Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (30 page)

Ursula said, “You have a soft heart, my precious. Yes, he has had a hard time of it, but your mother urged him to come and he came. It was a brave thing to do.”

“Yet she could have written to Father all that he told us. I don’t understand it at all.”

“I suppose she felt word of mouth was important. I was praying for her and your sister and the poor babe. I expect you were too, in the prayers for the sick.”

Bel shook her head. “I didn’t think of them. I’m wicked.”

“But you were praying for Father Patrick, that he will be safe when he goes to Newcastle tomorrow. You are a much better girl than you pretend to be.” She wagged her finger and let fly her chortling laugh.

When they reached Nurse’s cottage Bel turned to see if Father would ask her to join Ursula for Sunday dinner as he sometimes did but she saw Nurse shaking her head. Then she scurried in quickly and shut the door. They heard her putting the bolt in place.

“Odd,” he said joining them. “She was worried about those strangers in the village, yet she preferred to be alone. They look sinister in all black with those tall hats pulled over their ears. I suppose they are from some Parliamentary commission to persuade young men to join
their
forces, but they would see we have none left.” He sighed but smiled at Bel and added, “If our young men had been about, I think they’d have thrown the Puritans in the duck pond for their pains.”

Bel was pleased to hear him speak lightly of the matter. The church service must have lifted his usual gloom. They followed the village track another hundred yards to where it ended in the rear courtyard of the Hall.

As they approached Bel tensed and looked up at her father. “Something’s wrong. Look at the stables!”

She ran forward. The stable doors stood open to emptiness. Sir John’s fine chestnut mare and Patrick’s miserable old nag were both gone. So were the saddles.

“Surely he cannot have robbed us! A priest!” Sir John gazed at the vacant spaces in disbelief.

“The kitchen door’s open,” cried Bel and stepped inside. “Oh father!”

There were signs that someone had been eating and drinking here no, several people. Pewter mugs stood about that had been neatly on their hooks. There were crumbs across the table and the remains of a ham roughly hacked. Knives lay about and the biggest, the meat knife was on the floor.

An icy hand went down her spine. Were the intruders still here? She listened. There was no sound, but a creepy feeling made her shudder. Her father and Ursula had now come in. Bel picked up the meat knife so they wouldn’t trip on it. As she laid it on the table in the light from the window she let out a gasp of horror. There was blood on it. She set it down quickly and looked at her own hands. The blood was still wet.

Ursula plucked at her arm as she was leaping to the steps to the passage.

“Don’t look, Bel. I know what it is. It’s Father Patrick. They have got him at last.” She was crossing herself.

“God in heaven!” cried Sir John. “Have they taken him away?”

In a scramble they all went to look. Bel, pulling from Ursula’s grip, was the first to emerge from the kitchen passage into the great hall.

She stood stock still, spreading out her arms as if to prevent them from seeing what she could see. Of course they saw it. Her father groaned and put out a hand to the hall panelling as if he might have fainted with the shock. Ursula let out the tiniest of little screeches.

Patrick Dawson’s body lay sprawled face-down at the foot of the stairs, his legs trailing up the first two steps. A dark pool surrounded his head.

Bel stared. She could think of nothing but the attack in Cranmore House which she had prevented. This is how it would have been but she would have witnessed it herself, the hacking, the screams, the crash to the ground, the spreading blood. Here it was. It had happened. Where was the sense in my saving him? she asked herself. For what has he lived to come to this now?

Ursula was telling them both not to turn him over, not to look at his face. “I have seen many horrors, sir. He is surely dead. Let me deal with him. When I have covered him up we can carry him from here.”

“And lay him where Robert was laid,” Sir John said. He was white and shaking, making no effort to step any nearer.

Bel grasped Ursula’s hand. “I’m not afraid.” She looked into Ursula’s twisted face and saw her poor lips were moving at a great rate. She is repeating the prayer for a departing soul. I must wait till the right words are spoken.

When Ursula bowed her head and crossed herself, Bel said, “You believe he is at peace don’t you? He was a very fearful man, but now he has nothing more to be frightened of, does he, so why should we be frightened of a lump of mangled flesh?”

She crouched down but couldn’t bear to risk the blood touching her gown. She closed her eyes, realising what she had just said. It’s true. I should not be frightened but for two years I
have
been afraid of a dead body. But that was my doing. Surely this is not? I saved him once, but today I was wishing him out of my life. I have just taken the sacrament unworthily. The devil is inside me and somehow he has done this thing. I stared at the strangers in the village and the devil has put them up to this. I am not safe to be among people. Did I not kill my brother? Where I am people are cursed. One a year, this very time of year. She straightened up and clutched at her throat.

“I can’t, I can’t touch him.” She turned and ran back to the kitchen and vomited into the tin wash bowl. Her vision seemed impaired. She groped her way, shivering to the back door and pulled it open and gulped the chill damp air. The paved courtyard, the empty stables, the crowding woods behind all came back into sharp focus. She stood, swallowing slowly with a hand on the doorpost, ashamed of herself.

Behind her she heard voices. Ursula was saying, “Oh Sir John, she is not yet sixteen. She is only a child.”

Then her father cried, “She took her brother’s death calmly enough and it was her fault.” His voice was on the edge of hysteria.

“No sir, no sir. It was an accident. This is a horrible murder. Did she never tell you how she prevented just such an attack on the poor priest at Cranmore House?”

There was a pause and then Bel heard her father say in a flat voice, “I had forgotten that. Did she love him, do you think?”

“What! Unlawfully?” Ursula cried. “Never!”

But Bel turned herself round and faced her father who seemed to think she couldn’t hear him with only the width of the kitchen between them. “Father, I hated that man. I hated Robert too. Blame me for their deaths if you will, but don’t accuse me of love.” She sank down onto one of the kitchen stools and bent her head over the table and broke into a torrent of weeping.

Ursula was beside her in a moment, an arm round her shoulders. “Hush, my pretty one. We are all shocked and know not what we are saying. I have covered the body and we must wait for Tom to come back to help us move him.”

Tom and Mary were allowed to eat their Sunday dinners with their families.

“No.” Bel stood up and brushed her eyes with the linen sleeve of her bodice. “We can’t leave him there till then. There are three of us. I am sorry, Father. I can do it now.”

To prove it she ran past both of them and up the steps and along the passage. Ursula had covered him with an old carriage blanket from the carved chest in the hall. Avoiding the pool of blood Bel went round him to the bottom stair and feeling for his legs under the blanket she pulled them round so that the body lay flat. She remembered how they had laid out Robert on a table in the far darkest corner of the great hall with two screens enclosing him completely.

The screens still stood there as they had for a whole year, just somewhere to leave them, she supposed. She went to look and found the table still there and a candle in the centre of it. Did Father come and light that sometimes and pray for Robert and grieve? She was astonished. She had had no idea. He hardly ever mentioned him.

She crossed the hall to the stairs again where Ursula was trying to work another blanket beneath the body so that it could be carried. Her father was standing by the open chest gazing into it.

“The moths have got in,” he said as Bel came up. “The rugs are ruined.”

“Then I’ll spread one on that table in the corner. We can carry him there.”

Her father murmured, “Robert’s corner?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does it matter now? What does anything matter?”

Bel took another rug. Wool flakes and dust shook out of its many holes. She ran across the wooden boards, set the candle on the floor and folded the rug to make a reasonable covering on the table. Then she ran back to Ursula who had mopped up most of the blood with rags from the kitchen and the body was now on the blanket. She must have rolled him to achieve this but she had left him face down.

Her father came to life then when he saw the two women prepared to lift the head end. He went to the feet and bending down grasped the two corners. Bel saw from his almost green colouring that he was struggling not to vomit as she had done.

They staggered across the hall where Bel had left the screens turned back and laid their burden down. At once, her father closed the screens and stood momentarily gasping for breath with his back against them.

“What are we to do?” he muttered. “Who can we tell? Is there any law now to bring the murderers to justice?”

Bel was moved with pity. He had himself been the law and carried out every case that came before him with precise attention to detail, until the ghastly hanging of that poor idiot. The weight of Patrick’s body had brought home to her how heavy must have been the big lad so cruelly hoisted up, alive and fit one moment and the next a dangling corpse. She wanted desperately to run away from that image that suddenly hung before her eyes.

Ursula had fetched mop and bucket and was trying to clean the stain from the wood floor.

Father walked over to her shaking his head. “It will never go away. Perhaps a mat . . .”

“Father,” Bel said, “I will run to the village and borrow a horse. Someone must ride to Newcastle and tell the authorities of this deed and the theft of your mount. The men may be hiding there. We might get Lady back for you.”

He nodded slowly. “The coroner still functions, I suppose. But you can’t go, a mere girl.” He straightened his spine. “I must ... I understand the processes. Did he have any family I wonder.”

Ursula paused in her mopping. “I knew his mother. She taught needlework at Cranmore House in its early days but she’s dead now. Patrick would have liked to teach drawing there, but his mother sent him to a seminary. She told me he was so beautiful only the Lord could have him. ‘No woman is worthy of him,’ she said. Eh, it’s sad, for if he’d stayed a humble drawing master he might have been alive today. But if there is any other family, Sir John, it would be in Easingwold in Yorkshire. That’s where his mother hailed from, but she was a widow when I knew her.”

“Perhaps he will have to be taken there for burial and I will have to meet the expense. It’s a dreadful business. In our house. It seems ... violated.”

At least, Bel thought, he is forming plans, he is thinking again. He won’t mourn Patrick Dawson as he does Robert.

Nevertheless the next few days were a terrible trial for him. Farmer Turner let him have a horse and he rode to Newcastle. He reported the whole matter to the Earl of Newcastle himself, who was commanding the Royalist garrison. He also arranged for a surgeon to come and look at the body and report to the coroner. He ordered a coffin maker to send a coffin.

“But, Bel,” he told her when all this was done, “the murder is not to be pursued in law. I was interrogated for hours. Were the men we saw in the village armed? I told them no. If they were the murderers, they used our own knives. But then they wanted to know why a Catholic priest was a guest in my house and who knew that he was there? Well, of course, Tom and Mary knew who he was, but I told them not to speak of it. I said he feared he might have been followed on his journey and he kept within doors. I held nothing back, the whole truth of it, why he had come, everything. Then they said I should have detained him myself and brought him before them. Did I not know that the King had passed a law that no Catholic priest could enter the country on pain of death? ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I had heard of such a thing, but the man was a messenger from my wife.’ They made light of that. He had met his due fate and though they disapproved of the manner of it, they were not prepared to take it further. They were more concerned at the theft of the horses. That a group of the enemy should come boldly in and seize our property was an outrage. But we are at war. They said the very words. If our troops could seize
their
horses or cattle, ransack
their
houses, return resistance with violence, they would do it. They are doing it all over the country. They said Patrick Dawson must have resisted arrest and got what he deserved for breaking the law. If they had got hold of him themselves, he would have been hanged. Bel, we are in chaos. The country is broken up. The beautiful thing I held so dear, the sanctity of our English law and its due processes, has been set at naught.” He left her abruptly, went to his study and closed the door. She knew he was going to weep.