North Side of the Tree. Maggie Prince

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СКАЧАТЬ first thought is that the Scots are attacking us again. Tilly and I look at one another, duck out of our yokes so that the buckets bump to the flagstone floor, and run outside. The screaming goes on and on. We race out of the barmkin. The crowd gathered by the gate is now hurrying up the slope, past the tower, towards the woods.

      “What is it?” I ask Germaine, who has remained by the trestle table with a jug of ale in her hand.

      She shrugs. “I have no idea.” She pours a mug for me, since all her other customers have gone. Now we can see two of Father’s henchmen emerging from the woods. They are carrying a wooden hurdle. Two homesteaders from the valley follow them, carrying another. The screaming has stopped, but several women from the valley come rushing past us, sobbing. Germaine shoots out her hand and grabs the arm of the first of them.

      “Whatever is happening, Betsy?”

      “A murder, madam. Two of the men from away have been killed in the forest. We found them…” She gives a gasping moan. “Their throats were cut. Sliced oppen.”

      I turn away, hands to my mouth. Germaine lets go of the woman, who hurries away down the hill after her companions. She turns to me. “A murder in these parts – how truly shocking. Your Scotsman did go, I presume?”

      I take a mouthful of ale, and walk away up the hill, ignoring her. I feel too sickened to be angry. The bodies are at the door of the gatehouse, surrounded by a silent crowd. There is no other way in except past them, unless I were to go by the secret passage under the floor of the dairy, which is out of the question with so many people about. My father steps forward. “Put ’em in t’wood cellar. ’Tis a poor end for those who only wished to serve their country.” The crowd nods and mutters. A few of the older people are crossing themselves, and for once my father lets it pass.

      A piece of bloodstained bedsheet covers the upper part of the first body. The man’s arms have slipped off the edge of the hurdle. As the henchmen lift it by poles at either end, the arms flap, as if alive, and for a moment I wonder if the man really is still alive after all. Then the bedsheet slides off completely, and his lolling head is revealed, his throat open in a frightful turtle smile, his brown jerkin and blue breeches drenched in blood.

      The face and shoulders of the second body are covered, but there are drops of congealed blood on the arms, crossed over his greasy green belt.

      When the bodies have been taken down the curving slope to the wood cellar, I make my way up the east staircase and along a twisting passage to the east landing. I need above all to be alone. The jakes on the east landing is the nastiest of our several latrines in the outer walls of the tower, a last resort for the desperate when all others are in use. Here I can be reasonably sure of being undisturbed. I wonder if Leo’s son, Dickon, our laystow boy among his many other duties, has emptied the privies today from the hatches one floor down. Understandably, he looks for any excuse to avoid this particular work. Kate, our cook, has been known to pursue him round the tower with a meat cleaver, to persuade him to greater diligence.

      The stink, and the hum of flies, make this little sanctuary an unlovely place to be, but peaceful. It is dark here, with only a faint luminescence from the jakes itself. I light a candle on the linen chest, and carry it in with me, propping the broken door shut with it.

      I have been pushing away the terrible thoughts in my head, but now they are unavoidable. The sight of the two dead men as I saw them in the woods keeps flashing across my mind. Sometimes they are alive again, and coming at me with the unexpectedness of the attack. Sometimes they are dead, lolling and staring. It is my fault, all my fault. I want to escape from it, from all the events of today, to stay for ever in this dark place with my guttering candle, to be walled in like a Papist nun. My mouth hurts. My knees and ribs and arms hurt. I want to slough off my flesh the way that grass snakes shed their skins. Yet it remains, white and sluglike, painful and unsheddable. The thought that I kissed John earlier appals me. Isn’t he supposed to be spiritual and remote? Isn’t that what I like about him? I want to scream that no, I am not to be touched, not by attackers, not by lovers, not by anyone. The urge to scream, in the way that the women who found the bodies screamed, comes roaring up from my feet, but all that emerges from my mouth is a tiny mew, like a kitten’s.

       Chapter 4

      There is something freakish about today; everything feels abnormal and unfamiliar. I’m beginning to wonder if the bang on my head was worse than I thought. There’s Hugh for a start, sweet Hugh, fair-haired and funny, whom I thought I knew, but who now looms at me with a predatory look that is new. He has been fussing over my bruises, and teasing me tenderly about being legless so early in the day. Dear Lord, it is grotesque. Normally he would have joked uncaringly, and suggested a ride in the woods, or target practice, to take my mind off it. I wonder if Uncle Juniper has been advising him on techniques for wooing reluctant females. I look at them now, across the crowded kitchen, drinking and conversing by the gatehouse arch. Uncle Juniper, whose real name everyone has long forgotten, is hunched over and gesturing wildly, clearly describing something deeply bloodthirsty. I wonder for a moment if I am really going to be able to do this – seriously do it – marry Hugh and see my future settled for ever within these confines.

      I decide to go and hide in the chimney corner. I seat myself facing the flames, my back against the hot stone, my skirts tucked in under my knees. The kitchen fire is roaring, and a tall blackjack of ale stands near me, on a griddle winched to one side away from the flames. Steam curls along the hot poker which Kate has plunged into it, and there is a smell of singed flesh where the poker leans against the lip of the big leather jug. The men who carried the corpses in appear up the slope from the wood cellar at the far side of the kitchen. Kate looks round from plucking thrushes at the table. “Help yourselves to ale, lads,” she calls. “I reckon you’ll be needing it.”

      The smell of newly drawn feathers mingles with the other smells of the kitchen, live flesh sweating and dead flesh singeing, and I realise that my mood is shifting. Instead of feeling shaky and terrified, now I am starting to feel angry. I am angry with the men who attacked me, angry that Leo’s saving of me had to take such a terminal form, leaving me as good as a murderer, angry at the droning throb of my bruises, at the loss of my knife, at the confrontation awaiting us all when my father finds out about Verity, and above all, angry that such a good friend and cousin as Hugh has to be turned into a husband for me, by those too old and set in their ways to know what they are talking about.

      The four men come over and ladle hot ale into their tankards. They nod to me but I pretend to be asleep. Leo’s son, Dickon, is mending the bellows on the opposite side of the fire from me, pleating new leather into the sides where the old has cracked, and if it were not for the tapping of his hammer I should probably indeed have slept.

      My parents have not arrived yet. I find myself practising speeches to calm my father’s temper when he finds out about Verity and realises that the family’s plans to marry her to Gerald, and keep the two farms within the family, are in ruins. He beat her once for her involvement with James Sorrell, and he tried to kill James. Now, faced with the inevitable fact that they must marry, and quickly, I simply cannot imagine what he will do.

      I wonder, too, what Gerald’s reaction will be. I watch him, a younger, darker, more angry-looking version of his brother, talking to Germaine in a far corner of the kitchen, stooping over her as she sits in a tall-backed chair putting tiny stitches into a pair of lace sleeves. Somehow, I don’t think he is going to be too distressed.

      Aunt Juniper appears beside me. She points at Gerald and Germaine. “Just look at that, will you Niece? He spends so much time talking to that skivvy that he scarcely gets to see your sister at all. He should be over at Wraithwaite СКАЧАТЬ