Chapter 4 – Visitors Unexpected

Shock froze him in place for a heart-stopped instant before instinct swept him back, ax levelled, into a turn onto guard that let him send a glance over his shoulder, back along the lane. Finding it empty, he sidestepped into the cover of the kitchen's side wall, passed the ax from right hand to left, and reached back for one of the smaller hatchets slung at his back. Paused to drag his sleeve across his eyes, clearing his sight, and waited. From here he could see anyone coming from either side, but it would take a precious moment or two before whoever came through that door would see him. Time in which to decide whether to speak or strike first.

Within the house, the pounding was followed by a screech of metal—hinges?—and a shout.

"Hi! Anyone t'home?" More thumps and further screeching of metal gave place to the softer sound of footsteps, and a murmur of voices. Two?—or was that three different voices he heard?

It should be hopeful that whoever this was, was troubling to risk his attention. Unless—and again, he shot a wary look behind him—it were only distraction.

But who? Who—and how now?

To be this close on his heels, he thought, they must have been coming down the road from the ridgeway as he was walking in the gate. Concealed by the woods where the road turned, perhaps?

He heard the bar scrape against the inside back door, and refocused. Metal screeched again as it was pulled wide, and a man stepped into view. Eric leaned aside to see further, then pulled straight in surprise and stepped back into full view, dropping his guard in deliberate irritation. "An' just what do you think you're doing here, Jeff Bowyer?!"

"Lookin' for you!" For an instant Jeff looked at him goggle-eyed—his right eye was blackening nicely, Eric noted—then raised his hands. "An' before you think to come after me with that ax, Eric, it's to make you an apology!"

"A—what?" Eric stared at him in disbelief. "An' what should possess you to do that?"

"Well, I could say what little conscience I have, " said Jeff.

"In other words, me," said Brother Anthony, popping out from behind him. He poked Jeff in the ribs so that he moved aside, and gave Eric a disarming smile. "He does have one of his own, which serves well enough when he doesn't let his pride get in the way of it. It just wants kicking occasionally."

"An' he's obliged, on this occasion," Jeff said, from the side of his mouth.

"What I should like to know first, though, is if you'd mind me putting Martha in that pen by your cattle shed, once I've got my baskets off her."

"Martha?" Eric stared at him, bemused.

"My mule."

"Ah, I—no." He collected himself and lowered the ax. "That'll be fine."

"Thanks." Brother Anthony gave Jeff a sharp look. "I'll get on with that, then, and you can get on with your business!" He leaned out to look round the door-frame, and gave the kitchen woodpile an appraising look. "Bring a little wood in when you're done, and I'll see about getting a fire going."

"If I make a good enough job of it, may be," said Jeff.

He met Eric's glower with clear unease as Brother Anthony padded back into the house.

"It does need to be said," he said, "that I was bein' a good bit rougher than called for with you, a few miles back. Not to put too fine a point on it, I got over a line in threatening you with consequences I'd no business doing." He folded his arms carefully, and looked down. "That's not to say they mayn't come upon you later, I've no wish to mislead you about that!—but it is to say," and he shot Eric a second wary glance, "that I'll not look to bring 'em. Ye've done nothing to earn it of me, an' I should say far more to earn my thanks, for bein' there to fight when my village was raided. An' for bein' there to stand forth as ye did, when the princess came into your protection, whatever the circumstances of that. And as yon little man would say, I need to heed the fact that if you hadn't chosen differently to me and all my righteous friends following the Duke, there might've been no man there to do any of it."

He stepped down from the doorway, a step forward, and paused, blue eyes drilling into Eric's. "So the question is now, will it do?

"Better than nothing." Eric looked down, then aside again at the leaf-strewn path. "Ye'll have to forgive that at the moment, I don't know I care." He flipped the smaller hatchet in his hand, so he could offer the handle as he stepped past the other, into the open door. "Here. You'll need this for the firewood."

-o0o-

The greater shade outside had softened the light inside as well, casting the high-roofed hall into near twilight despite both sets of shutters being left open. It helped make it at least a little harder to see how time and weather had marked the room. A net of cracks now traced across the lime-ash floor where it had been most exposed to everything falling between the bars of the high, unglazed windows, and as he'd expected, there was litter everywhere.

There didn't look to be a lot displaced or missing, he thought, unslinging the bundle he'd made of his coat and setting it by the door to the main hall. But then, he hadn't left much that mattered when he left. His visitors seemed to have left all the furniture he remembered, though the three pewter serving dishes which had once lined the top of the plate cupboard were gone. From the litter of alepots and wooden dishes on the table, it looked as though four or five had eaten a meal there, probably from the kettle still hanging over the hearth in the middle of the room. All of it had been so long ago as to be no more than dry waste under dust and leaves blown in from outside.

He'd wondered if this might now be no more than a place he'd not been in a while, and in some sense that was true. The land itself, especially its woodland, still felt like home. But this? Seeing it now, the surprise was how cold he felt to it all. It might please him, he thought, to imagine it restored and thriving, with families returned to the cottages outside the gate, and say a family in possession, putting it all to good use. Just not his now or ever, for what family should he ever have again, to need it? He could see looking back on it from the path along the hill, and being happy if that were so. But be here himself? Live here as master of it? No. Not after so long, and so much misery.

"It's a lot to put right," said Brother Anthony behind him, having come in to set a basket by the door. "D'you mean to take it all on yourself?"

"No, I don't think so," he said, and felt his heart lighten with saying it. "I don't mean to take on any of it."

He went to get the long pole from the corner to push the upper shutters closed, and flipped their latch into place with a still-practiced ease. "It's more than I can do without help I've no surety of ever having. Truth is that despite being born here—" He paused and met Anthony's gaze in passing, before crossing to tend the front shutters similarly. "It's always felt more burden than birthright. When I think on it, the only times I'll call happy were those my Sara shared it with me."

He stepped back, turning to put his face in shadow. "She was murdered in that back lane there three years ago, an' after this past hour I don't see ever getting past that fact."

"I'm sorry." Still full in the light, the other's expression was kind. "That's a hard thing to bear."

Eric set the pole back in its corner, and nodded.

"Even if it does look different now, it's much the same. There's enough else, that I don't see wanting to live here and see every day, either. Even here—" He gestured round at the hall. "I imagine one could fill this up with people so I'd not be reminded every day, but will it not always speak to me of her? Here, an' in the garden, and that orchard to the side?" His voice ran out and he shook his head, and drew in a breath to get it back. "I know she ran through there, Brother, an' tipped a bee-skep in the path of the man chasing her, in hopes of it savin' her—an' I promise that doesn't make me feel like ever peacefully picking apples from those trees again! An' that's not even touching that there's a room up the stairs I don't want to see, never mind ever sleep in again—alone or with any other woman beside me."

"That's a pity." Anthony considered him, waiting. "By the looks of it, this has the makings of a fine farm, and the beginnings of a village at its gate. What will you do, if you don't live here?"

"Live somewhere else." Eric crossed to the buttery door, pulled a wooden bucket from under the counter that lined its back wall, and set about packing it with an assortment of the wooden dishes stacked above. "It's a hide of land I own here. No law says I can't live anywhere I like within it. That said, I don't see as much as stayin' tonight under this roof."

He turned back to consider the little monk with as neutral an expression as he could find in himself. "As you're here, you and Jeff are welcome to stay if you wish. Make up the fire, use anything you need, just close doors and shutters when you go."

"But where are you going?" Anthony asked. He watched as Eric came to get a handful of rushlights from the basket beside the hall door, then swept up a holder for them from the table.

"Goin'?" Jeff came in through the other end of the passage, an armload of wood balanced in his good arm. "Who's goin' where?

"I'm not stayin' under this roof the night." Eric reached to take back the hatchet Jeff held out to him, and concentrated on securing it once more at his back.

"So where are ye goin', then?"

Eric smiled with his best intent to be annoying. "Don't know, yet. First cottage down the lane, that suits me."

"Oo," said Jeff. He looked down at his bundle of wood. "Well, in that case, let's just have these in yon big basket, and we'll take 'em on there for you." He raised a warning finger when Eric looked at him askance. "Now, you may just take off that dubious look! I did also tell Anna I'd look out for you, and we've still some business to do, as regards that."

"And unless you really want to say 'don't follow' there's no reason we can't help you set up housekeeping wherever you like," said Brother Anthony. He gave Eric an engaging smile. "Any chance?"

His impulse might be to say 'no', but he found the sense to stop himself. "Aye. Aye—I'd reckon you're right."

-o0o-

It was agreed after a little further talk that as his was the only house left with any fittings in place, he and Jeff should go with what they carried to choose his new home. Brother Anthony would look about for goods worth taking to furnish a household for a single man, and collect them in the hall to be taken later. When that was done, he asked if, with Eric's permission, he might dig a little in the hay barn. His hope was to find straw sweet enough to fill two canvas ticking sacks from his basket, to make himself and Jeff pallets for sleeping. Having stuck his nose in the barn for a moment while putting his mule in the pen beside it, he thought the mold Eric had smelled might be in no more than the rack nearest the door. He was prepared to dig further in pursuit of a good night's sleep, and Eric was content to say he might.

It was also easily decided that he would take the second cottage at the left along the lane, that had been Ted and Ivy Kelly's. As he told Jeff while looking in on the houses around it, it was the only dwelling left in the settlement that hadn't been touched either by murder or the taking of its women, or both. They shouldn't find it haunted, he said, by any ghosts they didn't bring with them.

To this Jeff vowed he should bring none, and when he asked did Eric think he'd any, Eric could only shrug. These days he would have said not. His dreams of Sara and the others had mostly stopped a while ago, even on those nights when he'd not been able to afford the drink to silence them. But who knew, here and now? He'd slept quiet since falling in with the princess. He would have said that in their fortnight together, just as being with her had cleared the poison of too much alcohol from his body, it had quieted his mind as well. Whether it could stay quiet now, he'd see.

It helped, that he'd no strong memories of the place. It was no more than any neat, smallish stone longhouse, its doubled doors leading through a cobbled byre to a timber door opening on the living quarters. He remembered helping Ted Kelly to renew its lime-ash floor the year before the raid, and that as Ivy had always tended to take cold from the winds off the sea, her husband had been fussy about making doors and window shutters fit snug.

That had served them both well. When Eric pushed the door open now, it was on a dark, dusty, empty box of a room rather than the ruin it might have been. There were cobwebs aplenty in the corners, and mice had surely got in, from the droppings he could see scattered about, but without food to keep them, they had not stayed.

"Eh, this's cosy enough," said Jeff, coming in with his basket of wood and setting it out of the way behind the door. He waved at the stone hearth in the middle of the room.

"D'you want I should lay a fire?"

"No' yet." Once he'd propped the shutters open and unloaded the things from his buckets onto the higher steps leading to the loft, Eric set about shedding his bracers and jerkin, and began to roll up his sleeves. "I'll fetch in a bucket or two of water first, and sluice out the dust. If I'd been thinkin' I'd have brought along a broom or the like."

"Plenty of rushes by that little river downslope," said Jeff. "If that's where you're goin' for water, it'll need only cutting a few to make a new one."

-o0o-

They worked steadily together most of the rest of that afternoon, making the cottage habitable, and then carrying things down the overgrown lane from the larger house to furnish it. Eric might wonder later, how much of that was about he and Jeff each testing the other in all of strength, wit and patience. Both of them had to be careful neither to over strain their injuries nor set them bleeding again, which led to a good many moments when one or other would call a halt to some joint effort, either to catch his breath or consider how to proceed least painfully. When it came to the heaviest task of loading the hand-cart from the tithe shed with the two small chests and the pieces of one of the smaller tables from the hall, and rolling it resisting through the long grass towards its new home, the stops were many.

Brother Anthony in the meantime pressed Martha into service to bear not only the two fat straw pallets he had filled from deep in the barn, but two larger beech-leaf mattresses taken from the beds in the maids' room and downstairs, where the men who'd worked for them had slept. Those, he suggested, once squeezed in on a canvas above a layer of evergreen boughs in the cottage's single sleeping alcove, might together give Eric the unusual experience of a bed really large enough to fit him.

Once all was in fair order, Jeff had another project to suggest: if Eric was land-owner here, did his rights include fishing in that little river which bordered it? They did, Eric said, and there should at least be a salmon or two still in it. At this Jeff produced a line and a packet of hooks from his pouch, and advised that if he might impose, he should see about catching them dinner.

-o0o-

He could not have hoped to accomplish as much alone, and had said so gratefully, by the time they sat down in the dooryard about sunset, to eat the dinner his guests had done more to provide, than he. Between the fine salmon Jeff had caught from the river and baked in clay over a new fire-pit dug in the yard, and the pottage Brother Anthony had made up with barley from his pack, and vegetables foraged from the cottage garden, it was easily the best dinner he'd had that year.

With full darkness, Brother Tony collected a rushlight and called a sleepy Martha along into the byre with the enticement of a thorough brushing before bedtime, and when shortly after the night breeze began to shift offshore, Eric and Jeff set about breaking their temporary camp. Jeff, with only one hand now really good for the effort, brought in the dishes with what would be left for breakfast, and undertook to dunk their bowls in what was left of the wash-water. Eric scraped two hands' worth of live coals from the firepit outside into a sheet of birchbark, and brought them inside to light the indoors hearth.

He sighed in relief, seeing the dry wood catch and burn almost without smoke. "A good fire in here now, for a little while, and what's left of it should keep us warm until dawn."

"What's left of t'other fire's out, " Jeff said, following him with the bucket. He set it beneath the still open window, pulled the shutters tight, and slipped the bar clumsily in place. "Now I will say that's nice and snug. That last tenant of yours looks to have been a fine carpenter."

"He was," said Eric, and pushed up from his knees. "Fine enough that unless the thought bothers either of you, I'll be leaving the small window at the back open for the smoke to go out."

"Shouldn't do," said Jeff. "Eh, Anthony? We've slept often enough out of doors, haven't we, to know if seein' the moonlight would send us mad?"

"I'd think so," Brother Anthony entered, pulled the half-door to the byre closed, and smiled. "I know it's said to do, but I've never noticed any difference. Though with you, Jeffrey, it might be hard to tell."

"Ha!—it might at that!" Jeff spun his hat off to rest over the pack by his pallet, and stooped to shake his blanket from its roll. "Night air's not poisonous, either, I don't care what anybody says about that. If it were, I doubt we'd any of us be living. Least of all you, eh, Eric? You must have slept rough enough times to know better."

"More than under shelter, this past year or two." He pulled the shutter down from the tiny window under the eaves, and came back to study the fire. It would do, not to suffocate them. "I've yet to come to harm by it."

He looked around then as the flames rose to light the room, and felt that wonder again, that he should in fact be sleeping tonight under as much as a sound roof. Not quite the roof he'd expected, but then—when had he last expected anything? He'd only been walking forward into things with his eyes open and his wits no more than half about him the whole day. Pulling himself from one hope to the next, then losing each in turn and falling into something new. Coming at last to this neat little house, all furnished with things he knew his own and yet mercifully had no memory of ever seeing before, for it was all put together differently to how he'd ever seen it. Add warm and clean enough, and quiet after the never-ending ruckus at the big castle last night, and next to anything he'd taken it for granted he'd be doing this evening—curling up under a tree, wrapped in his coat? Or camping out by the hearth in the hall at the farmstead, that treacherous thought kept calling 'home' no matter how his heart shrank from the thought of it, now or ever—or anywhere else he might have found, that he could stand? This was better than he could have dreamed.

Better than he could have dreamed, and useless given what he now understood.

"Eric?" Brother Anthony said, beside him. "You've gone quiet of a sudden. Are you all right?"

"Aye." He nodded and met the smaller man's gaze. "Just thinking."

"Good," said Anthony. "Give some little thought while you're at it, to how we may help you tomorrow, in getting ready to be here alone." He pulled the chair from the end of the table and nudged Eric toward it, before circling to seat himself on the bench at its back. "We'll have no need to leave before mid-day, and I'll be surprised if there isn't a good deal we can do."

"Aye," said Jeff. He settled himself astride the second bench between hearth and table. "We might at least bring what's left of the kitchen woodpile down from the big house, and tuck it in the corner for you here."

"Aye, could do, I suppose." Eric slipped a hand up to pull at the thong catching back his hair. "I think simpler though, if you just help me close up everything that needs it around the main farmstead, and get the gate barred again." He looked up, watching them eye each other in surprise, and then swing back to stare at him. "I'm thinkin' I see nothin' for it, but that I'll need to come back with you to the village tomorrow."

Next: Jeff points out one or two things Eric's been failing to consider...