Michael Jecks - The Outlaws of Ennor

Of the two, William was sure that the man needed the more support. The woman had her man to give her his strength, but there was no one apart from the chaplain to give her husband comfort. His pain lay far below, not up on the surface. It was there that William must concentrate his efforts.

Luke had that same sort of quiet, concealed pain. It was a manly pain, a hidden grief that was enough to tear at his soul, but which he could not mention to others. Perhaps he had raised it with his confessor at St Nicholas’s Priory. Because Luke had come here from a convent, so William had heard (gossip among the brothers and other religious was more common than among the most garrulous women on the islands), he was confessed by the Prior himself, so William had heard. That in itself was a bit curious. Not many lowly chaplains had such a prestigious confessor.

Yes. It was possible that the fellow had a deep hurt which had led to his being brought here to recover himself.

However, William was unconvinced. He had seen the way Luke’s eyes invariably sought out the prettiest women in his congregation and stayed there. To William’s mind, Luke was the sort of man who depended upon women to keep him content, and that was a poor qualification for a celibate. It was more likely that Luke was here for a failing. Perhaps it was that common failing among priests: the same as that which led to Peter Visconte being removed from St Mary’s in the first place.

As the sun climbed higher in the sky, Walerand made his way from the castle towards the marshy lands in the middle of Ennor, and thence up towards Penn Trathen.

He was relatively new to Ranulph’s service, but he was confident that he’d be promoted before too long. For now, he was merely a servant, but he hoped to follow men like Robert, the gather-reeve, and become a known strong man. Perhaps he could take over Robert’s job, winning money for their master. It was easy enough. The man only had to sneer a bit, act tough, and these pathetic bastards gave him their money. Walerand could do all that. More, in fact, because he wouldn’t stop at a scowl. He’d be happy to beat the living shit from most of the cretins on the islands.

He wasn’t born here. Originally he came from Falmouth, but an unfortunate mistake had led to his leaving in a hurry. The mistake was, he had thought that the priest in the church up on the hill just outside the town, was asleep. Sadly, he wasn’t, and when Walerand tried to pinch the plate, the chaplain had come in breathing hellfire and damnation. Walerand had been forced to pull out his knife to defend himself as the priest drew his sword and denounced him as a trailbaston and thief. Luckily, the priest was old and unused to fighting, whereas Walerand had grown up as an orphan in the rougher streets of Falmouth, and was more than capable of defending himself. He ducked under the priest’s blade, then stabbed upwards, feeling his own blade snag on something. Unpleasantly convinced that the ‘something’ was the priest’s heart (it was in fact merely a jerkin of sheepskin which the priest wore under his tunic during the miserable winter months, and he was unscathed), Walerand fled the place with no money and the conviction that he had consigned his eternal soul to hell.

The islands had called to him eventually. It had taken some while. After the botched robbery, he had escaped to Truro and tried his hand at many jobs, but every time, when a tradesman realised that he had never been apprenticed, he was looked at askance, apart from in the small brothel there, where any fellow could have gained a position.

One day, he heard of the island of Ennor from a sailor who had been there, and learned that there was a place which was a haven for outlaws. As soon as he heard this, he resolved to visit and offer his services. The sailor was happy to take him there, for a fee, and before dawn the next morning, Walerand stole the purse of the brothel’s keeper, and boarded ship. As he had hoped, Ranulph was happy enough to have him as one of his men, initially a servant, but soon no doubt he could take on more responsibilities as a man-at-arms or something.

He’d like that. He might even turn out to be better at that than at collecting the taxes. All too often people paid up on time, which wasn’t what Walerand wanted. He’d prefer a weaker peasant to give him trouble so that he could give the poxy shite a good kicking. He had gone with Robert before now, helping the gather-reeve as one of his guards; Robert always had guards about him because so many people here hated the tax collector. Robert got in their way, took whatever money they had, and most of them thought he stole a slice for himself. What if he did? Walerand thought it was fair payment for a man who had a hard enough job of it, trying to keep track of who owned what, who earned what, and who could pay what. If he made a bit on the side, that was only to be expected. He was farming the farmers.

It was no surprise that the folks here disliked him. Although it was odd to Walerand that Robert felt he should have a guard. From Walerand’s experience, there was no one on the island who was enough of a threat to the men from La Val’s castle to justify the protection of men-at-arms.

He walked farther up the coast. His master, the Lord of the Manor, had told his men to go and investigate his properties to see if they had been affected by the storm. Ranulph himself had gone to the worst-hit parts, over on the south-eastern side of the island, to inspect the damage. It was expected that there would be extensive waste of the crops over there, and he had some flocks pastured there too, which he wanted to see, to assure himself that they were all well. Meanwhile, the servants had been ordered to view other stretches, and Walerand had been detailed to come here, to the northernmost tip of Ennor, at the place called Penn Trathen by the locals. It meant ‘the end of the sand bar’, a treacherous spit of sand that always caught the unwary larger boats when they attempted to pass between St Nicholas and Ennor at low tide.

It was not the sort of work which appealed to Walerand’s nature. He broke off a stick from a hedge and used it to slash at the road as he went. From the castle, he had taken the old rutted track towards the middle of the island, until he reached the marshes. Once there, he took a detour around them, not knowing the safe routes through the middle which older Ennor hands told him existed. Once Walerand had witnessed the death of a pony which had fallen into the marshes, and its protracted suffering had amused him, but he had resolved never to allow himself to sink into that same damp embrace.

From the marshes, he had to climb the little hill. At the top he began to drop down again, towards the shore. Walking down between the fields, he soon passed in among the little stand of trees which a farmer had planted as his shaw. Once through them, the trail took him down to Penn Trathen itself.

He stopped at the treeline. Here he could see the length of the sand bar clearly, with the line of old rocks below the surface, their position clear because of the slimy trails of seaweed which clung to them. The sight made him shiver with revulsion. To his mind seaweed looked like a dead man’s fingers, and the feel of the soft, stringy tissues against his skin made him want to scream with terror, as though the weeds would drag him down into the icy depths of the sea. It was a fear he had wisely not confessed to his companions in the castle, but when he saw the peasants collecting kelp and drying it for fuel, he wanted to be sick.

Some said that the line of rocks here was an old road which was now submerged, but Walerand neither knew nor cared whether that was true. He would never try a roadway that was so smothered with weeds.

Continuing down the path, which now grew sandy and less muddy, he reached the shore and started for the point. There was not so much damage here, he noted. Some of the cottages had suffered badly, their roofs blown off, their doors of hanging leather or old wood stripped, their windows of waxed linen shredded, but that was the problem of the peasants, nothing to do with de Blancminster. No, his concern was the fields which bounded the sea, and the animals which lay within.