Beside the house was a small family chapel with a little turret into which Benedict Mason had been commissioned to install a new bell. On the other side of the house was a squat stone tower, twenty feet high, and on top of that was a wooden structure pierced with numerous small entrance holes. This was the dovecote, around which several dozen doves made their peaceful cooing and fluttering. Just past the dovecote, Robert had built a walled garden in which neat rows of hedges formed a framework for arbours and beds of roses. The whole place was a little heaven.
Sometimes, it was true, there were screams and cries of pain from the house, but if they heard them the villagers only shrugged.
Robert Forest was a rich and increasingly powerful man. If the quiet, dark-eyed squire of Avonsford chose to beat his wife or his children for some offence, it was his right.
“There’s good order at the manor,” it was said, sometimes with a nervous laugh.
It was bad luck for young Will that Robert Forest had turned him out. There were several reasons.
He was the only one of a family of five children to survive. His mother had died when he was ten, and after struggling on for six more years in the little cottage in Avonsford, his father had died that January. This was the problem: for the family’s lease was a copyhold, expiring at the death of the tenant. The yearly rent had not been high, but rents were rising now, and not only would the new rent be higher, but the squire as lord of the manor had the right to the old heriot death duty and also to a new entry fine before he would renew the lease at all. And Will had no money.
The village was small: the few other tenants were poor: no one had offered to help him. They could not. Nor had Forest.
“If you can’t pay, you’re out,” the steward told him. “The master says so.”
Which was not surprising, for two reasons.
The first was that Robert Forest had other uses for the cottage.
Since the Black Death the century before, the village of Avonsford had never recovered. Its population had remained meagre and, by chance rather than any design, the families in the place had formed into two groups at opposite ends of the straggling village, while the houses between gradually decayed and were pulled down. The larger group lay at the south end; the smaller, where Will lived, at the north. The northern cluster was reduced to only four cottages now, but around them were outhouses and a plot of common land where they had the ancient right to graze livestock: a fact which made Robert Forest angry.
“It’s a waste of good land,” he remarked drily each time he passed it. “Five acres I could use.”
The new lord of the manor had come to his decision that winter. He would rehouse the northern families in the southern group where there was already one vacant cottage and where he now built two more. The death of old Wilson in January made matters easier. Will, having no money, would not have to be rehoused at all but could be turned out. It was obviously a sensible decision.
The second reason was more subtle, but equally powerful.
Young Will Wilson was his cousin.
A distant cousin to be sure. When old Walter’s brother had refused to join the rest of the motley family collection that formed a labour gang for that cunning survivor of the Black Death, he had probably saved his own little family from ruthless exploitation. But while Walter’s descendants had risen to these new heights of affluence, his brother’s family had remained poor peasants ever since. Over a century had passed: four, five generations. But Robert Forest had silently suspected, and secretly verified, the connection as soon as he had taken over the estate. It was not a connection he wished to remember.
All through his childhood, Will had often noticed how sourly Forest looked at him if he chanced to pass the cottage, but since Robert Forest never smiled, he had not attached great significance to it.
And if ever he asked his father about the Forest family, his father had looked at the ground and told him only:
“They were rich merchants; now they’re gentlemen. Nothing like us.”
For although he too had been aware of the connection, Will’s father, guessing Forest’s likely feelings, was wise enough never to mention it.
“Why does he glare at our cottage?” the boy asked. “I’ve seen him.”
“Just his way,” his father had answered. “Show him respect, Will, and it’ll be enough.”
It had not been.
To Will however, the Forests were distant figures. Robert’s wife and two children, a boy and a girl a little older than Will, were seldom seen away from the manor house. On Sundays, they usually worshipped at their little private chapel rather than the small and half derelict church in Avonsford. But occasionally he could see them and would always wonder at how quiet and reserved the two children looked as they walked behind their grey-haired mother, still handsome but so severe that she frightened him.
“She wasn’t always like that,” his father did once admit to him. “I remember when she was a merry young girl called Lizzie Curtis.” He grimaced. “He at the manor, Robert Forest, changed that.”
Will had not fully understood what this meant until one day, when he had to help his father mend the entrance to the dovecote, he saw her walking alone in the walled garden and noticed that when her husband entered the place and came up to her unexpectedly, she instinctively flinched back from him in fear. He kept his distance from the lord of the manor as much as he could after that.
It was the previous month that Forest had turned him out. The way it happened had filled him with amazement.
Though his neighbours had left, he had been staying in the little cottage because he had nowhere else to go. The steward knew he was there, of course, but if he saw him about the place, ignored him as completely as if he had been a dead man. Will guessed that matters would soon come to a head.
The men came one morning: a gang of ten – four from the estate and six hired from the town. In a single day they knocked down the four cottages. They took no notice of him at all as he stood quietly with his few possessions, watching them at work. At the end of the day, his little cottage was rubble. He slept in a hayloft in the southern pan of the village that night. His neighbours there had not been quick to offer him food: he did not blame them – they had their own families to look after. Eventually however he had been given some wheatcakes. The next day he watched as the men came once more, this time with carts, and carried away any stones or other materials that could be re-used. Again he stayed in the hayloft. The third morning, the men brought heavy ploughs from all over the estate and four teams of oxen. All day they ploughed up the ground where the cottages had been, and the common land around it. In the evening, when they had done, it was hard for him to believe that the place which had been his home had so completely vanished under the naked, raw brown earth. The day after that, they began to plant the hawthorn hedge that would surround Forest’s new five acre field.
This was the process known as enclosure. It took many forms: sometimes open fields with their time-honoured strips, ridges and banks which were so economically wasteful, were converted to single ploughed fields; or the peasants’ corn fields might be converted to cattle and sheep pasture; sometimes these enclosures were made by mutual agreement, sometimes by compulsion, or often, as in the case of Avonsford, by a mixture of the two.
Although the process was already well known in many parts of England, because it was mainly open sheep country, the practice of enclosure was never such a striking feature of life at Sarum as it was in other areas. But enclosures there were, and it was Forest’s enclosure that forced young Will Wilson off the land.
Since it was obvious that Forest did not want him there, the villagers did not encourage him to stay with them. For several weeks he tried to find shelter and scrape a living. Local farmers gave him a day’s work here and there, and shelter for the night, but no home. In the city, the closed community of the craft guilds showed little interest in the penniless and friendless young labourer when he tried to find a place
as an apprentice. One of the inns told him he could clean out the stables, but after the innkeeper hit him for obeying an order too slowly, he decided to leave.
What was he to do?
“There’s nothing for me at Sarum,” he sadly decided. “Plenty for others, but not for me.” He missed his poor cottage in the valley at Avonsford. “If even that’s gone,” he finally decided, “I may as well try my luck elsewhere.”
And so it was on an April morning that he had come to the Avon valley to see the sunrise for the last time before he took his leave.
The mists were clearing now; he could see the river water and the long green weeds. People were stirring at the manor house. As the last trails of mist drifted downstream on the river the swans returned and, arching their powerful wings, made their comfortable landing on the water.
He turned to go.
He had said his farewell to Avonsford; now there was one last visit to make – to the great cathedral in the valley, whose graceful, soaring spire had been the dominant landmark of his short life. He would take one more look, pray there, and then be on his way.
It was difficult to wrench himself away from Sarum.
There was, however, one problem with his plan. When he left the city, where should he go?
He had no idea. He supposed one place was as good as another. It was a question he had been asking himself for over a week, without coming to any conclusion; and now the time had come.
“I shall go to the cathedral and ask St Osmund,” he murmured. It seemed the sensible thing to do.
It was as he came towards the little wooden bridge below the village that he saw her.
The lady of the manor.
She was standing in the middle of the bridge, apparently staring down the river, but she turned to watch him approach.
She was wearing a long, black cloak and her head was bare, so that the grey hair fell half way down her back.
He hesitated for a moment, for he was a little afraid of her: then he corrected himself.
“What’s she or the lord of Avonsford to me now?” he muttered and pressed forward.
She continued to watch him, impassively.
He wondered what this fine lady was doing down by the river so early; but who knew what was in the minds of the gentry? As he came close, he could not help thinking:
She’s old now, but she must have been beautiful once.
In fact, Lizzie was forty, though she knew she looked more. She had walked alone down to the river because just after dawn her husband, waking in a bad temper and after a few angry words when she foolishly contradicted him, had seemed about to strike her. Now that she was visibly growing old, she had supposed that his violence towards her might grow less, but it had not. Rather than begin the day with pain, she had quickly left the house and walked down to the bridge.
She too was watching the mist lift over the lovely manor house.
How strange to think that this place – everything that high-spirited girl Lizzie Curtis, had ever dreamed of – was now nothing more than a prison. On bad days, she thought grimly, she had known it to be more like a torture chamber.
She had to think hard to remember herself as she was – those light-hearted days seemed so far away. But when she remembered, she smiled sadly at the irony of her life. Oh yes, she had got what she wanted – wealth, fine clothes, a manor house – all of them: at the price of long cold years that made her wince as she looked back on them.
Lizzie had been gazing downstream. How many times she had done the same thing from the house, always with the same thought. In an hour or two, the water passing her would be flowing gently round the big curve in the river by the edge of the city; some of it would be diverted into the water-channels that flowed through the streets, some of that water would even flow past her childhood home. If only she could dive into the stream and travel southwards with it.
She would have left, countless times. Except that she knew very well that Robert would have kept their children, would probably have kidnapped them if she had tried to spirit them away. She could not bear to think of them left alone with him.
Which was why a new development in recent years had been all the more terrible.
For the children, despite her husband’s cold and sometimes cruel treatment of them, were starting to side with him against her.
It was nothing sudden, nothing obvious. It was a quiet, unspoken business.
When they were young and their father came into the room, looking around with his cold, menacing eyes, they would watch nervously, keeping as close to her as they could. They were both pale, thin little creatures and it had seemed to her that they needed protecting. When Robert began one of his rages, both the little boy and the girl would cling to her, or try to hide behind her if they could. How often had she borne the brunt of his cruelty to protect them.
But now they were almost full-grown. Robert seldom directed his anger towards them any more, but chiefly at her. And when he did, cursing her horribly in their presence, she was first astonished, then hurt to find that they did nothing to defend her. They hardly even looked shocked. Instead she would see their two small, narrow faces turned towards her, their eyes calmly watching, measuring, as carefully and dispassionately as a cat watches a wounded bird.
They no longer needed her. They were her husband’s children.
Lizzie watched the young fellow coming towards the little bridge. She recognised him and tried to remember his name. Of course. He was the Wilson boy her husband had thrown out of his cottage. She gazed at him curiously, then smiled to herself.
The boy’s features were familiar in more ways than one. They reminded her of Robert’s father, old John Wilson, the spider. Years ago, when she had first seen the boy and his father, and noticed this similarity, she had wondered if they might be the same stock; but she had never mentioned the subject to her husband for fear of how he might react. After all, he was a Forest these days.
Now the boy was on the bridge.
“You’re Will Wilson, aren’t you?”
He nodded, looking at her cautiously.
“What are you doing here?”
“Leaving, lady.”
“Leaving? You mean for good?”
He nodded again.
“Leaving Sarum. Nothing for me here.”
“So where will you go?”
“Dunno.”
And then, to his absolute astonishment, the lady of the manor said, as though she really meant it:
“How I envy you.”
The statement was so senseless that he could only stare at her in disbelief. Then it occurred to him that she might have gone mad. That would account for her wandering by the bridge at this early hour. Perhaps she was going to drown herself. Well, it was no concern of his.
Seeing his face, she laughed.
Yes, she was obviously mad. He wondered if she would try to stop him passing.
“Leaving your family at Avonsford?”
He had no idea of the hidden meaning in her words.
“All dead, lady.”
She did not pursue the point. The thought of leading this boy back to the manor and introducing him to Robert as his cousin gave her a moment’s amusement.
She put her hand inside her cloak and felt the little purse at her belt. As she thought, there was a gold coin in it. She pulled it out.
“Here,” she said with a smile. “Take it. Good luck on your journey.”
He took the gold piece in astonishment. This was a major windfall. He took it quickly before the madwoman changed her mind. Then he hurried past.
A few minutes later, still watched by Lizzie, he rounded the corner of the lane and turned south towards the city.
He wandered about in the huge church for some time before approaching his objective. How magnificent it was, with its soaring arches and the richly painted chapels and chantries below. There were many of these splendid memorials to the great nobles like Lord Hungerford, where the priests said masses every day.
Old Bishop Beauchamp was near to death now, it was said; no doubt there would soon be a new and splendid chantry built for him too. But though these sumptuous little chapels and impressive tombs reminded him of his own insignificance, there was only one monument in that great church that he approached with real religious awe.
The shrine of St Osmund was outwardly magnificent. It was not only painted and gilded: it was even studded with gems so that it glowed and glittered as the red and blue light from the high windows fell upon it. It was right, of course, that the saint should be honoured with all the ornaments that money could buy.
But to Will the little gleaming shrine was a magical place apart.
“God himself touches the spot,” the priest at Avonsford had told him, and he knew it was true. For in the cathedral, the holy body of the saint himself was present. The bodies of saints did not suffer corruption, like those of other men. He knew that too. They remained perfect and sometimes gave off a sweet odour. Some said there was even a warmth that came from the tombs. The very light that touched the jewelled shrine was holy, a direct shaft from the saint’s body to God.
“Touch the shrine,” the priest had assured him, “and you are touched by the saint himself.” Many had been healed of sickness by doing so.
Will knew about relics – they were holy objects you could touch. Once when he was ten, he met a pilgrim on the road outside Fisherton and the man showed him. in a little casket, a rusty sliver of metal. “It’s part of a nail from the true cross,” he confided, and Will looked at the nail with reverence and with awe. “You can touch it,” the pilgrim offered, but the boy had not dared, for he was suddenly overcome with the fear that if he touched a relic that had touched the body of Christ himself, he would probably be struck dead on the spot for his sins. He dreamed about the nail for years afterwards.
Almost every church had its relics, kept in little boxes and venerated by the people: shards of wood from the cross, a lock of hair belonging to one of the saints, a sliver of bone. But these were nothing compared with the holy shrine of St Osmund.