Michael JECKS: The Sticklepath Strangler

The scream stirred him: Margaret , his responsibility, his sister.

Her despair made him sit up, coughing painfully. In her voice he could hear her terror. She was too simple to comprehend what was happening, probably didn’t know her only brother was inside, but seeing her cottage in flames made her give shriek after shriek.

‘Go on! Throw her in with him!’ he heard someone shout, and that was enough to galvanise him.

‘NO!’ he roared, stumbling to his feet. She cried out again, and he felt the fury take him over. Gripping his useless bow in both hands and leaning heavily on it like a staff, he limped to the door, then lurched on outside shouting for his Meg. It was there, before his threshold, that the three arrows found their marks.

One smashed straight into his shoulder, the heavy arrowhead spinning him around, making him drop his bow and stumble to the ground. He had just propped himself up on his good arm to face his tormentors when the second arrow flashed into his neck and flew through it, thudding on into the cottage wall. He coughed once, and even as he drew breath to cough again, the last arrow slammed into the left side of his breast, straight into his heart.

Just before he died, Athelhard used his remaining strength to scream one last defiant curse. All the men heard him; all would remember it for the rest of their lives.

‘ Damn you! Damn you all! I’ll see the whole vill roast in hell! You are all accursed! ’

Later, much later, Serlo the Warrener walked down into the clearing. He took in the smoking shell of the house and eyed the smouldering corpse which lay just inside the doorway where the departing men had thrown it, to be consumed by the flames.

A dead body was nothing to Serlo; he had handled enough of them in his time, although he had never burned one. That looked wrong. It was one thing to bury a man after listening to his confession, letting him answer the questions of the viaticum and giving him absolution, but to slaughter a man like this was repellent.

He shrugged and turned away; a man of few words has little need of contemplation, and for the present he had one pressing consideration.

The girl knelt not far from the wreck of her house, her eyes wild, her mouth dribbling. Her round face was enough to show that her mind was addled, and it was that which saved her, of course. Serlo knew that the superstitious folk of the vill wouldn’t harm a girl like her. She was touched.

He gently crouched before her, blocking her view of her brother’s corpse, and clasped her hands in his. It took a long time, much talking, a lot of reassuring and comforting, but at last, as the dawn lighted the eastern horizon, she complied with his gentle urging and went with him up to his house.

Seven years later

Joan bolted up the track as though the hounds of hell were snapping at her heels. Splashing through the ruts and puddles, she could feel the mud spattering her calves and thighs underneath her skirts, the brambles catching at her sleeves.

Gasping, she paused at the top of the steepest part of the hill, gripping her sides and facing back the way she had come. There, far below her, she could see her red-faced friend Emma panting and waving up at her. Soon Emma had recovered and set off again, pressing her palms on her thighs with each step as though it could ease her progress.

Emma was too chubby, that was why she struggled to keep up with Joan, not that either minded. Joan was fond of her friend, and Emma was devoted to Joan. There were few other girls in the area and although with Joan’s fertile imagination she could populate the surrounding ten miles with different inhabitants, it was nice not to have to bother, and Emma had a similar sense of fun to her own. She was a good companion.

It was terribly steep here – Joan could recall her father telling her that ‘stickle’ meant steep – but now that they had climbed the sharper incline at the bottom of Greenhill, the slope rose less cruelly, taking them through the trees to the scrubby land above the vill.

From here she could see right over the clump of small cottages and the Reeve’s own larger house, to the river and then the hill which stood between Sticklepath and South Zeal.

She loved this view. Below her she could just glimpse her own family’s home, a large cottage at the edge of the vill under the hill that led up to the moors, a good-sized house for her and her parents. Behind was the mill, whose crunching and rumbling could be heard even over the steady rushing of the river. A short distance away was the chapel, sitting in the broad loop where the river curled around the bottom of the hill’s slope with, beside it, the small cemetery with its twin defences: the hurdles enclosing it to protect the dead from scavenging dogs and wild animals, while their souls were protected from demons by the single large wooden cross planted like a tree in the middle.

After that stood the inn, always filled with travellers. Sticklepath lay on the main road between Exeter and Cornwall, and pilgrims, merchants, fish-sellers and tranters of all kinds passed by here. Even now Joan could see a man leading a packhorse down the slope from South Zeal. He followed the muddy trail to the ford and stood there contemplating it, then ran across quickly, feet splashing the water in all directions. At the far side he turned, but his horse hadn’t followed him, and it stood for a moment, watching him with a kind of bemused surprise before wandering to the verge and nibbling at the grass. The man’s angry voice couldn’t reach Joan over the rumble and clatter of the mill, but she smiled to see him raise his fists in impotent fury before recrossing the river to fetch the beast.

The men and most of the women were outside, working, their legs stained brown from the mud in the narrow strips in the communal fields. Each little half-acre strip was separated by an unploughed, grassy path called a landsherd , and the women were bending to pull out the straggling fingers of couch grass before they could invade and establish themselves in the strips and threaten the new crop of oats.

It was a peaceful, comforting scene. Joan knew enough about poverty. It was hard not to, when everyone was struggling to make a living, when neighbours could scarcely find the money for grain to make bread and had to depend on the largesse of their lord, Hugh de Courtenay, whose serfs they were. Still, none of that could detract from the warmth she felt, surveying this serene little vill. It was her home.

As she gazed down she could feel her heart swell. The picture before her represented safety and comradeship; it contained all she knew of life and love. She had no idea of the trials which would soon afflict her and her family – those troubles were in her future, so today she smiled happily at the sight. The sun was shining down, the rains all but forgotten, and the fields glowed with green health and promise, shot through with blue and silver silken threads to show where streams and rivulets fed the soil.

All looked clean and pure, not like other places. Inevitably her attention moved beyond the fields, past the larger pastures and water meadows, all bounded by the river as it wound its way northwards.

She gazed in that direction, feeling faintly troubled. From here she couldn’t see the hills. If she walked up to the warrens on the moorland nearer to Belstone, the long, low blue line on the horizon was plainly visible, but not from here. Her father had told her that it was far-distant Exmoor, and that beyond it was the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It was so far away, it was incomprehensible that it should in truth exist. She had seen far-off towns – she had been to Oakhampton many times, and had even joined her father when he went to market in Tavistock once, miles to the south and west – but to think that somewhere like Exmoor lay there, so distant that even massive hills were an indistinct smudge, was quite difficult to accept. It was scary.