Michael Jecks - A Friar's bloodfeud

‘I don’t really, not yet. But I have a feeling, and I think my monthly time is late,’ she confessed. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything until I was more certain. Are you upset, husband?’

He smiled and gave her his arm. ‘My love, if you are right, I shall be the happiest man in Christendom!’

Adcock was settling down to sleep when he heard the muffled noises from outside.

This was a weird place. The men here were all more or less permanently armed, as though they expected a battle at any moment. Yet the land round about seemed ridiculously quiet.

He had mentioned that on the first day, when he had been sent about the manor with a man who the steward had described as a good source of local detail.

‘I’m Beorn, sir,’ he had said, bending his head respectfully, a large man whose face seemed composed mainly of beard.

‘Call me Adcock. I am no better than you,’ Adcock said, and he was speaking nothing more than the truth. As he knew full well, a sergeant was only the man set to farm the main activities on the estate. Unlettered, his skill must lie in his ability to persuade people to perform their duties willing or no, so that the manor showed a profit. Any failures or discrepancies were likely to be set to his account.

‘Adcock it is, then,’ Beorn had said without interest. ‘What do you want to see?’

‘Let’s go and walk the boundaries first. I’ll need to know where the holding finishes.’

Beorn had given a slightly twisted smile on hearing that, but he took Adcock all round the place, pointing out the boundary markers on the way, and explaining the small details which a new man wouldn’t understand immediately. ‘There’s the little bog, but see those green reeds farther on? Avoid that, sir. That’s the mire. We’ve been thinking of draining it for an age, but nothing ever comes of it. It’s dangerous. When we do clear it, I dare say there’ll be some dead oxen, horses and sheep in there, not to mention people.’

‘Really?’ Adcock asked, staring at the trembling ground with disgust. He’d seen mires often enough before, of course, and he rather thought the first thing to do with a small patch like this was to dig a trench to let the water run away, and fill the hole with good soil afterwards until the land was level, and then something could be made of the ground. He would take advice, and if no one had any objections to advance he would go ahead with the drainage.

Yes, Adcock was untrained in his spelling and reading, but he knew what his job was about. In his last manor he had been the assistant to the sergeant, and together he and his old master had taken the place by the cods and shaken it until every tiny patch of land was fruitful and of value to their lord. Here he would do the same, he decided. The land wasn’t different, not really: the soil was good and rich, from the look of the grass; and all the animals thrived, looking sleek and fat, so it was plain to see that there was nourishment in the ground.

‘This looks a fine manor, Beorn.’

‘Aye, it is.’

‘But, tell me,’ Adcock said hesitantly. ‘The men at the hall all seem to go abroad fully armed the whole time. Is there some fear of attack?’

‘It’s not fear of someone being attacked!’ Beorn burst out with a guffaw, and then he silenced himself and gazed about him with a swift caution. ‘You must be careful talking about such things.’

‘Why? Tell me what you know.’

‘Not for me to say,’ Beorn said, and from that moment he was as communicative as any other Devon peasant talking to a stranger.

Pagan had seen to the meal, and afterwards Isabel nodded to him briefly to indicate he could leave the room. He did so, pulling the door closed behind him and breathing in the cool air of the early evening before making his way homewards. It was a goodly walk, up to the north-east of the old hall, and he peered at it jealously as was his wont.

In the past he would have slept in the house with the two women, but Lady Isabel preferred that he returned to his home at nights now. It was since Ailward’s death, he recalled, as though she didn’t trust him any more … or perhaps because she wondered whether he might learn something?

That was daft, though. What could she think he might …

Pagan stopped and slowly turned to look back towards the house where Isabel and Malkin lived. Isabel had grown rather short with the younger woman recently. If she suspected that Malkin could have killed her own husband, could Isabel think to protect her daughter-in-law and grandchild by keeping all knowledge of that petit treason from her own steward? She’d not want anyone to hear of it, certainly.

It was hard to imagine Malkin could have committed such an act, though. Even today she had been very weepy. It was growing to be her usual condition. One of the maids had told him that Malkin slept very poorly. There was the sound of weeping into the early hours every night.

‘It’ll drive me to despair, it will,’ the maid had said.

Pagan had little sympathy with such feelings. So far as he was concerned, the servants all owed their service to the family. It was wrong to speak of tears late into the night — and yet he daren’t speak harshly to the girl in case she stopped telling him how the women were. It mattered to him.

Certainly Malkin was very sad since the death of Ailward. Lady Isabel was different — she mourned her son, but she remembered her husband with more affection. She missed him dreadfully, as a woman should. Losing him had meant losing her companion. Naturally she didn’t feel the same about Ailward. He was not formed from the same mould.

Not at all the same mould, as Pagan knew only too well. Which was probably why Lady Isabel felt it better that he should not be in the house now that the two men were dead. Having Pagan there once more could prove too much of a temptation to the old strumpet.

It was all very disorientating to a newcomer, but Adcock had done the best he could. He had ordered that the little bog should be emptied, showing the peasants how they might dig a trench to release the moisture from it. Later, he felt sure, the second bog could be drained too, but better to start with one and see how it went. After that, he went to study the middens, check the fields, see how the animals fared in their winter stables, and begin to take a hold of the place.

It was not easy, the more so because he was sure that there were a hundred different secrets about the manor.

For one thing, as he had noticed from the first day, it was a remarkably heavily manned place. Usually a house this size would have one knight, and then would depend on a number of servants and peasants, armed with billhooks and daggers, to protect it. The idea that anyone could need the three and twenty fellows who lived here was laughable.

Then there was the curious way in which the manor was kept. Visitors were not encouraged, and when strangers appeared all the men in the place kept quiet. Sir Geoffrey would talk, but the rest would stand silent and surly, eyeing the newcomers with grave distrust. Even provisions brought from the vill were left at the door and taken in when the household rose. Late, normally. There was a deal of singing and gambling of an evening, and little by way of religious observance. In fact Adcock had been surprised by the lack of any Christian sentiment among the men in the hall. Oh, he knew that often the priest in a vill would give men leave to go to their fields of a Sunday morning before Mass, provided that they attended church later, because it was often impossible for a peasant to find time to harvest his own crops after he had performed his statutory labour for his master otherwise, but to learn that of all the household only four men would go to church on a Sunday came as a shock.