The Gallows Curse

Night of the Full Moon,

December 1210



Crickets — Twenty crickets steeped in white wine are said to cure the wheezing of the breath and, if eaten, ease the colic and also pains of the bladder.

A cricket thrown into the fire will not burn. If they enter a house and dwell there they must never be killed or driven out, for they will bring good fortune and their chirruping on the hearth will warn of a gathering storm. A cricket will even tell a mortal woman when her lover is approaching her house. But should the cricket suddenly depart, ill fortune will follow.

But take heed, if a white cricket should chance to appear upon the hearth, one of those who warm their hands around that fire will surely die.

The Mandrake's Herbal





The Turning



Walter, the gatekeeper, was never one to want to stir from his fireside after supper, even on a hot summer's night, and he certainly did not disguise his annoyance at being roused at this late hour in the bitter cold. He stamped his feet and blew ‹›n his hands, grumbling that the wicket door was very likely frozen solid and if he did manage to prise it open, he'd likely not be able to get it shut again for the rest of the night.

"You'd think folks'd have the wit to get their business done in daylight,' he muttered, 'not go traipsing around the countryside when they should be abed. Second time this night I've been fetched out of my cot. All these comings and goings, it's enough to daul a man to death.'

Raffe was in such a foul mood that he scarcely registered what Walter was saying, but the man's fumbling with the frozen latch only served to irritate him the more and he pushed Walter out of the way so hard that the gatekeeper slipped on the frosty cobbles and fell heavily to the ground. Raffe didn't even bother to apologize.

Elena bent to help the man, but Raffe caught her arm and pushed her out through the wicket door. He ducked under the frame, following her. Elena stood shivering on the path outside, clutching her small pack of belongings and staring hack at the towering walls of the manor.

Raffe glanced sourly up at the swollen moon, which seemed closer and heavier this night as if it was taunting him with its belly-ripe fecundity. Holding the flaming torch aloft, he strode off in the direction of the village at a deliberately cruel pace, knowing Elena would almost have to run to keep up with him.

How could she have done it? How could she have betrayed him, after all he had done for her? When he thought about how useless she was at almost any task in the house, her clumsiness, the pots and flagons she had broken — other stewards would have taken a stick to her long ago. But he had covered up for her, turned a blind eye to her slipping out of the manor whenever she chose, had even given her gifts to take home for her mother. By God, if he had a stick in his hand right now, that little fool would smart for it. If he'd a whip in his belt he'd have flogged her every step of the way from the manor to the village.

Raffe's fury was not soothed by the knowledge that it was entirely his own fault that he was having to put himself through this private agony of delivering Elena into the arms of another man. For Lady Anne would have willingly allowed Elena to stay until morning when a cart could have been sent to take the girl home, but it was Raffe who had insisted Elena leave at once and now, though he told himself he'd gladly drown her in the nearest ditch, he found he could not bring himself to let her walk alone at night without protection.

Raffe sensed Elena glancing fearfully up at him as she scuttled to keep pace, but he wouldn't look at her. He couldn't bring himself to speak. When he had dragged her into Lady Anne's presence, with that shrew Hilda triumphantly bringing up the rear, Elena had started sobbing. He didn't know if her tears sprang from her fear of Lady Anne's anger or from the pain of his vicious grip on her arm. At that moment he didn't care why she was crying, and he refused to slacken his grasp.

But Lady Anne had not been angry. Raffe knew she wouldn't be, whatever Hilda had hoped. Anne had shaken her head gravely, but said it was only to be expected. Elena had done no more than any pretty girl would do, especially now that marriage was impossible because of the Interdict. Then she had turned her face away and stared silently into the firelight for a long time, a silence no one dared to break.

Finally, she spoke without lifting her gaze from the flames. 'It is not that I disapprove of what you have done, my dear.

Young love is not a crime to be punished. But you must understand that I cannot bear to have babies around me. It is too painful for me. Even a pregnant woman reminds me ... of what I have lost ... seeing life go on as if my son had never existed. I cannot do it.'

Hilda, hovering protectively behind Lady Anne's chair, glowered at Raffe. 'You need your rest, m'lady. I keep telling everyone that, but they take no notice.'

Lady Anne absently patted her arm and glanced up again at Elena. 'Perhaps it is for the best. I don't like the thought of having young girls sleeping in the manor when Osborn and his men are here. There are many in his retinue who believe that any comely maid is simply there to be plucked for their sport, like a squab from a dovecote, no matter how much she resists. And I can't keep hiding you out of sight in the kitchens. For your own safety, Elena, it is as well you should leave now.'

Hilda crossed herself. 'I swear I'll not be able to close my eyes while those brutes are here.'

Raffe snorted. You can sleep soundly, mistress. There's not a man alive who wouldn't sooner bed his own horse than try your virtue.'

She flushed angrily. 'What do you know of being a man, you -'

Lady Anne rose. 'Enough! There is nothing else to be said, go now. Leave me, all of you. Can't you see there are far more pressing matters weighing on my mind than a pregnant girl? I have lost my husband and my son, and now I have lost my lands too. I cannot bear any more. You cannot ask me to!'

But as Raffe guided Elena from the chamber, Anne added more gently, 'God in his mercy grant you a safe delivery, Elena, you and the child.'

Lady Anne was a good woman, Raffe thought, a saint, and she did not deserve to have that bastard Osborn foisted on her by King John in her own home, a home she'd spent a lifetime defending for her son. Raffe savagely kicked a stone on the track and heard it crack against the ice in the ditch.

There was a shriek behind Raffe and he spun round. Elena was crouching on the icy path, rubbing her knee. At once he was by her side.

'Have you hurt yourself?'

She shook her head and Raffe lifted her to her feet. She stood swaying unsteadily for a moment. Raffe realized she was shivering. In the vastness of the darkness that surrounded them the tiny figure looked more fragile than ever. Her eyes, round and bright as the moon, glittered in the torchlight as she glanced fearfully up at him.

Placing the torch into her hands for a moment, he unfastened his cloak and wrapped it around her. Then, taking back the torch, he clasped her frog-cold hand in his own. She stiffened, trying to pull away, and instantly his anger came surging back.

'Stop that prudish nonsense! You're as bad as that old hag Hilda, thinking every man wants to ravish you. It's slippery. You've already fallen once, next time you might not be so lucky. But if you want to take that risk in your condition, go ahead.'

He turned away and started off again, but he had not taken more than a couple of strides before he felt a small arm burrow into the crook of his own. His anger dissolved in an instant. He drew Elena close and they walked on, slowly this time. He felt a surge of unexpected joy as he sucked in the closeness of her and knew for the first time the warmth of her small body pressed into his. He could feel the movement of her slender ribcage against his arm, the bones so delicate that a man might snap them with his fingers. Her sweet breath hovered in a veil of white mist as she panted in the icy air.

They were the only two people awake in the world, one tiny ship of frosted light floating through an empty black ocean. A faint breeze rippled through the branches of birch and willow and through the long-dead reeds in the ditch, making them sing like soft waves breaking on sand. From a great way off came the yelping scream of a vixen. Elena shivered and pressed tighter into him.

Looking down at the top of that small head hidden beneath her hood, Raffe knew the overwhelming desire of a father or a lover to protect something so small and innocent. But he was neither of these things to her and she wasn't innocent. He had not forced himself on her as other men in his position would have done. He had kept her pure and unsullied, though it had taken every grain of self-control he possessed when she was there under the same roof constantly, clay and night. He had not touched her, but she had soiled herself anyway. Though he told himself he had been ridiculous to imagine she'd never take a man to her bed, all the same he felt like a child who'd been carefully saving a sweetmeat to savour, only to have it snatched from his hand and gobbled up by another.

'When?' he demanded so furiously that Elena jumped violently, almost slipping again.

Raffe steadied her and tried to control his voice, 'When did you get with child?'

'I . . . don't know.'

'Don't lie to me! You were a virgin when you came to Lady Anne's service, you told her so yourself. So it must have been after you started working in the manor that you started slipping off to the barn. How long did you wait — days, weeks? And was it just this Athan or did you have a stable of sweating field hands?'

He'd made her confess the name to Lady Anne, but it almost choked him to utter it.

She stopped and stared earnestly up at him, a look of astonishment on her face as if she couldn't believe anyone would accuse her of such a thing. 'It was just Athan ... I've never been with anyone else and I never will, not even . . . not even if Athan said he didn't want me any more. I love him more than anything else in my life. I'm glad his son is in my belly, no matter what you or Hilda or Lady Anne think. I want this bairn! I want it, do you hear, because it's his baby!'

She turned her head away, but Raffe could hear the tears in her voice, and he knew they were tears of indignation and fury, not remorse. They walked on in silence.

Elena struggled to keep pace with Master Raffaele, but she refused to beg him to slow down. She was so exhausted after the night's events that she couldn't even decide if she was devastated or relieved to be leaving the manor. She would be with Athan every day now, lying in his arms every night as she had longed to do. There was no question of returning to her mother's cottage. Now that she was carrying his bairn, she was, in the eyes of the villagers at least, Athan's wife, and a wife always moved into her husband's home to care for him and his kin. Her stomach lurched as she realized that meant she would be at the beck and call of Athan's mother, Joan, who made that sour-faced Hilda seem as kindly as a fairy godmother by comparison. But now that she was carrying Joan's grandson, surely the woman would soften towards her?

Elena glanced up at Master Raffaele. His face was turned away from her, staring ahead down the darkened road. There was no mistaking his anger, it pulsated from him, and yet she didn't understand why he was so furious with her. Unable to comprehend it, she tried to convince herself that his foul mood had nothing to do with her. As Lady Anne had said, with Lord Osborn taking over the manor, they had far more to worry about than the fate of a village girl.

She had been so anxious about Athan and then being caught by Hilda that the whole incident in Lady Anne's bedchamber earlier that evening had simply vanished from her head. But now she realized, with a little guilt, that perhaps she should have told Lady Anne what she'd heard. She had understood little of what had been said, except one thing whoever the men in that chamber were, they were helping the king's enemies.

The villagers in Gastmere mocked their lords and rulers unmercifully behind their backs. They found ways to creep around the law when they could. They might hide a piglet or two, or a few chickens to avoid paying the tithes, or spirit away the odd fleece at shearing time before it reached the manor's barn. It was fair sport to hoodwink your masters provided you didn't get caught. But treason, that went far beyond a game. Treason meant torture and certain death in this world, and an eternal damnation in the next, for even Christ would never forgive the blasphemy of the subject who rebelled against God's own anointed king.

And to Elena such harsh punishment seemed only just, for though she had no idea what the cause of the quarrel was between England and France, like every man, woman and child in England, she'd heard the rumours that the hated French were threatening to invade and, if they succeeded, would rampage through the countryside burning the villages, raping the women and slaughtering the children. Any Englishman who helped the French must be as wicked as they were.

Elena glanced up at Raffaele's stony profile and swallowed hard.

'Master Raffaele,' she whispered.

He didn't give any indication he had heard her. She raised her voice a little.

'I heard two men talking in Lady's Anne's chamber this evening. She wasn't there and I'd gone to fetch ... I thought the room would be empty. I heard men's voices coming from inside. I didn't mean to listen.'

Raffe turned to look at her, frowning. 'In Lady Anne's chamber? Were they trying to steal from her? You should have called me at once if there were strangers in the manor.'

'No,' Elena said hastily. 'They weren't thieves. At least, I don't think they were; they were just talking. But... it was about a ship, a French ship . . . coming here bringing men.'

Master Raffaele abruptly stopped and whirled to face her. 'Are you sure? Tell me everything. Tell me exactly what you heard.'

Elena told him all she could recall of the conversation she had heard. She knew her account was garbled and he had to prompt her many times to get the whole story, but she could remember all the names they had mentioned. She had always been good at that.

Finally, Raffaele asked, 'These men, would you recognize them?'

Elena shook her head. 'I could only hear their voices. But they didn't talk like Gastmere men. I think maybe ... they came with Lord Osborn.'

'And you are sure they didn't know they were being overheard?'

Despite the bitter cold, Elena felt her cheeks grow hot. 'I don't know ... I bumped into the door afore I ran off. They must have heard the thump, because one of them opened the door and called after me. But I didn't dare to turn round to see who he was.'

Raffaele grabbed her shoulders, almost lifting her off her feet. His face was creased with alarm. 'Are you saying that these men saw you?'

Elena flinched, trying to pull away from him. 'He couldn't have seen my face, but he might have seen my back. Will he ... do you think they'll come after me?'

The thought had not occurred to her before. She glanced fearfully back up the road towards the manor. When the man had not pursued her out into the courtyard, she assumed that he had thought her not worth bothering with. But now, when she saw the fear on Master Raffaele's face, she realized that what she had overheard could put her in grave danger.

Raffaele relaxed his grip on her shoulders and awkwardly tried to pat her arm as if she was a child. 'They didn't see your face, that's good, but it is as well you left tonight. Sooner or later they would have run into you if you'd stayed in the manor, and if they'd recognized your kirtle or your ...' He briefly touched her red curls.

Elena was shivering and not just from the biting cold.

'Come now,' Raffaele said in a more gentle tone than he had used all evening, 'I must get you inside before you freeze to death.'

Raffe did not trust himself to speak again until they reached the door of Athan's cottage. The village of Gastmere was silent, even the dogs were too deeply asleep or too cold to bother to bark at the footsteps crunching on the frozen mud. Here and there a few thin slivers of light from rush candles slid out between the shutters or cracks in the doors, but most had long been extinguished.

Elena hesitated before the door. 'Will you come in for a warm, Master Raffaele, afore you go?'

He backed away, bringing his hand up across his face as if to shield himself. It was more than he could bear to see that virile young man take Elena in his arms, to glimpse the bed where tonight they might. . .

'Elena, remember, I am still your friend. If you need help, if you need anything, come to me.'

The words blurted out of his mouth before he could stop them. He strode rapidly away, not even turning round to watch her enter the house.

His head was throbbing as if he had been repeatedly punched. He couldn't separate the hundred different thoughts that were darting through his brain - Osborn, the baby and now the French. If Elena was correct, then at least one, if not two, of the men who even now lay sleeping in the manor was a traitor to the throne of England, helping to smuggle spies into the country and laying the ground for Philip's invading army.

There were many in England who had reason to hate John, and would see a French king on the throne just to spite him, especially if it led to their advancement. God knows, Raffe had no love for John. But to betray England, Gerard's homeland, to an invading army, that was treachery he couldn't stomach.

Besides, no servants in the manor would have the wit or passion to plot against the throne, so one of the men at least must be from Osborn's retinue, for how else would he have got inside the manor and known the bedchamber was empty?

Elena said that they had talked of fighting in the Holy Land. Raffe tried to cast his mind back. Who in Osborn's retinue now had been with him in the Holy Land?

He and Gerard had not travelled there with Osborn, though Gerard's father had sailed with him, together with the bulk of King Richard's army. By the time Raffe and Gerard had caught up with them, the siege of Acre was already well under way. The Christian army had surrounded the walled city, trying to free it from the Saracens. Saladin, the great Saracen leader, was camped beyond the Christians, attacking them as they attacked the city, and trying to lift the siege.

Richard's army were hurling rocks at the ramparts from great siege catapults and slings. The defenders were throwing down lime and fire-filled pots on to the Christian army. You couldn't even recognize a man from his chevron or emblem, for everything was covered with a thick, choking dust. It was chaos; half the time you couldn't see the man fighting next to you for the smoke and sand blowing in the wind. Any one of the men riding now with Osborn could have been with him in that hell that was the Holy Land.

Besides, even if Raffe could identify the man, what could he do without proof? All he had was the word of a villein, and if the traitor, whoever he was, discovered that Elena had overheard him, he would find her and kill her without a moment's hesitation. No, there was only one thing to be done, he had to catch the traitor in the act of meeting these Frenchmen — that way he could bear witness himself and Elena need never be mentioned. There was just one man who might be persuaded to help him in this. He owed his life to Raffe, and Talbot was a man who did not forget a debt, especially one owed in blood.

But there was nothing that could be done tonight. Raffe tried to push the problem from his mind. The ship was not due until Spring. They would have to be patient and watch. In the meantime Elena was safe, that was the only thing that mattered. If the traitor was searching for her, it would be among the servants, not in the village, and if Raffe waited, as wait he must, then as time passed, the man would come to believe that whoever the girl was outside the door, she had heard nothing and was no threat to him.

As the icy air tore painfully at his lungs, Raffe realized that he had been striding away from the village at a furious pace. He stopped to catch his breath. The marsh pool at the edge of the track was frozen over. Frosted brown bulrushes bowed in permanent obeisance, their heads caught fast in the pond. The torch flames glittered in the ice. He caught sight of his reflection as he peered down, the sagging flesh around his jowls, the grotesque body. He had rotted from youth to old age without even fleetingly enjoying the body of a man in his prime, and his flesh would only become frailer and more repulsive as the days hurtled by.

Even at this moment, that fragile, flame-haired girl lay in the arms of a strapping young lad with all his life before him, a man who could give her the gift of a child. Life as a freed woman, money, even love itself, nothing that Raffe could have offered Elena was more than a stinking heap of dung, compared to one thing he could never give her — a child of her own. His own mother had once told him that was what every woman wanted more than anything else. She said, every woman longs to hold her infant in her arms and cannot feel complete without one. But when the next baby comes along, when her first-born is too big to be carried, what does a mother feel for her child then?

Somehow he had never really blamed his father for what they did to him. His father had paid the money. How much he never knew, but it wasn't a small sum, as his mother constantly reminded him when she told him how grateful he should be for the sacrifices they had made for him. His father had laboured night and day on the farm and at his pots, but he had done it without complaining. It was an investment not just for the boy, but for the whole family, that much Raffe understood. All their futures were pinned on Raffe, and he had betrayed their hopes. But his father alone had been the only one not to fling those words in his face, though Raffe could see them written in his eyes each time he looked at his useless son.

Men are forced to see their sons suffer much. Their boys are sent to mortify their flesh in cold cloisters of the monasteries, or to suffer the rope's lash on ships that lurch from danger to peril and back again. Young lads are killed in battle or plunge from cathedral towers, their mason's chisels still grasped tightly in their hands. Men and boys, fathers and sons, suffer and die side by side, but are not mothers supposed to plead and beg and try in every way to soften those blows?

His mother hadn't. She'd taken him to his executioner herself when he was just eight years old. He remembered as if it was yesterday the searing heat of that afternoon and twin puff balls of dust around his ankles as he scuffed his bare feet in the white grit of the path, dragging on his mother's hand, reluctant to be pulled away from a game of football with his friends. His mother tried to hurry him through the drowsy village, putting her finger to her lips as he whined to know where they were going. Flies crawled in the sweat on his upper lip. He was thirsty from playing football and the long hot walk. He remembered that vividly, a raging thirst, and when he saw the cold bath, that had been his first thought. He simply wanted to put his head down and drink the water.

They'd given him something to drink in the end, but it was not water. It was bitter, but he'd gulped it down so fast that he swallowed it before he had tasted it and it was too late to spit it out. His mother had been forced to help him undress, though she had not done so for years. He'd been mortified by that. She scolded him sharply as he fumbled with the strings of his breeches, slapping his hands away and undoing the knots herself, grumbling that he was keeping the good gentleman waiting. But he couldn't hurry, because his hands seemed to be floating away from the rest of his body, as if they had turned into butterflies. He staggered sideways. The floor was tipping. An earthquake! He must run outside. That's what his father had always drilled him to do, but he found he couldn't make his legs move and no one else seemed to feel the room spinning.

He couldn't remember if his mother had stayed to watch what the man did to him, but he relived it a thousand times in his head. Someone had picked him up and dumped him into the icy water. His teeth chattered in the sudden shock. Too late he'd seen the knife, felt the searing pain in his groin as it cut him. Fingers probed into him through the bleeding cuts, then the unimaginable fire of something being ripped out of his insides, once . . . then twice.

There had been others in the room, he was dimly aware of that even through his terror. But he knew for certain that his mother was not there when he woke up in the dark and found himself alone in an unfamiliar bed with his legs stretched wide apart, tied to the bed so that he couldn't move them. His wrists had also been tied so that he couldn't touch himself, couldn't feel with his fingers what they had done to him, what they'd taken from him, how they had mutilated him. He lay there alone in the darkness in the worst pain he had ever known in his short life, screaming and sobbing, not even able to wipe the snot from his own nose. And somehow, that seemed like the greatest betrayal of them all, that his mother had not been there to comfort him and soothe away his tears. Would Elena walk away from her crying child? Was that what all mothers did in the end?

The moon hung below the ice in the small bog pool, swelling up even as he stared down at her, as if she would burst open and thousands of baby stars would come tumbling out and wriggle away like tiny silver fishes into the black waters. Was Athan wriggling his way into Elena even now in the darkness, his sweat running over her pale skin, his hands on her breasts, making her giggle, making her moan and beg? Her lace floated in front of him. He could see her naked body thrusting up towards Athan.

In a fury Raffe raised the torch and smashed it down on the moon in the water. The ice splintered and stinking muddy water splashed up his legs and on to his face. The flames were doused and he shivered in the cold hard silver of the starlight.

But like a good sharp slap, the cold water had done its work; it had brought Raffe to his senses. Elena was gone now and that was for the good. He might glimpse her from time to time in the village, but she would not be living under his nose, for ever reminding him of what he couldn't possess; and in a few years, after she'd borne more brats, when her figure had thickened and the children and her husband had cut wrinkles into her face, why, he'd probably not even recognize her, much less want her.

Trying in vain to convince himself that he no longer cared, Raffe strode fiercely back towards the manor, the moon obstinately keeping pace above him, lighting his path and mocking his attempts to smash her. With every stride Raffe took away from Elena, he tried to make the picture of her in his head more bloated, aged and unlovely. He painted her red hair grey. He gave her sagging breasts and a huge mole, and then pulled out even her grey hair, making her as bald as an egg, but still he couldn't wipe the girl from his mind.

Mortals are fools to a man: they believe that if only they can convince themselves of anything they will make it so, but they can never quite convince themselves enough.