New Blood From Old Bones

by Sheila Radley

  Will stopped in his walk, and turned to look at his godfather. ‘The King is known to be terrible in his anger,’ he said soberly.

  ‘When his patience is exhausted, I think he will let no one – not

  even His Holiness the Pope – stand in his way.’

  Anxious for further discussion, Lawrence Throssell tried to persuade his godson to linger. But Will was eager to return to the castle and see his daughter again.

  There was none of the usual farmstead noise and bustle within the castle walls for most of the servants had gone to enjoy the holiday. As soon as he rode through the gatehouse he spied Betsy’s little white-capped head bobbing about on the far side of the herb garden, but she did not notice his arrival. Dismounting, he walked towards her and took her – without intention – by surprise. One of the many cats, harboured in the castle against vermin, came loping out from behind an overgrown lavender bush and Betsy ran laughing after it.

  Glad to see her happiness, Will bent and held out his hands to catch her. But the child was so dismayed by the reappearance of the tall stranger who was said to be her father that she stopped in mid-run, as though caught in wrong-doing. And there for a moment she remained frozen, her eyes big with alarm, her mouth silently open, her small hands splayed like starfish.

  Trying to put her at her ease, he went down on his haunches to match her height. But the nearness of his face alarmed Betsy more, and she herself promptly squatted, her gown crumpled on the ground, her head low, one plump finger absorbedly making lines in the dust.

  ‘’Tis allowed to laugh and run,’ he assured her. ‘I like to see you do it. Your Aunt Meg,’ he added, in some desperation to obtain a response, ‘always laughed and ran when she was a girl.’

  Betsy responded immediately. She said nothing, but raised her head and looked at him in total disbelief, clearly convinced that her aunt could never have been a child.

  Perplexed, Will cast about for some topic of mutual interest. His eye fell on one of the cats, a battle-scarred black hunter now dozing in retirement under a bush of marjoram.

  ‘There’s an old friend of mine,’ he said. ‘I called him Jasper. Is that his name still?’

  Betsy nodded. Emboldened by the stranger’s acquaintance with the animal, she rose to her feet. ‘Jasper will scratch if you touch him,’ she said, evidently passing on a warning she had been given.

  ‘So he will, for he’s now old and disagreeable. But what of that pretty grey-striped Cyprus cat – who is she?’

  His daughter beamed, her pink-cheeked face now confidently on a level with his. ‘Tabitha,’ she said.

  ‘A most suitable name,’ Will agreed. Then, ‘Aha! What young vagabond have we here?’

  He reached out and scooped up a passing kitten, its fur the colour of apricots, and held it up on the palm of his hand. The little creature, its round eyes still a pale blue, peered at him apprehensively.

  ‘Now I have you, sirrah!’ Will made his voice gruff. ‘Tell me your name at once, and what business you have in this parish, or I’ll report you to the constable!’

  Her shyness quite forgotten, Betsy stood chuckling at her father’s knee. ‘’Tis Watkin,’ she said. ‘He’s not a vagabond, he lives here! He’ll be a mouser when he’s grown.’

  ‘When he’s grown, hey? A fine excuse for idleness!’ said Will sternly. He addressed his captive again: ‘The constable will charge you, sirrah, with being a sturdy beggar, for though you are able-bodied you make no attempt to earn. The magistrate will have you set in the stocks for it, there to remain for three days and nights on a diet of bread and water. What say you to that?’

  The kitten mewed a protest. Betsy, beside herself with laughter, hugged her father’s knee. But their pastime was interrupted by a hurried and anxious Dame Meg Morston.

  ‘There you are, Will! Go to your nurse, child.’

  He nodded confirmation to his daughter. ‘Go, Betsy,’ he said, pouring the kitten off his hand into her arms. Then he stood up with a grimace, for his wounded leg had stiffened while he crouched.

  ‘What is it, Meg?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ scolded his sister. ‘One of the servants is back from the town, with news that the body you found is that of a Castleacre man! Is it – is it the prior’s bailiff?’

  Her eyes were apprehensive, and Will sought to reassure her. There would be time enough for anxiety if Ned Pye were to return without having found the man.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and rallied her with a small shake. ‘Come, Meg! When did you ever believe the rumours that Castleacre folk call “news”? In truth, the body from the river is beyond recognition. He could have travelled here from anywhere. He’ll be buried unknown, when Justice Throssell is assured that every man of this parish can be accounted for. As for Walter Bostock, his wife tells me that he’s over at Bromholm priory for the Michaelmas reckoning.’

  Relief smoothed Meg’s forehead. ‘Thank God – I truly feared that Gilbert’s madness had driven him to murder. Oh, but he’s in a difficult humour, Will. He said no word at dinner, save to snarl because most of the servants were absent. Now he’s gone up to the old keep, where he’ll sometimes brood among the ruins for hours on end.’

  ‘I’ll go and speak with him,’ said her brother, though remembering Gib’s stoked-up outburst of anger the night before, he was privately doubtful of doing any good.

  ‘No, leave him,’ urged Meg. ‘I fear he will turn to violence.’

  ‘Better that he should turn it on me, then.’

  ‘Well, go to him if you must. But keep Ned Pye somewhere near,’ she cautioned, ‘for your own safety.’

  ‘Ned’s up to mischief elsewhere,’ said Will, concealing his servant’s destination from her. ‘There’s too little scope for his talents in Castleacre, and I sent him away for a few days. But have no fear – I’ll deal with Gib if need be.’

  ‘No doubt you will!’ Her voice teased him, but clearly she meant it when she added, ‘If you’re not back for supper I’ll send men to find you, armed with cudgels.’

  Chapter Nine

  The lower ward of the castle, where the house and farmstead were, was already in evening shadow. But the old keep stood high on the upper ward, an earthwork behind the house, and its ruined walls – as uneven as rotten teeth – caught the last rays of the sun.

  When they were boys, Will and Gib had spent many warlike hours up there, fighting the barons’wars over again. As the elder, Gib had always claimed the right to be first holder of the keep, and that had suited Will, the more active and inventive of the two. Between them, they had demolished whole armies of imaginary archers and knights as they fought for possession of the keep. But every battle had ended in fierce single combat among the ruins, and both of them bore faded scars to remind them of their rivalry.

  The earthwork of the upper ward stood as high as the chimneys of the house, and its sides were as steep as the roof. It was overgrown with birch trees, now in yellowing leaf, and bushes glistening with berries, except where a wide scar ran straight from top to bottom. This was where the stones that had been taken from the old keep in Will’s grandfather’s day had been slid down to the lower ward for the building of the house. The process had gouged away the thin soil, making the scar as white and in places as steep as Dover cliff, for wind and weather had worn it to bare, slippery chalk.

  Climbing this cliff was one of the challenges Will had enjoyed in his youth. He had known better, though, than to take such an exposed route when his brother was holding the keep, for that would have been to invite defeat. Instead, he had found several different ways up through the maze of goat paths that traversed the scrub, so that he could always take Gilbert by surprise.

  Since then, the goats had been banished to the outer ditch of the castle, and the scrub had grown and tangled beyond recognition. Gilbert had no doubt made a winding path up to the keep, but it was not immediately obvious and Will did not intend to skulk about in search of it. On this delicate errand – w
anting to hear what Gib would say about the murder, but without antagonising him – he preferred to make an open approach. And besides, he relished the challenge of climbing the mound again.

  Casting off his cap and doublet he stood, as in youth, in shirt and hose and surveyed the chalk scar. Then, he had always begun the climb simply by taking a run at it. He was tempted now to ignore his years and wounds and take a run at it again – but that, he was forced to acknowledge, would almost certainly result in an early, ignominious downward slide. Better to be thrifty with his breath and scramble all the way, using embedded flintstones to give him a grip or a toe-hold where the chalk was steepest.

  At first the climb went well, for his hands and feet instinctively sought their old lodging places. Even so, he soon became aware that it was more taxing than he remembered, and he was obliged to pause for breath halfway. The dry weather had loosened the surface, and as he progressed he had been sending down trickles of chalk and small flints. When he resumed the climb, he became aware that chalk and flints were beginning to slide down from another source – this time upon him, from above.

  Very soon the slide became a shower. He had to stop and fling up an arm to protect his eyes. The small flints were becoming larger and sharper-edged, and when one of them caught him a dizzying crack on the side of the head he knew that this was no accident. The debris was not merely falling, but being kicked down on him. Once again, his brother was intending to do battle.

  Almost caught off-balance, with his full weight on his weaker leg, Will clung with one hand to a flintstone while his other foot scrabbled in vain to find a toe-hold. Glancing down, he saw that there was a long steep way to fall. Glancing up, he saw that he was near the top of the mound where the massive figure of Gilbert waited, a stone gripped in either hand.

  Were he still a boy Will would have acted without thought, swinging up lightly to the top of the mound and using his greater speed to dodge past Gib. But that was no longer feasible. For a man of impaired agility, who had come to pacify his brother rather than to challenge him, prudence was the only course.

  Shielding himself as best he could from the debris that still came down, Will spat out a mouthful of chalk dust and sued for peace.

  ‘Pax, Gib!’ he shouted, hoping that his brother would remember that much at least of their schoolday Latin. ‘Have done, I say …’

  The kicking stopped. He looked up again. Gilbert had moved forward to the edge of the mound and stood towering above him, his great hands still gripping the missiles, his hair and beard wild. ‘Pax?’ he said venomously. ‘I’ll pledge no peace to a brother who spies on me!’

  Will cursed himself for a fool. Had he a groat’s worth of the prudence he had just prided himself on, he would not have made this climb. His perch was precarious, his leg ached abominably, and their brother was as violent as Meg had warned. He could neither retreat nor stay where he was. The only way to advance was by talking, and that as reassuringly as he knew how.

  ‘I am not here to spy on you, Gib. Nor yet to do battle with you, for I have no cause. I’ve come merely to see the old keep, and to recall the merry times we had here.’

  ‘Pah!’ growled Gilbert. There was dark suspicion in his voice, but he turned away and flung his missiles elsewhere.

  Will seized the opportunity to hoist himself up to solid ground. The old defensive walls that had risen straight from the top of the mound had been quarried away completely at this point, making a gaping entrance to what remained of the keep. Gilbert had disappeared, growling, among the ruins, and Will limped about for a few moments until the cramp in his leg had eased. His head was sore, and his left eye was nearly blinded by the blood that was trickling into it. Silently cursing Gib, he wiped away the blood with his sleeve and remembered, with a fleeting satisfaction, that the shirt was not his own but one of his brother’s.

  Gilbert had removed himself to the far side of the upper ward, and was now hurling stones at the jackdaws that made their habitation in the ruins. Will thought it politic to reassure him that it was indeed the old keep he had come to see, and so he made a point of wandering through what little was left of the hall and passageways. Many of the walls were no more than shoulder-high, and since his last visit, years ago, plants had sprouted thickly from crevices between the mossy stones. Pushing past them he sought and found another gap in the wall, opening on to a pathway that led down to the foot of the mound. He was glad to know of it, for he had no intention of returning by way of the precipitous chalk face – nor yet of climbing it again, with or without Gib’s menacing presence.

  His brother was still trying to stone the jackdaws. They circled high, just out of his reach, calling their noisy kyow kyow, and Gilbert shouted curses at them as he missed.

  Before approaching him, Will went to the western side of the keep and looked out over the huddled, smoke-wreathed roofs and gables of the town. Firelight and the sounds of voice and horn and drum rose from the market place, which heaved with evening merry-makers, and the air was larded with the smell from a hundred feast-day cooking pots.

  In the valley beyond the town stood the great grey bulk of the priory, secure in its precinct within its own high walls. It was only from up here, on the old upper ward of the castle, that the massiveness of the priory church and the extent and grandeur of the buildings that surrounded it could be seen as a whole.

  From here, the contrast between priory and castle, the one so powerful in size and wealth, the other reduced to the farmstead that lay below this ruined keep, was only too clear. If Gilbert often came up here, as Meg had said, and brooded over the change in the Ackland family fortunes, small wonder he felt bitter.

  But how far, Will wondered, had that bitterness led his brother? Certainly to a sullen, vicious temper. Worse, to madness? Worst of all, to the Devil’s work of murder?

  Shading his eyes against the crimson set of the sun, Will looked further west to where the road to Lynn went past the prior’s tithe barn. He could glimpse the great roof of the distant barn, but the bailiff’s house was hidden by trees. Was Walter Bostock indeed at Bromholm, as his wife Sibbel had supposed? Or was he the murdered man whose mortal remains, now corrupting within his shroud, awaited burial in the parish churchyard?

  Will turned his gaze south to the rim of the shallow valley. He could see the line of the Peddars’Way, Roman-straight between tall hedgerows, rising over the downland sheep pasture of Bartholomew’s Hills. The hills were too far distant for him to see the gibbet that stood at the crossroads, but he knew well enough that it was there. And so did Gilbert, for all that he rarely travelled to Swaffham and never beyond it.

  The gibbet, and its purpose, was engraved deep in Will’s memory. As soon as he was old enough to ride so far, their father had taken him and Gib to see a hanging.

  Most of the townsfolk had had the same intention, and the press of onlookers was so great that by the time they arrived the miscreant was already hanging by his own weight. His arms were bound, but his legs still kicked feebly as his body revolved in the air, his tongue bursting from his mouth and his eyes bulging in his purple face. That, their father had told them sternly, was what happened to wrong-doers; and when the last breath left their bodies, their souls went straight to an even more dreadful punishment – the eternal torments of hell that awaited every unshriven sinner.

  It was a fearful lesson, and one that Will himself had never forgotten. Young as they were then, he and Gib were well aware of hell. Not only did the priest speak of it constantly but they saw it for themselves, every saint’s day and Sunday, in a painting above the chancel arch on the wall of the parish church. What was depicted there was the day of Doom, when good men would be separated from the wicked, and the mouth of hell with its fearsome teeth and furnace-red throat would gape open to receive unshriven sinners.

  But had Gib, in a few moments of murderous madness, quite forgotten those lessons? Was it his own fate he came up here to brood on? For if he had indeed killed the bailiff, it was not only
the possibility of discovery and being hanged that he would fear, but the certainty of being pitchforked by waiting devils into the everlasting flames.

  Feeling a rare compassion for his brother, Will went in search of him. He found him still in the same place, throwing flints with aimless savagery at a tall fang of masonry, for the birds had made themselves scarce.

  ‘How now, Gib?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Is it to be jackdaw pie for supper tonight?’

  Gilbert scowled at him, determined to take offence at whatever his brother said. ‘I’d marvel to see you hit more of them than I did.’

  Will laughed. ‘And I’d marvel with you, for your aim with a stone was always better than mine. What of archery, though? I’m sadly out of practice. Shall we go together to the butts tomorrow, as we used to do?’

  Gib flung another flint, this time taking aim and sending it whistling accurately through an arrow-slit in the wall. ‘Archery is a pastime for idle gentlemen who have nothing to do but travel and read books,’ he said sourly. ‘As for me, I am head of this family and its sole support, and I must work. Do not mock me with your pastimes, for I have leisure for none!’

  Will shook his head. ‘I come not to mock, but in friendship,’ he insisted. ‘And also to bring a message from Master Justice Throssell. He wants to know if any man of middle years is missing from the town, and asks me to ask you if all your servants are accounted for.’

  Gilbert gave him a piercing look from under his shaggy brows. ‘Why so?’

  ‘A man was found dead in the river yesterday. Didn’t you hear the news? It seems he was murdered.’

  His brother bent to pick up some loose flintstones. ‘Aye, so I heard,’ he said indifferently. ‘A stranger – a vagabond, by all accounts.’

  ‘That may be so,’ said Will. ‘He’s nameless, true, for his face was beaten beyond recognition. But the justice will not have him buried unknown, without ensuring that he’s not from Castleacre. He has sent the constable to enquire throughout the parish for missing men.’