Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [10]
“But…” Michael was still frowning. Nick’s younger brother was notoriously slow in understanding, but even he knew that something was wrong in the winter stable.
“Do it!” the priest snarled at him.
“It’s not right,” Michael said stubbornly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sir Martin said angrily and he pushed Michael out of the way and grabbed the girl’s collar. She gave a short, desperate yelp that was not quite a scream, and she tried to pull away. Michael was just watching, horrified, but the echo of a mysterious voice and a vision of heaven were still in Nick Hook’s head and so he stepped one quick pace forward and drove his fist into the priest’s belly with such strength that Sir Martin folded over with a sound of half pain and half surprise.
“Nick!” Michael said, aghast at what his brother had done.
Hook had taken the girl’s elbow and half turned toward that far window. “Help!” Sir Martin shouted, his voice rasping from breathlessness and pain, “help!” Hook turned back to silence him, but Michael stepped between him and the priest.
“Nick!” Michael said again, and just then both the Perrill brothers came running.
“He hit me!” Father Martin said, sounding astonished. Tom Perrill grinned, while his younger brother Robert looked as confused as Michael. “Hold him!” the priest demanded, straightening with a look of pain on his long face, “just hold the bastard!” His voice was a half-strangled croak as he struggled for breath. “Take him outside!” he panted, “and hold him.”
Hook let himself be led into the stable yard. His brother followed and stood unhappily staring at the hanged men just beyond the open gate where a thin cold rain had begun to slant across the sky. Nick Hook was suddenly drained. He had hit a priest, a well-born priest, a man of the gentry, Lord Slayton’s own kin. The Perrill brothers were mocking him, but Hook did not hear their words, instead he heard Sarah’s smock being torn and heard her scream and heard the scream stifled and he heard the rustling of straw and he heard Sir Martin grunting and Sarah whimpering, and Hook gazed at the low clouds and at the woodsmoke that lay over the city as thick as any cloud and he knew that he was failing God. All his life Nick Hook had been told he was cursed and then, in a place of death, God had asked him to do just one thing and he had failed. He heard a great sigh go up from the marketplace and he guessed that one of the fires had been lit to usher a heretic down to the greater fires of hell, and he feared he would be going to hell himself because he had done nothing to rescue a blue-eyed angel from a black-souled priest, but then he told himself the girl was a heretic and he wondered if it had been the devil who spoke in his head. The girl was gasping now, and the gasps turned to sobs and Hook raised his face to the wind and the spitting rain.
Sir Martin, grinning like a fed stoat, came out of the stable. He had tucked his robe high about his waist, but now let it fall. “There,” he said, “that didn’t take long. You want her, Tom?” he spoke to the older Perrill brother, “she’s yours if you want her. Juicy little thing she is, too! Just slit her throat when you’re done.”
“Not hang her, father?” Tom Perrill asked.
“Just kill the bitch,” the priest said. “I’d do it myself, but the church doesn’t kill people. We hand them over to the lay power, and that’s you, Tom. So go and hump the heretic bitch then open her throat. And you, Robert, you hold Hook. Michael, go away! You’ve nothing to do with this, go!”
Michael hesitated. “Go,” Nick Hook told his brother wearily, “just go.”
Robert Perrill held Hook’s arms behind his back. Hook could have pulled away easily enough, but he was still shaken by the voice he had heard and by his stupidity in striking Sir Martin. That was a hanging offense, yet Sir Martin wanted more than just his death and, as Robert Perrill held Hook, Sir Martin began hitting him. The priest was not strong, he did not have