Over the following months they had this conversation several times, but nothing could be resolved, and as they had now escaped it seemed pointless to keep reviving the issue.
The winter turned into spring, then summer, and the two refugees settled into the steady routine of life in Shebbear. With one exception, everyone accepted them, and they became part of the village community. The exception was Adam the carter, a freeman who made a living from his ox-cart, in which he carried goods and material all over North Devon.
Much of his trade was in transporting grain and wool from the King’s manors to Barnstaple and Bideford for shipment, but he would take anything anywhere for a few pennies. For some reason he took against Matilda from the start, scowling at them in the road and muttering under his breath. In the alehouse he would complain about these foreign interlopers coming to his village.
‘Escaped serfs, that’s all they are!’ he would whine. ‘Absconded from their master and pretending to be free!’
As the rest of Shebbear became quite fond of the pretty woman and her daughter, they took little notice of him, but he persisted in his dislike of the women. This feeling was mutual, as Adam was a scrawny, ugly fellow with a face like a weasel and a nature to match.
When there was additional work to be done in the fields, Matilda and her daughter pitched in with the rest, even though as free women they had no obligation to do so. Matilda also continued to gain her neighbours’ favour by dealing with sickness and childbirth, her knowledge of herbs being welcome, since the previous ‘wise woman’ had died of old age a year before.
She noticed that Gillota’s gift of unusual perception was increasing, and sometimes they would exchange a swift glance when something came into their minds simultaneously. On one occasion, after a heavy rainstorm, they both knew that something was badly amiss at the little footbridge over the stream. Both ran towards it and found that one of the village children had fallen into the swollen brook and was in danger of drowning. Having rescued him, they explained away their presence by saying that they happened to be passing, not to arouse any suspicions, but Matilda guessed that several villagers had a shrewd idea that they were ‘fey’.
Another example of their shared powers was in the matter of the little stone that lay on a shelf in Emma’s kitchen. At the back of the square room that occupied the whole cottage, there was a crude lean-to, entered through a gap in the rear wall. Here food was prepared on a table, and the task of dealing with the day’s milking was carried out, skimming some for cream in a wide earthenware dish. Emma’s few pots and pans sat on a plank shelf fixed to the wall, and as soon as Matilda entered for the first time she knew that something powerful was concealed there.
As she reached up, Gillota came in and their eyes met in complete understanding. ‘What is it, Mother?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘It’s strong and good, whatever it is!’
Alongside a pottery jug, Matilda’s finger found a hard, cool object, and she lifted it down carefully. Though it looked like a stone, it was too heavy and had a metallic feel. She held it out to Gillota. ‘I’ve never seen the like of this before.’
Her daughter took it almost reverently and laid it across her palm. It was the size of her hand and had four irregular arms.
‘It reminds me of a flying bird or a funny-shaped cross,’ she said wonderingly. ‘But I don’t think it’s meant to be anything other than itself.’
Her mother took it back and looked at it closely, turning it over in her hands. ‘It’s telling me that it came from far away, perhaps beyond the sky itself.’
‘It’s not just a strange stone; it has a life of its own,’ said Gillota, crossing herself. ‘Let’s ask Aunt Emma where it came from.’
Her great-aunt was dismissive of the stone. Both Matilda and her daughter were well aware that Emma had no trace of their gift.
‘My husband had it from somewhere,’ she muttered. ‘He said it had been in the Revelle family for years. No one knows what it is, but I kept it as a curiosity. You can have it, Matilda, if it takes your fancy.’
Matilda readily accepted it and kept it under her mattress to keep it near her, curious to learn what its properties might be. This was the second strange stone they had come across in Shebbear. Soon after they arrived, Matilda enquired casually about the large stone that she and Gillota had seen near the church and which had triggered some primitive fear in both their minds.
‘That’s the Devil’s Stone,’ she was informed. ‘He threw it there when he was turned out of heaven by St Michael.’
In November they joined the rest of the village in an ancient ritual, standing around the stone well after dark in the light of a blazing bonfire, to watch some of the men turning the massive boulder over with stout poles, while the church bell clanged out a racket to frighten off Satan.
‘No one knows why we do it,’ admitted their neighbour. ‘But it’s always been done, to avoid bad luck for the coming year.’
After the turning, there was food and drink provided by the bailiff, a pleasant tradition that was repeated throughout the year, usually on saints’ days, when a holiday was declared and an ‘ale’ held in the churchyard. The weak beer brewed and drunk in large quantities got its name from these ‘ales’, when eating, drinking, dancing and flirting were conducted in equal measure.
Several men became interested in Matilda, a comely widow, but she was older than all the unmarried men and did not fancy the prospect of wedding an old widower. However, Gillota was a different matter and, at almost fifteen, was well into marriageable age. A number of the village youths showed their interest, though having managed to shrug off their serfdom Matilda was concerned that her daughter might fall for a villein again and lose her freedom.
In August harvest-time arrived, as the weather had been good this year, a welcome change for some recent bad summers. This was the culmination of the farming year, and everyone turned out to help bring in the wheat, barley and oats that together with the beans and root vegetables would hopefully see the village through the next winter.
Matilda and her daughter joined everyone else in the fields, following behind the men who reaped with scythes and sickles. They collected and bound the cut corn into sheaves and stooked them to dry. Older women came with wide wooden rakes to collect the fallen stems, even Emma managing to drag one behind her with her good hand. Children were put to gleaning, squatting to pick up fallen grains into bags tied around their waist, as every speck of food might mean the difference between starvation or survival by next February.
The strips belonging to the King’s manor were harvested first, then the rest of the corn was tackled, of which a tenth would go to the Church as tithes, as did a similar proportion of almost everything else that the villagers produced, be it eggs, ducks or lambs.
For three days they worked from first light until dark, the stooks cut on the first day now being dry, thanks to the good weather. As Matilda followed the reapers, Gillota gathering behind her, the ox-carts rumbled past, piled high with yellow sheaves, headed for the tithe barn and the barns at the manor barton, ready for winnowing the grain from the straw.
Both men and women sang as they worked, looking forward to noon, when they could rest for a few minutes and eat the bread and cheese or scraps of meat they had brought and replace their sweat with weak ale. Then they carried on until the sun was sinking, when eventually the reeve called a halt and the workers began streaming back to their homes to eat and then collapse on to their beds until dawn, when the whole exhausting routine would begin again.
But for Matilda and her daughter, daybreak would bring a very different scenario.
Just as the early summer dawn was breaking, Emma awoke and, using her good arm, levered herself up from the palliasse on the bracken-covered floor. She went to the fire-pit and blew on the embers under the white wood-ash, then added a few sticks, so that she could warm the iron pot of oat gruel that sat on a trivet.