Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall by Vengeance Thwarted Page B

well, I hear the Bishop of Durham lives fat and comfortable and he would never come this far, so if they dinna want them ower the border I reckon that’s their business. It’s not a thing we should be fighting about.”
    After supper they wanted him to sleep in the barn but while there was still daylight he pressed on south by the way they had directed him to a drove road. When dusk fell he turned aside and walked over the moor till he found a hollow where he could curl up out of sight in the heather. The kindliness of the people soothed his mind and he was soon asleep.
    But finding thick whiteness about him when daylight came he dare not move in case he blundered further and further from the road. The delay frustrated him and because his body was inactive his mind worked feverishly, comparing these hill people with the village that poor Daniel had blundered into. Were they not all ordinary human beings? He went over the whole story the angler had told him, feeling his wretchedness at Daniel’s loss turning to bitter anger towards those responsible for his death. Could Sir John Horden not see that Daniel was slow-witted? Why had he allowed his vicious son to incite the mob to hang him so peremptorily? Why had no effort been made to find the fat boy who could be the key to the horrible mistake?
    Daniel said it was a dream. Ah but they didn’t know him, he thought. I could always sort his dreams from reality and when he spoke to me that night in the hut he was telling me what he had just seen. It was no dream, for he was well awake with the pain of his wound. What sort of a magistrate is Sir John that he could allow a verdict of guilty on such slight evidence?
    Nat worked himself into a passion as he paced about in the hollow to keep warm. He had water but no food to eat while he waited for the sunrise when the autumn warmth would surely suck up this cursed fog. His heart yearned to hear Dan’s voice soothing him. “Don’t be angry, Nat. Don’t be sad.” It always distressed Dan to see him give way to emotion, unless it was happiness, when he would laugh with him over the smallest and most absurd things.
    Nat thought of their boyhood with stabbing pangs of regret for the times he had been impatient with Daniel, when he had wanted to study and Daniel had begged to play. Mother would shout at me, he thought. “Go play with him at once. How can you stop being the little runt if you don’t exercise yourself!” How I hated her for that and my fury made me do everything in our play faster than Dan. I would be up a tree before he could haul himself onto the lowest branch. I always beat him in races and he never minded. And of course I could read before he even knew the letters. I had Father’s praise but it was he who warned me not to gloat over Dan’s slowness nor be jealous of Mother’s special love for him. It was still hard to take but never hard after that to love Daniel because he loved me with such a passion. Ah, but did I ever show him enough how much I loved him. And now I never can.
    Nat sank again into his heather hollow and gave way to a burst of weeping which he thought would never end. But at last he sensed through his fingers a lightening of the sky. The mist was thinning. The east was that way and so was the drove road.
    “God be praised.” He hoisted his knapsack and walked forward. He must complete his journey and face the horror of the homecoming. Beyond that he couldn’t see. It was shrouded as the distant hills were still shrouded. Perhaps he could talk to Dan as he walked of all that he experienced this day and find comfort in the telling.
    Bel sat on her bed and stared at the wooden bars that had been screwed into the window-frame in her absence. They didn’t matter. Nothing did. Her hands were sore from the caning Nurse had given her on her mother’s orders, but she remembered that monks and even nuns used to wear hair shirts and flagellate themselves in their cells. What a pity all those