dark, only the five men saw the tall unwavering flames.
Then John, a fisherman, farted. ‘Reckon that’s ripe enough to keep the old devil away,’ he said, and the other four laughed. Then they all abandoned the chancel steps and sat with their backs against the nave wall. John’s wife had provided a basket of bread, cheese and smoked fish, while Edward, who owned a saltworks on the beach, had brought ale.
In the bigger churches of Christendom knights kept this annual vigil. They knelt in full armour, their surcoats embroidered with prancing lions and stooping hawks and axe heads and spread-wing eagles, and their helmets mounted with feathered crests, but there were no knights in Hookton and only the youngest man, who was called Thomas and who sat slightly apart from the other four, had a weapon. It was an ancient, blunt and slightly rusted sword.
‘You reckon that old blade will scare the devil, Thomas?’ John asked him.
‘My father said I had to bring it,’ Thomas said.
‘What does your father want with a sword?’
‘He throws nothing away, you know that,’ Thomas said, hefting the old weapon. It was heavy, but he lifted it easily; at eighteen, he was tall and immensely strong. He was well liked in Hookton for, despite being the son of the village’s richest man, he was a hard-working boy. He loved nothing better than a day at sea hauling tarred nets that left his hands raw and bleeding. He knew how to sail a boat, had the strength to pull a good oar when the wind failed; he could lay snares, shoot a bow, dig a grave, geld a calf, lay thatch or cut hay all day long. He was a big, bony, black-haired country boy, but God had given him a father who wanted Thomas to rise above common things. He wanted the boy to be a priest, which was why Thomas had just finished his first term at Oxford.
‘What do you do at Oxford, Thomas?’ Edward asked him.
‘Everything I shouldn’t,’ Thomas said. He pushed black hair away from his face that was bony like his father’s. He had very blue eyes, a long jaw, slightly hooded eyes and a swift smile. The girls in the village reckoned him handsome.
‘Do they have girls at Oxford?’ John asked slyly.
‘More than enough,’ Thomas said.
‘Don’t tell your father that,’ Edward said, ‘or he’ll be whipping you again. A good man with a whip, your father.’
‘There’s none better,’ Thomas agreed.
‘He only wants the best for you,’ John said. ‘Can’t blame a man for that.’
Thomas did blame his father. He had always blamed his father. He had fought his father for years, and nothing so raised the anger between them as Thomas’s obsession with bows. His mother’s father had been a bowyer in the Weald, and Thomas had lived with his grandfather until he was nearly ten. Then his father had brought him to Hookton, where he had met Sir Giles Marriott’s huntsman, another man skilled in archery, and the huntsman had become his new tutor. Thomas had made his first bow at eleven, but when his father found the elmwood weapon he had broken it across his knee and used the remnants to thrash his son. ‘You are not a common man,’ his father had shouted, beating the splintered staves on Thomas’s back and head and legs, but neither the words nor the thrashing did any good. And as Thomas’s father was usually preoccupied with other things, Thomas had plenty of time to pursue his obsession.
By fifteen he was as good a bowyer as his grandfather, knowing instinctively how to shape a stave of yew so that the inner belly came from the dense heartwood while the front was made of the springier sapwood, and when the bow was bent the heartwood was always trying to return to the straight and the sapwood was the muscle that made it possible. To Thomas’s quick mind there was something elegant, simple and beautiful about a good bow. Smooth and strong, a good bow was like a girl’s flat belly, and that night, keeping the Easter vigil in Hookton church, Thomas was reminded of Jane, who served in the village’s small alehouse.
John, Edward and the other two men had been speaking of village things: the price of lambs at Dorchester fair, the old fox up on Lipp Hill that had taken a whole flock of geese in one night and the angel who had been seen over the rooftops at Lyme.
‘I reckon they’s been drinking too much,’ Edward said.
‘I sees angels when I drink,’ John said.
‘That be Jane,’ Edward said. ‘Looks like an angel, she does.’
‘Don’t behave like one,’ John said. ‘Lass is pregnant,’ and all four men looked at Thomas, who stared innocently up at the treasure hanging from the rafters. In truth Thomas was frightened that the child was indeed his and terrified of what his father would say when he found out, but he pretended ignorance of Jane’s pregnancy that night. He just looked at the treasure that was half obscured by a fishing net hung up to dry, while the four older men gradually fell asleep. A cold draught flickered the twin candle flames. A dog howled somewhere in the village, and always, never ending, Thomas could hear the sea’s heartbeat as the waves thumped on the shingle then scraped back, paused and thumped again. He listened to the four men snoring and he prayed that his father would never find out about Jane, though that was unlikely for she was pressing Thomas to marry her and he did not know what to do. Maybe, he thought, he should just run away, take Jane and his bow and run, but he felt no certainty and so he just gazed at the relic in the church roof and prayed to its saint for help.
The treasure was a lance. It was a huge thing, with a shaft as thick as a man’s forearm and twice the length of a man’s height and probably made of ash though it was so old no one could really say, and age had bent the blackened shaft out of true, though not by much, and its tip was not an iron or steel blade, but a wedge of tarnished silver which tapered to a bodkin’s point. The shaft did not swell to protect the handgrip, but was smooth like a spear or a goad; indeed the relic looked very like an oversized ox-goad, but no farmer would ever tip an ox-goad with silver. This was a weapon, a lance.
But it was not any old lance. This was the very lance which St George had used to kill the dragon. It was England’s lance, for St George was England’s saint and that made it a very great treasure, even if it did hang in Hookton’s spidery church roof. There were plenty of folk who said it could not have been St George’s lance, but Thomas believed it was and he liked to imagine the dust churned by the hooves of St George’s horse, and the dragon’s breath streaming in hellish flame as the horse reared and the saint drew back the lance. The sunlight, bright as an angel’s wing, would have been flaring about St George’s helmet, and Thomas imagined the dragon’s roar, the thrash of its scale-hooked tail, the horse screaming in terror, and he saw the saint stand in his stirrups before plunging the lance’s silver tip down through the monster’s armoured hide. Straight to the heart the lance went, and the dragon’s squeals would have rung to heaven as it writhed and bled and died. Then the dust would have settled and the dragon’s blood would have crusted on the desert sand, and St George must have hauled the lance free and somehow it ended up in Father Ralph’s possession. But how? The priest would not say. But there it hung, a great dark lance, heavy enough to shatter a dragon’s scales.
So that night Thomas prayed to St George while Jane, the black-haired beauty whose belly was just rounding with her unborn child, slept in the taproom of the alehouse, and Father Ralph cried aloud in his nightmare for fear of the demons that circled in the dark, and the vixens screamed on the hill as the endless waves clawed and sucked at the shingle on the Hook. It was the night before Easter.
Thomas woke to the sound of the village cockerels and saw that the expensive candles had burned down almost to their pewter holders. A grey light filled the window above the white-fronted altar. One day, Father Ralph had promised
