The Wilding (4 page)

I wondered whether she ever used this learning; as far as I had been able to see during the short time I had been in the house, she did nothing herself but left it all to the servants. Perhaps she meant music and French rather than the household arts.

My aunt was still engaged in the contemplation of her own glories. ‘He called me his little Amazon, said I was born to be a lad, and had I been, I’d have beaten most of them from the field. Whereas my sister –’

She stopped.

I had never heard of this sister before. ‘Wasn’t she as clever as you, Aunt?’

‘She was a foolish, pitiful creature.’ Aunt Harriet frowned as if to end the talk, but my curiosity was aroused.

‘Was she? What did she do?’

‘She died,’ my aunt answered, as if that were proof of her sister’s folly. My thoughtless question must have distressed her, for she rose from table.

‘Forgive me,’ I murmured, but too late; without further ado she left the room. I dared not follow and sat, angry with myself, drumming my fingers.

After a while I looked up to see the maid standing awkwardly opposite me, as if unsure how to proceed. Concluding that she was a new servant, as yet unpractised, I gestured to her to take the things away.

I had not, before this, paid the girl much attention – she had been nothing but a curtseying form behind a dish of rolls – but now, as she gathered up plates in the crook of her arm, I was able to study her. She was nothing like our maid at home. Alice was a stout, familiar creature whose solid presence gave promise of comfort. This girl was wiry and so straight in her bearing you might think her entire body was in stays. Her sleeves were rolled up to reveal tight, hard forearms ending in well-shaped but not particularly gentle hands. I had heard a ballad about a youth who dressed as a woman and went into service in order to kill the mistress of the house, and I now glanced nervously at the maid’s bodice. My glance dispelled any such wild notions: though thin, she filled out the front of her gown as females are supposed to. This was certainly a girl – the servant, I guessed, who had shown herself so vigorous as she heaved the bucket from the well.

She was altogether an extraordinary sight. Her expression was bitter in the extreme, but not, I thought, from any immediate displeasure at me or my doings. Rather, her features appeared to be grown that way from constant hardship and disappointment, and yet for all this she was not ugly. The straggles of hair trailing from her cap were amber-coloured; she had the wedge face and lucent eyes of a fox. That is about as far as I go in poetry; if I have still not made myself plain I will say bluntly that she was not beautiful, but she held the eye longer than many women who are, partly because of this striking physical presence but also because there was something terrible about her, as if, like the beast she resembled, she recognised no kinship with ordinary Christians.

‘You may clear away,’ I said. She obeyed me at once; I was glad to see her so prompt to my command.

* * *

The next day I took cartloads of apples to the stone cider mill, and then (having promised Dunne that Bully should not be put to this drudgery) I went with my aunt’s permission to her stable and chose a patient old horse to drive it. Once the mill was in action I unloaded my press, piece by piece, and fitted it together next to the old one, a fine construction and well worth the mending, but just now standing dusty. From time to time I left the shed to scrape down the mill and throw in fresh apples. The more I ran about, the happier I was; my spirits were always high when I was making cider, and the work was of a kind that hurried my body but left my mind at liy to think.

Now that I
did
think, it struck me that I had slid from not liking Aunt Harriet into suspecting her of wrongdoing. Yet the sense of Uncle Robin’s letter seemed quite to the contrary: whatever his wickedness might be, he had feared her discovery of it. This was a lesson to me. My feelings about my aunt had clouded my judgement, and I should be more careful in future.

I was crossing the yard as I made this resolve. Happening to glance up, I saw a casement open and the maid’s face visible within. She disappeared at once, and the window was pulled to.

This strange young woman: what was she doing in my aunt’s house? Why would Aunt Harriet, with her passion for deference and decorum, employ such a creature?

Perhaps, I thought, they shared some secret – but there I was again, suspecting my aunt when Robin’s letter gave me no cause, and of what? What
could
I suspect her of, but procuring or hastening his death? Put thus, the very notion was laughable. I again reminded myself: my purpose was to discover the crime Robin had wished to expiate – to ease his ghost, and my father’s anguish, by carrying out the instructions he had not time to give.

I went back to the shed and continued to feed the mill, but had not been there long before I looked up to see the maid standing in the doorway. She curtseyed to me but remained, seemingly at her ease.

‘Pray make yourself at home.’ I spoke coldly, but she seemed not to notice and nodded as if to accept my invitation.

‘Where’s Binnie, then – sick?’ Her voice had a rough edge surprising in so young a woman, like the hoarseness of one that lives outdoors.

‘Sir,’ I hinted, and was about to add that she had no business to address me, when she repeated, ‘Sir. Is he sick, Sir?’

‘I’ve nothing to do with Binnie.’

‘Oh. I thought you were his man.’

Surely she could not
mean
to be so impertinent? I studied her face but could detect no conscious insolence. I said, ‘Does your mistress have Binnie’s man to supper and to sleep in the house?’

She frowned. ‘No-ooo. Only he came for the apples last year. Who are you then, Sir, if you’re not with Binnie?’

‘I’m Mrs Dymond’s nephew.’

This made a great impression, I could see: she hung in the door, chewing on her knuckles as if she had heard something incomprehensible. At last she said, ‘Whose son are you – her sister’s?’

I was not used to being questioned by servants, nor to maids who referred to their mistresses as ‘her’. I said, ‘
Mrs Dymond
is not a blood relation of mine. Haven’t you any work to do?’

‘So whose son are you?’

I began to think that the girl was ;s ot right’, and that her shining eyes betokened some disorder of the mind. If so, there was nothing to be gained by rebuke, so I said more mildly than before, ‘Mr Robin Dymond was my father’s brother.’

‘You’re Mr Mathew’s son,’ she said slowly.

‘Yes. Mr Robin Dymond’s nephew.’

‘Not blood-relation to the mistress. I see, Sir. I see.’

‘Well, thank Heaven for
that
,’ I was about to retort, but just then her smile burst out and it was one to make the angels rejoice in heaven. Evidently there was no love lost between her and Aunt Harriet. The girl seemed a simpleton; but if not, I had perhaps stumbled on the very person I was seeking: the Judas.

* * *

‘Has Tamar been bothering you?’ my aunt asked that evening as we sat by the fire.

‘The maid? A little.’

My aunt bent forward to poke at a log. ‘She’s no jewel, eh?’

‘She seems an unskilful servant.’

‘And so she is. She came to me when Robin was soiling his bedding. At my time of greatest need, the laundress went back to her family and then the nurse I’d hired for him did likewise. They needn’t show their faces here again.’

‘So you did it all yourself,’ I murmured, scarcely able to picture this.

‘For a while,’ she agreed. ‘I let it be known in the village that I would pay handsomely provided I got a girl with a willing heart, but none came forward. There was still preserving to do, brewing, work to be had in the fields. Who’d choose to mop up the vomit and flux of a dying man?’ She gazed into the embers. ‘Then Tamar came wandering through the village, a vagrant, and the vicar sent her to me. She was better off here than taking a whipping. She did it all without complaint, but –’ She shrugged.

‘But what?’

‘Do you know these vagabonds, how they are? They’re not Christians. It seemed to me as if she’d got some hold over him, towards the end.
I
wonder did he give her money. He could never resist a young woman.’

I felt a shock run through me. I am not sure how much of this arose from the thought of my uncle, in his disgusting condition, making up to the maid, and how much from his widow’s speaking so calmly of it.

‘From what you say,’ I remarked, ‘he was too ill for anything of the sort.’

‘Perhaps,’ my aunt replied. ‘But be she pure as the driven snow, she can’t stay here. I want a laundress who can turn out bands and frills.’

‘What’ll happen to Tamar?’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t wish her to be a vagrant again?’

‘What she does is no concern of mine. She might find a place in the village.’

‘There are people here wishing to hire a maid?’

‘Or something,’ my aunt said acidly, her face so bitter that for a moment she resembled the young woman she spoke of. The mad thought came to me that Tamar was Aunt Harriet’s illegitimate daughter. Mad, because everyone knew that Aunt Harriet was unable to bear children. She had tried for years, only to bring into the world a succession of little corpses; my own mother had presided at one of these gruesome childbeds, and had come home weeping. So Aunt Harriet had no heir, which was why the mothers of Tetton Green tried to engage her affections to their own offspring. Besides, when I looked at her again her face had cleared. Seen thus, she no more resembled Tamar than an apple does a thistle.

‘You’d get on faster if Geoffrey sent some of the men to you,’ my aunt said.

‘No need to take them from their work,’ I replied. ‘What’s milled can lie there and concoct till the time comes to load it. There’s nothing more to do for now.’ Standing back, I wiped my hands and admired the dripping press.

She sniffed. ‘I smell rot.’

‘All to the good, if it doesn’t go too far.’

‘Then watch it doesn’t. I don’t want my cider turning to vinegar.’

‘That can always happen, Aunt.’ I took up my coat and made for the door, only to find Aunt Harriet following along as if she meant to drag me back. ‘There’s no more to do,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll come back in time, never fear.’ And with the coat slung over my shoulder I crossed the yard and left by a little gate that opened onto the lane at the back of the house.

It was my plan to walk a while in the wood and breathe its freshness; I had been indoors, hunched over the press and the vat, for too long. That autumn day was unusually bright and crisp; soon would come rain, and mud, and sitting with steaming legs before the fire, but for now I felt the need to move my limbs. When I was finished with the wood, I intended to go along the road and up to the green, and see these neighbours from whom I had to be stowed away in a back room.

I was not five minutes into the trees before I saw a woman ahead of me, decently clad in a white cap and plain dark gown, and hard put to it to prevent her clothes from tearing on the briars as she pushed her way through, for she was constantly having to untangle them. From time to time she stopped and glanced over her shoulder, but as she never turned right round, she did not see me; had she done so, she must have observed me at once. I judged by her motions that she was young, agile and perplexed: she moved like one that is doing wrong and knows it.

My curiosity was tickled and I decided to follow her some of the way. I guessed, of course, what she was headed for and listened out for the approaching lover, but of him there was no sign; he seemed to be coming by another way. We hurried on quite far into the wood, where the sounds of the village shrank to nothing. More than once she almost fell: I could hear the gasps as she staggered on concealed roots or stones. It dawned on me that I was a fool, and that she might think me worse than a fool: if she found me following she would scream, bringing the man running and placing me in no very enviable position. I had indulged my whim quite long enough, and turned to retrace my steps. But when I did so, the path we had travelled seemed to branch off at once into three. Worse, I had no longer any idea of where the village lay. I paused, wondering if I should wait in hiding and follow her out again – if indeed she chose to come back in the same direction. Just as I realised I had no choice but to continue following, the woman slid sideways off the path, as if down a bank, and vanished.

Cursing, I ran towards the place where I had last seen her. She had passed by an ash tree with a holly bush near it: I was now standing between the two. I stood very still and forced myself to breathe quietly. Birds trilled about me; the trees creaked as the wind stirred their tops; but the woman seemed to have passed into a world where sound was not. She was flesh and blood like myself: no matter how carefully she walked among the twigs and brambles she must needs make a noise, and yet …

A cold air seemed to blow on me. I recalled certain tales of my childhood, stories of spirits that lured men into lonely places and there delivered them over to the Black Woodcutter, a ghostly figure who swung his axe three times in the air. The children of the village would chant: 

after which the Black Woodcutter would slice through the victim’s neck, throwing the severed head into a tree. My parents laughed at such tales; still, a man from the village claimed to have seen the Black Woodcutter, late one night, prowling near the churchyard.

At that moment I smelt something comforting: smoke. The Black Woodcutter did not light fires, as far as I knew – the only trunks he was interested in were the human kind – and I looked about me for the familiar blue haze. But I could see nothing, and when another whiff came to me a few minutes later I realised from its flavour that this was the scent of an
old
fire, lingering among its ashes. The flames, wherever they had been, had been doused.

I spent a few minutes poking about beside the path. There was no sign of habitation; a steep slope led down from where I stood into a vicious-looking thicket of brambles some thirty feet below. The way was plainly not that way, and I turned back.

Now I had lost the woman there was nothing for it but to guess. I took the middle path and after some ten minutes’ walk began to hear noises from the road near the duck pond. Despite the fear I had felt a short while earlier, I was now very satisfied with my own powers, and it was with a cheerful heart that I emerged some way along the road from End House, and was able to see it there among the rest.

‘Black Woodcutter, indeed,’ said Ito myself.

* * *

I was still not inclined to go back to my aunt and thought I would carry out the rest of my plan, namely to take a tour of Tetton Green. That it had once been prosperous could be seen by the make of the houses, but the Civil War had thoroughly lanced its swelling coffers: rings, goblets, furs and countless other comforts had disappeared onto wagons and into soldiers’ snapsacks. My father had told me about that time; he was already living at Spadboro, where things were much quieter, but Uncle Robin and Aunt Harriet were caught up in the thick of it all. To judge by Aunt Harriet’s style of living, however, they had suffered no lasting harm. That was perhaps because Tetton Green was occupied by the King’s forces and the Dymonds have always remained loyal to His Majesty.

I was struck by the peculiar appearance of the Guild Hall. The windows were in the new elegant style, good in itself but out of tune with the rest of the building. I remember that I remarked on this to an old man passing by; he told me that they had been smashed during the war and not replaced for some years afterwards. Folk had scarcely enough to feed themselves, let alone replace windows, and as a result rain and wind had been let to play the devil with the interior, though all was now made snug again. I said it was a shame, and Cromwell the Dictator had the sufferings of an entire nation to answer for. He said it was not the rebels that did it. I said it came to the same thing, since the rebels must bear the blame for the war. Then I made the round of the houses, walked down to the duck pond and traced the stream uphill until I arrived back at my aunt’s house.

Crossing the yard, I heard a movement inside the shed where my press was. Aunt Harriet had gone against my wishes and put someone to meddle with my work. I walked smartly up and flung open the door, crying, ‘Come out of there.’

Tamar was within, laughing and holding a hand to her heart. ‘You did give me a fright!’ said she.

‘What are you doing in here? I said nobody was to touch it.’

‘I haven’t touched it, Sir. Look, I’m nowhere near.’

I could not deny that she was seated some yards off, on a heap of sacks. Trying not to look as foolish as I felt, I checked the press. All was as it should be, and the vat brimming with liquid gold.

Tamar said, ‘I came to ask if you’d give me a dish of murc.’

‘Isn’t that something you should ask my aunt?’

The girl looked crestfallen.

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘what do you want murc for?’

‘To give to someone. The mistress won’t notice, will she? It’s nothing to her.’

She was asking me because Aunt Harriet was sure to refuse. I hesitated. It was true that my aunt wouldn’t miss it, unless of course she had sent the girl to test my honesty. Then I remembered that Tamar was a vagrant, without a friend in the world. It seemed harsh t refuse her something so trifling. Besides, if this girl had secrets to sell, a dish or two of crushed apple given now might repay me a thousandfold later on.

‘Who wants it?’ I asked.

‘An old woman. A bit of that, stewed up, might move her bowels.’

I laughed. ‘She’ll need plenty of honey to go with it! These are like crab apples. You were going to take it, weren’t you?’

‘No, Sir. What would I put it in? I haven’t a bowl or anything.’

I thought a bowl might be concealed beneath her skirts, but I could hardly ask to see
there
; besides, being suddenly afflicted with a picture of her waddling off, a bowl of murc wedged between her thighs, I struggled in vain against laughter and having started, went on until the tears came in my eyes.

‘Are you well, Sir?’

‘If you fetch a bowl, I’ll give you some,’ I said, able to speak at last and waving away her thanks. ‘This old woman lives in the village, does she?’

‘She’ll pray every night for you, Sir, and if – if –’

‘What?’

‘The logs, Sir, the ones they give you. If you could let us have one.’

‘But there are trees all about here!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why don’t you make yourself a woodpile?’

‘We’ve neither axe nor saw.’

‘And you haven’t a neighbour to borrow from? Or to cut wood for you?’

‘Nobody that’s willing, Sir.’

‘Couldn’t Geoffrey lend you his?’

She shook her head. ‘He says I won’t bring ’em back. We use the smallest pieces of wood, Sir, but they soon burn through.’

I gazed at her. By dint of a few questions I had learnt more than Aunt Harriet had discovered in weeks: that Tamar was not a solitary vagrant but part of a ‘we’, a household, and that this household had an old woman in it; also that nobody in the village would help them to a fire. No wonder this girl was so hard and spare and fox-like: she led a fox’s life. Her words might be humble but her eyes, gazing back at me, were not as respectful as a servant’s should be. I was even, for an instant, a little nervous of her.

‘I understood from my aunt that you ‘lived in’ here,’ I said.

‘I do, Sir, for now. But I help out at home when I can.’

‘Fetch the bowl, then.’

She did not wait to be told twice and was soon back with a wooden dish which I filled to the brim with pulped apple. ‘Remember to sweeten it well,’ I warned her. ‘Otherwise your old woman won’t be able to eat it.’

‘I’ll take care of that, Sir.’

My aunt could be heard calling from the house. Tamar curtseyed and was gone.