Page 5 of The Armor of Light

Alec slid a wide, shallow dish under Harry’s knee. A horrified audience watched with Sal: the three labourers, Annie and her two children, and a white-faced Kit.

When the moment came, Alec acted with swift precision. Usingtongs, he lifted the bowl from the fire and poured the boiling liquid over Harry’s knee.

Harry gave the worst scream of all, then fell unconscious.

All the children cried.

There was a sickening smell of scorched human flesh.

The oil collected in the shallow dish under Harry’s leg, and Alec rocked the dish, making sure some of the hot oil seared the underside of the knee to make the seal complete. Then he removed the dish, poured the oil back into the jug, and stoppered it.

‘I’ll send my bill to the squire,’ he said to Sal.

‘I hope he pays you,’ Sal said. ‘I can’t.’

‘He ought to pay me. A squire has a duty to his workers. But there’s no law says he must. Anyway, that’s between me and him. Don’t you worry about it. Harry won’t want to eat anything, but try to get him to drink if you can. Tea is best. Ale is all right, or fresh water. And keep him warm.’ He began to pack his things into the chest.

Sal said: ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

Alec shrugged. ‘Pray for him,’ he said.

2

AMOSBARROWFIELD REALIZEDsomething was wrong as soon as he came within sight of Badford.

There were men working in the fields, but not as many as he expected. The road into the village was deserted but for an empty cart. He did not even see any dogs.

Amos was a clothier, or ‘putter-0ut’. To be exact, his father was the clothier; but Obadiah was fifty and often breathless, and it was Amos who travelled the countryside, leading a string of packhorses, visiting cottages. The horses carried sacks of raw wool, the sheared fleece of sheep.

The work of transforming fleece into cloth was done mainly by villagers working in their homes. First the fleece had to be untangled and cleaned, and this was called scribbling or carding. Then it was spun into long strings of yarn and wound onto bobbins. Finally the strings were woven on a loom and became strips of cloth a yard wide. Cloth was the main industry in the west of England, and Kingsbridge was at its centre.

Amos imagined that Adam and Eve, after they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, must have done these different jobs themselves, in order to make clothes and cover their nakedness; although the Bible did not say much about scribbling and spinning, nor about how Adam might have built his loom.

Reaching the houses, Amos saw that not everyone had vanished. Something had distracted the farm labourers, but his cloth workerswere in their homes. They were paid according to how much they produced, and they were not easily diverted from their work.

He went first to the home of a scribbler called Mick Seabrook. In his right hand Mick held a large brush with iron teeth; in his left a block of plain wood the same size; between the two was stretched a pad of raw wool, which he was brushing with firm, tireless strokes. When the thicket of dirty curls mixed with mud and vegetation had been transformed into a hank of clean, straight fibres, he would twist them into a loose rope called a roving.

Mick’s first words to Amos were: ‘Did you hear about Harry Clitheroe?’

‘No,’ said Amos. ‘I’ve only just got here. You’re my first visit. What about Harry?’

‘Got his leg crushed by a runaway cart. They’re saying he’ll never work again.’

‘That’s terrible. How did it happen?’

‘People tell different stories. Will Riddick says Harry was showing off, trying to prove he could push a loaded cart all on his own. But Ike Clitheroe says it was Will’s fault for overloading the cart.’

‘Sal will be heartbroken.’ Amos knew the Clitheroes. Their marriage was a love match, he thought. Harry was a tough guy but he would do anything for Sal. She bossed him around but she adored him. ‘I’ll go and see them now.’

He paid Mick, gave him a fresh supply of fleece, and took away a sack of new rovings.

He soon found out where the missing villagers had gone. There was a crowd around the Clitheroe cottage.

Sal was a spinner. Unlike Mick, she could not work at it twelve hours a day, for she had a host of other duties: making clothes for Harry and Kit, growing vegetables in their garden, buying and preparing food, laundry and cleaning and every other kind ofhousework. Amos wished she had more time for spinning, because there was a shortage of yarn.

The crowd parted for him. He was known here, and provided many villagers with an alternative occupation to low-paid agricultural labour. Several men greeted him warmly, and one said: ‘The surgeon’s just left, Mr Barrowfield.’

Amos went inside. Harry lay on the bed, white and still, eyes closed, breathing shallowly. There were several people standing around the bed. When Amos’s eyes became more accustomed to the dim interior he recognized most of them.