The Tolls of Death

Chapter One

It was two days later that Richer rode back alone from a hunt with his squire and Nicholas the castellan. Richer’s rounsey had thrown a shoe, and Richer knew perfectly well that a man-at-arms looked to his horse before his own pleasure. Some day his life might depend on it. Pleasure could be sought at any time.

The vill was quiet as he clattered slowly along the stony path. He felt surprisingly relaxed. After fleeing from here in such a hurry all those years ago, he had anticipated an overwhelming sadness when he finally returned. And fear, too: this was the first time he had passed through the vill on his own, without the protection of Warin or one of the other men-at-arms.

From here the road curled up towards the church and soon, through the trees, he could see the little belltower ahead. It was only a short way from there to the place where he had been born and raised. The long low thatched cottage had had a large logpile at one side and a barn behind, where the family pig and some hens were housed. His father had been a serf — a peasant who owed his labour to the lord of the manor — but Richer had gained his freedom by running away and not being caught. He wondered what his parents would make of him now. Probably they’d be unhappy at his chosen career, a henchman for a lord, but there was little else he felt he could do. At least he wasn’t a mercenary. He earned his robes and food from his loyalty to his squire, and if he was employed indirectly by Sir Henry of Cardinham now, it was on a more equitable basis than being a mere serf like his father.

At least he had travelled and seen a little of the country. That was more than most could say, especially fellows like Serlo. Cheeky bastard, trying to thieve money from people passing by his mill. Richer had asked about this at the castle, but apparently it was legitimate: the miller had bought the farm of the tolls. Which was weird, because if he owned the farm, there was no reason why he should let people through at a reduced rate, unless he was desperate. Perhaps that was it. Serlo’s family had always been money mad, ever since his father’s failure. Some men could be driven like that. As far as Richer was concerned, it was a curious craving. He preferred the security of belonging in a household. Especially since losing his family.

It was odd coming back here. Glancing about him again, he saw how little changed the place was. He would have expected the vill to show the scars of loss, some memory of the disaster which had taken his parents from him, but there was nothing. It was almost as if their deaths hadn’t happened. The houses were the same, the green unchanged — even most of the people were immediately recognisable when he saw then. A part of him expected to see his home; maybe he would meet his father again as he turned a corner. But he couldn’t. They were all dead: it was why he had run away in the first place. All were gone.

There was one welcoming face he longed to see, but after fifteen years, she must surely have been married. Yet he hadn’t seen her since his return. She wasn’t dead; he’d asked about her generally, and received some grunts from servants in the castle, as though mention of her was somehow bad luck, but he didn’t get the impression that she was in the graveyard. Christ’s bones, but he hoped not. He had loved her so much … so, so much.

And then, as though she had heard his wishes, he saw her on the way ahead. A tall woman, bent with hardship, but still strikingly attractive.

‘Athelina!’ he called in a choked voice.

She turned, and for a split second, her face registered astonishment. Then her face tightened, and resumed its expression of anguish. In her eyes was no pleasure, only a grim horror, as though she feared any man she met.

Even him.

It was almost a whole month later that two men stood high on a hill at the coast, one disconsolately throwing pebbles at an ant scurrying about a rock. He looked up again, a dark man with a dark face, and said emphatically, ‘No!’

The tall knight with him turned and gave his companion a stare. ‘Are you sure of that, Simon?’

‘Quite sure, thank you, Baldwin. I want no more of your damned boats,’ rasped his friend. ‘First I nearly die of sickness on the journey to Galicia, then I nearly die on the return, then we are blown from our course to hit those benighted islands, then we both nearly died under attack on those islands! And now we have struck our homeland again, thanks to that drunken oaf of a shipmaster, and you ask me to take another sour-bellied whore of a ship? God’s thigh! Be damned to you, man! I’ll take no more vessels. For me, it’s dry land from now on.’ He shuddered. ‘Christ save me! I could be seasick just walking over a puddle! No, leave me to ponder your fate while you go on alone!’

The two men stood staring down at the little vessel which had brought them this far and which had now failed them. One, a tall, rangy knight with the strong arms and shoulders of a man who had trained for his vocation since a lad, the other a thickset fellow with the ruddy complexion of one who had spent much of his life in the open, his hair bleached by the hot sun of Galicia.

‘It would be a great deal faster,’ the knight said mildly. ‘All I wish is to return home to Furnshill as soon as possible and see my wife and child.’

His friend sighed. ‘Baldwin, I want to get home too, home to Meg and Edith and Peter — but I don’t want to die in the process. Every attempt to travel since we first left home has left us close to death. For me, the land is so much more secure; I’ll take no other route.’

‘Yet the land itself holds dangers, Simon,’ said Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, his attention travelling inland. He had penetrating black eyes, which some said could see through a man’s skin to the sins beneath, but that was the merest nonsense and he was intensely irritated to hear such chatter. He simply had the skill of listening, and usually heard when a man spoke untruthfully.

‘Yes, all right,’ Simon Puttock agreed. ‘But at least the risks you take on land are the sort which a knight like you and a man like me can protect ourselves against.’

Baldwin nodded. His companion, the Bailiff of Lydford Castle in Devonshire, was more than capable of defending himself, and the pair of them had been involved in many fights both together and apart. It was the strength of Simon’s courage in battle that Baldwin found so confusing: a man prepared to brave a sword or arrow shouldn’t fear the sea so much — not in Baldwin’s opinion, anyway.

‘If we were to sail, it would be a great deal faster,’ he attempted.

‘I will not sail.’

‘It should be more comfortable, too,’ Baldwin pointed out. ‘No lurching nag, but a gently rolling deck …’

Simon flinched. He had been so badly seasick during the last voyage that he had prayed for death. ‘Give me a lurching brute. I prefer a lurching brute.’

Ignoring him, Baldwin blithely continued, ‘And wine available from a smiling fellow sent to serve the guests …’

Simon held up his hand. ‘All right, all right — you want to travel by ship? Very well.’

Baldwin tried not to gape. ‘So we can continue by ship when she is mended?’

Simon glanced over his shoulder. The sun was low in the sky, and the western horizon, away over the land, was gleaming pink and gold. Leaves were licked with fire, and even Baldwin’s face shone with an unearthly glow that lit up the thin scar on his cheek. It was a knife-mark, Simon knew, nothing like so damaging as the other wounds, the scars of swords and axes that marked his torso, but in this light it showed up livid and vicious. It made him look curiously threatening, a harkening back to the great civil wars of the past century. Even his beard was an anachronism. No one wore smart, trimmed beards nowadays, but Baldwin was proud of his. Once he had been a Templar knight, and in that Order it had been illegal to shave.

‘Simon, this beard is a mark of respect to those of my Order who lost their lives when the French King betrayed us,’ he had explained to his old friend. ‘If I allow it to grow wild, it would be a mark of disrespect. I will not allow that.’

To Simon’s disgust, he had even purchased a pair of small scissors from a cutler passing through the vill this morning. It was a well-made tool, Simon could acknowledge, like a small pair of sheep shears, with two sharp blades connected by a horseshoe-shaped spring that held them apart until the fingers squeezed the cutting edges together, but simply unnecessary. He could as easily have bought a pair in Crediton when he got there, but no, he needs must have his beard kept trim.

The sea was now a chill grey mass, occasional waves sparkling gold, while the ship lay, a black shell in the shadow of the hill in whose lee she sheltered. Simon winced at the sight of her and shivered in recollection of the night before.

Roaring drunk, the shipmaster had deserted his post at the tiller and fallen in a stupor after finding a bottle of burned wine. This powerful drink, apparently made by monks boiling wine and cooling its steam somehow — a process Simon neither understood nor cared about — had completely ruined the man after only a pint, and yet Simon had seen him consuming a quart of wine the day before! Without a helmsman, the ship had struck a sand bar, breaking her mast, and for the second time this year, Simon had thought that he was about to drown.

The memory was enough to stiffen his resolve. ‘You sail if you must, Baldwin, but my journey continues on foot.’

The knight made a great show of puffing out his cheeks and shrugging. ‘If you feel so certain …’

‘I do.’

‘Then it is fortunate indeed that I hired the best of the inn’s horses. Otherwise another might have secured them!’ Baldwin said, and laughed at Simon’s expression.

On the Sunday following this conversation, Serlo the miller left his house to walk the short distance to church, leaving his wife Muriel to prepare their tiny sons Ham and Aumery for the Mass. Serlo needed to speak to his brother Alexander, the Constable of the Peace, about some business, and the church was the usual place for men to discuss their trades.

He shrugged himself deeper into his thin tunic. The summer was nearly over now and autumn held the land in its fist. Last night there had been a slight frost, and the chilly atmosphere suited his temper. Since the arrival of Richer and his squire, Serlo had noticed people in the vill watching him. He didn’t need their fingers pointing to know that he was the object of all the gossip in the place. Damn them all! Too many remembered how Richer ran away as soon as his family was discovered dead, and many recalled the rumours at the time, that Serlo had been there at the house before it burned down. Rubbish, of course, but throw shit against a wall and some would stick.

He glanced into the fields nearer the vill and then at the lowering clouds. If it were to rain, the stooks could be ruined. The grain would get damp, and if it wasn’t properly dried it would not last the winter, which would mean disaster for everyone. Some men were already recalling the last war, when the stocks for half the winter were stolen by the King’s Purveyors. Christ’s bones, the weather here was as inconsistent as a woman’s moods.

His wife Muriel was always whining, demanding money as though all a man need do was wave a hand and coins would come sprinkling from the heavens. She swore that she and the children were always hungry, that they had nothing to live on since the failed harvest last year, as though it was Serlo’s fault. Stupid cow! Why couldn’t she comprehend that he was doing his best for her? Like any other man, he relied on his skills and cunning to wrest as much as he could from the mill, but there was little enough he could do when things were as bad as they were at present. All must be patient. Perhaps now the harvest was in, provided there was no rain for a little while, there would be more money. A harvest meant grain to be milled, and he would take his tenth from each sack — occasionally more, if the owner wasn’t watching too carefully as Serlo weighed his portion.

He could do with the cash himself, since apart from all his debts, he badly needed a new surcoat. This old thing was too threadbare to keep him warm. It had been fine the winter before last when he bought it, but now it wouldn’t keep out the chill of an autumnal morning. And the evenings were already creeping in. Soon it would be winter. The years flew past so quickly. His father had once told him that: as a man grew older, the days passed by more swiftly — and he was definitely not getting any younger, he acknowledged sourly.

He had to get hold of some coin! That was why he was trying to do deals with travellers instead of taking the tolls to which the manor was entitled.

Athelina hadn’t paid him any rent for months now, not since Easter-time. He’d been patient because her man had sometimes been a little slow to cough up for her, but now she said that his generosity had dried up and she had nothing. Well, Serlo’s patience had run out along with her money. Jesus’s heart, he had hated that confrontation. Athelina had looked at him silently, the tears springing into those magnificent eyes as he told her to go and whore at the tavern. That was what a woman did when she was desperate and her family needed money. Mind, a woman as skinny and ravaged as her, Serlo thought morosely, would scarcely bring in enough to buy him a kerchief, let alone a new surcoat.

One of her whelps had rushed to her, snivelling brat, as though to defend her honour against Serlo. Shame the cur hadn’t protected her from her last lover. Maybe she’d still have some self-respect and honour if he had!

Deep in his thoughts, he was aware of nothing but the path itself. Serlo cursed as his thin boots slithered over stones, almost making him fall.

‘Ho, now! So it’s our favourite miller, Master Serlo!’

‘I’m not in the mood, Richer,’ Serlo growled on hearing the familiar, taunting voice. ‘Leave me to go to church.’

‘Why, don’t you wish to chat?’

Peering ahead shortsightedly, Serlo could just make out two shadowy figures. In the swirls of freezing grey fog they appeared larger than men, much taller than Serlo himself, and for an instant he felt crushed. Then a breeze cleared the mist, and in that instant Serlo saw the church standing tall and serene behind his enemies. ‘May God forgive you both,’ he grated. ‘You’re holding me from the church.’

‘We aren’t stopping you, Serlo. Feel free to continue on your way.’

Serlo steeled himself and strode on, chin high, but when he was level, he hissed, ‘You’ll push a man too hard one day, Richer. Not everyone’s scared of you just because you carry a sword for the castle.’

‘Perhaps it will be you who is pushed too far, eh, Serlo? Go on, you corrupt bladder of wind! Go to church. You need the solace of God’s forgiveness more than most, I expect.’

Serlo walked on as though he hadn’t heard those words, but when he was gone a short way further up the track, he heard Richer’s voice again.

‘By the way, miller, I recall you asked me and my friend for a penny to pay no toll at the bridge. That was only a short while after you’d asked the steward for a refund of your investment in the farm of the tolls, is that right?’

‘What’s it to you?’ Serlo snapped, attempting to hide his fear.

‘Nothing … except that my master would be very interested to learn that you were pocketing gifts. Why, that would be defrauding him of his legitimate income. Theft, Master Miller.’

‘It’s a lie!’

‘Is it? I should ask Nicholas then, should I? Think on it, miller.’

Serlo said not a word. He walked on as though there had been no interruption, but even as he stepped into the security of the church, he felt the shiver of fear coursing along his spine as if Richer atte Brooke was again threatening him.

‘God’s bones, you bastard son of a Saracen harlot, I’ll have my revenge on you for your insults,’ he swore quietly. ‘If you’ve reported my tolls it’ll make repaying my debts that much harder. By Christ’s wounds, I’ll avenge any grief you bring on me: aye, an hundredfold. You’ll regret coming up against me and mine, just as your father did!’