‘J-Jared! Son – where …?’ His mother tailed off when she saw his condition. Ragged, torn, his features ravaged and eyes bloodshot, he walked unsteadily towards her.
She looked at him searchingly: had a corner been turned? She would not press him to speak of what he’d been through, but praise be, he now seemed to be in his right mind. Whatever had happened in the forest was over.
Later, Osbert awkwardly tried to say something. Nolly stood behind him but could find no words to reach out to his friend in his distress and they both withdrew.
Then Perkyn Slewfoot arrived with a small sweetmeat, which he pressed on Jared. He took it dully: Perkyn stared into his face and left, tears streaming.
At the evening meal Maud tried to read her son’s features.
Even the news that Gervaise D’Amory had been carried away to a just death by the very river that had borne his Aldith had not broken the brittle mask.
He said little other than that he would not return to the bed he’d shared with Aldith but would sleep in the smithy – and made her promise that no mention must ever be made of what was past and now gone.
That night Jared made up a sleeping area in the smithy outhouse. In the dark stillness around him the rows of pincers, hammers, swages and all the familiar pieces of the blacksmith’s art, still odorous of metal, cinders and burnt oil, were comforting and he let sleep steal up on him.
Then the nightmares began. Through the tortured face of D’Amory came the distant image of a body, floating, untouchably poignant.
D’Amory’s face changed to a cunning leer. He’d torn himself away, his naked body acquiring clothes as he ran; rich, noble costumes for he was fleeing towards the louring ramparts of the castle, high on the hill. Once there he could not be touched and would look down on him and mock.
Jared woke up in a sweat, disoriented. Burning memories and a meaningless panic tore at him.
The rest of the night passed in a half-sleep of torments and phantasm.
Osbert cautiously welcomed him back to the forge but at Jared’s moodiness and set face he kept his silence. They worked together on a barn door hinge, striking alternately on the brightly glowing metal, but what he saw was frightening. Jared’s measured blows turned by degrees into smashing, violent hits with hatred in them and when he flipped the piece into the quenching tub it was with an animal snarl.
There was no easing in the days that followed – nights of delirium racking his brain, days of sullen enduring.
It couldn’t go on; for Aldith’s sake – for little Daw – he had to break out of this whirlpool of madness.
Was it the price for what he’d done? A stricken conscience that would not rest until he’d been sent mad – or were the nightmares a divine retribution? No! He would never accept that what he’d done was other than a quickening of God’s justice on a vile creature whose guilt was absolute.
But now he was being tortured by dreams the hardest to bear – his dearest Aldith coming with outstretched arms to comfort him, the utmost concern and love wreathing the image but overtaken with a hopelessness as it fragmented and dissolved.
He had to get away. The heartbreak when he reached a corner of the house and expected her to be around it, the sudden stabs of feeling when little things unbearably reminded him of her – was more than he could endure.
To where? To roam the countryside like a vagabond, take his chances in some town – it didn’t make sense, it had no purpose or object. Yet his overwhelming desire was to be gone from a place with so many hurts.
It came to him: he’d go on pilgrimage.
Some went on penance for the absolving of sin, others to see and touch some sacred relic but his reason would be to lay his ghosts.
The announcement was applauded with relief: that it was in suffrage for the soul of Aldith in Purgatory was quite understood and he stood before his parish priest, Father Bertrand with the calm of certainty.
Delighted at the piety of one of the more tepid of his flock the cleric spoke to him at length about his journey. Was it to be St Winefride’s Well in the west or St Cuthbert’s in the north? Or for the utmost grace, Thomas Becket at Canterbury? Or even going so far as to commit himself to the arduous and laboured trail that led to Santiago de Compostela?
Jared knew what he wanted. Not weeks or even months of absence but a year or more until the remembrances had finally quite faded.
The Holy Land – Jerusalem.
The worthy Father was taken aback. Was Jared aware how expensive the journey was? Yes, he had money put by, and was it not an obligation for the pilgrim to beg alms along the way?
And, there was the matter of the route. It was a perilous and frightful passage across a Europe in turmoil, bands of thieves and brigands at large in great numbers and godliness nowhere to be found. If he was considering joining a group of pilgrims, he could not choose his companions and if they proved to be robbers in disguise he would be hung along with them.
Jared told him he would go by sea. As a boy he had met a pilgrim who had; he vaguely remembered his tales of boredom and filthy conditions at sea for weeks at a time, but he was young and strong and could endure that.
He heard objections about pirates and Devil-conjured storms but his mind was made up.
Jerusalem it would be.
The village gathered round. Nolly fashioned a fine ash staff, which Osbert finished with a forged tip calculated to give pause to wolves and robbers both. His mother sewed his sclavein, the distinctive robe that set him apart as a pilgrim, and a broad-brimmed hat with bleached palm emblems arrived anonymously.
A final touch was the scrip, a pouch that would carry all his worldly means. This he made himself from leather.
Suddenly, it was time to depart.
The last rite was to have his raiment blessed at the altar with what seemed to be the entire village in respectful attendance, and after a tearful farewell from his mother and a backward wave at his friends, Jared set forth on his pilgrimage.