use it against anyone who insults me.’
‘See what a gentleman I am?’ he asked, ignoring her remark and surprising Hester by offering his hand once again to help her up. She was beached in the mud, her skirts weighed down by clods of muck, but there was no way she would touch his loathsome hand again.
‘I’d rather lie all day in the mud,’ she scowled up at him as she struggled on to her hands and knees.
‘You’re obviously more used to it than I,’ he sneered.
Hester, speechless with indignation, could only watch as he whistled for his horse. The lithe creature trotted over immediately and stood completely still as his master sprang athletically into the saddle. However disgusting he was as a person, there was no denying he was a very fine rider, so at ease in the saddle that he and his horse seemed to move as one.
‘For the entertainment you have afforded us,’ he said without looking at her, flinging a handful of coins into the mud beside her. ‘Farewell, my lady wench,’ he shouted behind him as he sped away, followed by the other five, the hound bounding at his side.
‘How dare you insult me with your money? How dare you call me “wench”? How dare you insult the Lady of Abbascombe?’ she yelled after him, finding her voice again at last, but he was already far away. ‘Wretched, damned lout,’ she cursed to herself, venting her rage and frustration on the cold sea-wind. ‘He’d better not show his face here ever again. I’ll set every man in Abbascombe on to him if he does.’
As she struggled to her feet, trying to flick some of the mud off her skirt, Hester caught sight of William, her loyal farm bailiff, and a group of villagers running towards her. They were racing across the fields, eager to help; too late to be of use, but, alas, not too late to see their lady covered from head to foot in mud, as if she were a hog in its sty.
Hester would have preferred to be left to slink home in dirty but dignified solitude, but now there was no choice. She shook her skirts energetically and wiped at her face, although she suspected her efforts were covering her skin in more smears instead of cleaning it. Then she stood up straight to face her people, determined to behave nobly, however ignoble she might look.
‘My lady, are you all right? Did those men hurt you?’ asked William, all concern for her as ever.
‘I’m not hurt at all, just very muddy,’ Hester reassured him, putting her hand up to pat her plaits into place and finding a great lump of muck sticking to her hair.
‘We saw them from Clifftop Field and came as fast as we could.’
‘It’s all right, they’ve gone now. Never to return, I hope.’
‘They looked like crusaders, my lady,’ said Guthrum, a giant of a man, the largest and strongest in the village, who worked regularly in her fields, as well as cultivating his own plot of land.
‘You could well be right, Guthrum. They were certainly brutish enough.’
Crusaders returning from the Holy Land—yes, of course. The dark one had said they had been abroad for years. Now that the war was over and there were no more Saracens to kill, the adventurers were back. A group had passed through the village last year, demanding food and shelter. One had tried to seduce one of the village girls and there had been trouble. And now six more of them were riding roughshod over her land, destroying everything in their path. She’d had bitter experience of their type in the past—a long time ago, when the war began ten years earlier—but she hadn’t forgotten, could never forget the way that brute had treated her when he left for the war.
Suddenly all the old memories came flooding back, memories of that other crusader, long lost, thank God, no doubt dead and buried in some Saracen land years ago and good riddance. But the wound still throbbed with pain when memories touched it.
‘Right,’ she said to the men, shaking her head to try to clear the unwelcome thoughts and trying to ignore the muddy flecks which flew from her hair. ‘Let’s forget about them and finish off the sowing. A little more mud will make no difference to me. Eadric,’ she said, calling to Guthrum’s son, a trustworthy boy who was working with the men for the first time this year, sufficiently strong now to help with the heavy work of guiding the oxen and plough. ‘Eadric, those men dropped some coins. Why don’t you gather them up and share them amongst the children who are scaring the crows? Keep one for yourself.’
‘Oh, yes, my lady,’ said Eadric as he dashed off, his round face alight with the glee of being entrusted with an important task. Hester wouldn’t touch the money herself, but her people would be glad of a little extra.
These days there was a feeling of optimism in the village and on the smallholdings of Abbascombe, but the bad days were not so long ago that anyone could feel complacent. And some of those days had been very bad. They’d had hard years, which had tested them all, but they’d pulled through—well, most of them had. Wet summers and harsh winters, poor harvests and high taxes—taxes to pay for those blasted crusades, of course. War games for the lords, while the ladies stayed at home and struggled to keep body and soul together on the land.
Hester followed her workmen back up to Clifftop Field. This was the furthest field of Abbascombe Manor, on the very edge of the cliffs. It was Hester’s favourite, with the sea crashing on to the rocks hundreds of feet below, the waves beating a constant rhythm even on the balmiest of summer days.
While the men had been gone, the women and children had been doing good work scaring away the birds, throwing stones or whooping every time a crow or a gull swooped down to peck at the freshly sown corn.
‘Right, William, how are we getting on?’ Hester asked, businesslike now, though her cheek was still stinging from the scratches of that miscreant’s bristles, and her hands were not quite steady yet.
‘Not too bad, my lady. We’ll have to work late, but I reckon we’ll be able to finish tonight.’
‘We’ll have to. If Breda is right, the rains will start tomorrow and there’ll be no more ploughing after that.’ Breda, the wise woman, could almost always be trusted to predict the weather. On sleepless nights, Hester had sometimes watched unseen as the mysterious old woman limped out of the village before dawn to judge the formation of the clouds, the scent in the air, the way the frogs were swimming… Whatever it was she relied on for her information, it seemed to work.
According to Breda, the next week was to be filled with rain. Hester thought of the six riders and hoped they had a long journey ahead of them…a long, wet journey, very wet and cold, with no one foolish enough to offer them shelter, not even in a barn.
‘Good to get a bit of water on the new-sown corn though,’ William was saying as Hester’s thoughts veered back to the present.
She nodded her agreement. She and William always agreed. They had been working closely together ever since the old lord had died. She’d had her doubts about Benoc, the previous bailiff, who’d always had a tendency to callousness when dealing with the labourers. As soon as she had become sole mistress of Abbascombe, she had begun to watch him carefully and when she caught him selling her grain to corn factors in Wareham and pocketing the proceeds, she had given him his marching orders and appointed William.
Young and keen, William was a local boy who knew the manor inside out. He knew exactly which crop would grow best in which corner of the soil, the tiny variations from field to field, the way the sweep of the wind differed from one clifftop to another. Most importantly, she knew he loved Abbascombe
