Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [346]
“Well, ferret-face,” she addressed John Wilson. It was said cheerfully and without malice. “I hear you’ve got to give up the farm.”
John gave her a sidelong glance, but said nothing.
“Where will you live?”
John shrugged. “Dunno.”
She had grunted thoughtfully.
“I need some help on my land. If I buy this farm, you can stay on it and work for me. I need four days a week. How’s that?”
To little Walter this seemed wonderful news: they would not have to leave. He could not understand the look of white anger that passed over his father’s face.
“If I do that,” John said slowly at last, “then I’d be a villein. I’m a free man now.”
Mary did not seem interested.
“Can’t help that. It’s work anyway.”
It was not uncommon for a free man without money to be forced to take a position giving work-rent to a landlord which made him technically a villein, and it was possible for a villein to become rich again and buy his freedom back. But after all his efforts, to be the serf of one of the hated Shockleys! He tasted his greatest bitterness.
“At least you stay on your farm,” Mary said, not unkindly.
Walter remembered so well his father’s sad nod. Even at this age, he knew it was a gesture of surrender, and, though he did not understand the reasons, he felt sorry for his father, and angry with the big woman who seemed to be bullying him.
“All right.”
Mary smiled.
“That’s settled then.” She was turning to go, when she paused. She had noticed something on Cristina.
“Want to sell that gold chain?”
Mary thought she was doing the family a favour, but Walter remembered only how his mother’s hand had reached up and grasped the chain, as though someone was trying to tear it from her. He did not know where it had come from.
“Maybe,” Cristina had replied, dismally.
“Good,” Mary said. “I like that chain.”
It was the only ornament she ever bought in her life.
But what stuck in Walter’s mind even more was what followed after Mary Shockley had gone. Never, during the long sad years that his father worked the Shockley land, never while he saw Cristina slowly turn into an old woman with arthritic hands, and never afterwards did the vision leave him. For it was to him, Walter, that his father had turned when Mary had gone; it was he who saw, to his astonishment, his father’s calm and pleasant face suddenly contort into a look of savage hatred, and it was into his eyes that his father’s, full of an age-old urgency and rage, had looked as he took him by the shoulders and exclaimed:
“We’ll take this land back one day, and Shockley farm, and the mill, you understand? We’ll kick him out. If I don’t, you will. Don’t ever forget.”
He never did.
The trouble with Roger de Godefroi, on the other hand, was that he overspent. The two fine estates old Jocelin had preserved for him were there to be enjoyed; nothing had given his grandfather greater joy than to see his heir cut such a fine figure at the joust: he had pleased him by being everything a young noble should be. It was natural that after Jocelin was gone, he should live in a manner befitting so fine a gentleman; he knew it was expected of him.
As a youth he had attended the king on his expeditions to Wales: the revenues from the estates allowed him to do so in style. He jousted. He could afford it. He entertained sumptuously at Avonsford; the estates almost supported this and could have recovered. He married: a lady from Cornwall. She had wonderful Celtic looks – rich brown hair and dazzling blue eyes, which were greatly admired – and a tiny dowry. He had chosen her because she was the most beautiful woman watching a tournament at which he had triumphed. He provided her with magnificent dresses from London and the knight of Avonsford and his lady were pronounced the most handsome couple in the region. The estates groaned. He built a fine walled garden and planted it with mulberry trees, nut trees, roses, vines and willows; it was only luck that he never found time to build