Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [288]
“Be off,” the aulnager shouted.
Peter felt a surge of anger. He staggered towards Le Portier, and would have aimed a blow at him, except that at that moment, he saw behind him the figure of Alicia. She was standing in the doorway with a candle in her hand; and her face which suddenly looked older, was gazing at him with scorn.
He stood quite still.
“Go away, you child,” she said coldly, and then turned back into the house.
He stared at her, then her father. And then with a shrug he moved away down the street, watched by faces at every window.
It was his great misfortune that there was an unexpected witness to the whole business standing in the shadows fifty feet away.
William atte Brigge had lingered at a merchant’s lodgings near the northern gate until late that night and he had just begun to make his way through the town when he saw the young man loitering in the street. After pausing to observe him, he had seen with interest that it was young Shockley; and within minutes, his interest had turned to a malicious grin of pleasure. The boy had already broken a window and tried to assault the aulnager. Wondering what else he might do, he followed him.
At the market place he saw the youth kick the trestle tables by the cheesemarket moodily. He watched him pick up a stone and hurl it across the empty market place. He heard him cry out in rage.
The chance was too good to miss. Casting about, William found a large piece of wood that had been used to prop up one of the stalls. A moment later he had moved swiftly through the shadows, hurled the lump of wood through one of the windows of St Thomas’s church, and run quickly through the shadows towards the house of the bishop’s bailiff.
His satisfaction was complete when, a few minutes later, the bailiff strode into the market place and arrested the young man who was still mooning about near the stalls.
“I saw him throw a stone through Le Portier’s window,” he assured the official, “and then he came down here and broke the window of the church as well. Ask in Castle Street if you want witnesses.”
“I will,” the bailiff promised.
Ten days later Peter Shockley, brought before the Lord Bishop’s Court, was accused and promptly found guilty of causing a nuisance in the bishop’s market place and breaking a church window; he was sentenced to a morning in the stocks.
As the bailiff said to Edward Shockley afterwards: “I’m sorry about your boy, Shockley, but I can’t make exceptions.”
The Wilton merchant’s revenge was satisfactory; but it was not yet complete.
Punishment in the stocks was an unpredictable affair. A man could stand there all day and leave without a mark, or if he were unpopular, he might find all manner of objects thrown at him. With his hands and head locked in the heavy wooden yoke, he could not defend himself so he would probably emerge badly cut and bruised. Above all however, it was an undignified business, and when Edward Shockley heard the sentence he was filled with rage.
“You’ve disgraced the family,” he thundered. “After this, you’ll work at the fulling mill, but by God you’ll not be in charge.”
The following morning, when Peter Shockley was led out by two of the bailiff’s men and placed in the stocks, it seemed to him that his life, which two months before had appeared so full of promise, was now in ruins. I’ve lost the mill, he thought bleakly, and I’ve lost Alicia. As he stared across the market place and thought of Alicia in the arms of the knight from Winchester, his eyes filled with tears; a street urchin, not out of malice but for amusement, threw an apple at him which struck him in the mouth and made his lip bleed. He had never felt so without friends.
Yet his morning in the stocks did bring him one unexpected friend.
It was mid-morning when he became aware of a figure standing quietly by his side; and though the yoke over his neck prevented him from turning his head to look, he could see a pair of feet in rough sandals and the edge of a grey robe that was none too clean. This told him that