Mother knew what William was thinking. “Arthur is honest,” she said, not caring that the man was right there. “He’s old, and lazy and set in his ways, but he’s honest.”
William was stricken. He had only just sat in the chair and already his power was shriveling, as if by magic. He felt cursed. There seemed to be a law that William would always be a boy among men, no matter how old he grew. Weakly, he said: “How has this happened?”
Mother said: “Your father was ill for the best part of a year before he died. I could see he was letting things slip, but I couldn’t get him to do anything about it.”
It was news to William that his mother was not omnipotent. He had never before known her unable to get her way. He turned to Arthur. “We have some of the best farmland in the kingdom here. How can we be penniless?”
“Some of the farms are in trouble, and several tenants are in arrears with their rents.”
“But why?”
“One reason I hear frequently is that the young men won’t work on the land, but leave for the towns.”
“Then we must stop them!”
Arthur shrugged. “Once a serf has lived in a town for a year, he becomes a freeman. It’s the law.”
“And what about the tenants who haven’t paid? What have you done to them?”
“What can one do?” said Arthur. “If we take away their livelihood, they’ll never be able to pay. So we must be patient, and hope for a good harvest which will enable them to catch up.”
Arthur was altogether too cheerful about his inability to solve any of these problems, William thought angrily; but he reined in his temper for the moment. “Well, if all the young men are going to the towns, what about our rents from house property in Shiring? That should have brought in some cash.”
“Oddly enough, it hasn’t,” said Arthur. “There are a lot of empty houses in Shiring. The young men must be going elsewhere.”
“Or people are lying to you,” William said. “I suppose you’re going to say that the income from the Shiring market and the fleece fair is down too?”
“Yes—”
“Then why don’t you increase the rents and taxes?”
“We have, lord, on the orders of your late father, but the income has gone down nonetheless.”
“With such an unproductive estate, how did Bartholomew keep body and soul together?” William said in exasperation.
Arthur even had an answer for that. “He had the quarry, also. That brought in a great deal of money, in the old days.”
“And now it’s in the hands of that damned monk.” William was shaken. Just when he needed to make an ostentatious display he was being told that he was penniless. The situation was very dangerous for him. The king had just granted him custody of an earldom. It was a kind of probation. If he returned to court with a diminutive army it would seem ungrateful, even disloyal.
Besides, the picture Arthur had painted could not be entirely true. William felt sure people were cheating him—and they were probably laughing about it behind his back, too. The thought made him angry. He was not going to tolerate it. He would show them. There would be bloodshed before he accepted defeat.
“You’ve got an excuse for everything,” he said to Arthur. “The fact is, you’ve let this estate run to seed during my father’s illness, which is when you ought to have been most vigilant.”
“But, lord—”
William raised his voice. “Shut your mouth or I’ll have you flogged.”
Arthur paled and went silent.
William said: “Starting tomorrow, we’re going on a tour of the earldom. We’re going to visit every village I own, and shake them all up. You may not know how to deal with whining, lying peasants, but I do. We’ll soon find out how impoverished my earldom is. And if you’ve lied to me, I swear to God you’ll be the first of many hangings.”
As well as Arthur, he took his groom, Walter, and the other four knights who had fought beside him for the past year: Ugly Gervase, Hugh Axe, Gilbert de Rennes and Miles Dice. They were all big, violent men, quick to anger and always ready to fight. They rode their best horses and went armed to the teeth, to scare the peasantry. William believed that a man was helpless unless people were afraid of him.
It was a hot day in late summer, and the wheat stood in fat sheaves in the fields. The abundance of visible wealth made William all the more angry that he had no money. Someonemustbe robbing him. They ought to be too frightened to dare. His family had won the earldom when Bartholomew was disgraced, and yet he was penniless while Bartholomew’s son had plenty! The idea that people were stealing from him, and laughing at his unsuspecting ignorance, gnawed at him like a stomachache, and he got angrier as he rode along.
He had decided to begin at Northbrook, a small village somewhat remote from the castle. The villagers were a mixture of serfs and freemen. The serfs were William’s property, and could not do anything without his permission. They owed him so many days’ work at certain times of year, plus a share of their own crops. The freemen just paid him rent, in cash or in kind. Five of them were in arrears. William had a notion they thought they could get away with it because they were far from the castle. It might be a good place to begin the shake-up.
It was a long ride, and the sun was high when they approached the village. There were twenty or thirty houses surrounded by three big fields, all of them now stubble. Near the houses, at the edge of one of the fields, were three large oak trees in a group. As William and his men drew near, he saw that most of the villagers appeared to be sitting in the shade of the oaks, eating their dinner. He spurred his horse into a canter for the last few hundred yards, and the others followed suit. They halted in front of the villagers in a cloud of dust.
