Kate Sedley: The Tintern Treasure

The weather being what it was, we chose the straw, and half an hour later, in spite of the hardness of the cottage’s beaten-earth floor, Oliver Tockney and I were both fast asleep.

We set out betimes the following morning — after a breakfast of oatmeal and warm ale provided by our hostess and watched in glum silence by our reluctant host — to retrace our path to Gloucester. We had not gone more than a mile or two, however, before we encountered a sour-faced cottager, driving his pig ahead of him.

He said something to us in Welsh.

Oliver and I both mimed our inability to understand him, whereupon he dropped into English with the ease that many borderers have. Most of them, of necessity, speak both languages. ‘I asked where you’re bound for. Gloucester, is it?’

I nodded and he came to a halt, letting his pig wander off to rootle among the wayside bushes, their leaves still dripping from the previous night’s storm. ‘You won’t make it then,’ he announced lugubriously. ‘There’s a great tree uprooted not three or four furlongs up the track from here. It’ll take a day or so before it’s moved, I reckon. I was hoping to get my pig to Gloucester market and sell him. I need to buy provisions before the winter sets in. Just my luck! Now I’ve to leg it to Marstow to get help.’ He glanced upwards, regarding the lowering sky, the full-bellied clouds pregnant with rain. ‘If you’ve any sense, you’ll turn around and head for Monmouth. Get under shelter before the next storm comes. Try again for Gloucester in a day or so. Maybe me and a few other boyos will have got the path cleared by then.’

‘What about the sidetracks?’ I asked, loath to abandon our journey and start in the opposite direction. The further south we went, the wider became the Severn and the more difficult its crossing.

‘The sidetracks!’ The man was scathing. ‘They’re nothing but quagmires after all this rain. A lot of hamlets and settlements must be entirely cut off. I’ve been a countryman all my life and I tell you I’ve never experienced weather as bad as this. Rivers and streams are bursting their banks. It’s like the Great Flood. If we’d any sense, we’d all be building arks.’ With which, he hooked his pig out of the bushes with his long, curved stick and, cursing to himself, went on his way.

Oliver Tockney and I stood looking at one another.

‘What do you reckon, then?’ he said. ‘Do we take yon fellow’s advice?’

‘It seems we don’t have much choice,’ I answered reluctantly. Heavy raindrops suddenly splattered the earth around our feet, sending up little fountains of mud. ‘It seems as if it’s starting up again.’

The Yorkshireman nodded and turned about. ‘We’d better go back to the cottage and get directions and let the goodwife know about the tree.’ He gave a sudden shout of laughter. ‘The goodman will probably die of an apoplexy on seeing us again, just as he’s heaving a sigh of relief at having rid himself of us.’ We trudged in silence for a while, then Oliver asked curiously, ‘Who was this woman in Gloucester you were asking about? A friend of yours?’

‘A woman I knew for a short period once. A woman I’d almost forgotten — certainly never expected to hear from again — but who suddenly resurfaced in my life earlier this year to make trouble for me.’

I sensed my companion’s hesitation, but his curiosity got the better of his manners and the unwritten rule of the road that you don’t enquire too closely into other travellers’ affairs. ‘What sort of trouble?’

‘She claimed I was the father of her child.’ The unspoken question fairly shouted at me. ‘No, I was not,’ I snapped. ‘What’s more, at the time the child must have been conceived I was out of the country. First Scotland and then Paris.’

Fortunately for my patience and good manners, and for the sake of peace between us, this last piece of information drove all other questions from Oliver’s mind. ‘You’ve been to Paris?’ he breathed. ‘Paris? What’s it like? Is it true that even the children speak French over there?’

‘Perfectly true.’

Oliver furrowed his brow, and not just because a squall of wind and rain had buffeted him.

‘But how do they communicate with God and the saints, then? Everyone knows that God and the heavenly host all speak English.’

It took us all day and well into the evening to cover the four miles to Monmouth. The goodwife’s instructions how to get there had been lucid and concise when we reappeared at her door, and I think even she had been relieved that we hadn’t been seeking further shelter. She had thanked us for the information concerning the tree blocking the northern track and been moved to provide us with slices of bread and cheese to sustain us during the hours ahead.

‘Not too many dwellings hereabouts to beg food from,’ she had said.

She was right. Nor did we meet many people as foolish as ourselves, out of doors in such terrible weather. We passed a woodcutter once, going in the opposite direction, but he merely grunted in response to our greeting, too wet and sorry for himself to linger. A young girl carrying a basket of eggs, her skirts bunched up around her knees, scurried down a stony path leading heaven alone knew where. There was no house in sight that we could see. A discalced friar, not even allowing himself the permitted luxury of sandals, joined us for half a mile or so, his bare feet swollen and blue with cold. But he discoursed cheerfully enough of this and that, speculating with Oliver and myself on whether or not we believed the rumours that placed Buckingham at the head of a Welsh uprising to be true. Or whether, indeed, there was an uprising at all.

‘For I’ve seen nobody but you two gentlemen on the roads all day. Hardly surprising in this sort of weather.’

He didn’t mention the other rumour concerning the death of the young princes in the Tower, so I assumed they hadn’t yet come his way. And before I could ask him, he left us with a blessing and a hastily sketched sign of the cross as he disappeared abruptly into the woods which stretched, gloomy and dark, on either side of the track. After that, we trudged doggedly along, all our energies concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other and avoiding the worst of the puddles. Sometimes there was no help for it but to wade straight through the larger ones which stretched the width of the path, from one tangle of bushes and undergrowth to the other.

We ate our bread and cheese beneath the shelter of a tree, our silent thanks going out to the cottager’s wife who had so thoughtfully provided it. By mid-afternoon — or what we judged to be mid-afternoon — a thin sun emerged from between the clouds, striking down between the tree trunks in patterns of fretted gold. But there was no warmth in it. A wind had sprung up, whispering among the black and silver shadows of the leaves and making us shiver under our rain-soaked cloaks.

The sound of hoof-beats made us draw into the side of the track, and only just in time as a horse and rider went past us at a decent pace and with little regard for our safety. To be fair, the rider was so hunched up against the elements, I doubt if he was even aware of us.

I stared after his receding back.

‘I feel certain that that was Lawyer Heathersett,’ I said at last.

‘Did you see his face?’ Oliver asked.

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know?’ My companion was sceptical.

‘There was just something about his appearance.’

A snort was my only answer and I decided to say no more. Nevertheless, I was quite sure in my own mind that it had been Geoffrey Heathersett who passed us, and I was therefore not in the least astonished, two hours later, as Oliver and I entered an inn close to Monmouth’s St Mary’s Church, that the first person I clapped eyes on was the lawyer.