Squire Oxenham and his party came to the gate of Thorn, and sent one of the yeoman over it to drop the bar and let the others in. Three men were left to guard the horses and the gate, and two more to patrol the borders of the moat, while magistrate, attorney, king’s rider, and the rest spread themselves abroad to ransack the place, keeping their steel and powder ready in case they might come to grips with desperate men. But for all their bravery and bustle they found nothing but silence and emptiness in Thorn, as though the place had remained lifeless since the old Scotch folk left it in the autumn.
Squire Oxenham and Lawyer Gibbs found their way into the kitchen and went no farther in the man hunt, being content with the work done. The lawyer noticed the discolored stones in the floor and some wood-ash lying in the crevices. And had he touched those stones, instead of staring at them in a perfunctory and superior way, he would have discovered that they were warm, and that a fire had been lit there that very day.
Squire Oxenham, being an old and plethoric man with threatenings of gout in the right foot, sat down on the couch and pulled out a flask of hollands. He and the lawyer began gossiping together, and the Knight of the Chimney could hear every word that passed.
“We shall have an appetite for supper, Thomas, though we may not set eyes on Mr. Shaftesbury’s lord. Deuce take me if I can get my blood hot over the notion of sending some poor devil to the block. What are you staring at the floor for, Thomas?”
“There has been a fire here, Squire.”
“Months old, man; the place where Sandy Macalister smoked his Sabbath clothes before sneaking into heaven without crossing Peter’s palm. Have a drop of spirit, Thomas Gibbs. I wonder what made those Westminster wolves scent out Thorn as the man’s hiding-hole. The fellow Maudesly tells me that the Purcell woman—Halloo, Sacker, my man, have you found anything except owls?”
“Not a thing, your worship.”
“Just as I thought, Mr. Gibbs—just as I thought. Any man of sense with a warrant out against him would have been in France days ago and eating French dinners instead of freezing in a damned rubbish-heap like this. But these Jacks in Office must pretend to know everything. Some noodle at Westminster would be ready to tell me how much to allow my wife’s sisters, and how often my cess-pit ought to be emptied. Well, Mr. Maudesly, have you had enough of Thorn?”
The little man in the big periwig came in looking testy, and not to be trifled with. The men trooped in after him, while the Squire passed his flask round to the gentlemen, and condoled with them satirically on having drawn a “blank.” Stephen Gore in the chimney heard them gossiping there awhile before they tramped out into the court-yard to take horse for Battle Town before dusk fell. The thunder of hoofs went over the timbers of the bridge, and slowly, almost eerily, as the water of a stagnant pool settles over the stone that has been thrown into it, the heavy silence closed again over Thorn.
It was probable that my lord felt some elation over his escape, and that he was not a little eager to be out of so black and draughty a refuge. He was also very stiff and cold from having stood in that narrow recess for over an hour. At all events, he began the descent clumsily and carelessly, and, bearing too much weight on one of the nails that he had driven into the wall, the thing broke away from the rotten mortar, and, though he drove out his knees and elbows in an attempt to wedge himself in the chimney, his weight and bulk carried him heavily to the hearth below. Coming down on his right flank, his right thigh struck one of the iron fire-dogs about a hand’s-breadth below the great trochanter of the hip. And Stephen Gore felt the bone snap as a dead branch snaps across a man’s knee.