The Bleeding Land

by Giles Kristian

  Tom roared at the night like a mad man. Like a wounded animal. The anger and the hate entwined, swelling and blooming inside him, threatening to consume his soul. It was hatred purer and blacker than anything he had ever known. And he let it devour him.

  Bess could not sleep. She never could when there was a full moon; tonight the moon was a sliver from full and still she could not sleep. She lay cocooned in linen beneath a heavy quilted coverlet stuffed with wool, listening to the mice scratching in the wall by her head and, beyond those walls, the occasional shiver of leaves and the creak of branches clenching in the freezing dark. She was aware of the faintest trembling deep in her own limbs, not because she was cold – she was warm enough – but an effect of the moonlight itself she believed. Its cold luminescence soaked through the window drapes, washing the bedchamber in a silver-white light. An otherworldly hue that revealed the room’s contents: the brass stick with its stub of candle and the jug of small beer on the bedside table. The chair at the foot of the bed festooned with clothes – linen coif, woollen cloak, smock, long purple skirt and her silk and lace bodice which sat stiffly against the chair’s back because of the bone strips in it. The moonlight burnished the dark chest of polished oak drawers upon which sat a washbasin and pitcher. On another table, beneath a sloping ceiling threaded with fine cracks, her precious things glowed dully: the enamelled gold brooch set with pearls that her mother had given her, the emerald ring from Emmanuel which was too big and needed altering, a child’s silver-plated hairbrush and an ivory box containing other cherished possessions.

  There was something about nights like this that put Bess’s nerves on edge, made her feel as though she were meant to be somewhere else – anywhere but lying in her bed listening to the mice in the walls. She was fitful, her muscles and sinews thrumming as though preparing for sudden flight. It was not fear as such, but rather a sense of belonging to the moonlit night. Of being drawn away from human habitation and comforts to the forests and the moors. Like a predator on the hunt for food.

  It was a sense that she should be searching for something. Or running from something?

  It did not help that Emmanuel was still away in Shevington a day’s ride east, where he was overseeing the rebuilding of the house they would live in once they were married. That old ruin would be full of mice and worse things besides, she thought grimly, for the manor had once belonged to Cockersand Abbey as far back as King Henry’s time. Before the dissolution. ‘That pile of rubble!’ Sir Francis had exclaimed when Emmanuel had first intimated his plan to purchase the manor and its outbuildings including a groundskeeper’s cottage and a half-collapsed cowshed. ‘That relic is older than Noah!’

  ‘But it is big, Sir Francis,’ Emmanuel had said with a sparkle in his eyes and a broad smile. And it was big. Huge in fact. And Emmanuel had promised Bess and Sir Francis that it would rival Shear House one day, when he took over his father’s business. James Bright was likely the richest cloth merchant in Lancashire, employing no fewer than two hundred spinners, weavers, fullers, shearmen and dyers. But James Bright was ailing, which would have been hard on his family and employees alike if he had not a vigorous, well-liked son to take over when death took him.

  ‘I shall be making five hundred pounds a year!’ Emmanuel had announced proudly, for he had but recently asked Sir Francis for Bess’s hand in marriage and still felt a little like a man on trial, so he had admitted to Bess. A feeling which, she suspected, her father did little to discourage.

  ‘It is a pile of dilapidation, decay, and disrepair,’ Sir Francis had announced to Emmanuel’s obvious disappointment, earning a reproachful glare from his wife. He had frowned, coughed, made a steeple of fingers, then said: ‘Still, I like a man with ambition. So long as it is coupled with good sense, of course.’

  But Bess knew her father had grown fond of Emmanuel Bright, whom she loved with all her heart, and even though they did not share a bed – wouldn’t until they were married – she missed him being under the same roof.

  Bess could not sleep and so she kicked off the coverlets and went over to the window, pulling back one of the drapes and putting herself between it and the glass as though to be closer to the night beyond. Her breath fogged the pane and she shivered now because the window was as cold as ice. The curtain’s old dusty smell smothered her as she stared out across Shear House’s frosty, moon-silvered grounds, her eyes ranging along the pebble-strewn drive that stretched off into a dark wood of birch and sweet chestnut. Her mind roamed further still, past the woods and the dovecote whose residents she imagined hunched and shivering and cooing softly, and up to the boundary wall with its iron gate guarded by two stone lions. But then something in the near distance caught her eye, some movement that made her start, a sudden intake of breath catching in her throat where it stayed as her senses prickled. She was suddenly aware of her own heartbeat hammering against the windowpane as her eyes strained to sift the moving shape from the surrounding landscape. It was a man on a horse, she realized, but whoever it was was avoiding the path. Instead the rider was making his way across the east lawn. So as not to be heard, Bess thought.

  Which did nothing to assuage the sense of creeping dread that was raising tiny bumps on her arms and legs and stiffening the hairs on the nape of her neck. She pressed a palm against the cold pane and part of her wanted to call out, to wake the sleeping household. To warn them. Another part of her, the part that thrummed whenever the moon was full, preferred to watch a little longer, relished seeing without being seen. This was the stronger instinct and so she stayed as still and quiet as death. Watching.

  But then the figure suddenly looked up, a sixth sense perhaps, and the moonlight revealed his face as his eyes locked with hers. Tom!

  Her brother put a finger to his lips and Bess felt herself nod. She watched him draw nearer, somewhere in the back of her mind wondering why the sight of him had not dispersed the dread feeling. Then she turned and fetched a cloak down from a hook, throwing it around her shoulders over her nightdress, shivering again from the sense of trepidation that gnawed and scrabbled in her guts like the mice in the walls. Carefully, she opened her bedchamber door and stole out into the corridor, then descended the stairs that she had crept down innumerable times as a young girl up to mischief with her brothers.

  There was just enough moonlight filtering past the thick drapes that she could see well enough without lighting one of the hall lamps, whose oily smell she feared would drift upstairs and wake someone. She knew Tom would be stabling Achilles and so she gingerly unbolted the main door, then went into the parlour, cringing as the door-hinges squeaked. Inside, sweet-smelling wood smoke still clotted the air, though the room was cold, in large part due to its having three sizeable windows. Bess took a candle from the mantel over the hearth and, with the poker, stirred the ashes of the fire which Isaac had banked before retiring to bed. When a flame licked up from the grey pile she lit the candle and carefully placed some kindling on the embers, hoping to dull the sharp frigid chill that filled the parlour, making her huff into cupped hands. And then, as the sticks quietly crackled and popped, she faced the door which she’d left slightly ajar, and waited.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BESS SENSED THAT Tom was not telling her everything. He spoke of taking Jacob to Lathom village to watch the bearbaiting that afternoon, and of how, when it was all but over, the boy had admitted following Martha to Baston House. He told her how Jacob had spied through the parlour window and seen his sister engaged in heated argument with Lord Denton. But Bess sensed there was more to that part of it, judging by the way Tom’s eyes had slid from hers towards the fire in that part of the telling. He admitted letting his rage get the better of him. Had confessed to riding full of fury to Baston House to confront William Denton and how he had hungered to cut William and Henry down with his sword.

  ‘I wanted to spill their blood, Bess,’ Tom growled in the shadows, the small hearth flames dappling his ravaged face with golden tongues. ‘I wanted to rip
their bastard guts out.’ That part was true enough, Bess knew, and she shuddered. ‘But his men came at me and there were too many. They beat me like a damned dog,’ he spat, the words laced with shame, and Bess knew that part was also true because his face was a bloody mess. Beneath his gore-tangled hair – usually fair but dark now and filthy – his right eye was swollen shut, the taut glistening skin already blackening. His lower lip was twice its normal size and split so that his beard was matted with blood and Bess had to stop herself wincing because it looked so painful.

  But he was keeping something back. She was certain of it. He spoke through a grimace, which was understandable given the pain he was in, and his anger. But at twenty-four Bess was proud of her elder sister’s intuition and there was more to the set of Tom’s bloody mouth than pain and gall. There was a sense of him checking the truth, holding it behind a barricade of teeth. And then there was the smell coming off him, of damp wool and urine, and Bess could have wept at the thought of her brother being so terrified that he had wet himself.

  Tom clenched his left fist and ground it into the cup of his right hand. Both were crusted in mud and drying blood. ‘He pissed on me, Bess,’ he said firmly, looking at his hands because he could not meet her eyes. Bess swallowed hard because she suddenly realized that younger brothers had intuition too and Tom had somehow known what she was thinking. The shameful admission had been preferable to her assumption.

  ‘Henry?’ Bess said, her stomach knotting. She was caught between pity and a swelling black rage.

  Tom shook his head and looked up into her eyes. ‘Lord Denton,’ he snarled.

  ‘Who would do such a thing? What kind of man could treat a person so? What kind of monster?’

  Tom did not answer that. ‘I’m going to kill him, Bess.’ The flitting flames were reflected in his one good eye and illuminated the ruin of the other, and Bess knew the right thing was to speak against such a declaration, to try to dissuade him from violent thoughts. But she also knew her brother and so she said nothing. He needed the promise of vengeance. He clings to it, she thought, like a floating timber from the wreck of this night.

  ‘Get out of those clothes,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch some water and we’ll clean you up. We mustn’t let Martha see you like this.’ She tried to smile but felt the strain in it. ‘You’ll scare her to death.’

  ‘I watched them hang my father, Bess,’ a soft voice said from the parlour’s doorway. ‘Do you still think me such a feeble thing?’ They both turned to see Martha standing at the threshold, a candle lamp flickering in the draughts and casting its weak light on her neck, chin and full lips but leaving her eyes in shadow.

  Tom simply stared at her, his ravaged face a dark scowl, and so Bess invited Martha into the room before they roused the rest of the household. If the others were not already awake.

  ‘Achilles woke me,’ Martha said with a slight nod towards a curtained window. ‘Not that I could sleep properly for wondering where you were. I knew you had not come home.’

  There followed a silence into which Martha clearly expected Tom to drop some explanation. But he had none. So Martha came into the room keeping, Bess noticed, a distance between herself and Tom. ‘What happened to you?’ Martha asked warily, raising the lamp to throw its small light on Tom’s swollen, bloodied face. ‘You’ve been fighting.’ Her tone was more anxious than accusing.

  ‘I did scant little of the fighting,’ Tom muttered, turning his face from Martha’s light so that his swollen right eye was in shadow. The sparse kindling was all but burnt out but Tom kept his face turned towards it anyway, watching the last small flames lick out every now and then. A mouse skittered across the floor in front of the hearth, disappearing into a crack at the foot of the north wall. Then a gust rattled a loose windowpane and moaned down the chimney, causing the flames to flare and seethe briefly before dying away. Bess felt a sudden desperate need to escape that room and its silence that deafened her with unspoken words.

  ‘I will go and get some water to clean your face,’ she said.

  Tom’s head snapped up. ‘No, Bess. Stay,’ he said, fixing her with his good eye. She noticed fresh blood at the split in his lip, though he did not lick it away. ‘I am sure you are as eager as I to hear why Martha went to see that bastard William Denton. Why she has cloaked herself in deceit and kept it from me.’

  Bess could not help but look at Martha whose eyes brimmed with tears. The hand holding the lamp was trembling, so that the small flame quivered.

  ‘Well, my love?’ Tom said, looking back towards the ashes glowing red in the grate. ‘Now would be a strange time to play the demure minister’s daughter, don’t you think?’

  ‘You are hurt,’ Bess said to Tom, reaching out to tug a small twig from her brother’s tangled hair. ‘Surely all this will wait until morning when we have looked to your injuries?’ She glanced at Martha and saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks now. ‘When we have all slept,’ she added, dropping the twig into the fireplace.

  ‘I went to Baston House,’ Martha began, taking a deep, tremulous breath, ‘because they had accused my father of popery and I hoped I might prevail on Lord Denton’s mercy. That he might intercede on my father’s behalf.’

  ‘That bastard does not know the meaning of mercy,’ Tom blurted. ‘You were a fool to suppose otherwise.’

  ‘I had at least to try,’ Martha said, looking to Bess for understanding. ‘What else could I do? Your father had turned his back on us.’

  ‘My father took you in! Jacob too,’ Tom snapped, glaring at Martha with his undamaged eye. The other was darkest purple now, glistening with tiny beads of sweat.

  ‘Hush, Tom, you will wake them,’ Bess hissed. Tom laughed at that and it was an empty, bitter sound. Martha seemed to shudder.

  ‘Let them wake,’ he seethed. ‘They should know that they have a whore under their roof. I know what you gave him,’ he said, a drop of blood trembling on his bottom lip.

  ‘Enough!’ Bess said, not wanting to hear any more. She felt like an interloper, as though to hear more was to know too much. But she also pitied Martha whatever the truth of it all, for the girl seemed . . . broken.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked Tom as he strode past Martha to the parlour door. He turned, the hurts etched in his face nothing against the agony in his good eye, and looked at Bess but not at Martha.

  ‘To rub Achilles down. I rode him hard and fear I’ve cut him.’ He grimaced. ‘None of this is his doing.’

  ‘Let Vincent do it in the morning,’ Bess said. ‘Dawn cannot be far away now.’

  ‘I will do it myself,’ Tom said, walking out.

  Martha looked unwell, her face chalk-white against her black hair. Bess feared the girl might collapse. She wanted to comfort her. She knew that with two steps she could put her arms around Martha and hold her, this poor girl who had seen her father killed, who had even heaved the ladder to make him fall. And that horror after some desperate and dark undertaking which Bess could only guess at but which she knew had been in vain. Some base and futile act which had cost Martha her honour and now, perhaps, her love.

  But Bess did not take those two steps. Instead she stood frozen to the spot, unable to offer anything of any worth except for her presence.

  Martha muttered something which Bess did not hear properly, nor did she dare ask the girl to repeat it, then Martha walked from the parlour, leaving her alone in the cold. Her breath plumed in the half light and only then in the true silence did her memory untangle Martha’s last words.

  ‘God forgive me,’ the minister’s daughter had said.

  The morning was crisp and clear and cold. A fleet of long, tendrillous clouds were being pushed southwards across the roof of the world, white ships in an ocean of brightest blue. Below them, but still way up, rooks tumbled and eddied in the icy gusts, their distant hoarse clamour reminding Mun of the cries of the hound pack in hollow, echoing woods. But those gathering in the forecourt of Shear House, stamping feet and huffing
into hands, were not hunting fox today.

  ‘She cannot have gone far,’ he said, putting his foot in the stirrup and hauling himself into the saddle. Hector nickered, greeting his master properly now that they were united as one mass of flesh and bone. ‘I’ll wager we’ll find her up in Gerard’s Wood, or if not there then gone to the village. But we’ll find her, Tom.’

  Tom said nothing. He had saddled Achilles and was now cinching the saddle girth, but the stallion was stomping his front hooves and puffing up his stomach in protest. ‘Don’t test me today, boy,’ Tom growled under his breath, patting the beast’s withers. Then, as soon as Achilles relaxed slightly, he yanked the girth tight and fastened the buckle, sliding a finger beneath the strap to make sure it was not too tight.

  ‘Mun is right,’ Bess said, ‘she just needed some time alone.’ Bess was mounted too and cocooned in a thick, hooded riding cloak against the chill. She clapped gloved hands together to warm them and her sorrel mare, Artemis, snorted loudly, her breath pluming in white clouds.

  ‘She needed to get away from me,’ Tom said sourly, mounting. Achilles snapped at his bit and screeched, ill-tempered at being ridden again so soon. ‘She’s out there in this damned cold because of me, Bess, and you know that is the truth of it.’

  ‘We’ll find her,’ Bess said, glancing at Mun as she echoed his words. Mun’s jaw ached, having set rigid at Bess’s telling of what the Dentons had done to Tom and then having seen with his own eyes his brother’s injuries. Mun swore to himself that those haughty bastards would pay for their actions. But first to find Martha and bring her home. Home to a cup of warm spiced wine and a roaring fire, Lady Mary had said whilst rounding up a search party.

  ‘At least it’s dry,’ Sir Francis announced from Priam’s back, looking up at the great swell of Parbold Hill rising into the blue behind Shear House. ‘And Martha’s a sensible lass. She won’t have gone off ill-dressed.’