It was two days later that Richer rode back alone from a hunt with
his squire and Nicholas the castellan. Richer’s rounsey had thrown
a shoe, and Richer knew perfectly well that a man-at-arms looked
to his horse before his own pleasure. Some day his life might
depend on it. Pleasure could be sought at any time.
The vill was quiet as he clattered slowly along the stony path.
He felt surprisingly relaxed. After fleeing from here in such a
hurry all those years ago, he had anticipated an overwhelming
sadness when he finally returned. And fear, too: this was the first
time he had passed through the vill on his own, without the
protection of Warin or one of the other men-at-arms.
From here the road curled up towards the church and soon,
through the trees, he could see the little belltower ahead. It was
only a short way from there to the place where he had been born
and raised. The long low thatched cottage had had a large log-pile
at one side and a barn behind, where the family pig and
some hens were housed. His father had been a serf – a peasant
who owed his labour to the lord of the manor – but Richer had
gained his freedom by running away and not being caught. He
wondered what his parents would make of him now. Probably
they’d be unhappy at his chosen career, a henchman for a lord,
but there was little else he felt he could do. At least he wasn’t a
mercenary. He earned his robes and food from his loyalty to his
squire, and if he was employed indirectly by Sir Henry of
Cardinham now, it was on a more equitable basis than being a
mere serf like his father.
At least he had travelled and seen a little of the country. That
was more than most could say, especially fellows like Serlo.
Cheeky bastard, trying to thieve money from people passing by
his mill. Richer had asked about this at the castle, but apparently
it was legitimate: the miller had bought the farm of the tolls.
Which was weird, because if he owned the farm, there was no
reason why he should let people through at a reduced rate, unless
he was desperate. Perhaps that was it. Serlo’s family had always
been money mad, ever since his father’s failure. Some men could
be driven like that. As far as Richer was concerned, it was a
curious craving. He preferred the security of belonging in a
household. Especially since losing his family.
It was odd coming back here. Glancing about him again, he
saw how little changed the place was. He would have expected the
vill to show the scars of loss, some memory of the disaster which
had taken his parents from him, but there was nothing. It was
almost as if their deaths hadn’t happened. The houses were the
same, the green unchanged – even most of the people were
immediately recognisable when he saw then. A part of him
expected to see his home; maybe he would meet his father again
as he turned a corner. But he couldn’t. They were all dead: it was
why he had run away in the first place. All were gone.
There was one welcoming face he longed to see, but after
fifteen years, she must surely have been married. Yet he hadn’t
seen her since his return. She wasn’t dead; he’d asked about her
generally, and received some grunts from servants in the castle,
as though mention of her was somehow bad luck, but he didn’t
get the impression that she was in the graveyard. Christ’s bones,
but he hoped not. He had loved her so much . . . so, so much.
And then, as though she had heard his wishes, he saw her on
the way ahead. A tall woman, bent with hardship, but still
strikingly attractive.
‘Athelina!’ he called in a choked voice.
She turned, and for a split second, her face registered astonish-ment.
Then her face tightened, and resumed its expression of
anguish. In her eyes was no pleasure, only a grim horror, as
though she feared any man she met.
Even him.
It was almost a whole month later that two men stood high on a
hill at the coast, one disconsolately throwing pebbles at an ant
scurrying about a rock. He looked up again, a dark man with a
dark face, and said emphatically, ‘No!’
The tall knight with him turned and gave his companion a
stare. ‘Are you sure of that, Simon?’
‘Quite sure, thank you, Baldwin. I want no more of your
damned boats,’ rasped his friend. ‘First I nearly die of sickness
on
the journey to Galicia, then I nearly die on the return, then we are
blown from our course to hit those benighted islands, then we
both nearly died under attack on those islands! And now we have
struck our homeland again, thanks to that drunken oaf of a
shipmaster, and you ask me to take another sour-bellied whore of
a ship? God’s thigh! Be damned to you, man! I’ll take no more
vessels. For me, it’s dry land from now on.’ He shuddered. ‘Christ
save me! I could be seasick just walking over a puddle! No, leave
me to ponder your fate while you go on alone!’
The two men stood staring down at the little vessel which had
brought them this far and which had now failed them. One, a
tall, rangy knight with the strong arms and shoulders of a man
who had trained for his vocation since a lad, the other a thickset
fellow with the ruddy complexion of one who had spent much
of his life in the open, his hair bleached by the hot sun of
Galicia.
‘It would be a great deal faster,’ the knight said mildly. ‘All
I
wish is to return home to Furnshill as soon as possible and see my
wife and child.’
His friend sighed. ‘Baldwin, I want to get home too, home to
Meg and Edith and Peter – but I don’t want to die in the process.
Every attempt to travel since we first left home has left us close
to death. For me, the land is so much more secure; I’ll take no
other route.’
‘Yet the land itself holds dangers, Simon,’ said Sir Baldwin
de Furnshill, his attention travelling inland. He had penetrating
black eyes, which some said could see through a man’s skin
to the sins beneath, but that was the merest nonsense and he
was intensely irritated to hear such chatter. He simply had
the skill of listening, and usually heard when a man spoke un-truthfully.
‘Yes, all right,’ Simon Puttock agreed. ‘But at least the
risks
you take on land are the sort which a knight like you and a man
like me can protect ourselves against.’
Baldwin nodded. His companion, the Bailiff of Lydford Castle
in Devonshire, was more than capable of defending himself,
and the pair of them had been involved in many fights both
together and apart. It was the strength of Simon’s courage in
battle that Baldwin found so confusing: a man prepared to brave
a sword or arrow shouldn’t fear the sea so much – not in Baldwin’s
opinion, anyway.
‘If we were to sail, it would be a great deal faster,’ he attempted.
‘I will not sail.’
‘It should be more comfortable, too,’ Baldwin pointed out.
‘No lurching nag, but a gently rolling deck . . .’
Simon flinched. He had been so badly seasick during the last
voyage that he had prayed for death. ‘Give me a lurching brute.
I prefer a lurching brute.’
Ignoring him, Baldwin blithely continued, ‘And wine available
from a smiling fellow sent to serve the guests . . .’
Simon held up his hand. ‘All right, all right – you want to travel
by ship? Very well.’
Baldwin tried not to gape. ‘So we can continue by ship when
she is mended?’
Simon glanced over his shoulder. The sun was low in the sky,
and the western horizon, away over the land, was gleaming pink
and gold. Leaves were licked with fire, and even Baldwin’s face
shone with an unearthly glow that lit up the thin scar on his cheek.
It was a knife-mark, Simon knew, nothing like so damaging as the
other wounds, the scars of swords and axes that marked his torso,
but in this light it showed up livid and vicious. It made him look
curiously threatening, a harkening back to the great civil wars of
the past century. Even his beard was an anachronism. No one
wore smart, trimmed beards nowadays, but Baldwin was proud of
his. Once he had been a Templar knight, and in that Order it had
been illegal to shave.
‘Simon, this beard is a mark of respect to those of my Order
who lost their lives when the French King betrayed us,’ he had
explained to his old friend. ‘If I allow it to grow wild, it would be
a mark of disrespect. I will not allow that.’
To Simon’s disgust, he had even purchased a pair of small
scissors from a cutler passing through the vill this morning. It
was a well-made tool, Simon could acknowledge, like a small
pair of sheep shears, with two sharp blades connected by a
horseshoe-shaped spring that held them apart until the fingers
squeezed the cutting edges together, but simply unnecessary. He
could as easily have bought a pair in Crediton when he got there,
but no, he needs must have his beard kept trim.
The sea was now a chill grey mass, occasional waves sparkling
gold, while the ship lay, a black shell in the shadow of the hill in
whose lee she sheltered. Simon winced at the sight of her and
shivered in recollection of the night before.
Roaring drunk, the shipmaster had deserted his post at the
tiller and fallen in a stupor after finding a bottle of burned wine.
This powerful drink, apparently made by monks boiling wine and cooling its steam
somehow – a process Simon neither understood
nor cared about – had completely ruined the man after only a pint,
and yet Simon had seen him consuming a quart of wine the day
before! Without a helmsman, the ship had struck a sand bar,
breaking her mast, and for the second time this year, Simon had
thought that he was about to drown.
The memory was enough to stiffen his resolve. ‘You sail if you
must, Baldwin, but my journey continues on foot.’
The knight made a great show of puffing out his cheeks and
shrugging. ‘If you feel so certain . . .’
‘I do.’
‘Then it is fortunate indeed that I hired the best of the inn’s
horses. Otherwise another might have secured them!’ Baldwin
said, and laughed at Simon’s expression.
On the Sunday following this conversation, Serlo the miller left
his house to walk the short distance to church, leaving his wife
Muriel to prepare their tiny sons Ham and Aumery for the Mass.
Serlo needed to speak to his brother Alexander, the Constable of
the Peace, about some business, and the church was the usual
place for men to discuss their trades.
He shrugged himself deeper into his thin tunic. The summer
was nearly over now and autumn held the land in its fist. Last
night there had been a slight frost, and the chilly atmosphere
suited his temper. Since the arrival of Richer and his squire, Serlo
had noticed people in the vill watching him. He didn’t need their
fingers pointing to know that he was the object of all the gossip in
the place. Damn them all! Too many remembered how Richer ran
away as soon as his family was discovered dead, and many recalled
the rumours at the time, that Serlo had been there at the house
before it burned down. Rubbish, of course, but throw shit against
a wall and some would stick.
He glanced into the fields nearer the vill and then at the lowering clouds.
If it were to rain, the stooks could be ruined.
The grain would get damp, and if it wasn’t properly dried it
would not last the winter, which would mean disaster for
everyone. Some men were already recalling the last war, when
the stocks for half the winter were stolen by the King’s
Purveyors. Christ’s bones, the weather here was as inconsistent
as a woman’s moods.
His wife Muriel was always whining, demanding money as
though all a man need do was wave a hand and coins would come
sprinkling from the heavens. She swore that she and the children
were always hungry, that they had nothing to live on since the
failed harvest last year, as though it was Serlo’s fault. Stupid cow!
Why couldn’t she comprehend that he was doing his best for her?
Like any other man, he relied on his skills and cunning to wrest as
much as he could from the mill, but there was little enough he
could do when things were as bad as they were at present. All
must be patient. Perhaps now the harvest was in, provided there
was no rain for a little while, there would be more money. A
harvest meant grain to be milled, and he would take his tenth
from each sack – occasionally more, if the owner wasn’t watching
too carefully as Serlo weighed his portion.
He could do with the cash himself, since apart from all his
debts, he badly needed a new surcoat. This old thing was too
threadbare to keep him warm. It had been fine the winter before
last when he bought it, but now it wouldn’t keep out the chill of an
autumnal morning. And the evenings were already creeping in.
Soon it would be winter. The years flew past so quickly. His father
had once told him that: as a man grew older, the days passed by
more swiftly – and he was definitely not getting any younger, he
acknowledged sourly.
He had to get hold of some coin! That was why he was trying to
do deals with travellers instead of taking the tolls to which the
manor was entitled. Athelina hadn’t paid him any rent for months now,
not since
Easter-time. He’d been patient because her man had sometimes
been a little slow to cough up for her, but now she said that his
generosity had dried up and she had nothing. Well, Serlo’s patience
had run out along with her money. Jesus’s heart, he had hated that
confrontation. Athelina had looked at him silently, the tears
springing into those magnificent eyes as he told her to go and
whore at the tavern. That was what a woman did when she was
desperate and her family needed money. Mind, a woman as skinny
and ravaged as her, Serlo thought morosely, would scarcely bring
in enough to buy him a kerchief, let alone a new surcoat.
One of her whelps had rushed to her, snivelling brat, as though
to defend her honour against Serlo. Shame the cur hadn’t protected
her from her last lover. Maybe she’d still have some self-respect
and honour if he had!
Deep in his thoughts, he was aware of nothing but the path
itself. Serlo cursed as his thin boots slithered over stones, almost
making him fall.
‘Ho, now! So it’s our favourite miller, Master Serlo!’
‘I’m not in the mood, Richer,’ Serlo growled on hearing the
familiar, taunting voice. ‘Leave me to go to church.’
‘Why, don’t you wish to chat?’
Peering ahead shortsightedly, Serlo could just make out two
shadowy figures. In the swirls of freezing grey fog they appeared
larger than men, much taller than Serlo himself, and for an instant
he felt crushed. Then a breeze cleared the mist, and in that instant
Serlo saw the church standing tall and serene behind his enemies.
‘May God forgive you both,’ he grated. ‘You’re holding
me from
the church.’
‘We aren’t stopping you, Serlo. Feel free to continue on your
way.’
Serlo steeled himself and strode on, chin high, but when he
was level, he hissed, ‘You’ll push a man too hard one day, Richer.
Not everyone’s scared of you just because you carry a sword for
the castle.’
‘Perhaps it will be you who is pushed too far, eh, Serlo? Go on,
you corrupt bladder of wind! Go to church. You need the solace of
God’s forgiveness more than most, I expect.’
Serlo walked on as though he hadn’t heard those words, but
when he was gone a short way further up the track, he heard
Richer’s voice again.
‘By the way, miller, I recall you asked me and my friend for a
penny to pay no toll at the bridge. That was only a short while
after you’d asked the steward for a refund of your investment in
the farm of the tolls, is that right?’
‘What’s it to you?’ Serlo snapped, attempting to hide his
fear.
‘Nothing . . . except that my master would be very interested to
learn that you were pocketing gifts. Why, that would be defrauding
him of his legitimate income. Theft, Master Miller.’
‘It’s a lie!’
‘Is it? I should ask Nicholas then, should I? Think on it, miller.’
Serlo said not a word. He walked on as though there had been
no interruption, but even as he stepped into the security of the
church, he felt the shiver of fear coursing along his spine as if
Richer atte Brooke was again threatening him.
‘God’s bones, you bastard son of a Saracen harlot, I’ll have
my
revenge on you for your insults,’ he swore quietly. ‘If you’ve
reported my tolls it’ll make repaying my debts that much harder.
By Christ’s wounds, I’ll avenge any grief you bring on me: aye,
an
hundredfold. You’ll regret coming up against me and mine, just as
your father did!’