Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  As they drew breath, one arrow flew and hit Sir Stephen Flowerdew in the left eye. The Count had promised, saying that Hassan had promised no poisoned arrows, but this was an arrow and it might be poisoned. So he plucked it out, bringing his eye with it. Afterwards, he said that when the arrow struck he felt pain, but none when the eye came away. ‘And my wife will look on me with even less favour,’ he said, wryly.

  They were waiting again, obedient to orders. No pursuit; hold the gate and await his coming. When he came he brought workmen, one perched behind every saddle. They jumped down and cleared the tunnel and the knights clattered in over the blood-washed stones.

  As they did so a fountain in the centre of the square shot silver spray into the sunshine.

  ‘Four,’ the Count said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Two. Many Moors got away.’

  ‘Not far,’ Escalona said in a gloating voice. He moved his hand towards the fountain. ‘They were making for the water arch; escape by the river bed. Now… We make ourselves look as formidable as possible and move to the Palace, where Hassan will meet us.’ Three streets led out of the square; six men to each of two streets, seven to the third.

  Presumably from behind the lattices and shutters, eyes were watching, counting perhaps, but they might have been riding through a city of the dead. It put the final touch of strangeness on the whole fantastic operation. When towns were taken people watched with sullen hostility, dull resignation or simple curiosity. Here, nothing stirred except a few slinking, scavenging dogs.

  Of the six in this narrow, balconied street, Sir Godfrey and Lord Robert rode side by side and last. It was a short street and shadowed; at its farther end lay another square, bright with sunshine.

  Suddenly from a balcony some unseen hand tossed something. That was more natural and ordinary; hostile watchers threw stones, people who welcomed invaders threw flowers or favours.

  This was nothing that wither had ever seen before. It landed, quite softly, in the centre of Lord Robert’s breast-plate, clung there and began to glow. He tried to brush it off and as the unprotected inner part of his hand came in contact with it, said, ‘God’s blood! Red hot!’ He then hit it with the gauntleted back of his hand, a few bits broke off, fell onto his armoured thighs and began to glow there. The original piece stuck fast.

  A secret weapon! An invention of the Devil!

  Sir Godfrey reached out and struck at it. A fragment fell onto Pluto’s mane and there was a stench of burning horsehair; another fragment clung to Sir Godfrey’s gauntlet and glowed and grew hot.

  ‘Get down,’ he said. ‘I must unharness you.’ He dismounted himself and pulled off his gauntlets.

  His own armour was rather more than twenty years old and all that which he had worked on when he was a squire had been in the same style. Lord Robert—a rich man’s son—had new armour and fashions had changed. All the straps in the wrong places, all the buckles unfamiliar and complicated. Oh God! Oh God! Help me.

  Inside his red-hot carapace Lord Robert began to scream. His horse, aware of its smouldering mane, screamed, too, and galloped away. Sir Godfrey, his fingers burned to the bone, went on struggling…

  No fighting man could afford to be squeamish and in his time Sir Godfrey had looked, unmoved, on many an unpleasant sight but nothing quite like that disclosed when at last the armour, still aglow, clanked into the gutter. Roasted alive, the boy he had loved like a son.

  Overwhelmed by grief, stunned, single-minded as ever, he knelt—but not in prayer—by the charred thing which had lately been a lively, laughing boy.

  And so it happened that he was the only prisoner taken that day. By evening, the only Christian alive in the city.

  ELEVEN

  The letter came in April. ‘Threepence,’ said the old fish-woman who had bought it from Baildon.

  It was sealed in three places and marked with dirty fingerprints. With shaking hands, Sybilla broke the seals and read the words in a single glance. Then she turned dizzy and had to lean against the lintel of the door. Did people faint from joy? She drew a deep breath, read the letter again, kissed it and gave the old woman sixpence.

  Well, no doubt about it, when your luck was in it was in and when it was out it was out. Her good luck had started with the sale of her old donkey for such an unbelievable sum, had continued with the getting of a firm, regular order to supply fish to the place for bad women and the orphanage; and now, sixpence for delivering a letter. And seemed to be going on; for when she ventured to ask, ‘Will you be wanting fish today, my lady?’ the lady said without looking up, ‘Yes. Yes. Two dozen of each.’ You could trudge about for an hour to sell so many.

  I am safe and well and the worst is over now. He could be on his way home.

  Such wonderful news must be shared—if only to make it seem real.

  She ran out to the byre where Walter was milking, watched by Henry.

  ‘Walter, Henry, I have news. A letter. He is safe and well.’

  Walter rose from the three-legged stool and said gravely, ‘That is good news, my lady.’

  Henry slipped onto the stool and said, ‘Now may I finish her off, Walter?’

  ‘Yes, if you do it properly… My lady, is it over? Is he on his way home?’

  His servant asked that; his son milked a cow!

  Sybilla read the letter again. ‘That he does not say. He says he is safe and well and that the worst is over now. Oh Walter, I am so happy!’

  To Walter’s ear there was something a little strange about the words—the worst is over. A tournament. Would Sir Godfrey, who enjoyed tournaments, have written thus—unless he had had bad luck again. And if he had had bad luck, how was he safe and well? To Walter it sounded more as though Sir Godfrey meant the sea voyage was behind him when he wrote. But he would not say a thing to mar her pleasure.

  ‘Does it say where it was written, my lady?’

  It did, but she had taken no heed of that and now, read out, the name meant nothing to either of them.

  William, when he came as he did, a few days later, was more knowledgeable and less considerate. He lived in a sea-faring community and had never shirked contact with ordinary people.

  ‘Mondeneno,’ he said. ‘Yes, I have heard of it. On Spain’s northern coast… I think, my dear, that this letter indicates that Godfrey had survived the Bay of Biscay.’

  ‘Not… that he is on his way home?’

  ‘That could hardly be. The date—All Souls day in the Year of Our Lord 1452. I am no traveller, my dear, and my knowledge of geography is small; but I feel bound to say that no man could leave Bywater on St. Michael’s Day, go to the south of Spain, fight a tourney and be back in Mondeneno by All Souls’.’

  Was it possible to faint through disappointment?

  ‘This letter,’ William said, ‘has been long on the road.’

  And that was true. Father Andreas had left the strictest instructions that the letter should be delivered into the hands of the captain of the first English ship that put in to Mondeneno’s welcoming harbour; and he had been implicitly obeyed. The fact that the ship to which the letter had been entrusted was bound for the Canaries was merely incidental.

  The year went on. Walter’s fields grew green and the wind blew over them, a kindly, a rough hand smoothing hair. Lady Randall’s vigorous roses put out copper-red shoots which changed to green and changed again, a wealth of roses, two trees bearing red flowers, two white, and two mixed in the way called damask; all sweet scented. The lilies grew tall and beautiful and the bees buzzed about them. Sybilla cut an armful and carried them into the church—thus fulfilling one of Father Ambrose’s dreams. She knelt on the cold stone, alone, as the Abbess had said all must be with God. God keep him, protect him, wherever he may be; and in mercy, bring him back to me. There was, she realised with a start of surprise, something about the scent of those lilies. She had never been one for musk or attar of roses—both extortionately expensive and both used artfully to attract men—but now the lilies smelt of love
-making. A fierce longing gripped her.

  Late-sown as Walter’s wheat and barley had been, it had been sown on land that had lain fallow for years and by August he had something to harvest.

  ‘I’ll stook it for you, Walter,’ Bessie Wade said.

  ‘That’s for her ladyship to say.’

  Walter was always administering such snubs and Bessie was either too dim-witted or too thick-skinned to be deterred by them. She concocted excuses to go across the yard to his little house.

  ‘Walter, you only had half a supper. I brought your piece of pie.’

  ‘I’ve had enough. Give it to Master Henry, he’s always hungry.’

  ‘Ooh, Walter, you have made this place nice. Neat as a pin.’

  ‘More than I can say of your kitchen.’

  ‘’S’not really mine, is it Walter. Ooh, if I had a little place like this of my own, I’d keep it neat as a pin.’

  The very way she said his name, the frequency with which she used it, set his teeth on edge. Her devotion, her persistence, insulted him. Just because he had a scarred face…

  But in the field, anxious to please, she worked well. Sybilla had said that of course Bessie could stook and she would take charge of the kitchen. So Walter scythed, never hurrying and yet covering a great deal of ground in a day; Henry bound the cut ears into sheaves and Bessie stooked. It was fine, sunny weather, perfect for harvesting and she sweated a lot. Not a word of thanks or appreciation.

  Yet Walter could give praise. He said he had never had such good a rabbit pie as Sybilla had made. And he said, ‘I’m sorry you have to work so hard, my lady. Such a hot day, too.’ And he said that in the hearing of the woman who had plodded up and down, up and down in the field behind him!

  People who could afford to do so stacked corn and kept it until, late in autumn, prices rose. Walter, with some reluctance, decided against this, just for the one year. They needed the flour that could be made from the wheat; they needed the money which the sale of the barley would bring. He made a threshing floor and two flails, a large one for himself and a smaller one for Harry, and then… another large one for Bessie.

  ‘Truly, Walter,’ Sybilla said, ‘I find it almost as easy to do things myself as to direct her. If she is of help to you…’

  All this was makeshift; a holding on, a bearing up until Godfrey came back. The year tipped over and it was September again. On St. Michael’s Day, he would have been gone for a year.

  James, between his winter gout and his summer gout, had made conscientious visits and said vague, soothing things, about Spain being a long way away and the necessity of patience; but he was self-absorbed, taking her news about the letter and what William had said about it with ‘Good. Good!’ and proceeding to talk about the betrothal of his gawky daughter to a young man of good family but, alas, small fortune.

  On William’s next visit Sybilla said, ‘William, you hold high rank in the Church and the Dominican Priory is in Bywater. They have Houses in Spain, too. If you asked, do you think they would make a few enquiries? It is such a long time. And if he could find someone to write for him in Mondeneno, he would have found someone in Escalona.’

  ‘And may well have done so. Remember how long the other letter took to arrive. But I will certainly ask.’

  He had a good memory but was inclined to be absent-minded, having so many things to think about; so she made him write a little note to remind himself.

  It was now September, with just that hint of coming change in the air which was stimulating to sexual appetite; mornings came with a faint mist, like the bloom on a grape, midday was warm and at night the harvest moon hung like a great bronze globe in the sky, making night-work possible for people whose reaping was belated. Walter was not one of them; by the middle of the month even the flailing was finished.

  In a way, winnowing was an unpleasant job; husks worked their way into one’s hair and under one’s clothes. On a warm late afternoon, scooping up the last grains of barley and tying the neck of the sack firmly, Walter said, ‘Well, that’s over for the year. I’m going to take a bath. You, too.’ He spoke to Henry, not to Bessie. It simply wasn’t safe to speak to her except to snap out an order.

  Bessie decided to take a bath, too. It was in the course of it that she realised that Walter had never seen her one real beauty, the compensation for being too fat all over—a fine bosom with firm, well-mounded breasts, white-skinned and tipped with rose. She was thirty-two years old and desperate… desperate enough to rip, deliberately, one of the two shifts she possessed.

  Walter had heated a pot of water and poured it into a shallow bowl. Stripped to the waist he bowed over the bowl, washing his hair, face, torso. Then, discarding his hose, he stepped into the water.

  Not a position in which a man would wish to be caught by an unwanted woman.

  Enough to anger any man but what was worse was the sudden, involuntary response of his body to the sight of those white breasts. A revolt against years of discipline and self-imposed celibacy. He snatched up the towel to hide his shame, said, ‘Get out,’ and broke into the language so foul that much of it was incomprehensible to Bessie who had spent her life in circles where even abuse was limited. But she understood that, despite a second or two of promise, she was being rejected again. There could only be one reason and she spat it out at him.

  Holding the towel about him with his left hand, Walter used his right to slap her, forehand, backhand, across the face.

  The people of Intake, freed of feudal domination, had reverted to an earlier, more truly English institution—the Council of Elders.

  Sybilla faced the deputation, four venerable men in their tidy Sunday or market-day clothes and said,

  ‘I cannot believe it.’

  ‘But the girl’s face is swollen and bruised, my lady. She got a black eye one side, a split lip the other. And what about the torn shift?’

  ‘Granfer Wade,’—he had been excluded from the deputation for various reasons, too closely concerned in the matter, liable to get angry, certain to feel shame—‘Granfer Wade said Bessie went to his place, near naked and bawling like a calf just taken from the cow. And all hurt about the face.’

  ‘I was here,’ Sybilla said. ‘Should I not have heard? Bessie said she would take a bath—after supper, in the kitchen. Where was this assault supposed to have taken place? And when?’

  About that Bessie had not been explicit. But shift implied bed.

  ‘In her bed.’

  ‘But she slept above stairs.’ Bessie had indeed been privileged. In many places, even now and even in magnificent places servants, male and female slept all hugger-mugger in the hall of the kitchen; Bessie had had a room.

  ‘I sat here,’ Sybilla said. ‘Bessie took her bath. I went up, as I always do, to look in on the children, to see that they were covered. I thought that while I was looking at them, Bessie followed me up and went to her bed. It was not until this morning… All her outer clothes there in a heap in the kitchen… I thought… when she did not appear, that she was taking a rest, well-earned. I can assure you, this alleged attack did not take place in this house. What is more, Walter Freeman has been with me for many years. In places where sonsy girls were on display and fully available. And never in all those years have I heard one word against him—in that respect.’

  ‘He set about Bessie last night, my lady.’

  ‘Not in this house. Her clothes are there in the kitchen where she left them. Her grandfather says she went to his house almost naked. If Walter laid a finger on her last night, it must have been in his house; and she went there. In her shift. ‘

  They thought it over. Bessie Wade lost some of the aspect of innocent victim.

  ‘If she done that,’ old Martin said, ‘she were asking for trouble.’

  ‘Did you hit her, Walter?’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She broke in on me while I was washing myself. I told her to get out and she just stood there.’


  All too often Bessie’s response to any order or suggestion was just to stand there. Almost asking to be smacked.

  ‘You seem to have hit her very hard.’

  ‘Not hard enough…’ Suddenly, under the weathered tan his face crimsoned as he remembered the vile thing Bessie had said. Suppose she went saying it about the village. He thought—I should have killed the bitch!

  ‘Those old men seemed to think that she would not work here any more.’

  ‘I’ll find you another woman, my lady. A better one.’

  ‘That should not be difficult,’ Sybilla said.

  Yet it proved to be. Bessie’s story might not ring quite so true as it had done at first telling but it confirmed something that everybody had felt all along—there was something not quite right about Knight’s Acre. Big should be big and rich should be rich; Knight’s Acre was neither one thing nor the other; a servant who did not behave like a servant ruled there and her ladyship stuck up for him. Even at the Michaelmas Hiring Fair several likely young women who would willingly have gone to be bullied by Lady Emma at Moyidan, or to be half-starved in William’s palace at Bywater, shrank away when offered employment at Knight’s Acre. The woman Walter finally found was stone deaf as a result of having had measles when fully adult; but she was a good cook and a conscientious cleaner. Anxious to please, too, and gifted with a kind of extra sense as the afflicted often were.

  Downhill into winter. In the house one woman who heard nothing, and one whose ears were constantly alert for a footfall or a hoofbeat, for the news that never came. Henry growing every day more and more like his father in appearance—sometimes the likeness smote her to the heart; Margaret growing a little in size, but in no other way, and John as precocious and sturdy as Henry and Richard had been.

  From Beauclaire good news of Richard. Hateful to think that two letters from Alys—written by one of her waiting-women—had been sad disappointments, in a way. Lady Astallon, through her henchwoman, wrote that Richard had settled down very well and was well behaved. Richard was, in fact, not only behaving himself, he was enjoying a back-wash of public opinion; if the young Tallboys didn’t kick and bite, then he was a good boy.