Household

T
attered, tarred and weathered swung the late Jack o’ Diamonds, as he had called himself when with pistol in hand and a swift horse under him, he hid in culverts, lurked behind trees or, dismounted, lay low on the ground, his leathern garments artfully blending into the high, autumn-tinged grasses that bordered the King’s Highway.

Richard Veringer, riding towards the Hold, passed the gallow’s tree with a cursory glance at its fruit. Had he not received his mother’s letter, he would never have been able to identify the Jack. The highwayman looked uncommonly bony. The crows had made short shrift of his flesh, and his skull, gleaming white between shreds of dried and shriveled skin, would soon tumble to the ground. Before it did, Richard intended to have the men from the Hold give it a decent burial, Fulke being underground and unable to countermand the order.

A smile played about Richard’s shapely mouth. Slaying the Jack had been one of his late brother’s last deeds of “derring-do.” It had won him the gratitude of the county and, according to his mother, he had been called “hero” and “savior” for ridding the community of such a rascal. People’s memories were damned short, Richard reflected. That fact, coupled with a wish to respect the Veringers for what they had been over the centuries rather than the figure his late brother had cut, glorified the dispatching of old Jack and scotched the rumors that he and Fulke were hand-in-glove. Richard wondered what had caused his falling out with Fulke. Probably he had kept more than his share of the loot. It little mattered. Richard firmed his lips in order to banish the pleased expression that came and went like the sun on a cloudy day. It had been more rather than less in evidence ever since the messenger had come to the Kirk bearing the news that Fulke had been shot by the irate father of his latest conquest. He wondered how many brats Fulke had sired in the course of his three-year majority. Veringer features had been familiar in village cradles ever since Fulke’s fourteenth birthday.

Richard could not decry his taste in wenches for it had kept him unwed, and if there were bastards aplenty who could call him father, none could lay claim to the earldom. He, Richard Veringer, could now don that mantle with its yellowed ermine and the velvet that needed patching. He was now the sixth in his family to inherit the earldom of More—to which could also be added the older and earlier title of Baron. He touched the flank of his horse with a light flick of his whip. Fulke would have dug both spurs into the animal’s hide and galloped toward the grey battlements and towers outlined against the horizon. With the Hold looming large in front of him, he drew himself up, an instinctive bracing against the pressures which would presently be directed towards him. His answers, which were already framed and would remain the same, were embodied in the person of his mother.

He could imagine her now, austere in the black she had worn at his father’s death and never removed in the last three years. Mourning had become habitual, and she would use her grief as a weapon, a sword to bring him to his knees, agreeing to her wish that he would stay and manage the property.

Richard snorted. As if they did not have a steward capable enough to fulfill that obligation. He had always been expected to be the obedient son, but he had not been obedient four years ago when sent to study for the ministry. His father had exacted his acquiescence with a whip, laid across his bare shoulders until the blood ran. He had hated his father for that and hated Fulke for his laughter.

“Ye’ll die a martyr to your lack o’ faith, brother mine,” Fulke had said to the angry youth he had been, smarting from the flogging and the inexorable command he must obey. The first son had the title, the second was destined for the church and the third for the army. But there had been only Fulke and himself squeezed out of his mother’s spare loins, else he might have exchanged professions with the sibling that never was. He was certainly not suited to instill his flock with the fear of the God in whom he was not at all sure he believed. He could contain his smile no longer. The disciplines were at an end. Fulke was as his boon companion, the grinning Jack o’Diamonds on his gallows tree, and he was the Sixth Earl of More.

❖

Lady Veringer was thin as a stick and pale as a wraith, a wrathful wraith, Richard thought unlovingly as he listened with diminishing patience to the diatribe she was finally concluding.

“... tenants and those who depend on you,” she finished with a baleful glance.

“There’s the steward. I’ll give him my instructions,” Richard said, pleased with a succinct answer that put his mother in her proper place, not that she gave any indication of accepting it.

She glared at him out of eyes that looked cavernous in her wasted countenance. Meeting that reproving and, at the same time, accusing stare, he was uncomfortably reminded of the Jack’s empty eyesockets. She said in a voice to which she had added a quaver, a touch of artistry she had omitted from her earlier efforts, “I little thought that you would evade your responsibilities in this manner, Richard. You are the Earl of More and you must live up to all that it means. Your poor brother...”

“Lived down to it,” Richard muttered.

“I fear I did not hear you.”

“No matter,” he retorted impatiently. “I shall be leaving for London at sunrise.”

“It does not cause you any distress to know that you are breaking your mother’s heart?” she demanded with a bitter twist of her pale lips.

“I do not anticipate that that particular rupture will occur,” he said, shrugging. “You’ve borne two deaths admirably. Surely a mere departure could not exert such pressure.”

Astonishingly, she was able to squeeze out a pair of tears, one in each eye. Clasping her narrow hands over her meager bosom, she moaned, “You leave me with no words.”

“It’s just as well.” Richard produced a second shrug. “There is much I must do before my departure. I pray you will have left my brother’s wardrobe intact. My own suits are all in greys and blacks, excellent for traveling, but I’ve no wish to look like a country parson at London gatherings. And it will be several days before I will have found a tailor to my liking.”

He was confronted by a virago. “I’ll not allow you to touch as much as a... a button of your sainted brother’s garments!” she shrilled.

“Sainted?” he echoed and burst into laughter. “Oh, Mother, I thought you had no sense of humor, but I see I was mistaken.”

“You are a villain, a rogue, a... a whited sepulcher of deepest dye!”

“Better and better...” Richard was thoroughly enjoying himself. The old tigress had had her teeth drawn, but four years had sapped her strength. From being a thunderstorm she had dwindled to a drizzle. He continued, “I cannot agree that I have left you without words. Your vocabulary is, if anything, much improved since I was last here.” Richard turned on his heel, thought better of it and came back to her. “I think it is my brother’s death that has loosened your tongue. Or perhaps it was that of my father. Between ’em you had little chance for self-expression.” He turned away from the stiff figure of his mother and then bethought himself of something else that must irk her even more. “I intend to give old Jack a decent burial in consecrated ground,” he informed her gravely.

“Consecrated ground!” cried Lady More. “Not on your life! Let the rascal hang there until he rots!”

“That’s just it,” Richard replied. “The process is underway. Damned unsightly, I call it.”

“He serves as a warning to all malefactors!” Lady More’s eyes flashed.

“Do you think so?” Richard regarded her in some surprise. “It’s my belief that all malefactors faced with the Jack are of the opinion they’ll outsmart him, outrun him, outlie him. If anything his ending encourages rather than discourages thievery, serving as a challenge, as it must.”

“You make a mockery of your cloth!” snapped his mother.

“Quite,” Richard replied. His eyes, a blue-grey, became for a moment, entirely grey and cold. “And have done since I was forced to don it.”

“You are no son of mine!”

“I wish that were true, but the benefits accruing to the title provide some compensation.” Richard sketched a bow and started up the chill and shadowy stone steps that led to the upper floors.

Lady More looked after him and raised a bony fist, shaking it. “I curse you,” she cried. “I curse you, Richard. One day your sins’ll find you out!”

“I pray you’ll not be so medieval, Mother.” Richard laughed and continued on up the stairs.

There was a loud reverberating crash in the hall which he might have taken as an expression of heavenly pique had he not suspected that Lady More, in the very ecstasy of passion, had knocked over one of the two suits of armor that stood on either side of the door.

The upper floors of Veringer’s Hold were as dingy, as cold and as ill-lighted as the Great Hall. Lady More, as her garb implied, was of a saving nature, and she, too, had a strong Scottish strain in her ancestry. Consequently, there was a short supply of candles, and these were not wax but tallow dipped in the castle kitchens. One of them was guttering in a holder on a deal table just outside the first in the series of vast, chilly sitting rooms and bedchambers. Richard picked up the candle. It had been a long time since he had crossed that particular threshold and, he remembered, his last visit had been in the company of his late brother. They had come to admire Fulke’s likeness, painted by a man from London at what Richard suspected was a reduced rate, considering the results. Fulke, he recalled, had been uncommonly pleased with them, but no one had ever accused him of being a connoisseur of portraiture.

The gallery was even colder than the hall, for one of the windows was open and a breeze troubled the flame of Richard’s candle. Fortunately, he discovered a candelabrum containing three candles, two nearly melted down to the holders but one with about three inches yet unburnt. Richard lighted all three and set his own down on a long table pushed against the far wall. He shut the window and stared at the painted visages with more satisfaction than he had felt since first riding over the drawbridge which had groaned with what had seemed to him mechanical reluctance when lowered over the moat.

“My happily buried ancestors,” he muttered, paraphrasing Shakespeare and casting an eye toward the Second Earl of More, a staunch Catholic until 1536 and the Dissolution of the monasteries, a Protestant until 1554 and the ascension of Mary I, and in 1558 a Protestant again and thereafter, having been favorably impressed by the preachings of John Knox. The second Earl had been a second son like himself but the first of the heirs to bear the name Fulke; until then they had all been Richard. Coincidentally, the second Earl had dark red hair and a yellowish-green eye, the same coloring as his late descendant.

The third Earl, also a Fulke, resembled his father in appearance though not in deeds. If he were less changeable in his religion, his politics were definitely questionable. Richard strolled to his portrait; he looked sober enough in black with puritanical white collars and cuffs. No one could tell by looking at his solemnly righteous expression that some dry rot had attacked the roots of the family tree. A staunch Puritan with all the benefits accruing to a Royalist turned follower of Oliver Cromwell, he had cast a jaundiced eye on the Protector’s son and heir (a Richard) and sent considerable money to Charles II with the result that alone out of the countryside the Veringer family retained property and title. The resulting gossip had been a bitter blow to his wife, the stern-faced lady who hung by his side. Richard made a face at her since she looked a great deal like his mother. He strolled away from her and back several generations to Lady Janet, who had been the bride of Richard, the third Baron of More. She had a mane of fiery hair and flashing green eyes. The third Baron had seen her during a foray across the border to attack her sheep-purloining family’s castle and had made off with her immediately. He had locked her in the west tower and had had his face well-scratched, his neck bitten, his shins bruised and his toes mashed before the lady gave in, marrying him only when her belly was rising to accomodate the fourth Baron. She faced subsequent generations with a twinkle in her eyes and a smile on her lips. Richard smiled back and then frowned as he glimpsed the latest addition to the collection.