She looked with affection at her only child, all she had in the world now that her husband Robert was dead. He had been a good thatcher and a good man, but God had taken him away three years ago, when he fell from the roof of the church and broke his back. Matilda had been taken in by her father, who was the manor reeve, elected by the serfs to represent them and to organize the work on the strip fields and on the lord’s demesne. Matilda and her daughter worked his croft alongside him, except when he gave his villein service to the manor three days each week.
She sighed as she thought again for the thousandth time of all that had gone wrong in the last two years. First, their manor lord, Matthew Lupus, had died of a gnawing cancer of the throat, leaving his evil son Walter to inherit and make their life a misery. Then her own father, Roger Merland, had died six months ago of lockjaw, contracted when he jabbed his foot with a pitchfork. Soon afterwards, Walter began trying to seduce the attractive widow. When she repulsed him, he turned his attention to her virginal daughter and Matilda was hard-pressed to keep him at bay. Now she had endured enough, and they were stealing away illegally from Kentisbury, a village a few miles from the north coast of Devon, heading far inland for Shebbear, which lay south of Torrington. Their opportunity came when Walter Lupus, together with his steward and bailiff, went off for a few days to the great fair at Tavistock. Matilda and her daughter left covertly before dawn, and, though many of the villagers knew of their departure, they were willing to look the other way and plead ignorance when Walter returned home. He was an unpopular successor to his father, being dour, selfish and arrogant, and Matilda’s sympathetic neighbours were well aware of the harassment that they were suffering.
Matilda, leading a pregnant goat on a cord, whistled to their hound Chaser to round up their two pigs, which were snuffling in the undergrowth at the side of the track. They could not be far from their destination now, as it was about twenty-five miles between Kentisbury and Shebbear and this was the second day of their flight. They had spent the night under a wide elm, well away from the track, to be out of sight of the footpads and thieves who infested the fringes of Exmoor. With the cow and goat tethered to a tree and the pigs hobbled with cords, they passed the night in uneasy and fitful slumber, after eating the bread and cheese they had brought with them.
Ahead of them the track lay through a stretch of deep forest, the last before they reached Shebbear. This was the sort of place where outlaws lurked, ready to steal, ravish and kill, so they entered the gloomy tunnel of oaks and beeches with trepidation. There were few people travelling this lonely road, but Matilda hoped that this might discourage robbers, who would get thin pickings from such sparse traffic.
‘Why has God treated us so badly?’ said Gillota suddenly. ‘We have done no evil that I know of! I go to confession with Father Peter, but I have little to tell him — not that he seems interested, anyway.’
Matilda smiled to herself. Her daughter was naive, certainly, but she was intelligent and always seeking for truths that neither her mother nor anyone else in the village could give her.
‘There is little opportunity for folks like us to sin, child,’ she called at Gillota’s back. ‘Sin is for men, who drink and lust and cheat — and for the lords, who fight and kill!’
She knew that the girl was perplexed by the misfortunes that had overtaken the family. Her childhood had been secure, albeit impoverished, until her father died. Even living with her grandfather was tolerable, but after his death Matilda and Gillota had to scrape a living from the half-acre toft that he left them, existing on their few animals and growing vegetables for their staple diet. Though at thirty-two she was comparatively young, Matilda also had a reputation as ‘wise woman’, so she was all the village had by way of health care and a midwife, which brought her in a few pennies for her poultices and herbal potions.
In spite of their fears, the few miles of forest were crossed without incident, and they emerged only a couple of miles from Shebbear, where the road dipped down into a small valley and strip fields began to appear on each side. This was a King’s manor, having no lord but a bailiff who administered several such parcels of royal land in this part of Devon.
‘Do you know where your aunt lives, mother?’ asked Gillota as the first tofts and cottages began to appear at the side of the road.
Matilda shook her head. ‘I’ve never been here before — in fact, this is the first time I’ve ever left Kentisbury,’ she confessed.
It was her husband Robert Claper who had been a Shebbear man, being sent to Matilda’s village years before when the two bailiffs exchanged a thatcher for a blacksmith — and as an unfree villein he had no more say in the matter than if he had been an ox or a sheepdog. However, his good fortune was to meet and marry Matilda and to father Gillota before death claimed him.
‘How will we find her, then?’ persisted her daughter, fearful of this unfamiliar place that was opening up before them. A stone church faced an alehouse, the inevitable pair of buildings seen in almost every English village.
Suddenly their attention was attracted by something on the grass verge in front of the church. It was just a very large boulder, probably weighing a ton, lying under an old tree. Though nothing remarkable, the mother and daughter stared at it and then at each other, and something unspoken passed between them. Increasingly as she grew older, Gillota showed that she was becoming as ‘fey’ as her mother, both having the rudiments of ‘second sight’, knowing things that were outside the normal five senses. It was this that allowed Matilda to function as a ‘wise woman’, though she was careful never to let it be known, in case of accusations of witchcraft. Now that Gillota was showing the same hereditary gift, her mother worried that she might not yet be mature enough to hide these sporadic but powerful insights.
‘That’s a work of the devil!’ said the young girl impulsively, looking at the greyish rock.
Her mother nodded but pushed her daughter onwards. ‘None of our business, my girl! We have more urgent matters to deal with.’
‘So how will we find Aunt Emma?’ persisted Gillota
‘Your father always said she had a toft just beyond the church,’ answered her mother. ‘We will ask the first person we see.’
This proved to be an old woman, bent almost double over a gnarled stick, who came out of the churchyard gate as they passed. The crone stared at the procession of animals and muttered a greeting through toothless gums, which Matilda answered with a question.
‘Mother, can you please tell us where Emma, who was once called Claper, lives?’
‘Claper? It’s many a year since I heard that name. Emma married a man called Revelle, but he ran off to the wars and was never heard of again.’ She cackled at some private secret.
‘So where can we find her dwelling?’ asked Gillota politely.
The old woman raised her stick and pointed up the track. ‘The last cottage on the right side. But she’s not well, you know.’
Matilda stared. Only three weeks ago she had had a reply from Emma by word of mouth via a friendly carter, saying that she would welcome them into her household, and there was no mention of illness then.
‘Not well? What ails her, then?’
‘She had a seizure last week,’ answered the crone with morbid satisfaction. ‘Lost the use of an arm and her speech, though I hear tell she’s past the worst. Her neighbours are looking after her as best they can.’
Numbed by yet another catastrophe, Matilda murmured some thanks and set off rapidly up the last few hundred paces to the toft that the woman had indicated.
‘What do we do now, Mother,’ snivelled Gillota tearfully. ‘How can we stay with a sick woman? Will we have to go back to Kentisbury?’
‘Stay out here with the beasts!’ she commanded as they reached a rickety gate in a fence around the croft. ‘I’ll go inside and see what’s happening.’