He looked into the shadows. There was a dog curled by the fire, a goat tethered at the far side of the room, and he could see his wife’s aunt as a bundle of old clothes on a bench near the wall.
‘Mariota, she’s-’
‘I know, you great lummock! Come in and sit by the fire. I’ll fetch you some ale. Did you hit her?’
‘How could I?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘She’s made it plain enough she wants me. She’s tried to make me stiff for her, but nothing works. I can’t blame her, can I?’
‘Many men would, though,’ Mariota observed. She had brought him a jug of warmed ale, and now she pushed him down on the floor near the fire, and stood over him to watch while he drank off a great gulp. She was much older than this man, and tonight she felt all her years. It was during a storm like this that she had lost her own man. Now poor Tedia was going to give up hers, but in a more painful manner. Mariota knew perfectly well how much her niece had loved Isok and wanted him — and yet he couldn’t service her. Both were humiliated and shamed.
Well, there was nothing so certain as suffering in this world, she reflected. ‘How is she?’
‘How do I know? I left her ages ago.’
‘Don’t sulk with me, Isok, or I’ll let you feel my fist!’
‘I had to go and see to the boat after I left her. Once it was safe, I came up here. I can’t live with her any longer, Mariota. She’s already selected a lover, someone to service her,’ he said, his voice breaking.
‘I can’t stay there while she does that, can I? I can’t welcome another man into my home to take my own wife!’
‘Are you sure she’s sought a lover?’
‘She didn’t deny it.’
‘That’s not the same thing,’ Mariota said.
‘She’s already chosen her way. It doesn’t include me.’
Making a quick decision, Mariota pulled a heavy rug from her bed and tugged it over her shoulders. ‘Well, if you’re so stupid, at least I can go and make sure that your wife is safe this night. Stay here and look after the goat while I’m gone. I don’t want to come back and find her dead of fright because you left her in the middle of a storm!’
Isok said nothing. He was staring at the heart of the fire. But as the woman left, he felt a slight lightening of his spirits. At least now the future was decided. The knuckles had been thrown, and he could see how they had fallen.
He knew what the future held for him.
Thomas, the Sergeant of Ennor Castle, strode along swiftly as night fell. The rain was sheeting down as he hurried towards the castle and warmth, a huddled figure in his sodden cloak.
He hadn’t realised how bad the weather would be. The squall had been a black slanting smudge on the horizon when he first glanced up, but it appeared to be about to pass to the north of the island. He hadn’t expected it to move over and envelop him on his way back to the castle.
This place! It was as wet as Ireland. As wet and as miserable. There was no reason for him to be here, other than the obvious ones. He hated the place, and the people. They were nothing more than cattle.
No. Not cattle. Here the peasants were more likely to grab a knife and try to avenge an insult immediately, rather than behaving like proper serfs. It was the atmosphere of this curious little place. Five islands men could live on more or less comfortably, but without much in the way of pasture or decent farming land. It was all hills. Even when the farming brought in a return, what little the peasants had was always likely to be broken up and stolen or burned by pirates. The island of Ennor was the first place that many ships would see when they set sail for England, if they were blown from their course and approached from the west. That meant that hungry and thirsty sailors would arrive with pennies in their pockets, happy to pay any price for a good pot of ale — but it also meant that pirates and murderers from Brittany would sometimes arrive here instead of Cornwall or Devon, and denude the islands of all their stores, killing where they could. It was some years since the pirates had last come here, but that meant nothing.
It certainly led to a particular … spirit of independence among the islanders. When they heard the warning bells from St Mary’s on Ennor, or from St Nicholas on the island named after the Priory, they would grab their tools and go to protect their land and families.
The trouble with such independence, as Thomas knew only too well, was that it could sometimes lead to peasants getting above themselves. They grew to desire control over their own lives — and that was never a good idea. They were not powerful like him; he was free, and he had his own wealth as a result of his speculations.
A drip ran from the back of his thick felt hat; he felt it trickle down his neck, and beneath his outer tunic to his shirt. It itched like a devil, and he had to set his teeth. Damn this place! Full of ignorant peasants and mud. That was it. Mud and peasants.
Ennor, they called it. Imaginative arses! The old folks who could still speak the ancient tongue reckoned that it meant simply ‘The Land’. Ingenious, these peasants, he sneered to himself. Look at the ruddy place! He stopped and glared about him. The trees were rattling as the raindrops struck them, and all about him was the noise of water. Here, in the middle of the area called Hal La Val, the ‘low, marshy ground’ near La Val, all was soaked already. These wetlands sometimes made Thomas anxious. He had odd dreams, in which the sea rose here, in the middle of the island, and suddenly overwhelmed and consumed the population. It had happened in The Flood that all men were drowned, so the priests said, apart from the especially righteous one, whatever his name was.
It had happened before here on the islands, too. Men spoke of a legend that all the islands were once one. They had been broken up by a terrible storm and now the sea was biding its time, ready to smother them entirely. Even since Thomas had arrived here, seven years ago, there had been one exceptionally bad storm during which the sea battered almost over the sands at Porth Mellon. It had been a terrifying sight. The waves pounding at the shore, white spume jetting up fifty feet and more, and then the thunderous crashing as the water hurtled down once more.
This one could be as bad, he reckoned. The way that the sky had become suddenly black and the clouds had rushed over the sea as though to engulf Ennor and its neighbouring island St Nicholas, and then this heavy rain: it seemed more alarming than a normal storm.
For him, a storm at this moment would be disastrous. His investments were heavy, and the cargo expensive. There was no point in smuggling small amounts when a large consignment was possible, and when his ship landed in Cornwall — if it did so, safely — Thomas would make a lot of money.
The Sergeant to Ranulph de Blancminster was taking advantage of the confusion created by the sudden changes in the earldom. A short while ago, the earldom had been the possession of Earl Edmund, but since his death twenty-two or — three years ago, the earldom had been given to Piers Gaveston, just before he was exiled and then captured and executed, and more recently Queen Isabella had been granted it. There were new officials with each change in control, new men to bribe and flatter, but for all that Thomas reckoned he had some years of profit-making left to him. It would take an age for the earldom to realise that he was sending a ship of smuggled goods to Cornwall once a year and meantime profiting by the customs.
It was easy. All ships which landed in the Earl’s lands had to pay customs for their cargoes. The money collected was for the Earl, of course, but Thomas had soon realised that since his own master, Ranulph de Blancminster, couldn’t read, the only reports that would be seen by the Earl’s officers were the ones Thomas bothered to send in. Since the Earldom was in a constant state of flux, it was easy to falsify his reports. Thus, since Gaveston’s death, the Sergeant had been creaming off large amounts of the customs, which helped subsidise his investments in smuggling. Now he was independently wealthy, and he rarely sent in any customs reports at all.