The Bleeding Land (14 page)

So he held his tongue.

Then, gripping him tightly though he had given up struggling, Lord Denton’s men simply waited, their combined breath pluming by moon and starlight, fogging the space between
them
and their master’s broad back. Henry waited too, a half grin nestled on his face as though he was party to his father’s intentions, even though Tom suspected he had no more idea than Tom himself as to what was in Lord Denton’s mind.

William turned, pointing his rapier down at the ice-crusted mud and suddenly Tom was being manhandled, dragged to the spot and thrust down, his face in the numbing filth, so that he could smell the cold earth. He felt a foot plant square on his back – Walter’s foot – as the others squatted around, pinning his limbs to the ground.

‘The thing about cold weather,’ William said, and Tom heard the rasp as he sheathed his sword, then caught a glimpse of him taking the cloak which Henry offered, ‘is that it always makes me want to piss. Must be my age.’

There followed a silence but for the screech of an owl somewhere in the dark and his own breathing made ragged by the terrible pain in his ribs.

‘You may want to move your foot, Walter,’ Lord Denton suggested, and the pressure on Tom’s back vanished as Walter took two steps backwards, his muddy shoes in line with Tom’s sight. ‘Henry, make sure the papist whore-loving cur keeps still. I’ve had these boots but barely two weeks.’ Tom felt the cold bite of Henry’s sword on the nape of his neck and growled a curse. He tried to look up at his enemy but the steel point pressed harder and his exposed flesh instinctively recoiled from it so that his cheek pressed into the freezing mud again. His eyes followed Lord Denton’s high, bucket-topped boots as they strode around to his right and there stopped dead still, their water-stained toe ends level with his backside. He brimmed with furious anger, hot as a brazier of coals, but clenched his teeth on the curses that roared to be set free, in case they thought his clamouring born of fear. Do not give them the satisfaction, his mind commanded his body.

Not so long as he was yet master of himself, if of nothing else, and so every muscle and sinew thrummed with impotent
rage
, at the injustice of it, at himself for allowing them to humiliate him like this.

And then Lord Denton began to piss on him.

The stream of hot liquid seethed, spattering onto his back and head, running across his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth and the cuts in his flesh, stinging like the devil. And now he bellowed, any vestige of pride sluiced away by another man’s piss. ‘I’ll fucking kill you all!’ he screamed. The urine was dark yellow and melted the settling snow around his head, the steam from it filling his nose with its foul stink. ‘I swear it! I’ll kill you! Get off me, you bastards! You’re a dead man, Denton! Get off me! God damn you! Let me go!’ They were laughing at him as the steaming stream sputtered, came thick again, then petered to the last drops. Some of it had splashed onto Lord Denton’s servants but none of them had dared move or lessen their grip. The liquid had soaked through Tom’s cloak, doublet and shirt. He felt it as warmth on the skin of his back and he wished he could close his eyes and die, but he knew he could not.

‘Do you not need to piss, Henry?’ William asked his son, shuddering theatrically as he tucked himself away. Tom strained his neck, trying to glare at his tormentors, his eyes his only weapons. And saw Walter’s black-toothed grin and some others watching Henry expectantly. But Henry shook his head, still pressing his sword’s point against Tom’s neck. His eyes were wide with awe.

Because his enemy lies in the freezing filth, soaked with piss, Tom thought with grim rage.

‘That’s a young bladder for you, Walter,’ William announced, huffing into cold hands. ‘When you get to my age, lad, you’ll piss three times a night. Five when it’s as cold as this.’

He walked back around to Tom’s head and stared down at him, eyes brimming with disgust at the young man’s sopping hair and the cloudy vapour rising from it into the frigid night. ‘Now then, Thomas Rivers,’ he said, rubbing his hands
against
the chill. ‘You have given the impression of being a headstrong young man and while boldness can occasionally serve a purpose, mostly it gets men killed. Much wiser and, more importantly, long-lived, is he who considers the terrain and the enemy before charging ahead.’ He glanced at Henry, letting his son know that he was supposed to be listening to this advice too. ‘Therefore, boy, try for a moment to think past your hatred.’

Tom looked up, feeling the blade puncture the skin and scrape past his neck bones. ‘I’m going to cut your damned throat,’ he snarled.

Lord Denton rolled his eyes and shook his head. He squatted and, baring his teeth, grasped Tom’s sopping hair, snarling it around his fist, then yanked his head upwards so that their eyes met.

‘You’re not listening, boy!’ he spat. ‘My advice to you is to ride away from here and put this whole . . . occasion behind you. Call it youthful abandon. An error of judgement on your part. But leave it alone. Bring your family into this and you’ll lament it so help you God. You’ll just be heaping shit onto shit. Do you understand?’ Lord Denton tilted his head to one side, like a fisherman trying to decide whether to keep his catch or throw it back in.

Tom glared. Said nothing. The hate and the anger writhed in him like poisonous serpents. They churned and soured and boiled in his gut. He felt them twist his face into a grotesque mask, felt their malevolence blaze from his eyes.

Lord Denton stood and dismissed the whole affair with a waft of his hand. ‘Let him go,’ he said casually and his men looked at each other. They nodded and Walter counted to three and each of them carefully released his hold on Tom before standing and edging back, as a man does from a wild animal which he has caught and is letting go. ‘Bring Master Rivers’s horse, Walter,’ William said as Henry also stepped back, keeping his blade between them while Tom climbed
unsteadily
to his feet, eyes riveted to the architect of his humiliation.

‘You are lucky I did not spill your pus-filled guts tonight, Rivers,’ Henry said, gesturing for Tom to mount his horse. ‘Go before I change my mind.’

For several heartbeats Tom eyeballed Henry, fixing his enemy’s face in his mind, then, ignoring the piss-soaked tresses hanging against his own face, he turned from them all and snatched the reins from Walter. He mounted as smoothly as he could, given his many screaming pains, then dug in his heels and yelled coarsely. Achilles whinnied, snapping great teeth at the cold darkness, then surged forward, breaking into a canter which Tom spurred into a gallop. The stallion’s hooves thumped the snow-covered earth and together they sped away from Baston House along the well-worn moonlit path.

Tom roared at the night like a mad man. Like a wounded animal. The anger and the hate entwined, swelling and blooming inside him, threatening to consume his soul. It was hatred purer and blacker than anything he had ever known. And he let it devour him.

Bess could not sleep. She never could when there was a full moon; tonight the moon was a sliver from full and still she could not sleep. She lay cocooned in linen beneath a heavy quilted coverlet stuffed with wool, listening to the mice scratching in the wall by her head and, beyond those walls, the occasional shiver of leaves and the creak of branches clenching in the freezing dark. She was aware of the faintest trembling deep in her own limbs, not because she was cold – she was warm enough – but an effect of the moonlight itself she believed. Its cold luminescence soaked through the window drapes, washing the bedchamber in a silver-white light. An otherworldly hue that revealed the room’s contents: the brass stick with its stub of candle and the jug of small beer on the bedside table. The chair at the foot of the bed festooned with clothes – linen coif, woollen cloak,
smock
, long purple skirt and her silk and lace bodice which sat stiffly against the chair’s back because of the bone strips in it. The moonlight burnished the dark chest of polished oak drawers upon which sat a washbasin and pitcher. On another table, beneath a sloping ceiling threaded with fine cracks, her precious things glowed dully: the enamelled gold brooch set with pearls that her mother had given her, the emerald ring from Emmanuel which was too big and needed altering, a child’s silver-plated hairbrush and an ivory box containing other cherished possessions.

There was something about nights like this that put Bess’s nerves on edge, made her feel as though she were meant to be somewhere else – anywhere but lying in her bed listening to the mice in the walls. She was fitful, her muscles and sinews thrumming as though preparing for sudden flight. It was not fear as such, but rather a sense of belonging to the moonlit night. Of being drawn away from human habitation and comforts to the forests and the moors. Like a predator on the hunt for food.

It was a sense that she should be searching for something. Or running from something?

It did not help that Emmanuel was still away in Shevington a day’s ride east, where he was overseeing the rebuilding of the house they would live in once they were married. That old ruin would be full of mice and worse things besides, she thought grimly, for the manor had once belonged to Cockersand Abbey as far back as King Henry’s time. Before the dissolution. ‘That pile of rubble!’ Sir Francis had exclaimed when Emmanuel had first intimated his plan to purchase the manor and its outbuildings including a groundskeeper’s cottage and a half-collapsed cowshed. ‘That relic is older than Noah!’

‘But it is big, Sir Francis,’ Emmanuel had said with a sparkle in his eyes and a broad smile. And it
was
big. Huge in fact. And Emmanuel had promised Bess and Sir Francis that it would rival Shear House one day, when he took over his father’s
business
. James Bright was likely the richest cloth merchant in Lancashire, employing no fewer than two hundred spinners, weavers, fullers, shearmen and dyers. But James Bright was ailing, which would have been hard on his family and employees alike if he had not a vigorous, well-liked son to take over when death took him.

‘I shall be making five hundred pounds a year!’ Emmanuel had announced proudly, for he had but recently asked Sir Francis for Bess’s hand in marriage and still felt a little like a man on trial, so he had admitted to Bess. A feeling which, she suspected, her father did little to discourage.

‘It is a pile of dilapidation, decay, and disrepair,’ Sir Francis had announced to Emmanuel’s obvious disappointment, earning a reproachful glare from his wife. He had frowned, coughed, made a steeple of fingers, then said: ‘Still, I like a man with ambition. So long as it is coupled with good sense, of course.’

But Bess knew her father had grown fond of Emmanuel Bright, whom she loved with all her heart, and even though they did not share a bed – wouldn’t until they were married – she missed him being under the same roof.

Bess could not sleep and so she kicked off the coverlets and went over to the window, pulling back one of the drapes and putting herself between it and the glass as though to be closer to the night beyond. Her breath fogged the pane and she shivered now because the window was as cold as ice. The curtain’s old dusty smell smothered her as she stared out across Shear House’s frosty, moon-silvered grounds, her eyes ranging along the pebble-strewn drive that stretched off into a dark wood of birch and sweet chestnut. Her mind roamed further still, past the woods and the dovecote whose residents she imagined hunched and shivering and cooing softly, and up to the boundary wall with its iron gate guarded by two stone lions. But then something in the near distance caught her eye, some movement that made her start, a sudden intake of breath
catching
in her throat where it stayed as her senses prickled. She was suddenly aware of her own heartbeat hammering against the windowpane as her eyes strained to sift the moving shape from the surrounding landscape. It was a man on a horse, she realized, but whoever it was was avoiding the path. Instead the rider was making his way across the east lawn. So as not to be heard, Bess thought.

Which did nothing to assuage the sense of creeping dread that was raising tiny bumps on her arms and legs and stiffening the hairs on the nape of her neck. She pressed a palm against the cold pane and part of her wanted to call out, to wake the sleeping household. To warn them. Another part of her, the part that thrummed whenever the moon was full, preferred to watch a little longer, relished seeing without being seen. This was the stronger instinct and so she stayed as still and quiet as death. Watching.

But then the figure suddenly looked up, a sixth sense perhaps, and the moonlight revealed his face as his eyes locked with hers. Tom!

Her brother put a finger to his lips and Bess felt herself nod. She watched him draw nearer, somewhere in the back of her mind wondering why the sight of him had not dispersed the dread feeling. Then she turned and fetched a cloak down from a hook, throwing it around her shoulders over her nightdress, shivering again from the sense of trepidation that gnawed and scrabbled in her guts like the mice in the walls. Carefully, she opened her bedchamber door and stole out into the corridor, then descended the stairs that she had crept down innumerable times as a young girl up to mischief with her brothers.

There was just enough moonlight filtering past the thick drapes that she could see well enough without lighting one of the hall lamps, whose oily smell she feared would drift upstairs and wake someone. She knew Tom would be stabling Achilles and so she gingerly unbolted the main door, then went into the parlour, cringing as the door-hinges squeaked. Inside,
sweet
-smelling wood smoke still clotted the air, though the room was cold, in large part due to its having three sizeable windows. Bess took a candle from the mantel over the hearth and, with the poker, stirred the ashes of the fire which Isaac had banked before retiring to bed. When a flame licked up from the grey pile she lit the candle and carefully placed some kindling on the embers, hoping to dull the sharp frigid chill that filled the parlour, making her huff into cupped hands. And then, as the sticks quietly crackled and popped, she faced the door which she’d left slightly ajar, and waited.