Raider's Tide

by Maggie Prince

  Saint Hilda, my horse, is cropping thistles at the edge of the trees as I enter Barrow Wood. I stroke her nose and decide to leave her behind today. Walking will allow me more time for thought. I have a good nuncheon of cheese and bread in my sheepskin bag. I do not intend to hurry back.

  I follow the direct but strenuous route over the top of the hill, where flat, fissured limestone slabs alternate with patches of bracken. Herb Robert grows in crevices, and lady’s-slipper orchids tremble in the shade. I take off my boots. The stones are warm and smooth through my black linen stockings. I sit down on a rock to eat, looking out over the bay.

  This is not my best batch of bread ever. It emerged from the oven dark and bitter-tasting. I fear there was a mould in last year’s wheat, caused by the damp spring. Sometimes these moulds cause outbreaks of madness right across the north of England. We’ve tried all ways to keep the bitterness out of the bread, such as not letting the leaven stand too long, a week instead of a fortnight. Unfortunately, the resulting bread is then so hard that you could brain Scots with it.

  The mould tends to be worse in the barley and rye bread which the homesteaders make. I wonder sometimes how far the death-hunts and burnings which sometimes plague us round here are a result of these outbreaks of collective madness.

  The beacon is behind me, a raised stone hearth piled with wood and turf. I lean my back against it. A tinderbox lies in a covered cavity beneath it, with dried moss and tar-soaked rotten sticks for kindling. I gaze round me, sleepy in the warmth and stillness. The crown of the hill is like a monk’s skull, a white summit fringed by trees. There are still monks over the water at Cartmel, despite the old king’s wisdom in tearing down their dens of iniquity. Sometimes I wonder about the iniquity. Despite being impoverished themselves, the Cartmel monks give to the poor, and are also said to shelter fugitives.

  I look out across the distant curve of the bay to Gewhorn Head, where wolves still roam occasionally, and beyond, to the lakeland hills hidden in a smudge of mist. This is when James Sorrell appears. I don’t know which of us receives the bigger fright when his face materialises above the rock wall.

  “Beatie, whatever are you doing here?”

  “I’m on my way to meet my mother, James. For heaven’s sake, how do you manage to be so quiet? You frightened the life out of me. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s my turn on watch.” He sits down beside me, and looks at me in silence. James does not communicate well. His manners are often rough, and surprisingly for a landed farmer in our prosperous region of the north, he has never learned to read or write. I feel it is something to do with the fact that his father used to beat him half senseless when he was a child. We all knew it. I can remember my mother flying into a rage with the old man, and being shown briskly off the premises of Low Back Farm. Because James cannot read or write, Verity keeps his farm’s financial books for him, and as a result he has fallen in love with her.

  He takes off his leather jerkin. He smells of sweat and cattle. “I haven’t seen Verity lately,” he says. For some reason, perhaps because he knows I like him, James lives in the forlorn hope that I will help him obtain my fifteen-year-old sister’s hand in marriage. Nothing could be further from my mind.

  “She’s busy, James,” I answer, and pass him some bread and cheese to cheer him up. We sit in silence for a while. The world is very beautiful today. Below the rocky plateau on which we sit, on a level with our feet, young hazel leaves are curling out of their buds. High above us a hawk hovers. Trouble for someone. A hint of the strange feeling I had yesterday returns. I say, “You know, James, I feel as if we’re being watched.”

  “Aye?” He looks sceptical. “It’ll be the Green Man, I daresay.”

  I laugh. Now he is making me nervous. “No, nothing like that. I expect it’s just a deer watching us from the woods.”

  He smiles. “Well it’ll be the Green Man now. Speak and ye’ll see.”

  “Oh stop it, James.” I lean back, knowing he finds it amusing to frighten people, and wishing I had not started this conversation and given him the opportunity. There’s nothing on this sunlit hill to harm us. Except – a flicker of light westwards across the bay. I straighten and stare. James has seen it too. He sits forward. The flicker vanishes and is replaced by a thin line of smoke rising from the watchtower across the water. It is the warning beacon. The Scots are coming.

  Chapter 3

  I have a moment of simply not believing it. I think, this doesn’t happen. Three years without a raid have made me complacent.

  It makes me slow, slow to react, slow to get on my feet and grapple the tinderbox from its dry place under the beacon. James is faster. He is flinging dried moss and tarry sticks on to the pyre, poking them under the wood, pinching out little tendrils for me to light. I strike a shower of sparks into the moss. All of them go out. I strike again. A few sparks wriggle along the dry filaments and then they go out too. I strike again. The moss takes, bursts into flame. I light one of the tarry sticks from it, twisting it, giving it air, and then thrust it into the centre. A fragile line of smoke trails upwards. James picks up his jerkin and sways it back and forth to create a draught, not too hard, not too gently. He is good with fires. With a sigh, a rotten branch catches and sends up a puff of flame.

  “Best run now,” says James.

  I pull on my boots and ram the tinderbox back into its hole, then follow James across the clearing. We pick up speed when we leave the summit with its ankle-twisting fissures, and start a slithering rush downhill, leaving the path and taking the most direct route. Bracken and tiny treelets whip our ankles. We blunder between ash, hazel and juniper. Behind us the fire burns noisily. I stop and look back, and see the pointed flame flashing high then dipping low, surrounded by a black stream of smoke, shocking against the spring sky.

  All I can think is, where are the Scots? Are they coming across the bay at this moment? Are they here already, between me and the safety of the tower? They have been known to hide in the woods for days in some remoter parts, while villagers have gone about their business unawares. James and I both need to round up our livestock. We cannot take losses on the scale of three years ago, particularly as at the tower we have less gold and silver stored in the root cellar for buying new animals this year.

  In a good year, Verity goes to market in Lancaster in May with a bag of gold to buy cattle, and to Kendal in August with a bag of silver to buy sheep. I swear the other farmers and auctioneers are more afraid of her than they are of many a grown man. She controls our finances as well as James’s. She pays the men, oversees the weighing of the harvest, and, once, the thrashing of a farmhand who stole a bushel of wheat. Only once, because afterwards, as they untied the lad from the elder tree by the barmkin gate, she came into my room, sat down and headed a page in her accounts book Thefts. After that she let them steal, and the page in her book headed Thefts soon filled up with her pointed black script. Our father is a different matter, however, and our increasing success in keeping him off the highways has meant there’s less saved than in previous years.

  At last James and I emerge into the clearing. It is an overwhelming relief to see the tower still safe, a haven. “You’d better blow the horn, James,” I gasp as we make a dash across the open ground. He holds on to the hawthorn tree by the gatehouse, bent double, getting his breath back. I open the door and grab the battered ram’s-horn from its niche in the wall. James seizes it from me, and blows.

  The sound freezes in the air. It is like doom. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and legs. James keeps blowing, getting into his rhythm now, twice outside the main door towards the valley, then up the spiral stairway, once at each slit window. The effect is immediate. Kate’s screams echo up from the cellars. Thudding feet start running on the upper floors. Leo’s voice shouts in the valley, and the cows, under the thwack of his hazel tine, start bellowing. Whatever is the watchman doing? He must be asleep, not to have seen the warning smoke on the hill and over the water.

 
; He was. As James and I emerge on to the battlements he is rubbing his eyes and staggering about, his hair ruffled, and a smell of ale rising from him that could have ignited the beacon unaided. For a moment I feel mad with fury.

  “Henry!” I slap him hard across the face with the back of my hand, the one which wears Grandmother’s turquoise ring. It leaves a broad weal and breaks his skin. Tiny wells of blood rise along the mark. It also wakes him up.

  “Mis… Mistress Beatrice,” he splutters. “You’d no call to do that.”

  “The Scots are coming, you great boggart!” I hit him again for good measure with the tar torch, before I go to light it at the living-hall fire, one floor down. I can hear the combined braying of James’s horn and Kate’s screaming as I run down the steps and up again, carrying the roaring torch. By then my father, Verity, Kate and two henchmen, William and Martinus, have arrived on the battlements, and have begun stacking stones and arrows by the parapet. Kate’s screaming has dropped to a whimper now. She is terrified of the Scots, and of many things. Her nerves have never been the same since the day years ago when this tiny woman, with her wonderful singing voice, wild grey hair like a dandelion seed-head and a serious limp caused by stampeding cattle during a childhood Scottish raid, was accused of witchcraft. It was because she told fortunes, inaccurately it has to be said. She was also frequently accompanied by a black cat, mother of my cat Caesar. It was enough, for those looking for someone to blame for their own misfortunes. It was the old parson who accused her, from the pulpit one Sunday. Before the matter could get out of hand, as these things so often do, Mother stood up and faced him in the nave of the church and outquoted him text by text from the Bible, suggesting that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Or better still, eat it and choke for shame. I was astonished at my mother’s knowing, scornful voice, and at the sniggers that ran among the rows of people standing tense and motionless in the packed church. I didn’t understand what it all meant then, but heard tales later, when I was older, of this priest having a bastard in every village.

  The old parson, perhaps realising that if he had Kate hanged he would have no one to sing so beautifully at his weddings and funerals, not to mention the annual two-village barn dance at which the sight of him performing a Cumberland square reel with his cassock tucked into his hose was not unknown, marched out of church that day, and afterwards said no more of the matter.

  Witches hang and heretics burn, but there are fewer hangings and burnings under this queen than under the last one. Old people still speak fearfully of Queen Mary’s days. Bloody Mary, they call her. With the change of queen from Mary to Elizabeth the tide has turned from burning Protestants to burning Catholics. Burning those who disagree with you is a hard habit to shake off. We heard news recently of the burnings of some Catholics just a few hours’ ride south of us in Lancaster, but up here no one cares much what faith you follow so long as you are discreet. Witchcraft, of course, is another matter.

  Now the old priest is dead, replaced by a younger man who declares that witchcraft does not exist, heresy scarcely matters and that we had all better damn well love each other or he’ll know the reason why. He took over Verity’s and my lessons from the old parson. Sadly, these have stopped now that I am sixteen.

  I light my second beacon of the day. The tar barrels ignite at once with a huff of sound, and snarl like animals as they burn. I step down hurriedly as the heat hits me. Verity is handing out swords, bows and clubs, as more henchmen and Germaine appear at the top of the stairway. A grim air of calm hangs over us.

  Germaine refuses the bow which Verity offers her, and goes to fetch her own. Germaine is our only other female servant besides Kate. She is tall and dark and very beautiful, and plays a variety of musical instruments with a variety of lack of talent. She is supposed to teach music and needlework to Verity and myself, and do the mending. Instead she spends most of her time entertaining Father.

  I go downstairs with William and Henry to watch them lug our heavy old hagbut out of its cupboard on the east stairs and across the passage into the men’s common room. At Barrowbeck we cannot afford many firearms in the way that some of the bigger fortresses can. Our hagbut is inaccurate, slow to load and terrifyingly loud. Its eccentric angle of fire is such that it is more effective aimed from the common room, half way down the tower. When he was a young man, my father used to carry it into battle on his shoulder.

  The men latch the weapon on to its stand and tip it awkwardly backwards, like a cannon, for me to load. I uncap a horn of gunpowder and ram shot and gunpowder down the barrel, wadding it into place. “Better oil the hinges,” I suggest, extracting the ramrod and propping it by the wall for next time. I filter some fine gunpowder into the priming pan. “I’ll get you some lard from the kitchen. You need it to swing up more easily than that for reloading.” The acrid smell of gunpowder is in my nose and on my hands as I hurry downstairs.

  Now I am beginning to worry about Mother. Where is she? Is she still safely with Aunt Juniper, or is she in the woods on her way home? If the latter, then surely she will have heard the horn and seen the beacon, and will either hurry home or find somewhere to hide. Back on the battlements I work my way through the crowd to where Germaine is flexing her longbow. Most of us just have ordinary bows, but Germaine insists on using this six-foot monstrosity with its silk and flaxen string. I have to say, though, that she does tend to hit things with it.

  “Germaine?” I take care to be polite. “Would you please take charge of closing all the shutters, and later when we’re all in, wind down the grille on the door and open the wolf-pit? Can I just leave all those things to you? Oh, and please don’t forget to call ‘Wolf-pit open’. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to poor old Edmund.”

  She carries on flexing her bow, and replies, “You have an excessive amount of responsibility for one so young, Beatrice, and it has had a most unfortunate effect on you.”

  I turn away in irritation. Henry, who has re-emerged on to the battlements, overhears, and suppresses a grin. His face is still bleeding in a row of gleaming droplets. I am regretting my outburst of temper. I should like to apologise, but the words won’t quite come.

  “Henry.” I approach him. He looks minded to ignore me, but I stand in front of him. “Come with me, Henry. Let’s go and help Leo round up the cattle and bring the pigs up the hill.” I look round the full sweep of horizon. Smoke now rises from the Pike, and distantly from the direction of my cousins’ pele tower at Mere Point, as well as behind us on Beacon Hill, but of the raiders there is no sign.

  Chapter 4

  It is very quiet in the woods. The birds are silent and the squirrels and deer are nowhere to be seen. It is as if everyone and everything were waiting for the marauders to arrive. Yet by now, mid-afternoon of the following day, it seems almost certain that the beacon fire across the bay was a false alarm, a bush fire perhaps. It would not be the first time.

  In previous raids we have scarcely had time to get our cattle into the tower, let alone the sheep up into the woods. Surrounding homesteaders have not stood a chance, and their houses have been ripped bare of everything, then burned to the ground. Many of them have lost their lives defending their homes. At Barrowbeck Tower we are in a stronger position. Our thick walls protect us and we are excellent shots. We do not fight hand-to-hand, but shoot down arrows on the invaders, gavlockes with forked metal heads, or shafts with flaming tar-soaked rags bound to their tips.

  This time it has been possible to gather all the homesteaders, with their cattle, ponies, pigs and goats, into the lower rooms. The crush is terrible. The smell is worse. The silence of these woods is a relief after the dreadful racket of the animals. All I can hear now are my own footsteps, and the tinkle of the belwether as sheep wander in dense woodland.

  Our beacon is dying down, though it still throws out a ferocious heat in the afternoon sun. I am on my way to damp down and make safe the fire on Beacon Hill. I also have some slight hope of meeting Mother.
Mother looks after our dairy, and by now will be fretting about curds left to stand too long, and cream on the turn before it can be churned into butter, despite the coolness of its rock cave.

  I am too hot in my grey woollen gown. My byggen cap is sticking to my forehead. I rest for a moment, and from habit gather a few dry sticks to replenish the kindling on Beacon Hill. I have taken the less known path because it seems safer. Off to my left is an old hermit’s cottage in the hazel thicket. It is half overgrown with brambles since the hermit died of a quinsy last winter. I tell myself I could hide there, if the Scots came now.

  This way up Beacon Hill is hard going, overgrown through little use. When I reach the top the smoky air makes me cough. I rest a moment, then pile stones round the collapsed ashes of the fire, and shovel damp soil into the middle. We will prepare it ready for next time once the embers have cooled. A false twilight has spread across the valley and the bay, from the smoking fires, but the wind will soon clear it. On my way back down through the woods I feel a surge of cheerfulness. A distant brush-fire has taken a day from our lives, but no matter. Tonight all the beacons will die down, and tomorrow Mother will come home.

  As I emerge from the trees I do not notice, at first, the thin, dark line streaming down the far side of the valley. I am out into the open before I see them, careering between the windblown trees on the Pike, racing down the distant, pebble-strewn screes.

  It had seemed an impossible slope, almost vertical. They have never come that way before. I realise, all in a flash, that they must have been hiding up there on the Pike, waiting for us to relax, knowing they would not be expected from that direction because we thought the sheer screes protected us. How long have they been watching? Days, perhaps. The speed the steepness gives them is terrifying.