by David Gilman
‘What charge?’
‘Rape and murder of Sarah Flaxley.’
Blackstone felt his stomach lurch. His face betrayed nothing.
‘He’s done nothing wrong. There’s no need for us to run. Thank you for your warning,’ said Blackstone, laying down the cut firewood next to the front door.
‘Christ, Thomas, I know his lordship would not want any harm to befall your brother. You’re his keeper, and his lordship has always looked kindly on you both since your father’s death, but you will be held equally responsible. You will hang with him.’
‘Is your cousin still seeking to farm here? It would be convenient if Richard and I took to the hills as fugitives. Our ten acres would suit him.’
Chandler was stung by the truth of the accusation. ‘You’re a fool! Lord Marldon can’t protect you from this.’
‘My lord has always said a man has nothing to fear if he is innocent.’
Chandler pulled the reins free from the post and climbed into the saddle.
‘You remember Henry Drayman?’
A man disliked across half a dozen villages in the county. A brute of a man in his twenties who would gamble for any easy victory, be it cock-fight or throw of dice. Blackstone’s brother had repeatedly beaten him in archery competitions, but Drayman’s humiliation had been complete this past Easter when Richard had beaten the older man in the wrestling contest. Bested by a boy nearly ten years his junior, he had sworn revenge, and now, somehow, he was inflicting it.
‘Your freak of nature brother will be on the end of a rope by tomorrow. He’ll bray in terror. The dumb bastard.’
Blackstone took a step forward and effortlessly grabbed the horse’s reins. He twisted them, trapping Chandler’s hands in a leather burn. The man winced.
‘I respect your office, Master Chandler. You serve his lordship with diligence, but I would beg you to assure him that neither I nor my brother have brought any shame to his great name.’
He released his grip. Chandler turned the horse away.
‘They caught Drayman with her ribbons. Her body was found in her father’s cornfield. That’s where you used to take her, isn’t it? And your brother? Christ, the whole damned village fornicated with her, but Drayman turned approver before they hanged him yesterday.’
Blackstone knew there could be no escape from the sheriff’s court now. A man condemned to death could accuse his enemies by way of appeal – of implicating another in his crime by approval. Torture was illegal under King Edward III, but those with the power and authority of local law enforcement would never shy away from using it to secure a confession. After a week tied naked to a stake, soiled by his own waste, starved of food and denied water, the beating at the hands of the sheriff’s men had finally broken Drayman’s mind and loosened his tongue. His life was forfeit, but sufficient cunning still lingered behind the pain and suffering. He would leave this world taking another with him. An enemy. The one who had humiliated him; whose name was etched into his heart as if the stonemason himself had chiselled it there.
Chandler smiled. ‘The price of wool is going up. My cousin will have his sheep on your land in a week.’
He spurred the horse away.
Woodsmoke trapped by the mist snaked away, searching for its escape. There was none. Blackstone knew the dead man had wreaked his revenge. The sound of horse’s hooves clattered towards him.
It was too late to run.
*
Blackstone had time to warn his brother not to resist the armed men who came to arrest them. The boy made a guttural groaning sound, his way of confirming his understanding. His brother and guardian was the only source of comfort the deaf-mute boy had had in his life. He was little more than a beast of burden to anyone else and the butt of practical jokes and torment. Were it not for Thomas, Richard Blackstone could have used his strength to fight and kill his tormentors. The boy’s size and that great square skull with nothing more than a down-like covering confirmed to everyone in the surrounding villages that the boy was indeed a freak of nature. His crooked jaw gave his face a permanent idiot grin.
They had cut his mother open to lift the child from her and she was dead within hours from the loss of blood. A huge child at birth, he uttered no cry and showed no sign of reaction to the torchlight being crossed in front of his face. The village midwife who helped Annie Blackstone bring this hulking creature into the world said that the silent, mouthing infant should be left in the cold night air to die. Tortured by the loss of his wife, Henry Blackstone agreed. He already had a two-year-old infant to care for. This monstrous baby would be left to nature. It was a bitter wind that blew from the east that autumn of 1332. The barley crop had failed again, the drought suffocated the land and cold air settled at night into an unseasonable frost to cramp a man’s starving body. By midnight the moon’s glow illuminated the sparkling ground. The abandoned child’s father walked out to the corn stubble and found his son still alive. A ring around the moon shimmered, a sign of heavenly marriage between sky and earth, and Henry Blackstone lifted the child from the cold ground. His wife had taught the warrior that tenderness would not weaken him, and her love had weaned him from the brutality of war. He lifted the cold body and held it close to his naked chest, wrapping it in a blanket and settling more logs on the fire.
It was his child. It had a right to life.
*
The sheriff’s men took the brothers, tied and manacled in the back of a cart, through the hamlets and villages to the market town. The iron-rimmed wheels rumbled across the rutted marketplace towards the town’s prison cells, past Drayman’s body dangling from the gibbet. The crows had already taken his eyes and the pecked flesh was down to the bone in places. His tongue had been torn away by voracious beaks.
The soldiers threw the brothers into wooden cages in the coldest corner of the sheriff’s courtyard where the sun’s warmth could not penetrate. The boy muttered an almost animal-like whimper, a question to his brother.
Over the years Blackstone and his father had developed a means of communicating with the blighted sibling by using simple gestures to calm and explain events. Where he should go, what he should do, and why strangers stared and children tugged his shirt. The local villagers had ceased tormenting him when the novelty wore off and the boy’s strength and skill with a bow became apparent at the county fairs. They might call him the village idiot, but he was their village idiot and he brought victory. They lived in hovels, died young through disease, hard work and war – but Richard Blackstone, the freak child, gave them with his success the only status they would know.
There was no dulled intelligence inside the lumbering boy; his eyes and brain were as sharp as a bodkin arrowhead. The fact that he was trapped in silence was no indication that his mind was disabled as well as his speech and hearing. He kept a constant watch on his older brother and took guidance from his instructions, which was why he always walked a pace behind Blackstone’s left shoulder.
Now he endured the guard’s taunts as they jabbed their spears through the bars, forcing him into the corner of the cage, but he could not escape the man who urinated over him as he cowered back from the spear points. He could see Thomas’s face contorting in anger as he gripped the bars, his teeth bared.
‘Leave him alone, you bastards!’ Blackstone yelled and earned a blow from the dull end of a spear shaft.
However, there was little sport to be had from tormenting the creature and the guards soon went back to their posts. The piss-stinking boy looked to his brother and understood the look of anguish on his face, and his helplessness. Richard’s crippled jaw opened into a wider smile. These events were nothing new. He dropped his hose and bared his arse in contempt for his gaolers.
Thomas Blackstone laughed.
*
‘You’ve got yourself in a shit pit and there’s not much I, or his lordship, can do to save your neck from the gibbet. The court sits today,’ said Lord Marldon’s man-at-arms Sir Gilbert Killbere. ‘You know as wel
l as I do your brother spent more time quill-dipping Sarah Flaxley than most anyone else in the damned county.’ Sir Gilbert stood outside the cages. ‘I’m here to exert what influence there is, but his lordship won’t pay the sheriff’s bail – bribe more like – for your release and I dare say you haven’t got two pennies to rub together.’
Sir Gilbert tugged his belt and scabbard further round his hip, pulling his padded jacket tighter, which emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. He was almost as tall as Blackstone, but the soldier lacked the boy’s handsome features, not that he would have it any other way – Sir Gilbert’s pock-marked face added to his fearsome reputation. At thirty-six he was known for his skill with the sword and the lance and there would be no man willing to challenge him for speaking to the prisoners without the sheriff’s permission. Which he did not have.
Blackstone shook his head. ‘My brother is innocent. He didn’t kill Sarah Flaxley, you know that, Sir Gilbert.’
‘Henry Drayman told the court your brother was with him when he killed her. For God’s sake, boy! Don’t be so damned naive. He turned approver, that’s all there is to it. Justice is nothing to do with innocence; it’s to do with finding someone guilty for the crime. It doesn’t matter who it is. His lordship is aggrieved; the south wall needs finishing and here you are rotting in the sheriff’s gaol while you could be cutting stone. And there are other matters that don’t concern you – yet. You’ve been here a week and I’ve been dragged from my duties elsewhere. You’re a bloody inconvenience.’
‘I’m sorry, Sir Gilbert. I know you were rent collecting for his lordship.’
‘Sitting on my arse behind a table – and don’t think I’ll thank you for relieving me from that, or from listening to every excuse under the sun why scab-ridden peasants like you don’t pay what is owed.’
‘I’m a free man, Sir Gilbert. I’m sorry if that is an inconvenience.’ Blackstone chanced a smile. The knight had known his father and, with Lord Marldon, they had fought together in the Scottish wars.
‘Aye, you’ll have a different smile on your face when that rope tightens around your neck before the day is through. Christ, your brother must have shafted his arrow more times than I care to think. How often did the girl’s father pay leyrwite?’ he asked, referring to the fine – some called it a tax – levied by the local lord or abbot on poor women deemed guilty of fornication. ‘You train a dog by thrashing it. He didn’t wield the stick enough on the bitch. The whole damned county knew she was a whore – and you and your brother paid her.’
‘Can you help us, Sir Gilbert?’
Sir Gilbert shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Rape and murder. You being free men in Lord Marldon’s domain gives his enemies a chance to poke him in the eye. Sweet Jesus, it’s hardly the loss of revenue from the whore, is it?’
‘My brother beat Drayman at the Easter fair. That’s all this is about. He doesn’t deserve to die for that.’
‘You’re his keeper. You’ll be held as responsible. I might be able to save you, but not him. Christ, they’d have him in a bull pit and set the dogs on him if they could. Hanging is a merciful end.’
Half a dozen guards approached; they were taking no chances with the hulking boy.
‘They’re wanted, Sir Gilbert,’ one of the front men said.
Sir Gilbert half turned. ‘Wait, I’m not finished yet.’
The guard was about to say something but thought better of it when the knight glared at him. Sir Gilbert turned his attention back to Blackstone.
‘Can you read?’
‘Sir Gilbert?’
‘You’ve served a damned apprenticeship since you were seven; your father paid good money for it. They must have taught you to read.’
How many written words could Blackstone remember? He understood geometry more than any written explanation, but had had little use for reading. He needed only a good eye, a plumb line and a skilled pair of hands to chisel stone.
‘A little,’ he said.
‘Did the cleric at the school teach you nothing when you were a child?’
The village school had taught him to write his name and a few letters. Work was more important than learning.
Blackstone shook his head.
‘Sweet Jesus! What a waste of time.’ Sir Gilbert kicked the bars of the cage in frustration. ‘Had your mother lived she would have given you some learning. I can’t help you. I’ll speak for you and your grunting brother.’
Blackstone had prayed that Sir Gilbert’s presence was a sign of hope, but now he realized that he and his brother would most likely be choking to death, kicking to the amusement of the crowd, before the sun climbed higher than the prison’s turret. The knight nodded at the soldiers and stepped back as the brothers were roughly pulled from the cages, then prodded and kicked towards the sheriff’s tourn – the circuit court that dealt with serious cases, bringing the judges to the county, keen to clear any backlog of felons so that the gaols could be emptied. Leniency was seldom recorded in the court records.
As the brothers ducked beneath the arched doorway they saw two soldiers leading away a girl no older than ten. The one soldier laughed and turned to the other. ‘They dance longer at the end of rope when they’re this small.’
The child looked bewildered but allowed herself to be taken towards the town square and the decaying remains of the man still hanging from the gibbet. Blackstone felt a pang of remorse for her – more than for himself and his brother.
‘What did she do?’ he heard himself ask. Hanging was a common enough occurrence, though he and his brother saw little of it in the village, and the guard seemed surprised that he had even bothered to ask.
‘Stole a piece of lace from her mistress,’ he said, and shoved the brothers forward into the courtroom.
*
The usual mockery directed at Blackstone’s brother took up the first few minutes of the trial. That the grunting, incoherent creature in the shape of the accused was an affront to the good people of the county and that allowing such a dangerous beast loose on unsuspecting people constituted a public danger. Furthermore the responsibility for control of such a beast lay at the door of Thomas Blackstone. And as a man would be punished for the behaviour of his wife, she being his chattel, so too was this creature’s keeper responsible for the crime against Sarah Flaxley.
It was little more than a monologue of condemnation and insult and would serve only to be noted on the court record as the reason for the brothers’ execution.
The judge looked around the crowded room. It was to be a busy day with more than a dozen cases to hear – and after ridding this town of its felons he had to move on to the next county. ‘Does anyone speak for the accused?’
Sir Gilbert pushed forward. ‘I am Sir Gilbert Killbere, these are free men from the village of Sedley, which lies within the estates of my Lord Ralph Marldon. I have been instructed to inform this court that these are valued men to his lordship and he has no desire to see them punished from the approval of a turd such as Drayman.’
The judge could be bribed or threatened but it was not Lord Marldon’s place to do so, and everyone knew Sir Gilbert was a poor knight and held his position through his loyalty and fighting skills.
‘There is no evidence to suggest that this creature was not involved,’ the judge said, knowing the sheriff had tried bribery and been refused, so there was no chance that the larger amount that he would demand to dismiss the case would be forthcoming. Bribery and extortion were common practice for those exercising the Common Law. Whether it involved a judge, a bailiff or a gaoler, at every tier of justice money could save your life. How often had a sheriff had a condemned man approve the sheriff’s own enemies and then extort money from them for their lives? Sir Gilbert’s appearance was purely to make Lord Marldon’s standing appear more kindly to his tenants. He offered no means to buy the prisoners’ necks.
‘Is there any just cause why they should not hang?’ the judge asked Sir Gilbert.
‘You’l
l know of the proclamation for every man with an acre or more and who earns more than five pounds a year to provide an archer for the King’s intended campaign,’ said Sir Gilbert. He looked at Blackstone, whose head tilted quickly, looking at the knight. It was the first he had heard of it. A town crier would not have visited hamlets and villages, and any written proclamation would have gone unread unless a village cleric translated, and Sedley’s cleric was on a pilgrimage to the Pope in Avignon, and had probably been waylaid at Calais by the nearest brothel. Was Sir Gilbert using the proclamation as a means of saving them?
‘These are free men. They are not bonded to his lordship, but my lord needs men-at-arms and archers to answer the King’s writ to raise an army. Thomas Blackstone is an apprenticed stonemason and earns five shillings a year. That, with his wool and crops, brings him to the required amount. His duty is clear. His life is needed by the King,’ Sir Gilbert said.
‘There are sufficient archers and hobelars in the region to satisfy the King’s demands. I see no reason to offer him a village idiot who, by his very presence, would be an affront to His Highness. If that is the only defence it is denied.’
Sir Gilbert was not about to be cut down by a warty, pot-bellied judge, living fat from bribes and authority. ‘The boy is no idiot. He’s worked in a quarry all his life, he has greater strength than many grown men, and his skills as an archer are well known in three counties. It would please the King to see his skill put to good use in killing the enemies of the realm.’
The judge pointed a stubby finger at Sir Gilbert. Men-at-arms had caused him many a grievance over his years as a judge. Fighting men familiar with rape and looting on campaign often burgled and murdered at home. He would hang as many as came his way. This one was dangerous. He knew about Sir Gilbert’s violent reputation and fighting skills, and wished there was a felony in place for which he too could be charged. ‘The five pounds law is from the land holding alone. The fool earns nothing – he is a kept beast used for quarry work, as you have admitted. His fornication with the girl is well known. His life is forfeit.’
