Harry silently prays Johann throws up over himself further down the road.
The rest of the day passes quickly. There’s much for Harry to catch up on around the estate. He straps on his knight’s belt and saddles up Star, apologising to the faithful bay for the lack of rest. He sets out to ride the bounds, greeting his vassal farmers. Harry doesn’t miss how the farmers’ gaze lingers at the leather belt on his hips, the sword hanging down his left side. How they now address him as Sir Harry.
He chats to them about the harvest; how it looks like it’s coming late this year. It’s the middle of August already, but they don’t expect to bring in the wheat until the first week in September, and the beans thereafter. It’ll be a push to get everything in and processed by Michaelmas, and Harry is glad he’s back to help out.
It’s strange, though, riding the narrow, hedge-walled lanes and stopping by the patchworks of fields, accepting and returning the waves of the men and women in front of their dwellings. He knows his vassal families, mostly, but he’s been away at Sir Simon’s most of the past nine years with only short stints back at Dartington for high holy days and harvests. Time, distance and more pressing concerns have rendered his memory vague, and on top of that there seem to be so many new people on the estate. Or were they always there, and Harry just hadn’t been paying attention?
He never really needed to know the farmers’ names; his mother was the expert there. That’s Rufus, he knocked up the dark-haired scullery maid, you know, Mariah, the one who always puts too much pepper on everything? They’re marrying in the spring, we’ll send her fabric for a dress. Oh, and you remember Old Donald, if he ever has a nice word to say about anything you know it’s the End Times. Good with chickens, though. Hens’ll lay for him like nobody else.
His mother could also explain the relationship of everyone to everyone else in the village, the way a horse breeder could sketch the interconnecting lineage of his best nags for generations. Aelfred’s mother’s first husband, the one we all think she poisoned – nasty man had it coming, if you ask me, he beat her – his family were none too pleased she kept his fields, and Eleanor from down moor is going around with one of those cousins, they all work for Ufford now, so if you catch any of them hanging around believe you me they’re here for no good. And don’t give Eleanor a job, whatever sob story she tells you.
Harry knows the older faces, in a sort of dull, familiar way, and makes pleasant conversation with them, but he barely knows a single name. He feels a fraud. A fake lord, making fake gestures, to people who can probably see right through him.
At the far end of the manor’s lands, at the foot of Dartmoor itself, there’s a forest, tangled and ancient, that by tacit agreement nobody touches. It’s for the deer and the wild boar and the partridges, not for the humans.
Well, not for most humans.
A lonely boy began sneaking away to the pond hidden in its wooded depths almost as soon as he could ride, after a particularly cussed little pony ran off with him and didn’t halt until they were at the water’s edge. The boy had come back to the pond as often as he could afterwards. His most magical days of childhood were spent there, imagining faerie queens and silver knights holding a forest court, cloaked in robes of state made of spider silk and blossoms from the gnarled apple trees that line the bank.
And now the man returns, lonely still.
It is Harry’s most cherished place, completely private during times when he feels nobody will ever leave him alone, nearly silent when he feels surrounded by noise. He loops Star’s reins around a birch sapling and walks carefully out onto the flat, mossy boulder that extends into the water.
He lies down in the sunbeam that always seems to reside there, as he has done hundreds of times before, and lets himself be mesmerised by the light filtering through the leaves of the mighty oak and birch trees that surround him.
When Harry was a child, and thought as a child, he would dream wild adventures here. He would be a knight then, as he is now, but all in gold, and he would defeat the dark knight who guards the bridge but not kill him, and that knight would become his staunchest friend. They would ride out together and slay giants and dragons and go home to Harry’s fine castle in time for supper. And they would laugh and make merry and swear eternal brotherhood.
Harry was born in a famine year. There were no children of his age or social status nearby. Nobody but Rabbie, and he wanted nothing to do with little Harry. Two years’ age difference means nothing now, but it’s everything when you are eight.
Harry closes his eyes in the warmth of the mid-morning sun and thinks of how he used to pray for God to grant him a knighthood, and a brother-in-arms.
And God …
Tears well up in Harry’s eyes.
… God listened.
God gave him everything he prayed for, and only took the two people he loved most in the world in payment.
And he can’t complain, for he had never thought to ask the cost of his dreams.
He is a knight, made so by a king who pitied him in his youth and loss. And he has a squire. A feral, murderous squire of nigh-insufferable temperament.
Harry lies there and tries to glimpse the divine reason for Sir Simon’s death. For his mother’s. Because the alternative thought – that God doesn’t have a plan, that
