Michael JECKS: Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

Alan kicked Jordan, and the knight had to sweep the younger lad out of the way while Edgar took Alan’s arm and pulled him aside. The boy pointed at Jordan and sneered: ‘He’s lying. Or maybe it’s because he’s drunk. He’s been drinking all the ale in the buttery.’

‘Alan,’ Simon said quietly. ‘Your mother has admitted to killing Herbert. Either she is telling the truth and must be burned at the stake for petty treason, or she is lying – lying to protect someone.’

The youth stared at him with fury. ‘He’s going to say it was all me, but it wasn’t! He hit Herbert too. I wasn’t alone up there, and it was Jordan who held him down while I hit his head with the rock.’

‘Is this true?’ Baldwin asked the boy in his arms.

Jordan no longer cared. The last few days had been a nightmare. Knowing his father was innocent, but unable to get him freed without admitting his own guilt; realising that the shoe, the one lost by the priest while he made love to his woman, would be enough to ensure that the hated man should be blamed instead – this had given him hope for a while, but then the plan had gone wrong, and now here they all were, and he had admitted what he had done. Jordan broke down and wept, even as Alan at his side sniffed and wiped the tears from his eyes.

How could he explain? They had to hit him to make him shut up, but the harder they hit, the louder he cried. Finally, only when he was silent, did they realise their crime.

And then they heard Lady Katharine’s shrill voice from the doorway.

‘Is this true?’

Lady Katharine had been left on her bed when Daniel went out to the yard to accost the fish-seller, but she had soon recovered. The faint had left her weak and shaky, but she had managed to rise, and looked at her reflection in a mirror.

It was no longer the face of a happily married woman and mother, nor of the successful wife of a powerful squire. Her face had become a mask of horror. All that she loved had been destroyed. Even the woman in whom she had placed all her trust had betrayed her. Lady Katharine could hardly believe all that she had heard, and yet she must.

Staggering a little, she made her way back to the hall and there, while she leaned on the doorway, she heard the boys and Baldwin.

She could not absorb it. There was a scream rising inside her, which felt as if it might snuff out her very life if she allowed it to escape. It was composed of all her agony, all her sorrow at what she had lost. If it left her body, it must take her soul with it.

‘Is it true?’ she whispered.

Daniel made to move towards her, but she held out a hand without speaking, and he stopped, frozen with despair.

Baldwin closed his eyes for a moment, then said compassionately: ‘My Lady, I am so sorry. You should not have heard this. But I fear these boys are at last telling the truth of it. They murdered your son.’

Lady Katharine nodded once. She bowed her head, turned, and left.

‘Go with her, Daniel,’ said Baldwin gruffly and the steward hurried from the room.

Baldwin glanced at Edmund. The farmer stood staring at his boy, an expression of complete disbelief on his face. ‘You killed the boy?’

‘Dad, we didn’t mean to! We were just punishing him. It was like a game at first, but then I made him bleed, and he kept going on at us, saying he’d tell his mother. We wanted him to shut up, that was all, and then he tried to get away, and we had to stop him, and he tried to shout, so I held him, and…’ Under the appalled stare of his father, Jordan slowly ground to a halt. Crying, he covered his face with both hands.

‘It was mainly me, sir,’ Alan said, after giving his friend an ugly look. ‘If you want to hang me, I am ready.’

Baldwin snapped, ‘Oh, be silent, boy! You’ve done enough damage for a lifetime.’

‘What will happen to them?’ Edmund managed after a few minutes.

‘They are too young to be accused. They don’t know the meaning of good or bad, right or wrong,’ Baldwin said. ‘They cannot be treated like adults. They will have to be taken away to be looked after by someone else. Either the Church or a lord will have to take responsibility for them both. But not together, I fear – they should not be left together in case they lead each other to new felonies.’

‘Sir Baldwin!’

‘What is it, Daniel?’ the knight demanded irritably.

The steward pointed with a shaking finger. ‘It’s Lady Katharine, sir. She has locked herself in her solar, and I can’t get her to speak to me. Oh God, I think she may try to kill herself!’

It was evil, this whole place. Only a few weeks ago she would have thought that it was blessed, because then she had her husband and her child, but now she knew it was cursed. How else could a boy, another mere child, have murdered her son? She glanced up at the tapestries lining the walls, at the magnificent bed with its straw mattress lying on its mesh of ropes. In that bed she had lain with her husband; beside it she had given birth to her son. Yet now everything about this hall, even this room, was hateful; defiled by the ending of her son’s life.

With a kind of wonder she stared at the guttering candle in her hand. It flickered and shone, bright and beautiful. Fire! Fire could cleanse the most evil of spirits; that was why witches were burned, so that their malevolence died with them. Fire destroyed and left only wholesome, fresh emptiness. Burned stubble left clean fields; burned trees left soil ready for ploughing; burned wood warmed the soul and the body together. Fire was good.

Lady Katharine slowly stared about her, then lifted the flame to the hanging serge curtains that draped the bed. They took light in an instant, and soon the bedding too was ablaze.

Thick, greenish-yellow smoke from the straw of the mattress began to fill the room, mixed with repellent fumes as the uncarded wool in the pillows smouldered, and all at once Lady Katharine felt an awful fear rise in her.

Heat gushed, and she staggered backwards as if in a trance. The bedcurtains had become sheets of flame, and now they released themselves, the thin material converted into fine ash that danced in the fire like demons. When a gust of air blew in through the window, the flames glowed white for an instant.

Suddenly she wanted to be free from here. She no longer wanted to see this house ruined and laid waste; she simply wished to escape. But there was no door any more, only a ring of flaming cloth all about her as the tapestries burned. She could feel the skin on her face and hands beginning to scorch; the hair of her brows and the tiny, fine ones on her cheeks were curling.

She turned this way and that, but the door was hidden. With a scream of terror, she felt the flames climb higher.

When Simon reached the window, she had collapsed, and he clambered inside as quickly as he could, grabbing her and throwing her over his shoulder before hurrying out once more.

The manor was destroyed in a matter of hours.

The magnificent hall in which the squire had entertained his numerous friends was gutted, a mere blackened, smoking shell. Stray cinders had lodged in the straw roofing of the stables and the kitchen, and it was only the diligence of the grooms that had saved the animals from burning alive. Fortunately they were all released in time, but not a single building escaped from the devastating effect of the fire. Daniel had attempted to rescue some of the stores, but had been forced to give up when barrels began to explode, and he had sent the men to the lines of those trying to douse the flames with buckets of water.

In one way, Daniel thought, as he stared at the ruin of his home, it was the death of Anney’s young Tom which had led to the end of it all. Until he had fallen into it, the manor had possessed a well in the yard, a good, deep one, which would have made ferrying water that much easier and quicker; since his death, the well had been filled in, for a well that killed was destroyed, just as was a man, and the squire had never got around to digging a new one, so all the water had had to be brought up from the stream, away down the hill.