VIII.
The vestry chest at St. Giles was a long iron-bound coffer of black oak that smelled of mice, candle grease and three hundred years. Kezia knelt in front of it on the cold flags with the key her uncle had given her, while the Duke held the lantern, and brought out bundle after bundle of court rolls tied in faded tape and wrapped in old sacking, until she found the one she wanted.
"Sixteen seventy-two," she said. "The court baron of the manor of Wendlebury, held on the Tuesday after Michaelmas, before Sir Hamon Carrick, steward to the second Duke." She unrolled it carefully on the vestry table. The ink had gone brown; the writing was a crabbed secretary hand that the Duke, leaning over her shoulder, could not make out at all. The court itself had been recorded in Latin, but the orders of the homage were set down in English, so that the hayward might have them read to him. "Here. Item, it is ordered and agreed by the homage that every ancient cottage within this manor shall have common upon Coldwell for two beasts, one swine, and ten geese, and no more, under pain of three shillings and fourpence for every beast over. Two beasts, you see. Not one. And here, below, a later hand—seventeen hundred and nine, the same confirmed. And again in seventeen fifty. It has been two beasts for a hundred and forty years. Every hayward in the parish has known it."
"And Quarrendon has seen this?"
"Quarrendon asked my uncle for the key in July," said Kezia. "To consult the rolls for the purposes of the survey. He had the chest open for an afternoon. My uncle did not think to sit with him."
The Duke straightened slowly. In the lantern light his face was hard to read.
"If the stint's cut to one," he said, "half the cottagers are over it the day it's announced. Their second beasts go to the pound. They can't pay the poundage, not this year. So the beasts are sold. And the people who've lost their cow or their pig—"
"—will be very glad," said Kezia, "of His Grace's particular kindness in letting down their rents, if they will only put their mark to Mr. Quarrendon's paper." She rolled the court roll up again with hands that were not quite steady. "He does not need to prove anything in a court. He only needs them frightened enough to sign before anyone looks. It is not even illegal, I suspect. It is only wicked."
The vestry door opened.
It was Matthew Sowerby, out of his livery, in a shirt and an old coat of his father's, soaked to the knees and breathing as though he had run the whole length of the park. He saw the Duke and stopped, and remembered, and began to bow, and the Duke said, "Never mind that. What is it?"
"Your Grace," said Matthew, "it's the pound. Simeon Fairweather's been and counted, but it wasn't Simeon done it in the end, he wouldn't—it's Mr. Quarrendon's men from the estate office, and two of Sir Lionel's keepers. They've been along the whole row since noon. They've took Mrs. Pell's pig and Lacey's heifer and—" His voice cracked like a boy's. "They've took my mother's red cow, Your Grace. They've took all the second beasts. And there's half the common down at the pound in the village now, and Lacey's talking about Littleport, and Sir Lionel's ridden in with his groom and says he'll read the Riot Act if they don't go home."
IX.