Michael JECKS - Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

His friend blinked in surprise. ‘How can it be your fault? You weren’t there.’

‘I was too tied up in my own prospects, in my own happiness, to recognise the misery on that poor child’s face.’

‘Rubbish! I was there too, and I saw only grief for his father; a very proper sadness.’

‘I saw more, Simon. I saw an uncle who wanted to inherit his nephew’s lands and a mother who apparently had no love for her son. Two dangers to the child, and I ignored them both, being too bound up with my own delight.’

‘Even if you’re right and one of them truly did hold an evil design on young Herbert, there was nothing you could have done.’

‘At the very least I could have spoken to them and made my suspicions plain so that they would never have dared attack him. He was only a child, Simon. Just think of it, a little lad of only five years, snuffed out like a candle. How could someone do that?’

Simon shrugged. ‘You know as well as I do that children die every day. They get lockjaw, they catch chills, they contract diarrhoea…’ His voice trembled as he recalled the death of his own infant son, Peterkin, from a fever two years ago.

‘Forgive me, old friend. I do not wish to cause you pain,’ Baldwin said gently, his face softening in compassion for Simon and Margaret’s loss. ‘However, those are natural deaths. They are different from deliberately ending a child’s life for reasons of personal greed, or…’ Baldwin recalled the expression on Stephen’s face at the graveside, ‘… or some darker motive.’

‘If you’d let me finish, I was also going to mention the girls who are allowed to die because their parents can’t afford to feed them.’

‘That is wrong, but one can comprehend the motives which might lead a parent to allow a girl to die,’ Baldwin said, with a troubled expression.

Simon threw him a quick look. ‘Really? I could never leave my own little Edith out to die of cold on a winter’s night; nor can I understand how any other parent could.’

‘Simon, I am sorry if I have upset you again. All I was trying to say was, it seems understandable to me that a man who already suffers from the most terrible hardship because of his poverty, one who has little food because the harvest has been poor, who has other mouths to feed, who has no money because his lord takes all he can earn, who has too many daughters already and cannot even think of ever having enough money to dower them all – well, in that position I can understand someone allowing a baby to die. In that example it is not someone killing for cruelty or personal benefit, it is a patriarch taking action for the better safety and security of the other members of his family. I find that easier to swallow than the murder of a young lad simply to satisfy a man’s avarice.’

‘I fail to see the distinction. And what is more, I still fail to see how you can blame yourself in any way for Herbert’s death. Are you seriously saying that you would have gone to Lady Katharine and accused her of planning her son’s murder?’

‘Simon, I don’t know,’ Baldwin said despairingly. He sighed, head bowed for a moment. ‘And yet I feel quite certain that if I had not been so tied up with my own pleasure and thoughts of my marriage, that young fellow would still be running around over the moors now. I cannot help it; I am convinced that if I had been more vigilant and thoughtful, Herbert, the heir of Squire Throwleigh, would still be alive.’

Night was falling as Baldwin and Simon clattered into the yard behind the house. The knight dropped from his horse as soon as he entered under the low gateway, shouting for a groom. When his horse was taken, Sir Baldwin impatiently tapped his foot until his friend joined him, and the two men made their way to the door.

Daniel, the steward, appeared in the doorway as they approached, and servants saw to their baggage.

The hall looked just as he recalled it from their previous visit, only a few days before, but now Baldwin was struck by how few were present. Whereas many of the local magnates and lesser nobles had turned out for the dead squire, only those from Throwleigh itself, Stephen of York, the servants, and van Relenghes – whom Baldwin did not recognise – were present. The knight felt outraged that so few had come to witness the burial of the boy. Perhaps it was because there was still a day to pass before the interment, but that was hardly an excuse! There was one other face he recognised, that of Thomas, the boy’s uncle. Thomas raised his glass in a vaguely convivial gesture that disgusted Baldwin, and he turned from him quickly, hoping that Lady Katharine hadn’t noticed.

Anger, frustration and a sense of his own guilt made his voice harsh as he bowed to the lady of the manor, saying, ‘I am sorry to be here again, my Lady, so soon after your other dreadful loss.’

Lady Katharine lifted her eyes to him. In her hand was a swatch of pale linen, with which she wiped at the constant tears. ‘I could have wished a happier occasion for your visit, too, Sir Baldwin.’

Her maid patted her back as she dropped her head in misery, sobbing silently. Lady Katharine’s whole body shuddered with her grief, and the maid looked at Baldwin with a quick frown and shake of her head. He nodded curtly and gestured to Daniel. While the lady wept, Simon and Baldwin went out to see the body.

The maid left her mistress and fetched wine. She poured a goodly portion and passed it to Lady Katharine, watching with a kind of weary disinterest as she sipped. To the maid’s mind there was no cure which could ease the loss of a much-loved son. She, Anney, knew that only too well.

Perhaps now her mistress would understand it, too.

Simon and Baldwin marched with the steward to the storehouse beneath the hall. Thomas followed them, overtaking the group as they arrived at the door.

‘Here, Sir Baldwin,’ Daniel said sadly, throwing open the door.

‘Fetch lights, man. I can’t see my hand before my face in this gloom,’ Baldwin snarled, and Daniel hurried out, shocked, as if he had never been bellowed at before.

Baldwin strode to the little table on which the boy’s body lay. He could just make out the features of the child, and his own face hardened. ‘If I find your murderer, child, I shall see him or her hanged,’ he swore.

‘You think the boy was murdered?’ Thomas asked. He had a stupid, befuddled look, and Baldwin ignored him. The steward finally returned with a pair of stands in which thick, yellow candles gave off a good light, but a foul odour as well, reeking of tallow and burning animal flesh as they guttered in the draught.

‘Here!’ Baldwin commanded, and the steward immediately complied, setting the candles on either side of the knight.

The boy was covered in a shroud, and before the knight could put out his hand to pull the cloth aside, Simon was already turning away, wincing. It wasn’t only the thought of the wounds he was about to witness, it was the smell – the poor lad had clearly been stored in the coolest undercroft, but decomposition had set in swiftly.

Baldwin hardly noticed his movement. He snatched the shroud away with a determined air, as if fearing what he might discover, and studied the tiny figure. ‘Gracious God! This is awful – he has great wounds, as if he has been beaten and crushed,’ he said, his voice dropping in awed horror.

‘Yes, and we still don’t know who did it,’ said Thomas, staring down at the little figure.

‘Then you should have acted more damned swiftly to find the killer!’ Baldwin snapped.

Thomas gave him a faintly baffled look. ‘It isn’t easy. That road’s busy, Sir Baldwin.’

The knight opened his mouth to roar at him, but then stopped and peered down at the child, his face filled with a kind of relieved wonder. ‘You mean he was killed on the road?’