‘Where’s the sheriff?’
The door was open barely a crack, and the voice from within no more than a mouse-squeak, so I heard not a word of it above the noise of the crowd. When Vaughan came back, the door was already being latched against him and the calm he’d shown on the road was gone.
‘My Lord, I’m— The sheriff’s gone with a couple of dozen men to fetch the prisoner from… from where he’s kept.’
A horse was prodded out onto the cobbles, guards forcing the crowd back, and the judge, Sir Christopher Legge, looked down.
‘They don’t have a gaol here?’
‘It’s not the strongest, and there’s fear that Gethin’s brigands will attempt to free him. He’s been kept in a dungeon in… in another place. Until the trial.’
‘Forget the trial!’ A man’s voice from the street. ‘Just hang the fucker!’
Whoops and laughter. Vaughan accepted the reins of his horse from one of the judge’s men, stood like he knew not where to put himself. Clearly hadn’t expected this. A single raindrop stung the back of my hand resting on the mare’s neck.
‘Remarkable.’ Judge Legge rose up in his saddle. He was not tall, and his tight leather riding jerkin emphasised how lean he was, almost skeletal, his bladed face shadowed by a wide-brimmed leather hat. ‘And what, pray, are we supposed to do until the sheriff returns?’
‘My Lord, I—’
‘This, I take it, is the sheriff’s house?’
‘It is, my Lord, but—’
‘I believe… I do believe that I was told by my clerks that I’d be lying here for the duration of the trial.’ Legge’s voice seemed to prick at words like a bodkin. ‘I do believe that I was told that. Now you are the…’ He flicked a wrist, with impatience. ‘…local man, I forget—’
‘Vaughan, my Lord.’
‘Vaughan, yes. Well, perhaps you could go back, Vaughan, and tell the sheriff’s servants to throw open the sheriff’s doors. And the sheriff’s gates. And’ – he leaned forward, to the side of his horse’s head, peered down at Vaughan, his voice brought down to a hiss – ‘get us the hell out of this human dungheap.’
‘I’ll do that now,’ Vaughan said.
‘Good of you.’
The sky was like to dark purple silk, all stretched. Legge leaned back in his saddle and looked up at it, with irritation, as if he might deflate it with his bodkin.
‘I do believe it’s about to rain,’ he said.
And, by God, he was not wrong.
XX
Old Itch
IT WAS AS if the sky had split like a rotted water butt, releasing the kind of rain that joins clothing to skin in seconds. A rain that blinds. We watched its torrent in the milken glass in the parlour at the rear of the Bull Inn, forming rivers on the sills, dripping to the flags.
It was not yet five in the afternoon. The splattered street empty now.
According to Vaughan, the Bull was the best of the seven inns of Presteigne. Dudley and I had been told we’d have to share a bedchamber though not, I’d been glad to discover, a bed. A back parlour, plain but well-scrubbed, had been given over for our use and that of some attorneys who were not accommodated at the sheriff’s house. Including Vaughan who came to join Dudley and me and a jug of small beer, explaining that the more senior lawyers were presently taking instruction from Legge.
‘Evidently he wasn’t expecting that,’ Dudley said. ‘I mean the crowd – not the weather.’
‘Nor I, Master Roberts,’ Vaughan said. ‘For which I’ll be held responsible for sure.’
I said, ‘You’re here to smooth the judge’s path? Interpret the ways of local people?’
‘Sent to him by one of my tutors. And making a cock of it.’
‘Not the way of the Border, is it?’ I said. ‘All this fanfare.’
‘We don’t normally make a big noise about anything,’ Vaughan said, letting the border into his voice. ‘And we don’t take sides till we knows who’ll win.’
Well, I knew this – less from my father than my dealings with Cecil and, in particular, Blanche Parry, who’d walk thrice around some matter before dropping hints as to where she stood on it. And even then you wouldn’t really know.
‘This town’s changed, see,’ Vaughan said. ‘New wealth and most of it from England. Big families in the wool trade come in from Ludlow. Experts in cloth-making brought from Flanders. And all the money from the Great Sessions – bedchambers and good food and wine for the lawyers and the judges. Like I say, it en’t England… but it en’t Wales either.’ He lifted his cup, about to drink then lowered it again. ‘As for free pies, free fruit…’
‘Free?’
‘A fresh mutton pie buys a good helping of merry cheer. In place of fear.’
He looked over to the window. A pool was spreading on the flags where rain was oozing between two badly-set panes. Dudley leaned forward on the bench.
‘You’re saying the merchants and the clothiers paid for that show of welcome for Legge? So he doesn’t think he’s come into a hostile Wales?’
‘He’s here to scratch a twenty-year-old itch, is what it is. Quick trial, nice long hanging.’
‘Itch?’
I recalled what Bishop Scory had said about the biggest hanging party he’d seen hereabouts. Vaughan blinked.
‘You do know, I take it, why the Sessions came to Presteigne?’
‘Should we?’ I said.
Preparing myself. Seemed to me that the Welsh border was like to a clinging midden, rotting history into legend so the twain could not easily be separated.
‘Twenty years ago,’ Vaughan said, ‘all the courts were held at Rhayader. Out west.’
He looked at me in query. I’d never been to Rhayader, but knew of it. A town on the edge of the bandit-riddled wilderness which Vaughan said now had been more or less ruled by the brigand gang, Plant Mat.
There had been some resentment, it seemed, over the way justice was administered by the English judiciary, with only English spoken in court.
Plant Mat fed upon it.
Vaughan talked about the year 1540, four years after the Act of Union, when Plant Mat, lodged in the neighbouring county of Cardigan, were extorting regular payments from landowners to the west of Rhayader.
‘If you didn’t pay up they’d burn your winter straw. And if that didn’t work it’d come to blood. Your stock then your family.’
I marked the suppressed rage roiling in Dudley’s eyes as Vaughan talked about a judge sent to Rhayader for the Sessions. An old man and devout. He’d ride to church before taking his seat in the court. One morning they were waiting for him in an oak grove by the river.
Plant Mat.
‘Took him down,’ Vaughan said. ‘Murdered him.’
‘The King’s justice?’ Dudley finally driven to outrage. ‘Was there no retribution for that?’
‘They knew where to hide, Master Roberts. It’s their country. There may’ve been a hanging or two, but no one knew if they’d got the judge’s killer. After that, it was deemed unsafe for judges to sit at Rhayader.’
‘Driven out? Bowing to this scum?’
‘So that was why the court was moved here. To the softer lands on the edge of England.’
‘And this man Gethin is the leader of Plant Mat. Where’s he caged?’
‘A dungeon at New Radnor Castle. Not much left of the castle since the Glyndwr wars, but still the safest prison we have.’
‘About an hour’s ride?’ I said.
‘If that. But they en’t gonner do it in this weather. They’ll want to see where they’re going, and who else is on the road. Or in the hills. If the rain en’t over well before nightfall, they’ll fetch him on the morrow. Won’t please Sir Christopher if it prolongs his stay, but what can they do?’