Lies of the flesh, p.3
Lies of the Flesh, page 3
He finally begins his journey towards Warcop a little after the sun reaches its highest point in the heavens, leaving Dolfyn to stand sorrowfully at their gate. Giles Helbeck, his father’s squire, rides with him, squat and dark and noiseful. As with so much else, Fran has not made up his mind what to do with Giles. Much of this particular indecision arises from the fact that he finds the squire a rather haughty fellow, never backward in bestowing his opinion on those he considers his inferiors or even, when he forgets himself, on those who would naturally expect him to keep his mouth shut. It’s true that Giles has always shown him proper reverence, serving him as diligently as he did his master. But Fran has been much irritated by the way the squire speaks to Sarah and the other servants, sees how he pushes his horse well beyond what is good for the beast.
But Giles is scarcely his most pressing concern. As they ride south out of Hilton, the unbounded prospect that suddenly rises up before them still makes Fran feel a little dizzy. To their left, hump-backed Roman Fell guards their flank while, far ahead of them in the distance, the angular tip of Wild Boar Fell slices through the sky. Fauvel, Fran’s palfrey, is pleased to be out, shaking his sleek chestnut head, his hoof-falls on the rough moorland track blithe and brisk. Fran feels them as a drumbeat heralding the moment when he and Will can sit or walk together. Finally, he will be able to speak with someone who is not only bound to absolute secrecy by virtue of his office as priest, but whom he loves and admires for his good sense, the wisdom so willingly imparted. Who makes him feel alive with one playful glance, hard-won but all the more glorious for it.
And yet his father’s voice mocks him from inside his head, for how can he tell Will the truth without his whole world collapsing?
Throwing that thought into the distant fells, Fran urges Fauvel to hurry, counting off each clump of trees, each stream and house on this well-worn route. A wren scolds them, flitting from one gorse bush to another, no doubt luring them away from her second brood of young. A vigorous wind throws itself at them from the south, but it hits them with a caressing warmth, the sun soaring above them. Fran prays quickly for the words that will help to unlock his predicament to Will. He is glad to be away from Hilton.
If only Giles would cease his onslaught of questions. Which does the young master prefer, the sword, the mace or the axe? What does he know of King Edward? Has he ever met Sir Robert Clifford? Is it possible Clifford isn’t truly dead? What does he think it’s like to ride into battle?
How on God’s earth would I know? Fran wonders for a moment if Giles is taunting him for not going with the king’s army, but nothing is written on the youth’s face apart from a rosy eagerness. Fran sighs to himself. ‘Hold your tongue, for pity’s sake.’
But Giles is rarely discomfited. ‘What’s that, sir?’ The squire stands up in his stirrups, looking to their left. They are now above Warcop, moving rapidly downhill, the great valley of the River Eden stretching entirely from the eastern horizon towards the west, a busy country of many colours, of light and shadow, of corn and pasture and meadows and woods.
‘What did I tell—’
‘You need to look over there.’ Giles points emphatically to the east, above the trees. A great plume of grey smoke streams towards the heavens.
Fran frowns. ‘I don’t know what it is any more than you do.’ He spurs on his horse, and they are soon within Warcop’s boundaries. Hastening towards the priest’s house, which lies beside Crook’s Beck, a clamour draws them instead to the small patch of grass where stands a maypole set atop four well-worn steps. A press of men is gathered round the sheriff, Will’s brother, Sir Henry Warcop, who stands resolutely on the second step trying to answer questions. Some turn to look at the newcomers and Fran raises his hand in greeting. They nod, turn back quickly towards Sir Henry.
‘Fran! I didn’t expect you to come.’
Fran’s gaze leaps down, all thought turned fugitive, to find Will standing beneath him, heavy black hair falling into his eyes beneath his cap, the white of his woollen habit drawing the eye like a great light. But where is the smile of greeting, the complicit glance that feels like an embrace? ‘God keep you, Father, I didn’t. I came to see you. My father is dead.’ He speaks quickly, forced into talking about what is necessary but not so weighty on his mind.
‘Oh.’ Will places a hand on Fauvel’s flank near Fran’s leg. ‘I see. I will . . . Look, the Scots are coming. They have already burned Brough.’
‘Damn!’ So that explains the smoke. Fran’s eyes leap towards the road east, though houses impede his gaze.
Will looks that way too. ‘We were brought word an hour ago. Please God it is not too late.’ He nods towards his brother, the sheriff. ‘They seem to be heading west, to go back over the border north of Carlisle. They have countless beasts with them, and it is best we do not try to stop them. Harclay and some of the men from Carlisle tried up on Stainmore . . .’ His face twitches. ‘But we should do what we can to get our people out of the way.’
Giles has been unnaturally quiet, twisting and gawping all around. Now he draws in a sharp breath, no doubt as the prelude to some insistent pronouncement or other.
Fran turns quickly to him. ‘Go back to Hilton and tell Harry Sowerby to move our beasts up into Swindale. Then ask my lady mother to gather all the women and lock themselves in somewhere. I don’t want you to delay for any reason.’
Giles frowns, opens his mouth.
Fran gives him his fiercest look. ‘Go!’
The squire shrugs, turning his horse with a clatter.
Will strokes Fauvel, speaks quietly, as if to the beast. ‘Jamie Dickinson’s boys are not yet come back from Scotland. Nor Adam Fothergill.’ He looks up, touches Fran’s boot lightly. ‘I should ready myself.’ And then he smiles, suddenly boyish again. ‘I would not want you getting too far ahead of me.’
Fran is thrown back more than ten years, to piles of books and parchment and Will – then a novice in the monastery at Shap – teaching him Latin and Greek, some mathematics and a little theology, the sun slicing through the window. How he had loved the time they spent together and how hard he had worked to justify and honour Will’s patience with him. He marvelled at all the things his teacher knew, the mysteries he became privy to under Will’s firm direction. He smiles.
But already Will’s face has grown heavy again. He raises a hand in farewell and benediction.
Sitting entirely still on Fauvel’s back, Fran is not afraid. But only because he cannot yet imagine all this, the familiar and the ordinary, washed away in a tide of hacking, burning, yelling savages. Getting down with a sudden leap, he ties Fauvel to a fencepost and edges forward to stand at the back of the crowd. But almost immediately men begin to run, no doubt on some signal from the sheriff.
‘Where’s Andrew?’ Sir Henry bustles up, tugging impatiently at his glove with only two complete fingers on his left hand, a constant reminder of another battle in Scotland, but one that was lost a long time ago. He has none of the priest’s vivacity, nor his fine proportions, bringing to Fran’s mind a great boulder stuffed into robes that are much too small, his features pinched and creased where Father Warcop’s are elegant and smooth. Nearly a score more in years and a different mother. But Sir Henry is a man who gets things done.
Fran whips off his hat, bows low. ‘God speed, my lord. My father is dead. Yesterday.’
Sir Henry blinks. ‘’Tis not possible. I saw him yesterday myself. We talked about the battle. He was in an almighty ill humour about it.’
‘Well, he’s dead now, for certain. I came to see about his burial. But’ – Fran gestures vaguely – ‘it’ll have to wait.’
‘That it will. I doubt . . .’
He’s going to tell me to go home, that this is no place for a . . .
‘. . . he ever thought you’d be fighting his battles for him quite so soon.’ Sir Henry clasps a great hand to Fran’s shoulder. ‘I sent my squire off with Jamie Dickinson, so you can come with me.’
‘You do me much honour, sir.’ Fran had hoped to wait for Will. This day has not turned out anything like the way he’d imagined.
Chapter 3
It is a warning for their own people that Sir Henry intends them to deliver, sending them in twos or threes up and down the byways that criss-cross the valley and the lower slopes of the Pennines, the great line of hills that lie like slumbering giants to the north of the valley of the River Eden. There is nothing to be done about the standing grain, but if even some cattle and sheep can be saved, it will be worth the effort. The hope is that those devils have enough booty already and will be eager to return home. What they must not do, Sir Henry tells Fran with a grimace, is attract their attention. ‘No one can say I wish ill on our neighbours, but if it’s us or them . . .’
Fran nods. They are riding not so very far from Hilton, heading towards Appleby. ‘Could we not lead the Scots away from here?’ He thinks his voice is a little too shrill, but vigorous enough, and marvels that he should already seek to make himself heard.
But Sir Henry shakes his head. ‘That would be beyond foolish. They know what they’re about, that’s for certain, and there’s nothing we can do to try to change their minds.’ He sniffs, looks down on Fran. ‘Why didn’t you and your father go with Sir Robert to Scotland?’
There was something to be said, Fran decides, for not drawing attention to yourself. He shrugs, scans the horizon again. ‘He thought we should stay here and protect our own.’ In truth, Andrew Hilton had told his son he would break his sword and slit his horse’s throat if he even thought about going. By then, Fran no longer knew what sort of man he wanted him to be.
Sir Henry sniffs again. ‘He was a strange man, your father. You know that, don’t you?’
More than most. ‘I should have chosen better, I suppose.’
‘Don’t be clever. You could have gone.’
Fran closes his eyes. ‘He wouldn’t let me.’ It sounds wretched, a coward’s excuse.
Sir Henry snorts. ‘You should be glad, and that’s the truth of it.’ He gives Fran a long look. ‘This isn’t a game, you know.’
They ride in silence for a while. Fran does not think it a game. In truth, he hasn’t thought all that much about the war these past years, though it’s always been there, worrying at them all like a tick bite, growing angry and painful every now and then.
Something stirs in his mind, a drift of purple spread beneath a host of ancient oaks, the delicate smell of bluebells as pleasing as laughter. And his mother smiling, arm draped over the shoulders of an older woman. Her mother, his grandmother. He cannot have been more than two years old, trying to find his own feet. In Scotland, before the war began. He remembers his grandmother’s smell, dry and warm, cabbages and roses. She liked to tickle him, he remembers that too, rub her nose on his belly. Does she still live? Why has he not thought on her these long years? Where has he been all this time?
They ride quickly along the edge of a great field, the barley dancing and rustling in the breeze. A chorus of barking dogs heralds their approach to a jumble of houses smoking gently. High up on a little hill, the square church of Great Ormside stands on impotent watch. The manor house at its foot is solemn and quiet, for John Derwentwater has been near to death this past twelvemonth.
Stopping abruptly, Sir Henry eases himself out of the saddle and raps on the first door, kicking at a mangy dog baring its teeth at him. But already women with very young children and a few men of the more decrepit kind emerge from round corners, from behind doors, some lingering, others gathering close.
‘The Scots are at Brough. They’re coming this way.’ Sir Henry directs his gaze at an old man with oily locks and pale, cloudy eyes.
But it is a fine-boned woman with a child on her hip who answers, moving her child deftly to her other hip as it begins to whimper. ‘What do you want us to do?’ It is nearly a shout.
Fran studies her, the darkness circling her eyes, the way her body swings and shifts so as to accommodate her child, the glittering force of a gaze that speaks of a life only just holding together.
Sir Henry’s mouth tightens. ‘Get out of the way. Until they’ve passed. Go now. Take your beasts, if you can, but go quickly.’
The woman gives them a look that falls like water through fingers, cleanly, quietly, without artifice. It seems to Fran she is telling them she is hopeless because she understands perfectly all that is wrong with the world.
They ride up to the church, which commands a good view over the River Eden and the ancient road on the ridge beyond. For a moment, all is peaceful. But at last, with a jolt in Fran’s spine, he sees a dark shivering fill the valley floor from the right, an unstoppable flow of men and beasts.
Sir Henry’s face burns to the dark, distressing colour of an engorged flea even as he raises his chin. They nudge their horses deeper into the shadow of the church.
Fran feels a great anger, against the Scots certainly, but it is their own impotence that hurts him most. ‘Is there nothing to be done?’ He thinks on the woman with the child. She has good reason to think them negligent, surely? And something else leaps into his mind, the recollection that Sir Henry’s own hall was violated a year or so ago by a group of armed men, Englishmen all, who took some of his goods, his widowed daughter Isabel and a boy who was his ward. To be the king’s own officer on the king’s own business and unable to protect your own, that must have hurt to the quick.
The sheriff stares straight ahead, eyes unblinking. ‘There’s some of them up there on the road too.’ He points across to the ridge on the other side of the river. ‘They must’ve gone off somewhere else to be behind those driving the cattle.’ His other hand beats urgently on his thigh.
‘Where do we go now?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to decide. Flakebridge was the plan. But that means crossing the Great Road.’
Fran feels something hard lodge in his belly. ‘Couldn’t we—’
But instantly Sir Henry turns to him. ‘No. I’ve already told you. Others have tried and failed. The Scots on the road can easily ride off it to make mischief, if they think it worth their while. We can either get out of the way and let them do their worst. Or pay them off, but I’m not minded to give them any more unless we must.’
‘What about trying to get them to go a different way?’
Sir Henry shifts in his saddle, nose twitching. ‘What do you mean?’
What do I mean? ‘If we could make them think something untoward is happening further on, something they would be foolish to ignore . . .’
‘Such as?’
Fran’s mind gallops through various possibilities, all equally reckless. But he becomes more and more certain they could – nay, should – do something no one would expect them to do. ‘What if we made a great smoke somewhere over there.’ He waves vaguely towards the west. ‘Make the ones behind think the ones in front have been attacked.’
‘They don’t need any help to destroy us!’ Sir Henry looks down on Fran, solid face turned molten with alarm.
‘It’s to stop them destroying us, don’t you see? Once they’re past, they won’t come back.’ Fran knows there’s nothing certain about this plan, can see the madness in it, but the simple logic too. ‘They might not come back.’
‘No, I don’t see.’ Sir Henry looks at Fran as if he is a strange object he has found beneath his boot. Then his mouth twists. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty.’ Fran feels a sharp heat, wondering what lies behind the question.
‘You’re small for your age, aren’t you?’
The heat fills Fran with intensity, pulling him out of shape. ‘That’s no reason to think less of me.’ The words slip out like pennies from a hole in a pouch. He wants to kick Fauvel in frustration that Sir Henry will not give his plan proper consideration, wonders why the sheriff thinks he has time for foolish observations when there’s still work to do.
Sir Henry’s eyebrows reach for the heavens, but already he is pulling on his horse’s reins. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about? I’ve scarcely spoken two words with you till today. If you want the truth, I thought there was something wrong with you, Andrew kept you at such a distance even when you were there among us. Now I see you’re just as bone-headed as he was.’
Fran contemplates the sheriff ’s words as they descend the hill, moving towards a loop of the Eden where it turns towards the south. He finds it grimly amusing that he and his father should be thought equally stubborn. They reach a clump of oaks beside the riverbank.
‘Stay here.’ Sir Henry does not wait for a reply, plunging into the water before heading steadily up the other side.
Fran grinds his teeth but knows better than to disobey. He worries that Sir Henry will come to harm. There is a kindness to him, for all his blunt words. Fran can see the sheriff is trying to do his best as everything shifts wildly around him.
Wiggling his shoulders to ease the pain in his chest, he hums a little tune to himself, a band of sparrows chattering noisily in the branches above his head. At last, Sir Henry reappears on the crest of the hill. Relieved, Fran advances out of the trees. But he has not even reached the river when there is a shout. With his heart in his throat, he turns his head towards it.
For a moment Fran sees only a shifting cloud, dark and menacing, but he soon understands that a small party of horsemen and beasts is travelling at speed towards him along the north bank of the river. Tugging at his sword, he realises too that they will soon come between him and Sir Henry. He glances round for an escape even as his father’s voice hammers in his head. Fight, goddamn it! If he hits you, hit him harder. Don’t you dare give up. But Fran has never been allowed to fight in anger before.
He pours all his attention on the two Scots who have broken away from the other three, riding fast. Young and swarthy, their broad grins tell Fran they are looking forward to seizing an Englishman for ransom. If they do not decide to kill him for sport first.
He knows the sheriff is too far away to help him for at least another few minutes. Grasping Fauvel’s reins tightly in his left hand, he urges his horse into a gallop with a sharp kick to both flanks, his passage on to their side of the river greeted with excited hollas from his pursuers. Fran feels the air rush at him so impetuously, it threatens to make away with every last breath in his body. Earth and sky, gorse and grass, the things that are up and those that are down, all are thrown together so violently, it is as if God Himself has decided His creation needs to be shaken up.
