Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (3 page)

The reaction of the faces made him wonder if he had said the wrong thing. He had been dressed like a soldier. He had marched like a soldier once and carried a pike. But when Nat had told him to leave his pike and put his own clothes on from his knapsack, had not some words been said about not being a soldier any more? Words were hard to remember but there was the picture to it. He could see Nat sliding their pikes down a bank to some water and they had sunk out of sight completely.

“By the Lord, he’s a deserter. He must go before Viscount Conway.”

“The army has retreated to Durham. Lord knows how far south they will go now.”

“Take him to Sir John.”

“String him up now.”

“Let’s hear what he has to say.” His face was slapped again. “You fired the stack. Ah, here comes Turner and his boy. Turner, this is the man fired your stack. Speak up, villain!”

Daniel struggled with his pictures. “There was a fat boy –”

“Hah! That’s a lie. What would our boys get fat on?”

The little lad who had thrown the stone was pushed forward. A man plucked up his ragged sleeve to show his arm. “There, that’s what our children are like. Skin and bone. A fat boy indeed!
You
set the fire.”

Daniel began to wonder if he’d ever seen a fat boy. The fire must be true though because they were all talking about a fire. He had a tinder box in his knapsack but he wasn’t wearing his knapsack. He was good at making a fire in the hearth at home or a bonfire in autumn for the leaves from the parsonage trees. Was the fat boy a dream? He did have dream pictures. Nat told him when they were dreams but he was far from Nat and he didn’t know how he could get back to him.

He was frightened and closed his eyes against the grim faces. Now he could hear horses’ hooves and felt a change come over the crowd.

“Heaven be praised! Here’s Sir John – and Master Robert!”

Daniel thought he might now be happy too till he heard the voice that went with the bang, the pain and dropping the hen. He had run from the voice, slithering down the stream bank and crouching till all the other voices that clamoured afterwards had gone away.

“That’s the man,” the voice said now with the same sharpness as “Hold! Put that down or I shoot.”

Daniel kept his eyes shut so as not to see the lips that made cruel sounds.

Another voice spoke, mild but with authority.

“Ay, Robert, but did you see him fire the stack?”

“Indeed not, sir. I would have raised the alarm at once and it could have been saved. We only saw the flames rising into the air when we had given up the wild goose chase for Bella. But there was no one else around. He came back and did it deliberately out of revenge. He’s a robber and a fire-raiser and should hang at once.”

“Ay, we all say that, Sir John. We got to make an example of him. He’s confessed to being an English soldier who ran away from the battle.”

“Has he indeed?”

Daniel opened his eyes and saw the man who spoke in an educated voice. He wore a fine large curled hat such as gentlemen wore and his eyes under grey eyebrows were staring straight at him.

“You are an English soldier?”

Daniel looked up into the eyes. They were straight honest eyes in a face that had no other distinct features but a small grey beard. An old man’s face, about the age of his own father who was nearly fifty.

I must answer honestly. Nat said I was not a soldier when I put on my own clothes.

“No, sir.”

“He said he was just now,” several voices cried. “He’s a liar and deceiver. He made up a story about a fat boy firing the stack. String him up at once, Sir John.”

“We are not savages. He must have a proper trial.”

“What about the Scots army, Sir John?” cried one of the pitchfork men. “Folks say they’ve took Newcastle and are sending troops to seize all the land round here. If we hanged him quick the deed ‘ud be done and they could do nowt about it.”

“They’ll fire the village if we hang a Scots spy,” a woman’s frightened voice cried out.

“String him up, Father. He’s English. He doesn’t talk like a Scot.” The cruel voice spoke again. Daniel looked this time, a quick glance and saw a young man on horseback with a nose and beardless chin as sharp as his voice. This man pulled his restless beast next to Sir John and muttered, “Why dilly-dally, sir? He’s plain guilty. The people want action. Get the man hanged and they can all get back to work.”

Daniel knew he had better hearing than most men, better than Nat’s even, and he felt that most of the shuffling crowd had not heard this. He looked back at the man called Sir John. I have hope in him, he was saying to himself. But good men can be persuaded against themselves. Nat had said that to him about their own father. “Father didn’t want us to fight. Mother persuaded him because you wanted to dress up as a soldier. But you don’t want to hurt people and now we’re away from Mother I’m thinking like Father.” He’d said it many times before the picture of the pikes sliding into the ditch. Daniel didn’t have many thoughts, but now he could feel that the Sir John man might be persuaded by the son with the sharp voice.

He saw Sir John look about him as Father sometimes looked when he wanted to escape from Mother’s voice. He spotted a woman in a shawl and bonnet at the back of the crowd. “Dame Leary,” he called out, “are you not holding school today?”

She bobbed to him. “It’s harvest holiday, Sir John, but I can call them in if you think best, Sir John.”

“No, leave them. We will hold court in your schoolroom. Take the accused inside. You that apprehended him and Farmer Turner and young Sam and my son are all witnesses. I will pick twelve men from the rest of you that I know to be honest souls to act as jury. Let us go in.”

The man they had called Farmer Turner came forward plucking the brim of his hat. “Nay, Sam and I cannot be witnesses, Sir John. We saw nothing but the stack burning. We went to help look for young Mistress Arabella. I did ask Sam about his bonfire but it was well out and way beyond the wee burn. And this man snatched Sam’s breeches off the clothes’ line for his own are ragged as you can see. But when he found they were only a boy’s he threw them down in the dirt. So I’d like to be on the jury. The man’s guilty as hell and he’s nigh ruined me. I’ll have to slaughter my beasts if they’ve nowt to eat this coming winter.”

Daniel looked at Sir John’s face for an answer to all this. It had been a lot of words and again they didn’t fit any of his pictures.

Sir John was shaking his head at the man called Turner. “A juryman must not be sure of guilt or innocence before he listens to the evidence.”

He pointed out twelve other men. Daniel counted them. He could count up to twenty if he had to but after that the numbers muddled him.

He was propelled forward then across the green to a low stone building with more windows than an ordinary house. Inside were six rows of worn desks and a platform with a bigger desk and a chair at the end of an aisle between the rows like a church. Sir John sat there and Daniel was placed in front of him while the twelve men were ordered to sit in the front row. It seemed as if the whole of the village crowded in behind when he peered round at the clumping noise of all the clogs on the wooden floor. The people called witnesses stood in a line by the nearest window but Daniel kept his eyes from the face of the cruel young man.

Sir John asked for a clerk to record the proceedings but no one offered their writing skills except Farmer Turner and his own son, Robert.

“You are both too concerned in the matter. Dame Leary, it is most irregular to call a woman but it is your schoolroom and I trust you can find paper and ink.”

“Pencil, Sir John.”

“Why are you wasting time on so plain a case, sir,” the sharp cruel voice called out.

“Be silent, everyone in the court,” Sir John said. “Pencil will have to do. It can be written over in ink afterwards.” He opened the desk and took out a Bible. “Let us proceed.”

Daniel looked up with hope at the Bible. Soon he might be allowed to go and find Nat and all this strange bewilderment would be over. Nat would be in charge.

Bel stretched in bed and remembered she was a prisoner for the day. It was a pity because she could see sunshine outside. Someone had been in already and opened the shutters. She put her toes out of bed and wiggled them into the thick Turkish rug. When she stood upright she looked towards the door and saw a tray on the floor with an egg and a toasted muffin and a mug of mild ale. She fetched it and sat on the bed with it on her knee and ate and drank, stuffing the food in as she never could when she was under scrutiny. There was some luxury in this.

She wondered if her egg had been laid by Farmer Turner’s hen who had escaped strangulation. Had they caught the man with flaxen hair? She didn’t like to remember that she had for a moment been frightened by him. She hoped he was locked up. At any rate she was locked in, so he couldn’t escape to get at her.

It was better to think of Sam. He would be taking the scraps from the farmhouse kitchen to scatter for the hens. Did they troop thoughtlessly out over the farm with no memories of the scare the night before? Were they all in love with the cock who strutted about as if he surely thought they were. Would Sam Turner strut if he knew that Arabella from the Hall was in love with him?

“He doesn’t need to strut,” she said aloud. “He’s as good as me, in fact better by far. But I know I could be a better person if I spent more time with him.”

She clasped her knees and thought over the whole of that afternoon with him. He had called her Young Mistress Arabella at first, till she had told him she never answered to that. She would to Bella but what she called
herself
was Bel.

“Just B-E-L,” she had said. “One L. Why waste letters? Your name is three letters. That’s good. I like things to be very simple. Have food when you’re hungry. Go to sleep when you’re tired. Wear something thin and cool in summer and warm in winter. People try to make everything difficult – rules about eating and drinking at set times. Get into bed and blow out your candle even if you’re still wide awake. Wear the most dreadful clothes with a thousand buttons –”

He had laughed and remarked that some people couldn’t eat when they were hungry because there was no food and they had only rags to put on summer or winter and no candle to light or bed to sleep in. He had sat back on his heels to say it in the middle of their game but so calmly and smilingly that she hadn’t felt humiliated as she often did at home. Of course he was right and it was good for her to think about poor people and try in the midst of all her rebelliousness to be thankful.

I think, she reflected, that was when I really began to be in love with him, only he never managed to call me Bel to my face. But that’s what makes me angry. Grown-up people make true love impossible. I would never be allowed to marry a farmer’s son. Yet Sam is honest, heroic, kind. Father is honest but he is not wise to let Mother pander to Robert, and he doesn’t know at all how to manage Henrietta. Robert is not honest. He’s a hypocrite. He sometimes takes Mass with Mother but reviles Popery behind her back. And he’s a coward too. He rode with Father’s troop to Newburn to fight the Scots, but after the battle he rode back again and said, “Our men had no heart for it. Some of them were more vicious against their own officers. One wretched captain was beaten to death on the way north because they suspected he was Catholic. I wasn’t going to risk them finding out I have a Catholic mother.”

Bel had grown up knowing that her proud, beautiful and confident mother was nevertheless a sort of liability to the family. She didn’t care that Father Patrick went about in peril of his life but she hated having this secret Popery thing within the walls of Horden Hall and she was very afraid that though her father didn’t like it either he might one day succumb to it. Her mother was the power in the home.

“King Charles is in thrall to a Catholic wife,” Robert would say, looking at Father with eyes like black diamonds so Father had no doubt what he was thinking.

But Sam, she thought, is at the Parish Church with his family Sunday by Sunday. They are not complicated people like us. They live in their modest farmhouse and milk their cows and toil in the fields and have no time to rebel or to spite or bully each other. That’s how I want my life to be, just straight and simple and true. Sam and Bel. What a good sound that has!

And then she put down her tray at the door and her chamber pot beside it and crept back into bed. She wouldn’t be able to see him again till tomorrow.

CHAPTER 3

Daniel looked at the boy they called Samuel Turner who had been summoned as the first witness. He had removed his hat to reveal curls the colour of ripe conkers and a fresh, sun-bronzed face with brown eyes.

He looks an honest boy, Daniel told himself, but I have never seen him before. Did he see me sometime and I didn’t know it? He tried to listen carefully to everything the boy said.

First he swore on the Bible to tell the truth. Then Sir John asked him, “Have you ever seen this man before?”

“No, Sir.”

“What were you doing yesterday afternoon?”

“I mended the stone wall next to the bridge, so my father gave me two hours to myself. I acted out the battle of Newburn with sticks for soldiers. It was a game, sir. Then I heard my mother call me in so I covered up the bonfire with earth and went inside. About a quarter of an hour later we heard a shot and all ran out. Master Robert came up and said he’d fired at a man who’d grabbed one of our hens.”