This was a foul little place. There was really nowhere as attractive as Bordeaux, where she and Jeanne had spent so many happy years when they were young. The climate, the wines, the markets … and here all there was was mud, dirt, smelly and uncouth peasants who hardly knew how to address a lady, and rain. Always rain. It was a revolting place to live.
Of course she had agreed to come here as soon as her charge was chosen by Sir Ralph. He was a good man. Always respectful, polite, sensible. Well, until he began to blame Lady Jeanne for their lack of children. Then he changed a lot. But that was only to be expected. He was a knight, and he wanted an heir. What was a marriage if God didn’t bless the union? The whole point of marriage was children.
On hearing a little sniff, she looked down at the bundle of clothing beside her. Richalda was asleep, but she kicked even when dead to the world, and now her little feet began pounding at Emma’s thigh. The woman glanced about her narrowly, and then put a hand down and started to stroke the mite’s head.
Sir Baldwin was all right, really. Not so bad as a master. His manor was dreadful, with a poky little hall, a piddling solar and pathetic lands about it, but for all that he had advanced, with Jeanne’s help, and he was a fairly successful officer. Not that Emma would ever admit to his face that he had any skills or qualities that she could admire. She preferred to keep her distance from a master. Always.
It would have been good to have children of her own, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not now. No, better that she concentrated on Jeanne’s. This one and the one to follow. Who could tell? There may be more later.
Baldwin was a lot better than some she knew of. Some women lived in constant fear of their masters. And she had known a bad experience, too …
It was more than ten years ago now, when it had happened. He was Jeanne’s uncle, the man who had taken the girl in when she was orphaned. He had chosen Emma as a maid for her, and took a close interest in both girls. At the time Emma had thought his concern was purely that of an uncle who sought to ensure that his niece was well cared for, looking to Emma’s behaviour and training to ensure that Jeanne grew to be a courteous and elegant young lady, a credit to him and the household.
But it wasn’t just that. Emma realised only afterwards that she was not the first. She wouldn’t be the last, in all probability, either. The maid who looked after his wife was treated the same way, and if anyone were to complain, well, the street was just beyond the door, and a maid could as easily be on one side of the door as the other. Emma knew she wouldn’t last ten minutes on the streets. So she assiduously saw to Jeanne’s every need so that Jeanne need never complain about her, and accepted that each night she might be visited by the lecherous old bastard.
Escape to England, this wet, cold, cheerless part of the realm, was still escape. She detested almost every aspect of the place — but she wouldn’t seriously want to swap it for Bordeaux, not for all the wine they exported!
Perkin stood back as Beorn jumped down into the trench. They had driven a channel all the way up to within two spade spits of the bog, and now they needed only a little more work to be able to see the water drain.
‘Go on, you old woman,’ he called to Beorn, and the peasant showed his teeth in a smile, then started to drive his shovel into the boundary of the bog. Perkin watched with amusement.
The first shovelful hurtled through the air and narrowly missed Perkin, landing with a damp slap only a foot away from him. ‘Hey!’ The second would have hit him in the midriff, had he not leaped backwards. ‘You mad bugger!’
Beorn grinned again, and took two more spadesful, and then climbed from the channel quickly as a filthy-looking black-brown tide began to breach the remaining wall. It swirled, mud slid aside, and suddenly there was a dark stream trickling through a narrow fissure of soil. Soon the trickle had washed the fissure into a breach that bubbled with the draining water.
’Tin was up at the front, peering down into the bog. It was a strange sight, he thought. Usually it would be a soggy mass of matted rushes and grass that looked like a continuation of the pastureland all about, but now, as the level sank, the top of the bog was gradually starting to lower itself.
There were spots, he saw, where the rushes or grasses remained in place as the water seeped away. As Perkin called a boy and told him to go and find the sergeant and fetch him here to tell them what to do next, ’Tin stepped forward cautiously, testing the firmer clumps with his foot. The surface gave, like mud, but was held together with the mat of vegetation. Soon the water was low enough for the full extent of the bog to be seen as it dropped below the level of the surrounding pasture. Beorn was in the ditch again, shovelling out the excess mud before it could block the channel and stop the water flowing away, and ’Tin watched him flinging black mud towards a cursing and laughing Perkin, who rolled balls of mud and hurled them back.
’Tin grinned at the sight, and turned for a last look at the bog’s level. It was slowly falling around him, but in the middle it seemed to be dropping much faster, as though in there it was more like a pool of water, and not a bog at all. Things were sticking up from there, and ’Tin peered more closely, repelled and fascinated simultaneously. People had said that there’d be dead animals, even a few men, probably, because this bog had been here for as long as anyone could remember, and he wondered what a man who had died many years before might look like. There was a brown twig lying in a grassy hillock, and he grinned as he imagined it might be a hand, twisted and broken, and cast aside as though this was merely a midden.
Nah! There was hardly likely to be anything here. If anything, some long-dead cow’s carcass or a sheep that had wandered this way before ’Tin was born. Nothing more recent than them. Wouldn’t be a man, he told himself sadly. No one had been missing for so many years that the chances of finding a human body down there were remote. It was a shame, because he’d never had a chance to go to witness a hanging. In the old days, hangings used to happen here on the manor, apparently. Then executions were made a bit less arbitrary, and instead of being able to hang anyone he wanted, a lord of the manor had to have the coroner there, make sure everything was legal and stuff …
’Tin was annoyed that he’d missed out on those old days. Men were braver then, not like the present lot. If they’d had a little courage, they’d have been off to the wars rather than hanging about the vill here. He would. He wanted to join a host and fight; he’d be good at that. Except his mother would go completely potty if he told her …
Then he frowned and blinked. As the waters receded, they left a lump in the filth at the bottom of the rank pool. He could see the shape amidst the mud, and where he had seen the twig in the little clump of grasses he now saw that a thin, frail stick-like wrist connected it to a thicker one, as though they were forearm and upper arm leading to a shoulder …
‘Perkin! Perkin!’
There was nothing to show that this was the grave of two people who had been loved. It was a small, almost square hole in the ground, with soil heaped over it and a few heavy stones piled on top to stop animals from rooting about and digging up the bones. A spare wooden cross had been made from a couple of lathes lashed together, and this was thrust in at the head.
‘There was no money to pay for the funeral or the mourners,’ the priest said sorrowfully. ‘I used some of my own funds to do the best I could for them. Of course they’d only been here a year or so, so there was hardly anyone here who really knew them.’
‘Two years,’ Baldwin corrected him coldly.
Simon heard his voice, but could say nothing. In his breast there was only a great emptiness, and as he stood staring at the bare little cross he felt it welling up and rising to his throat, threatening to choke him. He daren’t trust his voice. Instead he made a pretence of clearing his throat, but the action was belied by his having to wipe his eyes.