Doctor Mirabilis (6 page)

How the town had prospered since was clearly visible to Roger from where he had paused in the early morning light just over
the rim of the valley. The chessboard of orchards and pastures was sere and without motion in the cold of Autumn-Month, but
from the clustered house and shops south of the Yeo, there rose many slow-writhing lines of hazy white wood-smoke; and the
bare trees of the churchyard could not conceal the elegance of St. Mary, with its new (no older than Roger!) horizontal building
abutting the octagonal tower, which had piers formed of mouldings in stone at doors, windows and arcades. Ilchester was a
borough of substance now: it even had bailiffs, though only as of last year.

What of substance now remained for Roger of Yeo Manse was the question. Ilchester itself did not, from this distance, look
at all disturbed by the incursion of the King’s justiciar, but that meant only that de Burgles knights had not burned anything
down–for which, of course, one should thank God, but not too hastily, for there were worse depredations possible which would
still leave behind just so superficially peaceful a scene as this. The problem now was to skirt Yeo
Manse closely enough to assess how it had fared, and thence into Northover to find that inn called the Oxen by the serf Wulf
(there were four or five inns by that name in Ilchester, at least two in Northover to Roger’s knowledge) without being recognized
for what he was by some soldier of Will of Howlake. To do so without being seen by some such man was out of the question,
but Roger was reasonably sure he could pass any casual inspection – after all, his breeches and coarse surcoat were just like
those of a thousand other young men from the anonymous poor, except that they were slightly less threadbare. Unless he was
incautious in his curiosity about the manse, he would probably not be picked up at all; and even if he were seized and searched
thoroughly enough to turn up the manuscript in his gear, he could feign to be a goliard – one of the many raggle-taggle vagabond
scholars who, eager enough for learning but utterly impatient of university routines, wandered from teacher to teacher and
monastery to monastery, themselves teaching or writing anew the text of one or another of the Miracle plays in return for
their instruction and keep. He would get by with such a deception if he had to practise it. The danger did not lie there.
It lay in the good possibility that someone in Northover, someone who belonged there, would recognize him under the eye of
someone of Howlake or de Burgh, and speak too soon and too loudly.

He dug one heel into John Blund; the horse moved reluctantly, and just as reluctantly Roger gave it its head, for the side
here, though only half as steep as a roof, offered no road – he had quitted that before topping the crest out of elementary
caution – but instead slippery outcroppings of rock and moss, giving way farther down to a tumble of rubble, like a talus-slope
at the foot of a cliff, full of incipient shifts and slides and glistening menacingly with frost. No man could presume to
guide a horse over such ground, but instead, must let him put each of his four feet where he chose and as delicately as he
could manage, until he showed himself willing to resume his gait.

And, in fact, to Roger’s faint surprise, John Blund
managed the sliding course without even a serious stumble, though there was one rock-tumble moment when he seemed certain
to break a foreleg, and probably to pash his awn and Roger’s brains out as well. It was over in half the time it would have
taken to say a pater noster, however (and in actuality, it had doubtless taken no more than ten pulse-beats); and then the
horse was clump-clumping across rimed brown grass in a complacent trot he had decided to undertake all on his own. Roger found
himself grinning. A lifetime of intimacy with horses had convinced him that nothing else on four legs can be BO stupid, but
so frequently and humanly overwhelmed by its own good opinion of itself.

He had, as well, good reason to be pleased with himself, for as he resumed the reins, he found himself and John Blund crossing
a frozen ditch into a broad ploughland which he recognized at once as bordering on the west vineyard of Yeo Manse. He could
hardly have arrived at a safer quarter of the estate, this time of year, for, to begin with, it had always been the poorest
cot in
itsfisc,
secondly, the most remote from the seigniorial manse and hence from Will of Howlake, thirdly, the cot (if Roger’s memory,
dim here, could be trusted) of the serf Wulf (who could be presumed to be haunting some tavern in Northover to the detriment
of his week work), and finally (though this, at least, could be laid to no foreplanning on Roger’s part) today was obviously
a boon-work day: for on the other side of the vineyards, where the little group of sod houses belonging to this and three
other cots were huddled, Roger could see a group of small hunched figures assembling, most of them carrying axes, mattocks
and adzes – a wood-cutting gang – and hear the shouts of a dean, one of Tom the steward’s overseers, distant but clear. Shortly
they would be moving off to give their one day’s work out of the week at the big house; in fact, they were moving away from
him already. Thinly over the motionless fields a hoarse baritone voice began bawling:

but the lyric, so plainly of spring and the gentry, came stiffly from amidst the rime-caked villein’s beard on to the November
air and began to fade:

and yet, just as the hewing party was almost gone entirely to Roger’s sight, other voices, equally unmusical, began to float
back the round:

Alysoun,
said the Yeo Valley.
Alysoun … soun … soun.

Heaving his huge keg of a chest up and down, the horse blew solemnly between his thick mobile lips, and Roger, too, resumed
breathing with a subdued start. What was left behind of the world was essence, without sound, motion or life, keeping its
slight claim to be real in the rank order of the generation of forms only because it was – least close of all secondary qualities
to the primary and real – still bitterly cold. In contemplation of these things as they always had been, it was impossible
to believe that Yeo Manse had changed or could change in th’eternalie of the world. Though Heraclitus had never been able
to put his foot twice into the same river, he had never been in any doubt about which was river and which was foot (one was
cold, one got cold; but
how in memory could he trust the order of these events, one being – secondary – used to judge the primary other?); everything
changed, but only to remain more and more perfectly the same, like the River Meander which cut new banks and channels every
year to maintain that clear, fixed, Platonic word of which the river in flux could never be more than a shadow.

But the shadowy solid horse beneath him, still sweaty after its delicate slide into the valley, trembled and reminded him
that this was no ultimate Horse he was riding, he himself no Idea of Man, and Yeo Manse no shadow of some ultimate Estate;
they all had names, and things with names pass away. He would have to give this horse-with-a-name (though it be John Blund,
or just ‘yon hay-bottle’) a rub before very long or it would come down with the glanders – and though there might be some
ultimate Glanders in Plato’s cave, when one hitched it to a horse with a name, one had a sick horse, which was a good deal
more serious in this world than any coupling of Sickness with Horseness; and the Heraclitean river – not the Yeo, but a much
more drastic Meander – flowed in an underground torrent beneath Yeo Manse, too, as under all things else.

As that river flowed on inexorably, the morning grew older … it must be well after eight already … but for a while Roger found
himself unable to move on, urgent though his errand was, and more urgent though the danger grew with each increment of delay.
These ditch-guarded pasturelands deep in long brown grass, the vineyard surrounded with its fence woven on close-set stakes,
the plough-lands lying humped and frozen in the heatless sunlight, the owl-haunted timber stands, the willow plantation where
withies and barrel-hoops were cut, the palisaded orchards where every tree was a boy’s lesson in climbing for the daylight
and a well of sharp cider and perry for the evening meal; the voices of the serfs, the shapes of the hills, the blue bend
of the sky over the wrinkling Yeo … these were all his home, now most strangely and heartbreakingly hostile in its – absolute,
changeless stillness. It had been with bitterness and
defiance toward Robert, and an unbrookable, long-swelling passion to be free of Yeo Manse once and for all, that he had left
this place to become a clerk, but never with any thought that it would itself reject him in its turn. No, Yeo Manse had borne
the Bacons on its breast for centuries, and would always lie awaiting his return, should he deign to make it ….

His shadow, wedded to that of John Blund, slowly lost stature on the earth beneath him. His breast hollow with sullen, helpless
loneliness, he turned the horse’s head northward. There was nothing more to be learned here; it was all exactly as it had
always been … except that it was suddenly an alien land.

We shall not all die,
the self murmured;
but we shall all be changed.

‘Us be an old man, Meister,’ Wulf said. ‘Old and cleft a bit, as it mote be said, and most deaf and blind eke, as mote be
said, and good for naught. But us remembered thee.’

Old the man was, without doubt nearly eighty, his hairs white, his teeth gone but for a few brown tusks, his skin the texture
and colour of bad leather. Even across the splintery trestle table in the Oxen, he stank most markedly, a mixture of sod,
sweat and a sour and precarious digestion; yet, curiously, his homespun was sturdy and almost clean, and his filthy ankles
rose out of crude but strongly stitched slippers of hide so well and recently cured that the pointed toes still protruded
straight ahead – in proud contrast to the points of Roger’s own shoes, which tended to fold under the balls of his feet every
third or fourth step.

‘How didst thou know me?’ Roger said, shifting his stone mug on the planking. ‘And how canst thou lurk here away from the
manse, morning as well as night? Inns are not for serfs, even such a one as this.’

The old man smiled dimly, as though recalling some exercise of craft half a century bygonnen. ‘Us knew thee, Meister,’ he
said. The gnarled hand closed about a leather tankard but did not lift it. ‘Us saw thee and followed thee when thou wert but
a new lamb. Nay, a badger, thou wert,
with a girt chest and shoulders, and always at digging and burying. Wold Wulf was proper crofter then with’s boy to lead the
oxen, twice as old as thou art and with boys of his own now, Meister; and us good for naught in these years, as mote be said,
but for to hold the cot till us be called. Us be’ent missed now that poor son’s a man grown and ploughs and has childer. Nay,
wold Wulf may go where us will, as mote be said, and there’s an end to it, Meister.’

Roger frowned, unable to press the question further, but remaining as puzzled as before. Of course the grandfather of a serf’s
family would not be missed from the work – he had understood that much of the mystery of the unremembered Wulf the moment
he had been confronted by this snaggly sour-breathed ruin; but when his query to the suspicious host had flushed Wulf at last,
the old man had been brought from the back of the inn, still wearing a nightcap in the midst of the day, so that it had been
made most clear that he was living at the Oxen, which was impossible for a serf; though he be the grandsire of all the serfs
that ever were.

The old man seemed to have forgotten that that question, too, had been asked him. He stared with his white-filmed blue eyes
at the fire, over which a soup of some kind – from which a faint additional odour of hot mutton fat attested to the early
kill at Yea Manse, for under normal circumstances, no mutton could yet have reached so mean an inn as this –was seething in
a huge black kettle hanging from an iron chain.

‘Us were a sheep herd, then,’ he said abruptly. ‘Us took they sheep to the uplands for pasture, with Hob that was wold Wulf
‘s dog that died afore thee’d remember him, Meister, and wold Wulf’s boy that keeps the cot now to carry the hurdles. And
Tom the steward, that was no older than Wulf’s boy, he told us to mind thee when thee wandered, Meister, as wander thee did
till us was blue out of breath. A-diggin’ up and a-buryin’ thee was, and in and out of rafters and trees—’

‘Go thou to the point, old man,’ Roger said, gripping the edge of the table fiercely with both hands. Yet he was sure
that he already knew what the answer was to be. ‘Why didst thou write to me? What hast thou for me?’

‘Us shall show thee, Meister,’ Wulf said with a secret smile. ‘Us can’t show thee here, but us has it all, fear thee not.
Us took it all, and more. Us made proper fools of they King’s men. Us took away thy diggings, and put thy buryings in they
ilke holes’

‘What dost thou mean?’

‘Nay,
Meister, glare not so at wold Wulf,’ the serf said, beginning to snivel. ‘They was but bits of trash, as mote be said, like
boys ud bury—’

Roger fought back his temper, as best he could. There would be no point in so alarming the old man that he became incoherent.

‘Tell me what thou hast done,’ he said, with a gentleness he was still far from feeling. ‘And hew to it quickly and directly.’