Maggie Prince - North Side of the Tree

“If everyone’s going down to Low Back Farm, who’ll

be on watch?” I ask her.

“Leo, that slitgut, him as should be off tending t’cows.” Before she has finished speaking, I have made up my mind.

As night falls, I can hear them preparing for the attack. Swords scrape and tinderboxes click. The smell of hot tar rises up the tower walls as arrows are wrapped and dipped. I offer up a prayer for Verity and James, then rip the sheets off my bed, drag the clothes press against the door, retrieve the warmingstone and wait for it to become silent outside.

It takes a long time. My stomach churns with nervousness as I wait, straining my ears. Raindrops beat against my window, driven by the wind. I can see nothing beyond the wet glass but a great darkness full of moving shadows.

The gale battering the tower becomes too loud for me to know whether or not all the men have gone. I can only hope it is also loud enough to cover the sounds of my escape. Kate will be asleep in her room behind the kitchen hearth. Germaine, I do not know. I just hope she is off on one of her unexplained absences.

For a moment I cannot do it. I hold the green granite warmingstone, and can think of nothing but how expensive this fragile glass was, and how cold my room used to be before the window was glazed. I listen. Will Leo really be on the battlements in this weather, with no Scots likely and no one to check his vigilance? What will he do if he sees me? It is, after all, for his sake that I am imprisoned here. I swing the stone high above my head, and bring it crashing against the window.

In a second it is gone, precious glass smashing and tinkling away into the night. I am almost knocked back against the bedpost by the wind roaring in. Now I must hurry. I stuff the knotted bedsheet out of the window, but it blows back over and over again. When it is finally out, it will not hang down. I think of Robert climbing the wall on his swaying rope ladder, his face at the window, my hands pushing him and the terrible injuries he sustained when he fell. The height and the precariousness of these walls seem suddenly fearsome and impossible.

There is a lull in the gale. Is this the moment to go? No one appears to have heard me so far. The bedsheet whips round and catches on some shards of glass. I free it, prise the fragments out, check that the other end of the sheet is still firmly knotted round the leg of the bed. There is a sound from above. I must just go, never mind the sheer drop and the frightening fragility of the knotted sheets. I drag my cloak round me and climb backwards on to the deep windowsill. The wind rips at my skirts and I feel as if I am being sucked through the narrow aperture before I am ready. I kneel there, holding on to the sheet and the window-ledge, staring back into the room, and as I do so, the clothes press which was jammed against the door starts to move. It judders along the floor towards me. I stare at it, paralysed. Someone is coming in, and I hadn’t even heard the key.

With the opening door, the gale rushes right through the room. Hangings rattle and ash swirls. “What’s the matter with this door?” enquires a voice. “I knocked, mistress; is everything all right?” With a final push, Leo enters. “Sweet Jesu!” He rushes across the room and grabs my arms as I frantically try to lower myself out.

“No!” I hit out at him. “No! Let me go, Leo! Let me go at once!”

Almost effortlessly he drags me back in and sets me on my feet in the chamber.

“Leo, how dare…”

“Shh.” He goes to the window, pushes the knotted bedsheet out again and watches it spiral around the window space as the wind catches it. Then he crosses to the door, holds it open for me and bows. “An easier way, mistress. I heard nothing, with this terrible wind blowing.”

We look at one another. All manner of things are in that look, acknowledgements of deeds done and faith kept. Leo looks away first, as he unhooks a piece of hessian twine from his belt. “Come on, lady, out with you.” I step on to the tiny landing that leads to the spiral staircase, and watch as Leo loops the twine round a leg of the clothes press, then hooks it under the door. “Anything more you wish to take?” he asks. I look back, and shake my head. I have all I intend to take bundled into a large pocket attached at my waist. I watch as Leo closes the door and locks it, then pulls both ends of the twine so that the clothes press scrapes back into position, barricading the door on the inside.

“Thank you.” My voice is hoarse. I have to clear my throat. “Thank you, Leo.”

“Come lady, we’d best get you moving. I’ll saddle a horse. You’ll be going to the parsonage?” I nod. Down in the blowy barmkin, whilst Leo puts my sidesaddle on Germaine’s little mare, Mattie, I stand and watch my bedsheet high on the tower wall, flailing about in the rising gale.

If I had not gone to stay at John’s, everything would have been different.

For my first few days at the parsonage, I am filled with melancholy. I miss my home, my room, the rhythms of life on the farm. I have to remind myself that I was a prisoner there, and that the past week was intolerable. On the many occasions in those first few days when my father comes beating at the parsonage door, only to be turned away, I feel almost glad to hear him, simply for the familiarity of his rage. From a small, high window I watch him walk back to where his horse is tethered at the trough on the green, and I see that he has a severe limp, presumably from his latest encounter with James and the men of Low Back Farm.

My mother does not visit me, but instead sends such of my clothes as I might need for a short stay, and a note berating me for supposedly risking breaking my neck by climbing out of the window, and commanding me to mind my tongue and under no circumstances to speak about the deaths of the two strangers.

The day after my arrival John and I sit in the kitchen where Mother Bain is baking bread. Smoke rolls through the late afternoon sunlight as she lifts out trays of flat, black loaves from the bread oven, and tips them on to the wooden rack. The bitter scents of smoke and rye fill the kitchen.

“I’ll mull some ale.” John looks tired. He has been up half the night with one of his parishioners who is dying of consumption. “Will you have some ale?” he asks Mother Bain.

“Nay lad. The bread’s done and I’m off to lie down. I daresay the pair of you are safe to be left?”

This has become a joke between the three of us. John watches her go to her room behind the hearth, which she took over when James left, since stairs have now become too much for her.

“We should get a chaperone for you,” John says when she has gone. “It’s well enough to joke, but your being here is a very different matter from Verity’s being here. I don’t think it can be entirely unknown to people that you and I have some fondness for each other.” He pushes the poker into the fire to heat. “I want you to stay. I want you to stay as long as you’re willing to, and I want there to be no whisper of scandal to spoil it.”

I do not distress him by telling him that there is already considerably more than a whisper of scandal surrounding my presence here, amid speculation about my imprisonment and escape. I have seen groups of villagers on the green casting curious glances at the parsonage, and we have had a stream of visitors here these first few days, bringing pies and puddings. They say it is to welcome me to Wraithwaite, but I know it is in fact to see the state I am in, since my father’s notorious temper appears to have driven yet another daughter to seek refuge here. On the occasions when my father comes galloping up to the parsonage door, a surprising number of people appear to have business requiring their attendance on the village green. John goes out and talks calmly to him each time, locking the door behind him, and in the presence of so many witnesses there is little my father can do but eventually leave.