Through the spring, news had come on every south wind of supporters flocking to Duke Robert’s standard. As early as February, Ranulf Flambard had escaped from the Tower and fled to him (though there was a whisper that his escape had been arranged, and he was gone overseas as a spy for King Henry). Now, in these last weeks, the news was of a war fleet gathering on the Normandy coast. The English fleet was at sea already, the feudal levies and the Fyrd had not yet been called out, but the more alert of the knights up and down the coast were making ready their men and stores against the call-out that they knew must come.
That day Sir Everard had been going through the Manor’s war gear, with the two boys to help him and gain experience; making sure that the leather jacks were well oiled and stout, and that no dagger had a sprung rivet, testing the war-bows and seeing to the supplies of arrows and spare bowstrings. (Every man kept a hunting bow hidden in the thatch of his hut, though it was against the law; but the stout, four foot war-bows that could send a shaft through ringmail were kept locked away and only issued for practice or the real thing.) Now, after supper, he had strolled out to sit on the edge of the cider press at the high end of the garth, with the two boys and the hounds sprawled at his feet.
The sun was westering behind Long Down, the shadows creeping towards them across the turf, but the tops of the apple trees were still touched with sunlight that seemed all the more golden because there had been rain earlier. The rain had brought out the good smells of the summer earth, and Randal, sitting on his heels and playing with a half-grown puppy of Joyeuse’s, caught, through the tang of woodsmoke and stable droppings, the scent of the hay in the long pasture, and a whisper of something else that might be honeysuckle but was more likely elder. The thrush who had had his nest in the pear-tree by the gate was singing as he sang at this hour every evening; and there would be a new moon presently.
Reynfrey had gone into Steyning to take their tithe of strawberries to the Priory. The Dean strawberry bed, begun by Bevis’s mother with wild strawberry plants gathered from all over the Manor, as well as plants that Sir Everard had had specially brought for her from Normandy, and later tended by Sybilla and Ancret for her sake, was the only one in that part of Sussex, and every year the Prior of Steyning made a great point of receiving his tithe of the little sweet, scarlet fruit. What an odd world it was, Randal thought, in which you saw to the rivets of your helmet and sent your tithe of strawberries to the Priory on the same day. The Prior would have kept Reynfrey for supper, but he should be back soon.
‘Everything looks so peaceful,’ Bevis said suddenly, glancing about him. ‘It seems almost too strange to believe, that in a few days we shall be facing Duke Robert’s army.’ His eyes were wide and bright, and he sat with his new sword across his knees, fondling it. As d’Aguillon’s body squire, he would be going with him as a right; but Randal was going too. He did not think he could have borne to be left behind, and the stronger the hay smelled and the sweeter the thrush sang, the more he thought he could not have borne it. Well, there had been no question of that; he was sixteen, and Sir Everard had said to him days ago, ‘When the call-out comes we shall need every man we can raise. There’s an old leather gambeson in the armoury kist, Randal. Go and see if it fits you.’ It did not fit him very well, being somewhat large, but it had horn scales on the breast and shoulders. Only Reynfrey was to be left behind, and Randal did not see how the old man-at-arms could bear that. Maybe one did not care so much when one grew old?
Matilda, sitting against d’Aguillon’s knee, raised her head to listen. She was very old now and quite blind, so that her eyes in the evening light were milky, but she could still hear as keenly as any of the other hounds. Luffra pricked his ears and sat up, and Joyeuse swung her tawny head towards the gate. A few moments later they all heard it; the beat of horse’s hooves drumming up the track from the ford.
‘That will be Reynfrey now,’ Randal said.
Sir Everard was listening with a little frown. ‘If it is, he’s riding as though the Wild Hunt were behind him!’
‘Maybe it is the call-out.’
‘We shall know soon enough.’
The hoof-beats swept nearer, nearer, came to a trampling halt before the Hall. Urgent voices sounded, and a few moments later – they were all on their feet by now – Reynfrey appeared round the end of the Hall and came half-running up the garth towards them.
‘Good God, man, what’s amiss?’ Sir Everard said, for the old steward was panting so much when he reached them that for the moment he did not seem able to speak.
‘All Hell broken loose in Steyning, that’s what’s amiss!’ Reynfrey rubbed the back of a hand across his sweating forehead. ‘There’s some wandering friar been stirring them up for days, Brother Thomas at the Priory told me – and there’s the market crowd, o’course, today, and they’d been drinking – and then the shout went up –’ He drew a deep breath and seemed as though he were trying to straighten out the urgent tumble of words. ‘There’s a witch hunt started and they’re heading this way over the downs. They’ll be here by dusk!’
‘This way? Why this way?’ Sir Everard snapped.
The two men looked at each other for one sharply silent moment, and then Reynfrey said, ‘Ancret.’
Randal felt everything go still and unreal about him. ‘Witch hunt! Witch hunt!’ The words, hideous as leprosy, seemed mouthing, gibbering, screaming themselves over and over in his head. If there had been wind and storm and the tree tops bending double he could have taken it in more easily; it might even have seemed less horrible; but on this still, hay-scented summer evening . . .
Sir Everard had swung round to his grandson. ‘Bevis, go and fetch Ancret up to the Hall.’
‘I’ll go too,’ Randal said, as his fellow squire swung on his heel to obey, but Sir Everard stopped him.
‘She will come for Bevis alone, if she will come for anyone; and I have other work for you. We must get in all the men near at hand, and for safety’s sake the women and children also had best come up to the Hall.’
Afterwards, Randal’s memory of what came next was always blurred, as though he were remembering it through running water or drifting smoke. He was pelting down the village street, scattering dogs and cats, pigs and chickens, thrusting into one after another of the villeins’ hovels, shouting his warning of the witch hunt, shouting to the men, ‘D’Aguillon wants you!’ To the women, ‘Best get the bairns up to the Hall out of harm’s way.’ Pelting on again with the women squarking behind him as loudly as the scattered poultry. Bevis joined him before the end with a couple of the house churls with him and the news that Ancret was safely up at the Hall; and they finished the round-up between them. When they got back to the Hall at last, Randal was carrying a sick child for its mother, and Bevis and another man were dragging a wildly bleating goat between them, because the miller’s wife, whose darling it was, refused to come without it.
In the Hall, Sir Everard stood by the hearth, with Reynfrey and the men of the Manor gathered about him, and the women huddled in the farther shadows against the gable wall.
‘Na, na, there is naught to huddle like sheep for,’ he was saying with a touch of exasperation. ‘’Tis not Duke Robert coming down on us, but a mere market crowd from Steyning with too much cider in their bellies.’
But the fore-shadow of the witch hunt was on them, and Randal could not help seeing how even some of their own Manor women had drawn aside from Ancret, looking at her a little askance, as though in some way the fact that the witch hunt was for her made her something to fear, a kind of danger point like an oak to draw the lightning.
She stood, tall-seeming as always, and looked round at them, then turned her dark gaze to Sir Everard. ‘You should have left me to take to the woods.’
‘I’ll have no one of my Manor hunted across country like a deer,’ Sir Everard said briefly.
She walked out from among the women, her dusty-coloured kirtle drawn contemptuously close about her, and came to the fire. None of
the men drew away from her, but Alfwine the ploughman made the sign of the Horns, carefully hidden behind his back. But not carefully enough. Ancret flicked him with her eyes. ‘At the least I should have had the deer’s kinship with the woods, and the woods would not have been afraid of me.’ Suddenly she turned from them all, to the young squire loosening his new sword in its sheath, the only one of them all who mattered to her. And her narrow face broke up a little. ‘Young Master, are you afraid of me, too?’
Bevis left his sword to itself, and put his arms round her as though he was comforting a child. ‘You are all the mother I ever knew. How should I be afraid of you, Ancret, dear?’
It was growing dusk by now, though outside the thrush was still singing. The sick child whimpered, and was hushed by its mother. All colour and substance was draining out of the Hall, save where, close about the hearth, the light of the low fire woke the warm, earthy colours of the villeins’ homespun, and showed the look on their waiting faces.
There was not much longer to wait. Suddenly head after head turned, eyes widening; one man licked his lower lip, another half-pulled the knife from his clumsy leather sheath, as the first distant sounds of shouting splurged up into the evening quiet beyond the thrush’s song.
‘Here they come, then,’ Cerdic the oxherd said.
Nobody answered him.
The sounds were drawing nearer; a ragged surf of shouting, with something of the same note of menace that sounds from a disturbed nest of wild bees; the ugly, inhuman voice of a mob. Randal, waiting with his hand on the dagger in his belt, his eyes on d’Aguillon’s face like a hound that waits for orders, realised that they were coming straight over the shoulder of the downs towards the Hall, and even in that moment it struck him as odd that they should not seek Ancret in her own cottage; for there must be some among this Steyning crowd who knew where she lived.
Sir Everard, his sword in its sheath, strode towards the door, Bevis and Randal at his shoulders. They could see the witch hunt coming now, over the shoulder of the turf below Long Down; a ragged, loping skein of figures strung out like hounds on the scent. Some of them had torches, and the flames streamed out behind them in rags of smoky brightness on the dusk. They swarmed down into the village kale plots, their mass growing denser as the stragglers in the rear caught up with those in front; they were pouring through the gateway under the pear tree from which the thrush had flown in terror, breaking down the hedge on either side, bursting and jostling their way through into the garth. The sparks from their ill-made torches whirled up into the quiet branches where the fruit was setting, and their faces in the tattered flare of flamelight were both afraid and vicious. Randal saw the brightness of their eyes, the dark gape of their yelling mouths, and the torch-glare on cudgels and quarterstaffs and the sharper weapons, the scythe blades or butchers’ knives that some among them carried; saw also the friar, face hidden in the forward-drawn folds of his cowl, who strode in their midst.
‘Why doesn’t d’Aguillon draw his sword?’ he thought, as the mob, catching sight of them in the doorway, set up a fiercer yowling and closed in at the run. ‘Why doesn’t d’Aguillon draw his sword? The sight of it might stop them. Why doesn’t –’
D’Aguillon had flung up his arm, shouting above the tumult. ‘What is this garboil that you raise on my Manor? What do you here on Dean land?’
They were right before the door now, milling round it, but something in the three purposeful figures standing there and the glimpse of others beyond, something in the tall old knight confronting them on his own threshold, for a moment pulled them up.
‘Send out the witch that you have in your house!’ someone shouted.
‘What wicked folly is this?’ d’Aguillon’s deep voice cut through the ugly surf of sound. ‘You have drunk too much perry in the Market Place, and dreamed dreams.’
‘Do not listen to him!’ It was the friar now, crying out in a high, cracked voice. ‘He has the woman in his house and the woman is a witch! Remember the cow of yours that fell sick the day after she looked at you, Rafe One-Eye! The Wrath of God is on this house for the witch’s sake. Go you in and fetch her for the burning!’
The surge forward began again, weapons were brandished aloft, torches up-tossed above distorted, howling faces. Sir Everard had left his sword in its sheath as long as might be. Now he seemed to make scarcely any movement, but suddenly it was naked in his hand, a streak of glittering steel barring the doorway. In the same instant Bevis’s sword was out, and Randal whipped his dagger from his belt.
‘Get back!’ Sir Everard cried. ‘Get back, you fools! Go home and cool your hot heads and be wiser in the morning! There is no witch here, and I give up to you no woman of my Manor, though you choose to name her ten times a witch!’
They drew back a little, snarling as an animal snarls that is baulked of its prey, but the friar, with arm outstretched in accusation, was screaming them on, lashing up their fear and frenzy.
‘Will you give ear to this shielder of Satan’s women? Woe, woe to those who suffer a witch to live among them! She will put the murrain on your cattle and the mildew on your fields! She will cast her spells about you to suck out your souls while you sleep, and God will not save you because you have turned your face from Him to leave the witch alive!’
Suddenly there was a rush, and the thing had gone beyond shouting and became fighting: fighting that reeled to and fro in the doorway where Sir Everard still struggled to use the flat of his blade and not the edge. Someone had tried to fire the thatch, yelling that they would smoke the witch out that way if they could get her no other; but the thatch was damp after the rain, and the flames guttered out in a black reek of charring that Randal smelled thick and acrid at the back of his nose as he tramped to and fro with the press of struggling men in the doorway.
Then a man with a broad face made stupid by fear, and a butcher’s knife in his upflung fist, leapt in at Sir Everard. Randal caught the flash of the descending blade, heard a sharp cry that seemed torn off before it was well begun, and saw out of the tail of his eye the old knight stagger and go down.
A howl went up from the mob, and they seemed to waver, some to half-surge back in horror at what they had done, while others yet thrust forward. Bevis had sprung across his grandfather’s body, the house churls behind him; there could be no more fighting with the flat of the blade. And all the while in the midst of the turmoil the friar was still urging them on, mouthing and shrieking curses and wild accusations.
‘Na na, never mind the old one! Kill the young one – the yellow-haired one – I see the witch-light shining round his head! Kill! Kill! Kill!’
His hand was outstretched, pointing at Randal, his whole figure seemed contorted by a wild spasm of malevolence, and in the same instant, in the milling press about him, the black folds of the cowl slipped back from his face, and Randal saw it in the leaping red glare of the nearest torch, distorted with hate and rage, but unmistakable.
He gathered himself together and sprang as a wild animal springs; but quick as he was, Sir Thiebaut de Coucy had flashed a dagger from the loose sleeves of his habit to meet him, and the two blades rang together. Some instinct, something in the way the man moved, told Randal that de Coucy wore mail of some kind under his black habit, and a body blow would be well nigh useless; and something in him knew, though there was no time for thought, that failing a kill, the thing was to mark him – a mark that could be recognised afterwards . . . For a few heartbeats of time they reeled to and fro together, unaware of what went on about them, aware only of each other. Randal broke his blade free and struck again, and again felt the blow parried with a shock, as steel met steel, that jarred all up his arm. De Coucy’s dagger leapt once more, and Randal felt a fiery flick of pain in his left forearm, and sprang back an instant out of touch, then in again, striving to close with the man – the great black cat, he seemed in that habit, whose claws were one bright dagger-point of death – and beat down his defence. Then de Coucy’s weapon darted past his s
houlder as he side slipped, with such force in the blow that for one split instant of time the man was off balance; and in that split instant Randal had him by the dagger-wrist and closed with him. He saw the rage and hate in de Coucy’s eyes, the man’s whole face, close to his own, a blazing mask of hate, and slashed it across the cheek once, twice, the second gash crossing the first.
Sir Thiebaut dropped his dagger and staggered back with a strange, high cry like a woman’s, clutching at his face. Randal sprang after him and caught him by the breast of his habit, twisting his hands in the black folds, dagger raised for another blow; but the thick stuff tore in his grasp, dragging away at the shoulder, and the torchlight fell full on the quilted gambeson he wore beneath it. And next instant the man had whirled about with the swiftness of desperation and kicked Randal in the groin.
The boy doubled up, as his world darkened and swam in agony, and when it cleared again, de Coucy was gone. He was on his knees, winded and retching. He glared up at the aghast faces that wavered round him in the torchlight, and used the first shuddering breath that he could draw to rave at them. ‘You fools! You duped fools! Don’t – you know the difference between a friar and one of Ranulf Flambard’s gore-crows?’
Vaguely, as he staggered to his feet, he heard Reynfrey’s bull voice calling to the Manor men as a huntsman calls to his hounds. The witch hunt was over and the rabble was in full retreat, blundering away and breaking down the garth hedges as they went. It was partly the stunned realisation that they had wounded, perhaps killed, a knight whom all men knew was dear to the old Lord of Bramber who held all their lives in the hollow of his gouty hands, partly the sight of a knight’s gambeson under a friar’s habit, and the hated name of Ranulf Flambard flung into their midst, that had acted on them like a bucket of water flung over fighting dogs. They wanted nothing now but to get away, to reach their own homes and leave the harm that they had done behind them in the hope that in the morning it would all be a dream.