I hurry out and pass Kate on the stairs. She mutters a blessing to ward off the evil of having passed on the stairs, and adds darkly, “I reckon as t’master was right,” before stamping off up the stairs. I gather up my skirts and run down to the gatehouse.
I have watched plenty of harsh physical assaults in my sixteen years of life, on both people and animals. You can’t avoid it, can you, what with hunting and bear-baiting and cock-fighting and dog-fighting and slaughtering the pig for winter, not to mention attacks by Scots and disagreements between neighbours. There are burnings and hangings too, with their smells of blood and smoke and rank panic lingering long after. Violence is part of life, and one can do nothing about it. Perhaps the disgust and horror I feel is a sign of my own weakness.
I sometimes wonder about you, reader of my story, my invisible friend, separate from me in time and place. Are you gentle or brutalised? Do you watch the burnings and bear-baitings, or do you stay at home?
George and Martinus have stayed at home. I can see them on the battlements now, watching and pointing, as I run down the hill towards the barmkin. I decide, after all, against taking the horses. Saddling up will take too long, and we would be more conspicuous on horseback. I run down the valley behind the backs of the death hunt, mostly men on foot as far as I can see at this distance. I take the middle way up the Pike, not the screes down which the Scots came, nor the usual well-trodden path we take to go on watch, but a steep, less used path which approaches the lookout post from behind. As soon as I arrive I know that something has gone badly wrong. There is no sign of James. I look round and call him. He takes his lookout duties seriously and would be unlikely to forget. I move along the summit of the Pike, to the steep drop above the screes. I can see up the valley towards Mere Point, and down the valley towards the homesteaders’ dwellings, almost as far as the village of Barrowbeck itself. On this high promontory the sea is on three sides of me. Our own tower is visible on the low knoll at the far side of the valley. James’s farmhouse is the first dwelling to the north-east of ours.
I climb into the lower branches of a giant yew tree which overhangs the scree, filled with an overwhelming premonition of disaster, and crane my neck. The mist is clearing now, shifting into small cloudlets in the clumps of tall grass over the cowpats. I can make out the tiny figures of Father, William and Jonah, with two new henchmen who joined us last Lady Day. They are emerging now from James’s farmhouse. I wonder if James might already be in hiding. Moments later I know the worst. William goes round the back and emerges dragging James by the hair.
I see then that other figures are appearing in the valley, gathering in the area around James’s house. My father is gesturing, giving out instructions. A stake is being hammered into the ground with James’s own fence hammer. Brushwood is being fetched from his own outbuilding.
I scramble from the tree and start to run along the summit of the Pike, then realise it will take too long. If Robert went down the screes, then so can I. I push my way through the bushes and confront the precipice of pebbles, then settle my feet in front of me, and go.
It is terrifying, but not as terrifying as the scene below. As the stones start to roar and tumble with me, I lose my footing and go thudding along on my shoulder and hip, skinning my elbow, bombarded about the face and arms by pebbles. Far below, a high-pitched screaming has begun. It is a sound I remember well. I used to lie in my bed at night when I was small and listen to it echoing up the valley from Low Back Farm. Before I reach the bottom of the scree, I can smell the smoke.
Chapter 17
I arrive at the bottom with my stockings torn, my kirtle ridden up round my ears and my shoes lost on the way, but if it weren’t for the speed at which I arrived, I think the crowd might not have noticed me, they are so engrossed. How quickly word has travelled. Forty or more surround the stake. James, stripped almost naked, is tied to it, struggling furiously. A low, angry grunting comes from his lips now, as he battles with the ropes. His teeth are bared in an awful grimace, but his mouth looks soft and human, too wet to burn.
“Stop!” I scream. “Are you mad? He isn’t a heretic!”
My father comes up and puts his arm round me. I feel repulsed. I can only think of this hand hitting Verity, this hand trying to set fire to James. I realise that in the space of a moment some things have changed for ever. Some things that – what? Make it easier to leave? I push the thought away. There is no time for that, no time for the sort of weakness which Robert causes in my mind and limbs.
My father says, “Now now, Beatrice. What a state you’re in. Calm down. It’s treason for this lad to have defied his liege lord.”
“What?” I am incredulous. “That’s rubbish, Father. You’re not his liege lord. He’s a free man, with his own land. I think you’ve gone mad. Anyway, even if it were treason, you only burn women for that, not men. You hang men. Anyone knows that. Stop. Please stop.”
My father clucks his tongue in exasperation. “Beatrice, the laws are there for us to interpret. You’re a dutiful daughter, and if you prefer him to hang, then I would normally allow it, but I think swift justice is called for on this occasion. Now let’s have no more of this!”
The brushwood around James’s feet is not properly caught yet. Sparks like tiny insects run to and fro along the green twigs. I turn away from my father and barge through the crowd and into the pyre, scattering brushwood right and left. The crowd stands in startled silence for a moment, then mutters and moves towards me. I wrench at the knots round James’s middle, which attach him to the stake. There is a sort of huffing noise behind me, something strange, not like anything I have ever heard before. I half turn, and realise, in perhaps the most chilling moment of my life, that it is the sound of the crowd, rushing at me.
They grab me. I am too shocked to resist. I find myself pulled to and fro between muscular, hostile hands. “He has bewitched her too!” someone shrieks. “Tie her! Tie her!” I wrench my head round to see the shrieker. It is Tilly Turner, whose house I have been helping rebuild.
“Heee! Heee!” She seems completely mad, and the madness is spreading to others. Mouths are stretched wide with hatred. Eyes are narrowed and vicious. For a moment I almost grasp some truth – something to do with poverty – then Father is elbowing his way to me and it is gone.
“That’s enough!” he bellows. He shoves people out of the way and grabs me by the arm. “Get to the tower, girl.” He shakes me. The crowd backs off and titters. I cannot tell if he is drunk but his look is suddenly one I can remember from long ago, from sitting on his knee as a small child by another fire, before the ale brought him to his knees and to this one.
I am shaking. My bruises and grazes from coming down the scree are hurting, and I have new scratches and pulled muscles from this rough handling. I shrug free of him, and say, “Father, I’m going to finish untying James.” James is rocking to and fro, trying to free himself. I move carefully back among the brushwood and once again try to undo the knots.
“Let’s be done with this nonsense,” someone calls out.
“Aye, we’re wasting time.”
“Get that fire lit again.”
There are some voices of dissent, though, and I realise that not everyone favours this burning. I call over my shoulder, “Help me. Someone come and help me.” Suddenly Leo’s wife, Sanctity Wilson, nine months pregnant, is next to me, struggling with the knots that tie James’s hands behind him.
“They’re a right bugger on your nails, these,” she says to me, and grins. Since neither of us has nails to speak of, after all the housebuilding, I take her remark to be a slightly satirical sign of friendship, a way of saying that I may be that stuck-up Beatrice from the tower, but on this occasion, as far as she is concerned, I may consider myself one of them.
James presses back against the stake to make it easier for me to undo the ropes. I tell him, “We’ll have you free in a minute.” I can feel the warmth round my own ankles from the extinguished sticks, and am suddenly over
come by the terrible human truth of burning, that flesh fries and blood boils. My own nails bend as I fumble faster, trying to disentangle the complicated knots. I am terrified by the thought that the fire might reignite of its own accord, and surge up my skirts and engulf me. One of the knots is undone now. I pull part of the rope loose, but my father suddenly seizes me by the shoulders and drags me backwards, off my feet.
“You are an undutiful daughter, Beatrice,” he shouts, and swings his hand at me.
I duck, and struggle to regain my footing. “And you, sir, are a highway robber,” I stammer. His hand stays where it is. We look into each other’s eyes. I give a slight nod. I feel changed, freed from something, grown-up perhaps, grown into myself.
“Would you truly betray your father?” he asks in disbelief.
I do not know, and am not called on to reply, because there is a commotion at the edge of the crowd now, and Martinus and George are there, pushing people aside. Their faces are contorted with disgust. At the same moment Parson Becker’s horse appears out of the woods beyond the tower, galloping flat out.
John jumps off his horse before it stops, and Universe goes cantering on, propelled by his own speed. I see to my astonishment that our priest has a bullwhip in his hand. Without a word, he sets about the crowd with it. He is more frightening than anything I have ever seen, including the Scots.
The homesteaders back away, screaming. He does not stop until they are scattered over a large area of the valley floor. My father is stepping back and forth as though crazed. He raises his fist, then subsides, looking merely puzzled. At last John lets the whip coil in on itself at his feet. His face is shining with sweat. He looks round and says, “My friends, I have lost patience with you.” I think we had rather come to that conclusion ourselves.
After a moment in which we all wait to see what he will do next, he adds, “What is the matter with you all? Truly, what is the matter with you? Do I waste my breath Sunday after Sunday?” then to Tilly Turner, “Untie James.”
James is now trying to untie himself, but his hands are shaking so much that he cannot make much headway. He looks on the verge of passing out. Tilly and I untie him, avoiding each other’s eyes. John Becker catches him as he falls among the sharp branches. “Come on, James,” he says. “I think you and Verity had better stay with me while Cedric patches you both up.” He whistles, and Universe comes trotting through the crowd as it disperses along the valley.
Later that day Mother and I drive Verity and James to Wraithwaite Parsonage in the carretta pulled by Saint Hilda. They make a bedraggled pair, jolting together painfully as our little cart lurches along the bumpy tracks. Verity’s face is mottled and swollen. Her lips are like cooked beetroot, and both her eyes are blackened. Her shoulder was badly dislocated and has been reset and bound up by Cedric. She keeps weeping in bouts of delayed shock, and can scarcely stand unaided. James has now fallen completely silent. I remember him like this as a child. He will not allow anyone to tend his bruises and grazes. John puts him to bed in the small room behind the hearth, because it has a lock on the door, and he believes that James needs this extra feeling of security just now. Mother stays with Verity in the austere, wood-panelled guestroom upstairs. As I am leaving, John takes my hands and says, “We need to speak together.” I feel a leap of fright in my throat, then realise that he can’t possibly know about Robert. I nod, abruptly light-hearted. Yes, when all this is over, we can sit down and talk. It will be wonderful, like the old days in the classroom, when anything could be discussed and no problems were insoluble.
Through the hot days of late July, and into August, Verity does not return. I miss her. I feel I have lost her, and that it is my own fault. I did not appreciate her when I had her. I neglected her by concentrating on Robert.
I try to reverse that. I stay away from Robert and spend more time at Wraithwaite Parsonage. It is clear that John is talking to Verity and James about their futures, and trying to assess whether love as well as convenience is involved in Verity’s plan. He will not allow my father over the threshold. He has taken Mother Bain on as his housekeeper. Cedric is often there too. He seems to be surrounding himself with magic.
My father is angry all the time now. He is sometimes away for nights on end, roaming, we assume, to more distant highways, and though we dread to think what he is doing, his absence is a relief. When he is home, he accuses us of all manner of disloyalties. He accused George and Martinus of treason against him, and dismissed them without pay. He accused me of making a fool of him in front of the homesteaders. He accused my mother of undermining his authority by riding over to fetch the priest on the day of the burning, as indeed she did. She, in her turn, treats him with contempt.
As the heat and humidity build up, Robert is frequently angry too. This English summer is too hot for him. He is bored, and I can see he is miserable that I stay away so much. When I do go, he is so beautiful and well-looking, yet so foreign, that it feels more frightening and wrong than ever. His strength returns, and as I see what he has become, I realise how close to death he must have been before. We lie by the beck and talk, and I feel closer to him than I do to what remains of my own family. We edge closer and closer to meaning too much to each other, so that I am afraid of the moment when a parting will become unbearable. We touch more and more, kiss cheeks and hair and foreheads at any excuse, become shy of each other’s bodies in a way that I was not shy of his when I nursed him.
In mid August, harvest time, the summons comes to prepare to join the border lords’ retributive raid on Scotland. I think we had all hoped that it would be quietly forgotten. Certainly no one has mentioned it for weeks, through the long, sultry hours of mowing, raking, rick-building and planting for winter, when these practical matters of life have taken our minds right away from practical prospects of death.
We take on Tilly Turner to work in the dairy. Mother has vowed to knock some sense into her if it kills them both. We are all too hot, and short of patience, much of the time. Kate and Germaine gossip for hours sprawled on the kitchen settle in the evenings, drinking ale and sweating with the dying heat of the cooking fire on top of the heat of the day. When the call comes for all able-bodied men to prepare to march against the Scots, their talk takes on a new, gloomier tone. Although Germaine puts a good face on it and says what is expected of her, conventional declarations about hoping our men beat the living daylights out of the Scots, I sense real dread in her, an uncontrollable fear that Gerald might not come back.
One hot, deep day with thunder threatening, I take the familiar path through the forest. The tracks are very overgrown now, after all the sun and rain. Pushing through them is increasingly difficult. The blackberries and hazelnuts are ripening profusely in this lost part of the woods. Soon people will come here, hacking through the brambles and undergrowth, to stock up for winter. It is time for Robert to go.
He is not at the cottage when I arrive. He is often out trapping in the woods, so I settle down to wait. As always, I wonder if this time he has gone for good, and I face the fact that one day he will have gone for good. The thought fills me with despair.
It is so hot that my clothes are sticking to my back. I loosen my bodice and walk to the beck, just out of sight of the cottage. I lie down on the cool moss and damp stones, and close my eyes.
“Beatrice!”
I must have been dozing. The warm, fuddled moment of relief turns to icy dismay.
“John…”
John Becker emerges from the trees. He is wearing loose, light, peasant’s clothing, his linen shirt open at the neck. I am speechless.
“How nice to see you, Beatrice. I hadn’t expected to meet anyone in such a remote part of the woods.”
“I…”
“Have you just been walking here?”
“Yes…”
“I find that walking in the woods helps me think clearly. Do you find that?”
“Yes, I…”
There is a rustling of twigs. I have time enough to
feel sick with dread, seconds in which my mind races to find a way to warn Robert to stay back, be silent, before an elegant figure emerges from the greenery like some sort of nymph. “We are here to see how the cobnuts are ripening,” says Germaine, her dainty face scarlet with heat. “Are we not, mistress?”
I nod. I feel faint. I sit down on a fallen tree trunk.
“It does look like a good harvest.” John glances round at the laden hazel trees with their delicately fringed nuts in great, tight clusters. He reaches up and touches some which hang near his face. “Not quite ready yet, I think.”
Germaine looks at them critically. “Nay sir, you’re right. We shall have to return another day, I daresay.”
He smiles at us. “Well, it’s good to see you.”
Germaine drops him a curtsey, by way of dismissal, and with a last look at me, John leaves. For a while we can hear his progress through the woods. It seems infinitely appealing that he is so noisy, that here is someone who doesn’t need to be silent and creep about.
“He means you. He means it’s good to see you.” Germaine leans against a tree trunk and gazes at me. “You could have that one if you wanted.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Germaine, for heaven’s sake…”
“Quite.” She is laughing.
I stand up, but find that my legs are still too weak with fright to hold me, and sit back down with a bump.
“Beatrice, my dear.” Germaine crosses to me and kisses my cheek. “I’ll be off now, and leave you to it. I never thought you had it in you. Snibbed by a Scot, lady. I can forgive you a lot for such unsurpassed indiscretion.” She swings round, her skirts missing the briars in a way that mine would not have, and tramps away through the forest, laughing.
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