Читать книгу The Black Rose - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 14

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The downpour ceased at dawn, and man’s great and jovial friend, the sun, popped his head up over the horizon. There was a smile and a wink on his broad golden face, and he seemed to be saying: “Take heart, ye poor, channering earthworms, stumbling through the dark and the wet. Here I am, to drive the devil from the world again.” There was an autumnal vibrancy in the air. In their sedate beauty of ruby and brown, the trees stretched ahead on each side of the winding road. Through the up-perked ears of stone on Chanfrin Rock, they caught their first glimpse of Gurnie, standing sturdily in the bend of Franklyn Creek.

Walter sensed at once that there was something wrong; and his pride, which had only the greatness of Gurnie to feed upon, took alarm. He could see droves of small black animals about the stables and was sure they were swine. “Where are the horses?” he asked himself, uneasily. He had a guilty fear that the expense of sending him to Oxford had made sweeping economies necessary.

There was an equally unpleasant surprise for him when they came in sight of the western exposure. What had once been the yew garden was now a huge rubbish pile. He studied this fresh proof of poverty with a sinking heart. The pile was made up of rusted shields, broken lances, cast-off parts of horse gear, wheels of carts.

“St. Aidan!” he muttered, shaking his head. “Has my grandfather gone mad? There used to be a garden here that was my mother’s special pride. We had a yew walk four hundred years old. There isn’t a trace of it left!”

“Perhaps your grandfather has sold it,” ventured Tristram. “The abbeys are always ready to pay handsomely for yew.”

To complete the picture, there were chickens everywhere. They filled the road, expostulating as they scattered to make way. They were perched on the pointed beams of the palisade, clucking indignantly from this point of vantage. Even the drawbridge, lying flat and impotent with its hoisting chains rotted clear away, was covered with their feathers. When Walter saw that the water in the moat was coated with straw and foul with marish growths, his humiliation was complete.

Wilderkin admitted them, looking well fed and content. In fact, he filled his hempen shamewes with a fine roundness of belly which bespoke no shortage of food in the household. Walter noticed, however, that the seneschal was beginning to show his age. He was rheumy of eye, and time was tracing purple reminders on his nose and cheeks. This was to be expected, for Old Will was getting close to fifty years, a good ripe age.

“Ha, Master Walter!” he wheezed. “We looked for ye at sundown. Ye’ve had the word, then?”

“Yes, Will. One of the Bulaire men was sent to Oxford to bring me back. Simeon Bautrie sent him.”

“Simeon Bautrie sent him!” The eyes of the old man opened wide at this. “Now that makes good hearing. Simeon was the earl’s man of law. Can it mean that some land has been left ye?”

Land! Ever since the confiscation, that word had been spoken in the household with almost savage longing. Land, the one basis of prosperity, the sole means of enjoying comfort and security; how bitterly its lack had been resented!

“I know as little of that as you do, Old Will.”

The low-beamed hall into which they stepped was dank and unaired. Was the inside of the house as unkempt as the exterior?

“Old Will,” said Walter, laying a supplicating hand on the rough sleeve of the seneschal, “what is amiss here? The whole place is as sour as rennet. It reeks of swine and hens and rotting merd. Why is that pile of rubbish in the yew garden?”

“We are doing the best we can, let me tell ye, Master Walter,” said Wilderkin, with a trace of sulkiness. “Do ye find fault with the steps taken to keep food on the board? There are only a few begster acres left; and twelve men and four women to feed, not to mention the two bordar boys and that slut of a buttery burd. Ye would not object to the hens and the swine if ye knew the jingling price we get for them in the London market. Oh yes, we sell all the way to London. As for the rubbish, it will bring wealth to Gurnie in time.”

Walter heard his grandfather’s voice calling from somewhere within, “Wilderkin, where are you, knave?” He asked hurriedly, “What wealth can there be in splintered lances and rusted hubs?”

“Ha, that’s the surprise we have for ye,” declared the seneschal, with an air of sly triumph. “Two of the men scour the countryside for the ross ye see out there. It’s little they pay for it; but how different it is when the armourers come here, looking for the metal they can melt in their furnaces? Steven Littlesteven has come to us all the way from his shop in London. The right metals are hard to come by these days.”

“But—but——” Walter was so stricken with horror that he found it hard to command his tongue. “Are you telling me that my grandfather has gone into dealing in old metal? He, a belted knight!”

Wilderkin laughed scornfully. “Belted knights can starve as easily as common men, Master Walter. I tell ye the profit we make is an honest one. Not that my lord Alfgar has any part in it himself, save to do the planning and keep the books.” He gave vent to a sudden sigh. “It is true I have more stomach for the ross trade than for the swine. Men hold their noses when they see me now and ask, ‘How sets the wind?’ ”

Walter’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark inside, and he could see now that nothing had been changed. The hall, bare of all furnishings save a few ancient weapons and shields hanging on the walls, opened into the main room where the tables and trestles still stood from last night’s rere-supper. Burnt-out torches sagged in the wall hooks. He could hear dogs scratching and snuffling among the floor rushes.

Wilderkin was looking him over critically. “Ye’ve grown,” he said. “I swear ye’ve stretched up a full two inches. I like it little that ye resemble him so much. There is little trace of Gurnie blood in ye that I can see.” He suddenly clutched one arm of the homecomer, “Did ye hear he was killed in Gillam’s Spinney? By an arrow through the heart?”

The seneschal’s words came as such a shock that Walter gazed at him for several moments in a stunned silence. He had lacked the will to ask any questions of the thrall from Bulaire. “Killed!” he said, suddenly. “It must have been an accident. My lord of Lessford had no enemies.”

Wilderkin wagged his head. “No one knows for a certainty, Master Walter. No enemies, ye say? How have we regarded your good lord of Lessford here at Gurnie? His lady has no doubts. She is sure in her mind he was killed by someone poaching in Gillam’s Spinney.”

“That could be true, and it could yet be an accident. Do you remember the death of King Rufus?”

The face of the old retainer hinted of things still untold. He kept nodding his round head and smirking, as though savoring the effect his disclosures would have.

“Come, Old Will!” cried Walter. “Out with it, man! Tell me what you’ve heard.”

“The widow has not been content to wait for the king’s justice. Nothing would suit her but she must take the avenging of her lord’s death into her own hands. All of the men who have ever been known to loose an arrow after sundown in Bulaire domain were brought in to her. Six of them, Master Walter, six stout fellows with families of their own and no fault on their consciences that anyone wotted of. They were lined up before her and charged with the murder of her lord; and with such a violence of words that even her own servants hung their heads as they listened. They were put to the torture and, when nothing was learned, she summoned them out again. It passes all belief, Master Walter! She had them hanged from one tree in full view of the castle.”

“All of them! Six innocent men hanged! Were—any of them from Gurnie?”

“No. None from Gurnie. A blessing it was, for my own nephew Jack had been——” Wilderkin drew in his breath sharply. “Forget what I said, Master Walter; and lay a promise on this fellow with ye to keep a still tongue in his head.”

“But has nothing been done about it?”

Wilderkin shook his head slowly. “There have been plenty of black looks and much talk. Ye may depend on it, there will be trouble for the widow when the word gets to Lunnon.”

Tristram, whose face had gone white at the first telling, said in a suppressed voice, “Some day the common men of England will rise up and put an end for all time to such crimes as this!”

“The common men?” said the old servant. “The common men have little stomach for trouble hereabouts since Evesham. They were all out against King Harry then, and plenty of them swung from the gallows tree before it was over. As for the widow, they say she boasts of what she has done. Norman justice, she calls it.” He clutched Walter’s arm a second time. “Ye’re not to go there! If ye show yer face at Bulaire Castle, the she-devil will hang ye up with the rest of them. She’s always hated ye; make no mistake about that!”