The village pound at Wendlebury St. Giles stood at the bottom of the green, opposite the Carrick Arms: a square of old stone wall breast-high, with a stout oak gate and an iron hasp and a padlock that the pinder, a nervous little man named Ivatt, kept on a string around his neck. This afternoon it held eleven cows, four heifers, six pigs, a dozen ewes and somewhere above sixty geese, and every one of them was objecting.
Round the outside of it stood most of Coldwell Common.
Kezia saw it as they came down the churchyard path at a run: forty or fifty people in the drizzle, men and women both, the women with shawls over their heads and the men with their hats pulled low, and children in among their legs. Nobody was shouting yet. That was the frightening thing. They stood in a thick, silent crescent round the pound gate, and in front of the gate stood Joseph Lacey the thatcher with a crowbar in his hands, not lifting it, only holding it, the way a man holds a thing he has not yet decided to use.
On the other side of the gate, on a tall bay hunter, sat Sir Lionel Bastable, red-faced and stout and wet, with a paper in one hand and his riding whip in the other. Beside him, in the estate gig, under an umbrella held by a clerk, sat Mr. Quarrendon, looking very pale and very composed. Two of Sir Lionel's keepers stood at the hunter's head with their guns broken over their arms.
"—and I tell you for the last time, Lacey," Sir Lionel was saying, "that I am a magistrate of this county, and if you and these people do not disperse to your homes I shall read the proclamation, and after that anything that happens is on your own heads. You have all heard what was done at Ely in June. Five men hanged. I do not want to see it here."
"Then don't do it here," said the Duke of Wendlebury.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He walked straight through the crescent of people, who parted for him without quite knowing why, and came to a stop between Joseph Lacey and the pound gate, with his back to the crowbar and his face to Sir Lionel's horse. He was bareheaded—he had left his hat in the vestry—and the rain was running down his face, and he looked, Kezia thought, exactly as he had looked in the stable yard on Saturday morning: plain, tired, wholly unafraid.
"Wendlebury," said Sir Lionel, after a moment. "I did not know you were come down."
"I came on Friday night. I've been looking at things." The Duke glanced at the pound. "Who ordered these beasts taken?"
"The beasts were taken over stint, Your Grace," said Mr. Quarrendon from the gig, in his calm, pleasant voice, "in accordance with the custom of the manor, and in Your Grace's name, as lord. I regret the necessity. But the common has been shockingly overstocked for some years, and with the survey for the enclosure about to begin—"
"What's the stint, Quarrendon?"
"One beast to an ancient cottage, Your Grace. As set down in the court rolls."