The Outlaws of Ennor: (Knights Templar 16) (11 page)

He’d like that. He might even turn out to be better at that than at collecting the taxes. All too often people paid up on time, which wasn’t what Walerand wanted. He’d prefer a weaker peasant to give him trouble so that he could give the poxy shite a good kicking. He had gone with Robert before now, helping the gather-reeve as one of his guards; Robert always had guards about him because so many
people here hated the tax collector. Robert got in their way, took whatever money they had, and most of them thought he stole a slice for himself. What if he did? Walerand thought it was fair payment for a man who had a hard enough job of it, trying to keep track of who owned what, who earned what, and who could pay what. If he made a bit on the side, that was only to be expected. He was farming the farmers.

It was no surprise that the folks here disliked him. Although it was odd to Walerand that Robert felt he should have a guard. From Walerand’s experience, there was no one on the island who was enough of a threat to the men from La Val’s castle to justify the protection of men-at-arms.

He walked farther up the coast. His master, the Lord of the Manor, had told his men to go and investigate his properties to see if they had been affected by the storm. Ranulph himself had gone to the worst-hit parts, over on the south-eastern side of the island, to inspect the damage. It was expected that there would be extensive waste of the crops over there, and he had some flocks pastured there too, which he wanted to see, to assure himself that they were all well. Meanwhile, the servants had been ordered to view other stretches, and Walerand had been detailed to come here, to the northernmost tip of Ennor, at the place called Penn Trathen by the locals. It meant ‘the end of the sand bar’, a treacherous spit of sand that always caught the unwary larger boats when they attempted to pass between St Nicholas and Ennor at low tide.

It was not the sort of work which appealed to Walerand’s nature. He broke off a stick from a hedge and used it to slash at the road as he went. From the castle, he had taken the old rutted track towards the middle of the island, until he reached the marshes. Once there, he took a detour around them, not knowing the safe routes through the middle which older Ennor hands told him existed. Once Walerand had witnessed the death of a pony which had fallen into the marshes, and its protracted suffering had amused him, but he had resolved never to allow himself to sink into that same damp embrace.

From the marshes, he had to climb the little hill. At the top he began to drop down again, towards the shore. Walking down between
the fields, he soon passed in among the little stand of trees which a farmer had planted as his shaw. Once through them, the trail took him down to Penn Trathen itself.

He stopped at the treeline. Here he could see the length of the sand bar clearly, with the line of old rocks below the surface, their position clear because of the slimy trails of seaweed which clung to them. The sight made him shiver with revulsion. To his mind seaweed looked like a dead man’s fingers, and the feel of the soft, stringy tissues against his skin made him want to scream with terror, as though the weeds would drag him down into the icy depths of the sea. It was a fear he had wisely not confessed to his companions in the castle, but when he saw the peasants collecting kelp and drying it for fuel, he wanted to be sick.

Some said that the line of rocks here was an old road which was now submerged, but Walerand neither knew nor cared whether that was true. He would never try a roadway that was so smothered with weeds.

Continuing down the path, which now grew sandy and less muddy, he reached the shore and started for the point. There was not so much damage here, he noted. Some of the cottages had suffered badly, their roofs blown off, their doors of hanging leather or old wood stripped, their windows of waxed linen shredded, but that was the problem of the peasants, nothing to do with de Blancminster. No, his concern was the fields which bounded the sea, and the animals which lay within.

Since the fields were small here, the walls and trees offered good protection to the creatures, and when he peered over the walls, Walerand saw that the cattle and sheep appeared to have forgotten any fears from the night before. The cows sat chewing the cud contentedly, the sheep circled their pastures, cropping the grass.

Bored, Walerand wandered idly to the shore and kicked up the sand. Here, above the watermark, the sand was still cluttered with rubbish from the water which had blown over it the night before. Pieces of timber abounded, and he frowned. Surely a ship must have foundered for there to be so many wasted baulks lying about here.

A
man who had lived on the islands for any period soon knew when to look for an opportunity, and Walerand was no exception. He knew that the island folk would soon be out here, scavenging whatever they could from the wreckage, and rather than let them take everything, he started searching for valuables. You never could tell what might have been lost from a drowning ship.

The treasure he found, though, was more directly beneficial to him than all the timbers and trinkets which might have fallen from the ship.

He had just passed Penn Trathen, and was continuing along the coast, when he saw an odd lump in the grassy dunes. Walking over to it, he saw it was a boot, and a good one at that, so he scrambled up the sand to grab it. But when he got to it, he saw that it wasn’t one boot, it was a pair of them, bound together with a short thong. He had bent to pick them up, already assessing their value and quality, when he saw something else.

A short distance beyond lay a man: Robert, their owner. He lay on his back, his hosen off, leaving him bare-legged, his jack open at the breast and his shirt beneath a curious hue. There was blood on his lips, and Walerand realised that more had run down his torso and stained the sand a pale pink all about him. When Walerand saw his face, he thought Robert must have died in agony, his hands scrabbling at the sand and grasses about him. Some grasses still protruded from his dead left hand, although when Walerand prodded at the hand with his boot, the bits and pieces fell away, leaving his clawed hand resting on the sand.

This was an unpopular place because it was said that a vill had once stood here until the sea had overwhelmed it. Ghosts were supposed to populate the place. Now Walerand looked about him, but he felt no fear. He had seen enough dead men to know that Robert was no longer a danger to
him
. More to the point, as he told himself happily, throwing the boots over his shoulder and whistling, the job of gather-reeve was open again. He began searching for booty among the corpse’s belongings. Maybe his promotion would come sooner than he had expected.

On
St Nicholas, it took some little time for Tedia to gather up women and two men to carry the body to her house. As the woman who had found him, Tedia laid claim to the half-drowned man, and soon had him laid upon a palliasse in her home. It made for a crowded room, but there was nothing she could do about that.

Baldwin for his part was only semi-conscious. He came to partly as soon as he felt Tedia’s hand on his neck, gently stroking him, but the night had taken its toll, as had the shock of the long journey, swimming desperately in the hope that he might find a spar or piece of jetsam to cling to. It seemed too much to hope that he might strike land, and as soon as his exhausted mind took in the fact that he was safe, he fell into a deep sleep and was entirely unaware of anything that went on around him.

While the men stood in the doorway and watched, the women stripped the figure bare, then began to wash him with warm water fresh from the fire. His clothes were taken by Mariota, who shooed the men away, and then sat in the doorway with needle and thread to mend the worst of the tears, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the stained and malodorous material.

Tedia surveyed him as she cleaned him. There was blood in profusion from a graze at his temple and down past the left side of his jaw, and a long, deep scratch from his shoulder to his right nipple, and the women washed these areas most carefully with clean water. Salt in a wound caused great irritation, as the islanders knew. When all had been cleaned, one woman broke an egg, quickly separated out the yolk, and poured the white into the wounds to clean them. The yolk was set aside for him to eat later.

When he was cleaned, Tedia sat back on her heels and studied him. He was definitely good-looking, she thought. If she hadn’t already lost her heart to Robert, she could be tempted by a man like this.

He was much older, at least double her age, not that such a difference mattered. The thin line of beard that followed the line of his jaw was odd, for men generally wore their beards untrimmed or went close-shaven, but this man seemed to have cultivated an appearance of cleanliness, for all the filth on him
from his time in the water. It was attractive, and she found herself wondering who he was and where he had come from, to arrive here so suddenly. His breathing was irregular, and now and again he made little snuffling noises, then gasps and cries in his sleep, and she stroked his hand and arm. Gradually his alarms faded and he calmed.

The other women all had their own work to attend to. They melted away when they could see that nothing exciting was likely to happen for some time. Before long even Brosia had gone (Tedia had seen her at the edge of the group while she washed Baldwin’s wounds), and there was only her Aunt Mariota left sitting impassively in the doorway, her needle rising and falling with her stitching.

‘This is a fine mess, isn’t it?’ Mariota said when she felt Tedia’s eyes upon her. She was a large woman with pendulous breasts under her shift from birthing and nursing eight boys. Three of them had survived to adulthood, a good record. ‘I wonder where the man’s ship struck.’

‘He doesn’t have the look of a sailor,’ Tedia said reflectively.

‘No,’ Mariota laughed. She held out her own hands, heavy and powerful like a man’s. Work had made them hard, just as it had made her arms more powerful than many a smith’s. ‘Look, mine are more horny than his! He must have an easy life of it. You mark my words: he’s a rich man.’

Tedia felt her aunt’s eyes on her. Mariota had the sharp intelligence of a woman who was used to dealing with her own problems alone, ever since her husband had died, many years before, in another storm. ‘You mean he may pay me for saving him?’

‘No. You know what I mean. When you have got divorced from that wastrel, you—’

‘There’s no need to call Isok a wastrel. He has done all he can.’

‘You protest all you want, maid. I only say what everyone else thinks. He may be a good enough fisherman, but he can’t snare his own wife, can he? What sort of a man does that make him? You mark my words, you’ll be best off without him. Feel sorry for him, by all means, but you need a new life. A new man.’

‘He
has been a good husband to me,’ Tedia stated, and left her aunt sitting there on her stool with her wise old eyes sparkling with humour.

The trouble was, there were no secrets on an island. She had gone to Luke, and already her aunt knew all about it. So did everybody else on the island. As she left her home, Tedia was sure that she could feel their eyes on her. She set her back defiantly and strode proudly, bucket in hand, to fetch fresh water.

Meanwhile, in William’s church of St Mary’s on Ennor, Simon Puttock felt his eyes growing heavier with each passing moment. Soon after William had left him, he nodded, his chin resting on his breast, and when he came to with a start, he saw that an old man with a long, skeletal frame was sitting cross-legged at the cabin-boy’s side.

He had a hand on the boy’s wrist, and he mumbled to himself softly. As he spoke, he lifted his other hand outstretched, and then slowly let it fall towards the boy’s chest. Simon almost expected to hear something as it touched, but there was nothing, only a sudden pause in the old man’s voice.

‘He’ll be well now.’

‘Who are you?’ Simon asked. He had no need to ask what the man had done. He was a charmer, a man who could cure animals of most ailments. Such men were prized in vills of all sizes, although often frowned upon by the Church.

‘I’m known as Hamadus. It’s a good enough name, I daresay, master.’

‘Tell me, where are we?’ Simon asked. ‘The priest told me, but …’

‘But you were tired. Yes, you did well, master, getting all the way here. You are on the island of Ennor. It’s south and west of your land.’

‘Ennor.’ Simon had heard of it before.

‘It is owned by the Earl of Cornwall,’ Hamadus added helpfully.

It was little help to Simon. The information only made him realise how much further he must travel to get to his home. ‘Christ’s blood, and I have to cross the damned water again,’ he groaned.

‘To
get home?’ Hamadus cackled. ‘Of course, my friend. You can go nowhere from here without getting your feet wet, apart from to other islands, when you’re very lucky and the tide’s well out.’

‘I don’t want to go to other islands,’ Simon said. ‘I only want to make my way home.’

‘You’ll have a wait. There’s a boat every once in a while.’

‘What of all the ships based here on the islands?’

Hamadus shrugged with a happy smile. ‘They’re all looking for your ship now. They’ll try to steal everything they can before Ranulph finds it, and then they’ll claim salvage. You know what that is?’

‘Yes. I know,’ Simon said. After all, when he returned home, he was to take up a new post at Dartmouth, under his master, Abbot Champeaux of Tavistock, who had bought the post of Keeper of the Port. The good Abbot hoped to make a profit for the Abbey, so that it would be left with a favourable balance on his death. Simon knew that his master was determined to see the Abbey on a sound footing, and the way that the Abbot had arranged the Abbey’s finances, Simon was comfortably assured that his master would succeed. ‘Who is this Ranulph?’