“Answer me, brother.” William swung back with the other hand, knocking Tom’s head across.
“Do you know what it means?” He hit him again, right-handed.
“Answer me, my little beauty.” The next swing was lefthanded, then right-handed again, and the blows settled into a rhythm. Slam, with the right. Slam, with the left. Tom’s head rolled loosely from side to side. He was swiftly losing consciousness, and the succession of blows never let up.
“Primogeniture” Slam! “is the” Slam! “right” Slam!
“of the” Slam “firstborn.” Slam!
The next blow came from behind Black Billy’s back.
Dorian had followed them down the path and had seen what was happening to his favourite sibling. The blows raining down on Tom hurt Dorian just as painfully. He looked around desperately for a weapon.
There was a thick accumulation of fallen branches along the edge of the path.
He picked up a dry stick as thick as his wrist and as long as his arm and crept up behind William. He had the good sense to give no warning of what he was about to do, just quietly lifted the branch with both hands high above his head. He paused to take aim, gather all his strength, then brought down the branch on top of William’s head with such force that the stick snapped in his hands.
William’s hands flew to his pate and he rolled off Tom’s chest.
He looked up at Dorian, and let out a bellow.
“The whole stinking litterV He came to his feet, and swayed unsteadily.
“Even the youngest cub.”
“You just leave my brother be,” Dorian threatened, white, faced with terror.
“Run, Dorry!” Tom croaked dazedly, from where he lay in the bracken, without the strength to sit up.
“He’ll kill you. Run!” But Dorian stood his ground.
“You leave him alone,” he said.
William took a step towards him.
“You know, Dorry, that your mother was a whore.” He smiled, soothingly, and took another step forward, dropping his hands from his injured head.
“That makes you the son of a whore.” Dorian was not certain what a whore was, but he answered furiously, “You are not to speak of my mama like that.”
Despite himself he took a pace backwards, as William advanced menacingly upon him.
“Mama’s baby,” William mocked him.
“Well, your whore mama is dead, baby.” Tears flooded Dorian’s eyes.
“Don’t say that! I hate you, William Courtney.”
“You, too, must learn some manners, Baby Dorry.” William’s hands shot out and locked around the child’s neck.
He lifted Dorian easily into the air, kicking, clawing.
“Manners make the man,” William said, and pinned him against the trunk of the copper beech under which they stood.
“You must learn, Dorry.” He pressed carefully on the child’s windpipe with both fingers, staring into his face, watching it swell and turn purple.
Dorian’s heels kicked helplessly against the tree trunk, and he scratched at William’s hands, leaving red lines on his skin, but he made no sound.
“A nest of vipers,” said William.
“That’s what you are, asps and vipers. I’ll have to clean you out.” Tom heaved himself out of the bracken and crawled to where his elder brother stood. He clutched at his legs.
“Please, Billy! I’m sorry. Hit me. Leave Dorry alone. Please, don’t hurt him. He didn’t mean anything.” William kicked him away, still holding the child against the tree. Dorry’s feet were dancing two feet above the ground.
Respect, Dorry, you must learn respect.” He relaxed the pressure of his thumbs and allowed his victim to draw a single breath, then clamped down again. Dorian’s silent struggles became frantic.
“Take me!” pleaded Tom.
“Leave Dorry alone. He’s had enough.”
Tom pulled himself to his feet, using the tree trunk to support himself.
He tugged at William’s sleeve.
“You spat in my face,” William said grimly, “and this little viper tried to brain me. Now you may watch him choke.”
“WilliamV Another voice, rough with outrage, cut in from close at his side.
“What in the name of the devil do you think you’re playing at?” A heavy blow fell across
William’s outstretched arms. He let the child drop to the muddy earth and whirled to face his father.
Hal Courtney had used his scabbard to strike his eldest son’s hands off the child, and now it seemed he might use it to knock William off his feet.
“Are you mad? What are you doing to Dorian?” he asked, his voice shaking with rage.
“He had to be, it was only a game, Father. We were playing.”
William’s own rage had miraculously evaporated, and he seemed chastened.
“He has taken no harm. It was all in good part.”
“You have half murdered the lad,” Hal snarled, then went down on one knee to pick his youngest son out of the mud. He held him tenderly against his chest. Dorian buried his face against his father’s neck and sobbed, coughed and choked for air. There were livid scarlet finger marks on the soft skin of his throat, and tears were smeared across his face.
Hal Courtney glared at William.
“This is not the first time we have spoken about rough treatment of the younger ones. By God, William, we will discuss this further, after dinner, this evening in the library.
Now get you out of my sight, before I lose control of myself.”
“Yes, sir,” William said humbly, and started back up the path to the chapel. As he left, though, he shot Tom a look that left no doubt in the boy’s mind that the matter was far from settled.
“What happened to you, Tom?” Hal turned back to him.
“Nothing, Father , he replied staunchly.
“It’s nothing.” He wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve. It would have been a violation of his own code to carry tales, even of such a hated adversary as Black Billy.
“Then what happened to make your nose bleed and your face swell and turn red as a ripe apple?” Hal’s voice was gruff but gentle: he was testing the lad.
“I fell,” Tom said.
“I know that sometimes you’re a clumsy clod, Tom, but are you sure someone didn’t push you?”
“If I did, then it’s between him and me, sir.” Tom pulled himself up to his full height to disguise his aches and injuries.
Hal placed an arm around his shoulder. With the other he clasped Dorian to his chest.
“Come, boys, we’ll go home now.” He took the pair down to where he had left his horse at the edge of the woods, and lifted Dorian up onto its neck in front of the saddle before he swung up behind him. He slipped his feet into the stirrups then reached down to take Tom by the arm and haul him up behind.
Tom placed both arms around his father’s waist and pressed his swollen, bruised face into the small of his back.
He loved the warmth and smell of his father’s body, the hardness and strength of him. It made him feel safe from all harm. He wanted to cry but he forced back the tears.
“You’re not a child,” he said to himself.
“Dorry can cry, but you can’t.”
“Where is Guy?” his father asked, without looking around.
Tom almost said, “He ran away,” but he stopped the disloyal words before they were spoken.
“He went home, I think, sir.” Hal rode on in silence, feeling the two warm bodies pressed gratefully against him, and hurting for them as he knew they were hurt. Yet he felt a sense of angry helplessness. This was far from the first time he had been sucked into this primeval conflict of siblings, the children of his three wives. He knew it was a competition in which the odds were heavily loaded against the youngest, and from which there could be only one possible outcome.
He scowled in frustration. Hal Courtney was not yet forty-two William had been born when he was only eighteen, yet he felt old and weighed down with care when he confronted the turmoil of his four sons.
The problem was that he loved William as much, if not more, than even little Dorian.
William was his firstborn, the son of his Judith, that fierce, beautiful warrior-maid of Africa, whom he had loved with deep awe and passion. When she had died under the flying hoofs of her own wild steed she had left an aching void in his existence. For many years there had been nothing to fill the gap except the beautiful infant she had left behind.
Hal had reared William, had taught him to be tough and resilient, clever and resourceful. He was all those things now, and more. And in him there was something of the wildness and cruelty of that dark, mysterious continent that nothing could tame. Hal feared that and yet, in all truth, he would not have had it any other way. Hal himself was a hard, ruthless man, so how should he resent those qualities in his own firstborn son?
“Father, what does primo genital mean?” Tom asked suddenly, his voice muffled by Hal’s cloak.
He was so in step with Hal’s own thoughts that his father started.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked.
“I heard it somewhere,” Tom mumbled.
“I forget where.” Hal could guess very well where it had been but he did not press the boy, who had been hurt enough for one day.
Instead he tried to answer the question fairly, for Tom was old enough now. It was high time that he began to learn what hardships life held in store for him as a younger brother.
“You mean primogeniture, Tom. It means the right of the firstborn.”
“Billy said Tom softly.
“Yes. Billy,” Hal agreed frankly.
“In accordance with the law of England, he follows directly in my footsteps. He takes precedence over all his younger brothers.”
“Us,” said Tom, with a touch of bitterness.
“Yes, you,” Hal agreed.
“When I am gone, everything is his.”
“When you are dead, you mean,” Dorian bored in, with indisputable logic.
“That’s right, Dorry, when I am dead.”
“I don’t want you to die,” Dorian wailed, his voice still hoarse from the damage to his throat.
“Promise me you won’t ever die, Father.”
“I wish I could, lad, but I can’t. We’re all going to die one day.” Dorian was silent for a moment.
“But not tomorrow?” Hal chuckled softly.
“Not tomorrow. Not for many a long day, if I can help it. But one day it will happen. It always does.” He forestalled the next question.
“And when it does, Billy will be Sir William,” Tom said.
“That’s what you’re trying to tell us.”
“Yes. William will have the baronetcy, but that’s not all. He will have everything else as well.”
“Everything? I don’t understand,” said Tom, lifting his head from his father’s back.
“Do you mean High Weald?
The house and the land?”
“Yes. It will all belong to Billy. The estate, the land, the house, the money.”
“That not fair,” Dorian expostulated.
“Why can’t Tom and Guy not have some? They’re much nicer than Billy.
It’s not fair.”
“Perhaps it isn’t fair, but that’s the law of England.”
“It isn’t fair,” Dorian persisted.
“Billy’s cruel and horrible.”
“If you go through life expecting it to be fair, then you will have many sad disappointments, my boy,” Hal said softly, and hugged his baby. I wish I could make it different for you, he thought.
“When you’re dead, Billy won’t let us stay here at High Weald.
He’ll send us away.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Hal protested.
“Yes, I can,” Tom said, with conviction.
“He told me so, and he meant it.”
“You’ll make your own way, Tom. That’s why you have to be clever and tough. That’s why I’m hard on you sometimes, harder than I ever was on William. You must learn to fend for yourselves after I am gone.” He paused.
Could he explain this to them, when they were still so young? He had to try. He owed them that.
“The law of primogeniture has served to make England great. If every time somebody died his land was split between his surviving children, then soon the whole country would be divided into tiny, useless parcels, unable to feed a single family, and we would become a nation of peasants and paupers.”
“So what will we do?” Tom asked.
“Those of us who are driven out.”
“The army, the navy and the Church are open to you.
You might go out into the world as traders or colonists and come back from its far corners, from the ends of the oceans, with treasures and wealth even greater than William will inherit when I die.” They thought about that in silence for a long while.
“I’ll be a sailor, like you, Father. I’ll sail to the ends of the oceans like you did,” said Tom, at last.
“And I will go with you, Tom,” said Dorian.
it ting in the front pew of the family chapel, Hal Courtney had every reason to feel pleased with himself and the world around him. He watched his eldest son waiting at the altar, while organ music filled the small building with joyous sound. William was strikingly handsome and dashing in the costume he had chosen for his wedding. For once he had eschewed his sombre black attire. His collar was of the finest Flemish lace, and his ” waistcoat of green velvet embroidered with golden stags.
The pommel of his sword was encrusted with camelians and lapis-lazuli. Most of the women in the congregation were watching him also, and the younger ones were giggling and discussing him in whispers.
“I could ask nothing more of a son,” Hal told himself.
William had proved himself as an athlete and as a scholar.
His tutor at Cambridge had praised his industry and capacity for learning, and he had wrestled, ridden and hawked his way to prominence.
After his studies, when he had returned to High Weald, he had proved his worth yet again as an administrator and entrepreneur.
Gradually Hal had given him more and more control over the running of the estate and the tin mines, until now he himself had almost withdrawn from overseeing the day-to-day running of the family estates. If there was anything that made Hal at all uneasy, it was that William was often too hard a bargainer, too ruthless in his treatment of the men who worked for him. More than once men had died at the tin face who might have been spared if a little more thought had been given to their safety, and a little more money spent on improvements to the shafts and the haulage. Yet the profits from the mines and the estate had almost doubled in the last three years. That was proof enough of his competence.