Michael JECKS - Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

All the time she was pestered by these fools, Squire Roger had avoided her gaze. She had looked to him often, where he stood at the other side of the room, hoping that he might recognise her plight and come to rescue her, but he had nobly smiled and moved on. Only later did she realise that he had thought her content with men of her own age. Yet she had not desired them. She only ever wanted a strong husband, a real man. Someone like him.

And it had been a real delight, a wonderful, ecstatic recognition, when she had seen the love in his eyes. She had thought him cold, but that was a mask to conceal his true feelings. When she confessed how she felt, she found him as passionate as herself, and that same day she and he had become handfast, engaged to be married.

Her father had not been over the moon about it. He’d been hoping for a good local marriage to strengthen his lands, but he was too kindly a man to ignore the obvious adoration that Squire Roger felt for his daughter, and which was so clearly reciprocated. And, he might well have reflected, there could be advantage in being allied to the squire of Sir Reginald of Hatherleigh.

But their time together had been too short, Katharine thought as the breath caught in her throat and she felt another bout of sobbing threaten her composure. And now their only child was gone as well.

Her husband had fallen from his horse, and it must have been God’s will that he should have died there and then, but Katharine couldn’t rid herself of the conviction that Edmund had contributed to his end.

A murdered man might be gathered up to God because He had ordained the fellow should die, but his killer should still be punished. That was why she had a personal determination to see Edmund pay, forcing him to revert to servile status. He had angered Squire Roger and possibly increased the heat of his blood, making him burst his heart.

She clenched a fist and pounded the arm of her seat: Edmund would suffer for taking her husband from her!

Baldwin took a deep breath and strode on, glancing neither to right nor left as he went up to the door where Peter Clifford stood waiting.

‘Sir Baldwin, good morning! The sun has favoured you on this happy day; God must be smiling on you.’

‘I didn’t expect it from the look of the weather yesterday. I was convinced we would get washed out,’ Baldwin admitted gruffly, his eyes darting hither and thither as he sought out his wife-to-be. ‘There’s still time,’ he added gloomily, glancing up at the thin, white clouds hanging peacefully in the almost clear sky.

Peter laughed and continued chatting inconsequentially. He had conducted many such ceremonies, and knew the torment Baldwin was going through, if only at second-hand. In his experience, grooms were always nervous and stiff until after the formal service. Baldwin was true to form.

The knight was pale and, although Peter would never have said so, he was sure that Sir Baldwin was viewing the ceremony with the utmost trepidation. No matter, Peter thought to himself: once the food and wine began to flow, the most terrified groom always recovered.

They were still waiting in the porch when Simon heard a murmur in the crowd, and he walked to the churchyard gate. There he found his wife standing in attendance to another woman.

‘Jeanne, you look wonderful,’ he said simply.

Looking about her, Anney thought that Lady Katharine’s hall had the atmosphere of a prison. It was a place of doom and misery. There was nothing in it to lighten the spirit. If she could, she would have left long ago, but that was impossible, even though it contained almost every painful memory of her life: not only the trial of her man, but the inquest of her son. The husband she had sworn to cleave to had been accused here, in this very room, by his true brother-in-law, the brother of his first wife, the man who had come to expose his bigamy.

There was no doubt of the validity of the charge. He had no choice but to confess, and although he protested that his first wife had trapped him, that he had never wanted to wed her, he had been forced from Throwleigh. Anney had been left alone with her children who, she learned, were legally bastards. She was ruined. No matter that she had given her vows in good faith; the men of the vill regarded her as tainted, and as they made clear to her from that day on, she should be grateful for any attention they might choose to offer.

It had been hard. She had been abused by everyone. The women ignored her, or joked at her expense; the men were worse. A woman needed a protector. Without one, whether father or husband, grown-up son or brother, there was no security, no safety.

This was brought home forcibly the first time she was raped on her way back from the hall. The man responsible was drunk and had seen her approach. She’d known him all her life – that was what really offended Anney more than anything, the fact that he was as old as her father before he died. The fellow had made advances and thrust her into the hedge before lifting her skirts and…

It wasn’t the only time, either. The men of the village looked on her as fair game. She had given herself to a bigamist, so she was contaminated – a mere common stale. After a few weeks, Anney had taken to carrying her dagger as she walked, and that afforded her some little protection; once she wounded a man trying to molest her.

And then, when her little boy Tom, Alan’s younger brother, died in that futile, stupid manner, the light had blown out from her life, like a rushlight caught in a gusting breeze. Once more she had been brought in here to this damned hall, to receive the terrible news, and when the Coroner arrived two days later, it was in here that he came, to undress the little body of her Tom.

At first she had felt quite calm as they removed his clothes, which were still damp from when he drowned, but when the Coroner had pulled his arms and legs apart before the greedy gaze of the audience, all of the jury staring with rapacious eyes, she had felt her control slipping. Was it just that they were hungry to see another’s death because that made their own somehow less fearsome to contemplate? She didn’t care; she had loathed them all from that moment.

That was why she had carried on working at the manor. She couldn’t face labouring in the fields with the other villagers after seeing their hideous excitement as the Coroner turned her boy’s body over, showing them in turn the back, the head, the neck, the arms, the legs, his belly, and his strangely sad little shrivelled penis. She could never work alongside those who had enjoyed her son’s humiliation, even after his death.

This room would always be loathsome to her. Hateful. The officers were different, but the hall’s atmosphere was unchanged. She despised it and everyone in it.

Especially the hypocrite – the priest who was supposed to be above worldly things, and who was no better than any of the other men in the village: he was a degenerate.

Hadn’t she seen the proof?

Lady Jeanne de Liddinstone smiled at the bailiff and gave him a low curtsey. She was dressed in the gown of bright red velvet that Baldwin had bought for her at Tavistock Fair, but now it was trimmed with grey fur, and she wore a narrow girdle of red with a harness of silver. A linen wimple covered her red-gold hair, and the white of the head-gear made her cornflower-blue eyes stand out still more brightly in comparison.

Simon opened the gate for her, and she and his wife entered, Jeanne walking at his side, his wife Margaret following a couple of steps behind, leaving the place of honour to the bride.

‘How is he?’ Jeanne whispered.

‘As twitchy as a deer at bay!’ Simon whispered back, and was rewarded by her throaty chuckle. He continued, ‘I doubt he’ll be able to remember the words. He won’t be happy until he’s out of here and back at his manor.’