red wine spread out in a puddle by his foot, while the gaudy gilt cup rolled off the dais and came to rest against the messenger’s foot.
‘Sir, Daniel the steward sent me to warn you. The funeral will be…’
‘Yes, yes, I heard you the first time,’ Thomas broke in impatiently, his face serious, demonstrating the correct sadness on hearing of his sibling’s death. ‘It’s awful! Poor Roger, dying like that – the manor must be in a turmoil. Well, it’s plain I must go back. You’ll need wine and food: there’s plenty in my kitchen. See my cook and get yourself vittles. I shall speak to you again before you leave. Poor Roger!’
He dismissed the man with a wave of his hand, and sat staring at the door for several minutes, hardly moving. ‘Dead!’ he exclaimed once, shaking his head, but then slapped his thigh and gave a low, wheezing laugh. ‘Dead!’
Standing, he retrieved his goblet, filled it, and held it up in a silent toast. Drinking deeply, he smacked his lips, and laughed again. ‘Oh, and here’s to my brother’s poor grieving widow, dear little Katharine, lady of the hall – but not for much longer!’ Pausing, he bellowed, ‘Nick! ’
‘Sir?’
The voice of his steward came from the screens passage, and Thomas jerked his head. ‘Come in here!’
Nicholas was a little older than his master. Short, with a leather jack stretched tightly over his broad shoulders and a face marked heavily with the pox, he looked more a man-at-arms than a bottler, which was the case. He had been a soldier for a period, until his master had taken him on as a servant, and ever since he had served Thomas loyally. He glanced at his master curiously from shrewd brown eyes.
‘Tomorrow we leave for my brother’s house in Dartmoor. Pack clothing and essentials for four weeks,’ Thomas instructed self-importantly.
‘Your brother’s? But I thought you and he hated each other,’ Nick said, his spirits falling. In his mind’s eye he could see the moors again – cold, bleak lands in which a man could die without anyone realising.
‘Ah, but my brother, the skinflint with the heart of frozen lead, has died, Nicholas. That means we may have a solution to our problems – for a nice, fat, juicy inheritance may well be flying our way. Now make haste and pack, and with any luck when we return it’ll be with my brother’s money in our purses.’
Chapter Three
Godfrey swore under his breath and let the point of his rebated sword drop an inch or two. ‘I said hold your hand here, at the belly.’
His student, a sulky youth brought up in Italy, sneered at him: ‘It’s hardly an elegant posture, is it? My teacher in Venice told me to hold my arm out behind because it balances the body. It puts the attacker at a disadvantage, too, because he can’t see so much of the body to hit.’
‘Really? Show me, then. I’m not too old to learn.’
Godfrey returned to the outside guard, his sword hand well out to his right, blade angled upwards, so that he was peering just under the middle of the blade at his opponent, while he held his left hand out flat, low before his belly. The young man, little more than a boy, smirked happily, danced on the balls of his feet for a moment or two to ease his calves, then sprang into his imitation of the outside guard, his arm held out behind him.
It was a pose Godfrey had seen often enough with those who had stayed a while on the continent. There men preferred to look fashionable rather than fight effectively. Godfrey’s attitude was entirely pragmatic and English: if he was forced into a fight, he had one aim, and that was to win! If his left hand was dangling out behind his body, it might well give some benefit in terms of balance, but that advantage was outweighed by the fact that it left his whole left side unprotected. While he concentrated on the lad before him, Godfrey decided how to teach this simple lesson.
There was a flash. Godfrey saw the attack not so much in the movement of the blade itself, but in the sudden narrowing of the lad’s eyes as he moved his sword arm, lunging forwards with his whole body. Godfrey gave an inward sigh as he saw his pupil shift foot, hand and body in one united movement, and brought his own blade down to block it easily. He made no other move, unsure whether the stabbing manoeuvre could be a part of a feint, but his attacker pulled back, a slight frown wrinkling his forehead, and Godfrey had to suppress a groan. He had hoped that there might be a second blow concealed beneath the obvious one.
When the second stamp, lunge, stab came, Godfrey blocked the sword, then stepped quickly to his left, grabbing his opponent’s sword arm as he went. He put his foot on the boy’s forward boot and pulled. The lad was already off-balance, and this dragged him over. As he fell, Godfrey held his blade at his belly.
‘That’s not fair! You shouldn’t hold a man’s arm!’ the student spluttered angrily once he had managed to rise to a sitting position.
Godfrey hauled him up by his shirt and held him close, staring into the suddenly scared face while the point of his blunted sword tickled the boy’s throat. ‘You think an outlaw could give a bollock about what’s fair or not?’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘You reckon a drawlatch would think, “Oh, I mustn’t kick the poor master in the coddes because he’s got a sword, and it wouldn’t be fair”?’ He dropped the mincing tone he had adopted and shook his pupil with contempt. ‘If you want to stay alive, assume your enemy will be devious and unfair – and make sure you’re nastier than him. Now pick up your sword and try again.’
They had three more bouts. In the second, Godfrey scornfully knocked the lad’s sword aside and grabbed his shirt, kicking away his legs and shoving him over. Next his student tried a half-decent left attack followed by a right slash that almost surprised Godfrey, but he blocked both, knocked the fellow’s arm and spun him around before drawing his sword along the length of his opponent’s back and kicking him down. Their last combat involved a short flurry of blades, a hit, then a second and a third, before Godfrey had come close enough to punch the boy, not too hard, on the jaw while his blade pressed unrelentingly on his belly.
It was while he was wiping his face with his shirt that he heard the door shut, and turned to see his newest client standing in the doorway, a faint smile on his face as he perused the scene. On the floor before Godfrey, his student was gazing up with fury in his eyes while he felt his jaw, but Godfrey also saw the beginnings of respect. He kicked his opponent’s sword away before reaching down and helping him to his feet. ‘Right! You’ve tried your Venetian ways, and you’ll agree there’s merit in mine. Next week we’ll practise techniques which won’t look elegant, but which’ll save your life.’
‘Not next week, Godfrey.’
The master of arms glanced at his client. He was leaning on the wall, a broad grin on his face.
‘No, next week you will come with me to a little manor out on the moors, where we will visit the house of an old friend of mine. A squire who has, very sadly, died. You will be my guard.’
It was three days later that Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin Furnshill made their journey to the little village of Throwleigh. They had left the knight’s home in Cadbury early in the morning, and after taking two halts to rest their horses and take refreshment from their wineskins, they had not made particularly good time, but were at least reasonably fresh as they breasted a hill and could at last see Dartmoor ahead through the trees.
For Simon, as they jogged slowly down the muddy, rutted track, it was a return to his new home. As one of the bailiffs to the Warden of the Stannaries he had been living at Lydford for five years now, riding out over the wild lands to settle arguments or arrest criminals. Seeing the bleak landscape ahead was almost welcome. At the sight of the awesome bulk of Cosdon Hill to their right, Simon felt his heart give a leap before their view was obliterated once more and the travellers had to duck beneath another spread of low beech branches.
Baldwin couldn’t feel the same pleasure. To him the landscape of Dartmoor was barren, infertile. It was as if a race of giants had fought a pitched battle here and blasted the whole area until nothing remained, not even a tree. To him it felt threatening and unwholesome.
It wasn’t only the moors, either. Even here, in the lush woodland immediately north there were very few people; wherever Baldwin saw evidence of habitation, it looked long deserted. Every so often he would notice a weed-strewn track leading into the trees, proof of a long-disused assart, where someone had hacked down trees to build his cabin or to feed his fires. These woods had been cleared for coppices and farming; men had burned out the roots of old trees, gradually beating back the frontier of the woodland until enough bare soil existed to graze a cow. This was the way the land had been brought to heel over decades – but now the land had won.
The assarts looked as if they had lain deserted for ages. Since the appalling famines of 1315 and 1316, many
