across the town toward the highroad, and passing by the tavern, I looked up and
into the eyes of a girl.
She sat in a carriage before the tavern and when I looked, she seemed to smile.
Now there was an exuberance upon me. Gaiety and good will were in my blood. My
pockets jingled with more coin than I’d had in many a year past, and more to
come.
She was no child, this one. A girl, but a woman also, and of rare beauty. So
when she smiled, I smiled in return, and doffed my hat as bravely as though it
were plumed.
She was of the gentry, it went without saying. A carriage was a rare thing, and
few possessed them or had the use of one. She was gentry, and the less one
noticed or was noticed by them the better. I was passing when her low voice
said, “I am thirsty.”
What was I to do? The well was there, its water cold and fresh. Filling a
brimming dipper, I took it to her.
I was holding the dipper out to her when it was struck from my hand, a vicious,
stinging blow.
Turning sharply, I faced a young noble wearing a plumed hat such as I did not
have, his face flushed with anger.
“Carrion! Why, you vulgar …!” He struck at my face with a gloved hand, but
instinctively, knowing something of fisticuffs, I dodged. Missing the blow he
fell into the mud.
I laughed … and she laughed as well.
For an instant he glared at me from the mud, and then with a burst of fury he
came off the ground. In the next instant he had drawn his sword.
She screamed. “Rupert! No!” And he lunged at me.
That he was beyond reason was obvious. Also that he intended to kill me.
It was my father’s training that saved me. Although I wore no sword I carried a
blackthorn stick, and automatically I parried and thrust, the end of my stick
taking him fairly in the wind.
He staggered and went down.
A rough hand grasped my arm. “You daft fool! That’s Rupert Genester, nephew to
the Earl!”
Chapter 2
There was an opening in the gathering crowd. I took it. There was a space
between the houses, I went through it. There was an open lane under the trees. I
went down it.
Many were my faults, but lack of decision was not one of them. Why Genester, if
such was his name, had struck me I did not know, unless he feared contamination
of his lady by one of such modest birth as myself.
He had struck me, and worst of all, I struck him back, knocked him down, and to
compound my errors, I laughed at him, as his lady had laughed. In his place I
might have been furious, too.
Decision had been imperative. My actions had been purely reflex, instinctive
responses. To strike was to parry, to parry was to thrust … these impulses lay
in my muscles and that part of my brain that directed them. When he came up from
the ground he had intended to kill me.
As I ran, someone came abreast of me. “This way!” he gasped. “Through the
trees!”
Great old trees bordered the lane. He dodged between them and led the way across
an open field. We walked a while to catch our wind.
“I have a horse,” he said.
Beside a tumbled ruin, within a shady place, his horse grazed. I did not ask why
he had left his horse hidden in such a place. But for the first time I did get a
good look at the man who was helping me escape.
He was a slender, wiry man, not yet so tall as me, of sallow complexion, eyes
black and deep-sunk. He looked to be a shrewd and careful man. He carried a
sword, which at the moment I envied, and a Florentine dagger. Its mate was in my
cottage near Isleham, on the fens.
“One horse?” I asked.
“We will take turns, running and riding. We can travel quite fast.”
He insisted that I mount, and I did. We emerged from the hidden place and into
another lane, he trotting alongside and clinging to the stirrup-leather. When we
had gone a half-mile we changed places, me running alongside.
During one such change he said to me, “I regret I can offer no place where we
would be safe. This land is strange to me.”
“Worry not over that,” I told him. “I have such a place, where none will
follow.”
My thoughts had been busy. Who in Stamford might know me? None but Hasling and
his housekeeper, and not even they knew where lay my home. Not many people
traveled so there was a goodly chance none of those who had witnessed my deed
had seen me before, or my village. Yet if such there was, once I reached the
fens I was lost to them.
For the fens were a vast area of low-lying ground, of shallow lakes and winding
waterways, impassable swamps with here and there limestone outcroppings that
created small islands, often with clumps of birch or ancient oaks.
From a distance the fens were deceptively flat and uninteresting, but once down
in the winding waterways, they proved anything but that. For there were clumps
of willow and alder, or tall reeds that permitted boats to move about almost
unseen. The scattered islands in the vastness of the fens were mostly secret, a
knowledge reserved for fen-men alone, places of refuge in time of trouble. Most
of the waterways were hidden by reeds up to ten feet tall.
Bog myrtle, bladderwort, marsh fern, saw sedge and dozens of varieties of plants
and shrubs grew there, and we of the fens knew them all. It was there the Iceni
had gone to escape the attacks of northern sea-rovers who invaded the land by
sailing up the Ouse or the Cam.
Our fens were sparsely inhabited by a clannish lot who cared not for outsiders
coming to our watery world.
We left Lincolnshire behind, my companion and I, traveling devious ways. I led
the way to Thorney, a lovely village with a great old abbey and many sheltered
places where a man might keep from sight. We had no desire to leave behind us
those who might speak of our passing.
In a wooded copse, a hollow among the hills, we built a small fire and tethered
our horse.
“I am Barnabas Sackett,” I said. “I have a place on the edge of the fens. We
will go there.”
“I am Jublain. My family, it is said, came from Mayenne, but that was long ago.
I am from nowhere in particular.”
“A man is what he is.”
“A profound saying. You have the manner and the shoulders of a fighting man. You
are a soldier?”
“I am a farmer. I have a small holding.”
“You moved swiftly. It was beautiful, Barnabas … beautiful!”
“He would have killed me.”
“He would that. It was in his eye when he came up from the mud. He did not like
being made ridiculous, and not knowing you, I thought you were a dead man.”
From his saddlebags he took a chunk of bread and broke it in two, handing the
half to me. It was old bread and hard, but it tasted well, very well.
“I have no wine.” He glanced at me. “I have eaten little these past few weeks.
These are bitter times for a masterless man.”
“Wait. We will have enough to eat.”
“They will search for you. You know that?”
“Do you know aught of the fens? They’ll not find me, not in a hundred years.
Mile upon mile of deep marsh, willows, alders, and channels. Places where you
can walk for several hundred yards, then drop through the grass into a hole
large enough to take a cathedral. We will go there.”
I paused, considering. “Yet I do not believe any in Stamford knew me. I was
there on business.”
“And he whom you saw on business? He will not speak?”
“I think not. He seemed a good man, but one who would keep silent. And there is
reason for his silence, a good reason.”
He looked at me but I did not explain. One does not tell a stranger with a
dagger and a sword that one has gold.
“Still, a man of your size, with your skill at arms …”
“Nobody knows my skill. Not even my friends. My father taught me at home when
none were about. There are few who know me. Some know I own land; most only that
I have worked in the quarries.”
“Your father was a soldier?”
“Yes.”
“A neat parry,” Jublain muttered. “I’d have taken you for a swordsman.”
“I am a farmer,” I insisted, “planning to buy a cow and a few acres more.”