North Side of the Tree

I lash out, sick with terror. Then suddenly it is as if the first man has flown away. He is lifted off me bodily by a pair of strong, brown hands. “Get away, lady,” snaps Leo. “Run for it.”

I run.

Chapter 3

I stand behind Father on the battlements. Below us, assembled in the meadow, are the scores of men who walked to Barrowbeck from all over this corner of England. Whatever one might fear or mislike about my father, one can’t help admiring his reputation as a warlord. He is certainly better at this than he is at farming.

He raises his hands for silence, and shouts, in a voice for once unslurred, that they should all return home and thank the Lord for sparing them. There will be purses for all of them at the barmkin gate, he tells them. Then he wishes them Godspeed on their journeys home.

The rain has stopped, but a cold wind is blowing across the battlements. The clouds shift. There is a flash of blue sky, brown trees, memories of blue breeches and brown jerkin. I feel unsteady, and support myself against the beacon turret. The pain in my mouth is making me feel sick. I touch the cuts and swellings, now liberally plastered with Mother’s marigold balm.

Mother is standing next to Father, her arms folded in her sleeves, smiling serenely. Strange how we keep up appearances in the face of strangers. She turns to me. “Are you all right, Beatrice? You really did come a cropper in the woods, didn’t you.”

I attempt a smile. “I’m well enough, thank you Mother.”

Germaine, music tutor and wardrobe mistress to the household, is standing next to me. She gives me a critical look. “Was it really a fall?” she enquires disbelievingly. Far below, amongst the shuffling crowd, I catch a glimpse of Leo. His gaze is fixed on me.

“Yes,” I mutter, averting my eyes from her, from him, from everyone.

If I had not turned back, after I ran from the men, I should not know what I do know now. After Leo rescued me, I fled along the edge of the woods for quite a little way, unwilling to go into the open in the state I was in, my mouth bleeding and my clothes torn. Then I stopped. There were two of those men against Leo. They both had knives. I seized a hefty branch from the ground, and turned back.

Leo met me. He was striding along in his usual way, his hands full of snared songbirds. His mouth was thirled in a horrifying, animal snarl, though. I stood and gaped at him. He said, “Mistress Beatrice, what are you doing still out here? You should be home, getting Kate to tend to your hurts.” When I did not reply, he asked, “Do you want to come back with me and let Sanctity see to you?” I glanced beyond him, back along the path and into the undergrowth, and my knees buckled.

Leo supported me through the woods, clutched against his jerkin full of the smells of the cowshed. I could scarcely bear to be touched, but the alternative would have been to fall down. We tottered our way right round the edge of the clearing and down the tiny, briar-tangled path to the cottage he shares with his wife, Sanctity, and their many children. Sanctity helped me to a straw bed in a corner, where I lay on the counterpane of patchworked rabbitskins whilst she mopped my injuries. Sanctity Wilson is a scent-maker by trade, and because she brews potions, she dresses in the fashion of the religious, in high-necked, dark clothing with her hair scraped severely back, to avoid any possibility of being considered a witch. This is how they say Queen Eliza used to dress when she was a princess, as protection against her half-sister, Mary. Several women across the valley dress so. Fear of being accused of witchcraft grows to unreasonable proportions in some.

“Please don’t tell anyone what happened, Sanctity,” I asked her.

She stood by the small fire under the roof hole, rocking her latest baby, and frowned at me. “Well, I won’t if you don’t want me to, dear, but you should certainly tell your mother.”

I lay back and inhaled the musty smell of rabbitskin, and wondered how much Leo had told her of what had happened. All I knew was that no one would hear any of it from me. My mouth would heal. I had not lost any teeth. My clothes would mend. I heaved myself up and sat with my back against the wall. Next to me a tree was growing as part of the wall. One of the house beams had taken root, and was calloused all over where branches kept having to be lopped off. The smell of cow dung, sweet and familiar, came from walls newly rendered for winter. From the tripod over the fire, where Sanctity was brewing scent, the fragrance of rosewater competed with the dead-flesh smell of the rush lights. On a shelf by the door stood bottles of sticky, brown fluid, full of the perfumes of summer.

“Take one of these,” she said. “Lavender will calm you down.”

I can smell it on me now as I stand on the battlements, watching my father move to the parapet and raise his hands in blessing. “Go your ways peacefully,” he shouts. “There’s ale as well as a shilling for you, down at the barmkin gate. God bless you.” I can feel his relief that the opportunity for having a drink himself is drawing nearer. The sunlight brightens, and flashes on something amongst the men below. Leo is polishing his broad-bladed knife. In a moment of light-headedness I imagine it hissing through leather, grating on bone.

My father steps back, hands on hips, face flushed and smiling. He is pleased with his performance. He comes towards us waving his pouncet box to perfume the air, as if to say, that’s enough of the stinking masses, back to more delicate matters. He peers at my injured face and demands, “What’s the matter with you, girl?”

“Nothing, Father. I fell in the woods.” I ponder how strange it is that he can still undermine my antipathy so easily, with just one look of concern.

“Come Germaine, Beatrice, will you help me serve ale to the travellers?” Mother ushers us towards the spiral staircase. “Are you fit to do it, Beatrice, or do you want to lie down? Kate can help with the ale.”

“I’m late with the milking, Mother. I’m sorry. I should go down to the cowsheds and see if Tilly Turner has managed on her own.”

“I don’t suppose she will have. Go on then. We don’t want them getting milk fever. Whatever were you doing instead?”

“I went to see Verity.”

Suddenly I have all my mother’s attention. “How is she?” she demands under her breath, so that my father will not hear.

“She’s with child,” I whisper.

Mother stops, one foot poised, at the top of the spiral staircase. For a long moment she says nothing, then she murmurs, “In that case, the sooner we get her home the better.”

A good milker can do a cow in a few minutes. Tilly Turner takes about an hour. She grumbles and mutters about how sore her fingers are, instead of singing to the animals so that they relax and let the milk down. I have to say that singing to cows is not my idea of the best way to start a day either, but now I sit back-to-back with her on a low stool in the cowshed, and hum a tune under my breath, partly from sheer relief at doing something safe and ordinary. The cow’s warm, gurgling side is against my cheek, and the rhythmic stroking of fingers against palms, the slap of milk into the wooden bucket, combine to soothe away the terrors of what happened to me. For once, I am even thankful for the distraction of Tilly’s tales of injustice and martyrdom. I sneak a look at my aching knees. They are bruised black where I fell. What happened with John now seems so remote and unreal that I don’t feel absolutely sure it took place. It seems more like one of my long-ago daydreams about him.

After the milking, we put on our shawls to soften the drag of the yokes across our shoulders, and toil up the hill with the buckets swinging wide on their ropes, past the crowd, through the barmkin, to the dairy in its rock cave. This is when the screaming starts.

My first thought is that the Scots are attacking us again. Tilly and I look at one another, duck out of our yokes so that the buckets bump to the flagstone floor, and run outside. The screaming goes on and on. We race out of the barmkin. The crowd gathered by the gate is now hurrying up the slope, past the tower, towards the woods.

“What is it?” I ask Germaine, who has remained by the trestle table with a jug of ale in her hand.

She shrugs. “I have no idea.” She pours a mug for me, since all her other customers have gone. Now we can see two of Father’s henchmen emerging from the woods. They are carrying a wooden hurdle. Two homesteaders from the valley follow them, carrying another. The screaming has stopped, but several women from the valley come rushing past us, sobbing. Germaine shoots out her hand and grabs the arm of the first of them.

“Whatever is happening, Betsy?”

“A murder, madam. Two of the men from away have been killed in the forest. We found them…” She gives a gasping moan. “Their throats were cut. Sliced oppen.”

I turn away, hands to my mouth. Germaine lets go of the woman, who hurries away down the hill after her companions. She turns to me. “A murder in these parts – how truly shocking. Your Scotsman did go, I presume?”

I take a mouthful of ale, and walk away up the hill, ignoring her. I feel too sickened to be angry. The bodies are at the door of the gatehouse, surrounded by a silent crowd. There is no other way in except past them, unless I were to go by the secret passage under the floor of the dairy, which is out of the question with so many people about. My father steps forward. “Put ’em in t’wood cellar. ’Tis a poor end for those who only wished to serve their country.” The crowd nods and mutters. A few of the older people are crossing themselves, and for once my father lets it pass.

A piece of bloodstained bedsheet covers the upper part of the first body. The man’s arms have slipped off the edge of the hurdle. As the henchmen lift it by poles at either end, the arms flap, as if alive, and for a moment I wonder if the man really is still alive after all. Then the bedsheet slides off completely, and his lolling head is revealed, his throat open in a frightful turtle smile, his brown jerkin and blue breeches drenched in blood.

The face and shoulders of the second body are covered, but there are drops of congealed blood on the arms, crossed over his greasy green belt.

When the bodies have been taken down the curving slope to the wood cellar, I make my way up the east staircase and along a twisting passage to the east landing. I need above all to be alone. The jakes on the east landing is the nastiest of our several latrines in the outer walls of the tower, a last resort for the desperate when all others are in use. Here I can be reasonably sure of being undisturbed. I wonder if Leo’s son, Dickon, our laystow boy among his many other duties, has emptied the privies today from the hatches one floor down. Understandably, he looks for any excuse to avoid this particular work. Kate, our cook, has been known to pursue him round the tower with a meat cleaver, to persuade him to greater diligence.

The stink, and the hum of flies, make this little sanctuary an unlovely place to be, but peaceful. It is dark here, with only a faint luminescence from the jakes itself. I light a candle on the linen chest, and carry it in with me, propping the broken door shut with it.

I have been pushing away the terrible thoughts in my head, but now they are unavoidable. The sight of the two dead men as I saw them in the woods keeps flashing across my mind. Sometimes they are alive again, and coming at me with the unexpectedness of the attack. Sometimes they are dead, lolling and staring. It is my fault, all my fault. I want to escape from it, from all the events of today, to stay for ever in this dark place with my guttering candle, to be walled in like a Papist nun. My mouth hurts. My knees and ribs and arms hurt. I want to slough off my flesh the way that grass snakes shed their skins. Yet it remains, white and sluglike, painful and unsheddable. The thought that I kissed John earlier appals me. Isn’t he supposed to be spiritual and remote? Isn’t that what I like about him? I want to scream that no, I am not to be touched, not by attackers, not by lovers, not by anyone. The urge to scream, in the way that the women who found the bodies screamed, comes roaring up from my feet, but all that emerges from my mouth is a tiny mew, like a kitten’s.

Chapter 4

There is something freakish about today; everything feels abnormal and unfamiliar. I’m beginning to wonder if the bang on my head was worse than I thought. There’s Hugh for a start, sweet Hugh, fair-haired and funny, whom I thought I knew, but who now looms at me with a predatory look that is new. He has been fussing over my bruises, and teasing me tenderly about being legless so early in the day. Dear Lord, it is grotesque. Normally he would have joked uncaringly, and suggested a ride in the woods, or target practice, to take my mind off it. I wonder if Uncle Juniper has been advising him on techniques for wooing reluctant females. I look at them now, across the crowded kitchen, drinking and conversing by the gatehouse arch. Uncle Juniper, whose real name everyone has long forgotten, is hunched over and gesturing wildly, clearly describing something deeply bloodthirsty. I wonder for a moment if I am really going to be able to do this – seriously do it – marry Hugh and see my future settled for ever within these confines.

I decide to go and hide in the chimney corner. I seat myself facing the flames, my back against the hot stone, my skirts tucked in under my knees. The kitchen fire is roaring, and a tall blackjack of ale stands near me, on a griddle winched to one side away from the flames. Steam curls along the hot poker which Kate has plunged into it, and there is a smell of singed flesh where the poker leans against the lip of the big leather jug. The men who carried the corpses in appear up the slope from the wood cellar at the far side of the kitchen. Kate looks round from plucking thrushes at the table. “Help yourselves to ale, lads,” she calls. “I reckon you’ll be needing it.”

The smell of newly drawn feathers mingles with the other smells of the kitchen, live flesh sweating and dead flesh singeing, and I realise that my mood is shifting. Instead of feeling shaky and terrified, now I am starting to feel angry. I am angry with the men who attacked me, angry that Leo’s saving of me had to take such a terminal form, leaving me as good as a murderer, angry at the droning throb of my bruises, at the loss of my knife, at the confrontation awaiting us all when my father finds out about Verity, and above all, angry that such a good friend and cousin as Hugh has to be turned into a husband for me, by those too old and set in their ways to know what they are talking about.

The four men come over and ladle hot ale into their tankards. They nod to me but I pretend to be asleep. Leo’s son, Dickon, is mending the bellows on the opposite side of the fire from me, pleating new leather into the sides where the old has cracked, and if it were not for the tapping of his hammer I should probably indeed have slept.

My parents have not arrived yet. I find myself practising speeches to calm my father’s temper when he finds out about Verity and realises that the family’s plans to marry her to Gerald, and keep the two farms within the family, are in ruins. He beat her once for her involvement with James Sorrell, and he tried to kill James. Now, faced with the inevitable fact that they must marry, and quickly, I simply cannot imagine what he will do.

I wonder, too, what Gerald’s reaction will be. I watch him, a younger, darker, more angry-looking version of his brother, talking to Germaine in a far corner of the kitchen, stooping over her as she sits in a tall-backed chair putting tiny stitches into a pair of lace sleeves. Somehow, I don’t think he is going to be too distressed.

Aunt Juniper appears beside me. She points at Gerald and Germaine. “Just look at that, will you Niece? He spends so much time talking to that skivvy that he scarcely gets to see your sister at all. He should be over at Wraithwaite Parsonage at this very moment. I really don’t know what’s becoming of this family.”

“Germaine’s a bit more than a skivvy, Auntie,” I reply, wondering why I am defending the person who annoys me more than any other in this household.

“Nonsense! She’s a serving woman and she’s twice his age, and what Gerald wants to be doing talking to her is a mystery to me.”

People near us glance round and grin. I suspect Aunt Juniper is the only person to whom it is a mystery.

Mother comes in, her cheeks pink and her hair escaping from its cap. “That’s the last of the strangers on their way!” she declares. “I never thought I’d thank a Scot for anything, but I do thank him for forcing our men to stay at home.” She crosses to the hearth. “I’m going to open my elder wine. Give me a hand, Juniper. We have good reason to celebrate.”

“Them downstairs don’t,” mutters Kate.

I peer round the corner of the hearth as my mother and aunt lift out two wooden-stoppered clay flagons from the proving oven. “Give Kate a drink, Beatie, for pity’s sake,” Mother orders me. “I can’t be doing with her endless griping. Get out the silver goblets. I’m not using pewter any more. Cedric says it rots your brain.” She thumps the flagons on to the table and stares round her for a moment, hands on hips. “I can still scarce credit that the march on Scotland is stopped.”

“For now.” Kate slams her rolling pin into a soft mound of dough. “We wouldn’t have given up so easily in my day – one Scot and a whole war called off – I never heard the like of it.”

I take down the best goblets one by one from the dresser, whilst Mother and Aunt Juniper unstopper the flagons. I remember Father coming home with these goblets one Michaelmas, fifty of them in finest silver, beautifully wrought with patterns of herons and reeds. When I have passed everyone a goblet of wine, I go to sit on the bench at the long table, and as I do so there is a commotion in the gatehouse arch and my father comes crashing in. “What’s the merrymaking?” he bellows, and lurches towards the kitchen table. “Are the dead men laid out?” He throws an arm round Kate who is putting the lid on the thrush pie. “What’s in t’tart, Kate?”

“Songbirds.” Kate peers up into his face and scowls at him. “Cupshotten already, master? You wasted no time.”

“Aye well, Katie, you see we don’t have any time to waste, do we, as them downstairs will surely warrant.”

“You’re right there, master.” She stabs the pie crust three times with her pastry knife, muttering, “Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”

“Amen,” intones my father, and the two of them nod gloomily at one another.

I pour myself more wine. The sweet-smelling brew rocks to and fro in the shiny round bowl, red, maroon and purple in the shifting firelight. I see my mother leading my aunt away, arm round her shoulders, heads bent, to seat themselves in my place in the chimney corner. My mother is talking. My aunt is listening. I realise she is being told the news about Verity. With a surge of longing I want my own sister here, back where she belongs. I have no one here now who thinks as I do, who is prepared to laugh with me at the absurdity of our elders, and to defy them with me when necessary.

Suddenly Leo is at my side. I jump. I had not seen him arrive. I take a large swallow of wine, and then have to lean my elbows on the table to keep myself steady. He sits down next to me and asks, “How are you, lady?”

“Well enough.” I realise how ungracious I sound, and stand up to pour him some wine. “I thank you, Leo, for enquiring.”

He rummages at his waist. I catch the flash of a blade. “You’ll be wanting this back.” He produces my knife from where it was pushed into a sheath with his own. I stare at it, so familiar, with its horn handle and curved blade. “Was this what you used?” I ask him, appalled. Our eyes meet. It is as if we were alone in an empty kitchen. He makes a circle of his finger and thumb, touches it to his own broad-bladed knife, then to his lips.

“Nay,” he says. “I used my own. It was a pleasure, lady.”

There seems to be nothing more to say. My profuse and incoherent thanks of earlier cannot be repeated, back in this normal world. I try to work out my feelings. I try to work out whether there was anything else he could have done. I feel a strange closeness to Leo, like kinship. We share one another’s secrets. Perhaps this is how you do feel towards someone who has saved your life. After a while Leo says, “I’ll be saying nowt about the other, neither, mistress.”

I have to think for a moment what he means, then I realise he means John, and the kiss. “Oh. Well thank you. And… Leo, you can be sure… I shan’t be saying anything to anyone about what happened, either.”

He nods. A pact has been sealed.

Germaine comes round with cates, tiny squares of bread fried in goose grease, wafer-thin slices of salty black pudding, candied gooseberries, marchpane comfets. We help ourselves from two big platters. My father, leaning lopsidedly on the chopping block, slips off when he tries to help himself, and bangs his cheek. With a spluttering curse he heaves himself upright and crosses the room to the fireplace as if dancing the galiard, relieves himself into the flames, then pirouettes back. He picks up one of the flagons with both hands and drinks from it. The wine spills down his neck, staining his ruff. “Damnation to the Scots!” he shouts. The assembly raises its goblets. The fire flares brilliant, unfocused, into the room. Germaine goes round lighting the candles, and they shine with rainbow haloes in the smoky air. Leo pats me on the shoulder, and leaves.

As the afternoon draws on, Kate puts on barley broth to stew, for those who might wish to recover their senses later. I grow weary of explaining my injuries to people, and wonder if I would have minded less if my explanations had been the truth.

Tilly Turner, curled on the oak settle by the fire, faints with great drama, smashing her head on the hearth, and has to be revived with a burning feather under her nose. Mother pats her cheeks back and forth with more vigour than is strictly necessary, and William the henchman assists her out into the fresh air. Moments later he returns with a flurry, calling to Father, “Master, parson’s come out of t’wood.”

“Woodworm’s come out of t’wood,” my father mutters, staggering to his feet. William comes over and props him up.

“Is he to come in, master? Is the parson to come in?”

Everyone waits for my father’s answer. They all know his opinion of John Becker.

I creep across the kitchen and take over Tilly’s place on the oak settle, where I can be hidden by its high sides. I had forgotten that John was coming. I’m horrified at the thought of him seeing me hot, sweaty and half-drunk. Germaine comes to sit next to me. “Hiding, Beatrice?” she enquires. I nod carefully, fearful that my head might fly off. Germaine laughs. “He might consign the rest of us to hellfire, but not you, my dear.”

To me, the kitchen already seems like Hell – hot and full of people whose misdeeds are about to catch up with them.

My father blunders across the kitchen, stumbling over chairs and benches. “Might as well show him in, William lad,” he shouts. “Yon whining preacher could do with a drink, I daresay. Can’t do aught but improve him.”

Everyone’s gaze swings towards the entrance. We hear the front door crash open, then William’s voice. “They’re in the kitchen, sir.” My father prepares himself grandly, feet apart, hands on hips. William comes back into the kitchen and whispers something to him.

“Nay lad,” my father replies loudly, “I’ll see him in here. Is he too grand for the kitchen? Eh? Eh?” His voice is thick. His nose stands out purple with a slight knob on the end where a vein pulsates. William departs, and returns with John.

It is a shock to see him, all the more so because he looks absurdly pale and sober and clean, in comparison with the rest of us. I see how we must look to him, red-faced and rowdy. It dawns on me how unsuitable a match I would be for John, or indeed for any decent and respectable person outside the family. “Good day.” He looks round and addresses everyone, then turns to my father. “May I speak to you privately, Squire Garth?”