The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett [468]
The outlaws’ success humiliated William. It made him look like a buffoon who could not police his own earldom. To make matters worse, the outlaws rarely stole from anyone else. It looked as if they were deliberately defying him. William hated nothing more than the feeling that people were laughing at him behind their hands. He had spent his life forcing people to respect him and his family, and this band of outlaws was undoing all his work.
Especially galling for William was what people were saying behind his back: that it served him right, he had treated his tenants harshly and now they were taking their revenge, he had brought this on himself. Such talk made him apoplectic with rage.
The villagers of Cowford looked startled and fearful as William and his knights rode in. William scowled at the thin, apprehensive faces that looked out from the doorways and quickly disappeared again. These people had sent their priest to plead for them to be allowed to grind their own grain this year, saying that they could not afford to give the miller a tenth. William had been tempted to pull out the priest’s tongue for insolence.
The weather was cold, and there was ice around the rim of the millpond. The waterwheel was still and the grindstone silent. A woman came out of the house beside the mill. William felt a spasm of desire when he looked at her. She was about twenty years old, with a pretty face and a cloud of dark curls. Despite the famine she had big breasts and strong thighs. She had a saucy look when she first appeared, but the sight of William’s knights wiped it off her face, and she ducked back inside.
“She didn’t fancy us,” Walter said. “She must have seen Gervase.” It was an old joke, but they laughed anyway.
They tied up their horses. It was not exactly the same group that William had gathered around him when the civil war began. Walter was still with him, of course, and Ugly Gervase, and Hugh Axe; but Gilbert had died in the unexpectedly bloody battle with the quarrymen, and had been replaced by Guillaume; and Miles had lost an arm in a sword fight over dice at an alehouse in Norwich, and Louis had joined the group. They were not boys anymore, but they talked and acted just the same, laughing and drinking, gambling and whoring. William had lost count of the alehouses they had wrecked, the Jews they had tormented and the virgins they had deflowered.
The miller came out. No doubt his sour expression was due to the perennial unpopularity of millers. His grouchy look was overlaid by anxiety. That was all right: William liked people to be anxious when he turned up.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter, Wulfric,” William said, leering. “You’ve been hiding her from me.”
“That’s Maggie, my wife,” he said.
“Cow shit. Your wife’s a raddled old crone, I remember her.”
“My May died last year, lord. I’ve married again.”
“You dirty old dog!” William said, grinning. “This one must be thirty years younger than you!”
“Twenty-five-”
“Enough of that. Where’s my flour? One sack in twenty!”
“All here, lord. If you please to come in.”
The way into the mill was through the house. William and the knights followed Wulfric into the single room. The miller’s new young wife was kneeling in front of the fire, putting logs on. As she bent down, her tunic stretched tight across her rear. She had meaty haunches, William observed. A miller’s wife was one of the last to go hungry in a famine, of course.
William stopped, looking at her bottom.