In the first week of April, a dusty messenger arrived from Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, Papal Legate and the Chief Justiciar of England. Walter was the man who held the country for Richard while the King did battle against Philip’s forces in Normandy. I knew him by sight as a short, wide, muscular bishop, the kind of man who was equally at home slaughtering his foes from the back of a horse or delivering a solemn address in an incense-wreathed cathedral. He had a reputation across Europe as an able administrator, a ruthless ruler and a man utterly loyal to King Richard.
His messenger was a tired knight I had never met before, and whose name, I am ashamed to say, now escapes me. His message was simple: Richard needed more knights for the war in France, and all those landed men in England who owed him service were being summoned by Hubert Walter to a muster at London in May. The new force was expected in Normandy at the beginning of June. I held three English manors of the King in the West Country, the manors of Burford, Stroud and Edington – I held Westbury, of course, from the Earl of Locksley – and also in theory the manor in France now occupied by the black-headed French knight and his son: I had little choice. Like it or not, I was going back to war.
The second arrival was even less welcome. On the day the messenger had left, to carry his news to other idle knights scattered about the North, Goody had bid me goodnight at dusk and had left me, with a cup of watered ale beside the banked hall fire, cleaning Fidelity with an old cloth, a smooth stone and a pot of goose fat, and made her way to her own apartments in the southern part of the courtyard. A few moments later, I heard her screams: three long, high shrieks of soul-shrivelling fear.
I burst out of the hall with my sword in my hand and sprinted towards the two-room guest house that Goody had made her home. The outer door opened at one blow from my boot, and I found myself in a small, dark hall. To my left I could see seams of light coming from the other room, a bedchamber, and in a trice I had smashed that door from its hinges with a brisk shoulder charge. As I stood in the wreckage of the doorway, I saw Goody standing, apparently unharmed, in the centre of the room, clutching a candle to her chest, her underlit face frozen in a rictus of fear. On the far wall, on the white limewash, some shaky hand had written in blood:
One year, one day
after you wed, you pay.
But that was not the horror of the room. On the bed, propped up on the pillow, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of a new-born child, was a day-old lamb, with a little white baby’s linen cap tied to its head. The animal had been crudely skinned before being dressed in linen bands, and its pink, glistening flesh, pointed jaw, and bulging blue-grey eyeballs gave it the resemblance of a freakishly deformed human infant. Nur, it seemed, was back in our midst, her malice towards us undimmed.
The room smelled of blood and excrement and burnt hair. There were people crowding into the chamber behind us, peering through the smashed doorway, muttering and crossing themselves, and the light of half a dozen candles made the crude lamb-baby look even more terrible. I strode across to the bed and swept the awful dead thing off the blankets with one sweep of my hand, and then I went and took Goody in my arms, pressing her wet face gently into the crook of my neck and shoulder.
She was no longer screaming, but her whole body was shuddering with the shock of the encounter. I held her tightly. We did not speak. Then I steered her, on unresisting feet, out of the guest house and back into the hall, and from there through into my bedchamber. And, holding her chastely in my arms, we both lay down on the bed and I gently rocked her until, some hours later, she found sleep.
I could not sleep myself: the words written on the wall in Goody’s chamber marched through my head in a simple, endless drum-beat: One year, one day, after you wed, you pay. One year, one day, after you wed, you pay …
The next morning, at dawn, I rose, summoned a sleepy-eyed Thomas from his pallet, washed, dressed, armed myself with sword, mace and misericorde, saddled Shaitan, who was badly in need of some exercise, and took the road towards Alfreton. I was determined to speak with Nur and put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. I ordered three green-cloaked men-at-arms to accompany Thomas and myself on that mission, reckoning that five mounted warriors would easily be a match for one mutilated girl and whatever poor bedraggled followers she might have gathered around her in the deep woods. And, to be honest, it felt good, a warm satisfying feeling, to be well-armed and mounted on a mettle-some destrier, and surrounded by my loyal armed men, riding to war in defence of my woman.
We approached the lair of the witch Nur from the east, coming up the Great North Road from Westbury and turning left on a narrow path towards Alfreton into dense woodland two or three miles from that small settlement. It was an ill place, even on a bright April morning, and the trees, venerable oaks, tall alders and exuberant ash, grew close together, their trunks covered in the snake lines of vines. The trunks seemed almost to be huddled together in fear, or from cold. We were no more than five miles from my lands and yet I felt as if I were entering strange and hostile country. As we plunged into the trees, a raven cawed above our heads and flapped away on black, tattered wings, and from then on the wood seemed softly quiet, almost expectant in its thick silence. The path grew even narrower; thin questing shoots, spreading branches and catching brambles barring our path, and plucking at our horses’ coats and our loose clothing; the ground underfoot was a deep mulch of dead leaves and boggy mud, our mounts’ hoofbeats no more than dull thuds. Even in full daylight, only a little sunshine pierced the high canopy of leaves, and we moved through a green-tinged world, silent and close. Evil seemed to hum in the air with the midges and dragonflies. The men-at-arms pulled their cloaks close around their shoulders, though the day was warm. Even sturdy Thomas wore an uneasy frown on his young face.