Flora looked at him enquiringly; he said nothing as he squatted beside their baggage, untying the cloth wrapped around a long narrow bundle.
The rapier came free, and Jimmy unwrapped the belt from the sheath and swung it around his hips. The tassets that the scabbard went through—a slanted row of loops on a triangular patch of leather sewn to the belt—kept the chafe—the metal reinforcement at the bottom of the scabbard—from tapping on the ground, if he walked with his left hand on the hilt. He wouldn’t have to worry about that in a few years when he reached his adult growth, but right now he was a bit shorter than most swordsmen.
‘Is that wise?’ Flora said.
‘It’s a mark of respectability,’ Jimmy said. ‘Or at least that you’re nobody to be trifled with!’
And there’s no Upright Man in Land’s End, the young thief thought. Demons and gods, but I’m sick of being pushed around!
They set out, walking slightly uphill along what Jimmy suspected would turn out to be the town’s main thoroughfare to the docks. He assumed there would be a large town square somewhere up ahead, and near there a reputable inn. His eyes wandered and again he studied the distant farms and wondered what it must be like up there. From what townsfolk said about farmers, their lives were pretty boring.
SEVEN - Tragedy
The girl looked up as her mother spoke.
‘When you’ve finished with that,’ Melda Merford said to her daughter Lorrie, ‘I want you to get the flax out of the pond.’
‘Mother, please!’ Lorrie protested.
She turned from where she’d been sweeping out the farmstead’s kitchen-hearth, wiping at her eye where a drop of sweat stung. She used the back of her wrist because her hands were black, but still she got a smudge on her cheek. The fine flying ash drifted up her nose, smelling dusty, like old wood smoke, and she sneezed: cleaning the hearth wasn’t a heavy chore, but it was disagreeable.
‘I was going to hunt today.’
She certainly hadn’t planned on pulling slimy bundles of flax out of the stagnant pond where it lay retting. Never a pleasant job, it would be more irksome still when her mind was fixed on a pleasant jaunt in the cool of the forest.
‘No,’ Melda said, not looking at her. She measured coarse flour out of a box into a wooden mixing bowl. ‘I don’t want you traipsing around those woods by yourself any more.’
Lorrie sat on her heels in astonishment. ‘Why not?’
‘You’re getting too old to be running around like a hoyden,’ her mother said calmly. ‘Besides, we need to get that flax ready. If we can make enough linen and thread to take to the market fair we’ll be able to pay our taxes.’ She looked at Lorrie with a frown. ‘We don’t want to lose the farm like the Morrisons did.’
Lorrie looked away, her frown matching her mother’s. The Morrisons losing their farm because they couldn’t pay the taxes had sent a shock through the whole community. There had been a lot of people losing their farms lately, but none here until the Morrisons. Everyone had assumed it was because of all the sons going to the war, or perhaps those farmers were lazy, but you couldn’t say that of the Morrisons; why, even the baby had chores. Taxes had gone up and up over the last few years, even before the war, and the smaller one’s farm was the harder it had become to pay them. Now even a medium-sized holding like their own had to struggle to pay the debt.
Still, it wasn’t exactly an emergency.
‘But we have hardly any fresh meat in the larder,’ Lorrie objected.
That wasn’t an emergency either—they weren’t nobles, or rich merchants, to eat fresh meat every day—but game helped stretch what they got out of the fields. The more they could sell rather than eat themselves, the better off they would be. The extra few coppers from grain sold rather than turned to bread could mean the difference between paying taxes and starving through the winter, or paying taxes and having enough put by to pay for fish from the town, and cheese from the dairy farmers.
Her mother bit her lip and raised her eyes to heaven. ‘It’s dangerous for a girl your age to go running around alone in the woods. Who knows who you might meet there with no one to help you.’
‘So when Bram comes back from Land’s End I can go with him?’
‘No! Absolutely not!’ Melda said firmly. ‘If anything, that would be worse.’
Lorrie stood to confront her mother, hands on her hips. ‘So I can’t go alone because it’s dangerous and I can’t go with a friend I’ve known my whole life because that would be worse than dangerous?’ she said, her voice ripe with sarcasm. ‘This makes no sense at all, Mother.’