Guardsmen of the King: A Historical Adventure Novel (George Glen's Adventures Book 1)

by Richard Bergen

  "You are free of guilt, George," I suddenly heard my mother say. She was still tied to the bed. "I did it."

  I went to her and untied her while asking, "What are you saying?"

  "Listen, George! We don't have time to argue. Half the village is gathered out there, they know Martin is in here and they fear something has happened to him." She smiled slightly. "They may not be wrong about that. But they don't dare enter the house yet. Knowing those stupid, superstitious buggers, they'll be looking for someone to blame for Martin's death. I want you to live, George. If they're going to hang anyone for this, it's going to be me."

  "Mother!" said I, startled. "It wasn't our fault after all. If I hadn't killed him, he would have killed us both."

  A bitter laugh left her throat. "They don't care about that out there. Martin was a respected resident. Someone has to pay for his death. You hide under the bed, George. I'm going to leave now."

  She turned towards the door.

  "No, Mother!" said I firmly. "I'm going."

  Ethel looked at me and I suddenly recognised in her intense eyes a plea that was meant to me. "George," she said almost tearfully. "If you care for me, stay here and live! I can't become much after Martin's death anyway. It doesn't matter whether I die today or in twenty years. I have no fear of death at all."

  "Mother!", I groaned again, stunned. I was on the verge of tears.

  From outside, the screams grew louder. "If you don't come out now, Martin, we'll come in.

  "Goodbye, love!" said Ethel.

  I moved to her and it was the last time of my life that I hugged her and kissed her goodbye. Then she opened the door and faced the mob.

  I hid under the bed and heard the door open shortly afterwards and several men screaming in horror when they saw Martin's body.

  I heard my mother stammering something to the effect that she had no other choice and that otherwise he would have killed her. Outside in the street, a man shouted loudly: "She is a bloodthirsty murderer. She murdered her husband."

  The following minutes were some of the most terrifying of my life. At the end of the day, I can't say with certainty why I didn't go out and shout out the truth. I could say it was reason or respect for my mother's wishes, but deep down I think it was plain, simple cowardice; a cowardice I am ashamed of to the present day.

  So I heard the men removing Martin's body. Wild shouts could be heard outside, which became quieter and quieter the further the mob moved away from our house.

  I was left in the dark about what had happened to my mother. She disappeared from my sight and I never saw her again. It was not until twenty-eight years later that one of the villagers told me what had actually happened.

  Chapter 12

  "You murdered him, you fucking bitch," Robert, one of Martin's boozing buddies, shouted at my mother.

  The terror in Ethel's eyes grew. Although she had told me that she was not afraid of death, she now realised that this was a lie. She was trembling all over and unable to make a sound for several moments. Then she stammered helplessly: "But he wanted to kill me. What I did was the only way to keep him off my back."

  "You beheaded him as the headsman does a shabby thief," roared Robert, beside himself with rage. "He was one of my best friends. He did not deserve to have a woman take his life, especially not his own."

  Ethel's face was flooded with the salty water of her eyes and she sobbed, but nevertheless she managed to answer Robert. "Martin took me against my will, like I was just a piece of meat. He beat me constantly and today he even wanted to go so far as to snuff out my life light ..."

  "Shut up, bitch!" now Henry, the helmsman on Martin's boat, interrupted her. "If he took you against your will, it's all your fault. You promised to love and honour him until the end of your days. If you refuse him, don't be surprised if he takes harsher action."

  "But he would have killed me ..." sobbed Ethel softly.

  Robert completely ignored her unspoken plea. Calmly, he looked to his cronies and said in a gruff tone, "Take her to the place!"

  Ethel was brutally grabbed on the arms by rough male hands. She screamed and tried to fight her way free. Mortal fear had taken possession of her, for she knew the real meaning of the place. Surrounded by a roaring mob, my mother was dragged out of the village. Three men had lit torches to better illuminate the path ahead. The snow reflected the light of the fire in its own mysterious way. The more the group of a dozen men moved away from the village, the quieter and more silent they became. Each of them knew the history of the place and at the thought of it, the hearts of the strong men filled with fear. Only Robert, who had made the suggestion to visit this place, looked with grim pleasure towards the awaiting darkness.

  The crowd reached a small wood, close to the coast. Ancient oaks had formed a natural grove here, which was mostly cool and shady during the summer months, protecting them from the sun. But now, during this icy season, it just looked tremendously terrifying. The shadows of the huge trees danced under the light of the torches and the place opened up in front of the group. A boulder half buried in the snow formed the centre of the small clearing.

  "No!" cried Ethel, whose sudden recognition turned to breathless horror.

  "Yes, it is!" said Robert grimly. He looked at Ethel, who hung kicking between the strong arms of Henry and John. He moved closer to her until his dirty, fanatical face filled her entire field of vision. She felt fatally reminded of Martin's many rapes as he spoke now, blowing his fetid breath into her face.

  "You murderous shit of a bitch killed my best friend. You will pay for that," he said, filled with hatred. At that, he stepped out of her sight and gestured reverently at the boulder that rested heavy and porous in the sandy womb of the earth.

  "This is the place our ancestors often came to hold court," he said pathetically. "It was centuries ago, but the importance of this place is unmistakable. On this stone, in those days, murderers and thieves were delivered to the justice of the old gods. For a long, long time, no blood has flowed here. But that will change today."

  Ethel's eyes widened even more. She shrieked and kicked so heavily that another man had to come to hold her. Ethel knew this place. Even as a child, her brother had frightened her with haunted stories of this place. He had told her of barbaric executions, of blood that had soaked the earth around the stone for centuries. Maybe they were all just horror stories and this stone was nothing more than a lifeless rock in a forest clearing, but Ethel could not deny that it held an indescribably gruesome attraction.

  "You're such a liar, Robert!" she shouted. "No blood has ever been shed in this place. Those are just fairy tales that parents tell their children to frighten them." And when she saw the expressionless but knowing smiling face of Robert, her nerves got the better of her. "You fucking bastard!" she screeched. "You and that bloody bastard husband of mine have always been in this together. And now you want to fulfil the legacy he shouted out when he fell into hell. But even if you kill me, I swear to you ..."

  "Shut up, you filthy murderer!" shouted Robert. He turned to John and Henry and demanded, "On the stone with her!"

  The men lifted the kicking Ethel with a concerted effort and laid her backwards on the stone. John and Henry held her arms and Robert bent over her. His face was utterly expressionless. When he spoke, the voice was little more than a clear whisper. "This is what was done to our murderous ancestors. Their faces were turned to the night sky and they begged their gods for mercy for their sins and then ... then came redemption."

  At this, quite suddenly, the blade of the scythe swung into Ethel's view. Yes, it was clearly that scythe with which Martin had been killed a short time before. One of the men must have taken it with them as they left the village. Robert now looked from the sharp blade of the scythe to Ethel's neck and grinned wickedly. Despite his fanatical manner, Ethel thought she could detect sincere anger in his gaze. He believed he was acting right, she thought. He was not crazy or possessed by the devil. He actually believed he was doin
g the right thing by beheading her here.

  "You know what ending you're going to have, I hope, bitch?" breathed Robert into her ear.

  Ethel wept silently. Her life passed her by in shadowy fragments. Her childhood in her family's lousy cottage. Father's death in a storm. Mother, who died of grief a few days later. The powerlessness of being alone and having no one to give you food and shelter, and then Martin. His being raw and violent from the beginning and yet this promise that she would never have to sleep out in the cold. The torment on the wedding night, the beatings and the morbid jealousy. His words: 'I beat you so that other men will no longer find you beautiful. You should be grateful to me for keeping these guys off your back'. And then that stormy night, the injured stranger and his last gift.

  "George!" she stammered softly. Her eyes slid to the trees, as if I were lurking somewhere in the bushes, just waiting for the right moment to rush to her rescue. But I was not there. I was nowhere. She hoped nothing more at that moment than that I would come to save her, it was clear from the way she spoke my name.

  "George won't come to help you," Robert said softly. His face was no longer a fierce grimace. It looked calm and serious. He had his friend to revenge, nothing more, nothing less. As he looked at her now - exposed, helpless and full of fear - a wave of pity suddenly surged up inside him. But he was not allowed to feel this pity. She had killed Martin and she had to pay for it. So he countered the pity with another, more destructive emotion - with hate.

  Then he swung out quickly with the scythe. It whirled high into the air, moved by his strong arms, and crashed like lightning towards Ethel's graceful neck.

  The ground of the grove was covered with snow, as was the whole of the south of England. But, owing to the sheltered situation of the place, it lay far less high here than in other parts of the country. Favoured by this special circumstance, a tiny early bloomer had set out to break through the blanket of snow. The plant seemed to instinctively sense that winter was fading away and stretched out its petals, yearning for sunlight. But the soft green was erased from the face of the earth by a strong blast of dark red, steaming life.

  ***

  I crawled out of my hiding place after a bit more than an hour. The shouting of the villagers had died down. I heard two men running along in front of the house. One said, "Too bad it happened so quickly. I hardly saw anything." The other replied, " So what? The main thing is that she is dead. Whoever kills his husband deserves nothing else."

  These words confirmed to me what I had already assumed anyway. My mother was no longer alive.

  For a brief moment, I felt nothing at all. It was as if I had heard a trivial message that should not concern me further. Only slowly and fragmentarily did the reality dawn on me. I had beheaded my father and delivered my mother into the hands of the headsmen. In a terrible moment of reasoning, I understood that I had deserved to die for this, more cruelly and worse than any other person in the world.

  My thoughts suddenly turned to the future and I became painfully aware that I could never return to Lady Isabelle. Too much had happened. Too much horror was associated with Longhill. I had to get away from here. I had to leave my birthplace behind and I would never return here again, I swore to myself.

  Under the cover of the night, I walked away, leaving my bloody, dark childhood behind me once and for all.

  P A R T * T W O

  Club of the Wolves

  1623

  Chapter 13

  The brilliant light of the sun poured down the winding streets and alleys of London. An azure sky stretched over the sea of church spires and town houses, doing its bit to brighten the spirits of the people in the city. The streets were narrow and mostly overflowing with mountains of rubbish. Market barkers advertised their wares. Merchants went to worship with their better-dressed wives and children. Loud, rowdy sailors strolled the pubs, bawling unseemly songs at passers-by. The Thames was a busy place. The harbour was filled to the brim with merchant ships, their rich contents transported to daylight by cheap labourers. Within the city, the river was a veritable sewage pit. The people of London discharged all their waste into the waters and so it was that the Thames came into London as a clear, sparkling river and left it as a murky, fetid cesspool. The streets were also filled with stench as the filth from the houses ended up directly in the gutter. The sun's rays evaporated the sewage and ensured that in those unspeakable summer months an almost palpable, nauseating smell wafted around the heads of passers-by. In all this filth, the rich bourgeois and the spruced-up aristocrats were rarely to be seen. The bulk of the population was made up of those underprivileged people whose meagre wages were barely enough to live on. And even they were doing very well in contrast to the people who had nothing and had to live on the streets - and I was one of them.

  For two months now, I had been hanging around the metropolis on the Thames and it was the end of a journey that had lasted several years and that I had started after the death of my parents, back then when life had seemed bleak and senseless to me, back then when I would have preferred to pay for the death of my parents with the sacrifice of my own life. There had been nothing liberating about leaving Longhill that night, for I had not thought of adventures ahead, but only of the loss of my mother. I wondered day and night if she would still be alive if I hadn't killed my father and the more I thought about it, the more often I could answer that question with a 'yes'.

  I had been despondent and without drive during those days. I moved inland and when I had felt hungry, I had gone to a place where I could earn a meal as a field labourer. I had rapidly lost weight and soon resembled a ghostly skeleton. Only my body had remained in reality, preoccupied with the issues of survival. My spirit I had left behind in the past. I thought often of Isabelle and her French lessons, and in doing so I gradually realised how much I had really lost when I had slain my father. The future I had associated with Isabelle and the trip to France had been wiped away like a dream. The world around me had done nothing to change my mind. Violence and murder had been the order of the day in the villages. I had constantly met peasants who had fled to the cities with their belongings. They explained to me that their land and houses had been taken away from them and they had been driven out. The landowners needed the land for grazing their flocks of sheep and the peasants' farming was in their way. Without further ado, they were robbed and driven out. Armed horsemen could be seen everywhere, enforcing the landowners' interests with iron force. If a peasant killed a sheep out of hunger to eat the meat and was unlucky enough to be caught, he was executed on the spot. Theft and begging were punishable by flogging and branding.

  Yes, those were hard times, and soon even I, the vagrant, no longer had a chance to earn some money working in the fields, because there were hardly any fields left. The lands were largely enclosed and guarded by hedges and fences. A sheep was worth ten times as much as a human being. A beggar I had met had told me it was because the price of sheep's wool cloth had risen tremendously. So the landowners were committing these atrocities out of simple greed.

  Driven by hunger, I finally set out to find a town. I wondered which way to turn and found the answer in the past. John, Isabelle's stableman, had been going on and on about London, its grandeur, its crowds, its nobly dressed ladies and its magnificent carriages. That's where I would go. I turned east and wondered my way for weeks until finally I stood at the gates of the city and let myself be sucked in by the throng of passers-by. Oh, how I had loved those days. Everything around me had been so completely new and strange. The tall buildings, the magnificent churches and the throng of people. Filled with awe, I strode through the streets. Very soon, however, I had to realise that there were hardly any opportunities for a boy of my age to get work, for I was far from being the only newcomer. The displaced peasants I reported on preferred to go to big cities to start a new life. However, all work opportunities were soon gone and the men and women who had tilled their fields some time ago were gradually forced to steal, rob an
d beg. For this reason, the streets were crowded with poor riffraff. The king, however, wanted to ensure peace on the streets. So patrols of soldiers roamed the streets day and night to stop robberies, thefts and begging. Anyone caught in the act was liable to severe punishment out of all proportion to the seriousness of the crime committed. The outcasts called this procedure blood laws, and the term was by no means an understatement.

  I had now taken up residence in the docklands of London. My dwelling was a small boat lying keel up on land. The planks were full of holes, so I assumed that this boat would never be used again. So at night I slept under it, because it made an excellent shelter from the rain, if there was any. During the day, I wandered around the alleys, looking for - how do I put it best - opportunities. And there was never a shortage of opportunities in London.

  I was currently sitting next to a wine cellar on one of the parked barrels, watching the customers fleeing the midday heat into the shady comfort of the pub. They were mostly half-decently dressed men. They did not look wealthy, but they had enough money to afford a glass of cheap booze.

  On the first floor of the half-timbered house that rose above the cellar was a well-attended inn. The smells of roasting meat penetrated my nose and made my empty stomach start to growl unwillingly. I couldn't say for sure when I had last eaten, but it was definitely more than two days ago. I felt weak and drained, but my brain was still working well and it told me that food waste was always to be found near inns. I left my seat and crept to the back of the building. And indeed, here the tantalising smells of roasting were even more intensely perceptible. They almost robbed me of my sanity. My mouth watered and I could almost imagine the taste of the meat. A window at the back of the house gave me a glimpse into the kitchen. I saw several men engaged in the tasks of seasoning and tasting over huge cooking pots. In an oblong pan I could make out several crispy chicken livers simmering in the drippings and further back in the room I caught sight of a small hearth fire over which a young journeyman was turning a skewered piglet. I had to summon all my willpower not to rush into the room like a madman and snatch everything edible. I urged myself to inner calm and looked around the backyard. Apparently this place served as a storage space for all kinds of junk. An old, broken washing trough lay here next to a broken wagon wheel and an odd, open wooden box was in the back of the small yard. I wondered what this box was for and was startled when I suddenly heard a rumbling, snarling sound that repeated itself rhythmically. I approached cautiously and peered inside through the open front. I felt as if I were looking into the lair of a dragon. I recognised two heavy paws covered in shaggy fur and the tip of an elongated snout. It was an immensely large specimen of the dog genus. One look at the knife-like claws made a cold sweat break out on me and I was glad he was asleep. With calm movements I moved away from the monster, afraid to breathe for fear of waking him up. Usually I wasn't afraid of dogs, but I didn't feel comfortable with this wolf-like animal in his hut. And anyway: who actually built a small house for his dog? Had the world gone completely mad?