The Bleeding Land (15 page)

CHAPTER NINE

BESS SENSED THAT
Tom was not telling her everything. He spoke of taking Jacob to Lathom village to watch the bearbaiting that afternoon, and of how, when it was all but over, the boy had admitted following Martha to Baston House. He told her how Jacob had spied through the parlour window and seen his sister engaged in heated argument with Lord Denton. But Bess sensed there was more to that part of it, judging by the way Tom’s eyes had slid from hers towards the fire in that part of the telling. He admitted letting his rage get the better of him. Had confessed to riding full of fury to Baston House to confront William Denton and how he had hungered to cut William and Henry down with his sword.

‘I wanted to spill their blood, Bess,’ Tom growled in the shadows, the small hearth flames dappling his ravaged face with golden tongues. ‘I wanted to rip their bastard guts out.’ That part was true enough, Bess knew, and she shuddered. ‘But his men came at me and there were too many. They beat me like a damned dog,’ he spat, the words laced with shame, and Bess knew that part was also true because his face was a bloody mess. Beneath his gore-tangled hair – usually fair but dark now and filthy – his right eye was swollen shut, the taut glistening skin already blackening. His lower lip was twice
its
normal size and split so that his beard was matted with blood and Bess had to stop herself wincing because it looked so painful.

But he was keeping something back. She was certain of it. He spoke through a grimace, which was understandable given the pain he was in, and his anger. But at twenty-four Bess was proud of her elder sister’s intuition and there was more to the set of Tom’s bloody mouth than pain and gall. There was a sense of him checking the truth, holding it behind a barricade of teeth. And then there was the smell coming off him, of damp wool and urine, and Bess could have wept at the thought of her brother being so terrified that he had wet himself.

Tom clenched his left fist and ground it into the cup of his right hand. Both were crusted in mud and drying blood. ‘He pissed on me, Bess,’ he said firmly, looking at his hands because he could not meet her eyes. Bess swallowed hard because she suddenly realized that younger brothers had intuition too and Tom had somehow known what she was thinking. The shameful admission had been preferable to her assumption.

‘Henry?’ Bess said, her stomach knotting. She was caught between pity and a swelling black rage.

Tom shook his head and looked up into her eyes. ‘Lord Denton,’ he snarled.

‘Who would do such a thing? What kind of man could treat a person so? What kind of monster?’

Tom did not answer that. ‘I’m going to kill him, Bess.’ The flitting flames were reflected in his one good eye and illuminated the ruin of the other, and Bess knew the right thing was to speak against such a declaration, to try to dissuade him from violent thoughts. But she also knew her brother and so she said nothing. He needed the promise of vengeance. He clings to it, she thought, like a floating timber from the wreck of this night.

‘Get out of those clothes,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch some water and we’ll clean you up. We mustn’t let Martha see you like this.’
She
tried to smile but felt the strain in it. ‘You’ll scare her to death.’

‘I watched them hang my father, Bess,’ a soft voice said from the parlour’s doorway. ‘Do you still think me such a feeble thing?’ They both turned to see Martha standing at the threshold, a candle lamp flickering in the draughts and casting its weak light on her neck, chin and full lips but leaving her eyes in shadow.

Tom simply stared at her, his ravaged face a dark scowl, and so Bess invited Martha into the room before they roused the rest of the household. If the others were not already awake.

‘Achilles woke me,’ Martha said with a slight nod towards a curtained window. ‘Not that I could sleep properly for wondering where you were. I knew you had not come home.’

There followed a silence into which Martha clearly expected Tom to drop some explanation. But he had none. So Martha came into the room keeping, Bess noticed, a distance between herself and Tom. ‘What happened to you?’ Martha asked warily, raising the lamp to throw its small light on Tom’s swollen, bloodied face. ‘You’ve been fighting.’ Her tone was more anxious than accusing.

‘I did scant little of the fighting,’ Tom muttered, turning his face from Martha’s light so that his swollen right eye was in shadow. The sparse kindling was all but burnt out but Tom kept his face turned towards it anyway, watching the last small flames lick out every now and then. A mouse skittered across the floor in front of the hearth, disappearing into a crack at the foot of the north wall. Then a gust rattled a loose windowpane and moaned down the chimney, causing the flames to flare and seethe briefly before dying away. Bess felt a sudden desperate need to escape that room and its silence that deafened her with unspoken words.

‘I will go and get some water to clean your face,’ she said.

Tom’s head snapped up. ‘No, Bess. Stay,’ he said, fixing her with his good eye. She noticed fresh blood at the split in his
lip
, though he did not lick it away. ‘I am sure you are as eager as I to hear why Martha went to see that bastard William Denton. Why she has cloaked herself in deceit and kept it from me.’

Bess could not help but look at Martha whose eyes brimmed with tears. The hand holding the lamp was trembling, so that the small flame quivered.

‘Well, my love?’ Tom said, looking back towards the ashes glowing red in the grate. ‘Now would be a strange time to play the demure minister’s daughter, don’t you think?’

‘You are hurt,’ Bess said to Tom, reaching out to tug a small twig from her brother’s tangled hair. ‘Surely all this will wait until morning when we have looked to your injuries?’ She glanced at Martha and saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks now. ‘When we have all slept,’ she added, dropping the twig into the fireplace.

‘I went to Baston House,’ Martha began, taking a deep, tremulous breath, ‘because they had accused my father of popery and I hoped I might prevail on Lord Denton’s mercy. That he might intercede on my father’s behalf.’

‘That bastard does not know the meaning of mercy,’ Tom blurted. ‘You were a fool to suppose otherwise.’

‘I had at least to try,’ Martha said, looking to Bess for understanding. ‘What else could I do? Your father had turned his back on us.’

‘My father took you in! Jacob too,’ Tom snapped, glaring at Martha with his undamaged eye. The other was darkest purple now, glistening with tiny beads of sweat.

‘Hush, Tom, you will wake them,’ Bess hissed. Tom laughed at that and it was an empty, bitter sound. Martha seemed to shudder.

‘Let them wake,’ he seethed. ‘They should know that they have a whore under their roof. I know what you gave him,’ he said, a drop of blood trembling on his bottom lip.

‘Enough!’ Bess said, not wanting to hear any more. She felt
like
an interloper, as though to hear more was to know too much. But she also pitied Martha whatever the truth of it all, for the girl seemed . . . broken.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked Tom as he strode past Martha to the parlour door. He turned, the hurts etched in his face nothing against the agony in his good eye, and looked at Bess but not at Martha.

‘To rub Achilles down. I rode him hard and fear I’ve cut him.’ He grimaced. ‘None of this is his doing.’

‘Let Vincent do it in the morning,’ Bess said. ‘Dawn cannot be far away now.’

‘I will do it myself,’ Tom said, walking out.

Martha looked unwell, her face chalk-white against her black hair. Bess feared the girl might collapse. She wanted to comfort her. She knew that with two steps she could put her arms around Martha and hold her, this poor girl who had seen her father killed, who had even heaved the ladder to make him fall. And that horror after some desperate and dark undertaking which Bess could only guess at but which she knew had been in vain. Some base and futile act which had cost Martha her honour and now, perhaps, her love.

But Bess did not take those two steps. Instead she stood frozen to the spot, unable to offer anything of any worth except for her presence.

Martha muttered something which Bess did not hear properly, nor did she dare ask the girl to repeat it, then Martha walked from the parlour, leaving her alone in the cold. Her breath plumed in the half light and only then in the true silence did her memory untangle Martha’s last words.

‘God forgive me,’ the minister’s daughter had said.

The morning was crisp and clear and cold. A fleet of long, tendrillous clouds were being pushed southwards across the roof of the world, white ships in an ocean of brightest blue. Below them, but still way up, rooks tumbled and eddied in the
icy
gusts, their distant hoarse clamour reminding Mun of the cries of the hound pack in hollow, echoing woods. But those gathering in the forecourt of Shear House, stamping feet and huffing into hands, were not hunting fox today.

‘She cannot have gone far,’ he said, putting his foot in the stirrup and hauling himself into the saddle. Hector nickered, greeting his master properly now that they were united as one mass of flesh and bone. ‘I’ll wager we’ll find her up in Gerard’s Wood, or if not there then gone to the village. But we’ll find her, Tom.’

Tom said nothing. He had saddled Achilles and was now cinching the saddle girth, but the stallion was stomping his front hooves and puffing up his stomach in protest. ‘Don’t test me today, boy,’ Tom growled under his breath, patting the beast’s withers. Then, as soon as Achilles relaxed slightly, he yanked the girth tight and fastened the buckle, sliding a finger beneath the strap to make sure it was not too tight.

‘Mun is right,’ Bess said, ‘she just needed some time alone.’ Bess was mounted too and cocooned in a thick, hooded riding cloak against the chill. She clapped gloved hands together to warm them and her sorrel mare, Artemis, snorted loudly, her breath pluming in white clouds.

‘She needed to get away from me,’ Tom said sourly, mounting. Achilles snapped at his bit and screeched, ill-tempered at being ridden again so soon. ‘She’s out there in this damned cold because of me, Bess, and you know that is the truth of it.’

‘We’ll find her,’ Bess said, glancing at Mun as she echoed his words. Mun’s jaw ached, having set rigid at Bess’s telling of what the Dentons had done to Tom and then having seen with his own eyes his brother’s injuries. Mun swore to himself that those haughty bastards would pay for their actions. But first to find Martha and bring her home. Home to a cup of warm spiced wine and a roaring fire, Lady Mary had said whilst rounding up a search party.

‘At least it’s dry,’ Sir Francis announced from Priam’s back,
looking
up at the great swell of Parbold Hill rising into the blue behind Shear House. ‘And Martha’s a sensible lass. She won’t have gone off ill-dressed.’

‘I feared you had run off too!’ Lady Mary chided Edward MacColla, the butler, who was hurrying down Shear House’s steps bearing a tray upon which sat two bottles of sherry – one full, the other a third full – and several small glasses that chinked as he hastened across the forecourt.

‘Ah’m sorry, mah lady,’ MacColla gnarred, glancing at Achilles who was still biting down on his bit and tossing his black head. The Scotsman was in his fifties, grey-haired, slender as a beanstalk, and had never, to Mun’s knowledge, smiled. His mouth was ever a thin line in his lantern jaw and most of the other servants, especially the women, were afraid of him.

‘Ah suspected tha one bottle would be lecht so ah ventured doon intae th’ cellar fur anither,’ MacColla grumbled. Mun reflected on the times he’d heard Sir Francis moan that he must be the only man who kept a butler who disapproved of drinking.

‘Well the cellar must be deeper than I remember it,’ Lady Mary said, uncowed by the man’s prickly demeanour and taking a glass of sherry from his tray. She reached up and offered it to her husband with a nod that implied he should drink it all and be quick about it. And so Sir Francis downed the sherry in one draught before handing the empty glass back and sweeping a gloved hand across his lips and moustaches.

It had been Jacob who had first realized that his sister was not at Shear House. He had been up just before dawn, lighting fires with Isaac as the other servants began their daily tasks. Knowing how much his sister felt the cold, Jacob had taken to bringing her a cup of hot hippocras every morning but this morning he had found her bedchamber empty. Suspecting she might have been in Tom’s room, he had gone across to the west wing to warn her that others were awake.

‘I was afraid of what Lady Mary would say if she caught them,’ he had told Mun. ‘My sister said they do not have your father’s blessing. That Sir Francis will not let them marry. But Martha wasn’t there.’ Tom had opened the door and told Jacob that the last time he had seen Martha was in the parlour and that his guess was that she was with Bess.

She had not been with Bess and now Shear House was a hive of activity as they prepared to ride out across the fields in search of Martha Green. As well as Sir Francis, Bess, Mun and Tom, several of the servants had clothed themselves in thick wool, and mounted horses that were now stamping and neighing excitedly, their ears pricked forward and tails lifted. The stable boy, Vincent, was there, as were Owen O’Neill, Peter Marten and Robert Birch, all of whom worked as labourers on the estate. A good bunch, Mun thought, so that they were bound to find Martha before anyone got too cold.