The Bleeding Land (10 page)

Her skirts fell to the floor and despite the fire’s heat she felt a chill breeze across her legs as she pushed down her stockings and took them off, laying them beside her shoes. Lord Denton’s eyes flickered hungrily down to her private parts. She saw a shudder surge through him culminating in a twist of his neck that reminded her of a bird of prey.

He went over to the tapestry and ripped it from the wall, then spread it across the floor. Dust caught in Martha’s throat but she tried not to cough.

‘Now come here,’ he said, his voice somehow thickened, and extended a hand down to the floor. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

Martha glanced down at her nakedness, her hair hiding her face for a moment. ‘God forgive me,’ she whispered. Then she went and lay on the tapestry and closed her eyes.

When Lord Denton had finished he stood and pulled up his breeches, smoothing his moustaches with finger and thumb. He put his fingers to his nose and inhaled deeply, then walked over to the table and filled his glass with wine, turning his back on Martha.

She took the opportunity to stand and found that her legs were weak and would barely support her as she hurriedly put on her skirts, sickened by the man’s stink that clung to her, filling her nose and throat. Appalled at the wetness between her legs.

When she was dressed again, Lord Denton turned back to face her and she saw a faint twist of disgust at his lips.

‘Are you repulsed by
me
, Lord Denton? Or by yourself?’ she dared, lacing up her bodice.

‘Get out of my house, girl,’ he said through a grimace.

She walked towards him, suddenly terrified that she had upset him. ‘I am sorry, my lord,’ she said, ‘I did not mean to—’

‘I said get out!’ he barked, so that Martha stopped suddenly, afraid to move at all.

‘You will keep your word?’ she asked, feeling now more desperate then ever, because of what she had given for that word.

Lord Denton glanced down at the tapestry still on the floor, then glared at Martha.

‘Who are you to make demands of me?’ he asked bitterly.

‘But your word, my lord! You said my father would not spend another week imprisoned.’

‘And so he will not,’ Lord Denton replied, a grin twitching
his
moustaches, ‘for he is to be executed for his crimes. In four days, I believe.’

‘No!’ Martha screamed, flying at him. She clawed at him, gouging his face, but William was still a powerful man and he knocked her arms aside and clamped a hand around her throat, using his free arm to fend off her flailing hands.

He’s going to kill me, she thought. Then the parlour door opened and Henry came in, his face flushed from riding and his boots trailing mud across the floor.

‘Father?’

‘Get out!’ William yelled, spittle flying from his mouth and spraying Martha.

For a heartbeat Henry took in the scene, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. His gaze flicked down to the tapestry and back up to Martha and his nose twitched as though catching a scent.

‘I will not tell you again, boy!’ his father growled.

Henry dipped his head and backed out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

‘Listen to me, harlot, and listen well. If you do not stop meddling in affairs that are beyond you, I will make it known that you came here and whored yourself.’ His grip was strong. She could not breathe. ‘I am sure Tom Rivers will be interested to hear that I fucked his dirty little harlot.’ Blackness was flooding her vision and she felt hot urine running down her leg.

Then she felt herself fly backwards and hit the floor, where she lay for what seemed like a long time before her senses flooded back in.

‘Never come here again,’ he said, grimacing at the small puddles on the oak floorboards.

Martha climbed unsteadily to her feet and fled from him, back into the entrance hall where dead faces stared at her accusingly, then out of the great door where she found her horse waiting for her, its reins held by a young boy who would not
look
her in the eye. She put her coif to her nose and breathed in her own familiar smell, trying to be rid of his because she thought she would vomit. Then she mounted the mare, wincing in discomfort, and rode from Baston House. And she did not see her brother, Jacob, sitting on a chestnut colt among a stand of Scots pine.

CHAPTER SIX

AT FIRST THE
snowflakes had clung to one another, plunging from the ashen heavens like duck down and melting on the muddied track and on hat brims and cloaks. But now the wind had picked up, scattering the snow into finer flakes that swirled around chaotically, some of them even ascending back into the desolate, wan sky. It was a cold, bleak, hopeless day, but that had not kept the crowds away and now they were gathered, huddled like sheep against the chill. Having come from miles around, men, women, even children stamped feet and huffed into hands, a cloud of freezing breath rising from them along with a constant murmur like that of the sea. For nothing could keep them from an execution.

Most had come up from Parbold, Lathom and Newburgh villages, Bess supposed, following the ancient tracks to Gallows Ledge on Hilldale like so many before them. Like those early pilgrims traipsing up to Golgotha beyond Jerusalem’s walls, she thought, wondering then what it was about death that so drew the living. But many, too, had come from farther afield, from Eccleston and Leyland, perhaps even from Preston. Excited folk had traversed fields and woodland on foot or on horseback, tramping over the sandstone foothills of the West Lancashire countryside or through the valley of the River
Douglas
, wrapped against the day. To watch George Green hang.

They had set off from Shear House before sunrise, arriving in time to see two women executed first, one for being a witch and the other for murdering her husband. The witch had died quickly, thank God, her neck snapping like an old twig, but the other woman had jerked and kicked and fouled herself and it had taken two men hanging from her ankles to break her neck, at which the crowd had groaned and gasped, horrified and thrilled in equal measure.

Her mother had whispered a prayer for the women’s souls and her betrothed, Emmanuel Bright, had clutched Bess to his chest at the last to spare her the grisly sight. But to her shame Bess had looked anyway, transfixed by the murderess’s lolling tongue and bulging eyes. Now the women, whose chins, forearms and hands darkened as the blood pooled in them, were forgotten and all eyes were turned towards the main event.

‘How is he, Edmund?’ their father asked, nodding towards Tom who was pushing forward, leading Martha by the hand because she had wanted to see her father, or rather wanted him to see her. Before the end.

‘He is angry, Father,’ Mun said, the words sounding to Bess’s ears like an accusation. To Sir Francis too by the set of his jaw.

‘Just make sure he doesn’t do anything foolish,’ he growled. ‘Bad enough that he is with the girl now. In plain sight of this mob.’

‘Francis!’ their mother rasped. ‘The poor girl is about to watch her father hang. Have some pity.’

Sir Francis gave an almost imperceptible nod and cleared his throat. ‘You’re right,’ he muttered. ‘It is a thing no daughter should ever endure.’ Bess felt his hand cup her elbow and gently squeeze, a father’s reassurance that all would be well, and she gave him a smile that merely curved her lips. For Martha Green nothing would be well ever again.

‘Still, keep an eye on him, Edmund,’ Sir Francis said, eyes fixed on his younger son who was now in the front row. ‘He can go on glowering at me until Saint George’s Day. That’s up to him. But he looks up to you. You’ll have to be the one to make him see sense.’

Mun nodded but said nothing, a gust whipping his hair, tangling it with his beard and moustaches as he watched them rig the gibbet. To the right of the gallows three men had scraped a patch of earth clear of snow and now Bess watched them building a pile of furze and sticks.

‘Death to all Catholics!’ a woman screamed. The crowd cheered this and Bess’s eye was drawn eastward to a copse of elms in whose topmost branches a parliament of rooks clamoured raspingly in what sounded to her like a derisive echo of the blood-lusting humans.

Mun nodded eastwards. ‘Even the damned birds mock us,’ he murmured under his breath, and this, or the cold perhaps, sent an icy shiver scuttling up Bess’s spine. This was a desolate place to meet your end.

She looked at the pale faces around them, faces full of disgust and hatred. Full of something else too. Something like greed, as though they hungered for what was coming, their murmured curses stinking of spiced wine as the snow swirled, catching in beards and lashes and melting amongst damp hair. God have mercy on us all, she prayed silently.

Mun pushed forward, putting himself between Martha and a woman whose sombre dress of sad country colours was at odds with her florid face as she shrieked death to all Catholics, brandishing the white bony knot of a hand towards the condemned. But if Martha knew Mun was there she did not show it as she clung to Tom with both arms, as though she would fall without him.

Less than a stone’s throw away stood the stout gallows, piling with snow now. A ladder thumped against it, being tested by the
executioner
whose slab of a face was grim beneath his bird’s nest beard. Beside him stood the sheriff Robert Thurloe, two miserable-looking men clutching halberds, and George Green. The minister’s uncovered, balding head was bowed, lolling between slumped shoulders, and his hands were bound behind his back. He wore shoes, breeches, a thin linen shirt that ruffled in the icy wind, and nothing more. Even from that distance Mun could see that the man was shivering violently as he awaited the hangman’s noose. This cold will kill him before the noose will, he thought.

‘Black-hearted bastards,’ Tom growled. Mun was about to caution his brother against making his feelings known, when a thin voice sliced through the wind like a knife between ribs.

‘Sitha!’ Sheriff Thurloe cried, fishing a crucifix on a length of beads from inside the minister’s shirt. ‘The baubles of a papist!’ The onlookers jeered.

‘Whottle yer damned trinkets do for thi na, Green?’ someone screamed, and some amongst the crowd laughed at that.

‘They are not his! You have put it there!’ Martha yelled. Tom pulled her against him, protecting her from the eyes that scoured them both, and a fat man lifted his walking stick and pointed it towards Martha, yelling that there was another papist, clear as a boil on a whore’s arse.

‘Hold your tongue, sir,’ Mun snarled, and the fat man shuddered visibly and lowered his eyes, his cane vanishing back into the throng.

Mun could see that Green was speaking now, attempting to address the crowd through the veil of whirling snow. But his voice was too feeble and the people had come to watch him hang not hear him plead his innocence.

‘Silence the blasphemer!’ a toothless old man barked.

‘Stop ’is mouth!’ a woman yelled.

‘I wish warn burnin’ the wratch!’ a man chirruped. ‘Keep us warm that’d!’ And laughter rose on the sour fog of breath as the slab-faced hangman climbed the ladder and straddled the
gallows
, checking the hang rope’s knots with short, sharp tugs. He nodded at Sheriff Thurloe, who gave an order to the other two men at which they lowered their halberds so that the blades were inches from George Green’s throat. With that the minister turned and looked up at the gallows and the hangman sitting on it, and someone in the crowd screeched at him to get on with it so that they could all get home to their hearths.

‘Got hands cowd as meh wife’s heart!’ a man yelled, raising his hands to another chorus of laughter. Then, as if in reply, as though he too would be done with the thing, George Green nodded and began to climb. Slowly up he went, his legs trembling, so that the whole ladder shuddered.

Mun felt his hands ball into fists at his sides. ‘Don’t fall,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t give them the pleasure.’

‘That ladder leads to Hell!’ a wild-eyed young woman screeched, spittle spraying the cloak of the man in front and turning white as frost.

Mun glanced back and saw Bess bury her face against Emmanuel’s chest; he put his lips against her coif, as though breathing in the scent of her hair. Then he caught Mun’s eye and gave a subtle shake of his head, an inconspicuous but shared denunciation of what they were seeing. If they have any pity at all they will make it quick, Mun thought. Hoped.

But pity, it seemed, was as scarce as sunshine, and the hangman seemed to take an age to reach down and place the noose around George’s neck, and all the while the minister’s legs trembled so much that the sheriff himself put a foot on the bottom rung to preserve the execution’s decorum. Then, one foot on the ladder and the other in the mud, Thurloe addressed the crowd, declaring the condemned a heretic and a criminal and thanking them for doing their godly duty by coming to witness the King’s justice. This was the only time they held their tongues, hanging on his every word, lapping up his praise like proud hounds after the kill. And when Thurloe had finished he took his foot off the bottom rung and stepped
back
, commanding one of the armed men to turn the ladder and so let the minister fall. But the man would not do it. His lips pressed into a thin line and he shook his head and stepped away, slamming the haft of his halberd into the mud, the weapon proving his role in the play so that no man could rightly expect more.