Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [4]
Of course he woldn’t listen. He was just like the rest of them, Jane thought; it was worse than driving knowledge into her unwilling pupils.
‘Fun!’ she shouted at him. The memory of her experience in the farmyard was still searingly fresh: where was the fun in being skewered against a wall? What full was it watching grown, twentieth-century men dressing up to recreate an old war and tearing a village to pieces in the process?
But before she could protest the barn door flew open and two men were momentarily silhouetted against the light - two of the three men who had just given her the fright of her life. They marched inside.
The leader was the Cavalier who had glared at Jane from his horse, and then blandly watched his trooper having his
‘fun’. Sir George Hutchinson, Lord of the Manor of Little Hodcombe, owned half of the village and never allowed his tenants to forget it. He was a throwback to the old-fashioned arrogant squire, a dapper, military man with a brisk, authoritative manner that brooked no opposition.
His assumed role of Royalist General now gave him unbounded opportunities for power and display, and Jane could see he was in his element. He strutted across the barn like a gaudy peacock, looking almost foppish with his long gloves and broad white lace collar, which overlaid a steel shield around his throat, and his bright red Royalist sash.
Stalking along behind Sir George was the predominantly dark figure of his land agent and general henchman, Joseph Willow. He was the trooper with the banner who had very nearly speared Jane – a man for whom these opportunities for violence were too tempting to ignore. He, too, wore the red Royalist sash. Florid and quick-tempered, he made an uncertain friend and a cruel enemy. Now he looked at Jane with a smug, triumphant expression.
With a single dramatic gesture Sir George removed his feathered hat and swept it through the air in a grandiose bow. It was a movement of supreme arrogance. Added to the complacent smirk on Willow’s face, it was too much for Jane’s shattered patience. Before the country squire could utter a word, she flew at him.
‘Sir George, you must stop these war games,’ she demanded.
‘Why?’ His Ewes dilated with mock surprise. ‘Miss Hampden, you of all people - our schoolteacher -- should appreciate the value of re-enacting actual events. It’s a living history!’ Behind the mildness of his manner his gleaming eyes were sharp as needles.
But Jane had been blessed with a forceful character of her own. She was not to be cowed by Sir George’s position
- civil or military - nor by those obsessive eyes. ‘It’s getting out of hand,’ she insisted. ‘The village is in turmoil.’
Sir George glanced sideways at his henchman, and laughed. ‘So there’s been a little damage,’ he smiled, dismissing it as a trifle. ‘Well, that’s the way people used to behave in those days.’ He marched past Jane and Wolsey and strode among the bales and fodder to sit on the steps to the gallery. There he looked like a judge passing sentence –
or, in this case, exoneration. ‘It’s a game,’ he explained.
‘You must expect high spirits.’
As if to emphasise this point he reached inside the folds of his tunic and produced a black, spongy substance rolled into a ball. He kneaded it in his fingers, and tossed it into the air and caught it again.
‘It’s not a game when people get hurt.’ Jane argued. ‘It must stop.’
‘And so it shall. We have but one last battle to fight.’ Sir George regarded her with eyes that glinted obsessively. He tossed the spongy hall and caught it, and when he spoke again he weighed his words very carefully, and used his most authoritative and deliberate manner. ‘Join us.’ he suggested. ‘See the merit of what we do.’
He fixed her now with a steely stare. There was an unnatural brightness about him which made Jane shiver; his eyes seemed, like the point of that lance, to be trying to pin her to the wall. She found his invitation easy to resist.
The steady