Squire Throwleigh's Heir

by Michael Jecks

  ‘Then we have poor Petronilla. I can conceive of no woman less likely to be able to murder than one who is just about to become a mother for the first time, especially one who feels so alone and desperate as this girl, with no man she can legally claim as husband. As for the priest, Stephen, who was so keen to thrash his charge at every opportunity, and who received a stinging shot on his backside while he was… busy - well, he caught Herbert and beat him - but murder? If Stephen had murdered the child, surely he would have beaten him to death then and there - only he didn’t, because Petronilla was with him, and she declared that he returned to her, and that she heard Herbert when Stephen had rejoined her.

  ‘Then we have Thomas, who was down at the road. Yet how could one think that he might have captured a boy? He is not fleet of foot. Nor is there anything to suggest that the Fleming or his servant rode away from the place where they had been for so long. Edmund saw them, still lounging, probably waiting for Thomas to return so that they could go back to their negotiations, only he never reappeared. Instead they were passed by a fishmonger, and then by a carter going home after the market. They became bored and went home the longer way, hoping again to pass Thomas.

  ‘But two fellows were always up there, unaccounted for: Alan and Jordan. Two who always appeared to be above suspicion because they are young, and because so many others had good reasons to want to see Herbert dead.

  ‘We can assume that Herbert saw the priest making love with Petronilla, that Herbert’s sense of fun made him shoot Stephen in a painful and unfortunate part of his anatomy, but Jordan and Alan had no idea Petronilla was there. That was why they felt safe in fabricating the priest’s rape of their friend. They had no idea that he had an alibi - and I have to say, it was most fortunate that he saw fit to own up to it.

  ‘What reason could these two have for killing the boy, eh? One had the same motive as his mother, didn’t you, Alan? You wanted to avenge the death of your brother. What of you, though, Jordan? Why did you want him dead?’

  Jordan flinched as the knight’s eyes met his. It felt as if Sir Baldwin was boring into him. ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘ Shut up, you fool! Remember what I told you!’ Alan hissed.

  Jordan blinked, then screwed his eyes tight shut with the effort of not crying.

  Baldwin walked to him and took hold of his shoulders, softly pulling the unwilling boy towards him. He put a hand under Jordan’s chin and raised his head. ‘Look at me, child. You will not risk the rope if you tell me what happened.’

  ‘It’s not fair!’ Jordan snivelled. His alcohol-induced confidence had fled, and now he knew he was found out. ‘We thought the priest would never dare confess to covering Petronilla - he always said it was a sin, so how could he admit to that? He shouldn’t have told you. We’d be all right if he hadn’t told you!’

  Edmund stood staring open-mouthed, and now he strode forward. ‘Jordan, tell him you had nothing to do with it. Go on, tell him!’

  ‘I didn’t want to, sir,’ Jordan said, sniffing. ‘He wasn’t supposed to die. It just happened.’

  ‘What did?’ pressed the knight.

  ‘Sir, Alan and me found him, and he was all cross with Alan, because it was Alan who fired at the priest…’

  ‘No, I didn’t, it was you?“ Alan protested aghast.

  ‘… but Herbert wasn’t as good as us at hiding in the bushes, and the priest saw Herbert and beat him instead. And when Herbert saw us, he was crying, and said he’d tell his mother and make sure the priest knew, and then Alan would get lashed as well, and Alan told him he’d kill him if he did, and—’

  Alan kicked Jordan, and the knight had to sweep the younger lad out of the way while Edgar took Alan’s arm and pulled him aside. The boy pointed at Jordan and sneered: ‘He’s lying. Or maybe it’s because he’s drunk. He’s been drinking all the ale in the buttery.’

  ‘Alan,’ Simon said quietly. ‘Your mother has admitted to killing Herbert. Either she is telling the truth and must be burned at the stake for petty treason, or she is lying - lying to protect someone.’

  The youth stared at him with fury. ‘He’s going to say it was all me, but it wasn’t! He hit Herbert too. I wasn’t alone up there, and it was Jordan who held him down while I hit his head with the rock.’

  ‘Is this true?’ Baldwin asked the boy in his arms.

  Jordan no longer cared. The last few days had been a nightmare. Knowing his father was innocent, but unable to get him freed without admitting his own guilt; realising that the shoe, the one lost by the priest while he made love to his woman, would be enough to ensure that the hated man should be blamed instead - this had given him hope for a while, but then the plan had gone wrong, and now here they all were, and he had admitted what he had done. Jordan broke down and wept, even as Alan at his side sniffed and wiped the tears from his eyes.

  How could he explain? They had to hit him to make him shut up, but the harder they hit, the louder he cried. Finally, only when he was silent, did they realise their crime.

  And then they heard Lady Katharine’s shrill voice from the doorway.

  ‘Is this true?’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Lady Katharine had been left on her bed when Daniel went out to the yard to accost the fish-seller, but she had soon recovered. The faint had left her weak and shaky, but she had managed to rise, and looked at her reflection in a mirror.

  It was no longer the face of a happily married woman and mother, nor of the successful wife of a powerful squire. Her face had become a mask of horror. All that she loved had been destroyed. Even the woman in whom she had placed all her trust had betrayed her. Lady Katharine could hardly believe all that she had heard, and yet she must.

  Staggering a little, she made her way back to the hall and there, while she leaned on the doorway, she heard the boys and Baldwin.

  She could not absorb it. There was a scream rising inside her, which felt as if it might snuff out her very life if she allowed it to escape. It was composed of all her agony, all her sorrow at what she had lost. If it left her body, it must take her soul with it.

  ‘Is it true?’ she whispered.

  Daniel made to move towards her, but she held out a hand without speaking, and he stopped, frozen with despair.

  Baldwin closed his eyes for a moment, then said compassionately: ‘My Lady, I am so sorry. You should not have heard this. But I fear these boys are at last telling the truth of it. They murdered your son.’

  Lady Katharine nodded once. She bowed her head, turned, and left.

  ‘Go with her, Daniel,’ said Baldwin gruffly and the steward hurried from the room.

  Baldwin glanced at Edmund. The farmer stood staring at his boy, an expression of complete disbelief on his face. ‘You killed the boy?’

  ‘Dad, we didn’t mean to! We were just punishing him. It was like a game at first, but then I made him bleed, and he kept going on at us, saying he’d tell his mother. We wanted him to shut up, that was all, and then he tried to get away, and we had to stop him, and he tried to shout, so I held him, and…’ Under the appalled stare of his father, Jordan slowly ground to a halt. Crying, he covered his face with both hands.

  ‘It was mainly me, sir,’ Alan said, after giving his friend an ugly look. ‘If you want to hang me, I am ready.’

  Baldwin snapped, ‘Oh, be silent, boy! You’ve done enough damage for a lifetime.’

  ‘What will happen to them?’ Edmund managed after a few minutes.

  ‘They are too young to be accused. They don’t know the meaning of good or bad, right or wrong,’ Baldwin said. ‘They cannot be treated like adults. They will have to be taken away to be looked after by someone else. Either the Church or a lord will have to take responsibility for them both. But not together, I fear - they should not be left together in case they lead each other to new felonies.’

  ‘Sir Baldwin!’

  ‘What is it, Daniel?’ the knight demanded irritably.

  The steward pointed with a shaking fin
ger. ‘It’s Lady Katharine, sir. She has locked herself in her solar, and I can’t get her to speak to me. Oh God, I think she may try to kill herself!’

  It was evil, this whole place. Only a few weeks ago she would have thought that it was blessed, because then she had her husband and her child, but now she knew it was cursed. How else could a boy, another mere child, have murdered her son? She glanced up at the tapestries lining the walls, at the magnificent bed with its straw mattress lying on its mesh of ropes. In that bed she had lain with her husband; beside it she had given birth to her son. Yet now everything about this hall, even this room, was hateful; defiled by the ending of her son’s life.

  With a kind of wonder she stared at the guttering candle in her hand. It flickered and shone, bright and beautiful. Fire! Fire could cleanse the most evil of spirits; that was why witches were burned, so that their malevolence died with them. Fire destroyed and left only wholesome, fresh emptiness. Burned stubble left clean fields; burned trees left soil ready for ploughing; burned wood warmed the soul and the body together. Fire was good.

  Lady Katharine slowly stared about her, then lifted the flame to the hanging serge curtains that draped the bed. They took light in an instant, and soon the bedding too was ablaze.

  Thick, greenish-yellow smoke from the straw of the mattress began to fill the room, mixed with repellent fumes as the uncarded wool in the pillows smouldered, and all at once Lady Katharine felt an awful fear rise in her.

  Heat gushed, and she staggered backwards as if in a trance. The bedcurtains had become sheets of flame, and now they released themselves, the thin material converted into fine ash that danced in the fire like demons. When a gust of air blew in through the window, the flames glowed white for an instant.

  Suddenly she wanted to be free from here. She no longer wanted to see this house ruined and laid waste; she simply wished to escape. But there was no door any more, only a ring of flaming cloth all about her as the tapestries burned. She could feel the skin on her face and hands beginning to scorch; the hair of her brows and the tiny, fine ones on her cheeks were curling.

  She turned this way and that, but the door was hidden. With a scream of terror, she felt the flames climb higher.

  When Simon reached the window, she had collapsed, and he clambered inside as quickly as he could, grabbing her and throwing her over his shoulder before hurrying out once more.

  The manor was destroyed in a matter of hours.

  The magnificent hall in which the squire had entertained his numerous friends was gutted, a mere blackened, smoking shell. Stray cinders had lodged in the straw roofing of the stables and the kitchen, and it was only the diligence of the grooms that had saved the animals from burning alive. Fortunately they were all released in time, but not a single building escaped from the devastating effect of the fire. Daniel had attempted to rescue some of the stores, but had been forced to give up when barrels began to explode, and he had sent the men to the lines of those trying to douse the flames with buckets of water.

  In one way, Daniel thought, as he stared at the ruin of his home, it was the death of Anney’s young Tom which had led to the end of it all. Until he had fallen into it, the manor had possessed a well in the yard, a good, deep one, which would have made ferrying water that much easier and quicker; since his death, the well had been filled in, for a well that killed was destroyed, just as was a man, and the squire had never got around to digging a new one, so all the water had had to be brought up from the stream, away down the hill.

  He glanced about him again, taking in the men and women standing in little groups. One figure stood out: the knight, Sir Baldwin.

  Baldwin walked up to meet the steward. ‘It must be the first time I have seen you without your staff, apart from when Hugh snatched it from you,’ he said gently.

  ‘It was in the hall,’ Daniel told him sadly. ‘There seemed little point in grabbing it - not when there were more important things to rescue.’

  ‘Was anyone killed?’ Baldwin asked, gazing at the people all about.

  ‘I don’t think so. Even van Relenghes was saved. A couple of grooms got him out before the flames took hold of the kitchen. Oh, God’s teeth, what a mess!’

  Baldwin eyed him sympathetically. ‘You cannot blame your mistress. She was under a great deal of pressure, poor woman.’

  ‘Oh, I know. And I am glad in a way, too, for I don’t think I would have been able to bear serving Thomas of Exeter,’ Daniel confided. ‘But to think that the manor that my squire built and established is gone! It’s terrible.’

  And he clearly felt the misery. His eyes couldn’t meet Baldwin’s, but instead ranged over the wrecked area with a fevered misery, as if he couldn’t quite take it all in. Baldwin shook his head sadly, but he had a question he must ask. ‘Daniel, tell me, why did you demand that Simon and I should return to investigate the boy’s death? Everyone was content that it had been an accident.’

  ‘I never thought it was. The lad could have outrun most carts, so why should he suddenly fall before one like that? I was convinced his death was murder.’

  ‘So you really believed that Edmund was the killer, because of his treatment by the squire and your lady?’

  ‘Ed? God’s bowels, no! He’s too weak and brainless to think of something of that nature. No, but he did give me a pretext to call you back. For her.“

  ‘I see,’ said Baldwin, and he really did, at last. It was not uncommon for a widowed woman to later remarry the man who had been her dead husband’s steward, and the reason was all too prosaic: while knights and squires must spend time traveling from estate to estate, or going to war, their steward would remain at home - as would the wife. Often an understanding could spring up between them. Proximity could lead to affection. In Daniel’s case he wanted to do all he could to alleviate his lady’s suffering, and to his mind that included having her son’s death properly investigated.

  ‘My Lady - where is she?’ he asked now.

  ‘I will show you,’ Baldwin said, and picked his way down the slope.

  A few sheets and blankets had been saved, and these had been strung together over poles to create a shelter and give some protection from the cold and rain. Baldwin led the way there, and through the open side they saw Jeanne and Margaret tending to Katharine. Daniel hurried to her, and knelt at her side, burying his head in the sheets that covered her.

  ‘How is she?’ Baldwin asked his wife.

  ‘She’ll be fine. She got quite warm when the room went up, of course, but she received few burns, mercifully, and the coughing should go soon. The main thing is, we have to get her to a house so that she doesn’t catch a chill.’

  Baldwin glanced enquiringly at Daniel, who said: ‘There’s a farm not far from here. I’ll send a man to tell the farmer we’re on our way.’

  The knight nodded and left the makeshift tent, walking slowly to the hill where Simon waited, standing guard over the two boys with Hugh.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’ll live. But God knows if her mind will recover,’ Baldwin sighed.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said a voice behind him, and he spun around to face Thomas.

  The master of the ruins waved a large jug. ‘I’d offer you some wine, gentlemen, but this is all I have remaining, and I think I’d like to enjoy what I can.’

  ‘You still have your life,’ said Baldwin.

  ‘My life? I depended on this,’ said the other, gesturing at the smoking remains, ‘to fund my business. Now, even if the land brings in fifteen or sixteen pounds a year, I am still left with nothing right now. I’m ruined. I’ll lose my house.’

  ‘Return down here and rebuild, then,’ said Simon. ‘It wouldn’t take long to put up a good-sized house; maybe not as large as your brother’s place, but enough to support you and a family.’

  ‘Here? Never!’ Thomas declared, staring about him scornfully. ‘What should I want with a place like this?’

  Simon speculatively eyed the village nestling in the
valley before them. ‘Well, nothing I can say will change your mind, of course, but there are many places around here where the owners of villages have set up markets and fairs; they take a good toll of all goods for sale, and make money from taxing the villagers for the rooms they rent out.’

  ‘Fairs! Markets!’ Thomas said scornfully. He sneered and sipped his wine, but slowly, and he glanced towards Throwleigh with a pensive frown. ‘Mind you, the roads here are quite good, aren’t they…?’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When it began to drizzle, Baldwin called Edgar to his side; between them, the two bullied and threatened the traumatised victims of the fire into some semblance of order, organising a stretcher for Lady Katharine, who appeared unable to think for herself; kicking James van Relenghes to his feet; setting Hugh and others to guard the two boys.