Keldwick's Valley

Keldwick's Valley lies in the fringes of the Northern Marches, inside the claims of Baron George Keldwick, a lord whose title is registered and defended and whose riders can reach a ridge sooner than the sheriff's men. Like much of his northern ground, the valley has been held on paper for longer than it has been held in fact. It was fringe country, worked within memory and since let slip, with the woods closing on its fields and its tracks going to grass.

In the spring of this year the baron set out to change that. He gave a contract to Packwood's Company, under Captain Ellen Packwood, to make the valley fit for use again, and the company went in with axes, a guide and a camp at the near end. Since July it has buried two of its men and the guide. All three died along a single line on the old western bank, and nowhere else in the valley has anyone come to harm. The smaller creatures of the valley, the birds and the vermin that make a wood sound like a wood, have fallen quiet. In one week three hamlets nearby each turned the company away from some errand with the very same excuse.

The baron calls it beasts and has offered thirty pounds to anyone who will see them cleared by Martinmas. Captain Packwood does not agree. She says that whatever is on the western bank is holding it and defending it, as a man defends his own, and she would rather pull out and send for someone with the standing to treat with such things. Her articles say that a company which withdraws loses its share of the reclaimed ground, and she has gone to an attorney at Harrowgate to ask whether the words mean what they appear to. Until that is answered her men keep to the eastern side of the valley and the stumps of their first clearing stand raw in the wet.