William Napier - The Great Siege

‘Only one old retainer,’ said Nicholas.

Crake moved with the snakelike swiftness of a small, lean man, and cut Nicholas across the face with his whip.

‘Liar! Do not think you can lie to me, boy! You have seven household servants, seven . I know their names, I know their ages and their occupations, their religious practices. Damn it, boy, I know when they last changed their underlinen!’

Nicholas pressed his hand to the hot welt across his cheek. Tears pricked his eyes but he blinked them angrily away. His face burned, his heart ached, his whole world tilted.

‘I will deal with your servants. As for you and your sisters, you are now penniless orphans.’ Crake compressed his lips at the children’s cries. ‘Well, your dotard of a father should have thought of your fate before he entertained Knights of St John at his fireside, should he not? Your best course now is to quit this county, and throw yourselves upon your nearest relations, or else some charity or poorhouse. Either that or become mere hedgerow beggars, and join the great army of filthy vagabonds that infest this kingdom. It is no concern of mine.’

‘You cannot do this! You are a heartless villain, you will never sleep easy in your bed if I-’

‘Do not bring down the law upon your own head, boy!’ rasped Crake, his small eyes gleaming.

‘What care I?’

‘Nor the dainty heads of your pretty little sisters.’

Nicholas scowled ferociously.

‘Ay,’ murmured Crake, ‘there’s the rub. You are head of the household now. But without a house, alas! So enough of your youthful fits of rage. You need to learn to govern yourself, boy. For it will not be easy to keep body and soul together, the four of you, in your new life on the road. As vagabond children of a traitor. A short life but not, I fear, a very merry one.’

He pulled his horse around.

‘Turn them loose! Fire the barns!’

‘And the house, Sire?’

‘The barns would be sign enough. Leave the house.’

Some of the villagers looked mutinous as the barns and outbuildings of the Ingoldsby farm were put to the torch, and the four children were driven off down the street. Men clutched hoes and billhooks, women’s faces were dark with anger. But what could mere peasants do against a dozen mounted men-at-arms?

Crake observed it all with cynical penetration. If only the children could have been finally disposed of … But there were limits. Catholic priests on missions from France might be caught and lynched promptly enough, and night-time visitations from a foreign order of Catholic knights were certainly sufficient cause to argue treason. But you could not simply dispose of heretical Catholic children, as the Israelites slew the children of the Amalekites.

The law of England was harsh but fair. He would have to let them go. Penniless, without friends or family, they would not last long.

The children passed away down the lane and into the open country under the gaze of a hundred villagers. Smoke drifted overhead from the burning barns. Flames crackled. Rooks rose indignantly from the tall elms.

‘Here!’ called out Crake at the last moment. ‘Something for your journey.’

To everyone’s astonishment, he pulled a small but weighty leather purse from his cloak and tossed it down to the boy. Then he wrenched his horse around and trotted back up the hill. At the head of the lane, he turned in his saddle and watched them go.

The children stumbled on for they knew not how long. Perhaps they would wake up and find it had been a nightmare. The short October day drew to a close and the sky darkened over their heads. A wind came up and whipped the leaves about in maddened flurries beneath the trees. They did not wake up.

After a time, little Lettice said, ‘What will we have for supper? Is it to be only bread?’

‘We will ask at a farmhouse. Perhaps we can buy something more.’

He drew Crake’s purse out and unknotted the strings as he walked and peered inside. Then he looked up.

Susan was observing him closely.

‘Is it well?’

He re-tied the strings, he wasn’t quite sure why, and stowed the purse away again.

‘Very well,’ he said quietly. ‘If I had a sling.’

Crake had thrown him a purseful of pebbles.

‘I know what is in it,’ said Susan. ‘It is a favourite jest of Crake’s. He often throws purses of stones and pebbles to paupers, to see them run and grub in the dust. He finds their desperation amusing. But he says it is a parable, to teach them not to put their trust in gold.’

‘The man is a monster.’

‘God will make him pay.’

‘ I will make him pay. One day.’

‘You cannot usurp God.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘It was not your fault. What happened to father.’ She swiftly wiped an eye.

Nicholas said nothing. His heart was as locked up as a casket.

They came past a barn near a lonely farmstead, but a huge dog barked and tore at its chain as they approached, and Lettice and Agnes refused to go any nearer. Finally they made shelter in a small copse, Nicholas laying a row of sticks against a fallen treetrunk and then covering them crosswise with brushwood. They slept fitfully in this makeshift wooden tent, damp and desperately hungry, like shivering puppies.

Nicholas was lying awake in the bleak grey dawn when he heard footfalls in the leaves nearby. Someone knew they were there. He put his hand over Lettice’s mouth. Her eyes flared wide. He put a finger to his lips, and motioned her to tell Agnes.

He peeped out of the shelter, just in time to see a burly figure step behind a broad oak tree, the glint of steel in his hand. A dagger.

So Crake had changed his mind, after all, and sent one or more of his hired henchman after them to finish the job. Perhaps ex-soldiers, ex-mercenaries, hearts like flint. Come from the late religious wars in France, where they would have witnessed, or enacted, the foulest massacres. What would it be to them, to cut four children’s throats in this isolated copse, and bury them deep under the leaf litter? It would be nothing to them. And who would ever know?

Nicholas’s heart raced fit to burst. His fingers curled around one of the half-rotten sticks above him. His only available weapon, to defend himself and his three sisters against hardened killers.

The henchman remained behind the tree.

Nicholas drew the stick free and crawled out of the shelter as silently as he could. Leaves rustled, a twig cracked, but it was soft and damp and made little noise. He was across the clearing in a trice, rounded the tree, and delivered the hardest blow he could to the broad leather-jerkined back in front of him.

The stick snapped in two.

The figure turned, hurriedly returning his privy parts into his breeches.

‘Master Nicholas!’

‘Hodge!’

Hodge thought Nicholas had struck him in indignation at his relieving himself so near to his sisters. Nicholas, babbling with joy and relief, said he thought Hodge might be a mercenary come from the late religious wars in France, which only baffled Hodge the more.

‘And I saw you carrying a dagger!’

Hodge frowned and then pulled something from his jerkin, tucked in above the belt. It was a fire steel.

‘We can have a fire!’

‘Ay, sir,’ said Hodge. ‘Though I do have a small knife too. And a pannikin, and some eggs and mushrooms. I stole the pannikin and the eggs from the farm, under the very nose of that crookback dungheap Crake back there, God rot his stones. But since it was Sir Francis’s pannikin anyhow, I thought he’d not mind.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. His throat felt tight. ‘No, he’d not mind.’

‘Well,’ said Hodge, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Let’s have our breakfast then.’