by Lesley Lodge
‘What? That’s not…’ Shocked, Wayland paused for a moment.
Carter looked straight at him. ‘Oh yes, he said, ‘I know. The wife. The little woman at home. You still love her. But wait a moment. Isn’t she dead?’
Wayland’s mouth dropped open. His rage surged up again. He launched himself at Carter and they crashed to the ground. Years of manual work with molten iron had given Wayland’s arms great strength but Carter’s arms were longer and he was able to fight back while keeping his face further away. He spat, too, momentarily blinding Wayland with phlegm. Seizing his advantage, he held off Wayland with one hand while with the other he pulled a short dagger from his breeches. He brought its serrated blade up, closer and closer towards Wayland’s neck, grunting all the while with effort and triumph.
Wayland heard a loud howl and felt his face hit by shards of something. Carter’s grip had gone limp and Wayland was able to pull back and wipe his eyes clear. As the room came back into focus, he saw that Carter was lying on the floor, his head bleeding. Lumps of broken pot lay around him. The woman was still holding the remnants of the pot’s handles. They both looked down at Carter. He lay unconscious on the floor, his bottom exposed, the breeches around his knees again. The woman stepped forward and kicked at Carter’s inert form.
‘I think he’s out, for now,’ said Wayland, ‘thanks to you!’
‘And some thanks due to you, I think, that I am not out!’ she said smiling at Wayland, ‘Well, I’m Alice. And you are?’
‘Wayland.’ he said, momentarily lost for more words.
‘I am Tom the weaver’s widow,’ she continued, ‘and this is my home.’ She waited and when Wayland said nothing she smiled again. He thought she looked very different when she smiled. But she would of course, since the danger had passed. ‘So, my question now, I suppose, is,’ she said, ‘who is Wayland? I mean, I take it that you’re not from Colchester. Where are you from? And what are you?’
‘Please excuse my manners,’ he said, ‘I’m a blacksmith. My smithy is for horses not weapons though – when I’ve a say in it. Which, come to think of it, has not been the case at all since I’ve been caught up here in this damned siege.’ He thought then that perhaps he was becoming too garrulous, so he stopped. He only realised much later that he’d not really explained anything nor mentioned what had first set him on the road that had led to Colchester: Rebecca and the search for the boy’s killer.
Alice brought a cloth and wiped his face. As she took the cloth to put it down, he saw her kick Carter again as she passed. Carter twitched a little but he didn’t return to consciousness. Wayland and Alice gazed at each other, seemingly frozen in time. Neither of them noticed Alun walk in through the broken door until he spoke. ‘Wayland! Here you are. You must come back now.’ Alun stared around the room. ‘Oh no,’ he said, taking in Carter’s exposed nether parts, ‘you’ve been rescuing maidens and getting yourself into trouble again.’
He saw then the blood seeping from Carter’s head wound. ‘Oh, Lord!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Wayland, ‘or at least, it’s not as bad as you might think. He’s not dead.’
Alice kicked Carter again to see him twitch and prove the point.
‘Well, I suppose that’s something. But you’re lucky I’ve found you first,’ Alun said, ‘you’ve made enough noise between you to raise all the King’s men. Come now and be quick, before we all get caught.’
‘You can’t leave that here,’ said Alice, pointing at Carter.
‘No, that’s for sure,’ said Wayland, ‘and we shall not.’
‘It’s “we” now, is it?’ said Alun with a sigh. But he bent down with Wayland and they each took one of Carter’s legs. They dragged him on his back out through the doorway and along past six or seven houses. Then they pushed him into the drainage gulley beside the street.
‘Move his head,’ said Alun, ‘or he’ll drown in piss when folks wake and empty out their pisspots.’
They lifted his head onto the side walkway. Wayland checked Carter’s chest quickly for its heartbeat and breathing movement. ‘He’ll wake. Not that I give one damnation in hell, but I do mind about such a commotion as his death could cause.’
‘What about the commotion he’ll cause when he tells?’ said Alun.
‘Tells what? That I stopped him raping a town resident. And that after Sir Charles gave his word to the people and to Colchester’s finest that not a single town resident would be touched? Think about it. His fellow officers will likely put it all – his appearance and his night out – down to drink. And he’ll likely let them.’
‘Maybe,’ said Alun, doubtful, ‘but he’ll still be mad as hell with you.’
‘Let him,’ said Wayland, ‘I’m more than a little mad with him. Now wait here a moment.’ Wayland went back to Alice’s house. He knocked on the broken doorframe. She beckoned him in and he went over to her. ‘I must leave, it seems.’
She nodded, looking him in the eyes. ‘My thanks again,’ she said.
He started to reach out to touch her hand but held back suddenly and ended up patting her elbow.
‘Happen I’ll be back,’ he paused before continuing, ‘else you can find me, some time, either in the smithy or else in the baker’s place. That was the baker who came in, see, he’s a friend of mine.’
She nodded but said nothing.
‘Here,’ he said, stepping outside and pulling the bulk of the splintered door upright and over to the open doorway, ‘If I prop this against the door frame, it’ll do till dawn. I’ll see to it that it’s fixed in the morning. Folk might talk if I’m seen fixing it now.’
He went back to Alun and they made their way back to their meagre lodgings. Alun was clearly curious about Wayland’s actions but he got little explanation. ‘I heard the screams. I went; it seemed obvious what needed to be done.’ was all Wayland said.
‘The gallant smith rescues another maiden,’ Alun said, with a sing–song tone, ‘despite the trouble the last one got him into…’
He stopped short, catching a glower from Wayland.
‘The thing is,’ said Wayland, later, as they parted, ‘the more important thing is that I needed him – Carter – alive. I’ve still had no answer from him on what he knows about Rebecca.’
‘If anything,’ said Alun.
‘Aye, if anything. But I will find out.’
‘If he doesn’t have you killed or jailed first.’
23.
Wayland collected a few tools and took Jonathan round to Alice’s place the next day. He had thought at first that the lad might be curious as to how he’d come to meet a woman overnight. He didn’t tell him anything about it though. He always had at the back of his mind the hope that maybe one day there’d be something so compelling that Jonathan would want to know about so much that he’d start talking again in order to get an answer. But when he broached their mission with Jonathan the boy simply nodded.
Alice was up and ready when they arrived. Wayland noticed that she was wearing a different dress and her hair was neatly pinned under a plain bonnet. He thought he could smell rosewater on her hair. She welcomed Jonathan when Wayland introduced him and offered him a small, plain oatcake, apologising that she’d nothing else to give him. She raised an eyebrow when the boy simply nodded and smiled. Wayland sent him off to look a couple of streets away for some broken pieces of wood he’d spied the day before. Then he thanked her on Jonathan’s behalf, explaining that his son hadn’t spoken since his mother’s death.
‘Ah.’ she said simply. Neither of them mentioned the previous night’s events and Wayland began preparing the door for repair by propping it into place. He patched it up, hammering on the pieces of wood that Jonathan brought back. When he and the boy went to leave, she held his gaze for a moment.
‘If,’ he said, ‘I mean, well, suppose, if the door doesn’t hold for any reason – though it
should be firm enough – but if not, well, you can find me, like I said, most times at the smithy.’
She smiled. She looked at the solid patchwork on the door, held in place as it was by large iron nails. ‘I wager it’ll hold,’ she said, ‘and I thank you both.’
‘But still…’ he looked straight into her eyes. Green, he noted. He let his words hang there a moment. Then he turned and left.
Wayland thought of Alice many times over the next three days, but she didn’t turn up at the smithy and the king’s men kept him busy with more and more demands for weapon repairs and gave him no opportunity to pass by her house. Despite the huge finds of supplies at the Hythe quay, the situation seemed to have eased very little for the ordinary townspeople. The king’s men had commandeered all the sacks and, although there had been some nominal small distributions via the town’s bailiffs, Wayland was aware that very little food had reached most citizens. His own position was somewhere between the adequate food stocks enjoyed by the officers and the desperate scarcities inflicted on the majority. He was given – at irregular intervals it’s true – a basic allowance of strips of dried meat, since money payments were rapidly being replaced in the town by bartering due to the distorted values of food under siege. Thanks to Alun, Wayland also had access to the crusty bits of bread left on the oven walls after each morning’s baking. Such morsels were actually the best parts of the loaves made now. He knew that Alun was reduced to bulking up the bread mix with the addition of sweepings of flour and dust of doubtful nutritional value. Wayland didn’t like to consider how much was dust compared with how much was flour, but he knew such sweepings tended to sink to the middle of the dough mix. Now, whenever he thought as he worked the molten iron and whenever he tossed and turned on his rough pallet, hoping to sleep, two further issues tended to crowd his mind, vying with his morbid thoughts of Rebecca: Carter and the matter of what he knew or didn’t know and Alice and whether or how he could take her some scraps of food.
At first, after his fight with Carter, he’d worried, too, despite his own bold talk, that Alun’s warning was right, that the man would have worked his boasted contacts, pulled strings to make trouble for Wayland with the king’s men. When nothing seemed to come of it, though, he let go of that worry and so his other worries loomed larger. On the fourth day after his fight, however, there were developments, albeit slight, on both counts. He overheard one of the king’s men mention that Carter was lying up in the army’s makeshift injury room. He was said to be recovering from some accident he’d had with a horse. The first problem was that in this building there were, of course, several other wounded king’s men being treated for musket or canon shot. There seemed to be no obvious way he could get at Carter.
That same day, he had a large job lot of weapons to repair, by personal order of Sir Charles Lucas and with it a promise of ‘a goodly meal when you’re done with it.’ He worked away at his furnace with rather more enthusiasm than was his wont, finishing only after dark. His reward duly arrived, but Wayland was disappointed to find that he still couldn’t leave the smithy without the company of a guard. He sent Jonathan instead to Alice, with a parcel comprising nearly all of the meat he’d been given plus a couple of chunks of bread. There was of course no point in quizzing the boy on his return. Wayland’s simple ‘All right?’ to him had elicited a nod though.
A couple of days later the distraction of a messenger from Fairfax to the Royalist commanders did provide Wayland with the opportunity he’d been waiting for. He slipped out of the smithy while the king’s men were focused on orders to increase the security around the city walls, in case perhaps the messenger was intended only as a ruse and a distraction and some kind of frontal attack was actually planned. Wayland’s first action was to check that Carter was still billeted in the same place. A quick glimpse through the open door as Wayland strode by the building told him that the man was still poorly but probably on the mend. Another few days and maybe he would be out.
There was still a lot of noise coming from the direction of the city walls, so he decided he would risk the walk to Alice’s house. He was pleased when he reached her street to see that the repairs to her door had held. He hesitated a moment, then knocked.
‘Who is it?’ Her voice came through the closed door. She sounded cautious but not, he thought, fearful.
‘’Tis I, Wayland, the smith.’ he said. The door opened, and she beckoned him in.
‘Thank you kindly, Blacksmith Wayland, for the food.’
‘I’ve more,’ he said, fumbling for the package he’d concealed in his shirt, ‘but it’s not much.’ He looked at her, but her gaze was only for the food. She tore open the leaves he’d wrapped the meat. He noticed, as she ate, that her teeth were white and strong.
‘The leaves,’ she said, ‘what are they?’
‘Dandelion. They would have a yellow flower. Doubtless you will have seen them in meadows, in happier days. You can eat them.’
She did so quickly then fetched a jug of small beer and they both drank a little. ‘I must thank you again,’ she said, ‘but I hope you don’t…’
‘I’m not looking for anything more.’ he said, quickly, but even as he said it he knew he looked directly at her in a way that he’d not be looking at a man. He turned away. ‘I’d best be off then.’ he said, not moving.
There was a pause as neither of them made a move nor spoke. Then Wayland moved towards the door. She stepped quickly into his path, kissed him briefly on the lips – and pushed him gently out.
‘I’m my own man in life,’ he said, ‘I’m not tied to any master. But right now, though, I am a tied man in some respects, while this siege lasts. Most times I can’t come and go as I please. And that bothers me, especially now because, you see, I can’t promise to return on any one specific day.’
‘The smithy,’ she said, ‘you say I can find you there?’
‘Yes, it’s the same smithy as the town smith had.’ he said and went.
That night was the first night Wayland had slept through without waking from his nightmares with a jolt and in a sweat. He thought it odd because God knew that with no sign of the siege breaking his situation was desperate and getting worse. And he felt that he was no closer yet to achieving any revenge for Rebecca.
24.
Four days later Alice did turn up at the smithy. Wayland had sent a couple more small wraps of food since he’d spoken with her at her house and his first thought was that she’d come to thank him. He was pleased that she’d made the effort.
‘I’ve tried a couple of times to see you,’ she said, ‘but your man here –’ she pointed at the officer slouched, listless, picking at his boots by the door, ‘stopped me. But then the baker told me he’s eased up a little.’
‘He’s no man of mine,’ Wayland replied and then, more quietly and indicating the officer, ‘he’s Sir Charles Lucas’s man.’
‘They’re confining you for hitting an officer? I’m sorry,’ she said, then, quickly, also in a lower voice, ‘I mean, you know, I’m not sorry you hit him, though.’
Wayland turned to look at his guard. The man still seemed uninterested but Wayland never did like the thought of others overhearing his personal conversations. ‘No, it’s not quite like that. But to explain… well, there is a room upstairs,’ he said, ‘now don’t misunderstand me. What I mean is, it’s best for us to talk freely without Sir Charles and all knowing our business.’
Alice glanced down at the floor then turned to face him directly. ‘I believe you,’ she said, ‘and I believe I can trust you.’
He climbed ahead of her, up the few steps into the low–ceiling loft room that served as the sleeping area for himself and sometimes the boy. Once she was in, he pulled close the hinge–less door and plumped up the folded bedding to form a rough seat. He explained about the guard and the reason for it. They talked for near on an hour, awkwardly at first but very soon more confidently. Th
ey told each other the circumstances that had brought them to this present day. Alice asked few questions, but those she did ask showed she understood and felt his pain. Wayland had never opened up like this before to anyone since Rebecca’s death. For his part, he began to understand the kind of difficulties she’d experienced, living alone, without a man since her husband’s death, always needing to be suspicious of men, struggling to bring in enough income from weaving, competing against men for Flemish custom for her finished goods. She told Wayland how she weaved ‘bays’ which were, she explained, a sort of woollen cloth. Together with other weavers in Colchester she was preparing to lobby Lucas to seek his consent for their trade to continue despite the siege, but she held out little hope of success.
Neither of them was over talkative by nature and after their unexpected opening up to each other they abruptly fell silent. Wayland studied the door, as though expecting someone to burst in at any moment even though he knew that Jonathan was busy with the horses and no one else should be likely to bother them.
‘Well,’ said Alice. Wayland turned to her, worried that she was going to leave. But she looked directly at him, moving a little closer. That was all it took. He knew what he wanted and more importantly to him in that moment, he knew that she wanted it too. Their kiss was long and slow. She pushed away the bedding and pulled him back onto the straw pallet and they kissed again.
‘Are you certain?’ he asked, ‘What if…’
‘The way this siege is going, we may have no what ifs.’ she said simply. Neither of them said a word more. Their love–making was slow and gentle. Both he and she needed something utterly different from the harsh reality that had immersed them for weeks now. To Wayland at least, though, it didn’t seem any the less intense.
Later, when they were quiet and rational thought was beginning to come back to Wayland, he noticed that the rain–laden air had added to the sweat from their exertions. Rivulets were trickling down through the dark, wiry hairs on his chest. Alice was also coming to and she instinctively drew back from the damp heat of his body. They lay together a while on the now moist straw. Wayland looked over her skinny body, only now noticing the differences from Rebecca’s plump frame. At first her whole body was moving a little, her panting in the process of subsiding but soon she lay still. It was then that a slight movement in her hair caught his attention. He watched as first one, and then a second louse emerged onto her neckline. She opened an eye and caught him staring.