Chapter 30
Mark rode straight into the church at
Warren Hemlet. He could do so because his horse was small and the
church door hung open.
Inside, frowning at the stench of damp
and fox droppings, he found no one. Giles’s men had stripped the
place of ornament and plate, he recalled, but now there was nothing
else: the church was as deserted as the village. If any had died
here, they had been taken out and buried elsewhere.
So where were the villagers who had
been thrust into this church? Had they broken out and died in their
homes?
Mark turned his horse and rode
carefully through the narrow door and out into the village. He
called out several times, offering food, but only a single pigeon
fluttered out from a thatched roof. The roof timbers of many houses
were missing and the village paths were greened over with high,
standing grass. His horse cropped it contentedly as he
dismounted.
Again he shouted, but there was no
response.
“No one but me has come back here to
look,” he said aloud. He was amazed at Sir Giles’s carelessness,
but then the surrounding lands had been turned over to sheep and a
single shepherd lad would not dare to venture into this lonely
place. Unlike Giles, he knew what peasants whispered, and to them,
Warren Hemlet was an accursed name.
A rat burst from a hovel and scampered
into the overgrown wheat field, followed by more squeaking vermin.
Mark crossed himself and scrambled onto his horse.
The sun shone on the empty pens and the
empty houses and the empty church, but the flesh on the back of his
neck felt to be creeping down his spine. He yanked on his small
bay’s reins and trotted off, afraid his horse’s hoofbeats would
disturb something in those hovels, where every door was open and
black, hard shadows crept out. . . .
He rode hard, low over his horse’s
neck, galloping out of the valley, and he did not stop until he
reached a wayside shrine, where he could drink the holy water and
quench his parched mouth. Waiting for his heart to stop jumping in
his chest and for his breathing to slow down, Mark wiped the last
drops of water from his sparse beard and considered. Now that he
felt safer again, no longer watched, his wits began to ask
questions.
“My lord Giles does not know that the
priest and his flock have flown their church coop. Does that
matter? Should I tell him? I do not think he will pay to know this.
He does not like bad news.”
That was the real question: Should he
tell?