"Let us be off," said Harry, shifting nervously. "Now that the plague is in your village, 'twould be folly to linger overlong in the open air. Who knows what foulness might be borne on the wind?"
Considering his next move Lawrence Ravenne craned his head toward the sky. Harry was right about lingering, but his wife should not publicly gainsay him and this serf's manner was too arrogant for his liking.
"I think you not only took my wood," he said to Thurold. "I think you poached something. A deer mayhap? I have hanged thieves for poaching."
"See ye a deer about, m'lord? I've done naught wrong."
Matthew spoke up. "Elizabeth is right. Leave him go."
"Aye," echoed Harry. "'I fear the wind is picking up."
Ignoring them, Ravenne swung a leg over the saddle and dismounted. "You are lying," he said to Thurold. He planted himself in front of him. "Tell me what you've stolen."
Thurold felt his temper slipping away. Unconsciously, he balled his fists. "Look at me closely. Do ye na know me?"
"Why should I? Have you stolen from me in the past?"
"I should na be surprised, not when ye treat me and mine as if we be invisible. You ride through our fields and trample our crops. You demand week-works and boon works and give naught in return."
"Oh, dear," Elizabeth breathed. If a peasant should intrude in one of her epic tales—though she couldn't remember one ever having done so—he would never speak so disrespectfully.
"Swine!" Ravenne bellowed. "I'll cut your heart out and feed it to my dogs!" He grabbed for Thurold but he jerked away.
"Just like you killed me mother? Do ye not remember? You came sniffing around 'er often enough until ye sliced 'er through with your sword, ye bloody bastard!"
Thurold kicked him hard in the groin. Ravenne doubled over with a pained yelp.
Darting past the others, Thurold raced for the safety of the fens.
From her hiding place Margery saw Ravenne stagger to his horse, struggle into the saddle and race after him. Before they disappeared from sight, Margery saw their lord lean down and scoop Thurold off his feet.
In the ensuing silence, Elizabeth Hart sighed dramatically. She already suspected her marriage was not going to follow the trajectory of Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Iseult or some other passionate—however doomed—relationship from one of her Arthurian romances. Which meant she had to look to practicalities, such as maintaining good relationships with their villeins.
"I think, Matt, that we'd best catch up with my lord husband before he harms that lad, no matter how justified."
"You two go along," said Matthew. "I'll follow presently."
Harry frowned. "You are not that familiar with this area. What if you get lost? 'Tis foolish to tempt fate."
"I do not get lost. And I'll be but a moment."
Matthew watched his brother and sister ride away before turning his gaze to the spot where Margery Watson was hiding. He called out in English, "You can come out now."
Margery pressed against the earth as if she might somehow meld into it and become invisible. But no place was safe from Lawrence Ravenne and his kind.
Beyond her heart drumming in her ears, she heard the creak of saddle leather, heard the stirring of undergrowth as Matthew Hart approached her.
"Come out, little one. I'll not hurt you."
Margery felt like a trapped hare. Well aware of the target her exposed back provided, she could almost feel the bite of sword as the blade cut her in two...
A hand bunched the neck of her gown, pulling her up.
She screamed and pummeled Matthew, trying to scratch out his eyes, kick him in the groin, do anything that would make him loose her. Though three year's younger and one-quarter his strength, terror caused Margery to fight like a demon.
Finally, Matthew pinioned her arms behind her. Following the curve of her back with his body, he said against her ear, "Stop. I have no thought to harm you."
Margery's arms felt as if they were being ripped from their sockets. Finally, she ceased struggling and crumpled to her knees, awaiting this young lord's vengeance.
"I just wanted to see who you were, what you were doing here." Matt loosened his grip. "If you agree not to flee, I'll release you."
Margery nodded. Once freed, she turned to face him. Her mind flashed back to Alice's murder, to William Hart shouting, "What have you done?" Lord Hart was Ravenne's father-in-law.
"'Twas a bad thing your companion did to his lord," said Matthew. "Though I cannot completely blame him. My brother-in-law's temper matches his hair."
Margery was too frightened to make sense of his words. "I must save my brother! Lord Ravenne will kill him and I canna let him die. I'll have no one left to care for me."
Matthew frowned. The girl's words made no sense, but her agitation was real enough. "Why do you mistrust your lord? Your brother will not die for his act, no matter how dishonorable. This is the England of His Grace, Edward III, after all. Most likely your kin will escape with a fine of some sort." Seeing that words meant to placate made no difference, Matt added, "I will ask my sister to soothe his temper. Women have their ways."
Margery did not believe him. Ravenne had probably already murdered Thurold.
Matthew's gaze swept the deepening horizon. "You should not be out in the forest after dark. You live in Ravennesfield, do you not?"
Margery nodded.
"Has your house been struck by the Death?" Even with the plague roaming about, Matthew personally felt little fear that he or his loved ones would be harmed.
When her head bobbed up and down, Matt said gently, "You are very young to be alone."
I wasn't alone until your relative killed my mother.
Most likely this creature even knew about Alice's murder. Had Lord William Hart later made light of the incident to his sons, jesting about mad peasant women, or using Alice as a warning about the closeness of the plague?
"I... I also have the Death," Margery blurted, desperate to make him leave. "I have been vomiting for days and my arms have swelled. You had best be away. If you come near me again, you will surely catch it and die most horribly."
Matt inspected her more closely. "You do not look sickly. Dirty, mayhap. But not ill."
"I am though. I should be dead ere morning."
Matthew considered this. The girl obviously wanted to be rid of him and was making up tales. However, only a fool would risk the Death. Nor did he really relish travelling unfamiliar territory after sundown.
"I will try to ease things with your brother," he said, by way of leaving. "'Tis a shame that, with you dying, you will not be around to know."
Chapter 5
The Fens
"Thurold?" Margery jerked awake. What had startled her? She looked out at the lightening sky. Nothing at all but morning, blessed morning.
She whispered, "I am fine. I am still here." The words sank like rocks dropped in a well. She might still be alive, but she was alone.
Finally, as a rheumy-eyed sun struggled through a bank of clouds, Margery left the immediate area. Following the path along which Thurold had disappeared, she searched for some sign of him. Hidden in every shadow, beside every bush she expected to find his body. While walking through a small meadow thick with silvery ladies smocks, which were sacred to faeries, she remembered Giddy with her fist full of Thimble Flowers.
"Please," Margery whispered to no one, "No more bodies."
All the while calling Thurold's name, she zigzagged through the forest until she reached the area of the fens. Fearing its treacherous nature as well as its openness, she merely stood at the clearing, her eyes probing for Thurold's crumpled corpse.
By late afternoon Margery left off seeking her brother and began hunting for food among the lilies of the valley and cowslips carpeting the forest floor. Nestled amid fallen leaves she spied a spread of scarlet fungi and plucked several. She'd eaten similar mushrooms before but her mother had gathered them. Hadn't Alice cautioned that the wrong type so
wed strange dreams? Margery looked longingly at them, but finally tossed them aside and settled for a handful of beechnuts. Immediately, her empty stomach rebelled and she bent over, retching.
Do I have the Death? If so, she would die here with no one to care for her.
By sunset, with no more plague symptoms, she was wearied of searching for someone she knew would never return, and pondered retreating to Ravennesfield. At least at the cottage there would be food and turves for fuel. Better not to think of Alf, who must be long dead.
She retraced her steps until Ravennesfield spread before her, half a mile away. The tower of St. George was outlined against a sky the color of cooled pottage edged in a skim of grease, and from a handful of houses a yellow-tinged smoke curled outward, hovering above their thatched roofs. A gray mist seemed to rise from the road and cling to the lime-washed cottages. Even from this distance, Margery smelled sulphur.
Apprehensively, she approached the village. At sunset men usually returned from the fields, cows bawled to be milked, and mothers called to their children while readying oatcakes for the even meal. But not tonight.
Skirting the garbage-strewn kennel in the middle of the street, Margery tiptoed between the silent cottages. An occasional hen or pig rooted in the dung heaps flanking each door. Garden patches appeared untended. Roses and gillyflowers and scarlet-edged Sops-in-Wine drooped toward the earth.
Margery ran toward High Street and her house on Cottage Lane. Tripping, she sprawled, landing amidst decomposing filth. A black rat lay inches away, motionless, just like the sheep dotting various meadows. She struggled to her feet and careened onward, passing the Wytbreads, the Weavers, and Walt the Miller, all with red crosses painted on their doors. The paint ran like blood. Alice's blood. Giddy's blood. Alf's blood. Thurold's blood.
Along the narrow street, her footsteps rattled like clacking bones. The heavy air caught in her lungs. A light flickered from behind a shuttered window. She heard a continuous moan. It sounded like Whitefoot when he smelled a bitch in heat, only this moan was human. She turned on Cottage Lane, toward her house. The black tar on its outside timbers glistened like a forehead wet with fever. A red cross marked its door.
Through her ragged breathing, Margery became aware of new sounds. The creaking of a cart. The ringing of a bell. Not the comfortingly noisy bell of St. George's, calling villagers to mass, but a lonely jangle. She hid inside a doorway.
"Come out, one and all," someone called. "Bring me your dead."
Peering beyond the doorway, Margery recognized the old man who cared for Ravennesfield's graveyard, walking behind a cart drawn by a bony ox. In one hand he carried a hand bell, in the other a rushlight. The light illuminated the back of the open cart, the gleaming arms and legs and bodies which had been tossed inside like seeds in a hopper. Margery saw dried blood caked at the corners of grinning mouths. She saw staring eyes and faces black with the mask of plague. She saw golden hair, cascading over a creaking wheel. Hair like Alice's. Margery squeezed her eyes shut until the cart had passed.
Soon it will be me in the cart, my hair trailing upon the ground, my eyes fixed on nothing.
She crossed the street to her cottage.
What will it be like to be dead, without a body to walk around in?
She knew. Death would be black, and her thoughts would be trapped among the stars, and she would be alone in the darkness, searching for her mother.
As she laid her ear against the door, she thought she heard something.
Broody? Honker? Whitefoot? Or one other?
Margery pushed back visions of Death seated at the trestle table. Heart in her throat, she shoved open the door. Someone stood in the middle of the room by the cold hearth—a shadowy figure, staring at her. Margery swallowed hard and blinked several times until the figure came into focus.
"Alf?" she whispered.
Chapter 6
Ravennesfield, 1350-1351
Harvest time arrived, though few fields were harvested. Only a handful of laborers remained to tend the crops or thrash grain. The entire countryside possessed a mournful look, with sagging fences, untrimmed hedges, rotting fruit, and fields marred by the remains of diseased sheep, oxen and horses.
East Anglia itself suffered more than most of England. The city of Norwich lost half its population. In Cambridge, only enough people remained to fill one of the city's seventeen churches. More than two thousand clergymen died. Since priests maintained that the plague was God's punishment for sinners, ordinary people wondered why the Almighty had chosen to so ravage the ranks of his earthly emissaries. Monasteries were particularly decimated, with so many stricken that few inside remained well enough to tend their brethren. Most East Anglians kept their wonderings locked inside, however, and seldom spoke of them. Plague memories remained too fresh to assimilate, too frightful to dwell upon.
Ravennesfield mirrored the surrounding devastation. Death had not spared any family and half the cottages were vacant. Much of the garden produce had been lost to weeds or various blights. Occasionally, a few men sowed the fallow fields, but most neglected their strips. The majority of villagers seemed inclined to spend their days sitting in their doorways, staring at nothing.
Ravennesfield's priest, Father Egbert, succumbed early on. "Say penance to avert the plague!" thundered the priest who followed him. Church members obeyed, only to have the pestilence become more virulent.
A third priest, sent to replace Father Egbert's dead successor, ordered townspeople to form a barefoot procession and march around the village, hefting crosses and singing psalms. "That will appease God's wrath," he said. A week later, the third priest's corpse had been tossed into the common pit.
Villagers took note of these and other happenings, but seldom spoke of them.
For now, winter was coming.
For now, it was safer not to think of anything at all.
* * *
Margery hunched her shoulders against a sharp wind. She pulled Thurold's cary coat closer, but the wind nipped her exposed ankles. More than two years had passed since the pestilence and in that time she had grown so much her clothes no longer fit. She'd cut and re-fashioned one of her mother's gowns as best she could, though sewing was just another of the puzzling and impossibly difficult things she now had to do.
Last week, after Alf had killed their lone remaining pig, she had cut and salted its carcass, stored the salted joints in a barrel, and hung one of its haunches above the fire to make smoked ham. Her stepfather had always helped Alice, but he'd allowed Margery to struggle while he sat in front of the hearth fire, drinking and staring into the flames.
Margery did her best to master her mother's daily chores, and even attempted beer brewing, though Alf termed the final product undrinkable. Far simpler for him to retrieve a coin from Alice's store of money and send Margery to the Crown and Sceptre.
No wonder their coin purse was nearly empty. Whenever Margery pondered their dwindling money supply, she fought down a rush of panic. She wished Alf would provide. She wished that she, like he, could sit in front of the fire and stare into space.
But if she did, they'd freeze or starve to death. So she cut turves for fuel, caught fish and salted it, made rushlights for the long winter evenings, and what small repairs to the cottage that she could.
Lord Thomas Rendell had oft promised to provide for her, but that had been when Alice was alive. Would he do so now?
Margery would soon find out. For her father and his wife, the lady Beatrice, sister of the killer Lawrence Ravenne, had stopped at Ravenne Manor on their way south. After the plague's end, the nobility had resumed their routines, which included frequent traveling to various demesnes as well as visits with relatives. After spending time with Lord Ravenne and his wife, the former Elizabeth Hart, who'd just been blessed with their first son, the Rendells were headed for Thomas's main family holding, Fordwich Castle, in Kent.
Tomorrow I will seek you out, Lord Father. And see if you truly are a man of your word.
/>
* * *
Margery and her fellow villagers used Ravenne Manor's bakehouse to cook their coarse rye bread. Today was baking day. While Margery awaited her loaves, she watched the surrounding activity. The bailey was much shabbier than before the Death, though there were signs of rebuilding. And members of the Rendell household, with the blue jupon of the wolf upon their clothing, bustled about, grooming horses, surveying hawks on their perches in front of Ravenne Manor's mews, unloading supplies from wagons, playing dice, sharpening their weapons or just gossiping.
She prayed that Lord Rendell would put in an appearance for she did not have the courage to ask after him. She had no idea how to even approach his retainers, who barely glanced at her and the other villeins gathered around the bakehouse.
Finally, just as she'd retrieved her loaves from the oven and placed them in a basket, Margery saw him. Thomas Rendell was walking with his head down, his air preoccupied, away from the manor house toward the stables.
"My lord Father," Margery called, though she didn't know whether that was an appropriate title. "My lord," she repeated more uncertainly.
At first Thomas was happy to see her. He scooped her up into his strong arms and hugged her so tightly she was breathless.
"I feared you were dead of the plague," he said, after releasing her.
He could have found out easily enough. 'Twas a short walk from Ravenne Manor to Ravennesfield, wasn't it? Margery drew back to gaze into her father's face, noting new lines around his eyes and mouth. Lord Thomas Rendell, so big and handsome, who according to Alice's stories, was associated with cherry trees and crumbling kingdoms and scandals involving murdered saints. Who'd always seemed like a character out of a fable. Now looking worn and tired and all too human.
"Mama died," Margery blurted, though her throat seemed stopped shut when she tried to relay the circumstances.
Thomas did not appear surprised. Had he known already? Had Lawrence Ravenne, or Ravenne's sister, discussed Alice's murder during a relaxed dinner conversation after which they'd clucked their tongues and changed the subject?
A Knight There Was Page 5