Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [379]
For he had shrewdly observed that people liked his son better than they did him. It did not worry him in the least; but he saw at once how it could be used as a weapon.
“You just smile. Soften them up,” he would instruct Edward, and it was not long before the two of them had evolved a system of negotiating in this way that was devastating.
In the summer of 1350 Walter was ready for his next big step.
Edward still laughed when he remembered that day, when they had called for the first time upon Gilbert de Godefroi, and he had followed, so perfectly, his father’s instructions.
The Black Death had taken a terrible toll upon the knight of Avonsford. He had one consolation, perhaps the greatest: he and his son had been spared. But both his wife and almost the entire village of Avonsford had been lost. The Masons, Margery Dubber and half a dozen more remained. The rest all lay in a trench beside the little churchyard. And now the knight was in deep difficulties.
The first year after the plague, this had not been so. For although the villeins and free tenants who should have worked his land had gone, he still had the right to the heriot tax payable when a peasant died. From the possessions of the dead he had collected some twenty pounds, which had at least kept the estate’s accounts in balance. During the previous year he had paid high wages to cultivate at least part of his own demesne lands, but this had brought him no actual profit. And he had also been hard hit, like many others, by a murrain which had carried off most of his sheep. The Avonsford estate needed badly to be restocked and to find fresh tenants.
Thus it was that Walter Wilson and his son presented themselves respectfully at the manor house one morning, to enquire what land might be available.
They had walked all over the estate with the knight and his son. The land, Edward could see, was good, though untended; but it was the knight’s son Thomas, a young man of his own age, who fascinated him most of all. He had never spent any time close to such a person. It was not only his pale, fine face and dark hair that made him so strikingly handsome, not only his splendid, athletic body; it was his bearing, the way he walked, the way he addressed others. How elegantly the fellow carries himself, he thought, and he was not ashamed frankly to admire him.
He did not forget their purpose, though. At each place they came to, Walter would survey the land silently. Occasionally he would mutter, or even sigh, but he seemed, out of deference to the knight, to hold back from speaking. But the more he saw, the more depressed he looked.
At last he shook his head.
“Land’s tired.”
It was true that in recent years Gilbert had used dung and marl fairly intensively to improve the yield from the land – a fact of which Walter was well aware – but to say the land was exhausted was an exaggeration.
“Don’t think I can do anything with it,” Walter said, “Sorry.” He turned to go.
As he did so, Edward watched the knight. He saw Gilbert’s face fall. It was his turn now.
“Let me put sheep on it father,” he suggested. “Graze them above and then fold them here, let them dung it. I could work some of this land.”
Walter glared at him.
“Land’s no good, you fool,” he snapped. “Can’t make any money.”
“We could do something.”
“Better land elsewhere.”
He looked sad, as if having to acknowledge that this was true.
“You said I could take on a piece of land . . .” he began, then looked at the knight and his son, as though pleading with them for support.
Walter paused.
“And what do you think it would cost?”
Edward looked confused.
“Maybe . . . a penny an acre.” That was only half what Godefroi had wanted, but Walter made a sound of disgust.
“You’ll ruin us.”
This carefully calculated discord between them was kept up throughout the rest of the negotiations. It was clear that Godefroi wanted