Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  FOURTEEN

  The war which Father Andreas had foreseen in 1452 and which, in England, had been a matter of talk for years, came in 1455, in the beautiful month of May. It affected the part of Suffolk of which Baildon was the centre hardly at all, for it was a war between great lords with their own private armies and this was an area of manors, large or small, of fields and sheep-runs owned by people who had no political ambitions: at one point of the long, see-saw struggle there was a possibility that the French might send aid to the Queen and that French troops might attempt to land at Bywater. Then even the Abbot of Baildon, Lancastrian at heart because King Henry was such a friend to the Church, remembered that he was English and turned Yorkist, temporarily, sharing the general feeling—We want no French here.

  Apart from this short-lived scare, the war meant mainly a rise in prices and for people who produced things this cut both ways; if you paid more for what you bought, you gained more for what you sold.

  However, as time went on and the see-saw tilted this way and that, and there were truces, followed by fresh battles and other truces, even this peaceful corner was touched by war’s aftermath—footloose men, some wounded, some simply dismissed, turned off to make their own way home, if they had homes. Some merely begged, some demanded what they wanted with menaces. The civil war weakened the structure of law and order and the bands of “sturdy beggars’, as distinguishable from the pitiable, were much dreaded.

  Intake, for two years, escaped even such visitations; it lay at the end of a lane which led nowhere and on the whole the sturdy beggars infested busy roads where travellers and merchants could be robbed. Isolated houses of medium size were also a target; larger establishments with able-bodied men-servants about were avoided.

  The six men who came to Intake, towards the end of a March day in 1457, did so by accident, misled by one of their number who claimed to have knowledge of the area and said that the narrow lane was a short cut which would bring them out on to the road to Colchester. And was a sheltered road with thick woods on both sides.

  On an ordinary March day, to hardy men, that would not have been much of an attraction. But this was no ordinary March day; a blizzard was blowing, laden with something midway between snow and sleet. Hungry weather. They were all hungry men. Behind them, three bad days. A long tramp up a long drive to a house that looked likely, only to find it a blackened shell. An attack on Baildon market, where almost everything was for sale or for the taking—even hot pies, kept warm on a charcoal brazier—but, as they moved in, preparing to take what they could not pay for, the pie-woman screamed and immediately all the other stall-holders formed a ragged but effective amateur defence force. Out from under a stall offering butter and eggs came the club, from another the long knife, the hammer… even a pottery bowl, aimed well, was capable of breaking a nose.

  At the miserable end of a miserable day, Intake looked promising; a house, big enough to promise food, not big enough to offer much resistance. Food and shelter for the night.

  Civility first.

  ‘Lady, we’re hungry. Got a bite to spare for old soldiers?’

  Walter had spared her from the harrowing tales he had heard and he had not been to market that day. Supper at Knight’s Acre was over and had been an eked out, somewhat meagre meal. The farmhouse routine had been adopted here; when work in the fields was possible, dinner was makeshift, supper substantial; in winter the business was reversed; dinner was the main meal and supper simply something to stave off hunger until morning.

  ‘You are welcome to what I have—bread and cheese.’

  There was no question of asking them in; they were in, looming large in the kitchen. Margaret, as always when faced with any unusual situation, went rigid. The deaf woman looked startled, having heard nothing; she stared at the six men as though they had sprung up out of the floor.

  Sybilla made the signs which Madge understood, pointing to Margaret and to John and then to the floor above.

  Sybilla brought out the bread and the cheese; not much for six hungry men and now she half-understood the situation. Hungry beggars stood humbly by the door waiting for what ever was handed out. These men, uninvited, had walked in.

  ‘This all you got?’ one of them asked, cramming cheese and bread into his mouth.

  Another said, ‘We’re meat hungry.’

  She had the courage, partly inbred and partly acquired, of her class. This was, she now realised, a raid but the idea that anything untoward might happen to her never once occurred to her. But she might be robbed—was in fact already being robbed, insofar as the men were devouring a month’s supply of cheese, a week’s supply of fresh-baked bread. One of them had even followed her into the larder.

  ‘You live poor, lady, and no mistake.’

  ‘I am poor,’ she said.

  Henry stood staring and a thought occurred to her.

  ‘I could offer you ale… Henry, run across to Walter—tell him we have guests—old soldiers. Ask him to bring a jug of his ale.’

  ‘How many, Harry?’

  ‘A lot. Six or seven.’

  ‘Now listen. Where are they?’

  ‘In the kitchen. Eating.’

  ‘Then you take this… and these… Think you can manage? That’s my boy. You go in at the front and lodge them all handy, in the hall, near the door to the kitchen. And then go to bed.’

  ‘You going to shoot them, Walter?’

  ‘Not unless I must. I’ll try getting them drunk first.’

  The bleak, bitter, near-freezing day had ended in a clear, frosty night. Carrying not a jug but a cask of ale across the yard, Walter calmly made his plan. He could not fight six men within the narrow bounds of the kitchen; but with any luck he could get them drunk and incapable. What happened after that somewhat depended upon the men themselves or upon his judgement of them. To a degree he had sympathy with the plight of soldiers, turned loose upon the world, unwanted as soon as their masters had come to terms. He proposed to drink with them and talk to them; those he considered fundamentally honest, driven to villainy by circumstance, he proposed to drag by the heels and deposit in various parts of Layer Wood—and he would leave them their clothes. Real rogues he would strip and men so exposed, full of ale, on such a night, would die.

  He entered the kitchen with an air of conviviality.

  ‘Brought you some ale, mates. I know what soldiers like. Been one myself.’

  To Sybilla he said quietly, ‘Go to your room, my lady. Bar yourself in.’

  He sat, plying them with ale and pretending to drink with them. The first effect, as usual, was to make them garrulous. Even in this stage they all seemed decent fellows enough; boasting a little of brave deeds, desperate engagements, narrow escapes; but not of cold-blooded murder or rape. They seemed to be united in their hatred of Lord Delamount, whose men they had been; he’d switched sides so often that in the end neither Lancastrians nor Yorkists could trust him and he’d run off to Scotland without paying the money he owed them. Presently they were all drunk, laughing, singing bawdy, scurrilous ditties. But the next stage, the one for which Walter was waiting, seemed long in arriving. No heads sagged forward on to the table. Nobody fell to the floor. Strange! They had come in from the cold to the warm kitchen, they had eaten—for the first time in three days if they were to be believed—and they had consumed a vast quantity of ale, October ale, always considered the best and most potent.

  Walter took a meditative sip of his own cup. Yes, good ale.

  Yet they seemed to grow livelier. And hungrier. They now accepted him as one of their company.

  ‘We’re hungry for meat, mate. You got pigs around here.’

  Useless to deny the presence of pigs. They had only to go into the yard, take twenty paces and use their noses.

  ‘Old sow. Tough as the devil,’ Walter said, thinking of the seven piglets snuggled in the straw beside their mother. Anything to save them! ‘Tell you what, though; there’s pickled pork in a barrel.’

  ‘Then
why dint that bitch bring it out?’

  ‘And why dint you spot it, Joe? You follered her in.’

  ‘We don’t want no pickled pork. Lived on it for months.’ ‘That weren’t pork. That were horse. Went into the cask shoes and all.’

  ‘And harness! Believe me, mate what we ate, and fought on. Owd sow’d be a treat.’

  They were good-humoured enough but ready, Walter knew, to turn otherwise. He made one last effort.

  ‘Take an hour to get ready, she would; and three to cook. I could boil us up a bit of the pickled in no time at all.’

  But now their minds were all set on fresh meat, the fat· translucent and sizzling.

  Somebody said, ‘Make up the fire.’ He tossed a stool on to the embers. Somebody threw on two of the wooden plates. They were all on the move now. And potentially dangerous. Likely to set the house on fire. They were drunk but not in the way he wanted them to be.

  ‘Where’s this owd sow?’

  Walter’s aim now was to get them out of the house. And he had one small hope left. Sometimes men not ostensibly drunk in a warm room went into the cold and were suddenly very drunk indeed. It might happen now.

  The clouds had blown away; a thin layer of snow lay on the ground; in the sky the stars and a half-moon shone frostily bright. It was very cold.

  The men, laughing and shouting, keeping together, jostled out into the yard.

  ‘Over there,’ Walter said, ‘to your right. I’ll just make the fire up properly.’ He stooped and picked up some wood from the pile just outside the door and stood for a second, watching. The cold did not have the desired effect but they were drunk in a very peculiar way; they seemed to be dancing, making little leaps into the air.

  Very quietly he closed the door and barred it.

  His long bow and the six iron tipped shafts stood just where he had directed Henry to put them. Taking that precaution, he had not been able to visualise clearly how he could use them, now he knew. Passing the front door he barred that, too; and then climbed the stairs. Outside Sybilla’s door he called. ‘My lady, it’s me. Let me in.’ Her big bedroom had two windows, one overlooking the garden at the front, one the yard at the back.

  ‘Have you got rid of them, Walter?’

  ‘Far from it. But I’ve got them out. It’ll cost us one of the sucking pigs; maybe two. Men like that are wasteful.’

  ‘In that case we shall have escaped lightly,’ she said. She seemed unperturbed still. She had retired when Walter told her to because ordinary men, with ale in them, would use language unfit for female ears. His other instruction, to bar herself in, she had ignored—in any case, with what? And when the noise in the kitchen increased, Margaret had waked and screamed and John, for once copying Margaret, had yelled too. Sybilla was so uninformed, so unsuspicious and so confident… Six men, plainly hungry, had come and asked for food and she had given them not all she had but all she could spare. In the larder she had purposefully placed herself between the rather rude man who had followed her in and the cask of pork.

  ‘I hoped,’ Walter said, taking his stand by the window, ‘to get them drunk. Then I could have dealt with them. But it didn’t work. My lady, there’ll be a bit of trouble when they find the door barred. Better stand away.’

  Still with that extraordinary dancing, prancing gait they came back from the sty. Joy; joy; joy. Not an old sow, tough as the devil but that rarest of delicacies, a sucking pig. A dish which only the very rich could afford. People who reared sucklings never ate that tender meat because a young pig must be fed and coddled along until its weight outran its edibility. Sucking pig… no dressing needed; no bristles to be singed off; no real hide to be scraped. And taking no time to cook. The old sow would have been a different matter but even for her they had been prepared to wait. Within an hour this young but sizeable body would be edible. They pranced and danced, tossing the little corpse from hand to hand.

  And now, between them and the cooking fire, a barred door. The seeming old comrade had betrayed them.

  They hammered on the door and shouted; unless Walter opened the door at once they’d ram it in.

  From overhead Walter’s voice, cold and level, said, ‘The first man to touch that door, I’ll nail him to it.’

  From another window a younger but equally confident voice called, ‘And so will I.’

  They drew off a little. They were used to making shift. There were outbuildings. Easy enough to make a fire anywhere.

  At that moment a log on Walter’s untended fire shifted and blazed up, making the window bright in his little house. A cottage! Leaping and laughing they made towards it.

  ‘They’ve gone to my place now, my lady,’ Walter said. ‘But better there than here.’

  They’d ransack the place, of course. They’d find, in the second little room, his other cask of ale. His original plan might yet work.

  He watched and saw the window glow more brightly as the intruders broke up his bed, his chair, the big stool which served him as a table, the shelves he had made to hold his few belongings. Presently sparks as well as smoke emerged from the clay-lined hole which served him as chimney. Distance slightly muted the noise but there was a lot of it, and increasing.

  As though speaking to himself, Walter said at last, ‘It must be the rye.’

  ‘What rye, Walter?’

  ‘I used rye for my brewing this year, barley being such a price, my lady. It looked all right and tasted all right. The ale, I mean. But it made them drunk in a funny sort of way.’

  ‘Do you think they will leave tomorrow?’

  ‘I can’t say. Probably not. Maybe not till they’ve eaten all we have—including the horse. The one thing I can say is they won’t set foot in this house again. You’re safe enough, my lady.’

  ‘I always feel safe with you,’ she said simply. ‘Of course, I should never have let them in. But they said they were hungry; and I felt sorry for them.’

  ‘So did I—at first. But not now. I took against them as soon as they mentioned the pig.’

  Sybilla moved about. She looked in on Margaret and John, both sound asleep again. She took a blanket from her bed and offered it to Henry who scorned it. ‘Mother, I must have my arms free.’ Walter refused it, too, so she wrapped herself in it and sat huddled at the foot of the bed, cold even so. As the night aged the cold grew sharper.

  Suddenly Walter exclaimed, ‘God’s eyeballs!’ She ran to join him at the window.

  ‘Walter, what is it?’

  For a second he struggled between his two languages, Foul, which came naturally at such a moment, and Decent because she was here. There was a stammer and a choke before he managed to say, ‘They’ve set my place afire.’ She pushed beside him in the narrow window opening. It was true; sparks from the recklessly heaped fire had ignited the thatch at a point where the thin covering of snow had already melted from the heat within.

  ‘And I hope they all roast,’ Walter said.

  For quite a long time those inside Walter’s little house were unaware of what was happening overhead. The little pig was not well cooked but even its slight rawness was pleasurable. They dragged it from the fire and set it on the floor, pulling it apart with their fingers, cramming the charred, crisp outer skin and tender, only just heated flesh into their meat-hungry mouths. They were men of varied experience—the veteran of the party had been able to match, almost word for word, Walter’s experiences in France, the youngest was only six months away from the plough; but not one of them had ever known such happiness, such elation, such a desire to dance, to sing.

  Walter’s house, like all the others in Intake—except Knight’s Acre—was built of clay clods. It had a beam or two, and its thatch, vulnerable to fire; at shoulder level for a tall man, head level for a shorter one, it offered more resistance. When the roof and the beam that upheld it collapsed, four men were engulfed in smoulder and flame. Two, nearer the door, tore it open and escaped. The incoming draught fanned the conflagration and gave the others a mercifully
swift end. The two survivors, out in the yard, went through some antics. It was as though a puppet master had muddled the strings. And to the stark black and white of the moon and starlight reflected from the now frozen, diamond-bright sprinkling of snow was added the red glare of the burning house; and in the yard two madmen danced and then disappeared into the shadow cast by the outbuildings.

  ‘But Walter, should not they all—even the ones who burned—have Christian burial?’

  Four charred corpses—even their mothers would not recognise them— and two, frozen stiff; no need to strip them, in their dancing frenzy they had stripped themselves, just by the pigsty.

  Walter said, ‘There’s a bit more to it, my lady. Oh, I know Father Ambrose would get busy. He’s lost his memory for nearby things but he holds to the rules. He would very likely say suicide and he wouldn’t be far wrong. And then the Coroner’s Court… and talk… A place like this; one man and a boy… it could be a temptation to others. Better do it my way. And the first thing to do is to find out if they were seen. That might make all the difference. I’ll go down to the village and ask.’

  He put his questions craftily, ‘My place got set on fire last night. Did anybody see anybody lurking about?’ In every case the answer was ‘No.’ And Walter believed it. Had anyone seen the strangers he would have said so, if only to make plain the exculpation of any mischievous Intake boys. The men had arrived at dusk and, in such weather, everybody was within-doors and the shutters closed.

  Reporting back, Walter said, ‘What’s left in the house I shan’t bother about. I’d bury the other two but the ground’s too hard for digging. I’ll get the barrow and dump them in the wood.’

  ‘Will that be safe? Suppose they were found…’

  ‘There won’t be much left to find, my lady. This is hungry weather for foxes and weasels and such.’