An Honourable Estate

Copyright © 2012
Elizabeth Ashworth

Elizabeth Ashworth has
asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be
identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

This novel is
based on the legend of Mab’s Cross and is dedicated to the memory of Lady Mabel
de Haigh and Sir William Bradshaw, who can be found lying side by side in Wigan
Parish Church.

Contents

   
Prologue                                         
   

1. 
 Famine                                         
 

2.
  Murder                                         

3. 
 Rebellion             

4.   The Sheriff of
Lancaster              

5. 
 
A Year and a
Day                          

6. 
 
The
Outlaw                                    

7. 
 
Dicken                                           

8. 
 
The
Scot                                        

9. 
 
Captive                                          

10. An Audience with the
King                     

11. The
Adulteress                             

12. The Battle of
Boroughbridge       

13. The
Supplicant                             

Author’s
Note                                     

Prologue

Mabel
de Haigh paused on the edge of the market place.  Her bare feet were
bloodied and torn and the snow-laden wind made her shiver as she limped
forward, bareheaded and dressed only in her linen chemise.  In her hand
she shielded a lighted taper, almost burnt down now.  The villagers who
lined her path willed her on and gave her strength.  Although the penance
for adultery was designed to be a humiliation, these people neither mocked nor
jeered her as she passed, but the men averted their eyes from her unclothed
body and the women whispered words of encouragement and sympathy.

At last she reached the stone cross and knelt before it to
pray to God for the salvation of her soul.  She was an adulteress. 
She freely admitted her sin to God, priest and man.  But she prayed that
God would forgive her as easily as Father Gilbert, her confessor, and the
people of Haigh who stood protectively around her.

“That is enough,” said Father Gilbert as she felt a warm
cloak being placed around her shoulders and the hood raised to cover her hair
which hung loose and unbraided.  “Come away now.”

She held up her hand in a silent plea for a few more moments
of prayer.  Then she crossed herself, put out the taper and stumbled to
her feet as arms grasped hers and supported her.  It was over now and she
could go home, shriven, to have her feet bathed and bandaged and to recover
from her long penitential walk.

Chapter
One

Famine

Bending
over her sewing in the gloom of a single precious candle, Mabel heard the latch
of the outer door click open and William came into the great hall of the manor
house at Haigh.  His fair hair was stuck tight to his head and water ran
from it, dripping onto the sackcloth around his shoulders that was supposed to
have kept the rain from his clothes.  But when he took it off and shook it
in unison with the dogs who accompanied him, showering Mabel with the droplets,
she saw that the wetness had soaked through to his tunic and that his hose and
boots were similarly sodden and smeared with mud.  She sent Edith to fetch
some fresh clothes from the coffer in their bedchamber and cloths for him to
dry himself.  Then she called for one of the kitchen boys to bring more
logs to try to kindle the damp wood on the central hearth into a better
blaze.  The closed shutters rattled at the windows in a sudden gust of
wind and the incessant rain seeped through and trickled down the white
plastered wall.  It was August and it had rained every day for as long as
Mabel could recall.

“Another two dead sheep,” said William as he rubbed his hair,
making the flames of the fire sizzle from the wet drops, “and...” He paused to
look up at her.  Even in the gloom she could see the pain in his
eyes.  “The blacksmith’s child, the little girl...”

“She died,” said Mabel sadly, knowing what he was going to
tell her from the expression on his face.

“It was not unexpected.  You cannot save them all,” he
said in an attempt to comfort her before he returned to rubbing at his hair,
almost standing on the tail of one of the steaming hounds that had spread
itself next to the fire.

The hall filled with the mingling smells of wood smoke, wet
dog, wet wool and dampness.  It was a stench that Mabel had come to
associate with the summer of 1315.  That and the stench of death as the
animals died in the fields and the children in the village.

She had hoped that the blacksmith’s little daughter could be
saved.  She had, with her own hands, prepared an infusion of willow bark
and taken it to the family along with what food she could spare: a loaf of
coarse brown bread, though by the time the grain had been dried in the oven it
contained little nourishment, and, to tempt the child to eat, a tiny portion of
the fresh cod that had come from the weekly market at Wigan.  But when she
had looked down at the little girl, no more than bones, lying in her blankets
with her huge blue eyes staring out from her gaunt and colourless face and her
belly swollen despite her hunger, Mabel had known that there was little
hope.  The child had had that look of resignation that comes to those on
the brink of death and, despite her prayers and supplications and the lighting
of a precious beeswax candle in the chapel, Mabel was not surprised that God
had seen fit to take her from this world.

“At least her suffering is over,” she said at last, though
they were only words and she knew that she would have to put on her cloak and
pattens and walk down to the small house by the forge to see the frail body and
try to give what solace she could to the parents; to the mother who had tried
to coax some spoonfuls of the medicine into her daughter’s mouth in the hope
that it might work some miracle; and to the father, whose smithy stood silent
and deserted now that there were no animals to shoe or scythes to fashion
because the horses and oxen had died of starvation and the crops stood ruined
in the wet fields. 

William ran his fingers through his damp hair and pulled a
rough wooden stool nearer to the blaze, lifting the logs with a long iron poker
to encourage the flames.

“Something will have to be done, Mab,” he said.  “We
cannot go on like this.  Soon it will be Michaelmas and what will happen
then?”  He shrugged his shoulders in a sign of desperation as he stroked
the head of Calab, his favourite dog.  “Even if the rain stops there will
be no crop this year but Robert Holland will demand his dues as if the barns
were filled – and neither he nor the Earl of Lancaster will go hungry.” 
He threw down the poker in an angry gesture and the dog jerked back his
head.  “They have no care if we or our villagers starve.”

“But what can we do?” asked Mabel as she picked up his
discarded towel.

“I could take a deer from the forest and roast it in the
yard.”

“And risk having your hands cut off if you are caught? 
Talk sense, William!” she told him.  “Besides you know that we owe feudal
allegiance to the earl.”

“That does not mean I have to like him,” said her husband.

William
recalled when he had begun to dislike Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.  It had
been three years earlier in the summer of 1312.  He had been with the
earl, fulfilling his yearly knight’s service, when the message had come about
Piers Gaveston.  That Lancaster hated Gaveston was well known.  He
had been the foremost of the earls who had forced the king to send his friend
and companion into exile for a third time and when Lancaster had discovered the
man was back in England he had flown into a rage, kicking stools, dogs and
servants around his lavish hall and vowing revenge on both Gaveston and the
king. 

William understood that the Earl of Lancaster had good reason
for his hatred of Gaveston.  The Gascon and the king had allegedly sworn
an oath to be blood brothers, a pact that was more often made on the
battlefield or in tournaments, to fight together and to divide the spoils. 
But the king had begun to treat Piers Gaveston as if he were truly his familial
brother, giving him precedence over his cousin Lancaster who had been subjected
to more ridicule and taunting from Gaveston than even a peasant could have been
expected to tolerate; and all this from a man only the son of a knight of the
household.  Of course it should have been Lancaster who carried the crown
of Edward the Confessor at the king’s coronation, but Gaveston had mocked the
way he walked and laughed that the ceremony would be spoiled by Lancaster’s
minstrel efforts.  So Edward had appointed his favourite to the honour
instead.  Worse had come when the king was in France with his new bride
Isabella, and Gaveston rather than Lancaster was appointed regent and left in charge
of the kingdom.  Even though Lancaster had been ill and unable to fulfil
the role he had still taken offence at the appointment of his sworn enemy and
had sent him a message to say that he would bow down to no one, least of all a
Frenchman. 

Gaveston had taken refuge at Scarborough, but the Earl of
Pembroke had persuaded him to give himself up from the besieged castle,
promising him safety if he came out and put himself into his protection to be
escorted to London where parliament would decide his fate.  But Pembroke
had been lax.  As the party rode south he had not been able to resist the
temptation of a conjugal night with his wife at his manor house at Bampton and,
after lodging his prisoner at the rectory in Deddington, he had gone home. 
In his absence the Earl of Warwick had taken Gaveston and marched him barefoot
to Warwick Castle where he had imprisoned him.  Lancaster and his men had
followed.

William recalled the day they had approached Warwick. 
It had looked magnificent in the evening twilight and, as they urged their
weary horses up towards the towering stone ramparts, William saw that torches
had been lit to welcome them in.  He had been sweating and thirsty all
day.  He had a sore on one leg where his lined hose had bunched up under
the top of his cuisses and he was looking forward to a long drink of ale, a hot
supper, perhaps the chance to wash his feet as well as his hands and a decent
night’s sleep ‒ even though it would be on a pallet in a tent rather than
the comfort of his own feather bed at home in Haigh. 

The hot day was still sultry with the promise of thunder in
the air and, as William handed his horse to one of the boys who had come
forward to take charge of the animals, he saw his friend and neighbour Adam
Banastre coming towards him.  Adam nodded his head towards the
tight-lipped Earl of Lancaster who was climbing the wooden steps to the great
hall with an expression of grim satisfaction.

 “If ever a man was bent on revenge,” he remarked, “it
is our lord and master.”   And as William watched the earl disappear
inside, he agreed that Lancaster would not be satisfied until he saw Gaveston
dead.

The next morning William was one of the men whom Lancaster
had called to attend him.  Once the court was assembled in the great hall
the Earl of Warwick had ordered the prisoner to be brought up from the dungeon
below where he had been held overnight.  William watched as the door was
flung open and Gaveston, in chains, was thrust forward and pushed to his knees
on the floor rushes. It was the first time William had actually seen Piers
Gaveston though he had heard plenty about him and as he studied the tall, well-muscled
man he had to admit that it was hardly surprising he fared so well in the
jousting tournaments.  He had already beaten all the knights of the earls
of
Arundel, Hereford and
Warenne, and they all hated him with a vengeance for his disgracing of them and
their households.