Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

Robin descended the stairwell. The cellar was dank, the walls slimy stone. Slivers of light from cracks between the floorboards added to the dungeon air. Millpond water trickled through the foundation and made a gutter of mud. Stripes of flour matched the cracks overhead.

A torch of folded beech bark was stuck in the mud. Robin Hood picked it up, fanned it brighter. He flinched as something flittered overhead like an errant autumn leaf, then skittered up the stairway. A bat in the daytime: a sure sign of death.

By the light of the new-broken hole in the floorboards and the torch, Robin traced the millworks and the miller’s unfortunate path.

Outside, Robin had seen, was a spring-fed millpond shored by a stone-and-mud dike. Alongside the building, nestled in a pit, was a mill wheel ten feet high. A wooden sluice channeled water that overshot the wheel and filled its deep buckets, so both the force and weight of the water turned the wheel. The millshaft passed through the stone wall and ended in an oaken crown wheel with cogged teeth like a whale’s jaw. This vertical wheel, or gear, turned a matching horizontal gear. Its post rose through the ceiling and turned a grooved millstone of granite. Atop that sat a stationary stone surmounted by a hopper.

The miller had only to lean out the window and open the sluice gate to start all these shafts and wheels spinning, and thus the millstones grinding. He filled the hopper with grain, where it settled between the millstones and was sheared to flour that trickled out the grooves onto a catchboard. The miller swept the flour into sacks. For his services, he got a sixteenth of the flour, while the owner, the lord of the manor, got two sixteenths. Thus millers tended to be the second-richest men in the community.

This miller had valued his money over his mill.

Hosea of Long Valley Screed had been bald and near-toothless, with the paunch of a rich man. His weight had been his undoing, it seemed. A rotten floorboard had shattered and dropped him into the cellar. Half-impaled on the horizontal gear, one fat knee had jammed where the gears closed. Under the terrible power of the millwheel, wooden teeth had rent skin and flesh, then snapped.

Trapped, Hosea had bled to death. In agony, to judge by the lines etched in his face. He lay propped against the descending post, arms outspread. Blood had spattered gears and posts and miller. Its coppery stink compounded the fug of mud and moss.

Spooked, the outlaw wondered that the torch stayed lit: It should extinguish near a corpse. Robin crossed himself and muttered the Lord’s Prayer to quiet the miller’s soul.

“Rob?”

“H-here, Marian.”

His wife tripped down the stairs, ducking to admit her back quiver. “They hunt hard money. They’re not after us.” Ofttimes, sheriffs or barons or forest rangers imposed bounties on Robin’s outlaws, usually two pounds, same as for a wolf’s head. The church always rescinded the bounty, yet rumours persisted and inflated it to ten pounds, fifty, five hundred.

Marian assessed the scene. “The price of sloth, poor man.”

“Aye. He neglected his mill and it killed him.”

“And in dying, killed the mill.” Marian wrinkled her nose, sniffed at the man’s face. “Drunk, too. That helped. Though he smells...”

“Like a brewery?”

“No. Like a vineyard. Where would a miller get wine this time of year?”

Robin nodded upwards. “I dislike that floorboard.”

“Eh?”

He raised the torch to examine the splintery ends of the plank framing the hole. Snapped off clean against the joists, the boards were punky gray along the bottom from rot, but the middles were pale yellow. The outlaw pulled out his Irish knife and tapped. “That heart is sound as Little John’s arm. It shouldn’t have broken.”

“He had a heavy tread.”

“No. I could rear a war-horse atop oak this thick.” Handing Marian the torch, he picked up fragments of floorboard, moved under the square hole for light, and fitted them together like a puzzle.

“A small horse, perhaps,” offered Marian. “Maybe he shouldered a hundredweight of grain while standing in the wrong spot?”

More head-shaking. The outlaw plucked something feathery from a splintered edge. “Fibers. A rope was wrapped around this board. But that wouldn’t break it even if someone yanked hard.”

“Someone down here?”

“Where else?” Robin took the torch, prowled the cellar floor. Grit clung to his deerhide boots. The gutter of mud and blood marred the middle, but the rest of the floor was sand stained dark by oak-leaf tannin, striped light by flour. Half-hunched, Robin searched, then grunted. Marian joined him.

Twin footprints faced a corner. Robin dabbed at a white jot in one heelprint. “Bat dung. Fresh, just this morning. And the edges of the footprints are still sharp.”

Marian peered around her husband’s shoulder. “Why face the corner?”

“There’s a woman’s question,” Robin jibed. He leaned over the footprints and sniffed in the corner like a hound. “He drained his bladder.”

“Oh.” Marian rubbed her nose. “So someone was down here.”