snorts and head-tossings. He waited by the gate to see her go, but she ignored him. That was a flash of temper she regretted the rest of her days, for she never saw him alive again.
The accident happened on a feast day, when the lower bailey was filled with the tents of acrobats and jugglers and sweetmeat sellers, while the place resounded to shouts and laughter and the clatter of cudgels where the young bloods of the surrounding villages tried their strength one against another. Robert’s horse bucked as he crossed the outer bridge, and threw him; he struck his head against the stone, and fell into the dry ditch. The fair was quietened, and doctors brought from Durnovaria; but his skull was crushed, and he never reopened his eyes. Eleanor, summoned by a signal that fled from Challow Hill to Pontes inside an hour, rode hard; but she came too late.
She buried her father at Wimborne, in the ancient Minster there, in the painted tomb he had built to share with his wife; and the party rode back slowly to Corfe Gate, the horses and the motors dressed with black, the slack drums thudding out a dirge. It was still September; but a chilling wind moaned in from the sea, and the sky was grey as iron. Eleanor reined when she came in sight of the castle, and waved the rest of her people on down the long dim road. The seneschal waited, his horse fretting in the wind, till the mourners had passed nearly out of sight in distance; then she turned to him, her cloak whipping round her shoulders. She looked older and very tired, dark shadows under her eyes and tear tracks marking her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here I am a great lady; and that is the house I own…’
He waited silently, knowing her mind; she swallowed, and pushed the hair out of
her eyes. ‘John,’ she said, ‘How many years did you serve my Father, Robert?’
He sat his horse impassively and considered before he answered. Then finally, ’Many years, my Lady.’
‘And his father before him?’
Again the same answer. ‘Many years…’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You served him well; I left him alone, and sent no word. And it was all over such a trifling little thing. I’ve almost forgotten why we first fell out. Now it’s too late of course.’ She sat quiet a moment, stroking the neck of her horse as it fidgeted in the cold. Then, ‘Have you a sword?’
‘Yes, Lady.’ ‘Then give it me, and get down off your horse. This much I can do…’
He waited while she held the sword and looked unseeing at the damascene-work on the blade. ‘A title is a little empty thing,’ she said, ‘to such as you. Yet will you take it from me?’
He bowed; and she touched his shoulder lightly with the steel. 'Whether the King confirms my choice or no,’ she said, ‘to us you will be Sir John…’ Then she turned her horse and rode hard for the castle, narrowing her eyes to see up at its glooming battlements and towers. So she came home, to a mourning place; and soon to the anger of Pope John.
From the outset Eleanor’s position was a curious one. The successive Lords of Purbeck had held their lands in feoff from the King; under normal circumstances she could have expected to be married off fairly rapidly and to see the demesnes granted to another. But she was, or would one day be, an heiress in her own right as granddaughter of the last of the Strange family; and in the restricted economy of the times the annual tax paid by that huge house accounted for a measurable proportion of the revenue to the Crown. Since Charles, King of England and nominally at least of the Americas, was expecting to make an extended tour of the New World in the spring he was content to let matters rest at least until his return; Eleanor was confirmed in her position of authority, although there were many up and down the country who resented the decision.
She took her duties with great seriousness. One of her first self-allotted tasks was to tour the boundaries of her lands with a circuit judge, settling such petty differences as had arisen since her father’s death. She rode informally, with only her seneschal in attendance, stopping off at cottages and farms as the fancy took her, speaking to all in the language of their birth, and her liege-folk scattered over the breadth and length of Dorset were much impressed. Where she found hardship she alleviated it not by gifts of money, too easily spent in the local taverns, but with clothing and food and grants of freeholds. She saw much suffering, and was shocked by it; she began in fact to feel dissatisfaction with her own way of life.
‘It’s all very well, Sir John,’ she said one evening shortly after her return to Corfe Gate. ‘But I’ve really achieved nothing at all. I suppose one’s bound to get a glow of wellbeing from a few small charities but looked at in a broad view they’re meaningless. One or two people are probably better off for not having to scrape and save and find their rent every week but what about all the rest I haven’t been able to do anything for? As long as the Church applies a censorship to certain forms of progress, which is what she does however strenuously the Popes deny it, we shall always be a scrappy little nation living just above the famine line. But what else am I to do?’
They were dining in the sixteenth century hall beside the great keep; she waved a hand at the furnishings, the richly hung walls, and spluttered over a mouthful of food. ‘I can’t pretend,’ she said, ‘that I don’t like this life, and being able to buy horses and dogs when I want and nylons and perfumes, things the ordinary people never get to see let alone afford… You know,’ she added, grinning suddenly, ‘when my poor father sent me off to town I had a fancy to run away and give it all up; just live the simple life, working the soil and rearing a family like a peasant girl. Only what I’ve seen has changed all that; I realise now I should have ended up having innumerable children by some brawny oaf who stank of pigs, and dying before I was thirty from sheer hard work. Or am I just getting cynical? Do tell me, you say so very little any more.’
He poured wine for her, smiling.
‘I was arguing with Father Sebastian the other day,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I quoted the thing about giving all you have to the poor. He said that was all very well but you had to come to terms with the Scriptures and realise there had to be teachers and leaders for the people’s own good. It seemed an awful get-out to me, and I couldn’t help saying so. I told him if the Church would sell half her altar plate she could buy shoes for everybody in the country, and a lot else besides; and that if the Pope would make a start in Rome I’d see about getting rid of a few job lots of furniture down in Corfe. I’m afraid he didn’t take very kindly to it. I know it was wrong of me but he annoys me sometimes; he’s so pious, and it seems to mean so very little. He’d walk miles in the snow to pray for a sick child, he’s a very good man; but if there was more money about to start with maybe the child wouldn’t have been taken ill. It all seems so unnecessary…’
The winter was hard and long, the brooks and soil frozen like stone, even the rim of the sea sharded with ice. The towers clacked, on days when the Signallers could clear their arms of ice, with news of other parts of the country suffering as badly or worse. The spring that followed was late and cold, and the summer nearly as bad. Charles postponed his trip to the New World till the following year, spending his time, according to the semaphores, in organising relief schemes for the areas worst hit by famine. When autumn came round again, and the rush- bearing to the churches, the worst news of all arrived, brought by the urgently clattering grids. The taxation system of the country was to be reviewed; commissioners were already at work assessing contributions to be made by each area not in money but in kind.
Eleanor swore when the news was brought to her, and would certainly have given the officials a hot reception had they presented themselves at her hall; but nobody came near. Instead she was supplied via the semaphores with a list of the goods she would be expected to levy. Other parts of the country had been taxed in everything from turned ware to parsnips; Dorset’s contribution would be in butter, grain, and stone. ‘It’s quite ridiculous,’ fumed Her Ladyship, stamping up and down the little room that served her as office and study combined. ‘Butter and stone are all very well, or would be if they didn’t represent extra taxes; but grain! The people who drew this up must know very well there’s practically no arable farming round here at all; what little wheat we do grow is strictly for our own use and after a summer like we’ve had there’ll be barely enough of that to go round; I’m confidently expecting to have to set up soup kitchens in the bailey like they did once or twice in my father’s time. In Italy they don’t seem to have much idea of what a bad season can do to the produce of the farms; not that I suppose for a minute this junk ever came from Rome. It was probably drawn out by some fatpaunched little clerk in Paris or Bordeaux who’s never seen England and doesn’t want to and will sell our stuff over there at vast profits as fast as we can ship it. Anybody would think they’re deliberately trying to break us. If I squeeze all they demand out of the folk round about there’ll be deaths from starvation before the spring; on the other hand why I should buy in from Newworlders in Poole, give them back what I took from them, and ruin myself in the process I can’t imag -’
She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics. ‘Sir John,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not going to do it. There’s no reason, except pure maliciousness, why I should either starve my people or pauperize myself.
She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with a stylus. ‘Have the towers send this message,’ she said. ‘Our crops
