Dacre's War (23 page)

‘Where are ye from?’ the guard asked the soldier, halting at the sight of the wolf.

Antoine’s smile remained in place, though the pallor of his face was ghastly. The guard repeated the question, and Louise took a seat beside her new guest. ‘He speaks no Scots,’ she answered for him. ‘He is one of our kin, but newly arrived. He is a soldier to trade, but has agreed to help my ailing cousin Benoit in his carpenter’s shed for a time. I hope to have him fluent before the year is out.’ She took his hand, and pumped it playfully on the table. Seeing the man’s stare fixed still on Antoine, she continued: ‘Antoine is my late mother’s godson, the child of her dearest niece.’

‘Ask him to stand up,’ said the guard, as if she had not spoken.

The hall fell silent. The children had stopped their chase, the infant had tired of the horn and was sucking his thumb, and nobody at the table was able to breathe. Into this abyss charged Emily. With a squeal, she flung herself at the table, nearly toppling Old Crozier from the bench, and throwing her arms around the soldier, who came close to fainting once more as his leg fell off the stool. His face hidden in the child’s embrace, he fought back the encroaching darkness, shook the ringing out of his ears and, with a look as grim as if carved from granite, made to get up. The girl loosened her grip, but before he could rise she held up a small leather-bound book. ‘Look what I found!’ Antoine’s face went from white to grey, and Louise’s eyes widened with horror. The book must have fallen from Antoine’s cloak while he lay on the settle.

She leapt up, placing herself between child and guard, who advanced with outstretched hand. ‘Give me that,’ he commanded.

Escaping from behind her aunt, Emily danced off across the room, ‘Catch me then, fat-face!’ she crowed, leaping onto the settle, then across the fireplace, as if this was the best game she had ever played. Her skirts flapped as if she were an insect in flight, and her delighted laughter sent a rill of iced sweat down Louise’s back.

At that moment, the chief officer returned from his hunt of the cellars, and his companion emerged empty-handed from the upper floors. Wat’s curses on the warden’s men flew around their heads as he and the keep’s guards stationed themselves beside them. Moments later, the last Selkirk guard finished prodding the stable hayricks and the brewhouse vat, and joined them, plodding down the stairs with a disappointed tread.

The officers assembled, as if to confer, but sensing the altered mood in the hall they looked around with fresh interest. Louise was almost as ashen as Antoine. She no longer looked like the affronted mistress of a fortress, but a girl scared out of her wits. Ella was darting between table and hearth, trying to catch her daughter with one arm, a startled infant tucked under the other, and there was a sheen of excitement on the guard’s face that told them he had found something.

‘What’s going on?’ barked the leader, raising his hand to calm the hubbub. Emily, a stickler for doing as she was told, continued to jig and holler. Seeing the officers bearing down on the child with swords drawn, Louise screamed at her to be quiet. ‘Bring me the book!’ she cried. Frightened to hear her aunt so angry, Emily burst into a bawl and approached, sobbing. Louise took the book, and dropped a kiss on her head. ‘You’re a very good girl,’ she whispered. ‘Now, go sit by old Tom.’ Old Crozier held out his hand and, hiccuping with tears, the girl climbed onto the bench beside him, pulling his arm around her.

Without a word, Louise held out the book. A sense of nightmarish unreality numbed her fear, and she no longer trembled, though she believed that whatever it contained would condemn her, and the soldier, to gaol, and probably far worse.

The leader of the Selkirk guards sheathed his sword and took the book. As he flipped through its pages the hall was hushed. In the shadows, Hob fingered his dagger. The wolf’s growl thickened, haunches tensing as he readied himself to leap at the first sign of attack.

The officer frowned. Crabbit black print spread across the page. He saw scribblings in the margins, in a paler ink. ‘Bible, is it?’ He thought of the huge illuminated tome his priest read from in chapel. ‘Seems small for a bible.’ Turning it over he saw the embossed gold cross on the back cover, and the letters INRI. Even one who could not read understood what that meant.

The guard ran a finger over the leather binding, marvelling. No one he knew owned the holy book. Not even all priests had their own bible, sharing one between parishes, and copying out the parts they most often used. Many priests, he had heard, could not even read. They learned passages by heart, and spouted them at every chance, lest they forget them.

He handed it back to Louise. ‘Read me some of it, then,’ he said. Louise opened it. It was not in Latin, but in a language she did not recognise, though each letter was clear enough. Her eyes flew to Antoine, who was staring at the table with the air of a man on the scaffold.

She looked up at the guard with contempt. ‘I cannot read. Does your wife?’

Sensing he was closing in on the mystery, the guard looked around. ‘Someone here must be able to read it,’ he said. ‘A house such as this, there’ll have been a bit of schooling. Otherwise what’s it doing here?’

Louise went cold. Unsure what the book contained, she could not claim it was her husband’s. Yet to say it belonged to her guest was to draw attention to him. That he had not already spoken up told its own story. She could not answer, and the longer she was quiet, the deeper the guard’s suspicions would grow. Not knowing what words she would utter, she was about to speak when someone else did so first.

‘I will read it,’ said a hoarse voice, and a figure at the top of the stairs pushed back his hood and picked his way down to the hall. ‘It is after all my book.’

‘Father Walsh!’ cried Louise.

‘Apologies for my tardiness, madam,’ said the priest, taking her hand, and bowing over it, ‘but the confession hour overran. I am here now, though, for the family’s weekly instruction.’ He cast a look over Selkirk’s officers. ‘Lent is a serious business, my friends. No true Christian can reach the kingdom without first shriving his soul. But before we begin,’ he continued, unclasping his cloak, and draping it over the settle, ‘I see my little book has been amusing you.’

‘Who is this?’ the guard asked Louise, as the priest patted down his cassock and ran a finger under his collar.

‘Father Michael Walsh,’ she replied, ‘the valley’s priest and a friend of the family since my husband was a boy. And this man,’ she went on, turning to the priest and biting back tears, ‘is from the border guard, who accuse us of harbouring a heretic. They have searched the premises and found nothing, but still they persecute us.’

‘Give me back my book,’ said Father Walsh in his mild manner, ‘I was vexed at leaving it here.’ He turned the pages. ‘Such handsome print,’ he murmured, rubbing the page, ‘and what an elegant typeface. A far richer paper too, compared to the copy in the church. Quality rags, that’s the difference.’

‘It does not look big enough to be a proper bible,’ said the guard doggedly, standing at his shoulder.

‘Indeed no, it is not,’ said Father Walsh. ‘It is my travelling bible. This is merely the New Testament.’ He smiled at the guard. ‘So then, let me read you the first page, from the gospel of Matthew.’ He put his finger under the line, and then looked up. ‘No, I will spare you the endless genealogy.’ He flipped further into the book, humming under his breath, until he found a passage some pages in. ‘Now this,’ he said, looking up with an innocent smile, ‘this is a good text for the long days of Lent.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Matthew chapter six, verse one.’ He began to intone in Latin, his voice weak with advancing age, but growing stronger as the familiar, much loved words flowed. When he finished, he looked up. ‘That was telling us to beware of doing good deeds simply so that we will be praised. As the gospel says, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men.’ He turned to the Selkirk guard. ‘You should know, sir, that the Croziers are a fine example of those who hide their light under a bushel. A more faithful, charitable, reverent family I could not wish to serve though they keep their good works quiet as the grave. Shall I read on?’

With a shake of his head, the officer admitted defeat. ‘No, Father, I thank you. Our business here is done.’ Clicking his boot heels, he bowed so low his fringe fell over his eyes. ‘Goodwife, I beg your pardon. Please accept my apologies. It seems we have made a mistake.’

Not trusting herself to speak, Louise inclined her head. The guard turned to his men, to herd them out. One jerked his head in Antoine’s direction but the officer pushed him towards the stairs. He could take no further humiliation. There was no apostate to be found here. As he and his posse emerged into the courtyard, the keep’s guards nipping at their heels, he looked up at the darkling sky and the rooks posted on the battlements. Perhaps their quarry had indeed turned into a bird, to escape, cawing, over their heads.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Silence fell over the hall as the door banged shut. Father Walsh reached the settle, and sank onto it like an old man. The hands clutching the bible shook. Pouring him a goblet of wine, Louise joined him. He took a gulp, then set it aside.

‘Holy Mother of Jesus,’ he said, dropping the bible in his lap, ‘where did you find this? It is heresy writ large. It’s not in Greek or Hebrew or Latin, it is a plain translation, into Low German, the language of the common people. Possession of this is a death sentence. You must get rid of it at once, and whoever brought it.’

Hob appeared at the priest’s side. He plucked the book from him, and threw it onto the fire. ‘If only it was as simple to deal with its owner,’ he said, casting a look over his shoulder at the table, where Antoine sat, head laid on his arms.

Louise rubbed the blood back into her hands before the sullen fire. Already the bible was curling in a snarl, and soon the pages would be ash. Had she or Antoine been found guilty of heresy, they too would have burned.

Leaving the priest to his wine, Louise gave the order for the soldier to be carried to the men’s quarters and given the infirmary bed, set apart from the dorm. What followed was, for Antoine, almost as taxing as the hour that had just passed. When finally his leg was cleaned, salved, bound and splinted, his palms bore the stigmata of fingernails. Barely able to speak, he fell into a sleep deep as a swoon. Keeping guard beside his pallet the wolf licked the soldier’s hand and lay down, refusing to abandon his new charge. Leaving Wat and the wolf to watch him through the night, Louise made her way back to the hall.

Her head throbbed. She was harbouring a fugitive, whose presence could bring them all before the executioner. A deserter was one thing, but to shelter a heretic was lunacy. A moment’s pity for a man barely more than a boy had brought them all to the brink of disaster.

‘I ken what you’re thinking,’ said Hob, finding her in the passageway. ‘Me and all. Bleeding hearts we both are, and we nearly swung for it.’ Yet there was no contrition in his tone, and his eyes brightened under the torchlight. ‘That lad might be a dangerous fool, but there is no real harm in him. You can talk sense into him as soon as he is better.’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You were as kind to me, remember. Without that soft heart of yours, I’d no be alive today.’

She covered his hand with her own. ‘You were a child, Hob, and no one could have left an orphan alone out in the wilds. But this foreigner, who we know nothing about . . .’ She looked at the groom who, in the years since she had rescued him, had become as dear as if he were a brother. ‘We have problems enough without my adding to them.’

‘You had no choice,’ said Hob, as they stepped back into the hall.

‘But what will Crozier say?’

‘He will agree with me. Now, you maun eat, while I settle the horses.’

Early the following morning, Louise returned to the infirmary. The soldier had slept through the night, Wat told her, though he had thrashed and cried out in his sleep. At dawn Wat had changed his dressing and packed the torn flesh with moss, but though he had hissed with pain the boy had not woken.

‘He looks feverish to me,’ said Wat, examining the soldier’s warm face. ‘We need to watch him closely. The leg’s turning yellow.’

‘Go and get some rest,’ Louise replied. ‘I will send Hob to collect nettles and rue for a compress. Come back at noon.’

For a while she sat silently by the sleeping man. His features were fine-boned, delicate as a girl’s. Though his hands were chapped and calloused with work they were sensitive, more like those of a troubadour or bard than a man of arms. Who could imagine trouble arriving in such gentle form?

Her thoughts turned to Crozier, and the dark days when she had sat vigil by his bed, not knowing if he would live or die. In those cruelly slow hours she had learned his face, every line and turn of it. Ten years on and nothing she had discerned then had changed. He was the same man in every respect. Only her love had altered, deepening with time, though in those early days, when she was drawn to him as to life itself, she would have laughed to think that was possible.

Her eyes went to the window, where morning was brightening behind the shutters. Opening them, she stood staring out at the treetops, fear of her husband’s waning affection troubling her thoughts like the breeze among the pines.

When Hob returned with the herbs she mixed a compress, and together they applied it to the swollen, darkening leg. Wakening, their patient grew restless. Louise drew a cup of well water from the bucket, and held it to his lips. Not recognising her, Antoine put his hand over hers, to steady the cup. His fingers were hot, his eyes glittered, and he seemed eager to talk, but the jumble of words made no sense.

For several days Antoine lay in limbo, his mind wandering far from the keep. The task of nursing him was shared between Wat and Hob, the groom treating him as if he were an Arab steed; Wat, like an errant son. Under their care the infection began to ebb and the bone to knit. When at last the soldier regained full consciousness, he learned he would be spared Wat’s long-toothed saw. A tear trickled down his face. ‘You do not look much like an angel,’ he whispered, ‘but that is indeed what you are.’ Wat gave a guffaw that made the invalid’s head pound.

Louise was in the brewhouse when Hob told her the soldier had asked to see her.

‘What does he want?’

‘To confess all, I think,’ he said. ‘Should be interesting. Here, I’ll finish the stir.’

She passed him the paddle she had been using to spread the barley and hurried out to the keep, the wolf at her heels.

Antoine was sitting on a stool by his bed. He was dressed in a long woollen tunic, the sort a monk would wear, and his splinted leg was stretched before him, as if it were not his. Louise cut short his effusion of thanks. ‘What was it you wanted to say to me?’ she asked, dusting her hands on her skirts, and taking a seat on a chest by the door.

‘I owe you not just gratitude for saving my life, but an apology,’ he replied, his words slow and clipped as if each had been dredged from a newly awakened memory. ‘I have acted like a fool. In following my own conscience, I have risked your family’s lives as well as my own. That is unforgivable.’ He tapped a finger on his knee, in private reprimand. ‘Lying here, this past week, I have had time to clear my thoughts. It has not been a pleasant experience.’ He smiled, his eyes dreamy yet clear. ‘Odd as it will sound, the fear of losing my leg was less terrible than facing my maker, and acknowledging my sins.’

‘Sins?’ Louise scuffed her boots on the floor. Of all the words she knew from the bible, sin was the one that made her most uneasy. It seemed to her a slippery notion, more often used to denounce those who had little to atone for than admitted to by people whose faults were plain.

‘I have committed the sin of pride,’ he continued, ‘and I will make amends.’

‘Enough of this,’ said Louise. ‘You need not confess to me, I am not your priest.’

She started to get up, but Antoine put out his hand. ‘I am trying to explain, madame. I have made many mistakes. I need you to understand.’

Louise looked at the young man’s earnest, anxious face, and sighed. ‘I’ll listen, then,’ she said, and sat down once more.

His story took a long time to tell. By the time he had finished, Louise had set the tapers on the wall burning and the infirmary bedchamber glowed as if it had been lit by his words.

Antoine d’Echelles was from the north-east of France, a town on the tip of Germany’s ear. The son of a merchant’s clerk, he spoke French and German and English. For two years he had begun to train as a priest, but what he saw at the seminary changed his mind, and he entered a local militia, rather than become like the priests he had learned to despise.

He and a group of other townsmen had heard of a preacher who wanted to do away with the church. This man, who lived in Germany, believed that no one should come between God and his believers. The Catholic church, he said, was corrupt, and should be destroyed. After what he had seen, Antoine was quick to agree.

Passing themselves off as tradesmen, he and his friends went to Germany to hear this man preach. ‘He was . . . was . . .’ The soldier could not find the word he wanted, but his eyes brightened at the memory. ‘Pure,’ he said finally, ‘and untainted, and true. It was this I was trying to tell the good people of Selkirk, when they turned on me.’

Louise shook her head in disbelief. The preacher, Martin Luther by name, sounded as if he had lost his senses. To condemn the Catholic church, and denounce the pope? He must enjoy a charmed existence still to be alive. So too Antoine, since he had escaped Selkirk’s clutches with all but his bones intact.

With the hope of one day spreading Luther’s ideas, Antoine had joined the French king’s army. Before they went their ways, he and his friends had vowed to take the new gospel to every corner of the world. Stationed under the Duke of Albany’s command, he soon heard they were to serve in Scotland. He knew at once that this was where he was called to witness to the new faith. Already, he said, there was a small group of true believers in the east of the country whom he could join, preaching as he made his way there. ‘In order to share the message,’ he said, with a childlike smile, ‘we each carry a bible written for the people, buttoned into our shirts. It is not in Latin or Greek for priests to interpret, but in words everyone can understand.’

‘We burned it,’ Louise said. ‘You must be out of your senses, to carry such a book. The guards could have locked you up and sent you to trial for that alone. And all of us with you,’ she added.

‘That is what I have been thinking on,’ he said, quietly. ‘And the sin for which I have begged the good Lord’s forgiveness.’

Louise’s voice was harsh. ‘You expect us to house you, a heretic and a deserter? What have we done that you want to bring such trouble upon us?’ She was as angry with herself for courting danger as with the man who had brought it.

‘I know, I know,’ he said so softly she guessed at the words rather than heard them. ‘And as of this morning, I renounce the faith of the Lutherans. That, indeed, is the shape my penance must take. It is the worst punishment I could imagine, setting me once more at a distance from the Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept it gladly. Eagerly.’ He looked up at her, his lashes wet with tears. ‘I will return to the Catholic church, and submit to its teachings. If the good Father who saved my life will hear my confession, I will make it to him, and be on my way.’

Louise stood. ‘My husband will be home soon. Once I have spoken to him, we can decide what is best for you to do. For the moment, though, you must rest.’ She rose, clicking her fingers at the wolf, but he was curled at the soldier’s feet, and had no intention of leaving.

From far down the valley, Crozier saw the plume of smoke from the keep’s chimneys. He rode ahead of Tom and Benoit, anxious to be home. When he left, a week earlier, Louise had been quiet. She had said little when he told her he had been summoned to Lord Foulberry’s, and even less on the morning he departed. She had raised her lips to his as they said goodbye, then turned and disappeared into the keep, without watching him ride off. He had not seen her at their window, keeping his horse in sight until the trees closed in and hid him, nor again at the parted shutters in the depths of the night, her tears flowing unchecked.

When the riders reached the walls, Wat and the watchmen raised their hands in salute, and the bugler blasted his horn. Crozier’s eyes narrowed. The guards were tense. Something had happened while they were away. Before he could enquire, Wat had slipped off, like a vole into the waterbank. The borderer rode through the gates at a clip, but his first fears were allayed at the sight of Louise and Ella hurrying across the courtyard to meet them. In the confusion of children, chickens and stableboys he could do no more than cast a questioning glance at his wife as he dismounted. She smiled but her face, he thought, was drawn.

Not until the horses were unsaddled and their gear carried into the keep did he again find himself near his wife. He put an arm round her waist, and pulled her aside. ‘I have missed you,’ he said, bending to kiss the top of her head.

She raised her eyes to his. ‘We have a visitor. And I have a confession. You will be angry, I know.’

When he heard her story, Crozier was too relieved for anger. Later, alone, the thought of what might have happened to her, and the others, made him dizzy. He had suddenly to sit, until the blood returned to his head. But as Louise first described Antoine’s arrival, and that of the Selkirk guards, he merely listened in grim silence.

‘He’s nothing more than a boy,’ she said. ‘Too young to think straight. A week ago he was prepared to risk his life for his faith, and now he renounces it. He’s like Ella’s children, who scream for a toy, and then grow tired of it. And yet there is something innocent and likeable about him.’

‘As soon as he can walk he will have to make his way back to Albany’s army and face his punishment. Or return to France.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘But it might be weeks until then. For so long as he is here we’re in danger, aren’t we? The border guards could return any time.’