The Sacred Stone
Page 13
Simon thrust his angry face near hers. ‘Because it never happened! Every villager could suddenly decide to claim that they had been freed, so why do you think that your particular lies should be heeded?’
‘You were not even here when my father was released from his bondage!’ she blazed.
Simon pushed her out of the way, making her stagger back. ‘I want no more of this nonsense, do you hear?’ he snarled. ‘If you open your mouth about it once more, I’ll have you back in chains again – and that brat of yours!’
He stalked out of the kitchen, leaving Matilda close to tears and Gillota trying to comfort her, as did the cook and one of the serving wenches. Later that day, she sat on her thin mattress and tried to think of a way out of this nightmare. Escaping again was impossible, and it seemed equally impossible to get justice at the manor court – and she knew of no way of seeking it elsewhere. She took her cloth bag that lay on a shelf on the wall and took out the strangely shaped stone, wrapped in a rag. To her, it still had an aura of power about it, which she could not describe but which she felt in her very soul. Yet it seemed unable or unwilling to translate its potency into action.
She turned it over in her hand and studied the strange marks on its surface, which meant nothing to her. Rubbing the steely-hard surface with the rag burnished it slightly, but had no other effect. Yet when she held it close to her chest, she fancied she could feel the slightest of vibrations deep inside. With a sigh, she wrapped it up again and was about to place it back in the bag when two crystal-clear images came unbidden into her mind. One was the face of Philip de Mora and the other was that of Father Thomas. They shone brightly in her mind’s eye for a moment, then merged together and faded.
Conscious that something unusual had taken place, she turned towards the door and saw that Gillota was standing there, watching her.
‘Those two men are our only hope, Mother,’ said the girl, not needing any words to know what Matilda had just experienced.
Though Walter Lupus had ignored her until now, a week later Matilda came to his attention once more. She was squatting outside the kitchen hut one morning, scouring cooking pots with wet sand and a rag, trying to remove the ever-present rust, when a pair of leather shoes suddenly came into her vision. Looking up, she saw Walter standing over her, staring down with his usual dour, inscrutable expression.
‘Come with me, woman,’ he commanded with a beckoning gesture. Reluctant and somewhat apprehensive, she rose to her feet and followed him towards the steps that led to the back door of the manor house.
‘What do you want with me now?’ she asked defiantly. ‘Have you reconsidered your bad treatment of me and my daughter?’
He ignored this and led her up into the hall of the house, which occupied most of the ground floor, apart from two small rooms partitioned off to one side. It was now early September and a fire smouldered in the large chimneyed hearth on the opposite side of the hall. Alongside, a doorway led to a narrow staircase set in the thickness of the wall, and she followed him up the stone steps, uneasy at this new departure from her routine. There were several men in the hall, merchants and tradesmen by their appearance, so she could hardly be ravished there, but going up the dark stairs was another matter.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, trying to conceal a tremor in her voice.
‘To see my wife,’ was the surprising reply, but at the top it proved to be true. The upper floor, beneath a sloping roof of stone tiles, was divided into a solar overlooking the front of the house and behind it, through a door, a larger bedchamber.
Walter stopped with his hand on this door and spoke in a low voice. ‘My wife Joan is ill and needs constant attention,’ he revealed. ‘She is cared for mostly by Alice, the housekeeper, who needs more help. You will work here now instead of the kitchens.’
He said this with an air of finality that did not invite questions, but Matilda was not satisfied. ‘Why me? I am no nursing nun. I know nothing of running a sickroom.’
‘You will fetch and carry at Alice’s direction. You need know nothing of physic!’ he snapped. ‘An apothecary comes each week from Barnstaple for that. Not that he’s of much use.’
Walter sounded bitter, and for a moment Matilda had a pang of sympathy for him, until his next words set him against her again.
‘In spite of your insolent nature, you have the glimmerings of intelligence and are preferable to those other slatterns in the kitchen. Now, go in and make yourself known to my wife and Alice, who recommended you.’
He pushed his finger through a hole in the door to lift the latch and shoved her inside before vanishing down the stairs.
A wide bed occupied much of the room, raised on a wooden plinth, instead of the usual position on the floor. Beneath covers of heavy wool and sheepskin lay Joan Lupus, staring listlessly up at the dusty rafters high above. Alice the housekeeper, a fat woman whom Matilda had known all her life, sat on a milking stool at the side of the bed, holding a pewter cup of posset, trying at intervals to tempt the lady to drink the honeyed mixture of milk and spiced wine.
‘Here’s Matilda, a nice young woman to help me look after you, my lady,’ coaxed Alice, but the pallid wraith in the bed gave no more than an uninterested nod, then turned her head away. Soon she was asleep, and Matilda took the opportunity to question the housekeeper.
‘What’s wrong with her? I saw her in church the other Sunday. She looked ill then, but not as bad as this.’
‘She is losing blood down below,’ said Alice primly. ‘She has been for months, but it’s getting worse and she’s getting weaker all the time. That apothecary is useless, so I thought you might be able to help. You have a reputation, Matilda. We sorely missed you when you went away.’
‘I’ll do my best for her. Anything is better than working as a skivvy. But I’ll not be diverted from my fight to regain my freedom!’ she added in a fierce whisper.
For several days she helped Alice, mainly in changing the soiled bed coverings, cleaning up the sick lady and fetching and carrying anything needed in the sickroom. She took turns in feeding her, trying to coax her to eat a variety of tempting morsels, but Joan Lupus seemed oblivious to their presence for much of the time, sleeping a great deal. Her husband came several times a day and tried to exchange a few gruff words with his wife, with little response.
‘Is she dying?’ he asked bluntly one day, speaking to Alice, but with Matilda standing alongside.
The housekeeper tried to reassure him, but Matilda was more honest.
‘She has lost so much blood that unless it stops she cannot survive,’ she said firmly.
Walter glowered at her. ‘That’s not what I wanted to hear,’ he said. ‘So what can be done? Shall I send for a physician? The nearest one of any substance would be in Bristol.’
Matilda shrugged. ‘I doubt any doctor could do much. Her strength needs to be built up, so that she can replace the blood she loses. And then you need a miracle to cure whatever is the root cause!’
The lord of Kentisbury turned on his heel and vanished down the stairs.
‘You are risking yourself, speaking like that,’ admonished Alice. ‘And what can we do to build her up, as you call it?’
‘Give her pig’s liver and green herbs like Good King Henry and cabbage,’ suggested Matilda. ‘An infusion of periwinkle may help to slow the bleeding. I’ll go out along the lanes with my daughter and see what I can find.’
This was partly an excuse to get out as much as possible, and also to get Gillota away from the drudgery of the kitchen hut, as she persuaded Alice that she needed her to search for the various medicinal herbs and plants that flourished in the hedgerows and woods. But the image of the priest and the former soldier was always in her mind, and she single-mindedly strove towards meeting them again.
Towards the end of that week, part of her hope was realized when she was grubbing in a ditch for wild spinach and a voice made her spin around.
‘Are you trying to dig your way out of the village?’
They sat on the verge for a while and she brought him up to date with her fortunes, such as they were.
‘At least I’ve managed to get away from slaving in the kitchen – now I need to get Gillota away from there, too.’
Philip listened thoughtfully to her tale. ‘Walter seems to have lessened his persecution of you. Perhaps he will come around to acknowledging your freedom – or at least letting it be heard properly in the manor court?’
She shook her head. ‘I doubt it – that foul man, Simon Mercator, seems to hate me, and he controls the court. He has a strong influence over Walter Lupus.’
De Mora thought for a moment. ‘The sheriff has to come twice each year for the view of frankpledge. That might be a chance to raise the matter with him and get it taken to the county court or even to the King’s court in Exeter.’
The ‘view of frankpledge’ was the six-monthly inspection by the county sheriff of the system whereby the population was divided into ‘tithings’. Each tithing was made up of all males over twelve years of age, from about ten households. All the members were held collectively responsible for the behaviour of the others and, if one committed an offence, all the rest were punished, usually by a fine.
‘A good idea, but I doubt if the steward would let me get within a hundred paces of the sheriff,’ said Matilda bitterly.
‘We’ll see when the time comes – he must be here by about Michaelmas or soon after, less than a month away.’
Matilda then told him of her idea to try to speak to Thomas the priest about her predicament. ‘Surely I can insist on making my confession,’ she said. ‘That would give me the chance to raise the subject. He seems to be a sympathetic man.’
Philip agreed with her, knowing something of the man in question. ‘He was once the clerk to the famous coroner Sir John de Wolfe, back in Richard the Lionheart’s time. He was well known for his honesty and love of justice, so maybe some of that rubbed off on to his clerk!’
They walked back to the centre of the village together, and Philip promised to think further about her problems and to see her after church next Sunday. She left him feeling much more cheerful than usual and, back in their dormitory, she took out the stone and sat looking at it with Gillota.
‘Maybe it’s working its will slowly?’ suggested her daughter.
She took it from her mother and held it tightly against her head. ‘Though I don’t feel anything special today. Maybe it has to rest, just like us.’
The rest of the week did not go so well for Matilda. She spent a lot of time trying get Joan Lupus to take the various concoctions she had made, from the herbs she had collected to potage made from meat and liver, in an effort to improve her blood.
Alice explained to Walter on one of his daily visits that Matilda had been looked on as having special skills, inherited from her mother, and he seemed vaguely content that something was being attempted to save his wife. This did not translate into any increase in friendliness towards Matilda, and she dismissed any hope that his gratitude might extend to reversing his attitude towards her bondage to the manor.
It was Simon Mercator who was the main problem, for he obviously resented the softening of Walter’s regime that held the two women in strict bondage.
‘You’ve wheedled your way out of the hard work, I see,’ he sneered at her as she passed through the hall with a bundle of clean clothing for the invalid. ‘It won’t last, I assure you. You’ll be back scouring pots and chopping firewood before long.’
At every opportunity he scolded her and made threatening remarks about her, but worst of all he began badgering Gillota when her mother was occupied upstairs. The girl came to her one day, weeping because Simon had cornered her behind the kitchen shed and kissed her roughly while he groped his hands over her breasts and bottom. Gillota had broken away and run off, leaving the steward laughing at her distress. Infuriated, Matilda went running to seek out Simon, unsure what she was going to do when she found him, but it came to nothing, as he was nowhere to be found. Then she went looking for Walter Lupus, but again he was away, said by the stablemen to have ridden to Ilfracombe.
Frustrated, she went back to Gillota, who was being comforted by the cook, who sounded as if she was ready to use her biggest knife on the steward if he crossed her path.
‘He’s well known to have molested several of the girls in the village since he arrived,’ she said indignantly. ‘In a few months there will already be two babies who could call him father!’
According to her, the village gossip claimed that he had had a wife where he lived in Taunton, before coming to Kentisbury, but that she had run away from him.
Gillota recovered rapidly but vowed to keep well out of his way in future, if that was possible. Once she had settled down and was being kept company by two of the other girls, Matilda resolved that the time had come for resolute action, if she was to save her daughter from more harassment and eventual shame.
As soon as the lady of the manor was made comfortable for the night and Alice had said that Matilda could go, she threw a shawl over her kirtle and went out into the evening twilight. The first chill of autumn was in the air as she hurried down to the centre of the village and pushed open the gate into the churchyard. Passing the porch, she carried on along the path to the small house on the further side of the yew-encircled graveyard.
The parsonage was little bigger than the cottages in the village, but it had two rooms under the steep thatched roof. Summoning up her courage, she knocked on the frayed boards of the front door. Getting no answer, she knocked again several times, with the same lack of response. Feeling deflated after her impulsive gesture, she turned away from the door and slowly made her way back towards the gate. However, just as she was level with the porch again, she heard some coughing from inside the church and hurried into the nave to find their priest brushing away with a birch besom at some loose leaves on the hard floor.
He greeted her cordially, leaning on his brush. ‘Hello, my child! The autumn has started early this year. These leaves are down already.’
‘I am Matilda Claper, father,’ she answered. ‘I work at the manor house, more’s the pity.’
The small priest looked at her quizzically. ‘That’s an unusual introduction, at least. Tell me more about it.’
She felt his soft brown eyes on her and knew instinctively that here was a man with compassion in his heart. ‘Sir, I came to ask if you would hear my confession – and the first thing I would have to confess is that it was but an excuse to seek your advice.’
Thomas de Peyne smiled, his old face lighting up so that he looked decades younger. ‘You don’t need an excuse for that, daughter! That’s what parsons are for – or should be!’
He dropped his brush and led her to the stone shelf around the wall, sitting down and motioning her to perch beside him.
‘Tell me your troubles, Matilda. I have seen you and your daughter at Mass but know nothing of you.’
Feeling secure with this mild-mannered man, she explained her whole predicament from start to finish. At the end she said, ‘They will not allow me to be heard at the court-baron and I doubt I can get the sheriff to listen to me when he comes for his view of frankpledge. Now this vile behaviour of the steward towards my daughter makes it all the more urgent that we leave this village.’
Thomas listened gravely to all she said and now sat with his chin in his hand, considering the problem.
‘It is true that this is not a happy manor, compared with most I have known,’ he conceded. ‘There is little I can do about that, being an outsider who is here only on sufferance until a new priest is appointed. I will speak to Walter Lupus, but from past experience he is not a man who accepts any view but his own.’
She nodded, fearful that in spite of her hopes this man would also side with those who dominated the manor. ‘But at the time, most of the village heard about it and accepted it,’ she pleaded. ‘If there was a genuine hearing before a jury, surely they must confirm that?’
‘Was there no document of manumission provided, as there should have been?’ asked the priest.
‘I don’t know. My father never showed me one, but what would be the point? No one except the priest could read or write.’
The prebendary pondered this for a moment. ‘There should always be a document of manumission, properly witnessed by one or preferably two people. As those in holy orders are usually the only literate ones, the witnesses are usually priests. Then the document should be confirmed by the county court. Do you recall your father ever going down to Exeter for that purpose?’
Matilda shook her head. ‘The furthest he ever went in his whole life was Combe Martin, a few miles away.’
‘The priest who was here before me must have been involved,’ he murmured. ‘Father Peter, God rest him. But he left no parchments behind. This house was bare of anything but a few sticks of furniture.’
‘Perhaps Walter Lupus took them – maybe he destroyed them?’ suggested Matilda, but Thomas shook his head.
‘I doubt that, because any document should have gone to Exeter for ratification, as I said.’
He stood up and extended a hand to politely raise up the woman from the bench. ‘I have to go to Exeter on the Monday after the next Sabbath, so I will make enquiries, as I still have good friends there. I will be back in time for the following Sunday, in case I have any news of this matter.’
Matilda dropped to her knees and bowed her head before this good man, who made the sign of the cross over her as he blessed her.
‘Come to me at any time for advice – or for that confession you mentioned,’ he said with a grin.