Michael JECKS - Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

‘That’s not fair! You shouldn’t hold a man’s arm!’ the student spluttered angrily once he had managed to rise to a sitting position.

Godfrey hauled him up by his shirt and held him close, staring into the suddenly scared face while the point of his blunted sword tickled the boy’s throat. ‘You think an outlaw could give a bollock about what’s fair or not?’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘You reckon a drawlatch would think, “Oh, I mustn’t kick the poor master in the coddes because he’s got a sword, and it wouldn’t be fair”?’ He dropped the mincing tone he had adopted and shook his pupil with contempt. ‘If you want to stay alive, assume your enemy will be devious and unfair – and make sure you’re nastier than him. Now pick up your sword and try again.’

They had three more bouts. In the second, Godfrey scornfully knocked the lad’s sword aside and grabbed his shirt, kicking away his legs and shoving him over. Next his student tried a half-decent left attack followed by a right slash that almost surprised Godfrey, but he blocked both, knocked the fellow’s arm and spun him around before drawing his sword along the length of his opponent’s back and kicking him down. Their last combat involved a short flurry of blades, a hit, then a second and a third, before Godfrey had come close enough to punch the boy, not too hard, on the jaw while his blade pressed unrelentingly on his belly.

It was while he was wiping his face with his shirt that he heard the door shut, and turned to see his newest client standing in the doorway, a faint smile on his face as he perused the scene. On the floor before Godfrey, his student was gazing up with fury in his eyes while he felt his jaw, but Godfrey also saw the beginnings of respect. He kicked his opponent’s sword away before reaching down and helping him to his feet. ‘Right! You’ve tried your Venetian ways, and you’ll agree there’s merit in mine. Next week we’ll practise techniques which won’t look elegant, but which’ll save your life.’

‘Not next week, Godfrey.’

The master of arms glanced at his client. He was leaning on the wall, a broad grin on his face.

‘No, next week you will come with me to a little manor out on the moors, where we will visit the house of an old friend of mine. A squire who has, very sadly, died. You will be my guard.’

It was three days later that Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin Furnshill made their journey to the little village of Throwleigh. They had left the knight’s home in Cadbury early in the morning, and after taking two halts to rest their horses and take refreshment from their wineskins, they had not made particularly good time, but were at least reasonably fresh as they breasted a hill and could at last see Dartmoor ahead through the trees.

For Simon, as they jogged slowly down the muddy, rutted track, it was a return to his new home. As one of the bailiffs to the Warden of the Stannaries he had been living at Lydford for five years now, riding out over the wild lands to settle arguments or arrest criminals. Seeing the bleak landscape ahead was almost welcome. At the sight of the awesome bulk of Cosdon Hill to their right, Simon felt his heart give a leap before their view was obliterated once more and the travellers had to duck beneath another spread of low beech branches.

Baldwin couldn’t feel the same pleasure. To him the landscape of Dartmoor was barren, infertile. It was as if a race of giants had fought a pitched battle here and blasted the whole area until nothing remained, not even a tree. To him it felt threatening and unwholesome.

It wasn’t only the moors, either. Even here, in the lush woodland immediately north there were very few people; wherever Baldwin saw evidence of habitation, it looked long deserted. Every so often he would notice a weed-strewn track leading into the trees, proof of a long-disused assart, where someone had hacked down trees to build his cabin or to feed his fires. These woods had been cleared for coppices and farming; men had burned out the roots of old trees, gradually beating back the frontier of the woodland until enough bare soil existed to graze a cow. This was the way the land had been brought to heel over decades – but now the land had won.

The assarts looked as if they had lain deserted for ages. Since the appalling famines of 1315 and 1316, many of the smaller farms and homesteads even this far west had been evacuated, and where men had once worked, burning and sawing, now the brambles and nettles had taken over. Wherever the trees allowed a sprinkle of sun to strike the ground, the ubiquitous foxglove had colonised and erased almost all evidence of man’s occupation.

It all suited his mood, for Sir Baldwin Furnshill, the Keeper of the King’s Peace in Crediton, was joining his friend to witness the funeral of Squire Roger of Throwleigh, representing the Sheriff, who had been called away to meet the King’s procurers, while Simon was there to represent the Warden himself.

The knight, a tall man in his middle forties with the build of a swordsman, broad-shouldered with a heavily muscled right arm and still slim-waisted, rode easily, as befitted someone who had travelled extensively. His face was keen and sharp, with a neatly trimmed beard of the same dark colour as his hair, but his features had been marked with pain over the years: lines lay etched deeply into his forehead and at either side of his mouth.

His companion, a close friend, was more than ten years younger, yet did not look it. Simon Puttock’s hair was richly peppered with grey, and his figure was beginning to run to fat.

‘You are putting on weight, Simon.’

‘Bollocks!’

Baldwin gave him a look of haughty disdain.

‘If you want to distract yourself, think again about your fiancee,’ Simon laughed. ‘Don’t try getting at me.’

‘It is a shame that Squire Roger chose this moment to die,’ Baldwin admitted.

‘Why, because it’s only a short while to your wedding, you mean? Ah, I’m sure he’d be sorry to have dragged you from your home when you’re in the middle of the preparations.’

That was why Simon had been with his friend. Simon’s wife was helping Lady Jeanne, Baldwin’s fiancee, to prepare for their wedding, and Simon had been diverting Baldwin, trying to keep his mind from the myriad details of the celebration – and preventing the knight from getting in Jeanne’s and Margaret’s way. For once it was a relief to Simon that his daughter was not with him, for Edith had elected to stay at Lydford with a friend rather than make the gruelling journey to Furnshill. If she had also been there, Simon was sure she would have been under the feet of the bride-to-be at every opportunity.

‘You think I have any say about the arrangements?’ Baldwin protested. ‘God’s bones! I had thought that Jeanne would have had little time to organise me, especially now she’s lost her maidservants.’ It was a never-ending source of pleasure to him that she had, too, he reflected secretly. Jeanne’s ‘maid’ had been a large, coarse, brutal figure, an ungainly, peevish, froward woman who put the fear of God – or the Devil – into all she met – especially Baldwin. He shuddered at the memory. ‘But no! What with inviting the guests and telling me where they must sleep, and Edgar taking over all the other preparations…’

He stopped himself. The delight he was giving his friend was almost painful to observe, and he had no desire to increase Simon’s pleasure. It was curiously unsettling to reflect on the matter, too. Soon his whole life would be altered, he knew. The absence of his servant, Edgar, was a proof of that. Formerly Edgar had never let the knight out of his sight, and yet where was he now? Baldwin and he had been together for many years; Edgar had served as his man-at-arms when they were both warriors, and without him Baldwin felt strangely naked.