The Black and the White

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘What if we lose our way?’

  ‘We won’t. We only have to stick to the river.’

  I am about to argue with him when I hear it.

  Ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha!

  My guts clench and I spin around in the direction of the cruel laughter. The magpie is sitting in a tree a little way off. It stares at me, then gives its mocking cry again. My guts clench as I search the bare branches in vain for a second magpie. One for sorrow. Is Hob right — will we be attacked, will I be left alone again?

  I look behind us, catch Hob watching me.

  ‘Let’s carry on then,’ I say, ‘while we’ve still got some light.

  We plod on and, as the sky drains from blue to black, our world shrinks to the ground beneath our feet. We three might be the only living things left in England.

  Then, abruptly, a bell calls us back to the world of men.

  ‘Curfew — must be Marlborough.’ I wait but Hob says nothing. ‘It’s late,’ I push, ‘the embers’ll be fading. We need to stop and light a fire before they’re gone.’

  He looks back the way we have come, though it will do him no good; there is no moon and we would scarcely see an attacker until they were upon us. While he havers, I decide. Fear has driven us further than sense dictates and I will take my cart and my mare no further tonight. With every rut and hole and crooked stone we risk a broken leg, a twisted axle. I pull the mare up and make sure the cart is level and will not roll.

  After lighting the fire, I leave Hob skinning a rabbit he shot earlier and take the mare to the river.

  I keep my back to the mare and my eyes trained into the darkness around me as she drinks. How I long to eat meat with Hob tonight and not to have to make yet more pottage from oats and onions. Far from everything I know, I crave comfort. What does it matter if I break the Lenten fast? What does such a venal sin matter, when I have left my father, unshriven and alone, in the red earth of the Dene? And yet, I know I must not. If the saint is to bless my journey, even venal sins must be avoided.

  As I return to the fire, I see that Hob has just discarded the rabbit’s skin, head and guts on the ground. I reach down and put them on to the fire. Best not to attract foxes or badgers in the night; nor carrion birds in the dawn light to throw a curse over the rest of the day. The magpie from earlier has left me jittery.

  The fire spits and hisses like a cat at the blood and wet skin and the smell of burning fur fills my nose. If we were in Lysington, I would wrap Hob’s rabbit in straw and clay and bake it in the embers so that the meat falls off the bone when the clay is cracked open. But the fire isn’t well-on enough and we’ve neither straw nor clay to hand, so I watch as he spits the carcass over the thin bed of embers and turn aside to make my own thin supper.

  Our meal done, I gather the rabbit bones and set them in a pot to simmer on the fire for broth.

  Hob watches me work. I know what he is thinking. Woman’s business.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me?’ I feel his eyes on me from the other side of the fire but he gives no reply. ‘Richard Longe was right, wasn’t he? You may be a lord’s bastard, but you’re a runaway, too.’

  I risk a glance and see that this is not the question he was expecting. Still, he rallies quickly in his own defence.

  ‘What does it matter what kind of house I was born in? I’m free by right of birth.’

  It may be different where Hob is from but, where I was born, a bastard son has no claim on his father’s rights.

  He stretches out a finger, pokes the end of a stick into the fire. ‘What about your father?’

  My heart clenches. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Free or unfree?’

  The cold fist releases. ‘Free.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Unfree till they married.’ Not that it’s any of his business. ‘She was a servant in our house.’

  ‘He married a servant? A woman unfree and poor?’ It might be Richard speaking; my flesh crawls with chill bumps despite the fire. ‘So...’ He pauses. I can feel his eyes on me but I will not look up. ‘When did he marry her — before or after he got you on her?’

  If your mother hadn’t been such a slut, Dadda would’ve kept his cock to himself and you wouldn’t be here, Martin!

  Does Hob see my hand shake as I stir the broth? I think not — it would surely goad him to more taunts. My rage always roused Richard and Adam to greater cruelty.

  ‘I’m no bastard, Hob.’

  ‘Well I am.’ He leans forward, hitting his own chest with a closed fist. ‘But at least I’m a knight’s bastard, a soldier’s spawn!’

  He glares at me, as if he has issued some kind of challenge. Or as if I had.

  ‘The knight — he was your lord’s son?’

  He nodded. ‘Robert. My father’s name was Robert.’

  I get the whole story, then; the reason for all the pride and ambition and rage and hatred of lordship that seethes within Hob Cleve. I wonder that he has kept it to himself so long for, once he has started, he cannot stop. Not that it is a long story, or even an unusual one; it might be the oldest story in the world.

  His father in blood — this Robert — was esquire to a knight who fought with the king in Scotland and France and, in the year when he was seventeen years old, he came home at Maytime to see his ailing mother. And, as noble young men of high spirits will, he went a-maying with the villagers on his father’s demesne lands.

  ‘If it hadn’t been warm, that May-eve in the woods,’ Hob says, ‘I doubt I’d be here. No man likes to bare his arse to the rain and the cold, not even for a pretty face and a maidenhead.’

  Did Robert single her out, I wonder, or did the maid with the pretty face have her eye on him? I have been out in the moonlit woods to bring in the may-boughs with sunrise, I have seen how girls put themselves in the way of the young men they fancy.

  I meet Hob’s eye.

  ‘You’ve a disapproving look about you, Martin. But you needn’t think he forced her. I’m living proof of that, I think!’

  Somehow, he reads my ignorance in my expression and gives a thin half-smile.

  ‘Don’t you know? If the act gives a woman no pleasure, her womb won’t open, there’ll be no child.’

  I feel a heat rise within me as I picture Hob with the simpering girls who came to see the saint, see the practised way he spoke to them, touched them. No doubt he has experience of pleasuring girls, of taking his pleasure with them. And, no doubt, he can smell the ignorance coming off me. It scarcely mattered in Lysington where I was half-priested already; I find it matters now.

  ‘And then?’ I ask. ‘Did your father ride up on his destrier and claim you?’ It is a cruel question; he has already told me that his grandfather failed to acknowledge him and the apple never falls far from the bough that bore it.

  But Hob does not waver. ‘Yes! He was proud of fathering a son.’

  ‘So, he provided for you and your mother, then?’

  ‘He would have, if he’d been there. But he was with his lord.’

  A man among men, Hob’s tone says, a warrior who lacked the time to settle matters of women and their children.

  ‘He asked the old man to make sure we were provided for. Which he saw fit to do —’ Hob spits into the fire — ‘by telling his bailiff to find a husband for my mother.’

  His mother was unfree too, then. On many manors, I know, the distinction between free and bond has become one that no-one cares about overmuch; but if a lord is jealous of his rights and privileges, no unfree man — or woman — can stand against his will.

  ‘So, who was she married to — a man with no choice in the matter?’

  ‘Of course — who else would dare?’

  ‘Was he unwilling?’

  Hob spits again, as if his mouth has filled with bile. ‘Unwilling? He grabbed his chance with both hands — thought that having the future lord’s son under his roof would see him go up in the world. And so it should have —’ his voice is tight with fury —
‘would have, if Robert hadn’t died.’

  I take my knife out and tease some shards of meat off the bones in the pot as I wait for him to go on.

  ‘Every time he came to see us, my father promised he’d persuade the old man. That we’d be freed and provided for.’ He stops and sucks in a breath. ‘But the old bastard wasn’t going to give us our freedom for nothing. He wanted something from my father first. There was a widow he had his eye on — a rich widow with land and no heirs. That was the bargain — if my father married her, he’d get what he wanted for us.’

  ‘Isn’t that what lords do?’ I ask. ‘Marry for fortune?’

  ‘My father didn’t want an old woman, however rich she was!’

  ‘He could have kept a young woman as well, for his pleasure.’

  ‘My father was an esquire, soon to be knight! He wanted a beautiful woman at his table as well as in his bed. He didn’t want to sit and eat with a woman twice his age and look at her wrinkles and her barren belly!’

  I wipe my knife-blade on the grass and put it away. ‘He didn’t marry her then?’

  ‘No.’ The word is fraught with pride and resentment.

  ‘So you never got your freedom?’

  His glare is ugly in the firelight’s dark shadows. ‘My father would’ve freed us. And given us land. He promised my mother. As soon as the old man was dead and he came into his lordship, he’d free us. We’d be the best provided for in the village. A new house — land, sheep...’

  ‘He told your mother? He visited her — you?’

  ‘Every year he’d come back for the maying. If his lord could spare him. Every year. And he always brought something for me. He gave me this.’ He pulls his knife from his belt, smoothing the length of its blade with his fingers. ‘Taught me how to flick it up and catch it, how to throw it to kill a rabbit.’

  A knight’s esquire killing rabbits with a knife instead of his hawk? No wonder he and his father had not seen eye to eye; Robert obviously had too much of a taste for the pursuits of common men.

  ‘Every time my father came, he’d say — look after my boy, one day he’ll be a free man, he’ll be somebody on this manor.’ He looks over the fire at me to make sure my listening is rapt enough. ‘Every time, he’d tell him, my mother’s cur of a husband — look after my boy.’

  I wait for him to go on but Hob seems unable to finish his story.

  ‘He died,’ I say, finally. ‘Robert — your father — he died.’ Hob nods. ‘How?’

  He jabs his knife into the ground at his feet and pulls it back towards him, slicing the turf into a wound. ‘He was with his lord. And the king. At the siege of some town in Flanders — I don’t know its name.’

  It was sieges that had called the Dene’s miners to the king’s wars. Did our men undermine the walls of the Flemish town where Hob’s father died? Did they die there, too, leaving their own children fatherless, their wives widowed?

  ‘What happened? After he died?’

  Hob breathes in and out through flared nostrils. ‘Nothing,’ he says, finally. ‘For months. Nothing. My father died in August. We didn’t know anything about it until Christmas. The bailiff announced it before the feast — we had to hear it at the same time as everybody else. Damn him to hell!’

  Is his curse directed at his father for dying or the lord’s bailiff for failing to grant him the privileges of an acknowledged son? I cannot tell and I let him fall into silence.

  ‘The bloody flux,’ he says, after a long while. ‘That’s what he died of.’

  The bloody flux — a sickness of the campaigns. According to the foresters back from France, it brought a writhing, gut-twisting pain that made a man fear he would shit his bowels from his body.

  ‘My mother’s stupid bastard of a husband didn’t know when to give up. Thought we’d still get our freedom. Went to see the reeve.’

  I do not need to hear the rest. Hob’s face tells a sufficient story.

  ‘Came back dragging a stick. That was the beginning of it. Kept shouting that my father’d never meant to free us, that he’d only said that to get a free fuck out of my mother every time he came home.’

  Hob, his chin low, stares at nothing.

  I wonder what the reeve said to Hob’s stepfather. It seems to me that their neighbours might well have thought that Hob’s mother and her husband had made too much of their future expectations, of the golden boy beneath their roof who was going to make them wealthy and free. A man like the reeve, who had earned his position, won people’s respect by hard work and honesty, might well take the opportunity to have a small revenge on that kind of crowing presumption.

  ‘Got him back in the end, though, don’t think I didn’t.’ Hob’s words come creeping towards me over the fire, low and full of malice.

  My stomach clenches and I sit very still as his eyes clamp on to mine. ‘Watched him die, didn’t I? Watched him die like a dog.’

  Hob stabs the ground at his feet, tearing at the turf.

  ‘My mother’d never’ve died if it wasn’t for him. He brought death into our house. The pestilence started at the other end of the village, a mile away from us. Died quickly, families did, one after another. Lay in the church, stinking, unburied. Gravediggers wouldn’t touch them. Said the families had to do it. If there was nobody left, the corpse rotted where it lay.’

  Again and again, as he speaks, Hob stabs the knife into the ground and pulls it out. Stab — pull. Stab — pull.

  ‘He went to the parson. Said he’d bury the bodies if he was paid. So he did — day after day, he dug pits and threw them in.’

  Stab — pull.

  ‘And he brought their death and their stink to our house and she died.’

  Stab, pull; stab, pull.

  ‘She died and he didn’t care. Said she’d always been weak. She died and he lived. He buried her and he buried our neighbours and still he didn’t die!’

  Stab, stab, stab.

  ‘Still, he sat there, in the house, denying me my freedom!’

  He stops then and I stare at him. ‘But he died in the end?’ I ask, finally. ‘The plague took him in the end?’

  Hob looks up. Slowly he shakes his head, eyes holding mine. ‘Not every corpse put in a pit has died of the plague.’

  The look in his eyes, dead and cold, almost stops my heart.

  He looks down and pushes his knife slowly, deliberately, into the ground.

  ‘You killed him?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Now he looks up. ‘Does it? Do you know how many people died in my village? Hundreds. When I went to the priest and told him he was dead, do you know what he said?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘“Who’ll bury them now?” Not “why didn’t you come for me?” not “God have mercy on his soul”. Who’ll bury them now? He didn’t care that the bastard was dead, or how he’d died. He was just another corpse.’ He stares at me. ‘Tell me something, Martin — if God and his priests care so little that the folk of England are dying like flies in autumn, why should I?’

  I take first watch while Hob settles under the cart.

  I stare into the fire.

  I watched him die like a dog.

  Did Hob kill his mother’s husband? He certainly wished him dead.

  As you wished your father dead.

  I thrust the demon’s words aside and fasten my thoughts on Hob. Did he kill Edgar? He would have, if I had not stopped him — killed him like a rabid dog. I ask myself Hob’s question — does it matter? When churchyards are like ploughed fields and blameless acres are sown not with crops but with corpses, does one more death matter?

  I believe, in my heart, that it does. But not, I have to admit, as much as it would have mattered before the pestilence came. Perhaps nothing matters as much, now, as it did before.

  I look up and see Hob curled at the side of the fire. What if he decides that his life would be easier if I were dead? He needs money for his new, masterless life in Salster
and I have money.

  But no. He needs me. If he wants use of the cart and everything in it then he must have me too, for the mare will not go anywhere for him. Her unyielding refusal to budge for him has meant that I have had to lead her through every stream on our journey, take her to every drinking-place, bring her back from her hobbled grazing each morning.

  No. If Hob wants to arrive in Salster with the appearance of a man of substance, he will have to keep company with me. The question is — now that I have seen how little a man’s life might mean to him — do I want his company? And, if not, how can I escape him?

  CHAPTER 21

  The following day, as dusk draws near and the darkening skies threaten snow once more, we come upon Hungerford Regis. We round a headland and there is the town, spread out before us. Another river joins the Kennet here from the west and, on the spit of land where the two rivers join — an island, more or less — there is a cluster of white, slate-roofed buildings that is joined to the land on either side of the rivers by sturdy wooden bridges.

  ‘That’s our way.’ I point down at the island. ‘Dark’s not far off. If snow comes, we’ll need shelter.’ I look around at him, pulling aside the blanket that covers my head so that I can see him properly.

  ‘You think we should stay there tonight?’

  I turn and gaze down at the island’s sturdy buildings, screwing up my eyes in the fading light. ‘Most likely that’s a little priory or a hospital,’ I say, the wind almost whipping my words away. ‘They’d give us shelter.’

  ‘What if the plague’s there?’

  I glance over at him. ‘We don’t need to sleep in the guest-hall. I just want to be out of the wind if snow comes.’

  Hob looks up at the swirling sky. ‘If we’re going to stay amongst clerics, we should put the saint away.’

  I nod and move to unfasten the canvas. The knots are stiff to my frozen fingers and I am soon berating myself for not just taking the saint and lying her on the pallet in the back of the cart instead of wanting to hide her at the front, away from casual curiosity.