The Town House (30 page)

I rode out with him once during January at the time of the month when even Mother could not complain of my being in the saddle. Then, despite all his pleadings I made excuses until the next time the moon ruled my blood. That time, as she greeted me, Mother said, ‘What again!’

The ill humour into which this remark threw me was not improved by the tone of her conversation throughout my visit. Had I been eating green apples? Where, I retorted, would I find green apples in February? Don’t sit on grass. Lately, I snapped, there had been little temptation to do so.

‘You are so irritable,’ she said, ‘that I wonder if you are not already pregnant and deceiving me. Is that so?’

I was tempted to nod and so end it, but I had no wish to complicate matters even more, so I shook my head. She then went on to tell me two more helpful things. I should steep a pound of red meat in water, let it soak overnight, then squeeze it and drink the juice. And I should borrow a shift or a petticoat from a woman lately brought to bed, wear it without washing it for a month, then return it to her with a present of a new garment, red in colour.

‘What an old wives’ tale!’ I said.

‘Old wives are usually mothers and their tales should be heeded,’ she replied.

That afternoon, as we rode home, it began to rain and as soon as we arrived went up to our room to throw off our wet clothes. Flinging my soaked hood on the floor I said angrily.

‘It’ll be a long time before I go to Minsham again!’

‘Why, sweetheart? I thought you liked to go.’

Suddenly everything boiled up in me.

‘How can you be so stupid and blind,’ I shouted at him. Then I began to cry, and mixed up with the sobs and the blubberings it all came out, Mother’s questions and admonitions, my evasions and pretences, my suspicions that he wanted a sweetheart but not a wife, everything, everything.

I had flung myself down on the bed, burrowing my face into the pillow and when I had said
everything
I knew that I had said too much. I lifted my head a little and looked at him. I was frightened. He had the wild look on him and had gone as white as chalk. Now I had thrown away what I had had, a loving and pleasant companion, I thought.

He said, ‘I’ll show you.’

And there, amongst the wet clothes and the messed bedclothes, in the fading light of the February afternoon, I lost my virginity at last.

Now for me no more riding horse-back; no green apples; no sitting on grass; retching and revolted I gulped down pints of red meat juice, and when, early in June one of the workmen’s wives in the huts beyond the stables was brought to bed I borrowed her filthy petticoat and wore it, flea-ridden as it was and returned it, in July with a fine red woolsey cloak. It all availed me nothing; the August moon ruled me, this year as last.

All this was my private concern. Around me things moved on. Master Reed had taken another stride forward, and was building again. His new notion was to bring over some Flemish weavers to ply their craft in Baildon.

The Flemings were, at this time, an unhappy people, subject to this rule and that as the fortune of war decided. Richard had told me how, on one of his visits to the Low Countries he had seen between three and four hundred people, men, women and children, being herded along the
roads, like animals being taken to market. Their ruler of the moment, the Emperor, or the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy – I was never clear on that point – had decided that one town was too full of people and another too empty, so they were arbitrarily chosen and made to move.

With such circumstances prevailing in their home country Flemings were always willing to take service elsewhere. The best hired mercenaries were always Flemings, ‘routiers’ they were called. And the best craftsmen, the weavers, were unsettled too. Master Reed, who at set intervals made the voyage in one of his ships and visited his warehouse in Amsterdam, had engaged eight skilled men to come to Baildon and ply their craft.

A new building was reared, running out at an angle from the main house. The upper floor, very stoutly built to sustain the weight and thud of the looms, was to be the weaving shed; below it the weavers, all single young men, were to live. The weaving shed was a unique structure in that its walls were almost all window. The glass was very costly but Master Reed was sure that within four years he would have reimbursed himself. There would be no duty to pay on the home-woven stuff and he reckoned that he could sell it so cheaply that he would undercut everybody else.

‘I began’, he said once, ‘by doing smith work cheap. Then I offered cheap stabling. And when I went into the wool trade I was still cheap; I gave a little more for the raw fleeces and sold the baled wool for a little less. Now I hope to sell good cloth, cheap.’

I think that was the longest speech I ever heard him make.

The building was finished and the Flemings arrived in June – while I was wearing that horrible petticoat and trying to scratch myself without being noticed. And all through July and August Master Reed and Richard were dealing with the problem of language. Master Reed had learned enough to make himself understood in Amsterdam; Richard knew rather more, he had been inland as far as Bruges and being young had a more pliable mind. But the Flemings were difficult; they worked very well and needed little instruction or guidance so long as they were at their looms, trouble began when they took their feet from the treadles. They made straight for the town then, and in the town they were foreigners, everything they did suspect and resented; this they could not, or would not understand, so fights took place for the most trivial reasons or for no reason at all. They were woman hungry, and since no respectable females would have anything to do with them they fell into the hands of whores and harpies who cheated and robbed them. It would all have
been different and easier had Master Reed been popular in Baildon; but just as he hated all the townspeople, they hated him and took pleasure in dealing him a knock through the foreigners he had imported. Once they were all inside the town wall when the gates were locked for the night and then arrested for being vagrants. By the end of August Master Reed was talking of finding someone capable of speaking to them in their own tongue and controlling them.

‘Some old routier,’ Richard said, ‘with a good hard hand. They’d understand that.’

‘And where would you find one, except on the road, a broken-down ne’er-do-well?’ Master Reed said.

Anxious to be helpful I said to Richard, ‘My father might know of one, or my brother. Mention it next time you are at Minsham.’

He still rode out there two or three times a week and I always sent a present of some kind, with some kind of excuse – we’d killed a pig and were glutted with pork, or this was a cake I’d made myself, or this was one of the first pieces of cloth from the Baildon loom. I did not go myself. Now that all was well between Richard and me I could send a downright frank message – ‘Tell Mother to remember the junket,’ I could say. And he could laugh.

Half-way through September he came back from Minsham with two pieces of news. One was that Isabel was to go to stay with Aunt Astallon and the other was that as soon as she had gone Mother was coming to see me; she intended to stay two nights in Baildon at least.

‘Is Father coming too?’

‘No. Your mother only. She said she had business to do.’

I sighed. What her business might be I could not guess; one thing was sure, she would find time to go into mine. Still, I braced myself. I was no longer playing at being married. Richard and I were
married
and in that assurance I felt I could face her.

She arrived riding the better horse of the two, the one Father usually rode and when I had greeted her I asked,

‘What happened to Mag?’

‘I’m going farther afield,’ she said, mysteriously. ‘I was on my knees the other night, with my rosary in my hands and the Blessed Virgin herself put a thought into my mind.’

I had a feeling that this concerned me, so I said, with levity,

‘That poor old Mag should be put to pasture?’

Dear Mother; she laughed.

‘No. That we should go to St. Edmundsbury.’

‘What for?’

‘Anne, you have now been married for more than a year. And you’ve been a good girl and followed my instructions. The time has come when nothing but a visit to St. Petronella can help us.’

‘St. Petronella? I never heard of her.’

‘Nor I, until I consulted the priest. Now there’s a thing you never thought to do, I’ll warrant.’ She looked at me gaily. ‘St. Petronella is the one for us. And how fortunate that she is so near.’

We had the solar to ourselves; and while Mother refreshed herself she told me all that she had learned from the priest.

St. Petronella, in her lifetime had been a fish-gutter at Talmont in France, and in a quarrel with a fellow worker had been so slashed about the face that no man could look on her without a shudder. So her longing for children was never gratified and when, after a long and holy life she died and was beatified she gave special notice to the prayers of barren women.

About a hundred years before I was born a Franciscan Friar found his way to St. Edmundsbury and was concerned by the number of lepers living in destitution outside the town. He wished to help them, but had no money, nothing but faith and his own resourcefulness. He made a cross of elm wood and carried it, preaching and begging as he went, all the way to Le Mans where he laid it on St. Petronella’s shrine amongst all the glittering votive and thank-offerings that covered it. He prayed that some virtue might pass into the wood. Then he carried it back and announced that virtue
had
passed into it. He set it up under an arch of rough stones and it had become a place of pilgrimage for childless women. As long as he lived he used the income of the shrine for the relief of lepers and when he died the Abbey took over the shrine and built a little house for the lepers.

All this Mother told me as she drank some ale and ate cake in the solar. I listened and thanked her for her interest and concern for me. Once I had resented her questions and advice, but now it was different. Nevertheless, when she said,

‘We’ll go there, together, tomorrow,’ I protested.

‘What excuse can we give?’

‘Why excuse? You can give your real reason.’

‘It is a matter that is never mentioned, not even between Richard and me. As for his father…’

‘Nonsense! Not to mention a thing is not to say it does not exist. I’ll warrant that Richard and his father have watched you with eyes as keen as mine, and been as greatly disappointed.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘Never mind, we are doing all that we can. And the priest assured me that the Saint had worked some wondrous miracles.’

I announced – brusquely because I was embarrassed – that on the morrow Mother and I intended to ride to St. Edmundsbury. Richard put out his hand and squeezed mine, understandingly. Master Reed looked at me sombrely out of his sad eyes and presently, when we chanced to be alone for a moment, said to me,

‘Anne, I know the purpose of your journey, and I wish you well. But…’ He hesitated and then said, jerkily, the words coming out of him in a rush, ‘Don’t count too much upon it. Miracles …’ he paused again and looked down at his lame leg and the thick-soled shoe, ‘They work in a queer twisted way,’ he said. ‘And I can’t for the life of me see how what you’re wanting could be other than straightforward. And I don’t believe they can be that way. Miracles I mean.’ He touched my shoulder and said, ‘Perhaps your faith is greater.’

Next morning we set out, Mother and I with a man to escort us. Richard wanted to come, but that I did not favour, why I could not say. I would not have taken the man but Master Reed insisted; he was shocked to learn that Mother had ridden in from Minsham alone. His view of the open road was the view of the man who transports stuff of value from place to place and must ever be on guard against robbers.

There was no need to inquire the way to the shrine. Long before we reached it we found ourselves in the centre of a kind of Fair, a Fair devoted to the exploitation of childless women. It was so shameless that I wonder the Abbey allowed it. There were people selling charms, all guaranteed to bring fecundity; cakes made in the shape of babies; trinkets of bone or wood or stone, even of coral and ivory, all in the shape of babies. There were strings and strings of blue beads – blue being the Virgin’s own colour and thus associated with motherhood. There were slatternly women with great broods of children – borrowed or hired, I suspect, lining the road and screaming that they would sell, for a penny, the secret of their fruitfulness. ‘Two pence, lady, and I’ll put the good wish on you!’ ‘Threepence, lady, and you shall be in pod by Michaelmas.’ I was ashamed and drew my veil close, and even Mother said,

‘They overdo it somewhat.’

Monks are cunning. After all that brash huckstering along the road, with the constant demand for pence breeding disbelief until you were ready to think of St. Petronella as just another fraud, out to rob you, you rode through a gateway where only petitioners and their attendants were allowed to pass. Inside was a kind of inn; rails to which horses could be hitched, a stone trough full of water, benches and tables where people could refresh themselves. The whole place was shaded by chestnut trees, from which, on this day, the great yellow fans of dead leaves fluttered gently and quietly to the ground.

On the far side of this enclosure was a gate in the wall. Through this the petitioner must go alone. The path beyond was paved and bordered on each side by a green hedge, neatly clipped, very thick and an inch or two taller than a man. The path wound in curves so that at no time could I see more than a step or two ahead. I have never felt more lonely, more isolated from all other human beings. The contrast after the bustle and hurly-burly outside was complete. When I rounded the last curve there was the plain wooden Cross, under the rough stone arch, just as the Franciscan had set it up, more than a hundred years ago.

Offerings to this shrine were always in money – used for the relief of lepers and other purposes – so the shrine was quite bare, without even a flower. It was humble and touching, and in some strange way far more believable and impressive than any other shrine I had ever seen. I went down on my knees and prayed that St. Petronella would use her influence, and intercede for me and give me a baby. Here, alone, in the quiet before this simple Cross, I could acknowledge the need which hitherto I had hidden even from myself. I thought about holding a baby in my arms, feeding it at my breast.