The Perfect Sinner

‘I was three.’

‘I met William in the night when the battle was over. The windmill was burning to light the battlefield and there were fires everywhere to honour the dead.’

‘More of theirs than ours.’

‘Oh yes. Far, far more. It had been a slaughter.’

‘Not just a slaughter,’ he objected. ‘An honourable and magnificent fight, surely? You had been outnumbered by ten to one.’

‘Time and willing lips will always twist a tale. Some say it was four to one, others say five. All the same, you could have searched high and low for honour on that field and not found quite enough of it.’

I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He pounced on it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘another time perhaps.’

‘Please go on. What happened that night?’

‘Nobody slept. You never do after a battle. You know that yourself, but the French didn’t seem to know it was over. More and more of them kept blundering up the valley like moths to a candle. They were wandering in from the far end, for hours afterwards, thinking to join in the spoils. They just didn’t seem to realise that all the bodies heaped up were their own countrymen.’ I drained my wine and he refilled it.

As ever, what was in my mind was the moment when the troops parted for the doomed charge of a blind king, John of Bohemia, lashed between his friends’ horses.

It was blind John’s fate that drew me to the heaps of dead. I thought I knew where I had seen him fall. A stupid thought. From up on the ridge by the windmill I had marked his passage fairly well, but then chaos hid his end and now, down below in the dark there were hills of dead piled to head-height, horses and men mixed together in heaps which had formed a rising barricade. The French had gone on leaping and clambering over that barricade, taking arrows for their trouble and piling it ever higher in the process.

I was weary to my bones, barely able to drag myself through the churned earth of the battlefield, stumbling over arrows and helmets and arms and legs, and I turned over a battalion of bodies before I found him. It was only when I saw the lashings around a harness that I finally knew where to look. Pulling the other corpses off the three of them left me sweating and soaked in crusting blood, and I couldn’t get them free, you see? There was a black horse lying across them, a real charger, solid, stiff and utterly dead. In the morning, they were using teams of men with ropes and poles to prise those piles apart, but there in the night, there was just me and the flickering light of the nearest fire. The legs I thought belonged to John were sticking out from under the horse, and I was pulling as hard as I could when I found I was no longer alone. A huge man in a woollen tunic had joined me.

‘You take one leg,’ he said, I’ll take the other.’

‘I’m not looting,’ I said sharply, because most of the men out on that field were our camp followers, using their knives to dispatch the nearly dead and cut from them whatever they could find of value. I had taken off my mail and I was in a plain jerkin. I could have been anyone and I didn’t need another fight.

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you with the King all day, holding up the Standard. You did a good job. I don’t expect you need to loot, I guess you’ve got a castle or two of your own.’ There was nothing subservient about him, but right across that battlefield that night, in the aftermath of the desperate fight, men were talking to other men as equals and no one could be so proud as to mind.

‘One castle,’ I said, ‘and it leaks.’

He laughed harshly. ‘I know why you’re here. You and I saw the same thing,’ he said, ‘or thought we did, and we both need to know, don’t we?’

‘I’m Guy de Bryan,’ I said holding out a hand.

‘Are you indeed?’ he said as if he knew me. ‘Well now, there’s a fine thing. I am William Batokewaye,’ he squeezed my hand in his own much larger one. In those days he still had both arms. ‘In the service, for the present, of young Lord Montague, which is why I am here rooting around the carrion in the dark.’

Montague again. The Montagues were always embedded somewhere near the heart of my story. Let me get this right because, looking back, the order of all these events does get a little muddled in my head. That’s because so many of the things that really mattered in my life happened in such a short space of years, and so many of them involved the Montagues. They had given me no great reason for gratitude. Old Montague had harboured the villain Molyns, then imprisoned me, then done all he could to see his daughter, my dear Elizabeth, marry another man. When it came to the precipice of my sin, it was me who plunged over, but it was Montague’s hand that led me to the edge.

Now we had the new Earl of Salisbury, the younger Montague, and he was a fighter too, just like his wily, warrior father. Would he now set a curve of his own into the passage of my life? Molyns was still in his retinue. Molyns had done the deed that brought the two of us to root among these corpses in the dark.

I looked at the outline of William Batokewaye against the flaring firelight of the windmill collapsing behind him. ‘You’ll have to explain,’ I said. ‘What business does young Montague have here?’

‘His dead father’s business. Don’t you know the story?’ He looked at the leg he was holding, ‘This man saved the old Earl. Six years ago, soon after Sluys?’

‘Montague was captured.’ It was a busy time. I had forgotten the details.

‘Montague and the Earl of Suffolk, and something went amiss with the ransom,’ said Batokewaye. ‘Phillip of France threatened to kill both of them, and the only thing that stopped him was this man here. John of Bohemia taught young King Phillip a thing or two about chivalry that day, and he shamed him into letting them live. My master wishes to make sure blind John gets a Christian burial before the crows get to him. He deserves it after a death like that.’ He sighed.

I wasn’t sure if he meant the feathered crows or the human variety which were creeping around us on the edge of the darkness. I let go of my leg for a moment.

‘It was magnificent,’ I said and crossed myself.

‘Of course it was magnificent, but what did he think he was doing?’

‘He was riding to the aid of his men,’ I answered.

‘Lashed to his knights? As blind as a mole? What difference could he hope to make?’

‘You know the answer to that as well as I do. It’s a question of the spirit.’

‘It’s a question of being dead.’

We were both silent again and I knew we were both thinking about the means of his death.

‘If you’re in Montague’s retinue, you will be familiar with Sir John Molyns,’ I suggested.

He spat.

I waited, but it seemed that was all the answer I was going to get. It was certainly the sort of answer I most wanted, because I liked this man.

I pressed him. ‘Were you with Molyns today?’

‘Molyns was on his own business today, or perhaps the King’s business but certainly not Montague’s.’

I wanted to see where he stood.

‘What business do you think that was?’

‘The devil’s business.’

We agreed on that.

‘Come on then, heave,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

We heaved and he came out with a wet slither like a very old baby being born. He had new armour plate around his chest, one-up on chain mail, but it hadn’t done much for him. Batokewaye strode off and pulled a brand out of the nearest fire. By its light we examined the sad remains of King John of all the Bohemians, and it confirmed my very worst fears.

‘I’ll find a priest,’ I said. ‘We should say a prayer to see his soul through to daybreak.’

‘No need,’ said the big man as he studied the corpse. ‘You’ve found one. I am a priest.’

He didn’t look like a priest. He looked like a man who’d been on the winning side of many bloody fights, but we said our prayers, the two of us, there in the flickering dark, in a night that was threaded with the moans of the dying, and then we both sat down on the blood-soaked ground to keep the old king company until the sun rose.

‘I couldn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘I knew Molyns was planning something, and I couldn’t prevent it. No one else seemed to think it was wrong.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Batokewaye. ‘You’re a young man still. You can’t stop what can’t be stopped.’

‘It was a great sin and it should have been prevented. We’re not animals. There are rules. Even in battle we must remember…’

‘No.’ His voice was loud, cutting across me. ‘We may not be animals, but tell me this. You’re alone, walking in the darkest forest and you hear something rustle behind the next tree. What would you most want it not to be?’

‘A wolf,’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘A bear?’

‘Not a wolf, not a bear, not a snake, not a lion.’

‘What then?’

‘Another man.’

‘Yes.’

‘I tell you, we’re not animals, we’re more dangerous than any animal.’ He looked down at poor dead John. ‘When did an animal do that to one of its own?’

We talked until the sun first showed itself far away across the Somme, and by that time we were, what? Friends? Not exactly, not yet. Two people who sensed they were to know each other for years to come. Two people bound down the same road. I already knew that William Batokewaye would be a good companion on that road.

At dawn, we saw King Edward’s great mathematical exercise begin, his clerks edging their cautious way onto the butchers’ field to reckon exactly how many flowers of the French nobility we had plucked. Sir Reginald Cobham, that stalwart soldier, called together anyone with knowledge of the French colours, because in so many cases, it was only paint and crests and armour which still distinguished one pulped face from another. I closed my eyes when I had seen enough, but the distinctive noise of the aftermath made just as vivid a picture through my ears. I could hear the horse teams snorting and stamping and the sliding apart of the piles as they pulled. The clank of armour against armour and the wet thud of dead flesh hitting the ground as the bodies of horses and men were tugged apart. Every now and then there would be a sigh or a moan as air squeezed from dead lungs and, in amongst it, all the time, there was the cheerful shouting of men who found what they were doing to be perfectly acceptable.

‘I want to find a peaceful place,’ I said. ‘Somewhere to think and to gather those thoughts and to say prayers. Somewhere away from Molyns and his like. Somewhere away from war.’

‘You have your leaky castle,’ said Batokewaye.

‘Walwayns? Walwayns is a hard place to get to and a harder place to stay in. Walwayns spells struggle not peace. It is all I can do to stop it coming to pieces around my ears. Every day I spend there, I am beset by troubles. The people are full of complaints, the air is full of rain and falling rocks, the fields are full of weeds and the kitchens are full of rats. Walwayns is a penance.’

‘I know a better place,’ he said quietly.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It is in a fold of valleys and gentle hills, a short stroll inland from a friendly sea. A long lake, full of fish, protects it from that sea and there is a drawbridge on the lake to keep off raiders. The village is sheltered from the winds and it soaks up the sun like a sponge. It has a twisting narrow street, houses built of stone and the fields around it are full of fat beasts. It is close to Heaven and there is always beer in the jug and food in the pot.’

‘You come from this blessed place?’

‘I do.’

‘I wish it were mine to live in,’ I said.

‘It is, Lord,’ he replied.

‘I’m not a lord,’ I said.

‘The place I’m talking about is Slapton in Devon,’ he said, looking at me expectantly. ‘That’s why I call you Lord.’

‘What?’

‘You have not heard of it?’

‘No,’ and then, slightly irritated, ‘why did you laugh? Is it such a famous place?’

‘It should be,’ he answered, ‘to you at least. You are Lord of the manor of Slapton, as well as Nympton St George, Satterleigh, Newton, Rocombe and Northaller.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Did your father not tell you?’

For the last ten years of my father’s life he had told me that I was the child of Satan, that he could fly like a bat, that we could eat the stones of the castle’s tower if we only boiled them long enough, and that he was the rightful king of the lost tribes of Egypt. He had never mentioned Slapton. ‘No, he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Does that mean you knew who I was all along?’

‘Not until you told me your name,’ said Batokewaye. ‘I knew Guy de Bryan was serving the King, but I didn’t know which one you were. I’m glad it was you.’

‘Did you know my father?’

‘I was ten years old the last time he came to Devon. It always puzzled us that he didn’t come again. It’s a fair place and there are rents collected year by year.’

‘Who collects them?’

‘My father’s the steward. He’s an old man now, but he’s honest’

‘Is there a house?’

‘There is Pool.’

‘What’s Pool?’

‘The manor house, a great house indeed. It lies in the bottom of the little valley that runs inland from Slap ton. It is a shaded place but well built in stone and it has more chimneys than you ever see in that part of the world, and there is enough wood stored in Pool’s barns to make smoke come out of every one of them. You’ll like Pool.’

‘I’ll come to see it, William Batokewaye. I need a quiet place. Shall you and I go there together when this war is through?’

‘There’s a lot more Frenchmen where these came from,’ he said. ‘That may be a while yet.’

CHAPTER SIX

Having erased Slapton so successfully from her own story of herself, it had simply not occurred to Beth that Slapton’s inhabitants would not have done the same. If no one in London knew she came from Slapton, it seemed that everyone in Slapton knew she had gone to London and even had quite a good idea of what she was doing there. It didn’t occur to Beth that her father might be proud of her, that he might talk about her as if they were often in touch. Carrying in her head the scornful childish caricature of this place as somewhere so cut off from the modern world that it lacked television, radio and newspapers, she had been counting on anonymity. It had come as an absurd shock to find that her father knew exactly what had been happening to her in the past forty-eight hours, that the neighbours had told him, that people here were gossiping about her.

Head down, hurrying, Beth left his house and took refuge in the back lane. It led out of the side of the village towards her grandmother’s cottage, and it had served the younger Beth as an escape route many times before. There was nobody around in the lane, but she imagined eyes inside every window, looking at her, matching her to the stories in their morning papers, and it was a relief to leave the houses behind.

But Slapton wouldn’t leave her behind. It was coming back at her from the closed cupboards of memory, the stony surface of the path, the gate she used to sit on when she had somehow got annoyed with both parent and grandparent at once, and the fence where the dog had cornered her. In the first field, she saw the bushes where she used to make her camp and where, on her tenth birthday, she had buried a tin filled with the toys she decided she had outgrown, vowing to herself that she would never dig them up again.

The path led downhill between two more fields, then up into trees and by the stile she took the old branch to the right that led to Quarry Cottage. This was the spot, she had always felt, where you started to feel Eliza’s presence spreading out through the countryside around her house. She was going to take the familiar short cut straight through the deserted quarry, but something had changed. It was no longer deserted. New gates closed the gap between the trees. The roofs of the old sheds beyond had been repaired, the brambles had gone and a truck was parked on fresh gravel where the big puddle always used to be.

Eliza’s path ran around the far side of the quarry between the trees and Beth intended to take it but, out of mild curiosity and more from an unexpressed wish to delay her arrival at the old woman’s house, she walked towards the new gate, opened it an inch or two and looked in, straight up into the face of the man who had been walking quietly towards it from the other side. He wore overalls and he was pulling off a pair of heavy leather gloves. His face was painted with matt grey dust which accentuated the sharp planes of his cheeks. He was smiling at some private joke and his eyes shone. What was even more surprising was that he stopped, looked at her calmly and said ‘Hello Beth, I heard you were back,’ and for a moment, she had no idea who he was.

‘Lewis?’ she said, after a giveaway pause. ‘Is it you?’ For just one absurd moment, she had taken him for Lewis’s older brother, but Lewis didn’t have an older brother. Seven years had filled him out and toughened him. She knew it was seven years because the last time she had seen him, they were each home from university and she had given him the cold shoulder. Then they’d both moved away.

‘You went off somewhere,’ she said. ‘Scotland?’

‘Ireland. I came back. What about you?’

‘I…seem to be back too. Just for a day or two.’ She looked in through the gate. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Hasn’t Eliza told you? I reopened the old place.’

‘As a quarry? I thought it died on its feet years ago.’

‘Come in and see,’ he suggested, ‘if you’re not in too much of a rush.’

‘I ought to go on.’

‘It’ll only take a minute. I can’t be too long myself. I’ve got to be in Dartmouth in half an hour. It would be handy because I’ve got a bag of Eliza’s shopping in the shed. You could save me time by taking it with you. That’s if you don’t mind?’

Seven years on, and they were talking about Eliza’s shopping. She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Inside, the tall face of the quarry loomed out of the trees to their left. Rows of rough-cut stone slabs were laid out on the ground. He took her to the larger of the two sheds.

‘You remember, this whole place was my granddad’s?’ he said as he unlocked the door. ‘He never worked the stone, not after the war anyway. When he died he left it to me, so I decided I’d have a go.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Me and Rob. He’s here part-time.’

‘Who’s Rob?’

‘You must remember Rob. Robin Watson? He was in primary with us. He went to the comprehensive.’

For a moment Beth rejected the very idea that she might remember someone from junior school, that even more connections might be waiting in this place, ready to trap her and wind her back in, but all the same she had a vague memory of a large, shambling boy. The comprehensive? She and Lewis had both gone on to the grammar school, the only ones from Slap ton who did. Seven years of that long bus ride together, twice every day.

‘You make a living out of this?’ she asked, looking around.

‘You mean is it just a hobby? No, it’s a job.’

She bit back her words. She wanted to say, you were bright, you could have done anything. Why are you wearing dirty overalls with stone dust in your hair? Why are you wasting time in Slapton? You got away, why did you come back?

His eyes changed as if he remembered her capacity for scorn. ‘It’s a little gem, this place.’ He checked his watch, ‘Do you know anything about geology?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Have you ever been to Purbeck?’

‘No.’

‘On the Dorset coast? Maybe, oh I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’

‘I haven’t been there, no.’ He talked as if he could persuade her she had.

‘Well, it was always famous for Purbeck marble. There’s not much left to be had now. Come in and have a quick look, I’ll show you.’

On a bench inside was a carved and fluted column in a stone so dark green it was almost black. It glistened.

‘It’s not really marble,’ he said, running one hand over it. ‘That’s just what they call it. It’s a sandstone, you see, but it’s packed full of tiny, hard shells and when you cut it clean you can get a real shine on it. Beautiful, isn’t it? They always used it for the fine work in churches and places like that.’ His voice had an unexpected reverence in it.

Despite herself, the stone drew her attention and she traced the path of his fingers with her own. ‘So you get it from Purbeck and you carve it here?’

‘Oh no, no. This came from here. That’s the whole point. This is a geological oddity, you see, our very own little outcrop of the marble on the south-west, north-east line. The only place you find it west of Purbeck itself.’

‘So people still want it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What’s this bit for?’

‘Restoration work for a church in Winchester.’

‘And they come all the way here for it?’

‘Beth, this is where they came originally when they were building that same church. The marble looks just a little bit different in every seam, you see, the colour, the shade. You want to match it, you got to come back to the same place.’ He had always had enthusiasm and she could remember how much that had annoyed her when enthusiasm in any form was the last thing she admired. He bent down and pulled out a section of a column from the floor below the bench. It was dull and half of it had crumbled away. ‘This is the bit they want to replace. I’ve been down into a few of the old holes and I reckon I’ve found the very same face it came from in the first place. I’m carving the exact same stone.’

‘Why’s it in such a state?’ Beth asked, looking at the crumbling piece on the floor between them.

Lewis frowned. ‘It was just poor stuff. There was a pocket of mud in it and they carved it badly anyway. They should never have let it leave the quarry.’ He sounded irritated, almost angry, as if the family had let someone down.

‘When was that?’ Beth asked, thinking perhaps it was back in the fifties or sixties when his grandfather was still working.

‘Thirteen twenty-two,’ said Lewis. ‘They’ve still got all the old records. Very bad. You shouldn’t let anyone down like that. This stone should be good for thousands of years.’

She looked hard at him and saw he meant what he said. He was annoyed with stone cutters who had been dead more than seven centuries for letting the business down.

‘Any chance you can come back tomorrow?’ he said, looking at his watch again, ‘I’d like to show you the rest. See what you think.’

‘Maybe,’ said Beth. ‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying.’

‘Do you mind giving this to Eliza?’ he asked, picking up a shopping bag. ‘Her change is in it.’

‘If she’s there. I was going to take potluck. She doesn’t even know I’m here yet.’

‘Oh yes she does,’ said Lewis. ‘That’s how I knew you were here. She told me.’

Eliza already knew she was here. How could that be? All at once Beth found she needed to be out in the fresh air again, away from people who knew things. There was no escaping her grandmother though. Not if she knew.

‘Do you see much of her?’

‘She drops in most days for a chat and a cup of tea.’

She was heading for the door when she first noticed the fragments of the old stone slab. They were laid out on a flat table, eroded and camouflaged with lichen. She paused for a moment to look and Lewis stopped too. It had once been a stone rectangle, but at some point, long ago, it had broken apart into a dozen constituent pieces and the jagged edges had been softened and blurred with all the time that had passed since. Someone, Lewis presumably, had laid it out carefully on the wooden table, fitting it together like a jigsaw, but there was a large gap where one piece was missing. Faint lettering was incised into it, but that too had eroded almost away.