‘Do you often get travellers who want to break their journey here?’ I asked. ‘Have there been any recently?’
They didn’t understand me. ‘You get a muckle folk passing through?’ said Brockley, in an attempt at a Yorkshire accent.
‘Muckle’s a Scots word,’ said Sybil, not very helpfully. Brockley fixed the Thwaites and their bonny maidservant with a quizzical eye.
Whether or not muckle was really a local word, they did understand it, and shook their heads. No passing travellers had sought shelter with them since the previous autumn, they said, though oddly enough they had been visited twice by the county sheriff’s men, from York, who had asked after two men who had gone missing.
‘But we could tell them nowt,’ said Master Thwaite. ‘We’d not seen their lost men, any road. Only guest we’ve had lately, except for thee, is a horse, only she turned up later, after the men from York were here.’
It was our turn to be puzzled. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, however, it turned out that the brown mare we had seen in the stable wasn’t theirs. They had found her straying on their land. No, she had no saddle or bridle and no halter. She had been in poor condition and seemed forlorn. She was easy to catch. They were keeping her, feeding her well, and making use of her, until someone should come in search of her.
We all exchanged glances. It didn’t seem that either Christopher Spelton or Bernard Hardwicke had passed this way, but a stray horse did suggest that something untoward might have happened in this district, and this one matched the description of the horse that Christopher had hired in York. ‘When did the mare first appear?’ Brockley asked.
They couldn’t remember exactly. One day was so like another. But it had been some days after the second visit from the sheriff’s men. It evidently hadn’t occurred to them to send word about the mare to the authorities. When Brockley had conveyed to them that we were wondering about this, they looked surprised. ‘She’s nobbut a stray horse. Happen she wandered off from some other farm somewhere … there are places west and east of here, though there’s a good lot of miles of moorland in between, either way, and in winter, we doan’t travel much. Might do come the spring,’ said Master Thwaite. ‘Then us might do some asking about.’
He then changed the subject, and presented us with a problem. ‘How’ll thee travel when thee goes on, come tomorrow? Thee’ll not get there in that great lumbering coach thing.’
‘But the track’s good,’ said Brockley. ‘Rough, but broad enough.’
What Master Thwaite said next amounted to the fact that however broad the track might be to the north, towards Thorby and Stonemoor it would deteriorate within two or three miles until it ended up little wider than a sheep path. ‘Thy wheels’ll be on the heather and there’s stones sticking out of that all over the place. Coach is no good for that. It’s ride or walk.’
‘Aye, and I’d not say it’s any trudge for a lady,’ put in Mrs Thwaite.
‘Well, we’ve got enough horses,’ Brockley said, grasping the situation and pointing out the only solution. ‘Lucky we brought saddlery. But do we all need to go? Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just rode to Stonemoor and fetched the book on my own? How far is it?’
We sought the opinion of the Thwaites, who estimated twenty miles.
‘I might get there and back in one day, if I start early,’ said Brockley briskly. ‘If not, I can stop the night in Thorby and be back by midday the next day. I should think …’
I opened my mouth to protest but Dale was ahead of me. ‘No!’ She said it passionately. ‘I can’t abide the thought of it. Don’t, Roger, don’t. No!’
We were guests in someone else’s house and could hardly ask our hosts to leave their own main room so that we could confer in private. I said: ‘Please excuse us. We must talk of this outside,’ and although the Thwaites stared at us as though we had suddenly gone mad, I rose and my companions trooped after me, out of the living room, into the little farmyard, and there, in the chilly dusk, with hens pecking round our feet, we held council.
‘Now what’s all this, Fran?’ Brockley demanded.
‘You’d be on your own! So were they – that man Hardwicke that madam has told us about, and Master Spelton! They were both travelling alone! I think that brown mare is Master Spelton’s!’
‘So do I,’ I said. ‘That mare is a fine strong animal with sloping shoulders and good round haunches. Very much the sort for a remount. Buyers for remounts don’t pick weedy animals with goose rumps. She could well be Christopher’s. She isn’t Hardwicke’s – he was riding a chestnut.’
‘But I don’t see how there can be danger at Stonemoor,’ Brockley said. ‘Hardwicke and Spelton must have been attacked because of the letter they carried – Stonemoor is a household of ladies with no possible reason to harm a messenger who is bringing them money and just taking a book away! The ladies want to sell it, apparently.’
‘There’s no question of you going alone anyway,’ I said. ‘The task is rightly mine and I must go as well.’
‘Then I must attend you, ma’am!’ said Dale, grimly. Dale might not be a good horsewoman and she certainly wasn’t getting any younger, but she had a determined streak. ‘Bronze is a quiet horse,’ she said valiantly. Bronze, on the journey, had been the offside wheeler. ‘I can manage if I ride him.’
What Dale really meant, and I knew it, was that she didn’t want me and Brockley to go off together. I understood. I also felt quite sure that Cecil and James Morton had been right to feel that safety lay in numbers. It would be best for us all to stay together. If there was any kind of danger in Stonemoor, we would protect each other.
‘You’re not perfectly sure that Stonemoor is … all it should be, are you, Ursula?’ said Sybil.
I met her eyes and knew that she was reading mine. But Dale was looking anxious and I wanted to ease her mind.
‘I am sure there is nothing to worry about at Stonemoor,’ I said, untruthfully, ‘but I prefer that we don’t separate. In any case, I am in a way the queen’s representative and I should be properly attended. We will all go to Stonemoor and that’s that.’
The taciturn Joseph now joined in. ‘The mistress is right. She should have folk with her. That’s proper.’
‘We will have to leave the coach here and come back for it later,’ I said. ‘I hope the Thwaites won’t mind. We leave tomorrow morning, on horseback.’
We did of course have to sort out who was to ride which horse. Bronze was the quietest and therefore he was the best one for Dale. The others who had made up the four-in-hand were Rusty, another quiet bay, very like Bronze, and two of the new horses I had recently bought. They too were bays; my team was nearly a matched set though not quite, for Blaze had a broad white stripe from brow to nose, and Splash looked as though he had started out to become a skewbald but had changed his mind. He had a white patch on his near shoulder, another on his off haunch, and a small one on his off foreleg, above the knee. The two of them had been bought as a team and were used to being together.
We settled that Sybil, since she was nearly as uncertain a rider as Dale, should take Rusty, because he was almost as placid as Bronze, while I chose Blaze. Joseph would have Splash and Brockley of course had his own cob. We left at daybreak, warmly dressed, with hooded cloaks, and with us we took food, flasks of water, and spare clothes and other necessities in the saddlebags that Brockley had so providently insisted on bringing. My saddlebags were heavy, because I was carrying the purse containing the three hundred pounds in angels and sovereigns which were the price of the book we had come to buy.
The track was good to begin with and to save both Dale and Sybil from the tiring business of constantly rising to the trot we alternated between the walk and the canter. Within half an hour we found the fork that the Thwaites had told us about. As instructed, we took the left-hand way. After that, however, the path began to narrow and we saw how right our hosts had been to say that the coach would be useless. Even riders could not travel two abreast and we had
to settle for single file. Then, after a while, the path began to be bedevilled by stones. We slowed down.
‘This is the most desolate country I’ve ever seen,’ Sybil said, awed.
She was right. All around us, there was moorland, rolling hills of it, covered with heather and thin winter grass, with grey stone outcrops here and there. The morning frost had gone, but the wind was bitter, moaning dismally across the bleak expanses. There was no trace of humanity in any form. We could see no prints of feet or hooves on the path and there was no sign, in all the surrounding empty miles, of any dwellings, no homely spires of blue chimney smoke, no cultivation. Once we saw a few sheep in the distance and once a raven flapped, croaking, across our path. Apart from these, we seemed to be the only living creatures there.
We came in due course to a river ford where we stopped to let the horses drink, and then we dismounted to use some outcrops as seats while we ate a meal of bread and cheese. It was probably the only ford for miles, Brockley remarked, since to our left, which was upstream, the river flowed swiftly in a deep, narrow bed, and downstream, to the right, where the land rose abruptly, it entered a channel like a knife slash through the hill and ran between banks that were almost perpendicular, dropping fifteen or twenty feet to the water, which in their shadow looked as black as ink. The ford, in between, was a place where for a few yards the river slackened speed and spread out over a patch of flat, low-lying ground, and didn’t look as though it were more than a couple of feet deep. It still appeared cold and unwelcoming.
As we finished our meal, Sybil stood up to survey the scene once more, and again, commented adversely on it. ‘I don’t like this country. It’s so wild. Why would people – why would these ladies we’re going to visit – want to live in such a district?’
‘Maybe it won’t be so wild where they are,’ I said. ‘We’re not there yet. Let us remount and ride on.’
We did so, not too cheerfully, for apart from the cold, none of us ladies were very comfortable, because we had no leggings. We all had to ride astride in bundled-up skirts, which was awkward anyway, and we had nothing to protect our calves from the stirrup leathers, which soon began to bite. Also, the track now began to wind, finding its way round hills and avoiding steep gradients. I suspected that the twenty miles we had heard about referred to the flight of a crow and that the distance for travellers on legs was a good deal longer. However, after we had been riding for about four hours altogether without seeing any habitations, we came to a long rise which brought us up to the crest of a ridge and here we drew rein to survey what lay track ahead. ‘Look!’ said Brockley.
He was shading his eyes and pointing. ‘We’ve covered more than twenty miles, by a long way,’ he said. ‘It’s high time we saw where we’re bound – and there it is!’
And there it was, indeed. He pointed and with relief we saw that at last, in the distance and a little to the left, there was chimney smoke and from more than one chimney.
‘Surely that must be Thorby,’ Brockley said. ‘It’s in a dip … that’s why we can’t see the houses.’
‘There’s more smoke, from behind that hill there, next to where the village must be, look.’ Sybil had risen in her stirrups. ‘That might be Stonemoor House. Well, the end is in sight. Thank God. I never imagined such a barren land could exist! I’ll be thankful to get under a roof again. It was cold enough when we started, but I’m sure it’s worse now.’
I thought so too. The sun still shone in a clear pale-blue sky, but there was no warmth in it. Then Brockley looked round and pointed. To the west, above a hump of hill, a small brownish cloud had appeared.
‘I don’t like the look of that,’ he said.
‘It’s just a tiny cloud,’ said Sybil.
‘No bigger than a man’s hand,’ Brockley agreed. ‘But I’ve seen weather change, many a time. That’s often the way it starts. A little cloud. And then another. And then an army of them. That is a snow cloud, or I have never seen one. Come on. We’d better make what haste we can.’
EIGHT
The Uneasy Sanctuary
‘Are we still on the track?’ I asked, leaning down over Blaze’s shoulder to talk to Brockley.
We were no longer travelling in a wide landscape with clear visibility. There was nothing around us now but the silent, bewildering dance of falling snowflakes. Heather, grass, and track were swiftly disappearing beneath a white blanket. A little way back, we had passed through a dip where a few trees grew and by then their branches were already carrying an inch of white on their upper sides. We had been riding from the start with our cloak hoods over our heads but now we had pulled them forward as far as possible, to keep the cold out of our ears. Brockley had dismounted and was leading Mealy, using his feet to brush a way along the edge of the track and thereby to keep us on it. The path was slightly sunk between its tufty heather verges, which helped.
‘We’re all right so far,’ he said.
I wasn’t so sure. As long as we didn’t stray from the path, we would probably arrive at Thorby eventually, but if the track were to branch again, unseen, and we made the wrong choice, we could find ourselves hopelessly astray. Also, although Dale seemed to be enduring her discomforts with fortitude, I was seriously worried about Sybil. She was riding just behind me and a glance back showed me that her face was as white as the snowflakes that were gathering on her hood. She was sitting awkwardly and I suspected that her stirrup leathers were pinching her badly.
We went on in silence, for what I estimated was another fifteen minutes, and then I said: ‘Surely we should be near Thorby by now.’
Brockley didn’t answer. He had come to a halt. I couldn’t at first see why, and then realized that out of the haze of falling flakes a large grey outcrop had appeared in front of us. Brockley, kicking at the snow, was trying to see how the path negotiated it – on the left, on the right, or did it split, go past on both sides, and come together beyond it? Joseph dismounted and led his horse forward, and by what seemed to be tacit agreement, he tried the right-hand side of the outcrop and Brockley tried the left.
After a moment, Joseph came back and Brockley called to us to follow him. The rest of us did so. Just here, the path seemed to turn from earth to rock, for the horses’ hooves first crunched as they trod on the snow, and then rang on whatever was beneath it. The two men continued on foot, leading their mounts. Then Rusty stumbled and Sybil cried out. I twisted quickly in my saddle, to see that although Rusty had almost come down but was just recovering, Sybil was not. She was in the act of tilting sideways and falling from her saddle.
I was down in an instant. Joseph and Brockley came beside me. The snow had given Sybil a soft landing, but she seemed dazed as we helped her to her feet, and leaned heavily on us. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ She was shaking her head from side to side. ‘The snow … if only we could see where we’re going … the way the flakes dance turned me dizzy for a moment and … oh, my poor legs!’
She pulled at her skirts, and I stooped to look at the damage. Both her calves were red from the rubbing and pinching of the leathers, and the left one was bleeding a little.
‘You can’t go on riding like that,’ I said. ‘Oh, dear heaven.’
‘What are we to do?’ asked Dale. Hunched in Bronze’s saddle, she was shivering violently.
We were all shivering. We were benighted in a world where there was nothing but the snow and the cold and the silence. Then Brockley said decisively: ‘I’ll get back on to Mealy and take Mistress Jester up in front of me. He’s a good weight-carrier. Madam, can you dismount and lead Rusty and Blaze and help Joseph to do the pathfinding?’
‘All right. Thank you, Brockley.’
He remounted briskly, pushing his feet into the stirrups, and Sybil, bravely trying to pull herself together, put one of her feet on one of his and tried to heave herself up. Brockley got hold of her shoulders, Joseph and I pushed from below, and at last we got her on to Mealy’s withers. Mealy, fortunately, stood still throughout. I took th
e bridles of Blaze and Rusty, and turned to go onward.
And couldn’t find the path. Nor could Joseph. Picking Sybil up, rearranging ourselves, we had strayed aside from it. Neither of us, I realized in panic, even knew which way we were facing. I blundered forward, and then stopped short, having come face to face with the big outcrop. ‘I think,’ said Brockley’s voice from behind me, ‘that we’re going the wrong way, madam. I can see our hoof prints.’
He was right. Though the snow had already begun to fill them, there were still traces of the prints to be seen, coming towards us from beyond the outcrop.
‘We’ve been going backwards.’ Joseph’s calm voice was reassuring. ‘Best turn around.’
We did this, and with the outcrop as a point of reference, it should have been easy enough to find the path again, but it wasn’t. Joseph stopped short, obviously bewildered, and rubbed his forehead, while I was frankly too frightened to be efficient. I swept at the snow with a frantic right foot, while my skirt hems became soaked with the hateful stuff and I felt exhaustion and cold beginning to weaken me, legs, arms, and brain. I wasn’t on the path. Where I had brushed the snow aside, there was nothing under it but heather. Where were we? Somewhere I had heard or read that if caught in such weather, to stop trying, to give in and rest, meant death, and that might mean the deaths of all of us. I found myself crying, and the tears froze on my face. I heard Dale moaning softly.
Then Sybil, her voice faint but resolute, called: ‘There’s a verge on our right. Mealy has just trodden on it and kicked the snow off. I can see it. I think it’s the edge of the path.’
The Heretic’s Creed Page 7
