The Unquiet Bones by Mel Starr

she added. “He’s got the oxen for the day. He’ll be ploughin’ a furlong.”
    Villagers in a place like Shilton leased strips of land in several locations surrounding the town. Together these parcels might amount to perhaps thirty acres: a yardland. I led Bruce to the appointed home and knocked at the door.
    The house was one of the larger of its type in the hamlet. Like the rest, it was made of wattle and daub, with a thatched roof, but this one, unlike a few others in the village, was in good repair. At the rear, filling most of the toft, was a cultivated plot, now barren, which had evidently produced the year’s supply of carrots, cabbages, and turnips.
    A woman in a flour-dusted apron answered my knock and directed me with pointed finger over the small rise at the southwest corner of the hamlet where, she said, I would find her husband and son and the team of oxen the villagers owned collectively.
    I tied Bruce to a sapling and set off for the designated field. The ground was soft with recent rain, but not mud. Ideal for plowing. The two men looked my way as I crested the hill, but continued their work. The older man led the team, the younger held the plow expertly in the furrow. I met them at the end of the long, narrow field, where they would turn the team.
    The field they plowed had been fallow. Sheep droppings indicated the use to which it had been put for the past year. Now the manure was being turned into the soil to improve the wheat which would be planted there in a few days.
    “Are you Thomas?” I asked the younger man.
    “Aye…as is he.” He nodded toward his father.
    I introduced myself and my mission, and asked if he knew that Margaret, the smith’s daughter, had been buried in Burford churchyard the day before.
    “Aye.” His eyes dropped to the freshly turned earth at his feet. “Knew of it.”
    Thomas Shilton, the younger, was a large man, just grown to his full size, which was considerable. He was half a head taller than me, and heavier than Lord Gilbert. Twenty or so years of hard work and adequate food had produced a man of broad shoulders, strong arms and legs, and straight back. The stubble on his chin indicated that he was needing to shave more regularly now. His hair was fair, and matted in the wind which blew across the field.
    “I am told that, early in the summer, you argued with Margaret on the banks of the River Windrush.”
    “There, and other places,” he answered with a sardonic smile.
    “You argued with Margaret often?”
    “Aye. She were easy to dispute with.”
    “Yet you wished to marry her, I am told.”
    “I did,” he said softly.
    “She had some, uh, other qualities?”
    Tom smiled sheepishly, then said, “She forgot a dispute right readily.”
    “You argued about another man, I was told.”
    Tom seemed to think that, as I knew the source of their disagreement, my words required no comment. He stared at me, then studied the fresh earth at his feet once again.
    “Who was it that caused your discord?”
    “I do not know the man,” he replied with some heat.
    “How is it that Margaret could be…uh…associated with someone you would not know?”
    “He was not of this place.”
    “From where, then? Burford?”
    “Nay. She wouldn’t say. Farther, I think.”
    “It is rumored that he was a gentleman.”
    “So she said.”
    “Did she think a gentleman would take up with a smith’s daughter?” I asked.
    “’Tis what I asked her,” he replied, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
    “And what did she answer?”
    “She laughed. Said as how I might find out.”
    “How did you learn of this other fellow?”
    “I’d been pressin’ her to have the bans read. She wouldn’t agree. Back about St George’s day she changed her mind. Said as we’d have the bans read soon…but by hocktide she’d turned cold again. Perhaps I pressed her overmuch. She told me I wasn’t the only man as wanted her. I knew that. But I told her she’d not do