‘A good thought,“ Perryn said quickly. And to the jurors, ”Yes?“ and to a man, they nodded in matching, swift agreement.
Chapter 7
The church emptied by fits and starts, in clots of people talking as they crowded out the door into the churchyard or else in little groups around the nave while waiting for the doorway to clear and their own chance to leave.
Frevisse, in no hurry to be anywhere else, stayed where she was and noted Gilbey and his wife did, too, drawn together aside and turned away from everyone else, Elena’s hand resting on his arm as she said something to him too low for Frevisse to hear. No one approached them, but the several men coming Tom Hulcote’s way were headed off by Father Henry who, with his arms laid across several shoulders and a hand stretched to grip someone’s tunic, turned them aside and toward the door, talking cheerily at them while Father Edmund closed on Tom.
Mary was there first, holding on to her lover’s arm, standing on tiptoe to say something in his ear. Frevisse, unable to hear past Perryn talking with the jurors, watched as Father Edmund said something to them both that made Tom go sullen, tuck in his chin, and glower at the priest while Mary faced Father Edmund with her chin up and her little mouth in an angry pout, bringing Frevisse to the uncharitable thought that she had better make the most of her prettiness while it lasted, because there looked to be little else to recommend her.
But then, from what was said of her, making the most of her prettiness was exactly what she had been doing with Tom Hulcote.
That thought decided Frevisse that she had best do something else than stand here being unkind about Mary Woderove. Sister Thomasine was still standing against the wall beyond the font with lowered eyes and hands folded into her opposite sleeves while the last of the onlookers crowded out the door, and Frevisse moved to go to her but saw Father Henry turn from herding his men out the door, whatever grievance they had been going to share with Tom Hulcote forgotten for now because they were grinning as they went out, and cross toward Sister Thomasine. Not needed there, Frevisse joined Perryn, just finished with the jurors. Gilbey and Elena were going away down the nave toward the door, the jurors trailing after them, and Frevisse and Perryn followed, leaving Father Edmund still in talk with Tom and Mary, saying to them with patient insistence, “Consider. One reason for not making threats is that now, if anything happens in the least way to Simon or Gilbey, you’ll be the first one men will look to for the trouble.”
Beside her, Perryn made a soft snorting sound that told he had overheard, too, and quietly, for only the two of them to hear, Frevisse asked, “What do you think you’ll decide about the holding when all’s said and done?”
‘All’s as said and done as I need for it to be,“ Perryn answered, a tight edge of anger under his words, and for the first time Frevisse realized that, for all that the reeve kept a quiet outside, he would rouse if there was cause enough. ”Unless you’ve strong word against it, the jurors and I agree the holding should be kept in Lord Loveil’s hands for now, with Master Spencer’s leave when he’s been advised of how things stand. It means I’ll have to see to the hire of men to work it for the while and that’s not to the good but better than otherwise at present.“
From the little liking she had for Mary or Tom or Gilbey, Frevisse had nothing to say against that, but, “Mayhap someone else will offer for it.”
Perryn shook his head regretfully. “Not so long as it’s a quarreling point ‘tween Gilbey and Tom. There’s none wants to be caught there.”
Frevisse could see why. She little liked being there herself, even knowing that in a while she would walk away from it. “But Mary will have the profit from the crops this year?”
‘Oh, aye. She’ll not be done out of what’s rightfully hers, though that won’t be the way she tells it.“
They were to the church door now. Past Father Henry and Sister Thomasine going out ahead of them, Frevisse could see the small rain had finished while they were inside and the sun was making a watery-yellow attempt to burn through the clouds.
‘Uh,“ said Perryn as a moist, heavy heat met them beyond the church porch, and Frevisse felt the same, on the instant too aware of her layers of clothing and close-fitted wimple. Already among the village women scattered across the churchyard in talk and with an eye to their children playing among the grave mounds some had slipped off their wimples and were settling their veils or kerchiefs over their hair as loosely as when they worked in the fields.
‘Good for the last of the haying, though,“ Perryn said.
And if they could be at it tomorrow, they might well finish soon enough to have a rest between haying’s hard, long labor and the harder, longer one of harvest.
Frevisse made a small prayer for God’s blessing and to St. Dorothy for abundance, then asked, “What was that about between Walter Hopper and Hamon whatever-his-name?”
Perryn rumbled a deep, brief laugh. “That was thinking ahead on Walter’s part, that was. The thing is, he holds land enough that his workdays to the priory add up, and most years he has to hire a man or more to work some of them for him while he sees to his own land. In this dealing with Hamon, he gambled last autumn that the bad weather would change this year, knowing that if it did, there’d be out-of-the-ordinary high wages to be paid for anyone he needed to hire.”
‘Ah,“ Frevisse said, understanding. ”He therefore stood surety for this Hamon’s debt, certain he’d not be able to repay, and now will have him to work for no wages at all.“
‘Instead of having to bargain for others at rising prices, aye. Mind you, it’s no great cheat for Hamon, all considered. Walter will feed him along the way and Walter feeds well, and Hamon will be no shorter of money at the end than he would have been if he was hiring out on his own since he spends whatever he gets as fast as he gets it, at the alehouse here and on worse in Banbury.“
‘He’s a troublemaker?“ Frevisse asked.
‘Hamon? Nay, except what he makes for himself. He’s not yet learned and never will, I doubt, that it’s not play that holds life together but work. That makes him fair useless here, where most everything is work. Eh, well, that’s what the rest of us are here for, I sometimes think. To see to such as can’t see to themselves.“
One of the jurors came up on his other side then, wanting to speak with him. Perryn asked her pardon and drew aside and, glad of the chance to gather herself and her thoughts, Frevisse looked away, over the low church wall at the field beyond it, flowing away in waist-high green grain toward the distant woodshore’s darker band of forest. It was one of the three great fields around the village, each laid out in its own patterning of strips ploughed this way and that with how the land lay and planted or left fallow or set to hay turn and turn and turn about, year by year by year. They stretched out on all sides of the village, laced through with paths for workers going out and coming in and with wider ways for hay wains and harvest carts, with sometimes a tree left standing in a grassy balk, its shade somewhere for folk to sit through the midmorning and afternoon rest times and almost inevitably the tree was large-save here and there where some past giant had gone down with age or in a storm and been replaced by a stripling now no more than maybe half a century old- thick-trunked, the crowns of leaves widespread, their shade familiar to uncounted and mostly forgotten-even their graves in the churchyard replaced by newer ones- generations of Prior Byfield folk.
No one held all of any but almost everyone in the village held some of each, and there was meadow, too, for grazing cattle along the stream in the low places that too often flooded with the spring and autumn rains to be worth planting; and rough pasture beyond the fields, poorer soil cleared by men in want of more land before the Great Death of almost a hundred years ago had made such a dearth of people that there was, even now, no longer need to plough or plant those acres anymore. And of course on a green hillock well out of the village the windmill for grinding of the village’s grain spread its sailed arms against the sky. And downstream was the marsh with its rushes for so many uses, and here and there a hedgerow, and the road that ran through the village and away to north and south and places for the most part too far away to be bothered over by Prior Byfield folk. But it was the fields that were Prior Byfield’s life. If there was to be food in the village, then month in, month out, the fields had to be ploughed, harrowed, seeded, tended, harvested, ploughed again, harrowed again, seeded, tended… year around to year, no end to it, come what may, if Prior Byfield was to live.