‘Of course,’ Maud nodded.
Someone banged loudly on the cottage door, and a female voice called, ‘Maud! Maud Lilywhite! Are you in there? Theresa!’
Without waiting for a reply, the visitor lifted the latch and walked in – a round-faced woman with a coarse woollen cloak flung hastily and somewhat askew over her everyday homespun attire, whose plump features I vaguely recalled having seen in church on Thursday morning. She was pink-cheeked and panting.
‘My good soul, whatever is it?’ Theresa asked, guiding her to a stool and pouring her some ale from the jug on the table. ‘Anne, my dear, calm yourself. What’s the matter?’
The other woman gulped down the ale before gasping, ‘Such terrible doings … Down in the village … Came to tell you.’
‘Tell us what?’ Maud demanded, exasperated by the delay. ‘What doings in the village? What’s happened?’ She muttered for my benefit, ‘Goody Venables. Wife of the blacksmith.’
Mistress Venables nodded in confirmation and made a determined effort to impart her news.
‘Lambert Miller … Someone broke into the millhouse during the night and tried to kill him. Beat him half to death with an iron bar.’
‘Who? Who was it? Who did it?’ I asked, the Mistress Lilywhites being temporarily bereft of words.
The blacksmith’s wife shook her head. ‘Lambert couldn’t see. It was dark.’
‘But he would have some idea, surely … Is he incapable of speech?’
‘Oh, no! Far from it. His mother says he’s cursing and swearing fit to bring the roof down. He’s blaming Tom Rawbone, although as far as I can gather he’s no shred of proof. According to Goody Miller’s story, the man who attacked him had his hood on back to front, covering his face, with slits torn for his eyes.’
Maud’s hand crept up to her mouth.
‘Tom did take a beating from Lambert Miller yesterday. Ask Master Chapman, here. He witnessed it. So did Landlord Bush and Ned. Perhaps Tom was getting his own back.’
This was obviously news to Goody Venables, who struggled gamely to her feet, in spite of her former state of collapse, and made for the door.
‘I must get home,’ she said, ‘and see what’s happening. I thought you’d want to know.’
She was gone to spread her newly acquired knowledge around the village. I glanced reproachfully at Maud, then admitted to myself that her lack of caution was no great matter. William Bush and Lambert would be making everyone free of the information at some time or another.
Maud unhooked her cloak from its peg beside the door. ‘I must go and warn Ned,’ she said.
‘Heaven knows why!’ her mother-in-law exclaimed resentfully. ‘We owe the Rawbones nothing. Nothing! That wastrel, Tom, most probably murdered your daughter. Now he’s half-killed Lambert Miller. Don’t be such a fool, Maud!’
‘Ned has always been my friend,’ the younger woman answered quietly. ‘The rest of them can rot in Hades for all I care, but I won’t have Ned suffer because of his family.’
As she left the cottage, Theresa beat her hands impotently against her sides.
‘What can you do with her? The truth is,’ she went on, quietening down a little, ‘that Maud has always felt guilty because she fell in love with my Gilbert and refused to marry Ned Rawbone. He wanted to marry her, you know.’
‘So I was told. But didn’t his father object?’
‘Probably. But it was of no consequence in the end. Maud knew a better bargain when she saw one.’ Theresa put water to heat over the fire, giving me a shrewd glance as she did so. ‘If you’re leaving us, chapman, you’d better get started while the day’s still young.’
I hesitated, then laughed and gave in. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay a little longer, after all. I’ll go down to the village and have a word, if I can, with Lambert Miller.’
I was not the only one with this idea. There was a crowd of villagers gathered around the millhouse, all hoping to visit the invalid, and little knots of people the length of the village street, talking earnestly and gesticulating violently in a way that boded no good for the miller’s attacker. Lambert was popular in his loud, rather bombastic fashion, and there was no intention of allowing his assailant to go unpunished. There was also an undercurrent of menace which made the hairs lift on the nape of my neck, and I heard the name of Tom Rawbone muttered more than once as I pushed my way through the mêlée. I banged loudly on the mill door, without much hope of being invited inside by Mistress Miller.
It was, however, not Lambert’s mother, but Winifred Bush who answered my knock.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, taken aback, then gestured at me to enter. ‘You’d better come and talk to the village elders. You were witness to the fight between Lambert and Tom Rawbone yesterday afternoon. They’ll wish to hear what you have to say.’
My admission was not well received by the people left outside, all of whom had known the miller far longer than I had, and all of whom wanted to proffer their condolences and satisfy their burning curiosity at the same time. But Mistress Bush had no compunction in shutting the door firmly in their faces.
She led me upstairs to Lambert’s bedchamber, a narrow, sparsely furnished room on the second floor. Judging by the unaccustomed silence in the working section of the mill, there was no one in Lower Brockhurst who could grind the corn until Lambert had recovered.
At first sight, the little room seemed inordinately full of people, but after a minute or two these sorted themselves out into Mistress Miller, an unsurprisingly large woman for an equally well-built son, Rosamund Bush and her parents and a couple of solemn grey-haired, grey-faced men who were introduced to me as the two senior members of the Village Council.
Lambert himself was propped up in bed looking decidedly the worse for wear. His face was a discoloured mass of bruising and one eye was so swollen that it was completely closed, while he could just about squint out of the other. His lips, too, were puffed up to twice their normal size, while his bare chest was covered in weals and welts where he had received a savage beating. What was on view below the decorously drawn up sheet, I could only guess at, but from what I could see, I immediately dismissed the iron bar theory of Goody Venables’s overheated imagination. These injuries had been inflicted with nothing more lethal than a good, stout cudgel.
For now, Rosamund’s sympathies seemed to have veered once more in Lambert’s direction, and she was intent on demonstrating her womanly skills in the sick chamber, sponging her swain’s fevered brow with a mixture of water and vinegar and fluttering her eyelashes at him in a way that must have been seriously inhibiting his crying need for rest.
William Bush was giving the village elders an account of the previous afternoon’s quarrel between Tom Rawbone and the miller, the latter either nodding in agreement or making inarticulate grunts of disapproval if the landlord suggested that he, as well as Tom, might have been to blame. Rosamund was evidently refusing to endorse her father’s half-hearted claim that the miller had been the aggressor. I had no such scruples.
‘Nevertheless,’ I admitted in conclusion, after I had said my piece, ‘It’s no excuse for breaking into a man’s house and belabouring him while he’s asleep and defenceless.’
‘Did you see anything at all of the man’s face?’ one of the elders enquired of Lambert.
He shook his head and said something through his swollen lips that I could make neither head nor tail of. His mother, however, appeared to have no difficulty in understanding him.
‘He says the bugger had his hood on back to front,’ she interpreted. ‘He’d cut slits for his eyes and … and what, dear?’ She bent closer as her son again attempted to explain some detail. ‘Yes.’ She straightened up. ‘Lambert knows it was back to front because the liripipe hung down like a long, thin nose.’
I could imagine the effect in the dark: grotesque and possibly frightening in those first uncertain minutes after being so rudely awakened.