The Bleeding Land Read online

  ‘I feared you had run off too!’ Lady Mary chided Edward MacColla, the butler, who was hurrying down Shear House’s steps bearing a tray upon which sat two bottles of sherry – one full, the other a third full – and several small glasses that chinked as he hastened across the forecourt.

  ‘Ah’m sorry, mah lady,’ MacColla gnarred, glancing at Achilles who was still biting down on his bit and tossing his black head. The Scotsman was in his fifties, grey-haired, slender as a beanstalk, and had never, to Mun’s knowledge, smiled. His mouth was ever a thin line in his lantern jaw and most of the other servants, especially the women, were afraid of him.

  ‘Ah suspected tha one bottle would be lecht so ah ventured doon intae th’ cellar fur anither,’ MacColla grumbled. Mun reflected on the times he’d heard Sir Francis moan that he must be the only man who kept a butler who disapproved of drinking.

  ‘Well the cellar must be deeper than I remember it,’ Lady Mary said, uncowed by the man’s prickly demeanour and taking a glass of sherry from his tray. She reached up and offered it to her husband with a nod that implied he should drink it all and be quick about it. And so Sir Francis downed the sherry in one draught before handing the empty glass back and sweeping a gloved hand across his lips and moustaches.

  It had been Jacob who had first realized that his sister was not at Shear House. He had been up just before dawn, lighting fires with Isaac as the other servants began their daily tasks. Knowing how much his sister felt the cold, Jacob had taken to bringing her a cup of hot hippocras every morning but this morning he had found her bedchamber empty. Suspecting she might have been in Tom’s room, he had gone across to the west wing to warn her that others were awake.

  ‘I was afraid of what Lady Mary would say if she caught them,’ he had told Mun. ‘My sister said they do not have your father’s blessing. That Sir Francis will not let them marry. But Martha wasn’t there.’ Tom had opened the door and told Jacob that the last time he had seen Martha was in the parlour and that his guess was that she was with Bess.

  She had not been with Bess and now Shear House was a hive of activity as they prepared to ride out across the fields in search of Martha Green. As well as Sir Francis, Bess, Mun and Tom, several of the servants had clothed themselves in thick wool, and mounted horses that were now stamping and neighing excitedly, their ears pricked forward and tails lifted. The stable boy, Vincent, was there, as were Owen O’Neill, Peter Marten and Robert Birch, all of whom worked as labourers on the estate. A good bunch, Mun thought, so that they were bound to find Martha before anyone got too cold.

  ‘You will take the Ormskirk road,’ Sir Francis said to these men, at which they nodded resolutely. It was market day in Ormskirk and if Martha had gone there, four pairs of eyes would help the chances of finding her amongst the crowds. ‘Bess, Jacob and I will try the village and then if there is no sign of the girl we’ll ride to Lathom. The boys will ride up to the woods. One way or the other we’ll find young Martha before she freezes half to death.’ His eyebrows arched. ‘And we’ll save ourselves some trouble by separating the mares from the others, especially given Achilles’s mood this morning.’

  There were a few murmurs as the men voiced their own opinions about where Martha might have gone and each of them took their sherry in one tip to put some warmth in their bellies for the ride.

  ‘Well, good hunting!’ Sir Francis announced, then pulled Priam’s reins to turn the horse towards the south. And with that they all set off into the cold, bright day, their breath and that of their mounts fogging the freezing air. To find Martha Green.

  Mun wanted to ask about the fight at Baston House, wanted to know who was there and each man’s role in his brother’s debasement, but he did not know how to ask, for Tom was in a black mood. He smouldered like match-cord. His bruised and swollen face was clenched in pain and he sat his horse awkwardly, leaning one way and then the other, compensating for unseen hurts. So Mun held his tongue as they rode up the worn track leading to Old Gore meadow, with Parbold Hill looming against the blue sky.

  ‘He’s a good swordsman,’ Tom said eventually, cuffing away some liquid that was oozing from the bulge of his blackened eye.

  Mun did not know whether he was referring to Lord Denton or his son Henry, but he guessed at William. ‘He fought in the Low Countries and against the Scottish rebels with Father and grew a reputation,’ he said, remembering Sir Francis telling him that though he had no liking for William Denton the man was a good soldier. Brave too.

  ‘I should have taken a pistol and shot the bastard,’ Tom said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Then what, little brother?’ Mun asked. ‘The others would have surely killed you. As it was you were lucky that Denton let you walk away. You attacked him in his own house in front of witnesses. He could have you arrested. I’d wager he will. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘He raped Martha!’ Tom spat.

  ‘And he’ll pay for it,’ Mun said, though he suspected there was more to it than straightforward rape, that the waters were muddier than that. From what he had pieced together, Martha had gone alone to see Lord Denton and had said nothing about it afterwards. The girl was surely aware of her own beauty. She knew the effect it had on men. Might even have wondered what agreements might be made in her desperation to save her father from the noose. If she had gone merely to appeal for clemency, why hide it from Tom?

  ‘You should have taken me,’ Mun said.

  The crack of a twig echoed in the beech woods up ahead and for a moment neither brother spoke, ears straining and eyes riveted towards where the sound had come from. A fallow deer bounded deeper into the trees, its white tail bobbing. Mun relaxed. They were up on the high ground behind Shear House now, but at least the trees would offer some protection from the icy wind.

  ‘You can come and watch me kill him,’ Tom said through the twist of his mangled lips.

  They took an old cart path that had been carved years ago by men lugging timber down to the village and Mun instinctively looked up at the overarching skeletal branches that roofed the deep channel, appreciating how much warmer it was in the beech woods than out there among the wind-flayed meadows and rolling hummocks.

  Other than the chink of tack and the creak of leather they made relatively little sound as they delved deeper into the woods. Beneath them the soft loam was covered by a thick, springy crust of brown beech leaves and it was this otherworldliness, Mun supposed now, that had intrigued them both as boys. Woods were places apart, where brave imaginations could conjure fantasies. Where boys could play at war.

  But they were boys no longer and the time for games had passed.

  He glanced at his brother whose long sand-coloured hair, a shade darker than his own, was still bloodstained and would be until it was washed properly. His brother who was talking of killing a man for real. And Mun did not know what else to say.

  A little while later they stopped at a thatched wooden farmhouse from whose chimneys sooty smoke spewed into the blue sky. Mun asked the farmer, a thickset, red-haired man named Goffe, if he or his family had seen Martha. Eyeing Tom warily the man doffed his hat and shook his head, saying that he and his boy had only just returned from taking the sheep to new pasture and so would not know if a girl or the King of England himself had passed by. His wife and daughter had set off for the market at Ormskirk at first light so he could not speak for them. But he offered the brothers some broth and warm cider to fortify them against the chill, which Mun gracefully declined, noting the relief in the farmer’s face though not surprised by it, for Goffe would have little to say to Sir Francis Rivers’s sons. Besides which, Mun had noticed that ever since the discord between the King and Parliament, many tenant farmers and men of simple means seemed more inclined to keep themselves to themselves. As though the problems were none of their affair and conversing with landowners and the like would only bring them trouble.

  So Mun and Tom went on their way, riding at a trot along the old paths until, after another mile or so,
Mun shook his head and pulled up, calling for Tom to stop. ‘She cannot have come so far in the time,’ he said. ‘Not on foot.’

  ‘None of the mares was missing,’ Tom said, shifting in his saddle, the dark scowl twisting into a grimace at some pain.

  Mun shook his head and scratched his bearded cheek, then stood in the stirrups and scanned the bleak landscape across which the low winter sun spilled light that looked warm but was not. ‘Where do you two go to be alone?’ he asked.

  Tom frowned. ‘We are not children,’ he said, scowling, ‘or star-crossed lovers from one of those plays Bess and Mother love so. We have shared a bed.’ This admission came with a defiant glint in his good eye. ‘Damn Father and his disapproval, but we shall not sneak around like mice around the cat.’

  Mun raised his palms. ‘All right, little brother, calm yourself,’ he said, then frowned like a man looking for another way round a quagmire. ‘Where did you and she . . . use to go? When you were children,’ he said, half smiling, ‘and you didn’t want Minister Green to know that his daughter was rolling in the hay with a Rivers boy.’

  Tom glowered at him for a heartbeat and seemed about to object again, but then his swollen lips curled just a touch. ‘The bridge,’ he said. ‘We used to meet at the bridge.’

  Or underneath the bridge more likely, Mun thought. For Mun had met girls at the old stone bridge that crossed the wide part of the Tawd many times. Had even, one summer’s day when he was fourteen, etched Agnes Waite’s name into one of the voussoirs, though he’d never told Tom that. He had been beguiled by the effect the crumbling stone arch had on their voices and had wondered if that was how his father sounded when he spoke in the grand buildings of Westminster or London. Time in that dark, hidden place on the riverbank had seemed to stand still, which was what you wanted it to do if you were with a girl who would have to be off home before she was missed. He wondered if boys still took girls to the old bridge thinking it their own secret place.

  ‘She won’t have gone there,’ Tom said glumly. ‘I dare say she won’t want to be reminded of me.’

  ‘Any other ideas where to look?’ Mun asked. But Tom shook his head and with a flick of the wrist turned Achilles south-east towards the Tawd, towards the place where the Ormskirk road crossed the burgeoning river.

  And it was there that they found Martha Green.

  Tom had gone off at the gallop, perhaps eager to prove that searching at the old bridge was a bad idea, or maybe just to avoid having to talk. Together they had spurred down from the high ground, Shear House on their right, across wide fields in which plough teams laboured, breaking up the weeds and the remains of the last harvest and turning them under the soil to feed the next crop. They had raced past orchards busy with women preparing the trees for the next fruit season, and skirted copses of oak, maple and hazel in which pigs rooted noisily. And it was past midday when they came down from the fields and pastures to an ancient drovers’ path that followed the meandering Tawd. The low winter sun cast them and their mounts in nightmarish shadow forms before them, long spindly legs ranging along the sunken way that was still laced with last night’s frost.

  On rounding a thicket of bare alder and ash they came to the bridge and slowed their mounts to a walk. Achilles whinnied and snorted, breath gushing from flared nostrils to cloud the crisp air. There was no sign of Martha.

  ‘I told you she wouldn’t come here,’ Tom said through a grimace, patting Achilles’s strong neck. The horse squealed again and stamped his feet and this time Tom growled at him. Then Hector snorted and tossed his head.

  ‘Easy, boy,’ Mun soothed. Tom had already turned Achilles round so that the pale sunlight fell on his ravaged face, and there he sat glowering, waiting for his brother. But Mun did not turn. For some reason he did not fully understand himself, Mun gave Hector a touch of heel, urging him forward. Perhaps it was to satisfy a sense of nostalgia, to recall simpler times when this had been a magical place. Or perhaps it was some other, darker sense that impelled him to get a closer look at the old bridge, a curiosity piqued by the stallions’ strange behaviour.

  Whatever it was it led him along the bank of the murmuring river. And that was when he saw it: a woman’s body hanging by the neck from a rope tied to the remains of the worm-holed wooden rail atop the bridge. Before, it had been hidden behind the pier and the curve of the arch, but now there it was, swinging gently in the bridge’s cold shadow, a dark pendulum against the blue eastern sky beyond. It was Martha.

  Mun’s stomach lurched and he yelled his brother’s name as he spurred Hector up the bank and onto the bridge, hoping they were not too late but knowing that they were. Then he was dismounted, calling Martha’s name and leaning over the low wall to get closer to her, desperate for some sign of life. But there was no life, just a corpse hanging on a rope, a face that had been beautiful, so beautiful, now blue and grotesque, its tongue bulging from a rictus mouth.

  ‘Damn it! Help me!’ he roared, not knowing whether to pull her up with the rope or try to lower her into the river. Surely the river was too deep there to wade in, but the idea of hauling her up by her neck disgusted him. ‘I don’t know what to do!’ he yelled. ‘Help me!’ But Tom was still below on the bank, dismounted and staring at Martha, his face clenched in its own rictus of horror. So Mun took a grip on the rope which he supposed was a tethering rope from their own stables.

  Then he braced his shins against the cold stone and began to heave. The girl was surprisingly heavy but Mun was strong, and once he had enough of the rope he put it across his broad shoulders, bracing the weight so that his arms could do the hauling. Then the weight was as nothing and he realized that Tom was there too, and together they pulled Martha up until Tom was able to lean over the edge and grip her under her arms. He hefted her over the low wall and laid her on the ground and for a long moment the brothers looked at her. Mun could not help but stare at Martha’s neck which was clearly broken and now so unnaturally, horribly stretched. Then Tom bent double and vomited.

  Mun said nothing for fear that to unclamp his own jaw was to void his stomach, too. He took off his riding cloak and laid it over the girl’s dead body, feeling guilty as he covered her up. Yet relieved, too. Then, half stumbling, he went back to the low wall and slumped against it, looking up at the blue sky and the gulls whose arched white underwings reflected the pale golden light of the freezing day.

  Because Martha Green was dead.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MUN KNEW THEY must have been at the bridge for at least an hour. Perhaps closer to two. During that time he had tried to think of what he might say to his brother. Nothing had come to mind, besides which, anything uttered into the silence now would, by its conspicuousness, take on an import at odds with the words themselves. Anything ventured would blunder and fail, he knew, and so he kept his silence and watched his brother’s heart break. Tom sat slumped, had barely moved a muscle the whole time. He had thrown Mun’s cloak off Martha but then, seeing that her skirts were wet, he had replaced it leaving only her face uncovered. Martha lay on her back, her head cradled on Tom’s legs and her arms by her sides as he hunched over, staring into her face, his hands smoothing her raven-black hair back from her forehead over and over again. But no one would mistake the scene for two young lovers sharing a moment of intimacy. They would see the girl’s swollen tongue protruding from blue lips. They would notice her bloated red hands that had filled with blood. They would not see the young man’s face for he was slouched over the girl, but they would feel the agony coming off him, sense the torment twisting his soul like a weighted rope.

  Eventually Mun rose on stiff legs and walked over to the couple, standing silently for a long moment, loath to interrupt. ‘Let me take her,’ he said gently. Tom did not look up, did not break the rhythm of his hand stroking her hair as he whispered tenderly, as though they two were the only people left on God’s earth. ‘She can ride with me,’ Mun said, placing a hand on Tom’s shoulder, which made him flinch. Tom’s eyes locked
on his, though they were glazed, somehow unseeing. Far away.

  ‘We should get back. Take Martha home. Mother will know what to do.’ Tom blinked slowly but said nothing, then bent to Martha’s bloodless face once more and continued whispering words Mun could not hear. So Mun waited a while longer, watching flocks of rooks and jackdaws sweeping into a distant field. They came in widely spaced drifts like flurries of black snow, settling behind a man and boy plough team to pillage the turned soil. ‘We must go, Tom,’ he said at last. Though he did not know why they must go. In truth they could have stayed on the old bridge until dusk and still made it back before dark. And even then, what? Yet he itched to be away, to shrug off the black cloak of the thing. To stay was to indulge Tom’s pain, to let it seep deeper into his own soul where the weevils of guilt began to feed. Guilt for not helping Martha when she must have been desperate. Guilt for not standing beside Tom against the Dentons. For not being with his brother when Tom needed him.

  ‘I will take her,’ Tom said, swallowing hard. He did not move.

  Mun shook his head. ‘Let me do it.’ For a heartbeat Tom glared at him, but then the younger man’s eyes softened, which Mun took to be assent. And so, carefully, more carefully than he had ever done anything in all his life, Mun bent and took the dead girl into his arms, trying not to look at her face.

  The ride back to Shear House seemed to take for ever. But he had thought it unseemly to gallop with Martha’s body lying across Hector’s rump and he knew his brother thought the same, though neither had spoken of it. So they had walked, each adrift on the darkling sea of his own thoughts, as the bright day dimmed and turned colder still. There was no wind to talk of now and yet he could smell wood smoke on the air when they were still half a mile from home. He guessed the others would be back from their respective searches by now. He imagined Bess and Jacob standing in the forecourt waiting for him and Tom to arrive, expecting to see Martha mounted behind Tom, arms circling his waist. But when they passed through the main gateway under the scrutiny of the majestic stone lions on their plinths, and eventually came within sight of Shear House, Mun saw no one waiting in the cold gloom. He did not know whether that would make the thing harder or easier.