Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [256]
The dusk began to close in. No one came. Still something – was it only curiosity? – held him there.
And then the animal began to cry.
It was not a loud noise; at times it was no more than a snuffle, followed by a little moan; but then it would rise to a whimper and conclude with an eerie, weeping cry that echoed softly across the forest floor. It was the desolate cry of an animal that has been deserted.
Darkness fell, and a light wind began to blow through the trees, making a soft rustle. It was suddenly cold. It seemed to Godric that the whole forest was still: nothing was stirring in the tall trees, silent except for the rustle as they were brushed by the wind.
Once, far away, he thought he heard a cry from a wolf. There were few wolves about at Sarum now, but occasionally they still appeared at the forest’s edge and killed sheep who were not properly protected. The deer heard the sound too, and for a time fell silent.
But then, after a period of quiet, the little doe, alone and now invisible, began crying again in the darkness. She seemed to be calling him.
No one came.
At last he could bear it no longer.
He knew that a deer with a broken leg would have to be killed by the foresters; there was no question of that.
“I hid the pig well enough,” he thought. “Why not a deer?”
Softly he moved out of his hiding place.
“Mary will eat venison tomorrow,” he said to himself.
When he reached the deer he put his arm round her neck to calm her. She shuddered. Then, reaching cleverly for his knife, he put her out of her misery.
A moment later the doe sank to the ground, and he knelt over her.
The sudden start that Harold gave came too late for him even to rise before he felt the hand on his shoulder and heard the voice of Le Portier, the agister, who, from another vantage point, had been watching him for over an hour.
Richard de Godefroi was alone in the yew arbour, enjoying the last of the warm autumn sun and, for the tenth time, reading Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of King Arthur when he looked up angrily to see the squat figure of Nicholas advancing towards him: how dare the fellow trespass into his most private retreat?
But the stoneworker, red-faced and sweating, was not daunted by even the knight’s deep frown, and his sharp question: “What now, Masoun?”
“My nephew Godric, my lord,” he burst out. “They say he has taken a deer. Help us.”
At which the knight rose, closed his book, and came without a word.
The situation could hardly have been worse, as Godefroi discovered when he spoke to the agister at his house in the forest.
There were several ways in which a man guilty of a crime against the Norman forest laws could be apprehended: but the most damning of all was guilt by bloody-hand – red-handed men sometimes called it; and Godric not only had blood on his hands – he had been taken in the act itself.
“And his dog had not been lawed,” Le Portier told the knight: he dragged Harold out from the little kennel where he was keeping him and insisted on demonstrating that he was too big to fit through the leather hoop which had to be passed fully over any forest dog if it were to escape the operation.
“What about the boy’s story?” The knight had spent an hour with Godric that morning at the house of the forester where he was being held, and had listened to his account; though it was hard to believe, he had finally decided that he was probably telling the truth.
But Le Portier only stared at him blankly. “It makes no difference,” he said. “He had blood on his hands and the law says. . . .”
“We know what the law says,” the knight interrupted impatiently. In a court of law the boy’s explanation would be useless. “But are you sure it should go to court? What if the boy made a mistake?”
It would be up to the meeting of the forest officers, the swanimote, to consider the matter at their own informal court of attachment before deciding whether to refer it to a formal prosecution before the king’s justices, and the agister