Greygallows (20 page)

As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I
made out the form more clearly. It was that of a man. He looked up as I entered the room, holding my skirts high above the dusty floor; and then, as he recognized me, he struggled to his feet, his eyes shining whitely.

'My lady,' he exclaimed, in tones of amazement.

'You have sickness in the house,' I said. 'I have come to see how I can help.' Then, as he said nothing, but only continued to stare, I turned helplessly to Anna. 'Does he understand? Speak to him: ask him who is ill.'

'He understands,' Anna said. 'This is Will Jenkins. He was a groom at the house, until he grew too old to work and his Lordship turned him out without so much as a twopenny bit to drink his health. It is his daughter who lies sick.'

She indicated a door that seemed to lead to an inner room. I decided to take no notice of her criticism of Clare; I could hardly blame her for resenting an act so cruel, but it would have been improper for me to join in abusing him. I took a step toward the door; and then Jenkins moved. He lurched horribly; it was easy to see why he had been considered unfit for service. I recoiled; the movement had been so violent, and seemed designed to oppose my entrance.

'No, my lady,' he said earnestly, 'you must not go in. You will catch the sickness.'

Before I could speak, the inner door opened and another man came out. He was younger, tall and broad-shouldered. He stood in the doorway, blocking it. I could not see within, the small windows of the room were so grimed with dust, but I could hear the heavy breathing of someone in pain.

'Will's son-in-law,' said Anna, 'Mary's husband. How does she, Frank?'

Unlike the older man's speech, that of the younger was pure dialect. Anna interpreted.

'She is better, he says. He wants us to go. We will leave these things ...'

She took some of the things from the basket, put them on the table, and took my arm. I resisted.

'I want to see her, Anna. Is there no woman here? These men cannot give her the care she needs ...'

Apparently the younger man could understand me, even if he could not speak plainly. He made a low grating sound, like an animal's growl, and moved toward me. I needed no interpreter to sense his anger; it was clear from the tone of his voice and his hulking movements.

Anna spoke sharply to him, and he stopped. He was now visible to me, in the light from the open door; and as I saw his features plainly I lost my fear. His face was rough and not very clean; he had not shaved for several days. But the eyes under the heavy brows held a look of pain and bewilderment that went to my heart.

'Don't worry,' I said to Anna, who was plucking urgently at my sleeve. 'He means no harm. Is he—is he simple, then? Is that why he does not work, a big husky fellow like that? With his wife ill, I would think they would need his earnings to live.'

'You don't understand,' Anna began; and then the man began to laugh. It was a shocking sound in that house of illness and gloom. He spoke urgently, and Anna turned to me.

'He wants me to tell you what he says.'

'Go on,' I said.

It was a strange monologue that ensued: the man's harsh voice, followed by Anna's softer, calmer tones. I don't think I will ever forget what he said.

'Work? I would work if I could get it, and thank God for the chance. What work can I do? It was his Lordship's father who took our land, so we cannot get a living from the fields. Now my lord brings workmen in from London and York while our people starve; he spends nothing in this poor place. They will not hire me at the mill. Why should they, when they can hire women and children for half a man's wages, and get a full day's work from them? My wife worked there till she fell ill; before five in the morning she left here, and was not back until long after dark, too tired to cook or sweep. I try to help her, I can do no less, but I don't do it right; and it takes the heart out of a man, to let his woman work for him. Simple? Yes, I am simple, and soon I will be worse, sitting here and watching her fade away, and not knowing how to help ... Get me work, my lady! I don't want your charity; I want my rights as a free man. Get me work, any work, and see how simple I am.'

He would not let me go in to his wife. I did not insist; he meant it kindly, for all his rough words, and I sensed that whatever love could do, the woman received from this man.

I paid two more visits in that terrible little street. There were six children in one family; four of them were sick at home, sleeping all together in the single bed. Two others were at the mill. The other family...

But the stories were all the same; I heard the same complaints, from men and women alike.

Poverty and lack of work, houses that were rotting because there was no money for repairs, polluted streams, inadequate food.

I spoke to Clare at dinner. I had to speak, though I knew the subject would anger him. The things I had seen and heard that day would not let me be silent.

'So,' he said, when I had finished my little speech, 'you have been playing the grand lady. I promised not to interfere with you; but I must say I admire your courage more than I do your good sense.'

'I am not brave. But these things are so terrible! Cannot we do something for the people? Only to repair the houses—they tell me the autumn rains here are hard, and every roof has holes.'

Clare took a bite of cake.

'Repairs cost money,' he said calmly. 'At the moment I have none.'

Through the window I could see the finished facade of the restored wing. The windowpanes sparkled, and the stone was as white as marble. Within, the rooms were handsome, with new furniture and mantelpieces of imported Italian stone, costly ornaments ... Clare saw my look.

'I have none,' he repeated, and took another bite.

'But I thought I had—'

I stuck there; I could not put it into words. For one thing, I did not know what I had in the way of money. I had never known the amount of my fortune, and I had no idea how much he had spent.

Surprisingly, he did not take offense.

'You had, and have, a considerable fortune,' he said mildly. 'But even you must realize that one
cannot continue to spend capital without diminishing and eventually dissipating the income from it. Leave business matters to me. I assure you they are in good hands.'

So once again the subject was dropped because I had not the courage to pursue it in the face of Clare's superior knowledge. But this time I did not drop it from my thoughts. Clare was away from home a good deal, and since he didn't seem to care how I spent my spare time, I did not enlighten him. He would have laughed heartily if I had told him I was educating myself. I would have laughed too, a few months earlier, if anyone had told me that one day I would be learning from a crowd of semiliterate peasants and a little old man crippled with rheumatism.

I often wondered what sort of man old Jenkins would have been with the advantages of wealth and good birth. Before her death, Clare's mother had supported a short-lived village school. Several of the older villagers had learned to read and write; but Jenkins had gone farther. He had never stopped learning, and he had the rare gift of seeing beyond his immediate troubles to their underlying causes. I heard tales of distress and injustice from all the villagers, but it was Jenkins who told me about enclosure and the Poor Laws, about the Anti-Corn-Law League and the mills.

We must have made a comical picture on those mornings, as we sat side by side on the bench outside Jenkins' cottage—the old man, all bent and crippled by disease, his long white hair framing his wrinkled face; and the young woman of fashion in her furs and laces and jewels. I cared nothing for that, I was too busy learning. With Jenkins' help I
began to understand the reasons for the decline of this village, which was a sample of hundreds of others throughout England.

A century before, every family had farmed its own land, with the common pastureland open to all. Ownership of land was never questioned, for the plots had been in the same families for centuries. When the new laws were passed, most of the small farmers could not afford the work of fencing and draining required by law, and those who lacked formal titles to their land—the great majority—had no claim at all. They had to stand helplessly by and see the fields which had been in their families for generations enclosed within the lord's estate, leaving them nothing.

Jonathan had mentioned the evils of enclosure, as this process was called; but it was one thing to hear the dry statistics and quite another to see the results, in the pinched faces of hungry children and the helpless anger of their parents. The old village crafts of knitting and weaving had failed, replaced by the cheaper products of the mills, and the mill-owners would not hire an able-bodied man when they could get his ten-year-old son for less than half the wage. It did not take a man's strength to run the machines.

'One law for the rich and another for the poor.' Jonathan had said that, too. Now I knew what he meant. One set of laws deprived the poor of their land. Another law taxed imported corn, in order to keep up the price of home-grown agricultural products. But the agricultural land was now in the hands of the rich, so that even the price of the poor man's bread was controlled by those who had
stolen his cornfields. There was no avenue
of
protest open; for the law gave the landless man no vote and no representation in Parliament.

The revolution in France was not so far in the past. Miss Plum had spoken of those bloodstained years with horror; this, she implied, was how
foreigners
conducted their affairs. But as I listened to Jenkins, and saw the faces of the younger men gathered around him, I wondered how many Frenchmen had tried milder means of obtaining justice before they took up their pikes and marched out to murder and burn.

I wondered even more at my own thoughts. They were undergoing a kind of revolution too.

In his lighter moments Jenkins regaled me with local legends and history. His memories of the past were not dry excerpts from books; they were eyewitness accounts, handed down for generations. They may have been inaccurate, but they were certainly vivid. It was uncanny to hear him speak of Great Warwick and the Young Pretender as if they had lived only yesterday.

I was amused to find Mrs. Andrews' warning about King Richard confirmed. He was still a local hero, and disparaging remarks about him were not well received. Old Jenkins called him 'Dickon,' and described him so accurately I could almost believe it was he, and not his remote ancestor, who had been in the cheering crowd the day the young king made his triumphal entry into York.

'They called him "Crouchback,"' said Jenkins angrily. 'He was no such thing, my lady. He was a slight man, 'tis true, and only of medium height; but as straight as a spear, and a bonny fighter. Light-brown hair, worn long to his shoulders, and a dark eye that could pierce you like an arrow if
you had guilt hidden in your soul. But a very sweet smile he had, if he favored you. Then his eyes would light up and one eyebrow would lift as he laughed ...'

'Good heavens,' I said. 'You might have seen him yourself, Jenkins.'

'Well, but I heard it from my granther, who had it from his, and he from his mother's mother's mother,' said Jenkins. It sounded very convincing; I did not even stop to count up the generations, to see if they worked out.

Jenkins was too well-bred to criticize my husband's family in my hearing, but some of the other villagers were not; it was plain that they considered the Clares to be usurpers as well as tyrants, and that they had never forgiven the first Baron for conniving in 'Dickon's murder.' One dear vicious old lady, the terror of her downtrodden family, informed me that the Curse of the Clares had originated with no less a personage than King Dickon himself.

'Cursed them all, he did, as he lay dying,' she mumbled merrily through her toothless gums. 'Root and branch, flower and stem, the traitor Clare and his last living son.'

After someone had translated this for me, I couldn't help but admire the poetic ring of it. It didn't bother me a bit; like Fernando's silly story of pacts with the devil, Dickon's curse was too unlikely. I fancied Dickon had too much on his mind that day at Bosworth to spare breath to curse a single minor foe.