A Spurious Hanging

Chapter Two:

Chapter Two:

One month earlier...

Framlingham was a tiny English town off the East coast of the Anglo-Saxon Suffolk district. Known commonly by the locals only as "Fram," the tiny town was a beautiful market village and Civil Parish that was polka-dotted with trees all around its easy stretch of rolling hills.

Among its dwellers was Sir Edmond Zandor, quite a marginally witted individual, whose salary could not possibly fill the stomachs that he was responsible for. With a family of eleven, including him and his wife, he worked from morning to evening everyday with the stinging sweat of heavy work; yet despite his physically demanding job, he was rather scrawny due to malnutrition. His youngest was his son Harold, who was only five, while his eldest was his daughter Iseult, who was fifteen, and his son Tristan was a close second at fourteen.

His job at the stables was tough, he had to move heavy equipment for carriages and constantly stroke the loose hair out of each and every one of the neighbors' horses. If that wasn't enough, he would have to walk a mile-and-a-half both ways to fetch over a hundred gallons of water in a cart and drag it back to the stables, save for those few times on occasion when a horse was available to spare that work for him.

After that, he had to purify the water, then he'd go down to the baker's shop and buy wheat from the baker to help feed the horses when the fodder was low. Luckily for him, he had a bargain going on with the baker, Tom Garmes. Mr. Garmes desperately needed the money since he wasn't exactly wealthy himself. His and Edmond's friendship ran all the way back to the bowels of their childhood, because the two of them had to beg on the streets together since both of their families were so far down the status-chain. Edmond could only be grateful that he had a job at all, for in a beggar's eyes, being employed in any way beat being a pauper tenfold.

Despite being poor, his wealthy father had taught him how to speak "properly," for he considered Edmond's dialect at a young age to be an embarrassment to all of his higher-class friends.

After a long night of working, Edmond stumbled up to his front door and collapsed in the middle of the room into a blissfully welcoming pile of hay. His home was a small shack without a floor, or rather a glorified shed at any rate. His wife was sitting at the tiny table in the corner of the diminutive home with a bowl of soup; her only meal of the day.

"What's troubling thee Edmond?" his wife asked as she looked up from her meal. "Hast thou had any sleep?"

He gave her a gentle uncaring head shake in reply. Glancing over to see their children all sound asleep in their make-shift mattresses, he replied, "Nay Beth, no sleep, just labor."

She walked over and tilted his head off of the dirty hay. "Listen, it's only for a week. Thy father returns in the next seven suns."

He wasn't going to do cartwheels over only having to break his back seven more times. "My father is an ill-bred scut, all he is good for is his wealth above our class." After Edmond had grown up, his father had inherited butt-loads of money from his father- a stingy old man who let his son and his grandson rot in hell. And apparently Edmond's father intended on keeping that legacy, for when Edmond's grandfather died and he obtained the inheritance, he made sure that Edmond didn't so much as get a shilling of his own.

He had bought the stables six years ago, and without him Edmond wouldn't have been employed there. His father had over eight other workers, but Edmond somehow always managed to end up alone with all the work because his father would take all the other workers to go out on a "business trip," which is what he'd call a three-night stay at some alehouse in a foreign village.