It connected just as the man was looking up again. The iron hammer struck his forehead at the hairline. It was a hasty blow, and did not have all of Tom's considerable strength behind it. The thief staggered but did not fall.
Tom hit him again.
This blow was harder. He had time to lift the hammer above his head and aim it, as the dazed thief tried to focus his eyes. Tom thought of Martha as he swung the hammer down. It struck with all his force, and the thief fell to the ground like a dropped doll.
Tom was wound up too tightly to feel any relief. He knelt beside the thief, searching him. "Where's his purse? Where's his purse, damnation!" The limp body was difficult to move. Finally Tom laid him flat on his back and opened his cloak. There was a big leather purse hanging from his belt. Tom undid its clasp. Inside was a soft wool bag with a drawstring. Tom pulled it out. It was light. "Empty!" Tom said. "He must have another."
He pulled the cloak from under the man and carefully felt it all over. There were no concealed pockets, no hard parts. He pulled off the boots. There was nothing inside them. He drew his eating knife from his belt and slit the soles: nothing.
Impatiently, he slipped his knife inside the neck of the thief's woolen tunic and ripped it to the hem. There was no hidden money belt.
The thief lay in the middle of the mud road, naked but for his stockings. The two peasants were staring at Tom as if he were mad. Furiously, Tom said to Agnes: "He hasn't any money!"
"He must have lost it all at dice," she said bitterly.
"I hope he burns in the fires of hell," Tom said.
Agnes knelt down and felt the thief's chest. "That's where he is now," she said. "You've killed him."
IV
By Christmas they were starving.
The winter came early, and it was as cold and hard and unyielding as a stonemason's iron chisel. There were still apples on the trees when the first frost dusted the fields. People called it a cold snap, thinking it would be brief, but it was not. Villages that left the autumn plowing a little late broke their plowshares on the rock-hard earth. The peasants hastened to kill their pigs and salt them for the winter, and the lords slaughtered their cattle, because winter grazing would not support the same number of livestock as summer. But the endless freeze withered the grass, and some of the remaining animals died anyway. Wolves became desperate, and came into villages at dusk to snatch away scraggy chickens and listless children.
On building sites all over the country, as soon as the first frost struck, the walls that had been built that summer were hastily covered with straw and dung to insulate them from the worst cold, because the mortar in them was not yet completely dry, and if it were to freeze it would crack. No further mortar work would be done until spring. Some of the masons had been hired for the summer only, and they went back to their home villages, where they were known as wrights rather than masons, and they would spend the winter making plows, saddles, harness, carts, shovels, doors, and anything else that required a skilled hand with hammer and chisel and saw. The other masons moved into the lean-to lodges on the site and cut stones in intricate shapes all the hours of daylight. But because the frost was early, the work progressed too fast; and because the peasants were starving, the bishops and castellans and lords had less money to spend on building than they had hoped; and so as the winter wore on some of the masons were dismissed.
Tom and his family walked from Salisbury to Shaftesbury, and from there to Sherborne, Wells, Bath, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Wallingford and Windsor. Everywhere the fires inside the lodges burned, and the churchyards and castle walls rang with the song of iron on stone, and the master builders made small precise models of arches and vaults with their clever hands encased in fingerless gloves. Some masters were impatient, abrupt or discourteous; others looked sadly at Tom's thin children and pregnant wife and spoke kindly and regretfully; but they all said the same thing: No, there's no work for you here.
Whenever they could, they imposed upon the hospitality of monasteries, where travelers could always get a meal of some kind and a place to sleep--strictly for one night only. When the blackberries ripened in the bramble thickets, they lived on those for days on end, like the birds. In the forest, Agnes would light a fire under the iron cooking pot and boil porridge. But still, much of the time, they were obliged to buy bread from bakers and pickled herrings from fishmongers, or to eat in alehouses and cookshops, which was more expensive than preparing their own food; and so their money inexorably drained away.
Martha was naturally skinny but she became even thinner. Alfred was still getting taller, like a weed growing in shallow soil, and he became lanky. Agnes ate sparingly, but the baby growing inside her was greedy, and Tom could see that she was tormented by hunger. Sometimes he ordered her to eat more, and then even her iron will yielded to the combined authority of her husband and her unborn child. Still she did not grow plump and rosy, as she had during other pregnancies. Instead she looked gaunt despite her swollen belly, like a starving child in a famine.
Since leaving Salisbury they had walked around three quarters of a big circle, and by the end of the year they were back in the vast forest that stretched from Windsor to Southampton. They were heading for Winchester. Tom had sold his mason's tools, and all but a few pennies of that money had been spent: he would have to borrow tools, or the money to buy them, as soon as he found employment. If he did not get work in Winchester he did not know what he would do. He had brothers, back in his hometown; but that was in the north, a journey of several weeks, and the family would starve before they got there. Agnes was an only child and her parents were dead. There was no agricultural work in midwinter. Perhaps Agnes could scrape a few pennies as a scullery maid in a rich house in Winchester. She certainly could not tramp the roads much longer, for her time was near.
But Winchester was three days away and they were hungry now. The blackberries were gone, there was no monastery in prospect, and Agnes had no oats left in the cooking pot which she carried on her back. The previous night they had traded a knife for a loaf of rye bread, four bowls of broth with no meat in it, and a place to sleep by the fire in a peasant's hovel. They had not seen a village since. But toward the end of the afternoon Tom saw smoke rising above the trees, and they found the home of a solitary verderer, one of the king's forest police. He gave them a sack of turnips in exchange for Tom's small ax.
They had walked only three miles farther when Agnes said she was too tired to go on. Tom was surprised. In all their years together he had never known her to say she was too tired for anything.
She sat down in the shelter of a big horse-chestnut tree beside the road. Tom dug a shallow pit for a fire, using a worn wooden shovel--one of the few tools they had left, for nobody would want to buy it. The children gathered twigs and Tom started the fire, then he took the cooking pot and went to find a stream. He returned with the pot full of icy water and set it at the edge of the fire. Agnes sliced some turnips. Martha collected the conkers that had dropped from the tree, and Agnes showed her how to peel them and grind the soft insides into a coarse flour to thicken the turnip soup. Tom sent Alfred to find more firewood, while he himself took a stick and went poking around in the dead leaves on the forest floor, hoping to find a hibernating hedgehog or squirrel to put in the broth. He was unlucky.
He sat down beside Agnes while darkness fell and the soup cooked. "Have we any salt left?" he asked her.
She shook her head. "You've been eating porridge without salt for weeks," she said. "Haven't you noticed?"
"No."
"Hunger is the best seasoning."
"Well, we've plenty of that." Tom was suddenly terribly tired. He felt the crushing burden of the piled-up disappointments of the last four months and he could not be brave any longer. In a defeated voice he said: "What went wrong, Agnes?"
"Everything," she said. "You had no work last winter. You got a job in the spring; then the earl's daughter canceled the wedding and Lord William canceled the house. Then w
e decided to stay and work in the harvest--that was a mistake."
"For sure it would have been easier for me to find a building job in the summer than it was in the autumn."
"And the winter came early. And for all that, we would still have been all right, but then our pig was stolen."
Tom nodded wearily. "My only consolation is knowing that the thief is even now suffering all the torments of hell."
"I hope so."
"Do you doubt it?"
"Priests don't know as much as they pretend to. My father was one, remember."
Tom remembered very well. One wall of her father's parish church had crumbled beyond repair, and Tom had been hired to rebuild it. Priests were not allowed to marry, but this priest had a housekeeper, and the housekeeper had a daughter, and it was an open secret in the village that the priest was the father of the girl. Agnes had not been beautiful, even then, but her skin had had a glow of youth, and she had seemed to be bursting with energy. She would talk to Tom while he was working, and sometimes the wind would flatten her dress against her so that Tom could see the curves of her body, even her navel, almost as clearly as if she had been naked. One night she came to the little hut where he slept, and put a hand over his mouth to tell him not to speak, and pulled off her dress so that he could see her nude in the moonlight, and then he took her strong young body in his arms and they made love.
"We were both virgins," he said aloud.
She knew what he was thinking about. She smiled, then her face saddened again, and she said: "It seems so long ago."
Martha said: "Can we eat now?"
The smell of the soup was making Tom's stomach rumble. He dipped his bowl into the bubbling cauldron and brought out a few slices of turnip in a thin gruel. He used the blunt edge of his knife to test the turnip. It was not cooked all the way through, but he decided not to make them wait. He gave a bowlful to each child, then took one to Agnes.
She looked drawn and thoughtful. She blew on her soup to cool it, then raised the bowl to her lips.
The children quickly drained theirs and wanted more. Tom took the pot out of the fire, using the hem of his cloak to avoid burning his hands, and emptied the remaining soup into the children's bowls.
When he returned to Agnes's side she said: "What about you?"
"I'll eat tomorrow," he said.
She seemed too tired to argue.
Tom and Alfred built the fire high and gathered enough wood to last the night. Then they all rolled up in their cloaks and lay down on the leaves to sleep.
Tom slept lightly, and when Agnes groaned he woke up instantly. "What is it?" he whispered.
She groaned again. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed. After a moment she said: "The baby is coming."
Tom's heart missed a beat. Not here, he thought; not here on the frozen ground in the depths of a forest. "But it's not due," he said.
"It's early."
Tom made his voice calm. "Have the waters broken?"
"Soon after we left the verderer's hut," Agnes panted, not opening her eyes.
Tom remembered her suddenly diving into the bushes as if to answer an urgent call of nature. "And the pains?"
"Ever since."
It was like her to keep quiet about it.
Alfred and Martha were awake. Alfred said: "What's happening?"
"The baby is coming," Tom said.
Martha burst into tears.
Tom frowned. "Could you make it back to the verderer's hut?" he asked Agnes. There they would at least have a roof, and straw to lie on, and someone to help.
Agnes shook her head. "The baby has dropped already."
"It won't be long, then!" They were in the most deserted part of the forest. They had not seen a village since morning, and the verderer had said they would not see one all day tomorrow. That meant there was no possibility of finding a woman to act as midwife. Tom would have to deliver the baby himself, in the cold, with only the children to help, and if anything should go wrong he had no medicines, no knowledge....
This is my fault, Tom thought; I got her with child, and I brought her into destitution. She trusted me to provide for her, and now she is giving birth in the open air in the middle of winter. He had always despised men who fathered children and then left them to starve; and now he was no better than they. He felt ashamed.
"I'm so tired," Agnes said. "I don't believe I can bring this baby into the world. I want to rest." Her face glistened, in the firelight, with a thin film of sweat.
Tom realized he must pull himself together. He was going to have to give Agnes strength. "I'll help you," he said. There was nothing mysterious or complicated about what was going to happen. He had watched the births of several children. The work was normally done by women, for they knew how the mother felt, and that enabled them to be more helpful; but there was no reason why a man should not do it if necessary. He must first make her comfortable; then find out how far advanced the birth was; then make sensible preparations; then calm her and reassure her while they waited.
"How do you feel?" he asked her.
"Cold," she replied.
"Come closer to the fire," he said. He took off his cloak and spread it on the ground a yard from the blaze. Agnes tried to struggle to her feet. Tom lifted her easily, and set her down gently on his cloak.
He knelt beside her. The wool tunic she was wearing underneath her own cloak had buttons all the way down the front. He undid two of them and put his hands inside. Agnes gasped.
"Does it hurt?" he said, surprised and worried.
"No," she said with a brief smile. "Your hands are cold." He felt the outline of her belly. The swelling was higher and more pointed than it had been last night, when the two of them had slept together in the straw on the floor of a peasant's hovel. Tom pressed a little harder, feeling the shape of the unborn baby. He found one end of the body, just beneath Agnes's navel; but he could not locate the other end. He said: "I can feel its bottom, but not its head."
"That's because it's on the way out," she said.
He covered her and tucked her cloak around her. He would need to make his preparations quickly. He looked at the children. Martha was snuffling. Alfred just looked scared. It would be good to give them something to do.
"Alfred, take that cooking pot to the stream. Wash it clean and bring it back full of fresh water. Martha, collect some reeds and make me two lengths of string, each big enough for a necklace. Quick, now. You're going to have another brother or sister by daybreak."
They went off. Tom took out his eating knife and a small hard stone and began to sharpen the blade. Agnes groaned again. Tom put down his knife and held her hand.
He had sat with her like this when the others were born: Alfred; then Matilda, who had died after two years; and Martha; and the child who had been born dead, a boy whom Tom had secretly planned to name Harold. But each time there had been someone else to give help and reassurance--Agnes's mother for Alfred, a village midwife for Matilda and Harold, and the lady of the manor, no less, for Martha. This time he would have to do it alone. But he must not show his anxiety: he must make her feel happy and confident.
She relaxed as the spasm passed. Tom said: "Remember when Martha was born, and the Lady Isabella acted as midwife?"
Agnes smiled. "You were building a chapel for the lord, and you asked her to send her maid to fetch the midwife from the village...."
"And she said: 'That drunken old witch? I wouldn't let her deliver a litter of wolfhound pups!' And she took us to her own chamber, and Lord Robert could not go to bed until Martha was born."
"She was a good woman."
"There aren't many ladies like her."
Alfred returned with the pot full of cold water. Tom set it down near the fire, not close enough to boil, so there would be warm water. Agnes reached inside her cloak and took out a small linen bag containing clean rags which she had ready.
Martha came back with her hands full of reeds and sat down to plait them. "What do y
ou need strings for?" she asked.
"Something very important, you'll see," Tom said. "Make them well."
Alfred looked restless and embarrassed. "Go and collect more wood," Tom told him. "Let's have a bigger fire." The boy went off, glad to have something to do.
Agnes's face tautened with strain as she began to bear down again, pushing the baby out of her womb, making a low noise like a tree creaking in a gale. Tom could see that the effort was costing her dear, using up her last reserves of strength; and he wished with all his heart that he could bear down for her, and take the strain himself, to give her some relief. At last the pain seemed to ease, and Tom breathed again. Agnes seemed to drift off into a doze.
Alfred returned with his arms full of sticks.
Agnes became alert again and said: "I'm so cold."
Tom said: "Alfred, build up the fire. Martha, lie down beside your mother and keep her warm." They both obeyed with worried looks. Agnes put her arms around Martha and held her close, shivering.
Tom was sick with worry. The fire was roaring, but the air was getting colder. It might be so cold that it would kill the baby with its first breath. It was not unknown for children to be born out-of-doors; in fact it happened often at harvesttime, when everyone was so busy and the women worked up until the last minute; but at harvest the ground was dry and the grass was soft and the air was balmy. He had never heard of a woman giving birth outside in winter.
Agnes raised herself on her elbows and spread her legs wider.
"What is it?" Tom said in a frightened voice.
She was straining too hard to reply.
Tom said: "Alfred, kneel down behind your mother and let her lean on you."
When Alfred was in position, Tom opened Agnes's cloak and unbuttoned the skirt of her dress. Kneeling between her legs, he could see that the birth opening was beginning to dilate a little already. "Not long now, my darling," he murmured, struggling to keep the tremor of fear out of his voice.
She relaxed again, closing her eyes and resting her weight on Alfred. The opening seemed to shrink a little. The forest was silent but for the crackling of the big fire. Suddenly Tom thought of how the outlaw woman, Ellen, had given birth in the forest alone. It must have been terrifying. She had feared that a wolf would come upon her while she was helpless and steal the newborn baby away, she had said. This year the wolves were bolder than usual, people said, but surely they would not attack a group of four people.