Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

I did my best. I tried to think of The Old Gravestone as a heartbreaker, a sort of Don Juan who picked women up and dropped them without mercy, but I failed miserably.

‘I’m better off with you, Rumpole,’ Hilda told me. ‘I can always rely on you to be unreliable.’

Simon de Rougemont reined in his horse the better to gaze with pleasure upon his newly acquired domain. It was his reward for services rendered to William the Bastard. Every prospect pleased: the rich pastures, the wooded slopes teeming, no doubt, with game, and the glittering river promising fine fishing. And the settlement, of course. He sighed. Only man, in the form of his reluctant tenantry, was vile.

Beside him, Claude Villeneuve, the interpreter foisted on him by necessity, sniffed audibly. ‘To think that they call this a village!’ Claude’s finger led his lord’s eye to the cluster of low wooden huts, reed-thatched, from the roofs of which smoke meandered through more orifices than the builder had presumably intended. ‘Animals!’ the young man added tersely ‘In fact, worse than animals, which know no better.’

Simon raised a minatory hand. ‘Only think how much greater will be the joys of civilising them. First of all, we will build a church worthy of the name of the Almighty. And then we will introduce them to a proper legal system -’

‘Fortifying your castle is the best way of civilising those beasts.’

Simon chose to ignore the interruption. Somehow this invasion – no, this just retrieval of lands willed to William – had contrived to bring to the fore men who would never in earlier days have achieved any prominence. Some of his fellow barons were behaving in the most ungodly ways, in the interests, they insisted, of the rapid subjugation of their English cousins. To Simon’s mind, they were little better – and sometimes regrettably worse – than the savage Saxons whose confiscated fiefdoms they had been granted.

‘Not just wooden palisades,’ Villeneuve continued. ‘Good stone walls. The sort of building to show who’s boss.’ He dropped his whip ostentatiously. ‘Oy! You. You there!’ he slipped off his right glove to click his fingers.

A broad-shouldered man in his early twenties walked unsmilingly, and unhurriedly, towards them. He picked up the whip, reaching up to restore it to Villeneuve’s grasp. If he did not expect largesse, he certainly would not have expected the vicious cut across the cheek to which Villeneuve treated him. But he neither flinched nor swore, merely stepping back a pace and regarding his assailant steadily, as if to fix Villeneuve’s face in his memory.

‘Enough of that,’ Simon said sharply, as even their escort of soldiers shifted uneasily. ‘Law enforcement is one thing, brutality another. We are here -’

‘I know, to civilise and secure. But they’re like dogs, my lord – they need to be shown who’s in charge.’

‘So you say. With undue frequency, if you will permit the observation.’ Simon raised an acid eyebrow. He was Villeneuve’s senior not just in rank but also in age: Why should the wretched man not show him due respect?

Villeneuve was unmoved. ‘Now, how about that for a game piece?’

He pointed with the offending whip at another villager.

‘For God’s sake, man, can you think with nothing but your fist or your pizzle?’

The young woman in question, though, like all the villagers, thin to the point of emaciation, was extremely pretty, and her shabby, shapeless gown couldn’t conceal her magnificent breasts. But her occupation declared itself all too clearly as her charges trotted in front of her.

‘You’ll be forbidding access to the forest, no doubt, my lord?’ Villeneuve suggested.

It would be pleasant to believe that Villeneuve had only good husbandry in mind.

‘Only if my land agent recommends it. But there is nothing like pigs for keeping down undergrowth: I welcome them back in my estates in Beaune.’ He almost expected Villeneuve to protest that those were French porkers, these merely swine. ‘And remember the pig’s nose for truffles.’

‘I have a nose for something else,’ Villeneuve declared, swinging down from the saddle, contriving, as he landed in the mud, not to hear his lord’s rebuke. He set off briskly after the swineherd, slipping an arm round her to pull her face to his. His free hand was ready to pull her shift from her breast.

Simon swore in exasperation. There was no law to say a soldier couldn’t kiss pretty damsels. Kiss and more. It was almost de rigueur. Young men had appetites. And many a girl had a gown to her back and food in her belly she’d have lacked but for the generosity of the man who’d bedded her. But Villeneuve, old enough at twenty-five to know better, didn’t differentiate between a supposedly welcome frolic and what was seemly in the confines of the stockade, for example. At least in his lord’s sober company, however, he must no doubt show a little restraint.

Simon swore again, but this time with anger. Restraint! Well, if Villeneuve didn’t show it, at least the young woman did. Even from where he sat, Simon could see her pull back her hand to strike the face now so offensively close to hers, but hold off from the final blow. Not, Simon thought, from cowardice – though she could have been excused for fearing that she would not strike a conqueror with impunity – but, from the expression on her face, distaste at the prospect of having her wrist captured, as inevitably it would be. However thin and ragged the woman – and what Saxon after the long campaign would be sleek and smart? – and however lowly her function, she possessed a dignity that appealed to the older man, and he spurred his horse forward to deal with Villeneuve. But he was not the only one. One of the pigs, almost as if responding to the girl’s choked cry, turned sharply and, head down, charged, its evil little eyes like blazing beads. Villeneuve was too absorbed in extracting a kiss to notice. But the young man who might have been expected to relish a terrible injury to the Norman stepped swiftly forward, bringing down the shaft of his axe hard enough to stun the pig in mid charge. It reeled drunkenly away. Simon dismounted, elbowing Villeneuve sharply back to his mount. He dipped into his purse. The coins he proffered needed no interpretation, nor did the silent doffing of the man’s cap as he accepted them. But for all the goodwill in the world, Simon could not frame in the man’s own tongue the words of gratitude he sought, and he was a man of few gestures. At last the young woman stepped forward, pointing at the pig and making from her own breasts to the bottom of her belly a sign they all understood – the pig was in fact a sow and was enceinte. She waved her hands vigorously from side to side, pointing back to the sow. This, she gave Simon clearly to understand, was not the moment to upset a female.

Villeneuve was, alas, too highly born for Simon to condemn him to a public beating for disobeying orders. But he had to endure a veritable tongue-lashing, and lost his privileges for many days. Simon would have sent him home in disgrace immediately had he not needed him so much: to discuss the plans for the improvement of the stockade, to find the best timber, locate the purest springs. And to recruit – if that was not too mealy-mouthed a term – the local workmen. Simon was entitled to enslave the entire populace and work it to death if so he wished. Many of his brother barons certainly did. But he was a soldier, not a slave master, and though he didn’t think anyone had ever accused him of lax discipline, he preferred to temper force with fairness. And, like every good soldier, he prided himself on knowing not just every man in his command but also what that man’s function was and where he might be found at any time.