Ahead of them the track lay through a stretch of deep forest, the last before they reached Shebbear. This was the sort of place where outlaws lurked, ready to steal, ravish and kill, so they entered the gloomy tunnel of oaks and beeches with trepidation. There were few people travelling this lonely road, but Matilda hoped that this might discourage robbers, who would get thin pickings from such sparse traffic.
‘Why has God treated us so badly?’ said Gillota suddenly. ‘We have done no evil that I know of! I go to confession with Father Peter, but I have little to tell him — not that he seems interested, anyway.’
Matilda smiled to herself. Her daughter was naive, certainly, but she was intelligent and always seeking for truths that neither her mother nor anyone else in the village could give her.
‘There is little opportunity for folks like us to sin, child,’ she called at Gillota’s back. ‘Sin is for men, who drink and lust and cheat — and for the lords, who fight and kill!’
She knew that the girl was perplexed by the misfortunes that had overtaken the family. Her childhood had been secure, albeit impoverished, until her father died. Even living with her grandfather was tolerable, but after his death Matilda and Gillota had to scrape a living from the half-acre toft that he left them, existing on their few animals and growing vegetables for their staple diet. Though at thirty-two she was comparatively young, Matilda also had a reputation as ‘wise woman’, so she was all the village had by way of health care and a midwife, which brought her in a few pennies for her poultices and herbal potions.
In spite of their fears, the few miles of forest were crossed without incident, and they emerged only a couple of miles from Shebbear, where the road dipped down into a small valley and strip fields began to appear on each side. This was a King’s manor, having no lord but a bailiff who administered several such parcels of royal land in this part of Devon.
‘Do you know where your aunt lives, mother?’ asked Gillota as the first tofts and cottages began to appear at the side of the road.
Matilda shook her head. ‘I’ve never been here before — in fact, this is the first time I’ve ever left Kentisbury,’ she confessed.
It was her husband Robert Claper who had been a Shebbear man, being sent to Matilda’s village years before when the two bailiffs exchanged a thatcher for a blacksmith — and as an unfree villein he had no more say in the matter than if he had been an ox or a sheepdog. However, his good fortune was to meet and marry Matilda and to father Gillota before death claimed him.
‘How will we find her, then?’ persisted her daughter, fearful of this unfamiliar place that was opening up before them. A stone church faced an alehouse, the inevitable pair of buildings seen in almost every English village.
Suddenly their attention was attracted by something on the grass verge in front of the church. It was just a very large boulder, probably weighing a ton, lying under an old tree. Though nothing remarkable, the mother and daughter stared at it and then at each other, and something unspoken passed between them. Increasingly as she grew older, Gillota showed that she was becoming as ‘fey’ as her mother, both having the rudiments of ‘second sight’, knowing things that were outside the normal five senses. It was this that allowed Matilda to function as a ‘wise woman’, though she was careful never to let it be known, in case of accusations of witchcraft. Now that Gillota was showing the same hereditary gift, her mother worried that she might not yet be mature enough to hide these sporadic but powerful insights.
‘That’s a work of the devil!’ said the young girl impulsively, looking at the greyish rock.
Her mother nodded but pushed her daughter onwards. ‘None of our business, my girl! We have more urgent matters to deal with.’
‘So how will we find Aunt Emma?’ persisted Gillota
‘Your father always said she had a toft just beyond the church,’ answered her mother. ‘We will ask the first person we see.’
This proved to be an old woman, bent almost double over a gnarled stick, who came out of the churchyard gate as they passed. The crone stared at the procession of animals and muttered a greeting through toothless gums, which Matilda answered with a question.
‘Mother, can you please tell us where Emma, who was once called Claper, lives?’
‘Claper? It’s many a year since I heard that name. Emma married a man called Revelle, but he ran off to the wars and was never heard of again.’ She cackled at some private secret.
‘So where can we find her dwelling?’ asked Gillota politely.
The old woman raised her stick and pointed up the track. ‘The last cottage on the right side. But she’s not well, you know.’
Matilda stared. Only three weeks ago she had had a reply from Emma by word of mouth via a friendly carter, saying that she would welcome them into her household, and there was no mention of illness then.
‘Not well? What ails her, then?’
‘She had a seizure last week,’ answered the crone with morbid satisfaction. ‘Lost the use of an arm and her speech, though I hear tell she’s past the worst. Her neighbours are looking after her as best they can.’
Numbed by yet another catastrophe, Matilda murmured some thanks and set off rapidly up the last few hundred paces to the toft that the woman had indicated.
‘What do we do now, Mother,’ snivelled Gillota tearfully. ‘How can we stay with a sick woman? Will we have to go back to Kentisbury?’
‘Stay out here with the beasts!’ she commanded as they reached a rickety gate in a fence around the croft. ‘I’ll go inside and see what’s happening.’
Shrugging off her sledge ropes, she went up the few paces to the door. The cottage was a square box of oak frames, filled in with wattle and daub, a mixture of lime, clay, dung and horsehair, plastered over woven hazel panels. The thatch was old but in good condition, and two shuttered window spaces were set each side of the open front door.
Matilda tapped on the half-open door and peered in. In the centre of the single room she saw a large matron standing over the fire-pit, stirring the contents of an iron pot resting on a trivet over the glowing embers. Beyond her, an older woman was slumped on a stool, supporting herself against a table. One arm rested uselessly in her lap, and the corner of her mouth drooped as if part of her face had melted.
The neighbour looked around questioningly as Matilda entered. ‘Who are you, woman?’ she snapped. ‘You’re a stranger!’
‘I’m Matilda, widow of Emma’s nephew. I’ve come with my daughter to live here.’
Shebbear, August 1237
Gillota threw down the pile of dry grass in front of their cow, which had filled out well since the previous autumn. Served by the village bull, she had recently produced a calf and now munched away contentedly at the feed that the girl had cut with her sickle from the verges outside the village.
Matilda came out of the cottage with turnip peelings for the goats, and for a moment mother and daughter stood looking with satisfaction at their livestock. Their pigs were penned behind hurdles at the bottom of the half- acre plot, though in a month they would be let loose in the woods beyond the pasture, to root for beechnuts, on payment of a halfpenny-a-week pannage fee to the bailiff. A dozen fowls and four geese paraded around the back of the house, and in a distant corner half a dozen ducks splashed in the muddy water of a large hole dug in the ground.
They had worked hard since that day last summer when they came to find Aunt Emma struck with the palsy. Helped by the neighbours, they had nursed her back to reasonable health, and, though her arm was still weak and her speech a little slurred, her legs were sound and after a month or two she was able to do a share of the work in both cottage and on the croft outside.
Emma was a strong character, of formidable appearance. Tall and bony, she looked younger than her sixty- five years. The grey hair that strayed from under her head-rail still had streaks of russet in it, and she had kept many of her teeth, albeit discoloured and crooked. A devout woman, she was not given to much humour but was always even-tempered and tolerant of the two younger women who now shared her home.
‘You may stay here for as long as you need,’ she announced within days of their arrival. ‘And when I die, the toft will be yours, for I’ve no child to hand it to.’
Her gratitude for the attention that Matilda and her daughter gave her during her illness was muted, but nonetheless sincere, and as the months went by the all-female household became strongly bonded. Thankfully, it
