скачать книгу бесплатно
“It’s my turn on watch.” He sits down beside me, and looks at me in silence. James does not communicate well. His manners are often rough, and surprisingly for a landed farmer in our prosperous region of the north, he has never learned to read or write. I feel it is something to do with the fact that his father used to beat him half senseless when he was a child. We all knew it. I can remember my mother flying into a rage with the old man, and being shown briskly off the premises of Low Back Farm. Because James cannot read or write, Verity keeps his farm’s financial books for him, and as a result he has fallen in love with her.
He takes off his leather jerkin. He smells of sweat and cattle. “I haven’t seen Verity lately,” he says. For some reason, perhaps because he knows I like him, James lives in the forlorn hope that I will help him obtain my fifteen-year-old sister’s hand in marriage. Nothing could be further from my mind.
“She’s busy, James,” I answer, and pass him some bread and cheese to cheer him up. We sit in silence for a while. The world is very beautiful today. Below the rocky plateau on which we sit, on a level with our feet, young hazel leaves are curling out of their buds. High above us a hawk hovers. Trouble for someone. A hint of the strange feeling I had yesterday returns. I say, “You know, James, I feel as if we’re being watched.”
“Aye?” He looks sceptical. “It’ll be the Green Man, I daresay.”
I laugh. Now he is making me nervous. “No, nothing like that. I expect it’s just a deer watching us from the woods.”
He smiles. “Well it’ll be the Green Man now. Speak and ye’ll see.”
“Oh stop it, James.” I lean back, knowing he finds it amusing to frighten people, and wishing I had not started this conversation and given him the opportunity. There’s nothing on this sunlit hill to harm us. Except – a flicker of light westwards across the bay. I straighten and stare. James has seen it too. He sits forward. The flicker vanishes and is replaced by a thin line of smoke rising from the watchtower across the water. It is the warning beacon. The Scots are coming.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_f198557d-304c-519f-9f5d-da6082b5cdc6)
I have a moment of simply not believing it. I think, this doesn’t happen. Three years without a raid have made me complacent.
It makes me slow, slow to react, slow to get on my feet and grapple the tinderbox from its dry place under the beacon. James is faster. He is flinging dried moss and tarry sticks on to the pyre, poking them under the wood, pinching out little tendrils for me to light. I strike a shower of sparks into the moss. All of them go out. I strike again. A few sparks wriggle along the dry filaments and then they go out too. I strike again. The moss takes, bursts into flame. I light one of the tarry sticks from it, twisting it, giving it air, and then thrust it into the centre. A fragile line of smoke trails upwards. James picks up his jerkin and sways it back and forth to create a draught, not too hard, not too gently. He is good with fires. With a sigh, a rotten branch catches and sends up a puff of flame.
“Best run now,” says James.
I pull on my boots and ram the tinderbox back into its hole, then follow James across the clearing. We pick up speed when we leave the summit with its ankle-twisting fissures, and start a slithering rush downhill, leaving the path and taking the most direct route. Bracken and tiny treelets whip our ankles. We blunder between ash, hazel and juniper. Behind us the fire burns noisily. I stop and look back, and see the pointed flame flashing high then dipping low, surrounded by a black stream of smoke, shocking against the spring sky.
All I can think is, where are the Scots? Are they coming across the bay at this moment? Are they here already, between me and the safety of the tower? They have been known to hide in the woods for days in some remoter parts, while villagers have gone about their business unawares. James and I both need to round up our livestock. We cannot take losses on the scale of three years ago, particularly as at the tower we have less gold and silver stored in the root cellar for buying new animals this year.
In a good year, Verity goes to market in Lancaster in May with a bag of gold to buy cattle, and to Kendal in August with a bag of silver to buy sheep. I swear the other farmers and auctioneers are more afraid of her than they are of many a grown man. She controls our finances as well as James’s. She pays the men, oversees the weighing of the harvest, and, once, the thrashing of a farmhand who stole a bushel of wheat. Only once, because afterwards, as they untied the lad from the elder tree by the barmkin gate, she came into my room, sat down and headed a page in her accounts book Thefts. After that she let them steal, and the page in her book headed Thefts soon filled up with her pointed black script. Our father is a different matter, however, and our increasing success in keeping him off the highways has meant there’s less saved than in previous years.
At last James and I emerge into the clearing. It is an overwhelming relief to see the tower still safe, a haven. “You’d better blow the horn, James,” I gasp as we make a dash across the open ground. He holds on to the hawthorn tree by the gatehouse, bent double, getting his breath back. I open the door and grab the battered ram’s-horn from its niche in the wall. James seizes it from me, and blows.
The sound freezes in the air. It is like doom. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and legs. James keeps blowing, getting into his rhythm now, twice outside the main door towards the valley, then up the spiral stairway, once at each slit window. The effect is immediate. Kate’s screams echo up from the cellars. Thudding feet start running on the upper floors. Leo’s voice shouts in the valley, and the cows, under the thwack of his hazel tine, start bellowing. Whatever is the watchman doing? He must be asleep, not to have seen the warning smoke on the hill and over the water.
He was. As James and I emerge on to the battlements he is rubbing his eyes and staggering about, his hair ruffled, and a smell of ale rising from him that could have ignited the beacon unaided. For a moment I feel mad with fury.
“Henry!” I slap him hard across the face with the back of my hand, the one which wears Grandmother’s turquoise ring. It leaves a broad weal and breaks his skin. Tiny wells of blood rise along the mark. It also wakes him up.
“Mis… Mistress Beatrice,” he splutters. “You’d no call to do that.”
“The Scots are coming, you great boggart!” I hit him again for good measure with the tar torch, before I go to light it at the living-hall fire, one floor down. I can hear the combined braying of James’s horn and Kate’s screaming as I run down the steps and up again, carrying the roaring torch. By then my father, Verity, Kate and two henchmen, William and Martinus, have arrived on the battlements, and have begun stacking stones and arrows by the parapet. Kate’s screaming has dropped to a whimper now. She is terrified of the Scots, and of many things. Her nerves have never been the same since the day years ago when this tiny woman, with her wonderful singing voice, wild grey hair like a dandelion seed-head and a serious limp caused by stampeding cattle during a childhood Scottish raid, was accused of witchcraft. It was because she told fortunes, inaccurately it has to be said. She was also frequently accompanied by a black cat, mother of my cat Caesar. It was enough, for those looking for someone to blame for their own misfortunes. It was the old parson who accused her, from the pulpit one Sunday. Before the matter could get out of hand, as these things so often do, Mother stood up and faced him in the nave of the church and outquoted him text by text from the Bible, suggesting that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Or better still, eat it and choke for shame. I was astonished at my mother’s knowing, scornful voice, and at the sniggers that ran among the rows of people standing tense and motionless in the packed church. I didn’t understand what it all meant then, but heard tales later, when I was older, of this priest having a bastard in every village.
The old parson, perhaps realising that if he had Kate hanged he would have no one to sing so beautifully at his weddings and funerals, not to mention the annual two-village barn dance at which the sight of him performing a Cumberland square reel with his cassock tucked into his hose was not unknown, marched out of church that day, and afterwards said no more of the matter.
Witches hang and heretics burn, but there are fewer hangings and burnings under this queen than under the last one. Old people still speak fearfully of Queen Mary’s days. Bloody Mary, they call her. With the change of queen from Mary to Elizabeth the tide has turned from burning Protestants to burning Catholics. Burning those who disagree with you is a hard habit to shake off. We heard news recently of the burnings of some Catholics just a few hours’ ride south of us in Lancaster, but up here no one cares much what faith you follow so long as you are discreet. Witchcraft, of course, is another matter.
Now the old priest is dead, replaced by a younger man who declares that witchcraft does not exist, heresy scarcely matters and that we had all better damn well love each other or he’ll know the reason why. He took over Verity’s and my lessons from the old parson. Sadly, these have stopped now that I am sixteen.
I light my second beacon of the day. The tar barrels ignite at once with a huff of sound, and snarl like animals as they burn. I step down hurriedly as the heat hits me. Verity is handing out swords, bows and clubs, as more henchmen and Germaine appear at the top of the stairway. A grim air of calm hangs over us.
Germaine refuses the bow which Verity offers her, and goes to fetch her own. Germaine is our only other female servant besides Kate. She is tall and dark and very beautiful, and plays a variety of musical instruments with a variety of lack of talent. She is supposed to teach music and needlework to Verity and myself, and do the mending. Instead she spends most of her time entertaining Father.
I go downstairs with William and Henry to watch them lug our heavy old hagbut out of its cupboard on the east stairs and across the passage into the men’s common room. At Barrowbeck we cannot afford many firearms in the way that some of the bigger fortresses can. Our hagbut is inaccurate, slow to load and terrifyingly loud. Its eccentric angle of fire is such that it is more effective aimed from the common room, half way down the tower. When he was a young man, my father used to carry it into battle on his shoulder.
The men latch the weapon on to its stand and tip it awkwardly backwards, like a cannon, for me to load. I uncap a horn of gunpowder and ram shot and gunpowder down the barrel, wadding it into place. “Better oil the hinges,” I suggest, extracting the ramrod and propping it by the wall for next time. I filter some fine gunpowder into the priming pan. “I’ll get you some lard from the kitchen. You need it to swing up more easily than that for reloading.” The acrid smell of gunpowder is in my nose and on my hands as I hurry downstairs.
Now I am beginning to worry about Mother. Where is she? Is she still safely with Aunt Juniper, or is she in the woods on her way home? If the latter, then surely she will have heard the horn and seen the beacon, and will either hurry home or find somewhere to hide. Back on the battlements I work my way through the crowd to where Germaine is flexing her longbow. Most of us just have ordinary bows, but Germaine insists on using this six-foot monstrosity with its silk and flaxen string. I have to say, though, that she does tend to hit things with it.
“Germaine?” I take care to be polite. “Would you please take charge of closing all the shutters, and later when we’re all in, wind down the grille on the door and open the wolf-pit? Can I just leave all those things to you? Oh, and please don’t forget to call ‘Wolf-pit open’. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to poor old Edmund.”
She carries on flexing her bow, and replies, “You have an excessive amount of responsibility for one so young, Beatrice, and it has had a most unfortunate effect on you.”
I turn away in irritation. Henry, who has re-emerged on to the battlements, overhears, and suppresses a grin. His face is still bleeding in a row of gleaming droplets. I am regretting my outburst of temper. I should like to apologise, but the words won’t quite come.
“Henry.” I approach him. He looks minded to ignore me, but I stand in front of him. “Come with me, Henry. Let’s go and help Leo round up the cattle and bring the pigs up the hill.” I look round the full sweep of horizon. Smoke now rises from the Pike, and distantly from the direction of my cousins’ pele tower at Mere Point, as well as behind us on Beacon Hill, but of the raiders there is no sign.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_d63d0d89-f5f5-5e82-84ae-e60d8cc9a8fb)
It is very quiet in the woods. The birds are silent and the squirrels and deer are nowhere to be seen. It is as if everyone and everything were waiting for the marauders to arrive. Yet by now, mid-afternoon of the following day, it seems almost certain that the beacon fire across the bay was a false alarm, a bush fire perhaps. It would not be the first time.
In previous raids we have scarcely had time to get our cattle into the tower, let alone the sheep up into the woods. Surrounding homesteaders have not stood a chance, and their houses have been ripped bare of everything, then burned to the ground. Many of them have lost their lives defending their homes. At Barrowbeck Tower we are in a stronger position. Our thick walls protect us and we are excellent shots. We do not fight hand-to-hand, but shoot down arrows on the invaders, gavlockes with forked metal heads, or shafts with flaming tar-soaked rags bound to their tips.
This time it has been possible to gather all the homesteaders, with their cattle, ponies, pigs and goats, into the lower rooms. The crush is terrible. The smell is worse. The silence of these woods is a relief after the dreadful racket of the animals. All I can hear now are my own footsteps, and the tinkle of the belwether as sheep wander in dense woodland.
Our beacon is dying down, though it still throws out a ferocious heat in the afternoon sun. I am on my way to damp down and make safe the fire on Beacon Hill. I also have some slight hope of meeting Mother. Mother looks after our dairy, and by now will be fretting about curds left to stand too long, and cream on the turn before it can be churned into butter, despite the coolness of its rock cave.
I am too hot in my grey woollen gown. My byggen cap is sticking to my forehead. I rest for a moment, and from habit gather a few dry sticks to replenish the kindling on Beacon Hill. I have taken the less known path because it seems safer. Off to my left is an old hermit’s cottage in the hazel thicket. It is half overgrown with brambles since the hermit died of a quinsy last winter. I tell myself I could hide there, if the Scots came now.
This way up Beacon Hill is hard going, overgrown through little use. When I reach the top the smoky air makes me cough. I rest a moment, then pile stones round the collapsed ashes of the fire, and shovel damp soil into the middle. We will prepare it ready for next time once the embers have cooled. A false twilight has spread across the valley and the bay, from the smoking fires, but the wind will soon clear it. On my way back down through the woods I feel a surge of cheerfulness. A distant brush-fire has taken a day from our lives, but no matter. Tonight all the beacons will die down, and tomorrow Mother will come home.
As I emerge from the trees I do not notice, at first, the thin, dark line streaming down the far side of the valley. I am out into the open before I see them, careering between the windblown trees on the Pike, racing down the distant, pebble-strewn screes.
It had seemed an impossible slope, almost vertical. They have never come that way before. I realise, all in a flash, that they must have been hiding up there on the Pike, waiting for us to relax, knowing they would not be expected from that direction because we thought the sheer screes protected us. How long have they been watching? Days, perhaps. The speed the steepness gives them is terrifying.
I am out in the open, but they have not seen me yet. I start to run towards the tower. The Scots are spreading out in an arc. Now I can hear them shouting. I can see their saffron coats, goatskin jerkins and brown and green draperies flapping about their knees. They have bows over their shoulders; a few, horrifyingly, have crossbows. At their waists are axes, dorks and cutlasses. Some carry muskets, and others, most ominously of all, scaling ladders. They are coming faster than I am. It is like running into the gates of Hell. For a moment I consider hiding in the woods, but it is too late. The outer edges of their line are spreading into a circle that will join arms behind me. There is no way back. Suddenly they see me. A great shout goes up. Individual Scots break free of the line and run straight at me. The ground is shaking under their feet as I reach the tower door. Their hands stretch out for me. Their sweat suffocates me.
I had been afraid that no one would hear me or let me in, but the grille goes up fast, the door opens and Verity and Martinus pull me into the gatehouse. I stagger back against the wall, but something is wrong. The door will not shut behind me. Verity and Martinus throw their weight at it but the Scots are pushing from the other side, and slowly the door is opening again. I try to wind down the grille, but it will not move. I give up, realising they have jammed it, and instead add my strength to those trying to push the door shut. Laughter from outside mocks us. A cutlass pokes through the widening gap.
“They’re making it easy for us this time, laddies,” calls a voice next to the hinge, a hand’s breadth from my ear.
“Father! Send down more men!” Verity shouts through the inner door. Footsteps come running from above, but they are going to be too late. The door is opening now and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Those coming down the stairs behind us ought to bar the inner door against us, and safeguard the rest of the tower, but I know they will not. None of us here dares let go to seize weapons. Martinus gestures desperately to Verity and me to get behind the inner door and barricade ourselves in. Verity mutters, “And give you the pleasure of finishing off the bastards on your own?” except she does not describe them so genteelly.
The hairy hand and arm holding the cutlass pushes further through the gap. There is an explosion – our hagbut. Gunshots thud against the walls. In a brief, quiet moment I hear the hiss and whistle of arrows. Now James is here. He does not add his weight to pushing at the door, but instead seizes the horn from its niche and brings it up hard against the elbow that is pushing through the gap. The hand springs convulsively open and the cutlass clatters down, but the arm does not withdraw. Instead, with a jolt from outside, the door opens faster. Then a hand comes from behind me, a hand holding a sword. With a swift up and downward chop, it slashes at the arm. It is Kate. If her angle had been better she might have severed the limb. An inhuman scream spirals out of audible pitch. Blood spurts, and the arm is pulled back. I know I shall never again watch with equanimity while Kate carves the meat.
We all hurl ourselves at the door then, and at last it slams shut. Father is here now, and he crashes the six bolts and three heavy iron bars into their slots, fumbling with drunken haste. I steady his hand as he feeds metal into metal. Martinus drags at the handle which lowers the iron grille outside, and as he puts his full weight behind it there is a cracking noise, and it finally turns. Somebody outside yells as the descending grille hits them. James picks up the horn and restores it to its place.
The battle is long and terrible. It is the worst I remember. Father stands at the window of the living hall with his antiquated longbow, pumping arrows into the enemy. We don’t bother with crossbows here at Barrowbeck. At this height and range they have no particular virtue, and are too slow to reload, though the Scots put them to terrifying use from below. The extra power sends their arrows high over our battlements where our henchmen crouch, firing back. Behind them some of the young men and women from the valley kneel in the shelter of the beacon turret, binding arrow points in linen, dipping them in hot tar and setting them alight before passing them forward for firing. We all have short swords and knives at our belts, in case hand-to-hand combat should become necessary. Verity and James operate the catapult. James hefts the stones and Verity pulls back the lever. Occasionally James just throws a particularly heavy stone over the battlements. Downstairs Leo stands watch on the outer door, ready to bar the inner door if needs be. In the kitchen Kate boils lard for pouring on the enemy, and Germaine carries it up the stairs in wooden pails, cursing under her breath as homesteaders get in her way and the stairs grow greasy underfoot.
Many of the valley homesteaders who herded their animals into the tower are now huddled in the lower rooms with them. There are so many this time that in places it is difficult to move. We have put James’s black cattle in the kitchen with Kate. All the animals are going mad with terror. Their lowing and whinnying and squealing fill our ears, and the stink of them rises up the stairs in great waves.
My job is to go round checking that all possible entry points are defended. I have not forgotten the rope scaling ladders which I saw earlier. As I reach the gatehouse on one of my patrols, I find Leo looking very grim.
“They’re trying to fire the door, lady.”
I look down, and see a curl of smoke feathering out of a narrow crack at the base of the door.
“It will never burn, Leo. Thank the Lord we treated it in time.”
“Mebbe best get Mistress Kate to soak some leather for under it.”
“I’ll do that.” I move towards the kitchen, then stop. “Did you hear that?”
We both listen. Leo’s mouth tightens. “Grappling irons. They’re trying to get up the walls.”
“They must have hooked into one of the windows. Quick, Leo. If you start looking I’ll get some of the others to go round too.” As I speak, a homesteader comes rushing down from the battlements to tell us the Scots are scaling the walls. There is a flurry of commotion from above. Leo and I quickly bar the inner door and I hurry through the arch to the kitchen. Here people from the valley are tearing up linen for arrows and bandages, feeding and tending their animals, soothing their babies. At the far end of the kitchen James’s black cows are imprisoned by the long table, knee deep in straw and dung, lowing and stamping and rolling their eyes. Over the fire another cauldron of fat is heating, suspended from the greasy, dripping rackencrock. Shiny white gobs of lard slide from the sides of the cauldron, sink in the melted oil, then surface again, smaller. I ask some of the homesteaders to soak strips of leather for under the door, and others to spread out through the tower and check the windows for grappling irons. In the end, though, I am the one who finds the first ugly metal hook.
I go into the men’s common room and find Henry dead on the floor, our hagbut toppled from its stand, gunpowder drizzling out of its barrel. Henry has a great wound to his head where the grappling iron hit him, before it lodged tightly under the stone sill of the window. Now it rattles and shakes as someone climbs the rope ladder beneath.
There is no time. A face appears at the window. It all happens too fast. The bright hazel eyes are wide and wild, the beardless mouth young and reckless. He would have hauled himself in, but in the shock of seeing me, his defences are down, and he is too slow.
I take his face in my hands and push. With an arching cry he somersaults away backwards, out of sight.
I send his hook spinning after him, but I cannot watch him, or it, hit the ground. Instead, I race from room to room searching for more hooks. Between us the homesteaders and I find three more. We dislodge them with pokers and shovels, sending them and their human burdens hurtling to earth.
Whether it is the hurling down of these foolhardy climbers that finally makes the Scots lose heart, I do not know, but by the time I reach the battlements again, they are in retreat. Father’s henchmen send a score of flaming arrows after them for good measure, but the fleeing Scots are quickly out of range, heading down the valley towards the sea, carrying their wounded, and leaving behind them twelve or fifteen ghastly, staring corpses on the bloody, ashen, pig-greasy turf.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_9d641412-feca-585e-9dd0-0ea693936669)
None of us emerges until the following day. Double watch is kept all night. By next morning the whole area smells like a slaughterhouse, and a thick crust of black flies has formed on the outside of the tower. They creep in through the window slits and buzz in our faces, grotesquely unable to differentiate between the living and the dead. Outside, they swarm on the bodies. On the grass they move in patterns, forming and re-forming like fishermen’s nets on the sea.
My father, sober and out of bed for once, leads prayers of thanksgiving for our deliverance, as we all stand crushed together in the men’s common room. On our side only Henry is dead, though several more of the henchmen are wounded. Henry lies now in our tiny chapel over the gatehouse. Father prays for his soul. He even, in what seems to me like a fit of remarkable generosity, offers up a brief prayer for the souls of the fallen Scots.
“He’d best not let the parson hear him praying for folks’ souls,” Germaine whispers to me. “That’s Popish stuff.”
I look at her. Is she loyal to no one, not even my father? Not that there seems much point in his prayers. I cannot believe that God listens to my father. He might as well pray to the elder tree in the thicket, the way some people round here still do.
“Amen,” chorus the homesteaders. I look across their bowed heads. In a few minutes they will have to walk out past those bloating corpses and down the valley to see which of their stick and mud homes are still standing. Their children, tired from two nights on the common rooms’ floors, are mardy and whimpering. The stench from the livestock is overwhelming even up here now, and it blends with the smell of carnage below to create a foul miasma which clogs our noses. Several times I pass people being sick out of windows.
Later, most of us go down to help redistribute the livestock. Buckets of milk stand all along the downstairs passageways. The floors of the lower rooms are thick with dung. Most of the cattle are in distress because the crowded conditions have not made for adequate milking. They skip and kick as they are released down the curving slope to the cellars, then shoulder each other along the underground passage, through the stone arch under the dairy, up the slope at the other end where part of the flagstone floor has been removed, and out into the barmkin, pursued by Leo shouting, “Git on, yer great lummocks.”
Two pigs, herded by their owner out of the barmkin, rush towards where the bodies lie. Children watch in fascination to see if the pigs are to be allowed to eat the bodies, and Kate mutters, “Reet pigs an’ all,” and ushers the children away, while the swineherd hurries his charges up the hill.
Father yells, “Bury the dead!” I see that his hands are shaking from lack of drink. I put my arm round him and embrace him, then join the homesteaders and help them sort out their animals.
Later I go up to the chapel to see Henry’s body. Bright sunlight pours in through the high window and shimmers on the embroidered altar cloth and the linen sheet covering him. Four candles burn, two at his head and two at his feet. The four spiked silver candle prickets represent Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The old priest said they were Popish folly, but the new priest says they are beautiful. I lift one of the candles, spilling hot wax on my hand, and hold it close to see Henry better. I can feel my burnt skin puckering under the cooling wax. Henry’s cheeks are smooth and white, his chin dark with stubble. The wound from the grappling iron stands out in shades of black and purple, and below it, the graze from my ring is raised and red. I touch it with the hand I used to slap him, then turn away and bring my hand down on the spike. I am not brave. It is a gash, no more. The blood runs over my fingers, through the turquoise ring, and I walk unsteadily back downstairs.
Mother has arrived home, and with her are Hugh and Gerald. Verity and I stand outside the tower amongst the piled dungheaps which Kate and Leo are still shovelling out, and hold her tightly and cry.
“Are you all right?” she demands. “I was dreadfully worried about you.”
“Yes. Are you all right, Mother?” I see that her cheeks are very red and healthy-looking, and despite her stated anxiety she has the appearance of someone rather pleased with herself. Hugh and Gerald grin at us, and take themselves off upstairs to have a tankard of ale in the common room with the men. All of them are now back from burying the bodies of the Scots in a clearing on the hill behind Barrow Wood. Henry’s body will travel the Old Corpse Road to Wraithwaite tomorrow, for burial in the churchyard. Now the men have been given a quart of ale each to help them forget the dreadful sights they have seen and the dreadful textures they have touched.
Mother, Verity and I go up to Verity’s room and sit on the cushioned stone benches along the walls, leaning back against the pictorial tapestries which Verity weaves. We are all very tired. Kate, unasked, brings hot, mulled wine.
“Did they attack Mere Point?” I ask. Mother shakes her head.
“No, but we’d just let the cattle out again, and they took those. They’re getting too darned clever by half, hiding and waiting like that. I was frantic when I heard they were attacking Barrowbeck. A lad said they’d got into the tower, but Aunt Juniper wouldn’t let me come back until now. Even then she insisted on sending Hugh and Gerald with me. Not that they needed much persuading.” She says this with more hope than conviction.
We talk until Kate rings the bell for supper, then we go up to eat in the living hall. Lately Germaine has been eating here with us, instead of in the kitchen with Kate and the henchmen. As usual, our food is half cold by the time Kate has slogged up the east stairs with it. She bangs down the pewter dishes in front of us. I believe she thinks we should pay for our privileges.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to eat in the kitchen, Germaine?” Verity asks gently. When she speaks gently, we all know to watch out. “You’d get your food hot from the hearth then. In fact, I think I might start eating in the kitchen myself.”
“A good idea, mistress. Perhaps we all should.” Germaine helps herself to more of the congealing mutton in its puddle of yellow grease.
Father throws Verity a look and says, “That’s quite enough of that, Daughter.”
For much of the rest of the meal, talk is of the tower’s defences. It annoys me that Father booms on to Hugh and Gerald about improving the defences of the two towers, when he does so little about it in practice. Hugh takes my hand under the table and gives it a squeeze. I stare at him, quite startled. He asks my father, “Are you riding tonight, Uncle?” A shocked silence falls. It is an unspoken rule that we never discuss my father’s regrettable tendency to rob travellers on the queen’s highway.
My father smiles at his nephew. “Likely as not. You wish to come?”
Hugh smiles respectfully back. “Nay. Thanks Uncle. I’m as tall as I care to be.”
After the meal, Verity and our two cousins and I walk up towards Barrow Wood in the dampness of early evening. Hugh says, “It was time someone said something. You are all too careful of him. Being squire of Barrowbeck won’t save him from having his neck stretched, if they catch him.”
“Oh…” I sigh. “I know, but you don’t have to live with him. You had a more kindly response from him than any of us would have.”
It is exhilarating to be free of the constrictions and smell of the tower. Hugh takes my hand again, and I see Verity’s eyes widen.
“Well, Cousin.” Hugh speaks quietly to me, excluding the others. “How are you truly, after your ordeal?”
“Well enough, thank you Cousin.” I feel far too unnerved to make any pretence of proper conversation. I see, mildly alarmed, that we have now lost sight of the other two amongst the trees. I decide that frankness is my best defence. I lift our clasped hands.
“What am I supposed to make of this, Hugh?”
He flushes. Hugh is very fair-skinned, with pale, straight hair, fairer than his brother. I know that he is considered handsome, and I can see that one could think him so, but to me he is still so much my childhood companion that his comeliness or otherwise is irrelevant. We face each other in the darkening forest. “How do you feel about our families’ plans for us?” he asks me.
“Hugh… I’m not ready to consider them yet…” I clear my throat and try again. “Of course, I love you as a cousin…” I feel desperately disturbed by his closeness. Never, even in our most frightening games as children, has Hugh seemed threatening, but he seems threatening now. “It’s too soon,” I falter. “I hadn’t thought it would come so soon.”
“Your father and mine have indicated their wishes, Beatie, but it doesn’t have to be soon.” He lets go of my hand. “I should have liked it to be soon… it’s not just our fathers’ wish… but you’re two years younger. I can wait. Could we… perhaps… try to see each other differently? I have to confess that your friendly, jesting attitude towards me makes you rather unapproachable on these matters.”
There is a pause. The light is fading. Hugh seems like a stranger. We walk in the direction of the old hermit’s cottage, no longer holding hands, no longer speaking. Green light filters through the leaves, down to the forest floor. When we reach a corner of the crumbling boundary wall we sit down on it, side by side in the moss-coloured dimness. I turn to Hugh. “We know each other too well, Hugh. I cannot think of you in the way you wish.”
He puts his arm round my shoulders briefly, then releases me. “I won’t ask you again until the winter, Cousin.” After a moment he adds, “I would do anything for you, Beatrice. I would walk through the quicksands across the bay for you.”
I stand up. “Now you’re getting carried away, Hugh.” I feel uneasy and uncomfortable, and I think at first that Hugh’s words are the cause. Then I realise that there was a noise. I turn slowly. Surely the hermit’s cottage is still uninhabited? The noise is repeated, a crackling, shifting sound.
“Hugh, I heard something. Did you hear it?”
He stands up and looks around. “What did you hear?”
“I don’t know. A twig. A movement.”
