Dame Cecily was straining her ears to overhear them so Corbett simply shook his head in reply. But I am not surprised, he thought, staring across the table. Wherever there is wealth, power and the human heart you will find all sorts of crimes, misdemeanours, and sordid affairs. At the king's court high-born wives sold themselves for favours and high-ranking clerics hid in their love-nests a sweet girl or a fresh-faced boy with soft hands and plump buttocks.

At last the servants withdrew. Gurney tried to divert the conversation by asking Corbett about the progress of the war in Scotland, but Selditch, full of wine and mischief, steered the conversation back to the recent murders.

'The murder of the baker's wife,' he said challengingly, 'is a mystery that will tax even you, Sir Hugh.'

'I shall advise Sir Hugh about that and the other deaths in my own time,' Lavinius Monck warned quietly.

'Tush! Tush!' said Selditch. 'It's a macabre mystery. Here is the good wife, a pretty young thing – flaxen-haired and full-bosomed, with generous hips and a mouth like an angel's. She slips out of the house at dusk, leaving her husband behind, saddles their one and only horse and rides out along the headland. The next morning her corpse is found dangling from the old gallows.'

'Giles, stop it!' Alice commanded.

'No! No!' Selditch held up his hand. 'The mystery, Sir Hugh, is that, although the ground beneath the scaffold was wet and muddy, no hoof prints were found of a horse other than her own. And villagers saw the lady riding back to the village, though only the horse made its way all the way home to the baker's shop.'

'Is that correct?' Corbett asked.

'Yes, yes.' Monck snapped. The evidence seems to show that the baker's wife went out to the scaffold and hanged herself and then, somehow or other, rode her horse back to the edge of the village.'