A Murderous Procession

A Murderous Procession

  Between the parishes of Shepfold and Martlake in Somerset existed an area of no- man’s- land and a lot of ill feeling.

Just as the nearby towns of Glastonbury and Wells were constantly at odds, so did these two small villages dispute over whose pigs had a right to graze on the beech mast of the intervening forest, which stream was diverted to irrigate whose crops, whose goats trespassed over the boundary and ate whose laundry, etc., etc.

Today, Lammas Saturday, after a fine summer that had enabled the harvest to be brought in exceptionally early, the two sets of villagers, everybody who could walk and even some who couldn’t, faced each other across this strip of ground on which had been erected a dais to accommodate Lady Emma of Wolvercote (her manor was in Shepfold), her husband, and Sir Richard de Mayne (his manor was in Martlake), the two parish priests, an Arab doctor, his attendant, an elderly woman, and a ball the size of a good pumpkin consisting of tough leather stitched over a globe of withies stuffed with sawdust.

Father Ignatius (Shepfold) made the last of many appeals to prevent what was going to happen.

“My lady, Sir Richard, it is not too late to avert this evil and send all home . . . the sheriff has specifi cally banned . . .”

His protest fell on stony ground. Staring straight ahead, Sir

Richard said: “If Shepfold is prepared to be humiliated yet again, who am I to disappoint it.”

Lady Emma, also refusing to turn her head, breathed heavily through her pretty nose. “This year it will be Martlake who is humiliated.” Master Roetger, the tall German leaning on a crutch beside her, gave her an approving and husbandly pat on the back.

Father Ignatius sighed. He was an educated and civilized man. Tomorrow, Sunday, he thought, these people will dress in their best to bring sheaves and fruit to church and give thanks to God for His infinite bounty as was right and proper. But always, by some hideous tradition peculiar only to them, on the day before Harvest Festival they revert to paganism and turn the eve of a Christian festival into something resembling the excesses of a Lupercalia. A madness.

Adelia Aguilar sighed with him and mentally ran through the medical equipment she’d brought with her-- bandages, ointments, needles, sutures, splints.

It would be nice to think they weren’t going to be needed, but hope was outweighed by experience.

She looked up at the tall Arab eunuch standing beside her. He shrugged, helplessly. Sometimes England baffled them. They’d traveled a long way together. Both of them born in Sicily, that melting pot of races; she, an abandoned baby, probably Greek, rescued and brought up by a Jewish doctor and his wife; he, later taken into the same, good household to be her attendant, once a lost boy with a beautiful voice whom the Latin Church had castrated so that he might retain it.

Copyright © 2010 by Ariana Franklin.