by Alis Hawkins
He gets no response from his calling and knocking at the door.
‘She said she might be next door laying out a neighbour,’ I call to him. ‘Amice.’
Legge nods and makes his way to the next house. Hob and I stand in the lane, our sullen escort surrounding us.
‘You’ve got off easy,’ one man says, poking Hob’s shoulder.
‘How d’you make that out? We struck a bargain with the soldier and we kept our side of it. Your village hasn’t kept its part, so how have we got off easy?’
‘Hold your tongue, Hob,’ I mutter.
‘Yeah, Hob. Hold your tongue,’ one of the men jeers. ‘Take your friend’s advice and keep your mouth shut.’
‘Unless you want a good hiding.’
I watch Thomas Legge stand well outside the dead woman’s house as he speaks through the open door to Christiana. A few moments later, she comes out, wiping her hands on a cloth tied around her waist. She stops when she sees our escort, just as Harry Crookshank stopped when he saw Hob and me.
‘What’s this?’ she asks the reeve.
‘It’s no concern of yours, Christiana. Come and open your barn, will you, and see to it that only what went in is taken out?’
She comes away as he asks but, on the threshold of the barn, she turns, hands on hips, to face down the men who are half a pace behind Hob and me.
‘Do I look so feeble that I need help opening my own barn? I’ll thank you all to wait here. The cart’s owner will suffice.’
The doors swing open as readily as before but the sun is no longer shining through the shutter; clouds have covered the sky.
‘I gave your mare some hay,’ Christiana speaks loudly enough to be heard from outside the barn, then, as we pass out of sight of the door, she puts her finger to her lips. ‘They’ll search the cart,’ she whispers, quickly. ‘If there’s anything in it you don’t want them to have, take it out and leave it here. You can come back tonight when it’s dark.’
But I have no sooner put my hand to the canvas than one of the men appears in the doorway. Dark and thickset with frowning brows, he looks like a man it would be unwise to cross. He strides in, his companions behind him. Two of them have Hob’s arms twisted up behind his back.
‘Right,’ the dark-haired man says, ‘let’s have that money-bag of Pretty-Boy’s, shall we?’
Hob struggles and is punched in the face. One of the men cuts the purse’s strings and takes it from Hob’s belt. He looks inside and whistles through his teeth. ‘This must be the ten shillings he got off Master Longe.’
Thomas Legge shakes his head at the man who has taken charge. ‘You can’t take his money, Dickon. That’s thieving.’
Dickon meets his eye. ‘Oh yes? And who are your witnesses if you’re going to accuse me? Besides yourself, Reeve.’
Thomas the Reeve assesses the company. Besides Christiana, myself and Hob, there are eight of them.
Christiana breaks the silence. ‘I’ll stand witness against you, Dickon Miller. And all of you.’
The miller gives a low grunt of a laugh. ‘You? Who’s going to take the word of a whore against ours?’
‘Anybody who knows you?’ Christiana suggests.
One of the men steps forward and slaps her, open handed, across the face. She staggers to one side and he moves to fetch her another blow.
The rage bursts out of me and I charge at him, dropping a shoulder into his gut and driving him to the ground.
Before I can land more than half a dozen punches, somebody pulls me off and hits me, hard, on the side of the head. The world goes black for a moment or two. I fall against the wall of the barn and watch, helpless, as one of them comes after me.
‘Enough,’ Dickon says, his voice flat and hard. ‘You can beat shit out of him later, if you want. First I want to know what’s in that cart.’
The canvas is already untied where I took the letters from the press. The Miller lifts it up.
‘Well, well, well. This is a nice little haul. You two have been busy.’
‘It’s not stolen,’ Hob says, his voice thick with his broken nose. ‘Every stick belongs to us.’
I struggle to my feet, pulling myself up against the barn wall. As I stand, my head pounds.
‘Is that so?’ I hear Dickon Miller say. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’
I watch him pulling things out of the cart; the pallet, our cooking pot, the press.
‘What’ve you been doing, going into dead folks’ houses and stealing their chattels?’
One of the men has opened the press and found Agnes’s book. He hands it to Dickon.
‘Oh, so all of this is yours, is it? None of it’s stolen, is it?’ The miller’s eyes are dark and deep-set. He looks not unlike my father.
‘There’s nothing stolen in there.’ I swallow bile.
‘I suppose you can read this then?’ He holds the book awkwardly, unused to handling anything like it.
‘Yes.’
He makes a scornful sound.
One of the others puts on a high, effeminate voice. ‘Oh yes, I can read it, most certainly.’ There’s laughter at this and more efforts at mimicry.
I ignore them. ‘Give it to me.’ I push myself away from the wall. ‘Open it on any page and I’ll read it.’
Dickon narrows his eyes, suspecting a trick. ‘Any page I choose?’
‘Any page.’ I take an unsteady step towards him.
He pulls back the cover of the book and the pages fall open as if through long use. ‘There.’ He holds the book out to me. ‘Read that.’
I take the book from him and look down at the page. Suppressing a bitter smile, I read. ‘Placebo Domino. Dilexi quoniam exaudiet Dominus vocem orationis meae. Quia inclinavit aurem suam mi et in diebus meis invocabo.’
The Placebo, the prayer for the dead. Agnes must have been dwelling on it for the book to fall open there.
When I stop reading, the barn is filled with an uneasy silence. Master William always said I spoke the Latin with a better tongue than many priests but I do not think appreciation is keeping our captors silent.
‘Are you in orders, then?’
I turn, keeping my eyes from Hob. ‘Enough to claim trial in a church court if ever I’m accused.’ It is no lie; I would need far less Latin than I am master of to claim benefit of clergy and dodge the king’s courts.
The men look at Dickon, cast glances at each other. They are clearly at a loss, now. My reading has rendered me neither fish nor fowl. I am no priest but I can spout Latin which marks me more for church than manor. Not so easy, now, to accuse me of being a thief. Not so easy to beat shit out of me either, thank God.
‘Think you’re better’n us, I suppose?’ one of them sneers.
I look him in the eye. ‘No. But this —’ I hold up the book of hours — ‘is mine.’
I think of Agnes and her husband, lying beneath the heathland, the handcart with its bundles of finery marking their grave. My claiming her book seems a fair exchange for hearing her husband’s confession and ensuring that his promise was kept.
‘You going to tell us that this is yours, too?’ a voice crows from the other end of the cart.
Ungentle hands pull the Maiden out of her hiding place. ‘You can’t tell us you’re not thieves, now. This has come from a church!’
I take a step towards him, then think better of it and pull up. ‘No. She’s mine.’
‘What?’ The question comes from behind me. ‘Image-carver, are you? Make her, did you?’
I knew they would not believe me if I told them the truth.
‘That’s Saint Cynryth. She’s my family’s saint. I’m taking her image to her shrine in Salster. To ask for prayers for my father’s soul.’
Another uncertain silence is broken as Christiana points at the cart and one of the men holding Hob suddenly cries out. ‘Hey, Walter, what d’you think you’re doing?’
‘Searching the cart.’
‘I saw you take something out.’
‘I d
id not!’
‘You did, I saw you!’
Two or three of the men move towards Walter but, before they can lay hold of him, he breaks away towards the open barn door. So unexpected is his sudden flight that it takes several moments for any of his companions to give chase.
Once one is through the door, they all take up the hue and cry. All but Dickon and the two who still have Hob’s arms behind his back.
As I move towards her, Christiana holds up a hand to me but I know better than to make any gestures of affection.
‘Are you hurt, mistress?’
‘Not much,’ she replies. ‘But I fear Walter Little has made off with a money-bag of yours.’
At this, one of the men holding Hob lets go of him and runs out of the barn. With a darting glance at Dickon, the other follows.
The miller looks across at the reeve. ‘Well?’
Thomas Legge shrugs. ‘I saw nothing stolen.’
Dickon nods, turns on his heel and walks out.
The silence left by his going is broken by the reeve. ‘You’ve got off lightly.’
‘Lightly?’ Hob is enraged at being told this a second time. ‘You call being robbed of every penny we have in the world getting off lightly?’
‘They followed you here to teach you a lesson. But are your bones broken? Is your blood spilt on the ground?’ He shakes his head. ‘No. You got off lightly.’
‘And that’s it and all about it?’ Hob asks, his voice harsh. ‘We’ve escaped a beating so you do nothing?’
The reeve stares at him for a long while. ‘You’re strangers here. You came to Slievesdon of your own free will because you thought there was something here for you. It was a risk.’
‘We came in good faith with a message for your lord,’ I protest. ‘We didn’t take a risk, we kept our word!’
He turns to me. ‘Sadly for you, you brought an unwelcome message. You gave Piers Alleyne the news he needed to lord it over us. And you’ve paid the price.’
CHAPTER 24
For days Hob and I have not spoken about what happened at Slievesdon. We have scarcely spoken at all.
Our way has brought us south and east; first to the market-town of Basingstoke and thence over terrain so hilly that I feared the mare’s heart would burst, even with Hob’s muscles to help her.
A bedraggled group of travellers told us that passing through Farnham would provide us with an easier route to the east, so we find ourselves leading the mare down a steep slope past Farnham’s block of a castle and on to the river-crossing that links the town to the suburbs on the other side.
Luck, fate, or the good offices of Saint Cynryth are on our side and we soon find ourselves on the high, dry going of an old trackway. The ground beneath us is firm and, for the first time in days, I leave off worrying that the cart will be broken apart by the sheer effort of hauling it along.
Still, despite the better ground, we make slow progress. Though spring is in the air, it is not yet in the grass and, as we have no fodder for the mare, we are obliged to stop and let her graze when we come upon anything like pasturage. Between the need to feed her and to find firewood, I doubt we are making six or seven miles in a day, though we pack the embers soon after first light and do not put tinder to them again until dusk is almost dark. And I am beginning to worry about provisions. Our supplies of beans and peas will not see us to Salster and, now, we have not a single penny to replenish them.
So far, Hob has been lucky with his arrows, but he has only three; a run of bad luck could see him lose them all. What will he do if we run out of food? Will he stay with me or — now I have no money — will he seek out a better prospect? For all my doubts about him, I would rather have him with me than travel alone, prey to any wanderers. And my night-walking demon.
But, while my thoughts are desperate and unprofitable, the country about us seems determined that all will be well. Ploughing and sowing are going on apace and cattle are being driven out onto the common pastures to find what grazing they can as barns are emptied and haystacks shrink to seed-strewn circles. Every day we see sheep, released from their cotes and home pastures, skittering up on to the sweeping slopes to wait for the warmer days when they will drop their lambs.
The folk of the downs put their faces to the sun and it shines on them as if the pestilence had never come to England, as if churchyards the length and breadth of the land are not stinking and heaving with the dead, as if priests were our only confessors still. But it is not so. The pestilence has stopped up the veins of England, slowing her life to a feeble beat and, though March’s warming sun is ripening buds and coaxing out shy, soft-petalled primroses, I have no hope that spring will shrug off pestilence as it does winter.
That evening, Hob stands over me as I lay the fire. He says nothing, but I can feel his eyes as I sit between kindling and wind, coaxing the embers into flame.
He drops into a haunch-squat. ‘We must do something to earn some money soon or we will not live to see Salster.’
Though I am glad to have the subject broached, now Hob has brought it up, I find I do not want to hear how he intends to come by money with the country as it is. Today, we entered a village to beg water and, though the villagers gave it to us, it was with ill-will. How on earth might we persuade anybody to let us stay long enough to work when they begrudge us the time it takes to draw water?
I do not look at Hob, confine myself to feeding the weak, wind-blown flames with strips of bark and feathered twigs.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t feel it, too,’ he pushes.
‘Feel what?’
‘The lack of money. The want of a single farthing.’
I do. And I have begun to understand what he, most likely, has always known — that, having neither money nor obvious means to get it, nothing stands between you and starvation except the charity of others. That or theft.
‘The saint can help us,’ he says. ‘She has power to make people devoted to her as soon as they lay eyes on her! Think how the people at Tredgham came to her. And when they came, they brought gifts!’
I turn to the fire again. ‘Yes, after she’d done a miracle. People are apt to be impressed by miracles.’
‘So we must tell people about her miracles! Once they’ve heard what she’s done, they’ll be falling over themselves to bring gifts.’
But if the saint’s blessing turns out not to confer protection on all and sundry, then Tredgham’s coroner will hear of it — I know he will — and we will not be safe.
I reach for a length of firewood. ‘No.’
‘It’s not just to get gifts for us. We need people to pray to her to make her strong. So she can rescue your father from Purgatory.’ He waits but is impatient, wants to bludgeon me with his words. ‘Martin, don’t you believe in our saint’s miracles? Don’t you want people to know about them?’
My Tredgham vision dances before my eyes. An army of the healed, Saint Cynryth at their head. ‘Yes, of course I do —’
He thrusts his head towards me, towards the fire. ‘Well then?’ His face, lit from beneath by the growing flames, is eerie — a thing of shadows and glinting eyes.
My father’s words come back to me. Folks’d come traipsing through the woods to see her. They’d come pawing at her and touching her. I won’t have it.
‘I’m not going to make a whore out of her, Hob,’ I said.
He leaps to his feet. ‘Don’t you come the virtuous man with me, Martin Collyer!’ He stands over me, glaring down. ‘You were quick enough to pay your little whore weren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Christiana. Wouldn’t pull up her kirtle till you’d ferreted around in the cart to find your money-bag, would she?’
His words wind me like a fist in the gut. He gives a grunt of laughter. ‘Did you think I didn’t know? You shouldn’t have thrown yourself at that churl who slapped her if you wanted to keep it quiet.’
I stand and face him, my heart thudding with rage. ‘I don’t care whether you know or n
ot. But it’s none of your business.’
‘It’s my business if your cock makes trouble for us!’
‘Trouble? You’re the one who’s made trouble for us! Panting up to Piers Alleyne for your damned ten shillings!’
‘Oh! And I suppose you weren’t determined to bend every arse-licking sinew to go to Slievesdon and keep your precious word?’
I aim for his nose but he pulls back his head and my fist hits chin and teeth instead. I bend double, left hand clutching my damaged fist and Hob’s knee smashes into my face.
Staggering back, I right myself quickly, waiting for him to follow with his fists, but he stands off, running his tongue around his teeth.
‘How much did she take off you, Martin? However much it was, it was a bloody expensive fuck — because she saw where you took the money from —’ a hand on my chest pushes me backwards — ‘didn’t she? And she told that weasel Walter —’ another push — ‘didn’t she? That’s how he knew where to find it!’ A final push lands me back on my arse.
‘What are you talking about?’ As I open my mouth, pain shoots from chin to brow. I put my hand to my face; I’m bleeding from nose and lip. ‘I didn’t pay her!’
His boot catches my thigh. ‘Liar!’
‘It’s the truth!’ Again the pain blooms. I spit blood as I scramble to my feet, away from his boot. ‘She couldn’t’ve told Walter where the money-bag was because she didn’t know.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘D’you know what, Hob?’ I thrust my bleeding face into his, my words spitting blood at him. ‘I don’t care! I’m sick of you lording it over me because you’re some squire’s bastard.’
He backs off a pace. ‘Calm down, Martin. You’re squealing like a girl.’
I spit more blood. The taste reminds me of sickness and death.
‘A paid fuck or a free one, you and she together still cost us that purse.’
I lick blood from my bottom lip. ‘How?’
He closes the gap between us again. ‘Because while you were busy discovering what your prick’s for, I couldn’t talk to Piers Alleyne because I didn’t have the letter! If you’d come with me instead of following the urges of your knob, we’d have spoken to him and been out of the village before Dickon and his cronies ever turned up for the court.’ Hob takes hold of the front of my tunic and pulls my bleeding face up to his. ‘You owe me, collyer boy, and your saint is going to pay me back. When she’s earned us back our ten shillings, then you can say your piece. Until then, you keep your mouth shut.’