Within A Forest Dark

by Mary Ellen Johnson

  As she did today. Immediately, the sweetness of the morning fled, as if sunshine had been painted over by darkness.

  No one will mark their love for me, public or private.

  She felt the bitter taste of bile in her throat and the return of the melancholia that so persistently shadowed her. Claiming a bout of cramping, she hurried Orabel through shopping and hastened back to the Shop where she bolted herself in her chamber.

  "Mayhap some time in the back-side later?" Orabel urged, before leaving her. "Your plants always cheer ye."

  "Perhaps."

  Once alone, her thoughts turned not to the fantasy of Matthew Hart—enough of that—but to the reality of her step-brother's plight. Regardless of illness or melancholia, her main task was to make sure that Thurold enjoyed as much comfort as she could provide. Among the debtors and petty criminals, Edward III and his justices imprisoned the kingdom's most hardened criminals, approvers, heretics, rebellious and traitorous subjects in Newgate before trial and in many cases, execution. Even if Thurold had committed a crime, which he hadn't, he did not belong in Newgate.

  Margery must somehow devise a way of getting Thurold more money, but Simon had locked away her jewelry, save for one overlooked gemstone ring. She'd used the coins from its sale to provide her stepbrother a decent bed and adequate food but when that was gone he would be at the mercy of greedy, corrupt gaolers.

  Memories of the past weeks came unbidden, as they always did when she could not sleep her way through the day, drowsy with pain potions, or bury them in activity.

  "Why could you not have died?" she whispered to nothing. "Why could not Thurold have killed you?"

  But the other servants had pulled Thurold free of Simon—and her husband had soon extracted his revenge. While Margery had lain on a pallet—Crull would not let her use their bed—and lost her babe, Simon had had Thurold arrested. Not for assaulting him. Such an accusation might have led to an embarrassing investigation. Instead, he'd planted a missing ruby and turquoise pendant and several expensive mourning rings among Thurold's belongings. While her stepbrother had been incarcerated, he had not lost his "covetous" eyes or "pilfering" hands, as sometimes happened, but neither had he been allowed to merely pay a fine.

  If only I had the courage to kill Crull.

  Later in the afternoon, Margery did slip out the side door to the back-side. She even managed a bit of pruning, rearranging flower pots placed at intervals along the pebbled path, and picking fallen leaves from the herb patch. She imagined how pretty the back-side would look next summer, when bees flitted amid the iris and marigold, periwinkles and columbines, and robins and bluebirds perched on the trellised roses.

  By then, Thurold will be near release, and Simon's cruelties will be but a memory.

  Margery had planted everything according to the time of the moon, and had carefully nurtured each seed, each row, each patch. The plants had rewarded her care by growing ever more abundant and beautiful.

  The thought came again: If only I dared kill him.

  It would be so easy to pluck the blue, purple, or yellow flowers of wolfsbane, and mix a poisonous draught.

  She heard steps along the path and looked up to see Orabel, limping toward her with a bird cage covered by a silver-threaded cloth.

  Orabel's grin split her face. "This is for you, Maggie-dear."

  Margery raised her eyebrows.

  "A squire left it; he wore the badge of the hart." Orabel's smile broadened, as if she were overwhelmed by some hilarity.

  Margery frowned. What could this be about? She thought immediately of Matthew but knew such would not be the case. Harry Hart then? But why would he be leaving her gifts?

  She heard a chirruping from inside.

  Orabel said, "It doesna sound like a popinjay or raven, does it?"

  Margery carefully lifted the cloth from the finely worked cage, and caught her breath.

  Perched on a swing, staring back at her with bright dark eyes, was a red-breasted robin.

  Chapter 6

  Newgate Prison

  "You have all you need?" John Ball asked his far smaller companion. He and Thurold Watson were standing by one of the narrow barred windows facing Newgate Street. Acquaintances of the unfortunates condemned to Newgate Prison often stopped to converse with the prisoners, pressed as they were against the bars, while passersby dropped halfpennies into the outstretched hands of those begging alms.

  "Thanks to your contacts and my sister's largesse I've a pallet to sleep on, I am free of chains and I'm allowed on the upper halls to exercise. I've enough food to share with those who must depend upon alms and charities." Thurold shrugged. "I've slept in mud and snow, sitting and standing and leaning against me fellow soldiers, even next to corpses. And you and me've spent enough nights neath trees and beside 'edges to consider Newgate grand as the Savoy."

  John Ball clapped a massive hand on his friend's shoulder. For those who could afford to pay, Newgate would do. Because of the press of unwashed flesh, the watercourse beneath the foundations, and the nearby city ditch, the air was undeniably fetid. And Ball preferred not to touch the stone walls which seemed to bleed perpetual tears, though he suspected they were not a sign from God implying His distress over the prison's inhabitants, but rather from physical anomalies. However, Thurold was right. They'd endured worse.

  "I've been pondering your case. You can always file an appeal with Simon Langham." Ball referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England without using Langham's customary title. "But 'twould be costly. And the grounds are narrow; the chancery will only consider a failure in the legal process. You could certainly make such an argument..."

  "Not to mention the fact that I stole nothing," Thurold said with some heat.

  "Aye, but I am more concerned with the matter of Crull's beating. As an alderman if he should file charges you could lose a hand. At the very least. More likely your life."

  Once again Thurold shrugged. "I've no fear of death. I've seen so much wot's one more? Besides, if the king stirs up another war, I'll be granted a pardon in order to hie me to France. And if not that," he finished, "I can stand on me head 'ere for a year and a day."

  They left the window to walk around the cavernous area that comprised this part of Newgate. Ball knew many of the prison's jailers and some of its unfortunates and while most disregarded his jeremiads, he could count on them to make his friend's incarceration as comfortable as possible.

  On this November 20, the feast of Suffolk's saint, St Edmund the Martyr, Newgate was its usual busy self. Magistrates and prosecutors bustled purposefully about, as did charitable officials, physicians and families and friends visiting loved ones. Some of the wealthier were huddled with lawyers, clerks or scribes to draft appeals. An occasional inmate, either mad or despairing, begged a passing priest or mendicant friar to beseech God to have mercy upon his soul.

  "Newgate be no different from the outside," said Thurold, his gaze sweeping the panoply. "'Tis just figuring out wot is wot and 'ow to survive. If the money ends I'll find employment." He nodded toward several artisans busy at their work benches. "And our keeper pays to chain and unchain certain prisoners. I could do that. Or collect alms. Or act as a turnkey. It takes little brains to inspect packages or mark contributions. At the very worst I could be a scavenger and place men in the stocks. Or clean." Thurold gestured in the direction of the weeping walls. "Though 'twould take more years than I've been given to accomplish that particular task."

  With a mischievous gleam in his eye, he added, "I could allus petition to leave Newgate altogether in order to beg for alms on the street."

  John Ball's laugh was deep as a rumble of thunder. "If granted, 'twould be the last time anyone would lay eyes on Thurold Watson—at least inside Newgate Prison."

  They continued their circle in companionable silence.

  "I know your keeper, Adam le Gaoler," Ball said, picking up the previous thread of conversation. "He's of good character, as dictated by city
ordinance. And his guards be fair enough. Since they are paid a pittance they find ways to make a bit extra, which is ever to prisoners' benefit."

  As Thurold had already observed. For a price, guards smuggled in prostitutes, dispensed wine or allowed gambling and other illicit activities. Whatever a man needed. Newgate was London, England, France, all the world, writ small. Regardless of circumstances, God's children maintained their habits.

  "How fares my sister?" Thurold asked abruptly.

  "I've talked to her maid. Dame Margery is mending."

  Thurold's lips compressed into an angry line. His bright brown eyes narrowed. "I will kill Simon Crull for what he did, that I vow."

  "If the devil does not claim him first. I do not doubt your beating shaved a few years from his life. Which means he could be in his death throes this very moment."

  John Ball did not add that he had urchins watching the Shop, and that a string of doctors entered and exited the household, as well as a white-haired, white-bearded flamboyant creature, all to tend the Master. Then there was Dame Margery's great knight, the man she never spoke of and about whom John Ball knew all, who had taken to haunting Goldsmith's Row.

  "I ask you one thing," said Thurold. "Get word to her not to fear for me. Nor to worry, but to care for herself. I've endured far worse. We've endured worse, haven't we, hedge priest?"

  "Aye." John Ball's smile was melancholy. "That, dearest friend, we have."

  * * *

  It was not Newgate's weeping walls or stench or the night noises of fellow prisoners that kept Thurold awake on his parchment thin pallet.

  It was the memories.

  Ancient memories he nurtured for a purpose. One in particular. When his lord, Lawrence Ravenne, had killed his stepmother. Down the years, whether Thurold was trolling the countryside with John Ball, enduring a chevauchee, or bedded down among fellow servants at the Shop, he forced himself to recall that abomination in order to keep his hatred white-hot.

  Once again, tonight, he remembered...

  The darkened lane, he and Margery and Giddy, clutching thimbleflowers in her baby fist. A feverish Alice jerking over to vomit into the blackness. The thud-dump of horses' hooves; riders, one carrying a torch. Ravenne and a troupe of knights, wearing his badge and the badge of the hart, pulling up close. Leaping shadows on cottage walls. A delirious Alice running to Ravenne, clinging to his stirrup, crying the name of her noble lover, Thomas Rendell. Someone hollering, "Plague! Jesu, she has the plague!" Chaos. Ravenne yelling and kicking Alice, trying to loose her hold. Drawing his sword. The knight Thurold later knew as William Hart shouting, "Leave the woman be!" Ravenne swinging the blade. Slicing through Alice Watson's spinal cord as easily as if he were halving a cabbage.

  For near two decades Thurold had forced himself to contemplate Alice's murder as faithfully as he recited his prayers. So that he would not forget. Gazing down upon her crumpled body, a mere shadow in the lane, Thurold had made a solemn vow to kill Lawrence Ravenne, and he meant to keep that vow. As he meant to keep one more newly made—to kill Simon Crull.

  Thurold wasn't sure how old he was, but however old—thirty mayhap—he possessed a head full of memories. And of thoughts, roiling with such intensity he had trouble putting them into coherent form and, upon articulation, feared he sounded like an idiot.

  If only I could express meself as elegant as John Ball.

  Thurold lay motionless on his back, feeling the cold of Newgate's stone floor, staring at a ceiling he could not see.

  Thoughts...

  He loved the hedge priest. He hated England's lords. And France's. All members of the nobility. Well, he did have a grudging measure of respect for Edward the Black Prince and a few of his advisers since they seemed to have a care for their soldiers. And there was no doubt the prince and his war council were brave enough. Thurold would give them that.

  He understood that life, though simple at its core, was complicated by contradictions that he oft had difficulty sorting through.

  Thurold had fought at Poitiers, Rheims and Najera because he'd been ordered to by England's sovereign, not because he'd pleased. Those deaths were on King Edward, with his greed and grasping for France's crown. But Thurold had also fought for booty under John Hawkwood and Robert Knolles with their dreaded Free Companies. As a mercenary he'd killed as many French peasants as he had in the king's service.

  Which I canna justify.

  He most certainly had pity for France's paysans, who dressed similarly to England's, and sought no more from life than adequate food and grain and a dry roof over their heads and animals plump enough to take them through winter and children free from illness and accidents. Just like Thurold and his fellow countrymen.

  There is only one difference between us and the French. Our chevauchees against them.

  Thurold slipped his hands behind his head to act as a pillow and continued staring into the darkness. If he concentrated, he might be able to stir that darkness to produce images of his many campaigns.

  I am but a clod in the great war machine. I canna stop it, nor even slow it. I am not to blame for the paysans' misery.

  Except for that business with the Free Companies.

  Which I wish I could change. But I cannot.

  What Thurold could do was honor the French dead, those he and his fellow mercenaries had dispatched with such merciless efficiency.

  After re-living Alice's murder and his sister's beating, he went, as if fingering his paternoster from bead to bead, on to the matter of his "enemies."

  As best he could, Thurold remembered each one he'd killed. 'Twas his duty, his sacred obligation, to remember, though all too often the dead reappeared as little more than an image or as part of a larger scene. As if he were recalling some long-ago mummer's performance rather than a true event.

  If Thurold could gather together all he'd dispatched, he figured they'd populate an entire village, one he'd nicknamed his "Village of the Damned." He imagined the inhabitants' skeletal faces and forms, like figures in a Danse Macabre fresco he'd seen in a church they'd ransacked near Milan. Clustered together in the village green, empty eye sockets raised to the heavens, awaiting Christ's Second Coming.

  Aye, Thurold could see images in the ceiling's darkness. And scenes, which seemed real enough though he could not, even should his life depend on it, place which campaign fit which images.

  Smashed caskets in an undercroft. Wine spilling onto paving stones, mixing with the blood of the monks who'd thought to stop us. Capturing the wine in communion chalices snatched from city churches. Drunk as lords ourselves, soon enough.

  Torturing a fat abbot—more than one fat abbot—to make him reveal his abbey's treasure.

  Torturing reeves to lead us to hidden stores of grain.

  Defiling girls and women and grand-meres, some of whom preferred jumping from towers or roofs or into wells or slashing themselves to facing us.

  Slaughtering villagers; watching them flee their hovels like scurrying rats. Herding them toward our waiting knights, mace and sword and axe at the ready. Who rode them down for sport.

  No wonder they call us "de Fléau de Dieu," the Scourge of God.

  In Thurold's mind, France's lords, who seldom even pretended to protect their suffering subjects or their lands, were worse than England's. And far more martially incompetent.

  Beginning the century, French knights had fled the field at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, leaving their infantry to be hacked to pieces by Flemish foot militia. At Poitiers, they'd proven themselves hapless tacticians against an army half their size, ending with the ultimate humiliation, losing their king, Jean le Bon, for ransom. And afterward, following all the defeats, the wasteland left by the English, their simpering lords, piggish merchants and hypocritical clergy had not only raised taxes to impossible levels, they'd forced their villeins to repair all the ruined properties. Without compensation.

  Hearing of the French lords' hubris, witnessing it first-hand, Thurold often imagined tha
t there might be a way, not to terrorize their peasants, but to unite with them. To create one enormous army of the oppressed. So that all, in both kingdoms, might rise against their persecutors. 'Twas a lovely dream and he and John Ball discussed it sometimes, but such conversations were worse than foolishness for it would never happen. And thus left him near immobilized with despair.

  France's paysans HAD tried. Unlike us.

  A decade past they had risen up in a Jacquerie, a valiant though doomed effort. The uprising had been strongest in the north, near Paris. Thurold well knew the area where he'd participated in the usual looting, raping, and plundering without so much as a sword drawn or a crossbow wound in defense. It was no wonder that the French peasants had revolted when their lords had ignored their most basic obligation: to protect.

  Thurold had been back in England in 1358, but he'd heard the Jacquerie stories. He hoped they were exaggerated for not even he could countenance such horrors against any human, no matter their birth. The worst tale involved a gang of rebels, who, after killing a knight, roasted him on a spit before his wife and children. Then after repeatedly raping the wife, they'd forced her and her babes to eat the knight's roasted flesh. Before bashing out the wife's brain and then the children's, one by one.

  Of course the Jacquerie had been suppressed, its leader seized, crowned with a red hot circlet and beheaded in the town square of Clermont, a place Thurold had also seen. Then, implementing a counter reign of terror, knights, squires, men-at-arms and mercenaries had ridden out to annihilate the rebels where'er they could be found. Since Thurold was familiar with the Beauvais region, he could picture the French, armor glinting bright in the sun, racing down from wooded hills, splashing across streams and onto flat lands in order to hack up paysans and burn their barns, cottages and crops.