The Lost Son Returns as the Duke novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Mill Yard

The reeve hires Godric to watch him, his son sends seven men, and Godric wins in front of the mill hands.

The mill stood at the bottom of the lane, black with damp, its wheel turning slow in the brown stream.

Everyone in Thornwick wore green.

The dye vat at the mill made it cheap, and the cloth came out the color of pond water.

I stood in the yard in my brown cloak and felt like the only dry man in a flood.

Twenty hands were hauling sacks.

They looked at me, then at each other.

Word had traveled faster than I had.

"You're the one who broke Ranulf's wrist," a boy of fifteen said, grinning.

"I'm the one who's looking for wages."

"Then you want him."

He pointed his chin at the mill door.

A man stood in it with the light behind him.

He was broad and soft-handed, with thinning grey hair combed flat across his skull, and a heavy green cloak trimmed with fur.

He wore it indoors, in the yard, in the damp.

"Godric, is it?" he said. "Osgar Gaunt. I keep the Duke's peace in Thornwick."

His voice was warm.

It was the warmest voice I had heard in the village, and it made the hair on my neck stand up.

"I'm told you were hard on my boy."

"He hit a girl with a switch."

"He did, and I've told him so." Osgar spread his hands.

"Ranulf has a short temper. His mother died young, and I never learned to teach him."

The mill hands had stopped working.

They were listening, every one.

"I'd be glad to keep a strong man at the mill," Osgar went on. "Six pennies a day. Better than the Cobbs can pay you."

"I'd take it."

"Good. And I'd be glad to know where you came from."

"North."

"The Duke's north, or the king's north?"

"The road's north."

He smiled, the way a man smiles at a good move at chess.

"Careful with the Cobbs," he said. "You've seen how the village is. They did a thing, eighteen years back, that can't be forgiven."

"What thing?"

"They sold their own son for silver." He said it gently, like a priest.

"Twenty pennies. I wish it weren't true."

I kept my face still.

It was hard.

"The Cobbs are behind on the Duke's rent," I said.

"Twelve marks."

"I heard the Duke's rent was three."

"The Duke raised it this autumn."

"By order?"

"By order."

"I'd like to read it."

For a breath nothing moved in his face.

"It's in my strongbox in the hall," he said pleasantly. "The reeve's strongbox is not a place for a laborer's eyes."

"Of course."

"Start at the sacks."

I went to the sacks.

I was lifting my fourth when I heard the gate.

Ranulf came in with his arm in a splint strapped across his chest and six men behind him.

They carried flails and cart-spokes.

Two had boards with nails through them.

"Him," Ranulf said, and his voice shook with the pain of it. "Break his legs."

Osgar leaned against the door frame and folded his arms.

He did not say stop.

Twenty mill hands watched the men come across the yard.

Not one of them moved, and I understood that I had been set up.

I put down the sack.

There is an art to fighting six men in a yard full of flour.

The first came in swinging a spoke.

I stepped inside the swing and drove my elbow into his ribs, and the spoke clattered away.

The second I threw into the stream.

The third got a sack across the face, and the burst bag filled the air with white.

I took a flail from the fourth and used it on the fifth.

The sixth hesitated, and I did not.

When the cloud settled, five men lay in the dust and one stood against the wall with his hands up.

Ranulf had not moved.

He stared at me with his mouth open.

"Do you want the other wrist?" I said.

He didn't.

A sound came from behind me.

It was thin and unsure.

The boy of fifteen had begun to clap.

Then two other hands.

Then the whole yard, quietly, then louder, not at me, I thought, but at the sight of six Gaunt men on the ground.

Osgar did not clap.

He walked down the steps into the white dust, lifted the hem of his green cloak out of it, and smiled at me.

"Remarkable," he said. "You're dismissed."

"I haven't been paid for the morning."

"No. You haven't."

He put a hand on my shoulder, friendly as a bishop's.

"Tell Edith Cobb the rent is fifteen marks now," he said.

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