Squire Throwleigh’s Heir

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jordan stood before the imposing gates and stared up, awestruck. If it weren’t for the stoic friend at his side, he would have turned and fled from the place. As it was, his feet felt as if they were rooted to the spot.

It wasn’t only that this gate and the buildings beyond represented power and money, it was also the recent history of his family. The lord of this demesne had been going to evict them from their house; they weren’t only going to lose it, but were claimed to be villeins, too, their freedom gone for ever, and Jordan couldn’t help but feel a qualm at the sight of the studded oak gates which loomed so menacingly above them.

Yet he had his duty to perform. His father was here, in his prison, probably starving, almost certainly beaten for no good reason, just because the Lady hated him and his family. That thought made him swallow nervously, aware that she might order his own punishment, but it also fired a contrary determination to do whatever he must, to suffer beatings or whippings if need be, to get his father released.

Alan took a deep, shuddering breath – proof that he was not quite so bold as he had tried to make out. He felt the peril of the imposing gates as well.

It made Jordan sorry for the older boy. He knew Alan wanted to be the leader in their escapades, and yet here he was, fearful, while Jordan’s own anxiety was leaving him, to be replaced with a wish to get the dreaded interview over and done with.

‘Come on, Alan. We might as well get on with it,’ he said, and took his friend’s free hand, the one that didn’t bear the little parcel.

Edgar found Anney gently bathing Nicholas’s wounds. She agreed to return with him when he said that the bailiff wished to speak to her.

‘Bailiff?’ she asked tentatively, looking about her. Those who met her eye soon glanced away, and she experienced a quickening of her heartbeat. Edgar took her into the hall and led her forward until she was standing before the bailiff and the knight, who studied her in silence a moment. Thomas, who was swiftly becoming drunk, sat on a small stool nearer the fire. Every now and again he lifted his pot and supped noisily, and when the cup was down, his breath snored almost as if he was asleep.

‘Anney, we have heard you were up on the hillside on the day Herbert was murdered,’ Simon said. ‘What were you doing up there?’

‘Who says I was?’

‘Thomas says he saw you there.’

‘Me?’ Anney demanded. ‘What has he accused me of, the devil?’

Her voice was little more than a squeak, and she knew her face must be deathly white. There was no way she could hide her stupefying terror at being examined here, in the room where her husband had been taken from her, the room where her boy’s body had been exposed to the gaze of all those in the village who despised her. This hall had been a place of horror to her for so long, and now it held the threat of the rope. She could almost sense the creaking, swaying gibbet.

She felt a swimming sensation, as though the walls were moving around her. It was so like that time, when she had been called before the old squire, to stand here and be questioned and harassed by officials so that they could formally decide what all knew, that she had been taken in by that ne’er-do-well outside, who had stolen her virginity when he was already wedded to another.

Simon saw her tottering, and hurried over to help her to a bench. ‘Edgar, could you fetch some wine?’

‘No, sir, I’m all right,’ she protested, sitting quietly. ‘I felt a little weak, no more.’ However, Simon passed her the pot when it arrived, and she drank from it thirstily. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Once he had returned to his seat, the bailiff glanced from Thomas to the maid. ‘Thomas says you were also up there on the moors, Anney. Could you tell us what you were doing?’

She lifted her head coolly: her boy needed her. How could Alan survive without a mother? He didn’t even know Nicholas, his father. She met Simon’s serious stare. ‘Yes, sir. I was following the priest.’

Baldwin lifted his head, surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Because I knew he was there to satisfy his lusts.’

Many of the onlookers gasped, and the bailiff and his friend exchanged bewildered glances. Simon blinked and asked, ‘What evidence do you have for this?’ He was relieved that the cleric was not present to hear the accusation.

‘I have the evidence of my eyes, sir. What more do I need? You ask others around here, and see what they say!’ she declared hotly.

Baldwin tried to calm her. Her face had been pallid, but now it shone with a feverish glow, and he wasn’t sure of the strength of her mind. ‘Anney, priests take oaths of chastity, but if Stephen of York failed to maintain the high standard expected, I fear he is not alone…’ he said soothingly.

‘What do you think he’s doing, telling people like me that I’m a sinner, when he can satisfy his every carnal whim, eh?’

Baldwin and his friend had no need to look at each other. Both had the same thought: Anney had admitted a misdemeanour in the confessional, probably to carnal knowledge of the bigamist who had fathered her children, before discovering that the priest was guilty of similar lecherous acts. She wanted revenge on a man she thought was a hypocrite; showing that the priest himself was as guilty as she.

‘What did you see on that day?’ Simon asked.

She stared at him, breathing quickly. ‘I’ll tell you what I saw! I saw Stephen grab my son, and beat him with his stick. Alan was lucky, he twisted out of Stephen’s hand and managed to escape – but what happened then, eh? Stephen tried to catch Alan again, running up the hill and searching through the bushes, until he gave up and went back down to the stream. I was about to return to the manor when I heard this dreadful shout, and suddenly the priest appeared, coming up the slope again towards me. But he didn’t see me, his eyes were fixed on the boy.’

‘Your boy?’ Simon asked in the sudden hush.

‘Oh, no. Alan was too quick for the priest. No, the boy I saw was Herbert. The poor mite was pelting along as fast as he could, up towards me, with his sling in his hand. He’d only been playing a prank, I think, but the joke fell flat. Brother Stephen wanted his revenge, and he took it…’

‘What sort of prank? We must understand exactly what happened,’ Simon said with a trace of weariness.

‘What do you think? What do boys usually do? Herbert had his sling in his hand and probably fired a bullet from it at the priest’s arse, just in jest – and no more would have been said or done if Stephen was an ordinary man.’

Baldwin leaned back with an exasperated sigh. ‘Anney, you like to hint at things, but please come to the point. You say he’s no ordinary man, but what do you mean by it?’

She sat up exultantly. ‘You ask me what sort of man he is, and I’ll tell you: he’s a sodomite, a pederast! He likes little boys, he likes to…’

Simon held up his hand and talked over her even as her face became flushed with a fierce kind of joy at relating the accusation she had heard with such horror such a short time ago.

‘Anney, be silent! This is a very serious allegation indeed, you realise? If you are inventing this, if you have no proof, you could be in very grave danger for accusing a man in holy orders. Think, woman! If this is mere villainous gossip, hold your tongue! Don’t force us to record your thoughts if they are based on nothing more than speculation.’

‘Speculation! ’ she spat. ‘Do you think it is speculation when your own son comes home crying because a cleric has beaten him black and blue in the street? Is it guesswork when you witness the man thrashing a five-year-old in his chapel? I saw him – the day the squire died, I saw Stephen beating Herbert in his chapel, before his altar! This priest is evil! He has unnatural lusts, and tries to force the boys of the vill to give themselves to him. He beats them because it satisfies a wicked desire in him!’

There was no doubting the sincerity of her tone. She had leaned forward in her desperate desire to convince, and her eyes met Baldwin’s with an almost frightening intensity.

He didn’t know what to believe. That the woman was quite sure in her own mind that this was true he had no doubt, but that was different from knowing that her apparently wild denunciations were correct. She was picking at the sleeves of her tunic, worrying at the hems, trying to pull a thread free, and when it was, tugging at another. Her face looked careworn, he thought, and her body, although wide and strong-looking, was too thin. In her face the eyes stood out with unnatural brightness, as if all the power of the body were held within them.

It was the face of a woman pursuing her enemy: a man who had threatened her remaining child. She would accuse Brother Stephen of anything to protect her boy. Baldwin hadn’t noticed her singlemindedness before, and he blamed himself for that. The two deaths in Lady Katharine’s family had forced him to concentrate on the poor woman who sat in front of Anney now rather than the maid herself.

He concentrated on Anney, and was not reassured by what he saw. Her eagerness to see the priest ruined before his whole congregation, and her desire to convince Simon and him of the priest’s guilt, were quite hideous.

Seeing his musing stare, she suddenly stood and faced him.

‘Don’t trust to my word: ask him! Make him swear on his Bible, make him come and question him,’ she demanded. ‘Let him try to preserve his reputation! Make the pervert stand up to someone who dares confront him with his evil sins!’

The object of their enquiry was at that moment kneeling solemnly before the altar in his little chapel. He finished praying, rose, kissed the cross which adorned his stole, and removed it. He was filled with a feeling of melancholy.

His despondency had started on the day that the master had died. It had begun badly, when that young devil Herbert had so wilfully misbehaved, but from then things had grown steadily worse. Petronilla had been waiting for him after he had beaten the boy here in the chapel, and he had been surprised at the expression of horror on her face, and of course he hadn’t the faintest idea why at the time. He’d explained that he had been instructed to thrash the child, but that hadn’t helped.

And when Anney with her pinched, suspicious face had appeared, leading Herbert away and demanding Stephen’s presence in the hall, Petronilla had quietly insisted on arranging a tryst. Her doggedness had first alarmed, and then positively scared him. God knew what the bitch might get up to if he didn’t, so he’d agreed, and they had arranged a day to meet up near the stream where they had gone so often before. That was the day Master Herbert had died…

Stephen thrust his alb and stole into his chest and shut the lid, his lips pursed. He knew it was wrong of him to have felt such loathing for the boy, even if he only acknowledged it in the privacy of his own mind, but he couldn’t help but despise Herbert. Especially after what he’d done to the priest that day.

Just because the boy had died, Stephen was prepared to pray for him, as his mother desired, but he had no intention of keeping his own feelings hidden from his God. The child had caused the death of his father – of that Stephen was quite convinced – and had deserved his end, the barbarous little villain!

Squire Roger may not have been the ideal, God-fearing, learned and cultured lord that Stephen could have wished for, but for all his faults he was a kindly and generous man. Now, all because of that mendacious little swine, he was dead, and it was unlikely, from what Stephen had seen of Thomas, that his services would be required for much longer. Soon he would be forced to move to Exeter, or perhaps further afield.

He closed his eyes, and slowly sank onto his wooden chest, breathing deeply to control the anxiety he felt at this reflection. It was so hard, to be forced to find a new situation at his age. God only knew how far he would have to travel to find himself somewhere to live. And it was all because of that damned Herbert!

He was about to go to his private chamber and sit in quiet meditation when he heard a light tapping at his door. On opening it, he was surprised to see the knight’s servant.

‘Sir, would you come with me to the hall, please?’

Alan was as scared as Jordan, but he swallowed hard and carried on walking towards the hall. The bustle all about them was unnerving, especially when men leading horses walked past swearing at them, or riders cursed at them for wandering so slowly. This was a busy, working manor, and people had too much to do to want to stand aside for youngsters.

Jordan saw one groom staring at them suspiciously, and was glad that he’d left his sling behind. He was sure he recognised the man as one of his targets from the week before, and averted his gaze quickly. It would be humiliating to be captured and beaten now, just when they were trying to hand in the evidence that would destroy their enemy.

There was no doubt in either of their minds as to where they must go. They had to see the bailiff and give him their evidence, and that meant going to the hall. They had been there often enough; it was the place where their master, Squire Roger, had held all his celebrations, as well as his courts. Their lord had given feasts for Christmas, for harvest, for sheep-shearing, and all the other festivals, religious and otherwise, which punctuated the year.

On their way to the hall they had to pass a large gathering of workers who lounged at the door to the kitchen. Here another face caught Jordan’s attention. It was an ageing farmer, a freeman, but one of those who rented land from the manor and who had to pay his annual due of labour to the demesne. Like the others, he was here to collect his wages in food and ale.

‘Ho, there, young Jordan! What are you doing here? And you, Alan, you little devil. Have you both been called to the lord’s court?’

His friends all laughed at his sally. Alan in particular was well known to all the men in the area, and though some could laugh at his mischief, several eyed him sourly, recalling times when they had caught him running through their gardens or trying to shoot squirrels on their land.

‘Sir, we’re here to see the knight and the bailiff.’

The old farmer’s smile dimmed. ‘And why do you think the knight and the bailiff would want to see you two, eh? Go on, boys, clear off and play on the moors. Don’t interrupt men like them when they’re about their business.’

‘But we have to – we have proof of who murdered the squire’s son!’