Michael JECKS - The Mad Monk of Gidleigh

In the chapel he kneeled and gave a quick prayer for Mary, but also for his dead Agnes. Not a day passed that he didn’t think of her, and he found the cool silence in the chapel conducive to reflection, giving him time to gather his thoughts before he came here to Mary’s body.

She had been rolled onto a blanket, naked, while the Coroner studied her, prodding and prying with the subtlety and sympathy of a butcher with a hog’s carcass before the vill’s jury. All he cared about was the fines he could impose. Piers had observed a dignified silence while the money was totted up, convinced that the cash would mostly end up in the Coroner’s pocket. You couldn’t trust officials who collected taxes. Too often, most of the money they took would stick to them.

‘You couldn’t tell him much, could you?’ he said conversationally to Elias.

The peasant was older than Piers by some four years or so; Piers remembered him being almost married when he himself was still being sent out to hurl stones at the birds pecking at the grain as it was sowed.

‘What more do you expect me to tell him?’ Elias snapped. He had not aged well. His wife had also died years before, but Elias had never learned to cope with his loss. It had been worse for Elias than for Piers, partly because his wife had died during the birth of his son, who also perished, and then his first and only child died during the famine seven or eight years ago, raped, and suffering a slow death. At least Piers still had his own son and daughter. The lad lived with him, while his daughter had married and moved away to Oakhampton. Still, Piers saw her every so often, and her children, when he went up to the market in South Zeal, the new town roughly halfway between them.

Up till his wife’s death, Elias had been a cheery companion, always one of the first with a song or a story in the ale-house, but since his daughter’s death in the famine, he had grown withdrawn and surly. His greying hair was unkempt at all times, his heavy, round head tended to hang like a whipped cur’s, and his craggy features remained fixed in a scowl from dawn to dusk, his brown eyes all but hidden beneath his grim brows. He wore a thick grey beard that almost concealed his mouth and his solid jawline, but any strength it gave to his appearance was marred by the particles of bread and mashed pea that adhered to it.

If anything, his demeanour today was blacker than usual, a fact which gave Piers pause for thought. ‘Nothing. I was just interested.’

Elias said nothing, but Piers saw him shoot a look towards Huward. The miller had left his wife to her grief, and was marching towards the men carrying his daughter’s body.

‘We can take her to the chapel,’ Piers said comfortingly, but inwardly he wondered how he would cope were this his own daughter.

‘Be damned to that! You think I want her body set down in there, in the place where he raped her?’ Huward rasped.

The miller didn’t speak directly to Piers. He couldn’t. This was the saddest day of his life. Until he had been called to see Mary’s body, he had known only happiness. His wife was a source of delight, his daughters were both adored by him, and he had a son to take on the mill after his own death. This sudden collapse from joy to despair had left him with a more acute pain at his loss that he would have thought it possible for one man to bear.

Since confirming that the body was his daughter’s, he’d been filled with misery for the death of his little Mary – his little angel, as he always called her. He had the two girls, Mary and Flora, and Mary was always the calmer, quieter of the two. Flora, his flower, was sweet-natured, but more turbulent to live with. When she had a mood, all in the house knew it. Many was the time he had been forced to roar at her to be silent when she was teasing Mary or Ben, their brother.

Walking here, he had known that the inquest would be grievous. It was the hardest thing, burying your children. He remembered his mother saying that once, when his brother Tom died. She’d said that it was the toughest thing she’d ever had to do, putting him in his grave. Well, perhaps it was, but for Huward, the hardest part was the inquest. Seeing her poor, bloodied body being stripped and exposed for all to see. Every man in the vill standing there, eyeing her – oh, not with any lust, no, but that wasn’t the point. They could all see her, his little Mary, naked, like a whore.

That bastard priest would regret his brief fling and murder, Huward swore to himself. The devil-spawn had destroyed more than Huward’s little girl, he had killed off Huward’s grandchild and taken away the peace of Huward’s home. He felt as though with that one blow, the killer had slaughtered his entire family.

‘You think I’d let you take her there?’ he said brokenly. His hand reached out to stroke her cheek. ‘Cold. She’s so cold!’

Piers put a hand to Huward’s shoulder. ‘Come, let’s go to the tavern and find you a good draught of cider.’

‘I don’t need cider. All I want is revenge.’ He thrust forward and took his daughter up in his arms, forcing the men who held the blanket to relinquish their burden. Huward softly turned her face to him, then tucked it into his shoulder, his arms about her back and behind her legs. Then he turned away, and set off in the direction of Gidleigh and the church there.

When Baldwin ran to the stable and bellowed for Jack, he was aware of a strange feeling that things weren’t right.

Partly it must be the fact that Edgar was missing. Every other time he had been forced to raise the Hue and Cry, Edgar had been at his side. When Baldwin rode in search of a felon or some other assumed miscreant, Edgar was a permanent guard, always nearby. But today Edgar was at the manor protecting Jeanne, Baldwin’s wife.

Edgar had been his servant for more years than he cared to remember now, originally his sergeant in the Knights Templar. Every knight went into battle with a trusted man-at-arms to back up the knight’s charge, to protect his flank and to fight at his side, loyal unto death. After the Templars had been destroyed, Edgar had refused to leave Baldwin’s side.

However, his would not be the only missing face, Baldwin knew. The compact, wiry hunter, John Black, who had joined Baldwin on some of his early chases, was dead; he had fallen from his pony into a river during the floods of the winter of 1321. Tanner, too, who had been so successful as the Constable of the Hundred, a large, stolid man with a face and head that might have been carved from granite, had suddenly been stricken with a malady last summer, and had succumbed in three days.

Life was nothing if not fleeting. Baldwin couldn’t help but notice that the years appeared to flash past with increasing speed, and the thought was sad. He had only just found a woman with whom he felt he could spend the remainder of his life, and he regretted the years before he had met her. They felt wasted. Although he was no modern chivalrous knight, a lust-filled, salacious fool like those who thought that the only battle worth fighting was that for a woman’s virginity, he sometimes found himself thinking that if only he had met Jeanne earlier, he would have gained more enjoyment from his life.

He was getting old. He detested the idea that he might soon leave Jeanne, a feeling made still more poignant by the fact of his daughter, little Richalda. Almost one year old, she was utterly dependent upon Jeanne and him, and he felt that responsibility keenly. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he truly had a reason to live, or so he felt. He had loved Jeanne since he first met her in Tavistock nearly four years ago, and he knew that she loved him in return, but all the time he was aware that she was a strong personality in her own right. If he were to die, his widow would mourn him, mourn him deeply, but she would not expire for despair. Nor would he want her to.