"A good thing someone in this village is working today!" remarked Thomas Holland with asperity, as Bolingbroke's limping horse was led in.
The smith shrugged tolerantly. Whatever his personal sympathies, his was the decent independence of an essential tradesman. Ploughshares or horseshoes, his furnace must still roar.
Richard's eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom. He noticed that the posse of labourers were drifting away by some back entrance through the house. Thomas pushed him towards a rough bench against the smoke-grimed wall where the shadows were deepest. "Go and sit over there," he ordered, without ceremony.
Richard was glad to discard the dripping cloak, and sat down obediently. It was the first time he had been in a public smithy and it was interesting to watch the blacksmith's assistant work the bellows that blew the dulling embers to leaping flames.
The smith had backed the black horse into a kind of wooden frame and lifted a forehock onto his knee. He was probing for a stone. His strong, work-worn hands were amazingly gentle. Richard loved to watch an expert at work, whether he happened to be blacksmith, goldsmith, fletcher or bowman. He felt exasperated when his half-brother began fussing about wine and food, and wondered why old campaigners should consider it such a calamity to miss a meal. He saw the smith look up at Holland's peremptory demand and fancied it was not altogether the glow of the furnace which kindled such sparks in the man's fine brown eyes. "There is water in the well," he answered curtly.
But Thomas Holland had been hardened by the necessity of victualling armies in a ravaged land. "The young squire sitting over there is not over-strong," he insisted.
Richard could have hit him. But he had the grace to realize that probably both he and Beverly must be feeling extraordinarily worried about having brought him into such strange contacts.
"My daughter may have some bread," admitted the smith sullenly, and sent his assistant to find out.
The man went to a ramshackle door at the back and called "Rose!" and presently a girl appeared. A tall girl with white skin and straight, honey-coloured hair. She had brought a pitcher of water and a wooden platter with some pieces of bread. Not the dainty manchets of white bread they were all accustomed to, but hunks of dark stuff, made of rye and bran and beans such as they had seen the hungry prisoners devouring. She stood hesitating for a moment or two, embarrassed at finding herself in such well-dressed company. Then, dazzled by the outstanding elegance of de Vere, she carried the platter straight to him.
He refused it hurriedly. "Take it to the squire over there," he told her, with an apologetic grin at Richard. But she was oddly attractive in her grave, peasant way and he could not resist teasing her, and presently some of the other young men were ogling her too. Richard couldn't hear what they were saying for the roar of the bellows, but he saw the ingenuous blushes dyeing her neck and forehead and wished they would leave her alone. The girl was too simple for their sophisticated badinage. She was obviously in an agony of shyness—village bred and timid as a doe.
When at last she broke away and brought him the bread he spoke to her with grave courtesy to make amends. She kept her eyes cast down, and he could see her breasts were still rising and falling quickly with agitation beneath the thin blue garment she wore. But she stayed close beside him, away from the others, as if she felt safe there. He ate a piece of the sour-tasting stuff out of curiosity, and looked past her through the open doorway. The place appeared to be reasonably clean. A pot was simmering over a few sticks and the remainder of the loaf was on the table. "Do you live in there?" he asked.
"We all do," she said.
"All?" he questioned. It didn't look big enough to house a couple of dogs. Yet in spite of such overcrowded conditions, she smelled sweet enough.
She overcame her shyness sufficiently to look up, quizzing him with candid grey eyes that even held a hint of mockery. "My younger brothers and sisters, of course—and my father and I," she explained. He seemed quite a nice squire—less high and mighty than some—but, living in some noble's palace or knight's manor, he was probably quite stupid about the world outside.
Richard stood up so that he could see more of the puzzlingly bare interior. "But there's no bed," he said, looking for some sort of curtained four-poster.
Rose gave vent to a giggle and pointed to a pile of miller's sacks folded tidily in a corner. "I shake them every morning," she volunteered, wondering why he was so curious.
Richard coloured at his own clumsiness. Even at Eltham and Westminster some of the servants slept on the floor, he supposed. "But your mother?" he persisted, under cover of the clanging of the hammer. Surely a woman would want a bed.
"She died," Rose told him. And because of the way her eyes suddenly suffused with tears he sensed that it must have been very recently. Instantly all that he had been taught about the danger of going into the common people's homes came back to him. Instinctively, he drew away from her.
Living so close to the crude fears of life and death, Rose recognized them immediately. "Oh, no, not the plague!" she assured him, laying a hand on his fashionable sleeve with the same sort of mothering gesture she might have used towards one of her brothers. But the withdrawn uncertainty was still in his eyes, and she wanted to bring him back to friendliness. There had been some quality in it that she had never so much as glimpsed in village lout or patronizing gallant. And because she knew that people often lied about the plague lest their neighbours should refuse to come near or bring them food, she spoke in an urgent whisper which seemed to wrap them apart from his companions. "Truly, it wasn't, sir! It was just that she was going to have another baby—and there wasn't enough food for us all—"
Richard put the remainder of the bread back on the platter. It was true, then, in spite of the easy assurances—some of these people were half starved…And yet she and her father and the forge looked relatively prosperous. He would have liked to ask her how it came about that a blacksmith's wife should die of malnutrition, but just then there came an angry commotion outside, the shuffling approach of many ill-shod feet, catcalls and jeering. He sprang up and was conscious that all his friends did likewise. The blows on the anvil hammered no harder than their hearts. They were only a handful—the hated handful who had manors and velvets and wine—and for the first time in their lives they realized how dangerous it was to be in a social minority. The rabble they had left on the green were coming along the lane. They were making straight for the forge with the crazy Lollard egging them on and half a dozen men riding in front. Holland, de Vere, and Standish whipped out their swords and came and made a little circle of steel about Richard. Beverly rapped out an order and the men-at-arms lounging outside scrambled into their saddles. Only the blacksmith appeared to be unperturbed. "It's not your lordships they're after— it's those damned snooping tax-collectors," he told them, as well as he could with a mouth full of nails.
It was only then that they realized that the half-dozen horsemen in front were the pursued and the target for so much ribald venom. Sheepishly they put up their swords and relaxed. And the rabble, at sight of the soldiery whom they had previously defied, slunk back a little, suspecting a trap. As yet they dared not stop the taxcollectors doing their hated work. The lean, vulpine individual in charge had Parliament at his back. With his ink horn and stilo he appeared to be some sort of lawyer's clerk. He pulled up in front of the forge and consulted his assessment roll. "John Hilliard?" he read out inquiringly.
The smith answered civilly enough. "John Hilliard lies in the churchyard yonder, but I am his son."
The collector rested the roll on his saddlebow to cross out the name of the deceased. "And now the forge is yours, eh? What name shall I put?" Knowing the temper of the people, he was trying to be conciliatory.
"Walter Hilliard."
"Married? I'll be wagered you are, a fine figure of a man like you!"
But Walter Hilliard, bending over the black's hoof, held no truck with lawyers, facetious or otherwise. "I am a widower," he said, d
riving in the last nail. "And all my children are under fifteen."
"Then I must trouble you for your shilling, Walter Hilliard. And your man there. What's his name?"
The scraggy little assistant, who had been trying to make himself as scarce as possible, came out from behind the bellows babbling excuses. He'd been shaking of an ague ever since serving with the Prince of Wales in Spain…He hadn't his health as other men… He hadn't the money…He would pay if their Worships would give him time…But his master shoved him good-naturedly on one side. "He's served me well ever since he was disbanded, and I'll pay his shilling as well as my own. And God curse all wars!" he said. He fumbled beneath his leathern apron for the purse hanging at his belt; but his fingers were all foul from his work. He looked round for his daughter and saw her standing close to a pretty, auburnhaired gallant, whose flattery would probably do her no good. "Come here, my girl," he called, "and take two pieces o' siller out o' my wallet."
Rose moved obediently from the shadowed obscurity by Richard's side, and he thought she looked like a sliver of silver birch bark against the massive outline of her black-browed father. "'Tis all we have," she whispered, full of domestic concern, and stood holding the coins doubtfully on her open palm. But the smith smiled down at her as if, in a world where loss and injustice turned a man sour, she were all that kept life sweet. "Go give them to the scrivening vultures and be done with it," he bade her, careful to keep his great hands from soiling her gown. "There be things more precious than siller."
She went outside the shop and held them up to a coarse-looking ruffian who had the moneybags tied to his saddle. The rain had almost stopped and a shaft of watery sunlight breaking from the bondage of two clouds caught at the lights in her pale gold hair. Her uplifted face was sweet with innocence. Richard saw the man's brutish face as he looked down at her, and it spoiled the sunlight. Saw him hold on to her hand as well as the money and presently heave his bulk from the saddle and stand over her, pawing her bare white shoulder. Here was no young man's harmless ogling, of which he himself had been half envious; but the calculating lasciviousness of middle-age. Involuntarily, he glanced back at her father to see if he had noticed.
But Hilliard had other preoccupations at the moment. The officious clerk was not satisfied. "I see it is written here that John Hilliard had but one son who survived the wars and the Black Death," he observed, running a stubby finger down his records. "And that son was at one time apprenticed to a tyler in Essex."
Bolingbroke's horse stamped his newly shod hoof on the ground and was released with a friendly pat. "I am Wat the Tyler, if that's what you mean, Master Lawyer," answered the smith, turning at his leisure to face the assertion. "But my family was large and my wages small. So when news came that my father was like to die and no son to carry on, I came home to Kent."
The Earl of Arundel's minion pursed his thin lips disapprovingly. "You could have been branded for that, you know, my good man," he alleged, in pompous imitation of his master, "taking advantage of the shortage of able-bodied men to sell your labour from place to place."
"There've been Hilliards working this forge since Doomsday," the smith barked back at him. "And like enough they'll go on working it in spite of sharp-nosed busybodies like you!"
A new voice joined in the wrangle. "Since when are the highways of England free only for upstart lawyers and idle popinjays with decked-up horses to move from place to place?" the aggravating Lollard wanted to know.
Arundel's man ignored him. The crowd behind him had drawn unpleasantly close; but the courage of the obstinate was his. He had been trained to pry, and he went on prying. "I take it you paid your heriot dues to the Lord of the Manor here when you came back and took over your inheritance?" he inquired, determined to catch out this insolent giant.
But Wat Hilliard wasn't even looking at him. Having finished his shoeing job, he was free to observe what was going on. Particularly the press of labourers behind his tormentor and their menacing attitude. Some of them were neighbours he had known all his life, and some he had never seen before. But they were all on his side. His hardships and injustices belonged to each of them. And the tall, prisonbird of a priest, without an ounce of muscle to his arm, had dared to bait these well-fed Parliamentary scavengers in his defence. Wat was usually a peaceable man. But for the first time it dawned on him that he wasn't just one man protecting his own private affairs—that the comic ploughshare swords hidden away under his corn sacks might come to mean more to him than just an ill-paid job done out of neighbourliness. When he turned again to confront the lawyer's clerk his actions were more self-conscious and he raised his voice so that his defiance would be heard by all down the road, "What is it to do with you whether I paid heriot or not?" he demanded. "You were sent here to collect the King's taxes, weren't you? And you've got your filthy money, haven't you? Poll tax for two—which is about as much as I earn in a month!"
A titter ran through the crowd, brittle and ominious as flames crackling before the wind through dried bracken on a common. And still the official seemed unaware of the fire he was starting, and the underling in charge of the moneybags chose that moment to come swaggering into the forge dragging the girl. There were no blushes on Rose's cheeks now. Innocent as she might be, she knew evil when she met it, and she struggled at every step. "He's still cheating you, master," the ruffian laughed boisterously. "Don't tell me this tall, bed-ripe lass isn't sixteen!"
The smith swung round and saw his daughter with mute terror in her eyes. "Lay your foul hands off her, or by the Mass I'll kill you!" he shouted, in a voice so terrible that the very tools seemed to jangle on their hooks and the royal party, preparing to mount, stopped in their tracks.
But the man was either a born fool or drunk. Lust so licked him that he paid no heed even when one of his fellows warned him that up in Essex a bawdy tax collector had been stoned. Standing in the middle of the workshop, full in the brightening sunlight, he jerked the girl to him so that her clean, childish body merged obscenely with his own. "If you dodge the poll tax, friend smith, you can pay leyr-wite on her instead," he crowed, dragging the fresh linen from her shoulder to cup her tender breast in the grossness of his hand. And in spite of their sour-faced chiefs disapproval, his mates laughed coarsely. For even the youngest page present knew that whereas merchet was money a villein had to pay to his overlord when his daughter married, leyr-wite was what he paid for her shame if she merely became pregnant.
Richard sprang to his feet, caution burned up in a sudden gust of impersonal anger. But men's eyes were on stark drama and there was no need for speech. Wat Hilliard, tyler turned smith, had already— with the patience of his kind—suffered much. Provocation had at last produced a leader for the people who paid. His muscles were like whipcord and the hammer still in his hand. He swung it high above his head and it came down like God's vengeance out of the unsuspected shadows and split the tax collector's skull. Brains and blood spattered against the blackened post where de Vere had so lately lolled, and the ugly body slumped with no sound but a dull thud among the discarded horseshoes on the ground. Rose Hilliard would have gone down too in the ghastly embrace had not de Vere caught her as he was moving away towards his horse. He set her gently on a stool where she sat staring dazedly at a great splash of blood crimsoning the front of her bodice.
Silence held the forge, so recently alive with the clang of iron and warm, human voices. The immobility of actors in some tableau vivant held all present, arrested in whatever they were doing. The hirsute smith glaring without remorse at his victim; Henry Bolingbroke staring down with mildly surprised eyes at the lumpish thing which had so recently been a man; and Tom Mowbray, loosened from the last leading strings of childhood, trying not to avert his eyes from the first really toughening lesson of his manhood.
Holland, inured to such scenes of violence, glanced across at his half-brother with concern. He hoped to God the pampered youngster wouldn't faint or become hysterical like some of those idiot pages whim
pering in the background. Even in the red glow from the embers Richard's face showed white, and he moved aside fastidiously so that the sickening stream of blood should not touch his shoe. But he stood erect and gave no sign of what he felt. "He's gamer than I supposed," thought Holland, forcing himself out of the tenseness of the moment to take some sort of command.
"Your cursed horse is ready at last," he snapped at Bolingbroke, "so let's get out of here before there's a riot."
Before leaving, Henry Bolingbroke slipped a gold florin into the smith's slack hand. Wat's gaze shifted slowly to stare at it. It was payment enough to keep his family for months, but obviously he took in nothing of its value. His mind was still a consuming fire fed with the freshly perceived wrongs of his kind.
Drawn by a sense of catastrophe, the crowd had come closer and were craning over each other's shoulders to see what people were looking at on the ground. Something gruesome enough to divert their interest from a party of gentry resuming a journey. Particularly as their men-at-arms seemed far more anxious to get on their way than to mix themselves up with a local brawl. Let them depart to their fine houses in London or wherever they were going. And to ultimate perdition, no doubt...For had not John Ball just told them, with an inconsistency they were incapable of appreciating, that riches were a burden? "For verily I say unto you, it is as easy for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." They'd never seen a camel but no animal they had seen could do that—and it was written, he said, in the Holy Book. And if John Wycliffe got his way and had a printed Bible put in every church, anyone who knew how to read could see it for himself. As it was, of course, the priests read out only what suited them. And many of the priests were rich men themselves. Why, even the Archbishop of Canterbury had allowed himself to be made Chancellor, and the Prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem was Treasurer of England and had their hardearned savings in his hands…
Within the Hollow Crown Page 5
