The Wilding (16 page)
‘I’m sorry, Aunt.’
‘What use is sorry? We’ve never had vinegar before.’
‘Then you’ve been fortunate,’ I assured her with feeling. ‘I could boil it with raisins and honey – that might help. Or you could use it as it is.’
‘What, a hogshead?’ she retorted. ‘I could supply all England with vinegar!’
Ah, I thought to myself, you could do that without the cider.
Speaking to Aunt Harriet was now become an ordeal, and not only because she was so disagreeable. Knowing what I did, I could scarcely endure to look on her waxy skin, her pale blue eyes, her fading but still golden hair. Before, these had spoken to me of a life lived in comfort and plenty; now, they seemed the attributes of a carved and gilded tomb figure, a chill, heartless creature. They say the Gentleman appears to women in the guise of a handsome, mannerly lover.
His
hair is not gold, but the colour of night; his eyes sparkle and burn; his nakedness seems made of fire. Yet when he performs nature on a woman, all she feels inside her body is a deathly cold. My aunt had something of that same dismal quality; I could see why Joan called her one of his chosen.
Despite this aversion, which was so strong as to cause me distress whenever I was in company with her, I could not leave End House while my work remained to be done. By ‘work’ I do not mean the pressing (though there was all that to do) but my true work that had taken me there, the discovery of Robin’s guilt and the making of his reparation.
‘I’ll have a l look on h’ I said. ‘See if it can be saved.’ My aunt did not deign to thank me but nodded and went on her way.
*
In my chamber I washed my hands and face and lay down to think. I had done so much thinking in the last day or so that my brains might wear out, at this rate, before I was thirty.
The addled hogshead could be seen as a blessing in disguise in that it gave me more labour. My aunt had not so many late apples as early ones, which meant that in the ordinary course of things my time at End House would shortly run out. I was up to that, and had already resolved to delay the cider-making in every conceivable fashion, a cheat made easier in two ways: firstly, I was assisted not by Binnie, in whose interest it was to finish up and move on, but by Paulie’s boy. Secondly, not being paid, I had no conscience about spreading my labour thinly. I would therefore divide up the apples into as many combinations as my aunt would stand for, taking much longer than the task required, all under cover of making drink fit for a queen.
The question now weighing on me was: how was I to move forward? What should I do next?
I thought I knew enough already to piece together Robin’s crime. Putting together impressions I had gleaned from my father, from Joan, from Tamar and from Rose Barnes, I understood him to be a man inclined to the sins of the flesh, a handsome, sensual, weak-willed fellow, but capable at the same time of kindness and a lazy, slack-twisted kind of love. Cruelty had no part in him, any more than it had in my father. Feeling himself near death, he had at last found the courage to write a new will and to protect Joan and her child in a way he had never yet dared. But the will was lost, or he had not had time to write it, and now Robin could not lie at peace in his grave.
What did he know about Harriet’s part in the affair? I pictured her greeting as he returned to the room; she would be pale and self-possessed and ask after the horses. The next morning she would discover that Joan was not in her chamber, and then would come tears, and the discovery that her sister was gone off with the soldiers. She would no doubt tell him the girl had been desperate, because ruined – she would not fail to twist the blade – and that they must cover it up. Robin could scarcely imagine what had taken place in his absence; if the villagers had any sense they would hold their tongues. Still, he was my father’s brother, and most likely shrewd in his way. In time, when it was too late, he might make a guess that came somewhere near the truth.
When it was too late … how, after that night, did he go on living with Harriet and with himself? The mystery of other people, their souls opaque and infolded as cabbage leaves, here so overwhelmed me that I felt all the hopelessness of my task, but I pulled myself together. It was of no consequence how he lived with her. That was past.
What I already knew fitted with what he had written to my father:
her rights
. Joan’s rights? Or Tamar’s? What might they be, in his eyes? Some part of his inheritance? Something he bequeathed them in his will, a will lost or destroyed before my father could reach Robin and take it into his safe keeping? But how could the dying man imagine that Joan and her child would ever come back to claim what was theirs?
Perhaps he already knew them to be near. Perhaps he was amongshese who, looking on a wizened beggar woman, were able to see not only what she was, but also who she had been. Had Tamar revealed herself to him before his death? Had he known her by some trick of the face or voice? Why did he –
Why did he die?
If Joan and Tamar knew that he had altered his will, then they stood to benefit by his dying. How easy for a tender nurse to slip something into his cordials! On the other hand, if he had had no time to alter his will, or no knowledge of who it was who nursed him, only one person would benefit from his speedy departure: that figure in marble, Aunt Harriet.
This was like sinking into nightmare. I sat up, as if to shake off my thoughts, and as I did so I recalled something: Joan’s dragging herself up from the bed when she first thought she might be with child. Only now did it occur to me that this was most likely her old chamber, and that since coming to End House I might have been sleeping in the bed where she passed her ‘one sweet day’ with Robin. I looked round me: nothing but dim, chill corners, cobwebs and dust, and I shivered in the thickening darkness. Their fire, if it burned here, had left no blush on the sheets, no fragrance in the air. Stones outlive people; they have no passions to wear them out.
13
That evening, as I sat at supper with my aunt, I thought I would lose nothing by trying her with the story of the ‘drunken fool’ at Brimming. If it offended her, she could always bid me hold my tongue.
I had noticed that Aunt Harriet, like her sister, had a fondness for wine. I do not mean that she ever took too much – she was too careful for that – but she preferred to pay more for wine rather than confine herself to beer and cider. I therefore made a point of taking wine with her at supper, and drank off a toast to her health and happiness.
Aunt Harriet, who never missed a thing, said, ‘It seems your tastes have changed,’ which was the very opening I wanted.
‘Cider’s still to my taste,’ I said, ‘but I wish to take less of it.’
My aunt said quite amiably, ‘You’re scarcely a drunkard, Jonathan.’
‘No, but when I was at Brimming … still, when a man vomits up slander, it’s more than drink talking. It’s the wickedness of his heart.’
Shaking my head, I continued to eat. At the same time I was willing her, with every fibre of my being, to ask who the man was, and what he had said. She did not. Smiling through my disappointment, I went on with the meal.
‘Who was this?’ she asked at last, as if she had only just understood my words. ‘Vomiting? Slander? Not you, surely?’
‘Oh, no, Aunt! A drunken sot at Brimming. Very quarrelsome and insulting.’
I >‘I’m surprised they stood for it. They’re a rough lot out there – the women worse than the men.’
She was hovering round the bait.
‘Oh, it wasn’t them he insulted, it was us – our family. You know how it is; nothing shuts the mouth of a drunkard. Tell me, Aunt, shall I boil the sour cider in the morning? You’ll have to tell me how you want it, so I don’t make it too sweet.’
‘We haven’t much honey,’ said my aunt, ‘so you’re in no danger there.’
We continued eating. I felt like a hunter who sees the prey pass by his trap, come back, sniff it, move away again.
‘This man at Brimming. What did he say?’
I made a great show of confusion. ‘I’m not sure I remember.’
‘Oh, stop that nonsense. What do you think I am, some mincing girl?’
Bang! The trap closed with my aunt inside it.
‘I’m afraid you’ll be angry with me,’ I pleaded.
Her face was grim. ‘I give you my word I won’t.’
‘Very well,’ I said, soft and treacherous as the Gentleman himself, ‘only remember what you promised, Aunt, because it
is
hateful. The fellow was far gone in drink. He followed me about, slobbering on me and ranting of some evil he said was done here.’
She waited.
‘He had the face to say that my Uncle Robin bedded your sister, and he – he fathered a bastard child.’
‘My sister was a trollop,’ said Aunt Harriet, so calmly that I felt an acute desire to needle her.
‘My dear Aunt, what are you saying … ?’
‘A bitch in heat,’ my aunt replied still in that maddeningly blank manner. ‘Did your
intelligencer
’ – she seemed to sneer at this word – ‘tell you about this precious jewel of ours?’
‘He said she –’
‘She came of a weak and stupid mother – a degenerate – and showed all the signs of going the same way. My late husband was generous to a fault; he bore with her, tried to keep her folly within bounds until we could find her a husband. But then she must make a set at him, too. I put a stop to it at once, to pro tect Robin.’
‘The act of a loving wife and sister.’
She glared at me. ‘I’m not one for dressing up wickedness in fine language; I let her know my mind. She didn’t like that, so she abandoned our protection and ran after the soldiers. A woman of good family, to become a camp follower thrgh stubbornness and pride! Did you ever hear the like!’
‘Never,’ I agreed. ‘What I
heard
, Aunt,’ and here I looked her straight in the face, ‘was that someone in the house dragged your sister outside to the village men, saying she was able to dress any amount of flesh, and she was delivered over to the soldiery for rape.’
My aunt remained silent and motionless. I had anticipated exclamations, denials, justifications, but not this. I knew, as clearly if she had told me, that she was trying to work out who my teacher was, what else I might have learnt, and whether I had a witness up my sleeve: in short, where this game was leading.
‘He must think me a gull,’ I said, as if to comfort her. ‘How could anyone believe such savagery took place here, at End House?’
‘Envious folk will believe anything bad,’ my aunt murmured. Though her voice was soft, the pupils of her eyes had shrunk up like a cat’s. ‘What’s this fellow’s name?’
‘Oh … John, James, something like that. I don’t know his surname. He wasn’t one of the farm men,’ I added, helpfully giving the most useless detail I could think of. My aunt flashed me a look of pure hatred.
‘Did he say how he came to know about my sister?’
‘He heard about her, I suppose.’
She shocked me by bursting out laughing. ‘Is that all he did? She must’ve lain with half the county since then.’
‘Aunt,’ I said. ‘I’ve been thinking. If your sister’s children were discovered – if such children existed – could you find it in your heart to make provision for them?’
‘If, if,’ my aunt said. ‘Why should I?’
‘My father, then, if
he
made them a gift. It might reclaim them, and put an end to rumour.’
‘It’d do neither. Besides, nobody knows where my sister is. Did this man say where she could be found?’ She looked hard at me.
‘No.’ I was returning her gaze, assuming an air of the utmost innocence, when to my horror her cheeks bloomed a sweet, delicate pink – as near as Aunt Harriet’s waxen skin could get to a boiling flush. Had I not known what it stood for, I might have found it charming, but as it was I felt sick. I had given myself away. She had guessed that my drunkard was a fiction, and that my informant was Joan. At length she said, in a biting voice, ‘What a double-dyed fool you’d be, to go after my sister.’
‘I’d never go after her, Aunt. You yourself told me, when I first came here, that she was dead.’
Plainly she had forgotten that, and she was confounded. Seeing her blink with panic, I could not help but exult. But it was only an instant before she replied, ‘You do right to correct me. I confess, for many years now I’ve thought of her as dead; but she may live. Has Mathew talked about her?’
‘A little.’
‘And what does he say?’
‘That she’s an agent of corruption,’ I admitted.
‘There you are. Mathew’s known for his fair-mindedness. Take heed of what he tells you.’
‘He
is
fair,’ I said, ‘when he’s told the whole story. Tell him only half of it and he makes mistakes like other men.’
‘Then tell him this nonsense you picked up in Brimming. See what he says then.’
‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll go tomorrow, and I’m very grateful for your advice, dear Aunt.’
*
I had lost my head a little, perhaps because of the unaccustomed wine-drinking, and was not sure what I had achieved apart from letting slip that I knew too much – which was very foolish of me. But I had not revealed Joan’s whereabouts, or that her child had been a daughter, or who her daughter might be. As for the story of the rape, I could not say whether Aunt Harriet had condemned or cleared herself. My belief hovered between her and Joan, sure of neither, and I longed to get back to Spadboro and again consult my father.
However, I slept well that night, with no repetition of the cart dream, and I concluded that as far as Robin was concerned I had done no great harm.
* * *
The following day I performed a daring experiment. I smoked out a new hogshead with sulphur, poured off the sour cider from the old one into pots and kettles, had it boiled in my aunt’s kitchen (and oh, what a time that took), added honey and spices and sealed it all up again. I cannot say I took as much pleasure in it as in making fresh cider. I have, in general, a disgust of doing a thing twice when once should be enough; besides, the heat and steam of the kitchen were enough to turn the mice drunk.
When all that was done I put Paulie’s boy back into slavery, and made him help as I milled another batch of apples and set up a new cheese. After that I wiped off my hands before going up to my chamber – Joan’s chamber – for my coat.
What with all my delaying tactics I had still not finished up the last of the crop. This was certainly not a time to be going back to Spadboro, making yet another encumbrance in a time full of business, but I had told my aunt that I would and pride would not permit me to back down. First, however, I must make sure Joan was not still lying alone. Were I to go away while Tamar was missing, I might well come back to discover her mother dead.
I hurried along the path, fretting at what I might be about to find. Soon, panting as urgently as a lover, I was standing at the hurdle.
‘Joan!’ I called. As I did so I heard a tussling sound behind an ivy bush. ‘Is that you, Tamar?’ Thesound came again, and the bush swayed as if something was caught up in it. Picking up a stone, I flung it as hard as I could into the foliage to see what would break cover: there was nowhere to flee to except the next bush, some five feet away. I expected to see a fox shoot away over the grass, or a scolding bird heave itself into the air, but the leaves closed over my stone without giving up the secret. My heart began to beat more rapidly.
‘Who’s there?’
Thinking it was some wicked boys come to tease the old woman, I threw again. The ivy tod shook violently, there was a cracking sound and two men broke from the bush. Thickset, respectably clad and of middling age, they had not the look of thieves. I wished I had not flung that last stone.
‘And who might you be, young master?’ said one of them, eyeing me in no friendly manner. I knew him, now: I had seen him worshipping in Tetton church.
‘Jonathan Dymond. You’ll know my aunt, Mrs Harriet Dymond.’ At this the second man nudged his companion, and nodded; the first one now came forward, holding out his hand, though I hesitated to take it. ‘And you, Sir? Who are you?’
He said, ‘We’re on parish business. Come to visit your friends, have you?’
‘I gave you my name. What’s yours?’
‘Never you mind,’ said the second man. ‘This is a lonely place; I’d watch myself, if I were you.’
‘Is that your business – threatening people?’
‘Warning them is what
I
call it.’
As one, they turned and made for the path. I stood listening until the sounds they made faded away along the ditch. When I turned back to the cave, Tamar was standing just inside the entrance, leaning against the cave wall. She beckoned me with a finger and I went inside.
‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘I don’t like coming out when they’re there.’
‘You know my voice, surely,’ I said, stumbling along as my eyes adjusted to the dark.
‘Yes; but every time I talk to someone they write it down on a paper.’
‘Who employs them?’
‘Dr Green. He suspects us for witches.’ Her voice grew mocking. ‘I think you’re safe, though, Mrs Harriet’s nephew.’
I wondered whether Aunt Harriet had anything to do with the men’s visit, and if so, how she could have acted so quickly, or known where to look. I said, ‘What does Dr Green want with your visitors?’
‘Someone who’ll give evidence against us.’
‘Have they found anyone?’
‘Ann Whinwood. Joan made her an amulet against childlessness, and now rsquo;s with child she can’t keep her mouth shut. The parson heard about it and made her bring him here, and my stupid mother won’t rest till we’re hanged.’
I could now make out Joan lying on the ground nearby.
‘This is how she talks about me,’ the old woman put in. ‘Me, that raised her.’
‘You’ll have us on the gallows,’ Tamar hissed. ‘Coming out with your nonsense about the Gentleman. If you’d just shut your mouth, you old bitch, and let me talk!’
Joan’s straw rustled furiously.
‘It’s not like it used to be,’ I said, trying to comfort them both. ‘They can only go so far, and they know it. His Majesty’s no friend to witch-hunts, and nor, I think, is Sir Gilbert Sellis.’
‘I’ve not seen the King or Sir Gilbert round this cave. One day,’ she muttered to her mother, ‘you’ll start your nonsense and they’ll take you away. And then I’ll turn evidence, by Christ I will.’
‘
Robbing
’, rasped Hob.
‘You wouldn’t do that to me,’ Joan whined.
‘What, not to ’scape the rope! And get rid of that bird, he’ll hang you if I don’t. If I catch hold of him I’ll wring his neck.’
‘Who’s the robber?’ I asked.
They stopped bickering. Joan stared at me.
‘Robber?’
‘He said “
Robbing
”.’
Tamar burst out laughing.
‘Not robbing, Sir,’ Joan said nervously. ‘I thought you knew.’
‘Knew what?’
Joan looked down, away from me.
Tamar said, ‘Robin. It’s Robin. She taught Hob to say his name.’
‘He was kind to me,’ Joan muttered.
‘Kind?’ Tamar laughed. ‘Did you ever in your life see such a pitiful thing as she is?’
Joan said, ‘He did what he could. You don’t know, Sir.’
‘Here,’ Tamar said. ‘I’ll light the lantern – we’ve oil, for once – and you can tell him the whole sorry tale. Lord knows
I’ve
heard it enough.’
Joan’s reply to this was an indignant huffing. Anxious lest Tamar should provoke her too far, I said courteously, ‘If it please you, Joan, I should very much like to hear.’
‘Then for
you
, Sir,’ she said, with a sniff in the direction of her daughter, ‘I’ll tell it.’
* * *
It seems that Joan had indeed left Tetton Green in the train of common camp-followers, where her refined manner attracted at once the scorn and envy of a she-bully, a virago who for half a day made her life still more wretched. Fortunately for Joan, that same refinement also brought her to the notice of an officer, who took her aside and asked if she was willing to do honest work. She gladly consented, though without any idea of what was meant by working, and he led her to a wagon full of wounded. These were the men without wives to nurse them, and Joan’s task was to supply the lack.
