There was no sign of any living bones about the den, and when its overnight inhabitants were summoned with a shout and beating implements to give an account of themselves, no one appeared. Brooker Higgs was the first to raise his stick and strike the dwelling on its roof, expecting, with a single blow, to bring it to the ground and earn himself some cheap applause. His stick produced an unexpected clonk as dull and firm as a bag of chaff, but the roof, after seeming to adjust itself, fell in. What thickset man cannot bring down a length of sacking? But the hurried timber walls were stouter than they looked.
Other men stepped forward with heavier tools and would have finished the task had not, before the second blow, a pair of strangers — a young mop-headed youth with a feathery, novice beard and a shorter, older man, the father, probably — stepped out of the trees with longbows raised and drawn to the ear. In common with every other man about these parts, they clearly knew how to loose an arrow if called upon. They seemed baffled rather than belligerent. They looked, in other words, more innocent than any of us would have liked. Their squinted eyes and furrowed foreheads said, “What kind of villainy is this that takes a cudgel to a poor man’s home?”
The twins and Brooker Higgs no longer wished to be numbered among the front rank of their more aggressive neighbors, and not only because the strangers’ arrows seemed to be pointing at Brooker’s chest. He was the only one who’d done any damage yet and so was the most deserving of some punishment. He heeled his way into the crowd until his chest was not the first in line, and then — no fool — he let himself drop shorter. The women called their children to their sides and also backed away. The widow Gosse, I’m told, fainted and fell into some nettles. The other, more stalwart men made narrow with themselves, turning their shoulders to the arrowheads and tucking their elbows into their waists, protecting their soft organs.
Master Kent dismounted from Willowjack and stood behind her. He was not being cowardly but sensible. The men spread out, widening the strangers’ target and already calculating in their heads that the odds were on their side, that twenty sturdy men standing on their own God-given land with sticks and even one or two keen sickles were more than a match for two newcomers and a pair of arrows. As soon as those two arrows were released, no matter what damage they might do, the game was over and the beating could begin. As I’ve said, we’re not a hurtful people. We are, though, fearful, proud and dutiful. We do what must be done. But at this moment, so I’m told, the mood was murderous. Two poacher-arsonists were facing us with bows. We’d never known such disrespect and brazen sacrilege. The day had darkened suddenly.
Mr. Quill, for such a malformed man, showed the greatest bravery. Or was it simply courtesy? He clumsied forward wearing that ready, foolish smile which had kept us company in yesterday’s field. For a moment it was thought he meant to strike the den himself and earn the recompense of being augered through the heart by a hardened poplar arrow shaft. Indeed, one of the strangers turned his bow on Mr. Quill, secured his hold on the fletchings and string, and said in an accent no one there had heard before, “Step well away.” But the master’s chart-maker did not step well away. He had other plans. What those plans were, my neighbors never discovered. Four or five of them took advantage of what they would later describe to me as Mr. Quill’s shrewd diversion. While he distracted them with his determined smile, holding out his palms to show they had nothing to be fearful of, our bolder men edged closer to the newcomers. Two more steps and it would be done. If Mr. Quill was sacrificed in their attempt, then that might be a price they could afford. He was no cottager. They hadn’t grown used to him. No matter that his scratchings would be incomplete. I will not say they may have thought his death convenient.
This was the moment that the woman showed her face. No witnesses are in any hurry to blot out the vision of her rising from the den. She had been hidden and confined below the sacking roof all along, I’m told excitedly by almost everyone who saw it. She is the burning topic for this evening. While her men — no one knows yet what kinship there might be between the three of them — were concealed among the trees, she was evidently sitting up inside her crude dwelling and peering out between the branches and the earthy daub at what I have to call a mob. She will have wondered at the anger they brought with them, their fearsome staves and sticks, the glinting silver of their sickle blades. She will have seen a stocky young man with the stone-green eyes of a cottage cat step forward and bring his clonking stick down on her roof — and on her skull. The face that showed itself was running wet with blood, and her black hair was further darkened with a wound.
The whole encounter was transformed by blood, I’m told. What was a routine stand-off between two sets of men, two sets of armed men, both ready to defend themselves incautiously, had in a trice become an occasion of shame. The woman’s wound was too red and fresh not to take notice of. Indeed, the blood was marking her cheeks, like tears. At once the village women began to call out for restraint. Their men did not attempt those two more steps. They let their weapons fall away into the undergrowth or hang loosely from their hands. Again it was Mr. Quill who didn’t do what he was told. Despite the closeness of the bow, he moved forward awkwardly, pulled aside the topmost branches of their den, put out his hand and helped the bloody woman step into the light.
What were they to make of her? She was not beautiful, not on first encounter anyhow. She had what we might call (behind her back) a weasel face, wide-cheeked, thin-lipped, a short receding chin, a button nose, and eyes and hair as shiny, dark and dangerous as belladonna berries. What caught our women’s eyes at once was the velvet shawl she wore round her shoulders, an expensive lordly weave in heavy Turkish mauve and silver thread. Their instinct was to call out, Mind your cloth. Her blood was bulbing on her little chin and might soon drop to spoil the velvet. Their second thought declared, She’s dressed beyond her station. A woman of her kind could not possess a shawl such as that without first stealing it. Even Lucy Kent, the master’s wife, had never owned a shawl such as that. Indeed, a shawl such as that, so far as anybody could remember, had never crossed the village boundaries before. It’s not surprising, then, that so many of our wives and daughters widened their eyes in envy, hoped to feel the weight of it between their fingers, and wondered what their chances were of wearing it themselves.
The village men were not so taken by the cloth. They noticed it, of course, and how it added a becoming color to the scene. They could imagine making use of it, laid out in the hidden corner of some field, far from their wives. But, as men will, they were assessing her by standards other than her clothes. They surveyed her, hoof, horn and tail. And then they surveyed her two men. What they saw was someone who might happily infect their dreams, a wide-hipped woman who was enthralling to behold in ways they never could explain and all the more so for not being beautiful or statuesque but rather someone within reach, and someone who was defiantly — and irresistibly — proud. She held up her head, flared her nostrils in disdain, pursed her lips, and did not even dip her gaze as she was helped by Mr. Quill beyond the province of her broken home. She’d be, they thought, more than thirty years of age and so it was unlikely (and preferable, of course) that either of the men was her husband. The elder was already gray and balding, her father possibly, though any facial likeness was obscured by beard; the other was a man at least ten years younger than the woman, but equally as black-haired as her. A brother, then. This was a family. And it was safe to say the daughter of the house was still available, despite her age. She was a widow, possibly, with all that implies: she would be seasoned and experienced; she would have an unslaked thirst for company. In a village such as ours, where women die before the men, there are plenty of my neighbors who will have seen at once a tempting opportunity. While the women might have cast her as a subject of their kindom or a partner for their sons and might have nieced and cousined her, glad to have their breeding stock enlarged by some black hair, the men there will have chambered her and nested her the moment that she showed herself. Surely that could hardly count as sin. The local women were like land — fenced in, assigned and spoken for, the freehold of their fathers, then their husbands, then their sons. You could not cross their boundaries, or step beyond your portion. But this one, this incomer, was no better than any other wild quarry on common ground. Like any pigeon, any hare, she was fair game.