Gresham had ever seen, with flickering sparkles hidden deep inside them.
The girl shrugged. 'Then I suppose you'll beat me.'
'Do many beat you?'
'All the time. You see, I'm a bastard, and bastards deserve to be beaten.' The little girl said it as if it was a litany she knew off by heart.
'How often are you beaten?'
'All the time. Here, you may see.' The girl dropped her loose tunic over her bony shoulders, down to her waist. Seven or eight red stripes marked her back, with the older blows turning to dull and dark bruises. She turned to look at him, over her shoulder. There was no coyness in her posture or voice, merely a statement of fact.
'They go on further down, but you're a man, so I can't show you my secret places.'
She carefully drew up her stained tunic, and sat on her haunches, looking at him. 'May I have my forfeit now?'
Gresham had often wondered what would have happened then, were it not for the interruption. He suspected he would have given this little vixen a few coins, and shooed her on her way. It was still his time of darkness, not a time when he had a care for any other living creature, being too full of mourning for those he had loved and betrayed.
Yet at the word 'forfeit' there was an outraged yell from one of the hovels overlooking the pond, and an elderly man erupted from the ill-shuttered door.
'You bitch! You brazen whore's whelp! Where've you been, you little whore, when your duty called? I'll teach you your duty…'
The girl might have been quick enough to evade the blow, had she not been rapt in her attentions to Gresham. As it was, she was a split second late and caught the blow square on her back.
It was not much of a back, as these things went. It was only seven years old, it had never been properly fed or properly clean. Yet it could bleed like any other back, if a witch-hazel stick whipped across it.
Gresham broke the man's arm. It was easy enough, for a soldier. As he raised it for the second blow on the prostrate little figure beneath him, Gresham sprang up, finding his sword in his hand without consciously willing it there or even knowing it had happened. He brought up the sword arm, with its extra weight of metal, just behind the man's wrist, a split second before he brought down his other arm with terrible force on the outstretched arm 'twixt wrist and elbow. The crack of bone would have shattered ice.
The peasant was bellowing on the ground, his arm smashed. The girl had vanished back into the bushes, nursing a new welt but not, Gresham noted, making a sound. Neighbours were rushing out on to the green to see the cause of the entertainment. In very short order they surrounded the gentleman and demanded reparation not only for the damage done to the man, but for disturbing the peace of the whole village. After all, a sword could only kill one man, and there were ten or more of them there in the space of three or four breaths. There was money in this business, and they knew it, peasants that they were.
Then Mannion loomed over the rise that surrounded the pond, and things became calmer. Things usually did become calmer when Mannion arrived on the scene. The villagers who had been feeling their cudgels with enthusiasm suddenly thought it better to put them behind their backs. A rather more civilised process of negotiation assumed pride of place. The man on the ground howling in his agony — 'William', it would appear by all counts — was a labourer. Well, William would not be labouring for a month or two, that was clear. William was also the nearest thing this village had to a saint, that much was also clear. Taken on his daughter's bastard, he had, that same daughter who had caught God's justice when she died in childbirth with no man to call her proper husband.
Looking at William, Gresham wondered how the bastard girl had ever survived. The midwife must have spirited the poor wean away and presented it back to William when the lump it might have made in the pond would have been too obvious even to the other villagers. Come to think of it, there was a fretful old woman hovering at the back of the gesticulating villagers.
It took precious little money to calm them down. Yet what took all of them aback, including Gresham, was his final question.
'How much for the girl?'
Mannion looked up, startled, at his master, and wondered for a brief moment if he liked fucking children. God knows, enough did. And, Mannion decided almost instantaneously, his master didn't. Yet he too had seen the child sliced out of its mother's belly, and knew that taking on this child might somehow claw back some of the despair from that dreadful day.
And the child could always be handed over to someone else to bring up, when Gresham returned to emotions more proper for a man.
In the final count, the amount paid for the girl was paltry. The expression in William's eyes suggested that his arm was well broken if this was the reward. Gresham had visions of him erupting into the path of every gentleman who rode by, demanding that they break his arm.
She had shown no emotion until the time of their leaving. A mere piece of property, she had been bartered and sold, with no-one thinking to ask her opinion. She vented it, forcibly, when she was seated behind Mannion the servant on his horse, as was only proper.
She screamed and shrieked and pummelled and yelled, causing even Mannion's horse to buck and to rear in protest.
'What is wrong with you, girl!' Gresham exploded.
'You bought me,' the thin, shivering Eve proclaimed through gritted and tear-stained teeth. 'I shall ride on no horse except your own.'
Gresham had killed more men than he cared to count. He had witnessed the person he most loved in Creation die in agony before him, and because of him. He had suffered in a few months more pain than most men underwent in a lifetime. He had a fortune to his name, he cared for no man and he cared for nothing… Why, then, thought Gresham, am I riding at a sedate pace and freezing to death, whilst a seven-year-old bastard girl sits behind me in state, wearing my fine cloak?
If he had been able to answer that question, then perhaps he would really have been God.
There was a vestige in him of his own childhood. He too had known what it was to be the bastard.
'Find me a woman to care for this… minx,' he had said to Mannion as they arrived in London. The girl had been restored to rude good health by a substantial meal. If her eyes had opened any wider on their entry to London they would have consumed her face.
'Find me someone who won't just care for her. Find me some servants who'll love her, as if she were their own.'
And Mannion, as he always did, found what his master wanted.
Jane had fallen in love with the House only slightly less than she had fallen in love with the strange and darkly dressed man who had rescued her from abuse. It had been a dark, dreary and a sad place she had come to, still in mourning for the death of Gresham's father and an heir who seemed determined to neglect it. As a child she had haunted its every nook and cranny, and as she grew older and into womanhood she seemed to light up the building with her love for it. Nominally under the care of the elderly Housekeeper, Jane had grown into that role herself so gently that no-one could point to the exact time when she became the acknowledged mistress of the House.
The House was the best-run house in London. No wine was drunk, no food eaten and no clothing for footmen paid for without Jane being convinced that the expenditure was proper. There was a part of Jane that was the feral cat, a part Gresham knew would never leave her. It accounted in part for her raw sexuality, her enjoyment of the physical act. The servants saw the untamed Jane if they cheated their master, the House or her, and felt it. Gresham had seen her turn on a thieving servant with a cold fury, and a ferocious concentration of anger that was almost tangible. Yet months later she had waited most of the night by that same serving girl's bed when she seemed as if she would die of a fever, and fed her beef tea. That same woman he had seen when a sudden downpour had flooded the hall, her skirts tucked up to her knees, laughing and joking with the servant girls as they all joined to swoosh the filthy water back out into the street. The men servants may have leered at her behind her back, for all Gresham knew. To her face they were strangely protective, their visible respect tinged almost with a certain fearfulness. All the servants spoke in awe of her, grumbling as servants did. Yet it was her food that was the freshest, her room the most clean and her bed linen the most virgin-white. In a way Gresham did not understand, they took an immense pride in her. He knew and accepted almost with complacency that many of them
