by Alis Hawkins
I look around the frozen heath; despite Hob’s twitchiness, it seems an unlikely place to lie in wait.
‘If there were robbers here, don’t you think they’d’ve had that handcart by now?’ When Hob does not answer I turn away. ‘I’m going to hear his confession before he falls senseless and can’t speak.’
‘What do you mean, hear his confession?’
I explain, in as few words as I can, what the monk at Hungerford Regis told me. Hob takes it in without comment. ‘And then?’
‘Then we’ll see.’
‘Martin —’
I look over my shoulder.
‘Hobble the mare and let her graze, Hob. You’ve got your bow — you can keep watch over us.’
The man barely has the strength to confess before his eyes close and he falls silent.
When I make shift to move, his eyes half-open once more. ‘Swear to me … swear ... you won’t separate us. Swear it.’
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I swear it. You’ll be together.’
Pulling the cloak and blankets from his wife, I lay them over him. Then, clear in my mind, I make my way back to Hob.
‘What have you said to him?’
‘I’ve promised I won’t separate him from his wife. I’ll stay with him until he dies.’
‘No!’ He jumps down. ‘Martin, they’re nothing to us! It was only by chance that we saw them. If it hadn’t been for the dogs, we’d’ve passed them by and been none the wiser.’
‘But we didn’t pass them by. We were guided to them —’
He seizes my forearm. ‘But what if it was your demon that guided us? He’d like to frustrate a saint, wouldn’t he? And what’ll happen to your father’s soul if you fall sick, if you don’t get to Salster?’
I shrug him off. ‘I will.’
‘Not if you stay here when you don’t have to!’
‘I do have to. We both have to. Or didn’t your parson teach you the acts of mercy? Tend the sick! Bury the dead!’
‘You don’t have to do those things if they’re going to kill you! They’re for ordinary times not for now!’
I stare at him. That cannot be right.
Can’t it? the demon whispers. The church has changed its mind on where the dead must be buried and who can hear confession. The pestilence has changed everything.
I feel like Noah, stranded on a hill in a new land — everything I have ever known has been washed away and I am at a loss as to how a man must live in this new world. I shake my head, draw in a steadying breath. ‘I’m under the saint’s protection. I’ll be safe.’
It takes all my courage to turn my back on him and his bow. He could kill me here, bury me and take my goods. That handcart would carry everything he needs.
I have taken no more than half a dozen steps when he shouts after me. ‘If you truly believed in the saint, you’d’ve asked her to heal him.’
As the force of his words hits me, I falter. After Tredgham and her blessing of so many folk there, why has it not entered my head to offer her blessing to this man?
Hob. His hectic eagerness to be out of Savernake Forest has kept me from seeing clearly.
The afternoon wears away. Hob returns from foraging for firewood to find me trying to give water to the dying man.
‘God’s teeth, Martin, let the poor bastard die! You’re doing nothing but giving his suffering length as well as depth.’
I cannot look at him. ‘Leave me be. If you want to speed things, get to it and dig a grave.’
Two hours later we have a serviceable grave but still only one corpse.
‘Are you going to shroud them?’
I look up and Hob gestures at the couple’s handcart. ‘Bound to be something on there we can use. She looks like the sort of woman who wouldn’t want to be parted from her good sheets.’
He is proved right. Most of the bundles on the cart contain clothing and linen, the quality suggesting that they brought what they could carry rather than everything they possessed.
I wonder at a rich woman’s sense of what is needful in fleeing the pestilence. No pans, no precious herbs and spices, only clothes and linens, pewter candleholders and silver spoons, embroidery silks and needles. And a book.
I have seen no great number of books. In fact, up close, I have seen only one before — Master William’s rough-bound volume of offices and psalms and canticles.
In that book, the quickly copied text occupied the whole page for economy’s sake but, in Agnes’s missal, the script forms a small island of black ink in the middle of each page while the remainder of the vellum’s smooth, fine-grained surface is taken up with intricate embellishments. Scenes from the life of Our Lady are drawn in painstaking detail and painted in colours that make the real world seem drab; little animals and flowers scatter the page edges; braid-like borders in red and blue and green run across the top of the page, above the written words, and down the edge, alongside the words.
‘What’s that?’
I hold it out. ‘A missal — prayer book.’
‘Looks expensive.’
‘Yes.’
‘Found any money? People with a book like that aren’t going to be paupers. There must be money hidden somewhere.’
But we find none. Perhaps they have been robbed, after all.
There is, however, a great quantity of sheeting. I turn to tell Hob that we have shrouds aplenty and see him crouched next to the dying man, both hands outstretched towards him.
‘What are you doing?’ My voice is sharp. I hear the accusation and so will Hob.
His head snaps round and he drops his hands. Then he shrugs. ‘I was going to unfasten his cloak — see if his money-bag was on his belt.’
I stare at him. ‘Shouldn’t we wait to see whether he’ll live?’ I ask, eventually.
He shrugs again and lets it drop. But his outstretched hands disturb me. They were headed, not towards the man’s waist where his heavy cloak is bound, but towards his face.
Dusk. We have lit our fire and sit before it, backs to the cartwheel. Hob’s bow is at his side, an arrow ready.
‘You’re never going to leave it strung all night?’
‘I am. A stretched string’s easier to deal with than a knife in the ribs.’
‘Why are you so afraid we’ll be attacked here?’
He pulls his knife forward on his belt and takes it out. ‘You don’t know this place.’
I look sideways at him, seeing how the firelight deepens the dark hollows of his eye-sockets. ‘Do you?’
He does not reply. His eyes are fixed on the knife, finger and thumb stroking the blade. I look away. Has he been here before? Was he set upon, beaten? But then Edgar comes to mind and, before I can thrust the thought away, I see the two of them hiding in the wood, waylaying travellers, Hob with his bow, Edgar with his knife. A robber gang.
Hob wears a cloak that no villein would ever lawfully possess and I have only his word that he took it from Edgar’s pack.
Was Hob attacked, or was he the one doing the attacking?
Sometime after full dark we rise from our places by the fire, me to look at Agnes’s husband, Hob to peer into the darkness beyond our fire’s glow. Neither of us finds anything worth reporting and Hob fetches the pallet while I take the stool to keep first watch.
As he wraps the blankets around him, he asks, ‘You ever heard of a man so keen to be with his wife, even though she was dead?’
‘Only in stories.’
He grunts. ‘It’s not manly.’
I do not reply but Hob has another question for me. ‘How do you like a woman?’
Taken unawares, my mouth falls open but no words emerge.
‘Buxom and mischievous?’ he prompts. ‘Quiet and biddable?’
Still I do not answer and he pounces on my hesitation like a dog on a cornered rat. ‘Martin Collyer — I do believe you’re still chaste!’
‘There aren’t throngs of women in the forest and I was there nine months of the year.’
I picture Hob sneaking into a cottage or a barn with a young woman, see him thrusting into her, her arms twined around him as she makes the noises my brothers imitated so often in lewd talk with other lads. My own cock grows hard.
Hob turns away from me and shrugs deeper into the blankets.
I fail at my watch and Hob’s snores wake me in the half-light of dawn to a cold fire. I poke through the ash and clods and blackened sticks but find not a single ember.
Hob, roused by my cry of frustration, scowls at the lifeless ashes on the hearth-ring. ‘If I didn’t know you better, Martin, I’d say you’d let it go out so we’d have to go to Slievesdon to get embers.’
My mouth is open to tell him that I did no such thing, that we can get embers anywhere along the way but I catch myself in time. If the fire’s coldness gives him the excuse he needs to change his mind about going to Slievesdon, let him say what he wants.
Still, my guts clench at the thought of finally taking Longe’s letters to his lord. I see the writing on the outside of each in my mind. ‘For the private attention of Sir John de Loselei’, ‘The present Bailiff to Sir John de Loselei’.
I should have let Hob destroy the second one. I fear that nothing good can come of the bailiff reading it. My plan is to simply deliver Longe’s letter and rely on Sir John’s generosity. And yet I cannot quite bring myself to destroy the letter to the bailiff.
Hob yawns. ‘I hope burying your friend isn’t going to delay us too long.’
I look over to where Agnes’s husband is lying. His face is covered.
Hob watches me stagger to my feet. ‘He died not long after you fell asleep.’
I fall on my knees at the dead man’s side and bend over him, lifting the sheet that Hob has folded over his face. No bruises, no blue to his lips, no bending of his nose, no sign that anything but a plague-fever killed him.
Since there is nothing else to do once the trestle is loaded into the cart and the blankets bundled on top, we put the dead man into the grave with his wife. This is what the pestilence has brought us to: a death unseen, unmourned by friend or neighbour; a burial unconsecrated by the church. Agnes and her husband were obviously wealthy townsfolk and yet, here they are, committed to unhallowed ground by strangers, their burial watched only by magpies and crows. No almsgiving for prayers, no week mind, month-mind nor anniversary of their deaths to pray them from Purgatory.
I did not even know his name.
Nothing is as it was.
CHAPTER 23
Before long, the heathland is behind us and we are and back into cultivated acres. Some of the slopes are steep and, here and there, Hob is forced to put his shoulder to the back of the cart.
‘Why d’you think the saint didn’t heal him?’
I look around, surprised. I would have laid bets on Hob putting aside any thought of Agnes and her man as soon as we walked away from their grave.
I shrug, not daring to tell him what I truly think, for fear of another outburst against excessive married love. My belief is that the dead man’s promise to his wife weighed against him when the saint petitioned God for his life. He swore that he would not leave her and God has honoured his oath.
‘Perhaps her intercession was too weak,’ Hob suggests. ‘Perhaps all the blessing she did at Tredgham drained her.’
‘She’s not a water butt that needs refilling! Her power’s already given to her, from the holiness of her life on earth.’
Hob puts his head on one side. ‘I don’t know if that’s right, though. Think about the miracle at Tredgham. It didn’t happen when people first came on to the hearth to pray to the saint, did it? No — it happened after a week and more, when the store of prayers had built up.’ His eyes hold mine. ‘We need the saint to be strong, don’t we, to see us safe to Salster and to intercede for your father?’
I nod, wary. ‘Yes.’
‘So we must get more prayers for her.’
Until now, Hob has shown little interest in the saint beyond whether I stole her and I find his sudden wish to discuss how she comes by her power puzzling. I shake my head. ‘Even if you’re right, how would we do that?’
He smiles ‘Don’t worry. I’ll think of a way.’
We find ourselves in the village of Slievesdon without seeing a soul on our approach. The deserted fields and silent houses do not bode well, though I do not say as much to Hob. His eyes are darting everywhere. Is he expecting an attack or does he have it in mind to start plundering dead men’s houses in lieu of our ten shillings?
We walk past recently built dwellings with gardens as yet unfenced and on, into the village proper. A cat surveys our progress from its perch atop a roof. Its solitude disturbed, it stretches out a skinny leg and begins to wash itself.
Hob whistles. ‘There’s some money here. Look at these places.’
True enough, the houses and tofts look unusually prosperous and well-cared for. From the size of some of the outbuildings, there are families here who keep considerably more than a pair of cows and a pig — half the byres are big enough for a dozen head of cattle. From within one, a sudden bellowing is set up; the beasts have heard the mare’s hooves and know it means people — they want feeding.
Everywhere, doors are closed. There is no one fetching water, no one bringing home firewood, no one sitting in the chilly sunshine mending tools. A few chickens are scratching here and there but they pay us little attention.
Then, further along the street, we hear raised voices coming from one of the houses ahead. We quicken our pace and, as we draw near the next house on our right, I see that the door is open. A man’s voice — loud and reproachful — carries on the still air.
‘Your waywardness was all very well when your father was alive, Christiana, but now he’s not here to indulge you and pay the fines, you’d better mend your ways. A court’s been summoned and, if you don’t come, you’ll be the poorer for it.’
‘So be it. The tenancy’s mine, now, so I’ll do as I like, thank you. I shall find a husband.’ We cannot see her yet, this Christiana, but she sounds very sure of herself. ‘Twenty acres isn’t to be sniffed at. Plenty of men in this village’d be pleased with me and twenty acres.’
We have stopped now. It is as if both the mare and I are enchanted by hearing human voices arguing as if the pestilence had never come. We could not go on if we wanted to.
‘You and your bastard child, I suppose? I’m not going to argue with you, Christiana. I promised your father I’d try and keep you on the right side of the reeve but I’m not going to be found wanting myself. I’m going to the court. If you take my advice, you’ll come with me.’
‘You go! I’m not going to watch Piers Alleyne and that little queenling demand death dues before the dead are cold in the ground — not even in the ground some of them. It’s beyond all decency and sense.’
‘Very well. But on your own head be it.’
And he comes striding out of the house, dragging a stiff leg with the aid of a stout staff. He sees us and stops in his tracks.
‘God give you good day, master,’ I greet him.
‘What do you want?’ He stands his ground. ‘Don’t you know the Death is here? The pestilence?’
‘We have a letter for Sir John de Loselei,’ Hob says. ‘If this is Slievesdon?’
‘It is. But you’re too late with your letter. Sir John’s been dead these two weeks. His daughter’s lord now. Lady Matilda.’
‘We’ve got a letter for the bailiff too —’
‘Bailiff’s dead as well.’
Hob takes a step towards him. ‘Don’t tell me there’s no bailiff. Somebody must’ve taken over, if the old one’s dead. Who’s convened this court you’re going to?’
The lame man looks as if he has sucked on a sloe; we have clearly heard more than he hoped. ‘The old bailiff’s son, Piers Alleyne, has taken charge. You can come and try your luck with him, if you like.’
‘Hah!’ The woman he called Christiana appears at the door, an infant on her hip. ‘That’s if the reeve manages to keep folk from tearing the weasel’s limbs off! Dragging people in to answer for dues and death duties while their families are dying!’
Ignoring her, the man comes down the garden.
‘You can come if you like,’ he says again, to us.
Hob turns to me. ‘We’re in luck here.’ His is voice low. ‘The bailiff can’t refuse us in front of the whole place. We need to go to this court.’
He moves to follow the limping man but I stand, uncertain, held by the gaze of the wayward Christiana. She does not look like the slut the old man has painted her. Her green kirtle looks neat and freshly brushed and her hair is caught up modestly beneath her headcover. I wonder what manner of man fathered the child on her hip. If Slievesdon folk are anything like Lysington’s it will likely be a lusty young husband straying from a widow married for her acres.
Her would-be guardian turns. ‘Are you coming, Christiana?’
She shifts the child to her other hip and laces her hands beneath him. ‘No, I’m not, Harry Crookshank. I’m going to do as I promised her and lay Amice out. You can tell Piers Alleyne that if he wants anything from me, he knows where to find me!’ Glancing at me, she lowers her voice, though she appears to be speaking to herself. ‘Someone has to be a friend to the dead.’
I watch as Hob moves to join the lame man. Ten shillings or not, is he really going to go into a crowd of people in a village where folk are still dying?
Without touching him, Hob puts out a hand to stay the older man and asks where the court is to be held.
‘Under the Saxon oak outside Sir John’s — Lady Matilda’s gatehouse.’