geoffrey rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger and looked away. John, a soft-spoken, thoughtful Norman, had been a good friend; Geoffrey had often sought out his company when the other knights had become too rowdy and debauched.
"How did he come to be here?" Geoffrey asked, taking a deep breath and hoping Melisende Mikelos was too wrapped up in her horror at the body to be aware of his own. He went to the window to see whether it was possible to climb up from the outside. It was not.
She shrugged, her back still turned to him. "I do not know. I went out to visit my uncle, who lives near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and came back a few moments ago, intending to rest until the heat of the day was past. I drank some wine downstairs, bathed my feet, and then came up here to lie down. He was there ..." Her explanation was concluded with a sob.
"Do you know him?"
She shook her head, turning slightly so she could look at Geoffrey without seeing the dead man. "I have never seen him before," she whispered. "And I do not know how he came to be here. The door was locked, and my neighbours have just told me they saw no one enter." She gazed at him with enormous gold-brown eyes. "You must believe me! What reason could I have for a knight to be in my sleeping chamber?"
Geoffrey could think of one, but said nothing. He studied her intently. Younger than he had first thought, she was wearing the black that indicated she had been widowed, probably in the carnage of July 1099, he thought, when so many had been killed—Christian and Moslem alike—as the Crusaders took Jerusalem.
Nodding to one of his men to ensure Melisende did not run away, Geoffrey bent to examine John's body. The young knight was most assuredly dead, and his stiffened limbs and the dryness of the blood around the wound in his back indicated that he had been so for some hours. Geoffrey made a slit in the shirt, and looked at the single puncture mark that had killed him. It was a wide wound, and it could very well have been made by the curved Arab-style dagger Melisende had been clutching in the street.
Geoffrey sat back on his heels and reflected. Knights were not popular among the citizens of Jerusalem: it had been the knights who had led the slaughter that followed the city's fall. But while there were many knights who bragged about the number of people they had butchered, John was not among them. And besides, that was a year ago—if the motive were revenge, why should a killer decide to strike now?
Geoffrey glanced up to where Melisende regarded him with huge eyes that brimmed with tears. Her hands were stained with John's blood—either from the dagger she had been holding in the street, or from when she had murdered him.
"I did not kill this man," she whispered. "Please believe me."
"What I believe is irrelevant," said Geoffrey, trying to ascertain whether she was lying. "I am merely a knight. It is the Advocate you will need to convince. John was a favourite of his." And of mine too, he added silently, looking down at the lifeless body in front of him.
"I see," said Melisende, her voice suddenly hard. "You are yet another Norman incapable of independent thought, unless it is for repressing the local population. You are undoubtedly a nobody, some penniless younger son of an equally insignificant knight, who thinks to make his fortune from our land."
Geoffrey met her eyes, but did not answer—her accusation was true, at least in part. He was the youngest son of Sir Godric Mappestone, a knight who had followed William the Conqueror to England in 1066, and who had been rewarded for his bravery at the Battle of Hastings with a manor on the Welsh border. But, unlike most men in his position, Geoffrey cared little for making his fortune—indeed, he was generally indifferent to amassing wealth, and he usually found looting was more trouble than it was worth. Geoffrey's motive for joining the Crusade had been that it afforded him an excellent opportunity to travel. He had set out in high spirits, dreaming of the great libraries of the Arab world, and of an entire new culture of philosophy and literature about which he might learn. It was not a motive approved of or understood by his fellow knights, however, and Geoffrey had been regarded as something of an oddity from the outset.
John de Sourdeval had understood, though and had spent many hours discussing Arab writings with the scholarly English knight. Geoffrey's glance slid down to Melisende's bloodstained hands. Was she telling him the truth? Or had she murdered his gentle, honourable friend?
He shook his head impatiently. Now was not the time for speculation, not with his men travel-weary and a potentially hostile crowd gathering around. He grabbed a blanket from a neatly folded pile near the window, wrapped John in it, and told his men to carry the body downstairs. He glanced around quickly, but there was nothing else in the sparsely furnished chamber to give him any further clues. There was only one way into the room—up the stairs the way he had come—and if John had had any belongings with him when he was dispatched to meet his maker, they were not with him now.
Geoffrey took Melisende's arm again and led her out of her house into the street. His first thought was to find the knife she had hurled away from her, but there was no sign of it. He glanced at the crowd and was not surprised. The dagger had been a fine weapon with a jewelled hilt that looked valuable. It would doubtless fetch a good price at the market.
Sergeant Helbye was haggling with a scruffy-looking fig seller for the loan of his cart to transport John's body back to the citadel on the other side of the city. The citadel was where the Advocate, Jerusalem's military leader, had his headquarters, and where many of the knights, including Geoffrey, chose to live.
The crowd in the street was becoming larger with each passing moment, despite the searing heat of the early afternoon sun. Geoffrey saw his soldiers' increasing alarm: two had unslung their bows and had arrows at the ready. He overrode the indignant protestations of the fig seller and heaved John's blanketed body onto the cart. Seizing Melisende by the wrist, he shouted orders to his men and set off, the disconsolate fig seller trotting along beside them, bewailing the fact that his fruit was being crushed.
The crowd parted to let them through, but Geoffrey sensed a resentment that had not been there earlier. A small child darted forward and tried to press a knife into Melisende's hand. People became ominously silent, and Geoffrey was aware of his soldiers preparing themselves for a fight. Here and there, a flash of steel caught the sunlight as men in the crowd drew an odd assortment of concealed weapons from their clothing—kitchen knives, sticks, and even a discarded horseshoe. The silence of the crowd was now a tangible thing, sinister and menacing.
"Let me go," said Melisende in a low voice to Geoffrey. "It is because you are taking me that these people are angry. Let me go, and you will be allowed to leave unmolested with your men."
"If you are innocent of this knight's murder, as you claim, then you have nothing to fear," said Geoffrey, not slowing his pace.
The woman snorted in derision. "Who at the citadel will believe me?" she said. "You do not."
This was true, Geoffrey reflected: he did not. One of his men gave a sharp yelp and put his hand to his head.
"Keep moving," said Helbye in a calm voice to the jittery soldiers. "They are only throwing stones. You are wearing mail; they cannot harm you."
"Not much!" muttered the soldier with the bleeding head, but he kept walking. Geoffrey handed Melisende to Ned Fletcher, a slow but reliable soldier in his forties, and drew his sword. The crowd was following them along the street, hurling a hail of stones and other missiles after them. As the soldiers rounded the corner, the throng broke into a trot, and Geoffrey yelled for his men to run. His dog, true to character, had sensed the menace in the onlookers and had long since fled. Several of the soldiers fumbled to fit arrows to their bows, but Geoffrey ordered them to stop. Such an incident could turn into a bloodbath within moments, and he had no wish to be responsible for a skirmish that would cause the deaths of the women and children he could see among the crowd, or of his men.
A stone struck him hard in the chest, and a roar of approval went up from those at the front of the advancing mob. His chain mail and padded surcoat protected him from injury, but the force of the throw made him stagger. He collided with Helbye, who was close behind him, and before he could right himself, his leather-soled boots had slipped in some of the figs that had fallen from the cart, and he was down. With a howl of de delight, the mob rushed forward, and Geoffrey struggled in vain to clamber to his feet. He yelled to Helbye to run, but saw him stand firm with his weapon drawn, preparing to protect his fallen leader.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Murder in the Holy City by Simon Beaufort. Copyright © 2014 Simon Beaufort. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
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