Rhiannon

by Vicki Grove

  “I planted those willow sprigs two springs before my Maizie died.” Jim’s words were spiritless and heavy. “I thought they’d give over last year with the drought, but no, they came along, they did. Maizie so loved those willows, and I thought of her ever I looked at them. The cottage we lived in was small and nothing special, fit to be burned some might say, but those willows of Maizie’s . . .”

  Jim’s words petered out, and he just sat slumped upon his hard granite seat.

  “Look, Rhia, will you?” Daisy whispered, taking one of Rhiannon’s fingers.

  Rhia was too gloomed to do aught but give a glance to where Daisy pointed. Three robed men were leaving the church by its coffin door. One of them held a page of vellum with some writ, and they’d stopped to give instruction to four local peasants who were heaving a sledge of stone to the nether side of the building.

  “With so many priests at work, no wonder ill play’s afoot,” Granna muttered.

  Rhiannon saw her hard-eye one of them to emphasize her point, but then she looked quick away when he glanced in her direction. Even Granna was scared of a thing or two, such as fire in the roof thatch, brain fever caught from wild pigs, and churchmen.

  “Granna, you were right as rain when you spoke yesterday,” Rhia forced out, her chest all tight and raw. “Jim is forgotten as well as damned by his so-called friends. And now these churchmen have burned his cot and trees to make room for their fine stone buildings! They seem to have no care that their church will be made grander by the loss of all Jim had left in this whole world!”

  Then all of a sudden Rhiannon’s legs, with a life of their own, were pounding along hard through the stone dust, heading her right toward those fine clergy like a bull will run full-tilt at a marauder to his field!

  The robed priests turned toward her as she got near, seeing the shocked expressions of the local workers that already faced her way. For Rhiannon was flailing her arms like a berserker, though it wasn’t really hitting she wanted, unless she could have torn their heads clean off, which, of course, she’d not the strength for.

  She began to scream at all of them, clergy and workmen alike. “You fine religious with your stony church, will you be building it upon the bones of a brave man? Because you’ve kilt Jim’s large soul with your burning his cot, so you’d might as well have burnt his whole self while you were about it! He’s a just man who deserved not such ill treatment of his willow trees, one-legged though he be! Granna had warned of such a clear damning as this, though I would not believe it, and from God’s own clergy yet!”

  The dust was churned by her stomping feet and blown about by her whipping arms. She felt it settle on her face, gummed to angry tears she’d begun to spout.

  The workmen pretended not to notice any ruckus and fled on about their business, and the three clergy stood and looked at her with a calmness that made her even angrier.

  One even smiled in a chilly way and stretched his white hand in Rhia’s direction. “Stop, child,” he said. “You imperil your soul with such sacrilege, and you haven’t the wisdom or understanding to question such matters.”

  And then they put their backs to her and walked on, looking again at their writ.

  Rhiannon watched after them, too dizzy now to know what to do next. She dreaded turning back to Granna and the others, as she’d made such a certain fool of herself. Neither could she rush forward and be a nuisance to those clergy again, as her outlandish nerve for that was spent and she now felt only embarrassed misery.

  “Your Lord Claredemont told us that he burned only the useless cots of his tenants who’d died,” a quiet voice behind her spoke. “The space was cleared for our abbey garden, you see, as well as for a fish-pond to provide for a meager meal on fasting days.”

  She whirled toward the speaker and saw the brown-haired young priest she’d seen walking upon the beach, now standing framed inside the coffin door! He looked grave and puzzled, and was not smiling in the least at her foolishness.

  He came down the stair, and now stood in the sun. “Your Lord Claredemont’s brother was spared while fighting at King Henry’s side across the sea in Francia last year. In gratitude to God for his brother’s life and for the victory, your lord has become benefactor to a prior and six of us monks, all just this few days past arrived from Glastonbury Abbey. The earl’s given generous support, as well. With God’s grace we’ll expand your church here, taking it from wood to stone and building our priory buildings next to the site with a tithe barn across the road.” He leaned closer and whispered, “But say true, lady, were we mistold that this space was free and clear of other use?”

  Rhiannon could make no answering speech. She just dropped her eyes.

  His voice was troubled when he spoke again. “Our good abbot at Glastonbury saw chance in your lord’s largesse to establish a new cell for our order here in these hinterlands. We would bring to this place sustained prayer and hard work to further God’s kingdom, as set out in Saint Benedict’s Rule. But our brother abbot nor Benedict himself would have had a single man put out from his living.”

  “Thaddeus! Come straight along, now.”

  The young priest looked quickly at his elders. “I beg you pardon me,” he murmured to Rhiannon. With bent head, he hurried to join his three fellows.

  All agog so she could barely think, Rhiannon walked back to her own group.

  “Well done, Rhiannon!” Granna said, clapping her on the back.

  Mam’s reaction would be opposite, Rhia knew. She bent to Daisy and whispered words similar to those Granna oft used. “I lost my wits upon seeing those religious, and figured them liable for Jim’s burnt cot. No need to mention this to my mother, all right?”

  Daisy solemnly nodded, and Rhia moved close to Jim. “Lord Claredemont thought you’d died, Jim,” she said quietly. “He was surely mistold, or he would not have given leave for the vicar to destroy your cot and so besmirch your willowed toft.”

  Still staring at that smoky patch as though in a trance, Jim answered, “No, Rhiannon, it’s just the same by the law as if I had’ve died. I couldn’t give the lord his week-work now, and I have no son to take over. How could I stay tenant? I just wasn’t studying it right, ’tis all. Now I study it right, I wonder why I had other expectation.”

  He got up then, leaning hard upon his stick, and turned to hobble on, toward the morbid task awaiting all of them at the butcher shop table on the green.

  Rhiannon sadly took Daisy’s hand and made to follow close, but Granna clutched at her sleeve, stopping her.

  “Jim is now a homeless man,” Granna whispered. “He’s without a skill, friendless, near vagabond. The shame of that is not something he’ll want pressed with talk, so better give him a bit of space, Rhia.”

  And so they three just stood and sadly watched his halted progress along the muddy road. When finally they lost sight of him among the throng of townspeople moving toward the green, they moved along toward that place themselves.

  Chapter 6

  Beyond the churchyard, the cottages of Woethersly were strewn along all haphazard, each with its narrow strip of croft behind, leading back to a garden spot. Each also with a small toft in front of it, a patch of yard crowded with animal sheds and the like.

  The tofts were alive this day with skittery activity—children playing in the dirt by their stoops and gawking at all the passers, buzzards and gulls scavenging the rubbish heaps where wives had thrown peels and bones and duck innards, goats and cats and geese running into the cottages and back out, all flummoxed at so many people parading by. The milch cows in their byres watched as well, kicking their back feet at the confusion and rolling their large, bulging eyes. Porch dogs yapped and nipped at the skirts of the women, often earning a sharp kick in the ribs, which appeared not to discourage them from instantly resuming the same uncouth behavior.

  Rhiannon was edged to the ditch at one point by a packhorse piled high with bright cloths and led by a man with bristly gray whiskers to his waist. Many peopl
e walked in gangs and looked too swarthy, or elsewise too pale, to be from Woethersly. Around here folk, being farmers, were somewhat complected in the middle of at winter’s end. Rhia’s guess was that the swarthy were sailors, and the pale folk had come from some wooded settlement where the sun ne’er got through to them.

  “It’s fine weather after a bitter winter, giving people itchy feet,” Granna remarked, her eyes glistening. “Under such conditions, folk will make a fair of any excuse.”

  A black goat ran kicking through the street with a tortoise tied to his back. Three boys circled the terrified ride and the hapless rider, laughing and prodding at them with thorny sticks of hedge. An oxcart swerved around the commotion and nearly tipped, and the driver raised his own leather switch to the boys. They hightailed it.

  Daisy knelt in the dirt to go eye-to-eye with the poor tortoise, who was all shrunk with fright into his shell. Rhia untied the creature from its similarly terrified ride, and the goat shook his fleece, felt his freedom, and sped away to find his owner’s toft.

  “I’m keeping her,” Daisy whispered, wrapping the tortoise into her skirt. “Her name is . . . King Henry.”

  “Well, you can’t go around with your clothes to your waist,” Rhiannon scolded, yanking down Daisy’s skirt but catching the tortoise as it unfurled. “Here, I’ll make you a carrying pouch.”

  Rhia pulled off her light woolen shawl, which had become too warm for the bright day anyhow, and bent to work. “Since you say she’s a girl, why not name her after our queen instead?” she suggested. “Queen Matilda would make her an elegant name.”

  Their queen had died a year before, much the pity, and there was rumor the king would soon wed another. Still, the old queen, come partly from Saxon stock, had been dear to most everyone. Even Granna had had a good word or two to spare for her.

  Daisy clapped with delight at that idea. “Queen Tildy, for short!”

  “Rhiannon! Rhee! Over here!”

  Rhia jerked up her head and peered toward her good friend’s welcome voice. Maddy was with two of her mates from the lord’s dairy. The three were approaching from a distance, laughing as they elbowed through the crowd. Some group of uncouth men, rough cowherds or the like, stood watching them, smiling and nudging one another as they leaned together and drank from a jug.

  “Eyeing up young girls, will ye?” Granna said, rushing over to thump one of them on the head. “Off with ye, galloots! G’wan now about your business!” For good measure she added a shoo with her skirts, and they fled, the one rubbing his noggin.

  Rhia quickly nestled Queen Matilda into her new sling and draped it over Daisy’s shoulder, then she stood. “Granna, may I go with my friends for a bit?” She glanced down at Daisy in hopes Granna’d get her meaning, then quietly added, “I mean, alone? To catch up with the news and all?”

  Granna took Daisy’s hand. “Daisy can come meet my cronies at the ale booth,” she said. “And Rhia, you tell Maddy her blouse gapes too low for modesty. I’m surprised Lord Claredemont allows such from his maid-of-all-poultry.”

  “I will, Granna, and thanks!” Rhiannon waved good-bye to Daisy and set out, easing slowly and carefully through the press of folk, hoping she’d not lose sight of her pals.

  Far to her left, rising above the sea of heads and shoulders, she glimpsed the flowing pennant atop Lord Claredemont’s colorful pavilion. The lord oft had this fine silken shelter constructed to give himself and his family comfortable viewing when some tournament or race was staged on the manor grounds. But today, he’d lent the pavilion to be set up on the green, where it gave the butcher’s table shelter. Rhia supposed it would give shade to the body of the murdered man, and would also lend some privacy to the ritual, which by local custom should be witnessed only by God, the vicar, and the bailiff.

  Still, with its orange and green stripes, the pavilion struck Rhia as unseemly bright and cheerful for such grim work. A long line of people moved slowly toward that tent, where each must take a turn putting hands upon the corpse.

  Rhiannon shivered and felt no hurry. First, some fun.

  “Rhia! Come on, then!” Maddy stretched her arm through a gap in the crowd and grabbed Rhia’s wrist, and Rhia was well content to be pulled along.

  Maddy was a strong girl, bigger than Rhia and with far more nerve. She had no qualms at all about treading on the feet of others or barking rough orders when making her way, and so she maneuvered them through the roiling crowd, jabbing with her elbows at those who wouldn’t move and sometimes giving someone a little kick.

  Soon they reached the spot where Maddy’d left the other two to wait, and the four girls linked arms to keep from being separated. Giggling with freedom and good spirits, Nedra, Ginny, and Rhiannon left it to Maddy to blaze them a passage on toward less congested space where they could talk all at once and hear themselves as they were at it.

  Sometimes Rhia envied these three. Nedra and Ginny worked within the high-walled manor house complex just as Maddy did. They were two of Lord Claredemont’s dairy maids, and, as Granna had noted, though Maddy was only the orphaned daughter of local peasant farmers, she had nevertheless risen to the important job of maid-of-all-poultry. Her strength and bluster were put to good use in the job, as she was boss of the lazy young boys who carried in the firewood and mucked out the chicken yard.

  Rhia sometimes thought it hard, meeting your friends only on market days. When they’d all been little girls, Nedra and Ginny and Maddy had worked together as a gang in the fields. As farmers’ daughters they’d picked fruit, gathered rocks that might have stopped the plow within the furrows, brought home kindling for the fires, that sort of thing. Rhia’d met them all when she first came down to market with Mam when she was about Daisy’s age, and from then on they’d taught her their new games on the fly each time they met. Now, she imagined it would be fine living with your mates in the loft above the manor house kitchen in the center of all the world’s activity with no one to supervise you. Well, no mother or grandmother, that is, though these three claimed there were plenty of higher maids and housekeepers to make their lives miserable.

  They did not seem miserable, though. They seemed lively, always filled with the manor gossip, which they generally knew well before Lord Claredemont himself did. In fact, Nedra said it was not unusual for Lady Claredemont to wangle news from her under pretense of wandering through the manor kitchen to check the condition of the eggs collected of a morning and eve.

  “Maddy, where are we going?” Rhia called, suddenly realizing they’d left most of the crowd behind. She resisted a little, pulling back her arm, but Maddy showed no signs of slowing the pace she’d set for their little caravan of four.

  Rhia’s question triggered some alarm in Nedra and Ginny, too, and they came out of their complacent run and put on the brakes, each in her own way.

  “Oh no you don’t, Madeline Atwater!” Ginny yelled, skidding the heels of her slippers along in a vain attempt to slow things. “I see now what you’re about and by all things holy I swear that I am not going ever again to that demon-ridden place you fancy so much! Once was plenty too much and then some!”

  She withdrew her arm from Rhia’s and dropped behind.

  “Nor will I go, either!” Nedra screeched, dropping to her knees and yanking her arm from Maddy’s. “You’ve lost your wits, Maddy, to tempt the devil so! And you’ve no right to take Rhiannon all unsuspecting to share in your dangerous folly! Rhia, get free from this rash and stupid escapade before it’s too late!”

  Rhia looked back to see both Nedra and Ginny fallen behind, staring at her with fearful faces. But Maddy had Rhia’s arm clamped tighter within her own by then, and Rhia suspected she would not now slide free of such a muscled girl.

  Besides, she was plenty curious. Demon-ridden? Rash folly?

  “Where are we bent to in such a headlong rush, then, Maddy?” she yelled.

  “I’ve a grand surprise for you, that’s all!” Maddy called without slowing a whit.

  They
were on the far side of Woethersly by then, heading into the broad lawns of the north demesne of the manor grounds. That alarmed Rhia, as it was trespassing to enter the lord’s private lands—not so much for Maddy, being employed by Lord Claredemont and well able to make up some story should she be caught. But certainly for those with no business whatsoever there, like Rhiannon herself.

  Maddy turned them a sharp left when they reached the gated wall of the manor courtyard, and then they were running along a line of handsome yew trees, grown by the manor’s foresters for the fine arrows their branches made. Then next they were splashing right through the nether ford of the River Woether without so much as stopping to raise their skirts!

  “Maddy, what’s got into you to lead us in such a chase?” Rhia yelled, truly peeved by then. “I’m soaked, and I’ve rocks in my shoes!”

  “Would you complain about witnessing a wonder the likes of which the Roman Pope hisself would pay gold to see?” Maddy yelled back, neither stopping nor slowing.

  They ran up the rise beyond the ford and then passed close by the small hillock called Gallux Hump, this from the fact that criminals were hanged from a wide black oak that grew there. Should a vile murderer be discovered today, soon enough he or she would struggle and kick their last whilst adangle from that very same old bent tree.

  Rhiannon shivered at the thought, but she might better have focused her shivers on the equally dread sight that loomed in the distance straight ahead of them. For in fact they were barreling toward a perfect circle of tall and ancient trees that was ringed clear about by a high and crumbly stone wall. Indeed, ’twas Wythicopse Ring itself!

  Rhia’d never in her life come near this close to that eery circle of tree and stone, but like everyone in the manor, she’d heard of Wythicopse Ring all her life. Oh yes, all knew of it and steered clear of it. When the rest of the forest out here in the marshy land had been assarted, cleared to make the sheep more grazing, this stand of trees and its brambly wall had been left alone. These poplars were the finest in miles and would have built a church or else a stable worthy of the lord’s own horses.