He could not have put words to his feelings, but in a confused way he realised that when he had forced and then possessed her body she had somehow managed to escape him completely. But still he thought that she would come closer to him later, and he reminded himself often of how young she was, though very young she did not seem to him. For he had never seen her dance and romp as she had in London on May Day, nor had he ever heard her joyous quick laughter.
At Wednesday noontime, when they were a few miles south of Lincoln town, they turned off the Ermine Way and climbed the Ridge to see Hugh's smaller manor of Coleby, which he held in fee from the Duke of Lancaster. This manor was much neglected, its house nothing but a crumbling shell, where Hugh's reeve, a sottish drunken lump of a man named Edgar Pockface, dwelt in the leaky hall with a brood of fifteen children. The reeve came lurching out of the door as he heard horses in the weed-choked courtyard and stood aghast at seeing his manor lord. He tugged his Forelock and began mumbling. Hugh dismounted, glaring around at the tumbledown dovecote, the byres and stables half unroofed, the scanty piles of fodder mouldering unsheltered on the dank earth.
"By God's blood, Edgar Pockface!" he cried. "Is this the way you oversee the villeins, is this the care you give my manor!"
Edgar mumbled something to the effect that the serfs were unruly, that they refused to do their regular week-work for their lord, let alone the boon-work, that it had been so long since Sir Hugh or his bailiff had come here they had near forgot they were not freemen.
Hugh raised his hand .and struck the stupid face a vicious blow across the mouth. "Then this will remind you that you are not free!"
The man staggered back and fell in the muck beside the drinking well. He sat up spitting blood from a loosened tooth and weeping drunkenly.
Then, as though he had settled the whole matter of the manor's management, Hugh mounted his horse and gesturing, to Katherine and Ellis, led the way back to the High Road.
Katherine was pained and puzzled. Should Hugh not inspect his serfs? Should he not ride over the rest of his land to see in what condition it was? Should he not above all eject the drunken reeve, and find one who could manage the tenants and obtain from them the requisite labour? She rode in silence for a while, then ventured, "Will you not get a new reeve, Hugh, for Coleby?"
He shrugged. "Oh, Edgar'll do well enough now, he's learned a lesson. Fear makes the best taskmaker."
Katherine doubted it, but she said no more. She did not yet know that Hugh was the most indifferent of landlords, caring nothing for husbandry, and interested in his manors only enough to demand that they yield him sufficient rents and fines so that he might satisfy his few needs. He had not been home for three years and had left everything in the hands of his steward at Kettlethorpe, whom he had good reason to trust. So long as Hugh gave knight's service to the Duke, his wants and those of Ellis were provided for, and soon his war-time wages from the Duke would commence.
It was on the prospects of these that he had raised cash from a money-lending Lombard in London to finance his wedding and buy Katherine's palfrey. But the forced gift to the black cross at Waltham had so reduced him that now he had but a few pence left. This troubled him not at all. Gibbon his bailiff must produce an accounting at Kettlethorpe and replenish Hugh's purse, and that was all there was to it.
Katherine did not think long about the dilapidation of Coleby, assuming that all would be different at Kettlethorpe, the home manor. Yet her yeoman blood had been disquieted. She remembered a little of the great farm in Picardy where she had spent her childhood. She remembered the reverent voices of her grandparents as they spoke of their land, her grandmother's incessant orderly bustle to make, to tend, to repair. She remembered her grandfather, riding forth at all hours of the day or night to peer with shrewd weatherwise eyes at every field of grain and vegetable patch and pasture on his land. Katherine had loved them, too, those fertile sunlit acres, and the feeling of happy abundance after Michaelmas when the granaries were full, and the sweet hay stacked high in the lofts.
An ache for the past came to her as she looked out across the flat grey fenland. She thought the fens were ugly and forlorn. It had been drizzling all day, but now the dun clouds dropped lower and the rain sliced cold and straight as knives. When at last they reached the little suburb of Wigford across the river Witham from Lincoln town, Hugh was in a great hurry to cover the remaining ten miles to Kettlethorpe and would not let Katherine linger to gaze up the hill at the cathedral. She could see it but dimly through the clouds and rain, but it seemed to her a wondrous fair site for a house of God. The three great spired towers floated up towards heaven as though they had no roots in the sinful world below.
And how comforting it was to see a hill again, and a town, after the miles of flatness, punctuated only by isolated hamlets. They had come to a remote world in these days of travel. London seemed to her now as far off as France, as Rome, as the fairy land of Cockaigne. Their very speech was different here - it twanged and burred so she could scarcely understand it. She felt ungladness in the people. They smiled seldom and dressed in sober hues. So the glimpse of Lincoln heartened her, and she was pleased that Kettlethorpe was near.
But it was not. The ten miles dragged like thirty. Here and northward along the vale of the Trent it had been raining since St. George's Day and the full moon tides had thundered up the downrushing swollen river in an eagre; this sinister wave, high as a man, had burst many of the earthen dykes and flooded much of the land. And though now the water had receded and lay in pools and patches on the sodden fields, the highway was a mire of sticky red mud, so deep at times that the horses slipped and floundered; their hooves sucked in and out like uncorked bottles. While they used the towpath along the side of the Fossdyke progress was not so difficult, for on this busy link of navigation the bargemasters had placed stones and branches to give their towhorses some footing, but when the road turned from the canal at Drinsey Nook it became wellnigh impassable.
Katherine's little Doucette had begun to tire, and when beneath a puddle of water its hoof caught in a deeper hole the mare gave a frightened snort and fell splashing on its side. Katherine jumped instinctively and landed unhurt beside Doucette, but covered with the cold sticky mud and near to tears.
Hugh, swearing furiously, first picked her up, then with Ellis's help tried to raise the kicking, plunging palfrey. This they could not do until Katherine spoke to the little beast and soothed it with her coaxing. Katherine would have gone on afoot, but Hugh commanded her to mount again, and finding that the water on the road came nearly to her knees, she obeyed. Hugh took Doucette's bridle and led the horse after him; Katherine clung to the pommel in sodden misery. The drenched hood and cloak no longer kept off the rain at all. She found that she had lost one leather shoe back there in the mud, but it made no difference, her stockinged foot in the stirrup was no colder than the shod one.
As they drew nearer the manor lodge the wind came up and blew the rain in their faces, but the footing improved a trifle, for now the road ran through light moorland soil and sand which comprised most of the parish. Yet it was dark when they saw upon the left a pair of tall iron gates, and a cottage just inside them.
"Kettlethorpe!" said Hugh. "We'll soon be dry and sheltered, Katherine."
But no one came to open the gate, though Ellis kicked it and hammered on it, and both men shouted. The lodgekeeper's thatched shanty remained dark, and no smoke came from its chimney.
"The devil and his foul friends take this wretched churl! I'll have him put in the stocks, I'll lop off his deaf ears!" Hugh drew his sword and dealt the old padlock a violent blow. The chain that held it was near eaten through with rust and at the second blow it parted; the padlock dangled free. Ellis pushed back the creaking gates and said in surprise, "This road has not been used for long, Sir Hugh. 'Tis full overgrown."