The Turn of Midnight

by Minette Walters

  A cynical smile flickered briefly at the corner of Thaddeus’s mouth. It was a shameless tyranny that exploited weakness for its own benefit. ‘I doubt redemption comes through the wilful neglect of children, sir.’ He turned to the women. ‘Without a priest to guide you, you must decide for yourselves what God expects of you. If you truly believe you’ll be judged more harshly for stealing a sheep than leaving a little one to die, then do nothing; if you do not believe it, you must act.’

  Ian, seeing the way the women dropped their eyes, worried that Thaddeus had pushed them too far too fast. Even men needed courage to gainsay an elder, and there was no spark of resistance in any of the faces before him.

  A breath of time passed before Alice raised her head. She addressed Thaddeus. ‘We grieve for our families and long to see them again, My Lord. All were lost to the pestilence, but my father assures us that the youngest and least sullied will be waiting for us in Heaven. He urges us to keep pure hearts so that we may join them. It makes death more welcome to believe we can once again clasp our newborns to our breasts.’

  Thaddeus wondered if even Lady Anne could have said so much in so few words. He knew now how the old man had gained a hold over her companions’ minds—grief for lost children never went away—but he had little idea how to loosen it. To urge them to live the life they had rather than yearn for an uncertain Heaven would be to take all hope away. He looked to Ian and Olyver for inspiration.

  ‘Our father, Gyles Startout, would tell you all your family will be waiting for you, mistress,’ said Ian. ‘He heard the confessions of dying soldiers because there was no priest to do it, and he found only good in them. He has no belief that God caused their suffering in order to send them to Hell.’

  The old man stirred. ‘They were punished for the sins of all mankind, as were my grandchildren. It was the same when the Flood covered the earth and caused every living thing to perish. God saw that His creations were evil and corrupt, and He repented of making them. Only Noah, a man without blame, was saved.’

  Tears wet Alice’s lashes. Again, she addressed Thaddeus. ‘Our priest told us this before he breathed his last, sire. He thought it would comfort us to know our families paid the price for others’ sins and not their own.’

  ‘When did he die, mistress?’

  ‘Some six weeks after the pestilence arrived, sire.’

  ‘Did he tend the sick?’

  ‘Every hour of every day. We mourned his passing deeply.’

  Thaddeus nodded. ‘We hear the same story everywhere we go. God’s servants die early.’ He took her hand in his. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  He felt a trembling in her fingers, as if his touch made her uneasy. ‘To keep their suffering short, sire. The greatest anguish is to watch others endure terrible pain, knowing you can do nothing to help them.’

  ‘To believe that is to believe that Christ’s agony on the cross was less than His mother’s pain to watch it. Is that not a heresy, mistress?’

  Alice glanced nervously towards her father. ‘We try only to make sense of why a good man died early, My Lord.’

  Thaddeus reached for her other hand to encourage her to look only at him. ‘In Develish, where Lady Anne protects her serfs by refusing entry to strangers until they prove themselves free of the pestilence, every man, woman and child still lives. Here, where no such measures were taken, eighteen remain. Your priest died because he honoured his vows. He gave himself unstintingly to those who needed him and he caught the sickness through his closeness with them.’

  She took so long to answer that her father spoke into the silence. ‘He utters the Devil’s words. You’ll not escape Hell if you heed him, daughter.’

  Alice ran her tongue across her dry lips. ‘I nursed my husband and all my children, sire, but they died and I lived. How can that be if the sickness is caught through closeness?’

  Ian held his breath, praying that Thaddeus wouldn’t talk about rats or fleas. Precious few in Bourne had believed him, only following his rules on cleanliness because they were rewarded with food for their obedience. To expect this woman, so steeped in submission to her father and the Church, to understand a strange, new reasoning would be to lose her.

  ‘In the same way that you didn’t catch the sneezes every time your husband had them, or the pox from your children. Not all fall to every sickness.’ Thaddeus nodded to Ian and Olyver. ‘These twins’ father nursed Sir Richard and two of his fellow soldiers as they lay dying, and remains healthy to this day, yet he rejects any idea that God singled him out for favour. He knows his flaws too well to believe himself more deserving of life than those who have perished.’

  ‘But does God not ordain everything, My Lord? How else was I spared the sneezes except by His mercy?’

  A smile lit Thaddeus’s eyes. ‘If I knew that, mistress, we could be free of them forever.’ He paused. ‘I have few answers except to remind you that Jesus gave us only two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself.’ He released her hands to cup his palm under the chin of the toddler. ‘This is your neighbour. If you abandon him, you abandon God.’

  It was another two days before the snow stopped falling. By then, the church had become a stable for horses and the great hall a pen for as many sheep as Thaddeus and his companions had been able to shepherd through the blizzard. All were in need of fodder. On the first morning of clear skies, Edmund, Joshua, Peter and the twins located a barn stacked with hay on the edge of the pastureland, and used wooden spades from a shed beside the manor house to dig through the drift in front of the double doors.

  They stood for several minutes, contemplating the sheaves that were piled inside and the two pitchforks impaled in the ground on either side of the doorway. The pack’s lack of interest suggested there was nothing to find, but Joshua said dogs responded to movement as much as scent. If rats had burrowed into the hay to sleep through the winter, they’d emerge as soon as the sheaves were disturbed. Fleas too.

  Edmund, always the most reluctant to encounter rats, gave a groan of anguish before seizing a pitchfork and using it to stab a sheaf. ‘Bloody well set your animals on to anything that twitches or I’ll wring their necks myself,’ he warned Joshua, as he slung the bundle onto the snow behind them. ‘I’m damned if I’ll catch the pestilence to keep Pedle Hinton serfs alive.’

  He made a fine show of proving differently, Ian thought with amusement, as he watched his friend make deeper inroads into the stack. But whether Edmund wanted to keep sheep alive for the sake of the women or the toddler was anyone’s guess. He’d become the women’s favourite after patiently coaxing the infant to open his eyes and take nourishment, and there was no question he enjoyed their praise. They said his voice and face must resemble the child’s father’s, for the little boy responded more to him than to anyone else—so much so that he would only eat if Edmund cradled him in his lap and fed him from his plate.

  Thaddeus asked the child’s name and how old he was, but none of the women knew. He’d been found wandering the village one morning in November, but no one could say if he was from Pedle Hinton or had become detached from a family fleeing north to escape the pestilence. From his size, he was believed to be some two years old, but he couldn’t tell them his name. Before the pestilence, Pedle Hinton field serfs had numbered above five hundred, and toddlers had been hard to distinguish when some families ran to eight or ten children, with half being lost in the first three years of life. Alice thought he might be a Blount, the last of whom was believed to have perished in the week before he was discovered, but the other women were doubtful. He hadn’t the look of John Blount and they couldn’t recall Jeanne binding a suckling babe to her breast in order to work the fields in any of the previous eight seasons.

  Out of curiosity, the following morning Thaddeus searched the church for the parish register after he and his companions had hobbled their horses in the nave. He found it in the priest’s quarters, beneath the dead man’s blood-and-pus-
stained stole, which he flicked to the floor with the point of his sword, along with the wooden cross that lay on top. He bent his head in apology to the altar before he left, as much for turning God’s house into a stable as for his affront to the crucifix. He harboured no heresies against Christ, only against the Church which claimed to speak for Him.

  That afternoon, by the light of the fire, he traced the Blount family’s history in the register. The last child to be born to John and Jeanne had been a son in the winter of 1346, but his early death was recorded six months later. In the eleven years before, Jeanne had given birth to nine babies, only three of whom had survived long enough to see the pestilence. The priest had recorded their deaths before he, too, had succumbed.

  Since sons were valued more highly than daughters, Thaddeus found it hard to believe the toddler had been abandoned by fleeing serfs, and he combed the register for every boy born between the summer of 1346 and the spring of 1347. Eight had died within a year of their births, leaving sixteen unaccounted for. He read their names and the names of their parents aloud. In most cases, particularly where peasant strips adjoined or huts were close, one or other of the women was able to say with certainty that the whole family had perished, including babes in arms. But the fate of four was unknown.

  ‘I heard it told that Tom Halfpenny chose to abscond and take his wife and son with him,’ said Alice. ‘They were young and had more courage than the rest of us.’

  ‘Jacob Cooper did the same after his daughter perished,’ another woman said. ‘He and Molly swore an oath that they’d not let any more of their children suffer and were gone by the morning.’

  Harold Talbot, somewhat mellowed by taking food into his belly, nodded. ‘By my guess, upwards of fifty of the younger men absconded,’ he told Thaddeus. ‘They promised to come back for their families when they’d found shelter elsewhere, but none ever has. It may be that this child belongs to one of them.’

  Thaddeus ran his finger down the page. ‘We’re left with two. William Fulcher and Godfrey Lovell.’

  Edmund raised his head. ‘My grandfather was Godfrey Trueblood and my grandmother was Meg Lovell. That can’t be chance, can it?’

  Thaddeus turned back pages to find the births of Godfrey Lovell’s parents and grandparents. Every so often, he saw surnames he recognised from Develish and he wondered how many of the demesne’s daughters had married into Pedle Hinton. The stories of so many families were written in these simple inscriptions of births, marriages and deaths, and yet the knowledge was lost when there was no one to read them. With patient cross-referencing, he traced Godfrey Lovell’s lineage to the birth of his grandfather, Robert Lovell, and from there, three pages earlier, learnt the name of Robert’s older sister, Meg.

  He gave a bark of satisfaction. ‘I can tell you for certain when I’ve checked the Develish ledger,’ he told Edmund, ‘but it looks as if your grandmother was sister to this little fellow’s grandfather. She must have moved to Develish on her marriage.’ He read out the entries for both births. ‘Godfrey Lovell is your cousin.’

  Alice looked down from the gallery as the young men in My Lord of Athelstan’s entourage untied the sheaves and dropped the hay in loose piles amongst the flock. They were very assured in what they were doing. Peter Catchpole turned a lame ewe on her back and used his knife to dig a stone from between the cloves of her hoof while the twins moved from sheep to sheep, running their fingers around faces and ears, searching for ticks. Through the open door of the kitchen, she saw Edmund and Joshua filling My Lord of Pedle Hinton’s embossed metal piss-pots with snow before holding them over six-inch-wide candles to melt the crystals to water. She made a silent prayer that her father wasn’t watching as they carried the costly vessels into the great hall and placed them in front of the animals as drinking troughs.

  When she’d first seen the youths, she hadn’t doubted their status was above hers. True, they looked younger than the fighting men she’d seen in the past, but their weapons, their manner of speech and their coats and liveries, though saturated, had given them the bearing of freemen. Seeing them now, dressed in tunics and britches and showing more knowledge of how to manage stock than any Pedle Hinton soldier ever had, she wasn’t so sure. Certainly, her father believed them to be serfs, whispering constantly in her ear that Gyles Startout was as low-born as he.

  She turned to watch Thaddeus sort through scrolls on the shelves in My Lord of Pedle Hinton’s chamber. Most he returned to their places with only the briefest of glances, a few he placed on the floor at his feet. Feeling her gaze upon him, he looked towards her with a smile. ‘What troubles you, mistress?’

  A flush of embarrassment stained her cheeks. How churlish she would seem to question this man when his presence had brought so much hope and strength. And yet she was fearful. ‘You must not think me ungrateful, sire. Two days ago, I could barely stand, and I wept to see little Godfrey fade when the last of the dried plums were gone. It filled me with happiness to hear him laugh this morning.’ She searched his face, her own creased with anxiety.

  ‘Say what is in your heart, Alice. The truth will not offend me.’

  She took a breath to steady herself. ‘My father tells me Gyles Startout is as base-born as we and that his sons can be no different, sire. To accept the food they give us will not serve for excuse when a new lord comes.’

  Thaddeus interpreted her words as best he could. ‘You think it better to say you took food from a noble?’

  ‘We are obligated to obey the commands of those above us, sire.’

  He studied her with amusement. ‘You’ve come a long way, Alice. When we first met, you were afraid of God; now your mind is troubled only by the imagined arrival of a man who doesn’t exist.’ He nodded towards the burnt-out roof. ‘Which lord is so foolish that he’ll pay the taxes of inheritance to acquire a demesne without labourers? Who will repair this house and rebuild the village? Who will plough the fields and harvest the corn?’

  Alice shook her head in bewilderment. Such thoughts had never occurred to her.

  ‘No landowner in England will have the men to work his estates once the pestilence has passed,’ Thaddeus went on, bending to lift a scroll from the floor. ‘This letter was sent to My Lord of Pedle Hinton from a cousin in Normandy.’ He unfurled the vellum. ‘It’s dated Christmas, 1347—some six months before the pestilence entered Melcombe—and speaks of towns and villages in France and Italy being laid waste by a killing disease. In his own estates, this man had already lost one-third of his serfs and expected to lose another third before summer. He finishes by saying he’ll be reduced to penury if that happens.’

  He watched Alice’s expression move from bewilderment through shock to anger. ‘We thought only Dorseteshire had sinned,’ she said. ‘My Lord of Pedle Hinton raged at us for bringing God’s wrath to the county, and the priest ordered us to beg his forgiveness before we asked God for His. Neither said Normandy was afflicted.’

  ‘Would it have made a difference if they had?’

  ‘For certain, sire. It filled us with terror to think we were alone in our suffering. My poor husband died not knowing what wickedness Dorseteshire had committed.’ She dashed a tear from her eye with the back of her hand. ‘The master was cruel to berate us. If he knew that France had fallen to the sickness, he should have made plans to protect us, the same way My Lady of Develish did.’

  ‘I doubt he had Lady Anne’s courage, Alice. It takes strength and bravery to defy the Church. If Milady had believed what His Grace the bishop told her, the story of Develish would have been different.’

  ‘Why did she not believe it, sire?’

  Thaddeus answered honestly. ‘She was raised by nuns who taught her to follow the teachings of Jesus. It makes her the kindest and most considerate of mistresses. Since she sees no fault in her people, she cannot accept that God does either, and strives to keep them safe because her faith tells her that this is what she must do.’

  ‘Do her serfs follow the teachings of Jesus
, sire?’

  ‘They try, Alice.’

  ‘Then that is why God has spared them, sire. They have more goodness than the rest of us.’

  Thaddeus laughed as he dropped the scroll to the floor and took another from the shelf. ‘I have high hopes of you, mistress,’ he teased. ‘A minute past, you were quibbling about taking food from Develish thieves, now you raise them to the level of saints. You’ll be stealing yourself in another two days, if you believe the cause virtuous enough.’

  (EXTRACT FROM A PRIVATE JOURNAL KEPT BY LADY ANNE)

  The last day of February, 1349

  Thaddeus has returned with yet more plundered sheep. He has put them to graze on the common land, which is bare of snow now that the thaw has come.

  He and his companions surprised us by emerging from the woodland where the footpath from Pedle Hinton enters Develish. We had been searching the highway to the north and south for days, never expecting them to come along the track. They were herding the flock ahead of them, using Joshua’s dogs to confine stragglers, and we heard the animals’ plaintive bleating before we saw them. Gyles summoned me to watch as the column of sheep issued from the trees, followed by a motley army of women and children on horseback, and Thaddeus and his companions on foot.

  Edmund Trueblood appeared first, bearing a tiny boy on his shoulders and leading his horse with 3 young maids in the saddle. The Startout twins, Peter Catchpole and Joshua Buckler followed, each with 2 or 3 frail-looking passengers on their mounts, while at the rear came Thaddeus, guiding a heavily laden pack pony with one hand and, with the other, his charger with a greybeard and woman upon its back. I counted 18 extra souls and asked Gyles where they could have come from. He guessed Pedle Hinton, for he recognised the greybeard as an elder who goes by the name of Harold Talbot.