The Great Siege

5

The children passed away down the lane and into the open country under the gaze of a hundred villagers. Smoke drifted overhead from the burning barns. Flames crackled. Rooks rose indignantly from the tall elms.

‘Here!’ called out Crake at the last moment. ‘Something for your journey.’

To everyone’s astonishment, he pulled a small but weighty leather purse from his cloak and tossed it down to the boy. Then he wrenched his horse around and trotted back up the hill. At the head of the lane, he turned in his saddle and watched them go.

The children stumbled on for they knew not how long. Perhaps they would wake up and find it had been a nightmare. The short October day drew to a close and the sky darkened over their heads. A wind came up and whipped the leaves about in maddened flurries beneath the trees. They did not wake up.

After a time, little Lettice said, ‘What will we have for supper? Is it to be only bread?’

‘We will ask at a farmhouse. Perhaps we can buy something more.’

He drew Crake’s purse out and unknotted the strings as he walked and peered inside. Then he looked up.

Susan was observing him closely.

‘Is it well?’

He re-tied the strings, he wasn’t quite sure why, and stowed the purse away again.

‘Very well,’ he said quietly. ‘If I had a sling.’

Crake had thrown him a purseful of pebbles.

‘I know what is in it,’ said Susan. ‘It is a favourite jest of Crake’s. He often throws purses of stones and pebbles to paupers, to see them run and grub in the dust. He finds their desperation amusing. But he says it is a parable, to teach them not to put their trust in gold.’

‘The man is a monster.’

‘God will make him pay.’

‘I will make him pay. One day.’

‘You cannot usurp God.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘It was not your fault. What happened to father.’ She swiftly wiped an eye.

Nicholas said nothing. His heart was as locked up as a casket.

They came past a barn near a lonely farmstead, but a huge dog barked and tore at its chain as they approached, and Lettice and Agnes refused to go any nearer. Finally they made shelter in a small copse, Nicholas laying a row of sticks against a fallen treetrunk and then covering them crosswise with brushwood. They slept fitfully in this makeshift wooden tent, damp and desperately hungry, like shivering puppies.

Nicholas was lying awake in the bleak grey dawn when he heard footfalls in the leaves nearby. Someone knew they were there. He put his hand over Lettice’s mouth. Her eyes flared wide. He put a finger to his lips, and motioned her to tell Agnes.

He peeped out of the shelter, just in time to see a burly figure step behind a broad oak tree, the glint of steel in his hand. A dagger.

So Crake had changed his mind, after all, and sent one or more of his hired henchman after them to finish the job. Perhaps ex-soldiers, ex-mercenaries, hearts like flint. Come from the late religious wars in France, where they would have witnessed, or enacted, the foulest massacres. What would it be to them, to cut four children’s throats in this isolated copse, and bury them deep under the leaf litter? It would be nothing to them. And who would ever know?

Nicholas’s heart raced fit to burst. His fingers curled around one of the half-rotten sticks above him. His only available weapon, to defend himself and his three sisters against hardened killers.

The henchman remained behind the tree.

Nicholas drew the stick free and crawled out of the shelter as silently as he could. Leaves rustled, a twig cracked, but it was soft and damp and made little noise. He was across the clearing in a trice, rounded the tree, and delivered the hardest blow he could to the broad leather-jerkined back in front of him.

The stick snapped in two.

The figure turned, hurriedly returning his privy parts into his breeches.

‘Master Nicholas!’

‘Hodge!’

Hodge thought Nicholas had struck him in indignation at his relieving himself so near to his sisters. Nicholas, babbling with joy and relief, said he thought Hodge might be a mercenary come from the late religious wars in France, which only baffled Hodge the more.

‘And I saw you carrying a dagger!’

Hodge frowned and then pulled something from his jerkin, tucked in above the belt. It was a fire steel.

‘We can have a fire!’

‘Ay, sir,’ said Hodge. ‘Though I do have a small knife too. And a pannikin, and some eggs and mushrooms. I stole the pannikin and the eggs from the farm, under the very nose of that crookback dungheap Crake back there, God rot his stones. But since it was Sir Francis’s pannikin anyhow, I thought he’d not mind.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. His throat felt tight. ‘No, he’d not mind.’

‘Well,’ said Hodge, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Let’s have our breakfast then.’

Soon he had a fire going, with hunks of bread warming on the end of twigs. He split open some beechnuts and squeezed out just enough to oil the pannikin, then got to frying the eggs and mushrooms. Field mushrooms and platter mushrooms and jew’s ear and lawyer’s wig. It was the time of year for them. They ate them straight from the pan with grimy fingers, and spirits rose a little.

Lettice wiped her mouth. ‘Well done, Hodge. You are now promoted groom of the household.’

‘Well,’ said Hodge proudly. ‘While you were learning Latin and Greek and double Dutch and whatnot, Hodge was about the fields trappin’ partridge and hares and such, makin’ fires and cookin’ mushrooms. He don’t speak much Latin now nor will he ever, it’s safe to wager, beyond your hocus pocus in the Mass. But he knows how to fry a mushroom, even with no butter about him.’

He advised them to take down the shelter and hide all traces of where they’d slept. They bashed down the old sticks with noisy glee. He shook his head. That wasn’t what he meant.

He went and stood at the edge of the copse, looking out down the road. He heard girlish shrieks of laughter behind him. Yet there was no sadder fate than an orphan’s. He should know, he was one.

They had no chance. One small breakfast of eggs and mushrooms might lift their spirits for an hour. But their lives were ruined, and they were too grand folk in their laces and bodices and linen caps and nice neat shoes to know it yet. What to do? In the end, that verminous Crake was right. They would be best off in the poorhouse, even with the narrow wooden beds and the fevers and the gruel for supper.

It was their only hope.

Susan retired behind a bush, and when she returned, the others gasped. She had sliced off her fine long hair, that glowed almost red in the sun. Mere patches and tufts remained, with shining glimpses of white skull between. Like one committed to the asylum of Bethlem, head shaved to let out the heat of her madness.

She smiled at them. ‘To stay neat. Easier that way.’ And for some reason she sat down beside Nicholas.

Susan, always so organised and orderly. Her mother dying so young, she had been female head of the household since she was seven, and early bowed down with seriousness and responsibility. A cold fear gripped Nicholas’s stomach. It was Susan who wasn’t going to survive. The little ones would chatter on through — at least until they fell ill in winter. But Susan … there was something in her eyes already, roving about the empty fields and the bare sky. A look of something lost.

‘Come along now,’ she said. ‘Off to Shrewsbury we go, all sprightly and spry.’

Yet she stayed sitting where she was.

He took her hand and pulled her up. She had no weight in her at all. She drew her hand away from his and walked on ahead, alone, looking neither left nor right.

Later that morning he heard her softly singing a psalm under her breath.

‘I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him …’