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when he had gone to investigate,
     he had discovered that they were men talking at the far side of the river.
    So now he stood frowning, straining his ears to discoverwhere the riders could be. It was only sensible to be wary, especially with neighbours as unpredictable as the men under Geoffrey
     Servington. When he had first come here, he had been warned that Geoffrey’s men were prone to violence. Not long before there
     had been a scuffle of some sort, and Geoffrey’s men had killed Robert’s own predecessor.
    There was a sharp explosion of noise, and he spun round to find the area before his house filled with horses. He had been
     too keen to listen out for the riders coming along the track to think that they might approach another way. Somehow these
     men had ridden through the woods and come at him from the river. He moved aside as their beasts stamped and pawed at the soil,
     snorting and blowing after their urgent ride.
    ‘You the bailiff here?’
    Robert turned to find himself confronted by a thickset figure on a horse. He nodded.
    ‘I am Sir Geoffrey Servington. This land is my lord’s, bailiff. So I want you to leave.’
    ‘This is land of Sir John Sully. No one else’s,’ Robert said, but he was nervous in the face of all these men-at-arms. A black
     horse backed, stamping angrily, and Robert moaned when he saw it crush his carefully planted bean and pea plants.
    Following the direction of his gaze, Geoffrey shouted, ‘Get off the garden! After all,’ he added, smiling evilly at Robert,
     ‘when we have our own man living here, we won’t want him to starve, will we?’

Chapter Four
    Hugh brought the axe down one last time, wiped his brow with the back of his hand, and set the axe by the side of his pile
     of wood. Gazing about him, he grinned as he told himself that he had never been so happy as since he started to live with
     Constance.
    This old tree had collapsed during the year before last, when he’d first come here. Over time the other larger boughs had
     been cut out, but this one had, for some reason, survived. And then a foul storm had struck and it had collapsed, taking a
     lot of the old Devon hedge with it.
    It was a problem with older parcels of land in this area. The little holding where Hugh and Constance lived was once part
     of the Priory of Belstone’s demesne, but when Constance had been sent here by the prioress it had been empty for some years.
     The hovel which had stood here had been all but derelict, and when Hugh first saw it his temper had if anything grown more
     sour.
    ‘Best work on that first,’ he had declared, and stood staring at it while Constance gazed at him anxiously. She had been anxious
     a lot of the time back then, he remembered. About her baby, about her life, whether she had made the right choices, whether
     she should be here at Iddesleigh at all… there were so many concerns for a young woman with no vocation.
    What else could a moorman do, though? Hugh knew that a place like this needed a man to look after it, just as a woman needed
     a man to provide for her. It was all well and good to say to a woman like Constance, ‘Woman, there’s a place at Iddesleigh.
     There’s a house and some acres. Go and take it. You can live there,’ as though that was an end to the matter. But no one who’d
     ever farmed would think that. No, as Hugh knew, a farm which was left fallow for any length of time would soon be overwhelmed
     with weeds and brambles, the coppices overrun with small, useless stems, and the house … well, it would look as this one
     had.
    Constance was lucky the prioress had given her anything, of course. It was proof of the regard in which she was held by the
     prioress – but God’s ballocks, it was fortunate that Hugh had been here to see to it.
    The scowl on his face lightened a moment. Being born on the moors lent a man a suspicious nature, and for a moment Hugh wondered
     whether that could have been at the heart of the prioress’s