Читать книгу Raider’s Tide - Maggie Prince - Страница 12

None of us emerges until the following day. Double watch is kept all night. By next morning the whole area smells like a slaughterhouse, and a thick crust of black flies has formed on the outside of the tower. They creep in through the window slits and buzz in our faces, grotesquely unable to differentiate between the living and the dead. Outside, they swarm on the bodies. On the grass they move in patterns, forming and re-forming like fishermen’s nets on the sea.

My father, sober and out of bed for once, leads prayers of thanksgiving for our deliverance, as we all stand crushed together in the men’s common room. On our side only Henry is dead, though several more of the henchmen are wounded. Henry lies now in our tiny chapel over the gatehouse. Father prays for his soul. He even, in what seems to me like a fit of remarkable generosity, offers up a brief prayer for the souls of the fallen Scots.

“He’d best not let the parson hear him praying for folks’ souls,” Germaine whispers to me. “That’s Popish stuff.”

I look at her. Is she loyal to no one, not even my father? Not that there seems much point in his prayers. I cannot believe that God listens to my father. He might as well pray to the elder tree in the thicket, the way some people round here still do.

“Amen,” chorus the homesteaders. I look across their bowed heads. In a few minutes they will have to walk out past those bloating corpses and down the valley to see which of their stick and mud homes are still standing. Their children, tired from two nights on the common rooms’ floors, are mardy and whimpering. The stench from the livestock is overwhelming even up here now, and it blends with the smell of carnage below to create a foul miasma which clogs our noses. Several times I pass people being sick out of windows.

Later, most of us go down to help redistribute the livestock. Buckets of milk stand all along the downstairs passageways. The floors of the lower rooms are thick with dung. Most of the cattle are in distress because the crowded conditions have not made for adequate milking. They skip and kick as they are released down the curving slope to the cellars, then shoulder each other along the underground passage, through the stone arch under the dairy, up the slope at the other end where part of the flagstone floor has been removed, and out into the barmkin, pursued by Leo shouting, “Git on, yer great lummocks.”

Two pigs, herded by their owner out of the barmkin, rush towards where the bodies lie. Children watch in fascination to see if the pigs are to be allowed to eat the bodies, and Kate mutters, “Reet pigs an’ all,” and ushers the children away, while the swineherd hurries his charges up the hill.

Father yells, “Bury the dead!” I see that his hands are shaking from lack of drink. I put my arm round him and embrace him, then join the homesteaders and help them sort out their animals.

Later I go up to the chapel to see Henry’s body. Bright sunlight pours in through the high window and shimmers on the embroidered altar cloth and the linen sheet covering him. Four candles burn, two at his head and two at his feet. The four spiked silver candle prickets represent Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The old priest said they were Popish folly, but the new priest says they are beautiful. I lift one of the candles, spilling hot wax on my hand, and hold it close to see Henry better. I can feel my burnt skin puckering under the cooling wax. Henry’s cheeks are smooth and white, his chin dark with stubble. The wound from the grappling iron stands out in shades of black and purple, and below it, the graze from my ring is raised and red. I touch it with the hand I used to slap him, then turn away and bring my hand down on the spike. I am not brave. It is a gash, no more. The blood runs over my fingers, through the turquoise ring, and I walk unsteadily back downstairs.

Mother has arrived home, and with her are Hugh and Gerald. Verity and I stand outside the tower amongst the piled dungheaps which Kate and Leo are still shovelling out, and hold her tightly and cry.

“Are you all right?” she demands. “I was dreadfully worried about you.”

“Yes. Are you all right, Mother?” I see that her cheeks are very red and healthy-looking, and despite her stated anxiety she has the appearance of someone rather pleased with herself. Hugh and Gerald grin at us, and take themselves off upstairs to have a tankard of ale in the common room with the men. All of them are now back from burying the bodies of the Scots in a clearing on the hill behind Barrow Wood. Henry’s body will travel the Old Corpse Road to Wraithwaite tomorrow, for burial in the churchyard. Now the men have been given a quart of ale each to help them forget the dreadful sights they have seen and the dreadful textures they have touched.

Mother, Verity and I go up to Verity’s room and sit on the cushioned stone benches along the walls, leaning back against the pictorial tapestries which Verity weaves. We are all very tired. Kate, unasked, brings hot, mulled wine.

“Did they attack Mere Point?” I ask. Mother shakes her head.

“No, but we’d just let the cattle out again, and they took those. They’re getting too darned clever by half, hiding and waiting like that. I was frantic when I heard they were attacking Barrowbeck. A lad said they’d got into the tower, but Aunt Juniper wouldn’t let me come back until now. Even then she insisted on sending Hugh and Gerald with me. Not that they needed much persuading.” She says this with more hope than conviction.

We talk until Kate rings the bell for supper, then we go up to eat in the living hall. Lately Germaine has been eating here with us, instead of in the kitchen with Kate and the henchmen. As usual, our food is half cold by the time Kate has slogged up the east stairs with it. She bangs down the pewter dishes in front of us. I believe she thinks we should pay for our privileges.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to eat in the kitchen, Germaine?” Verity asks gently. When she speaks gently, we all know to watch out. “You’d get your food hot from the hearth then. In fact, I think I might start eating in the kitchen myself.”

“A good idea, mistress. Perhaps we all should.” Germaine helps herself to more of the congealing mutton in its puddle of yellow grease.

Father throws Verity a look and says, “That’s quite enough of that, Daughter.”

For much of the rest of the meal, talk is of the tower’s defences. It annoys me that Father booms on to Hugh and Gerald about improving the defences of the two towers, when he does so little about it in practice. Hugh takes my hand under the table and gives it a squeeze. I stare at him, quite startled. He asks my father, “Are you riding tonight, Uncle?” A shocked silence falls. It is an unspoken rule that we never discuss my father’s regrettable tendency to rob travellers on the queen’s highway.

My father smiles at his nephew. “Likely as not. You wish to come?”

Hugh smiles respectfully back. “Nay. Thanks Uncle. I’m as tall as I care to be.”

After the meal, Verity and our two cousins and I walk up towards Barrow Wood in the dampness of early evening. Hugh says, “It was time someone said something. You are all too careful of him. Being squire of Barrowbeck won’t save him from having his neck stretched, if they catch him.”

“Oh…” I sigh. “I know, but you don’t have to live with him. You had a more kindly response from him than any of us would have.”

It is exhilarating to be free of the constrictions and smell of the tower. Hugh takes my hand again, and I see Verity’s eyes widen.

“Well, Cousin.” Hugh speaks quietly to me, excluding the others. “How are you truly, after your ordeal?”

“Well enough, thank you Cousin.” I feel far too unnerved to make any pretence of proper conversation. I see, mildly alarmed, that we have now lost sight of the other two amongst the trees. I decide that frankness is my best defence. I lift our clasped hands.

“What am I supposed to make of this, Hugh?”

He flushes. Hugh is very fair-skinned, with pale, straight hair, fairer than his brother. I know that he is considered handsome, and I can see that one could think him so, but to me he is still so much my childhood companion that his comeliness or otherwise is irrelevant. We face each other in the darkening forest. “How do you feel about our families’ plans for us?” he asks me.

“Hugh… I’m not ready to consider them yet…” I clear my throat and try again. “Of course, I love you as a cousin…” I feel desperately disturbed by his closeness. Never, even in our most frightening games as children, has Hugh seemed threatening, but he seems threatening now. “It’s too soon,” I falter. “I hadn’t thought it would come so soon.”

“Your father and mine have indicated their wishes, Beatie, but it doesn’t have to be soon.” He lets go of my hand. “I should have liked it to be soon… it’s not just our fathers’ wish… but you’re two years younger. I can wait. Could we… perhaps… try to see each other differently? I have to confess that your friendly, jesting attitude towards me makes you rather unapproachable on these matters.”

There is a pause. The light is fading. Hugh seems like a stranger. We walk in the direction of the old hermit’s cottage, no longer holding hands, no longer speaking. Green light filters through the leaves, down to the forest floor. When we reach a corner of the crumbling boundary wall we sit down on it, side by side in the moss-coloured dimness. I turn to Hugh. “We know each other too well, Hugh. I cannot think of you in the way you wish.”

He puts his arm round my shoulders briefly, then releases me. “I won’t ask you again until the winter, Cousin.” After a moment he adds, “I would do anything for you, Beatrice. I would walk through the quicksands across the bay for you.”

I stand up. “Now you’re getting carried away, Hugh.” I feel uneasy and uncomfortable, and I think at first that Hugh’s words are the cause. Then I realise that there was a noise. I turn slowly. Surely the hermit’s cottage is still uninhabited? The noise is repeated, a crackling, shifting sound.

“Hugh, I heard something. Did you hear it?”

He stands up and looks around. “What did you hear?”

“I don’t know. A twig. A movement.”

The awareness of someone, a presence, is suddenly very powerful. It was the feeling I had on the Pike, and on Beacon Hill, but now a hundred, a thousand times stronger.

“The old man’s dead, isn’t he?” Hugh asks.

“Yes. Perhaps someone else has taken over the cottage,” I suggest, before we can start talking about ghosts and goblins. Hugh begins to creep round the low wattle hut. A branch snaps under his foot. I lift my skirts and step over the broken wall, then move cautiously along the front of the dwelling. A narrow window slot gives on to a dark interior, from which a foul, ancient odour seeps. The hermit was not known for his cleanliness. I move to the door and push it open and peer in. From what I can see of them, the matted rushes on the floor look as if they have been there since Queen Mary’s day. It is impossible to see anything else.

Suddenly, a buffeting wind shakes the woods. The patchy cloud cover overhead shifts, and tightly woven tree branches rattle apart. A bright hem of light swirls through the forest, and briefly illuminates the inside of the cottage. I can see more clearly the rushes on the floor, rank and mouldy, a battered iron skillet lying upended, a heap of droppings left by the hermit’s goat. There is something else too, a bundle of brown and green cloth lying in a corner where broken reeds hang down from the roof. The bundle moves. It is a man. I can see his face, bruised and swollen. It is a face I recognise.