Читать книгу Raider’s Tide - Maggie Prince - Страница 9

In the morning I find that my mother has still not returned, so I decide to walk over the hill to Aunt Juniper’s to meet her, and perhaps have another half-hearted go at seeing Hugh in a husbandly light. Before this, however, there are the morning’s tasks. We are not rich. We do not have many servants, so Verity and I do much of the work involved in running the household and farm. This morning I set some of the men to pounding seaweed into our outer door, to make it fireproof for the summer. We are late doing it this year. Then I walk down the hill to open the barmkin and release the flock of sheep belonging to our neighbour, James Sorrell. The sunshine drives away the last of my nightmares. I have vague recollections of dreaming about Hugh dressed in a suit of armour, which in view of my misgivings was probably wishful thinking.

This is a good time to be alive. Queen Elizabeth is on the throne and stability reigns throughout the land. We hear of distant battles fought and won by our English army and navy on land and sea, the news sometimes brought to us a year or more after they happened by fancy-talking travellers from the south. Our only real problem is the Scots, who raid the border counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland from March to September every year, though I daresay they feel that we are their problem too, since our men also cross the border from time to time.

There’s a lot to do now that spring is here. Our lower rooms and cellars, which have been used as food stores through the winter, must now be cleared, so that cattle, goats and horses can be herded in there fast in the event of a raid. There are times when I wish that one or both of my parents took more interest in the daily running of Barrowbeck Tower.

My father appears to be limping this morning, and I wonder if last night’s robbery on the highway did not go according to plan. “Hurt your leg, Father?” Verity asks unsympathetically as she sorts stones to repair the barmkin wall. Father is tottering down the slope towards the dairy in search of fresh milk for his morning dish of bread and milk. Despite their mutual insults it is always obvious how fond Verity and Father are of each other. I think they recognise themselves in each other. I am more like Mother, full of dreams and secrets.

“You can give back yon good pair of shoes if you don’t like what bought ’em, Daughter,” he shouts at her. Verity takes off her shoes and throws them at his retreating back, but he ignores them. I hold the barmkin gate open for him, and he shambles in, pushing his way among the sheep who are shambling out.

James’s sheep have been kept overnight in our barmkin instead of on their normal grazing on the saltmarsh foreshore, because it was full moon last night, and they would have been caught by the high tide, as has happened to many a human soul. I watch the sheep go strolling off down the hill on each other’s heels like, well, sheep, and I head back up to the tower. We all have to come and go to and from the barmkin the long way round. From outside it appears a separate thing from the tower. It is a high-walled, semi-circular enclosure lower down the hill, attached at each end to the sheer rockface from which our impregnable outer wall rises. The Scots have breached the barmkin many times, but they have never found the secret stone archway hidden under the floor of the dairy, which itself is built straight into the rock wall, like a cave. Deep in the hill an underground passage leads to our storage cellars and the curving slope up to the kitchen. Even if they did ever find it, they would then be confronted by an iron-bound oak door and a spiked wolf-pit. We scarcely ever come and go this way, for fear of leaving marks of passage, though the temptation is often great on a rainy day.

By midday Mother still has not returned, so I set off to walk up through Barrow Wood and over Beacon Hill to meet her. I want to talk to her alone. Nothing is inevitable. No official betrothal has taken place between Hugh and me. Not even the preliminary de futuro contract has been signed. I need to catch her in a good mood and make my case. She and my father are a glowing example of why matrimony should be avoided. She has often told the story of how, as a bride of sixteen, she travelled the Old Corpse Road on the back of a donkey to marry my father. “It would have been better had I married the donkey,” she once said in an unguarded moment.

Saint Hilda, my horse, is cropping thistles at the edge of the trees as I enter Barrow Wood. I stroke her nose and decide to leave her behind today. Walking will allow me more time for thought. I have a good nuncheon of cheese and bread in my sheepskin bag. I do not intend to hurry back.

I follow the direct but strenuous route over the top of the hill, where flat, fissured limestone slabs alternate with patches of bracken. Herb Robert grows in crevices, and lady’s-slipper orchids tremble in the shade. I take off my boots. The stones are warm and smooth through my black linen stockings. I sit down on a rock to eat, looking out over the bay.

This is not my best batch of bread ever. It emerged from the oven dark and bitter-tasting. I fear there was a mould in last year’s wheat, caused by the damp spring. Sometimes these moulds cause outbreaks of madness right across the north of England. We’ve tried all ways to keep the bitterness out of the bread, such as not letting the leaven stand too long, a week instead of a fortnight. Unfortunately, the resulting bread is then so hard that you could brain Scots with it.

The mould tends to be worse in the barley and rye bread which the homesteaders make. I wonder sometimes how far the death-hunts and burnings which sometimes plague us round here are a result of these outbreaks of collective madness.

The beacon is behind me, a raised stone hearth piled with wood and turf. I lean my back against it. A tinderbox lies in a covered cavity beneath it, with dried moss and tar-soaked rotten sticks for kindling. I gaze round me, sleepy in the warmth and stillness. The crown of the hill is like a monk’s skull, a white summit fringed by trees. There are still monks over the water at Cartmel, despite the old king’s wisdom in tearing down their dens of iniquity. Sometimes I wonder about the iniquity. Despite being impoverished themselves, the Cartmel monks give to the poor, and are also said to shelter fugitives.

I look out across the distant curve of the bay to Gewhorn Head, where wolves still roam occasionally, and beyond, to the lakeland hills hidden in a smudge of mist. This is when James Sorrell appears. I don’t know which of us receives the bigger fright when his face materialises above the rock wall.

“Beatie, whatever are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way to meet my mother, James. For heaven’s sake, how do you manage to be so quiet? You frightened the life out of me. What are you doing here?”

“It’s my turn on watch.” He sits down beside me, and looks at me in silence. James does not communicate well. His manners are often rough, and surprisingly for a landed farmer in our prosperous region of the north, he has never learned to read or write. I feel it is something to do with the fact that his father used to beat him half senseless when he was a child. We all knew it. I can remember my mother flying into a rage with the old man, and being shown briskly off the premises of Low Back Farm. Because James cannot read or write, Verity keeps his farm’s financial books for him, and as a result he has fallen in love with her.

He takes off his leather jerkin. He smells of sweat and cattle. “I haven’t seen Verity lately,” he says. For some reason, perhaps because he knows I like him, James lives in the forlorn hope that I will help him obtain my fifteen-year-old sister’s hand in marriage. Nothing could be further from my mind.

“She’s busy, James,” I answer, and pass him some bread and cheese to cheer him up. We sit in silence for a while. The world is very beautiful today. Below the rocky plateau on which we sit, on a level with our feet, young hazel leaves are curling out of their buds. High above us a hawk hovers. Trouble for someone. A hint of the strange feeling I had yesterday returns. I say, “You know, James, I feel as if we’re being watched.”

“Aye?” He looks sceptical. “It’ll be the Green Man, I daresay.”

I laugh. Now he is making me nervous. “No, nothing like that. I expect it’s just a deer watching us from the woods.”

He smiles. “Well it’ll be the Green Man now. Speak and ye’ll see.”

“Oh stop it, James.” I lean back, knowing he finds it amusing to frighten people, and wishing I had not started this conversation and given him the opportunity. There’s nothing on this sunlit hill to harm us. Except – a flicker of light westwards across the bay. I straighten and stare. James has seen it too. He sits forward. The flicker vanishes and is replaced by a thin line of smoke rising from the watchtower across the water. It is the warning beacon. The Scots are coming.