Something Red (9 page)

He entered a door in the southeast corner, between the inn and the storehouse, and found himself in a short enclosed walkway where brooms were leaned in a corner; from wooden pegs hung coiled rope and a tattered cloak. Three wide doorways led from this passage. To his left must be the inn: a din of voices sounded just beyond, and now and again he could hear Molly above the talk and laughter.

Two doorways led to the right. He poked his head into one and found himself in the pantry, an Eden of tempting fragrance. A spacious counter ran thwartwise immediately inside the door, barring entrance to the rest of the long room. The pantry took up a good part of the storehouse. One of Osbert’s elder retainers served as pantler, with two of the younger housecarls as prentices. The pantler nodded pleasantly enough to Hob, but after a bit, Hob realized that one or the other of Osbert’s pantry crew was keeping an unobtrusive watch on him.

Hob stood just inside the doorway and looked down the room at the bunches of dried herbs and bags of spices, some grown locally and some that Osbert traded for. Smoked hams and mutton legs and cheeses swung from the roof beams. The walls, of roughly dressed logs
chinked with clay, were lined with barrels and bins stretching away into the shadows.

He had to step in and move to the side as cook’s mates came hurrying in, one after the other, from the inn’s main room, where cooking was done in the great fireplace. A flurry of urgent requests, and the younger pantrymen began bringing meats and grains and spices to the counter to be taken away, while the pantler kept account with tally sticks.

After a hectic few minutes, the cook’s prentices were gone; the pantler came up to the counter and leaned on his elbows. Hob said, looking about, “Is all this Master Osbert’s, then?”

“It is indeed, cock. Tha’s just come wi’ yon pilgrims, hast tha? But surely tha’s young to be away on pilgrimage?”

“Away on— No, sir, I’m with Mistress Molly’s people.”

“Is Mistress Molly come in again, then!” He spoke over his shoulder. “Perkin, Daniel! Here’s Mistress Molly’s lad, her what eased my little Hildelith of her fever.”

After that, nothing would do but that Hob would be shown about the pantry and given a glimpse of some of Osbert’s riches, with Tilred the pantler as proud as though they were his own.

He waved a hand at sacks and wooden bins. “Theer’s thy anise, ginger, an’ t’ small cask is pepper; yon quarter-bushel cask is salt. Look tha aboon: theer hangs thyme, rosemary, and t’ wee sacks are of mustard seed. Thae bins are turnips an’ onions an’ garlic, sithee, an’ theer by t’ wall be casks o’ salt meat, an’ we put up t’ dried peas an’ beans an’ oats an’ such in yon butts.”

These last were barrels almost as big as Hob himself, stacked in two-tiered rows. His eye followed them as the pair marched deep into the pantry’s recesses. In the back wall he could just make out a doorway into a large room, where even greater barrels loomed in the shadows: the buttery, where the butts of ale and wine were stored. “Yon’s t’buttery, which young Master Forwin has in charge, sithee.” To one side of the
buttery entrance was a staunch well-made door, its bar secured with a cumbersome cylindrical lock. Osbert was reputed to have a store of silver coin; some said golden coin as well.

“. . . and remember Tilred to thy mistress, lad,” the pantler was saying. He plunged a broad hand into an open sack and poured a fistful of almonds into Hob’s cupped palms.

Hob thanked him and wandered back into the passageway. He put most of the almonds in his pouch, then knelt and cracked a few with the hilt of his knife. Water splashed nearby; voices echoed hollowly from wooden walls. Hob, his mouth full, went to the third doorway, off to the courtyard side of the passage.

Here he discovered a small octagonal outbuilding, attached to the storehouse; this housed the deep handsome well, sturdily built of fitted stone, that had given the family its name. It had originally been outdoors, but then Osbert’s enterprising father had seen fit to enclose it, and now water drawn up by winch and bucket could be poured into stone troughs that ran through the walls, in this direction into the adjacent inn, in that direction into the adjacent stables. Now none need haul large buckets of water across a courtyard slippery with slush, or break a skim of ice on troughs that watered the livestock.

“Killed? How could this be Tibby, then?”

“This were Tibby’s grandmam, also called Tibby. Tha were nobbut a wee lad, an’ young Tibby hersel’ were never born yet.”

Two men were toiling here. A strong old man, gray-stubbled, hauled at a winch handle, and up came a groaning oaken bucket, so full that the water spilled in sheets down its sides as it swayed on the rope. He lifted it easily from the hook and passed it to a younger man, who carried it, staggering a little, a few paces and poured it into one of the troughs, while his elder attached another bucket and began lowering it.

“An’ Wimund threw the ax at her?”

“Nay, she were wi’ Old Martin and Otho—both gone now—and
they all just set oot from here at inn, and t’ moon bright, and they was all deep in drink. And Wimund, that had come that close tae knives wi’ Otho over Tibby in courtyard—Master Osbert’s faither, Old Master Ernald, near threw ’em tae mastiffs, he was that put oot at sich ruction—Wimund come ten, eleven paces behind, and his wood-ax in his hand, and callin’ tae Tibby to come away and leave Otho. All of ’em staggerin’, we could see it from yon gateway. Nay, lad, put that in t’other trough.”

Hob leaned in the doorway, happily chewing his almonds and listening to the tale. The elder housecarl had to conserve his breath till the next heavy bucket was up on the lip of the well. He was panting a little, but only a little.

“And Otho comes roond wi’ his knife already oot and starts back at Wimund, and Tibby throws hersel’ on Otho tae keep him back, but Wimund’s cast his ax at Otho already, sithee, and didn’t it catch poor Tibby in t’ back of her neck, and she drops in road, dead as a stane.”

“Jesus save us!” said the younger man, and passed back the empty bucket. “Two more and she’s done, Uncle.”

“And Otho give a great cry, and he and Old Martin stand lookin’ at her, and Wimund turns and walks into t’ forest, and we seen nowt of him syne. Nor hide nor hair of him. He were outlawed; they read it oot at Mass, but none seen him syne.” He paused a moment and regarded the winch handle absently. “She were a fine-lookin’ woman, too. I fancied her mysel’.”

The old man began to lower the bucket again, and now Hob, his mouth full of almonds and his ears full of the housecarl’s tale, suddenly felt as though a cold shadow had swept over the inn. The creaking of the ropes and the squeal of the winch, the plash of the water as it lurched back and forth in the bucket, made it difficult to hear sounds from outside the walls, yet he almost felt that he had heard that cry,
that
cry, that he had first heard in the wooded valley below the Thonarberg.

He turned at once and went through the passageway to the common
room of the inn, seeking Molly. After a moment he saw her across the room crowded with pilgrims, talking earnestly to Osbert. Nemain came up to him.

“Did you hear it?” he asked, his eyes wide and staring.

“I did not,” she said. “There is a mort of noise here within; but it troubled me naetheless, and Herself says she felt it in the floor, through the soles of her feet. We are to do the round of the walls, with Jack and Ernald and others, and some dogs.”

They stood together and watched as Osbert bent his head to listen to Molly, nodded, pursed his mouth, put his hand around and absently fondled the hilt of a knife sheathed behind his back. Hob fidgeted; he felt that he would jump from inside his skin if they did not do something, anything. He turned to Nemain.

“I got these from the pantler,” he said distractedly. He opened his pouch and showed her the almonds. “His name is Tilred, he’s a friend to Herself.” He hardly knew what he said. “I’ll come with you, about the walls.”

She put her hand in and took a rough half of the nuts, transferring them to her own pouch. She squeezed his wrist affectionately. She smiled at him; but then her eyes shifted past him, at the door to the courtyard, and thence to the world outside, and her face closed down.

A
SHORT WHILE LATER
, Jack went out in the gathering dusk to the courtyard and came back with the war hammer at rest on his shoulder. Ernald and Matthew, each carrying an ax, were waiting in the little passage from the pantry to the hall, trailed by a pair of tall rough-coated hounds of brindled gray. Part deerhound, their ancestor had traveled with a party down from Scotland on embassy to the English court. The Scots had paused at the inn in the elder Ernald’s time long enough for their deerhound to give a distinctive cast to later generations of Osbert’s
house dogs. Yet these were mixed enough that they did not violate the prohibition against keeping Scottish deerhounds: this fell on any person of lesser estate than an earl. These hounds were kept apart from the grim mastiffs who made up Osbert’s night watch. The lean dogs, five in all, had the free run of the inn; they were whistled up when the men of the household went hunting.

The women had shed their veils as though preparing for exertion, and went bareheaded, an unusual sight when the troupe was among others, although grandmother and granddaughter were, on the road, more casual in their dress than was common. Molly had plaited her hair into a single braid, and it hung far down her back, and so had Nemain. With the hair pulled back so severely from their faces, they seemed to Hob to be stern and powerful, even young Nemain, and somehow remote.

The two women, Jack, and Osbert’s sons went out the postern door in the side of the gate, with Hob trailing after the party. The little group crossed the narrow run between inner and outer walls and went through the outer gate. Slowly they walked the perimeter of the inn. The early evening was crisp and still. They stayed close to the weather-silvered logs of the outer wall that ran around the sides of the inn buildings and the front wall of the courtyard. Dry dead vines crunched underfoot and caught at their ankles; the nimble Matthew went ahead, pulling the occasional tangle of low brush and vine roots aside with his ax till the women passed.

At each corner of the compound Molly and Nemain paused, and stood side by side, eyes wide, faces strained, listening, listening. They sniffed the air, they turned about, they scanned the forest. Hob watched in fascination. An erratic wind blew this way and that; it moved the brindled fur along the hounds’ shoulders. Down the women’s backs the two braids, one red, one silver-shot gray, swayed and twitched in the currents of air, like two panther tails. The dogs looked where the two Irishwomen faced, but soon, after the way of dogs, became bored: one sat down and
bit with explosive savagery at a spot on his left hind leg, chasing an itch along toward his foot; the other began investigating the base of the wall, to see if anyone of interest had left urine there recently.

Ernald hawked and spat. “Is there nowt, then, Mistress?” he asked Molly. His tone was polite, but he seemed as bored as the hounds.

“There is nothing,” she said, and then, still looking away into the woods, reached sideways and took Ernald’s arm firmly, “but be said by me, there was something hunting along our trail not a sennight since, and should it come here, see you and yours are within the gates.” She shook him gently. “Do not be slighting it, Ernald, great strong lad that you are and brave as a bear: it is something terrible, that no one should run to meet.”

T
HE COMMON ROOM WAS
awash in noise when they returned. Most of the pilgrims had been shown their sleeping quarters, had left their bundles, not without some trepidation, and were now returned, hungry and thirsty and voluble. A log fire roared in the great hearth. The fireplace was tall enough for a man to walk into and stand upright, with two cauldrons swung on iron dogs out into the flames and a small pig on a spit turned slowly by a young boy.

The wayward smoke and grease of generations, whatever had not escaped up the chimney, had blackened the deep beams of the ceiling. Osbert’s two daughters threaded their way among the tables with jacks of ale, and by the evidence of laughter and talk and empty bumpers before them, the pilgrims were no pack of sickly drinkwaters. Some villagers and carters and a pair of the shire-reeve’s men were mingling with the pilgrims. Across the room Hob could make out Aylwin’s jovial booming tones, and even the phrase “three finest glovers in Carlisle.”

More of the local countryfolk were drifting in. A rangy farmer brought a sack of wool halfway into the great room before Osbert sent
him back into the courtyard. With so little to do on the farm during these long winter nights, there was a deal of heavy drinking, and many folk from the farms and the village met for the evening at Osbert’s Inn. Osbert kept a score of alewives from the farms and homes around busy supplying his buttery.

Out in the courtyard, a housecarl took delivery of the sack, and the lanky villager went back into the inn and up to Osbert, who had retrieved his tally stick from a few score of similar sticks that hung by threads against the wall behind a counter. Osbert reached behind his back and, from a sheath thrust through his belt, drew forth his knife: a surprisingly big knife, a real sax, fully a cubit long and useful in diverse ways, some more pleasant than others. With this he made several nicks on one edge of the flat tally stick: that was for the villager’s credit for the wool. The other side showed deductions for the spirits Osbert served him. Hob wondered how the innkeeper knew which person each stick represented. As he studied the cluster of sticks hanging up, it came to him that each stick had different knots in the thread that held them to the little projections whittled in the log wall, but he could not see how Osbert remembered which sequence of knots identified this or that person.

A large group of villagers arrived, and then another, and now the room was nearly full. Hob was making his way toward Molly to ask her what he should do next, when Nemain’s hand closed on his sleeve. Her eyes were bright; she was excited; she had gone from the stern distant priestess of an hour ago, pacing the inn’s boundaries and scanning the woods for questing evil, to the mischievous young girl of last summer.