for a landed farmer in our prosperous region of the north, he has never learned to read or write. I feel it is something to do with the fact that his father used to beat him half senseless when he was a child. We all knew it. I can remember my mother flying into a rage with the old man, and being shown briskly off the premises of Low Back Farm. Because James cannot read or write, Verity keeps his farm’s financial books for him, and as a result he has fallen in love with her.
He takes off his leather jerkin. He smells of sweat and cattle. “I haven’t seen Verity lately,” he says. For some reason, perhaps because he knows I like him, James lives in the forlorn hope that I will help him obtain my fifteen-year-old sister’s hand in marriage. Nothing could be further from my mind.
“She’s busy, James,” I answer, and pass him some bread and cheese to cheer him up. We sit in silence for a while. The world is very beautiful today. Below the rocky plateau on which we sit, on a level with our feet, young hazel leaves are curling out of their buds. High above us a hawk hovers. Trouble for someone. A hint of the strange feeling I had yesterday returns. I say, “You know, James, I feel as if we’re being watched.”
“Aye?” He looks sceptical. “It’ll be the Green Man, I daresay.”
I laugh. Now he is making me nervous. “No, nothing like that. I expect it’s just a deer watching us from the woods.”
He smiles. “Well it’ll be the Green Man now. Speak and ye’ll see.”
“Oh stop it, James.” I lean back, knowing he finds it amusing to frighten people, and wishing I had not started this conversation and given him the opportunity. There’s nothing on this sunlit hill to harm us. Except – a flicker of light westwards across the bay. I straighten and stare. James has seen it too. He sits forward. The flicker vanishes and is replaced by a thin line of smoke rising from the watchtower across the water. It is the warning beacon. The Scots are coming.
I have a moment of simply not believing it. I think, this doesn’t happen. Three years without a raid have made me complacent.
It makes me slow, slow to react, slow to get on my feet and grapple the tinderbox from its dry place under the beacon. James is faster. He is flinging dried moss and tarry sticks on to the pyre, poking them under the wood, pinching out little tendrils for me to light. I strike a shower of sparks into the moss. All of them go out. I strike again. A few sparks wriggle along the dry filaments and then they go out too. I strike again. The moss takes, bursts into flame. I light one of the tarry sticks from it, twisting it, giving it air, and then thrust it into the centre. A fragile line of smoke trails upwards. James picks up his jerkin and sways it back and forth to create a draught, not too hard, not too gently. He is good with fires. With a sigh, a rotten branch catches and sends up a puff of flame.
“Best run now,” says James.
I pull on my boots and ram the tinderbox back into its hole, then follow James across the clearing. We pick up speed when we leave the summit with its ankle-twisting fissures, and start a slithering rush downhill, leaving the path and taking the most direct route. Bracken and tiny treelets whip our ankles. We blunder between ash, hazel and juniper. Behind us the fire burns noisily. I stop and look back, and see the pointed flame flashing high then dipping low, surrounded by a black stream of smoke, shocking against the spring sky.
All I can think is, where are the Scots? Are they coming across the bay at this moment? Are they here already, between me and the safety of the tower? They have been known to hide in the woods for days in some remoter parts, while villagers have gone about their business unawares. James and I both need to round up our livestock. We cannot take losses on the scale of three years ago, particularly as at the tower we have less gold and silver stored in the root cellar for buying new animals this year.
In a good year, Verity goes to market in Lancaster in May with a bag of gold to buy cattle, and to Kendal in August with a bag of silver to buy sheep. I swear the other farmers and auctioneers are more afraid of her than they are of many a grown man. She controls our finances as well as James’s. She pays the men, oversees the weighing of the harvest, and, once, the thrashing of a farmhand who stole a bushel of wheat. Only once, because afterwards, as they untied the lad from the elder tree by the barmkin gate, she came into my room, sat down and headed a page in her accounts book Thefts. After that she let them steal, and the page in her book headed Thefts soon filled up with her pointed black script. Our father is a different matter, however, and our increasing success in keeping him off the highways has meant there’s less saved than in previous years.
At last James and I emerge into the clearing. It is an overwhelming relief to see the tower still safe, a haven. “You’d better blow the horn, James,” I gasp as we make a dash across the open ground. He holds on to the hawthorn tree by the gatehouse, bent double, getting his breath back. I open the door and grab the battered ram’s-horn from its niche in the wall. James seizes it from me, and blows.
The sound freezes in the air. It is like doom. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and legs. James keeps blowing, getting into his rhythm now, twice outside the main door towards the valley, then up the spiral stairway, once at each slit window. The effect is immediate. Kate’s screams echo up from the cellars. Thudding feet start running on the upper floors. Leo’s voice shouts in the valley, and the cows, under the thwack of his hazel tine, start bellowing. Whatever is the watchman doing? He must be asleep, not to have seen the warning smoke on the hill and over the water.
He was. As James and I emerge on to the battlements he is rubbing his eyes and staggering about, his hair ruffled, and a smell of ale rising from him that could have ignited the beacon unaided. For a moment I feel mad with fury.
“Henry!” I slap him hard across the face with the back of my hand, the one which wears Grandmother’s turquoise ring. It leaves a broad weal and breaks his skin. Tiny wells of blood rise along the mark. It also wakes him up.
“Mis… Mistress Beatrice,” he splutters. “You’d no call to do that.”
“The Scots are coming, you great boggart!” I hit him again for good measure with the tar torch, before I go to light it at the living-hall fire, one floor down. I can hear the combined braying of James’s horn and Kate’s screaming as I run down the steps and up again, carrying the roaring torch. By then my father, Verity, Kate and two henchmen, William and Martinus, have arrived on the battlements, and have begun stacking stones and arrows by the parapet. Kate’s screaming has dropped to a whimper now. She is terrified of the Scots, and of many things. Her nerves have never been the same since the day years ago when this tiny woman, with her wonderful singing voice, wild grey hair like a dandelion seed-head and a serious limp caused by stampeding cattle during a childhood Scottish raid, was accused of witchcraft. It was because she told fortunes, inaccurately it has to be said. She was also frequently accompanied by a black cat, mother of my cat Caesar. It was enough, for those looking for someone to blame for their own misfortunes. It was the old parson who accused her, from the pulpit one Sunday. Before the matter could get out of hand, as these things so often do, Mother stood up and faced him in the nave of the church and outquoted him text by text from the Bible, suggesting that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. Or better still, eat it and choke for shame. I was astonished at my mother’s knowing, scornful voice, and at the sniggers that ran among the rows of people standing tense and motionless in the packed church. I didn’t understand what it all meant then, but heard tales later, when I was older, of this priest having a bastard in every village.
The old parson, perhaps realising that if he had Kate hanged he would have no one to sing so beautifully at his weddings and funerals, not to mention the annual two-village barn dance at which the sight of him performing a Cumberland square reel with his cassock tucked into his hose was not unknown, marched out of church that day, and afterwards said no more of the matter.
Witches hang and heretics burn, but there are fewer hangings and burnings under this queen than under the last one. Old people still speak fearfully of Queen Mary’s days. Bloody