The Wilding (8 page)
‘Oh, that’s easy, Master Jonathan.’
‘Easy?’
‘The spirit can rest a while. When you do what he wants, he leaves you alone.’
‘How am I doing what he wants?’ I protested. ‘I don’t know what it is.’
‘But you’re trying to find out. You asked me about that letter of his. Your aunt, she’s hiding something.’
Servants are at all times prone to think evil of their betters.
‘What could she be hiding?’ I asked. ‘It was my uncle who had a secret.’
Tamar began to hum under her breath.
‘That’s not an answer,’ I remarked. The smell of unwashed flesh and stale urine was growing oppressive, so I rose.
‘Now,’ I asked, ‘what shall I bring?’
‘Firewood,’ she said at once. ‘A saw – an axe. Blankets. Something cooked, soft – Joan’s teeth are bad –’
‘If I can. Anything else?’
She turned towards me with a curious expression. ‘Paper. Pen and ink.’
‘Can
you
write, Tamar?’
‘No.’
‘What will you do with it, then?’
‘Joan can make a spell – ill-wish our enemies.’
‘I hope you don’t mean me,’ I said, though I cared nothing for spells. ‘Or do you still think I told my aunt about the ring?’
‘Not when you’re so kind, Sir.’ She looked up at me pleadingly. The thought crossed my mind that if I
had
desired this girl, and wished to make her subservient to me, I could scarcely have done better than to betray her.
‘Can you get my ring back?’
‘No hope of that,’ I said. ‘My aunt’s convinced you stole it.’
‘You don’t understand, Sir.’ Tamar shook her head. ‘She’s never thought that, never.’
‘Why else would she dismiss you?’
‘Because the master took it off his hand, and put it on mine.’ She smiled. ‘
That’s
what she knows, Sir. That’s what she can’t forgive.’
* * *
When I got back to End House I went straight to my aunt’s room and tapped at the door. Hannah Reele, who answered, glanced at me approvingly and I saw she had been waiting for my visit.
Aunt Harriet was propped on a mound of pillows and quilts, surrounded by drinks and titbits. As I entered she was rubbing an unguent into her hands; Hannah bent over her and wiped it away with a cloth so as to protect the bed from grease-spots.
‘You may kiss me, nephew,’ Aunt Harriet announced in a clear, firm voice.
I stepped up to her bedside. My aunt’s cheek was sweet-smelling; the hair looped about her neck and ears retained its youthful gold. I knew that she used washes and perfumed waters of various sorts. In another woman that would be vanity; in her it was more a desire to get the greatest use out of everything, even her own skin.
‘She’s told you why I fainted.’
‘A curious error, Aunt: I’m not so like him.’
‘More like him than anyone else in this house. What were you doing on the stair?’
‘I intended to knock at your chamber door,’ I lied. ‘There was nobody downstairs when I arrived so I let myself in the back way.’ Another lie, and a stupid one since I’d had the horse with me. Had I gone to the front door first she would have seen him waiting there, but mercifully her mind was on other things.
‘I’ve rid myself of that girl,’ she announced, peering at me in the hawk-like way she had, but thanks to Rose her blow fell short; I only smiled.
‘You’ve found yourself a laundress?’
‘Not yet. But she had to go.’ She held out her fingers fanwise so that I could admire her ring, which I now saw was of gold, engraved with a pattern of dog-rose. ‘She took this from Robin while he was incapable.’
‘Shameful,’ I responded. ‘When did you find her out?’
‘The day after you left.’ She was a better fencer than I: the answers came back pat, without a pause.
‘What ingratitude, and you not over his death yet. He must be constantly in your thoughts.’
‘Indeed.’
I recalled what Hannah had told me. ‘My mother still dreams of her father, you know.’ (This was true.) ‘She says he’s watching over her from the other world.’
‘If Barbara thinks that, I’m surprised she doesn’t turn Papist,’ Aunt Harriet shot back. ‘I stand by good Protestant doctrine. The dead don’t go wandering about our heads at night.’
‘Then why do we dream of them, Aunt?’
‘Why do we dream of cabbages?’ Aunt Harriet sneered.
There was no doubt about it: she was fully recovered and back to her old self.
* * *
The cider-apple season is a long one. Even so, I could no longer stay at my aunt’s since so many villagers also had early varieties needing to be pressed; I would soon be obliged to return to the neighbourhood of Spadboro and my work there. There was no difficulty in doing this: I could easily finish up my aunt’s earlies and return for her lates.
First, however, I had to carry out my promise to Tamar. I knew nobody in the village who could supply me with pens, ink and paper, so I took some from my aunt’s private store, leaving her money in return along with a note that said, ‘I have not time to explain now, dear Aunt, but you will find this amply repays what I have taken’ – as indeed it did.
I had no expenses at End House and consequently had not touched the wages paid to me by Joshua Parfitt and other people. With these in my purse I went to the market the next day – Aunt Harriet, supposedly still weak, was staying at home – and purchased two good thick blankets from a weaver. I then bought a heap of hot pasties, folded them in the blankets and walked from the market directly along the lane and into the wood where Tamar and Joan (who had, as foretold, left the parson empty-handed) lay huddled against the cold. They were more than thankful; they wept. When I saw how they fell on the pasties, tearing at them like starving dogs, I thought the villagers could not be paying much for their wicked pleasures.
Afterwards they huddled together to keep in the warmth, bundling themselves in the blankets like a courting couple so that they resembled one body with two heads.
‘We spent months like this once,’ said Joan in that curious cracked voice that nagged at my memory. ‘Tamar was a tiny mite; she won’t remember.’
‘Where was that?’
‘Somewhere up in Gloucestershire.’
‘What, in a cave?’
She smiled at my ignorance. ‘Not as good! A cottage burnt out during the war. It was bitter cold – worse than this. When we weren’t looking for food we slept the time away, kept our strength in.’
‘But you must’ve een.’
‘Snails, roots, anything. I’d catch birds with a string. If you sleep you don’t eat so much; we just about hung on. Sometimes a labourer’d bring us a cabbage or a bit of pottage, something left over.’
I wondered what he had received in return. Joan’s words opened a window through which I glimpsed an unimaginably hard time, the wheeling years of hunger bringing round biting winters and blistering summers that had fused mother and daughter together. And yet, even while I pitied them, I also felt a strange envy of their wandering life. I had always thought of myself as a careful and hard-working son. Now I saw that I had grown up like a puppy, gambolling about in my careless way, while they had faced out hunger and violence; they had known and endured more than I ever could. This it was that made Joan seem so old, when her daughter could not be far into her twenties, if that. I recalled the unease I had felt on first meeting Tamar, the feeling that she was not of the same breed as ordinary folk.
And Tamar – what did she see when she looked at me? Just that, no doubt: a pampered puppy.
Is it pleasant, Sir, being so
virtuous
?
The portrait being scarcely flattering, I was glad to turn to the next part of my errand.
‘You asked for pen and paper.’ These things had so little in common with the life I had just been picturing that I thought perhaps Tamar had begged them in a spirit of mockery – this, in spite of my having seen the amulet.
It was Joan, not her daughter, who answered. ‘Yes, indeed Sir, if you please.’
‘You say you can’t write,’ I pointed out – not unreasonably, I thought.
‘I can, though. I’m telling you different now, Sir; I trust you now.’
I brought out the paper and pens from under my coat. Joan grew as excited as when I had handed them the warm pasties. It was extraordinary to see an old beggar-woman so delighted with the tools of scholarship.
‘What do you want them for?’ I asked, passing her the paper. ‘Can’t you make your amulets from leaves and bones?’
Joan seemed not to hear my question but pressed the paper to her breast, her eyes wide and wet. She was gone away into another world and there was something pitiful in her dumb, gleaming face.
‘She’s overcome,’ said Tamar. ‘You’ll be glad of your kindness one day, Master Jon.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘Now if we had firewood we’d lack for nothing, nothing at all.’
I marvelled at the shamelessness with which she turned thanks inside out. She was not a vagrant for nothing: here was one who could beg an apple peel and end by carrying away the tree.
‘There’s none to be had,’ I said. ‘I’ll cut you some for next year; but as for seasoned wood, my aunt will never give it.’
‘I know that, Sir,’ said Tamar.
There was a silence. I thought about that ‘next year’. By then they might be gone, or dead.
‘Where’s your raven?’ I asked to turn the subject.
‘Out scratting for food. He’ll come back when it’s dark.’
‘Did you teach him to talk?’
‘He taught himself.’
Another silence.
‘Your aunt has a big woodpile,’ Tamar said after a while.
‘It’s overlooked by the house. No, Tamar, I can’t.’
‘Of course you can’t, Sir,’ cried Joan, coming back to herself. ‘What’re you thinking of, girl? He’d be thrown out by his ears!’
‘He has a home to go to,’ Tamar said, grinning to show this was an attempt at wit.
Joan also favoured me with an almost toothless smile. ‘We have to take care of our Master Jonathan. No, Sir, you just make sure the gate’s unbolted when it comes dark. Tamar’ll do the rest.’
Panic rose in me. ‘What about Geoffrey?’
‘Don’t worry, Sir,’ Tamar said. ‘He’ll be none the wiser.’
Perhaps not, but I would. My conscience pricked at the very thought of it; I saw myself transformed in the moment of consent from a dutiful nephew to a whore’s accomplice preying on his own kin.
‘Supposing I did, it could only be for one night,’ I warned them, secretly glad that this was the case. ‘Tomorrow I leave for home.’
They bowed their heads in acceptance.
‘My word, Sir! Listen to the wind!’ said Joan. As if on cue, she and Tamar fell silent. Even inside the cave, I could hear how it wailed. Shuddering in the draught that blew in through the hurdle, I knew I would do what they asked.
* * *
‘What of the Redstreaks and the rest?’ my aunt demanded the next morning. ‘You won’t forget?’
‘Of course not. As soon as all the earlies are pressed I’ll come straight back and have a look at them.’
‘Very well,’ she said, as graciously as if she were paying me.
We liked each other no more than we ever had and I thought with longing of my parents. I missed their honest faces; I was more than ready to continue in my old roun did, it cith good fellowship and laughter, taking a bit of bread and cheese and gossip along with my wage.
I had, as agreed, opened the gate the night before: my final act of friendship towards Tamar and Joan before my departure. Strolling to the well in order to give the press one last sluice down, I glanced at the woodpile. I could perceive no difference in its size or shape, but then I had never observed it with any care until now. The gate was securely fastened. However skilful a thief, Tamar could hardly have bolted it after her; Geoffrey must have found it open. He would be on the watch in future.
There was nothing I could do: the women must lie cold, unless Tamar could wheedle firewood from one of her men.
She could not ply her trade in Joan’s presence, surely? But then it came to me that Joan might well have done the same in her youth, and raised her daughter to think nothing of it.
It seemed I had gone about the world deaf and blind up until then; I felt I was learning a great deal, in those days.
7
Though I knew my mother to be strong in her way, and capable at times of guiding my father with a firm hand, I had never been so aware of the warmth and force of her nature as when she opened the door to me and at once, without a word, folded me in her arms. I felt I had indeed come home. In my mother there was none of my aunt’s spiteful pride, none of the sly, fierce, spiky comradeship of the young fox and the old, just the generous love of a mother towards her son.
I held her tighter and longer than was my custom. ‘End House is well enough, dear Mother’ – I kissed her cheek – ‘but I’d rather be here with you.’
‘My darling son! We’ve missed
you
,’ cried my mother, still clinging to me. ‘Your father’s in the orchard, piling up, you must go to him. Oh, and Simon Dunne’s been asking after the horse. I promised you’d see him paid.’
‘My aunt had such a crop of earlies, we’re only just done.’ I took her hand and we walked together into the house. ‘I hope you didn’t think I was dallying there, Mother. The girl’s gone.’
‘We had a letter from Harriet said as much,’ my mother admitted. ‘And how did you leave your aunt? You were of help to her, I hope?’
‘She sends cordial greetings to you both,’ I lied. ‘She’s not like anybody else in our family, is she?’
Mother shook her head. ‘A different breed of person.’
‘Is that because of her noble blood?’
‘Perhaps. Your father knows her better than I.’ My mother smiled as if, though sorry for Aunt Harriet’s loss of her husband, she had often felt the need of patience when dealng with that disagreeable lady.
I said, ‘I think noble blood must be half vinegar.’
Mother laughed and squeezed my arm. ‘You went there of your own free will! Go and find your father while I tell Alice you’re here for supper.’
*
Father was turned away from me, bent over a heap of apples. I thought he looked stooped and burdened, but when he turned, saw me and straightened up, he at once cast off the years and flung out his arms in welcome, his face aglow with the kindly cheerfulness I remembered from childhood. I ran to him and he enfolded me, patting my back as if I were still a little one, though I was now as tall as he – perhaps taller.
‘I’m delighted to see you looking well, Father.’
He said nothing; I think he was unable. But his embrace left me in no doubt of my welcome.
‘It’s a fair crop,’ I said, pulling free at last. ‘Shall I start at once?’
‘That’s a right helpful, dutiful offer,’ Father said, beaming on me. Though I smiled back, I was not so very happy at this speech, which told me he had lately been considering me neither helpful nor dutiful. He then went on in a more practical vein. ‘If between us we pick ’em – you, me, your mother – and then allow time for digestion, you can do a four-day run, come back and help us mill, eh?’
I said of course I could, and showed willing by going with him round the orchard, noting which early trees had a bright ring of cast-off fruit encircling the roots, and which still had apples clinging to their boughs and would need to be finished off by hand.
Smooth going, so far. The awkward part began at supper, which we sat down to an hour later.
There was a little bustle at the start, since my mother had changed plans for the meal in honour of my return. They had cut into a ham and had the very best cider glasses, engraved with apple boughs, put on the table. These glasses, a wedding gift to my parents from Aunt Harriet herself, were grander than anything we usually drank from and were hardly ever brought out, for fear of breaking them. Though hungry, and eager to begin, I could have wished for something simpler. To my troubled conscience, the mingled perfume of food and drink carried a whiff of the fatted calf.
Father said grace and then proposed a toast in cider: ‘Here’s to this year’s. May it be equal in brilliance and beauty.’
My mother laughed as we clinked glasses. ‘Are you sure it’s the cider you’re toasting, and not some fine lady?’
Since he was a devoted husband, as she well knew, we all joined in the laughter, and set to with a will. The ham, cut into little pieces, had been stewed with onions and cream and I know not what besides. It was exceedingly rich, even after the food at my aunt’s house; I think my mother meant to show me that home, too, had its comforts.
‘Talking of fine ladies –’ said Father.
Now I was for it. They were eager for news of Aunt Harriet, of End House and also (since I seemed to have unshackled myself from her) of the mysterious whore who had been sent packing.
‘You’ve pressed a great many apples for your aunt,’ my father began. I took my cue and described the varieties I had milled and pressed, the combinations thereof, her mill (which was of a different make from ours) and the loss of good fruit when I was called home and my instructions neglected.
‘And with all those servants!’ my mother exclaimed, baffled by such profligacy.
I said it was a pity, but my aunt had been taken up with the discovery of the thief and retrieving Uncle Robin’s ring, and had forgotten to give the necessary orders.
Father nodded his head. ‘Harriet won’t be what she was, not now she’s widowed,’ he said.
I said I had never known her as well as I might but, widow or not, she was an altogether formidable lady. At this my parents exchanged glances.
‘Did she seem to like you, Jon?’ Mother inquired. I recalled what Aunt Harriet had said about that famous will of hers, and how women wanted her to inscribe their children in it.
‘To be honest, Mother, I think not. I can’t say I liked her.’
‘Your relations were civil, though,’ my father urged.
‘Yes, of course. I said I’d go back for the late varieties.’
‘Then we can ask no more.’
We were already overheated with the rich food. Father mopped his brow. ‘It seems the – difficulty – has blown over.’
‘Difficulty, Father?’
‘He means that girl,’ said my plain-speaking mother.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve scarcely given her a thought of late. Shall I tell you what I know?’
Mother said, ‘If it’s fit to be told.’
‘He would not repeat anything unfit, I’m sure,’ said Father, crediting me with his own delicacy.
‘She had a gold ring of Uncle Robin’s. Aunt Harriet says she stole it.’
‘Of course she did,’ said Mother. ‘Robin never gave a thing away in his life.’
Father replied, ‘He may have done, Barbara. He knew he was dying.’
My mother’s expression altered as she looked back at him. Recalling herself, she went on, ‘And the girl was brazen enough to wear it?’
‘Whestify" did or not, Aunt found it out.’
‘And took her before the constable?’
I stopped, brought up short. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know.’
‘He’ll send her back to her parish,’ said Mother.
I wondered what my parents would say if they could know that she was earthed in the wood just behind my aunt’s house, warmed and fed by their son; that she claimed she was the only one to care for Robin in his last days; that their son partly believed her, despite having witnessed certain proof that she was a whore, a filthy Maid Marian, just as Aunt Harriet had said; that I was now become her protector in every sense except the carnal one; and that my most recent exploit in the Robin Hood line had been to help her prey on my own family. But why had the constable not whipped her away? Thinking aloud, I said, ‘Tetton Green may
be
her parish. Her mother –’
‘Mother?’ they cried in chorus.
‘She begged in the village,’ I said with a calmness I did not feel. ‘She’s gone now.’
I had stumbled badly there. I must keep what I knew separate from what I was supposed to know, even in my own mind, lest one should fly out and smash the other to pieces.
‘These beggars are a plague,’ Mother remarked. ‘After the war, yes, there were bound to be beggars with so many injured and ruined and what not. But not now.’
‘They grow wild,’ Father suggested. ‘They forget what it is to be industrious.’
I said, ‘Well, the girl’s turned out of doors in this weather. That’s surely punishment enough.’
* * *
Before bedtime I took Bully over to Simon Dunne’s house.
Dunne looked suspiciously at me, as if he thought I was bringing the horse back under cover of darkness to conceal some injury.
‘You’ve never stayed away so long before,’ he said.
‘It was at my aunt’s – that’s a new one for me. She’d a huge crop, Simon. She could keep Spadboro in cider.’
‘Fine for some folk,’ he grunted.
I saw he was annoyed. ‘I didn’t know it’d take so long,’ I said. ‘I’ve a lot of houses still to call at. Did you want Bully while I was away?’
‘No.’ He shed some of his surliness with this admission. ‘I won’t be wanting him now, as long as you pay up, only I like to know where you are, and then I know where
I
am.’
We had agreed to settle at the end of the cider season but Ilt I had abused his patience a little and therefore paid him what was owing up till then. The money restored Simon to his usual self but lightened my purse, which had already been bled by Tamar and Joan; had I not been provided for at my aunt’s house I think I would have ended that season in debt.
‘It’s only four days now, and then I’m back,’ I said. ‘Another village, and Tetton Green again. I’ll come for him in the morning.’
He nodded. ‘Agreed, Cider-Rat.’
This was a name given me from childhood, when I first used to hang about the press. I disliked it, but a nickname is like quicksand: the more you try to struggle free, the tighter it clings.
* * *
That night Alice mixed us a posset of wine and cream and eggs that fairly knocked me out, so that I was half asleep as I kissed my parents goodnight and went up to my chamber.
It was soothing to be held (such was the power of the posset, I might even say
rocked
) in the embrace of this old familiar room. In the chill, elegant chamber I had occupied at my aunt’s house I had always felt that the very walls did not welcome me and were trying to thrust me out. Here I was at my ease and as I snuggled down between the sheets with their familiar odour of rosemary, I was so glad to have returned, so tired, so comfortable and so warm (Alice having been before me with a pan of embers) that I melted away at once.
During the dark hours I woke to find my mother in the room with a candle. She said I had been crying and shouting in my sleep; I had now done it two or three times and had just started again when she had risen and come to me.
‘I hope you have no bad conscience, son,’ she said gravely.
I shook my head. It was the cart dream, just as I had dreamed it before I went to Aunt Harriet’s: the misty figure, the sinister bright hair, the body lying crumpled in the road.
* * *
The next four days passed in much the same way as in previous years. Apples fallen, apples not yet fallen, apples going rotten, folk with mills, folk with no mills beating their fruit with wooden staves, murc standing in the mill, murc going straight into the press, the trickling of sweet must. My days passed in an innocent intoxication of the senses: the scent of crushed apples, the bite of the bitter-sharp cider they brought to me and the burn of the strong cheese they offered me with my bread, if I was lucky. All this I relished – and yet, perhaps, not quite so much as in the past.
Some of those waiting chided me for my lateness: Mr Drew at Tinsden, whose apples were far on in digestion, and Mistress Chinney at Lasden Magna. Hers turned in no time to vinegar, so we had to doctor them with honey and spices; but then they were an inferior kind to start with. Everywhere I went I begged pardon for the delay, and they were so relieved to see me that they mostly granted it at once. I cared little whether they forgave me or not; I had my parents to think of, and my aunt, and Tamar and Joan, and Robin – most of all Robin.
Like a gr me frow circling overhead, the dream cast a shadow over me. It followed me from my parents’ house, hunting me from orchard to orchard, and followed me home again. No matter where I was, or how exhausted when I fell into sleep, it came to me every night – worse, it did not leave me by day. I could never forget it, now. Each time I mounted the cart and clicked my tongue to the horse, I felt a sickly pang. If a mist came over the road (and there was mist aplenty in that season and that country) I sweated with fear lest this should be the journey when that dreadful sight would appear by the roadside, far from any help, and with no chance of waking.
* * *
‘And how’s the press, my boy – is the action still smooth?’
‘As silk, Father. Everybody says it’s a marvel.’
My father was like a child on the subject of my press, forever wishing to hear it praised, but as a rule he was the least childish of men so I was very willing to indulge him. His design
was
a marvel, cunningly made so that it came apart easily and yet, when screwed together, exerted as much pressure as a fixed device.
He had an excellent understanding of what was necessary and convenient, and was so observant that he could draw something onto a sheet of paper straight out of his head, without having it set before him. He would have made an ingenious artificer, had he ever been apprenticed. Instead he had been trained up as a secretary (his own father having noticed his quickness in reading and writing) and before I was born had actually been employed as such. Since inheriting our home in Spadboro he had laid down his quill and would read only what interested him: works on farming, on philosophy, and sometimes sermons and poetry in place of the begging letters, flatteries and threats which were, he said, mostly his portion before. He was independent, now, and his time mostly taken up with improving his house and land. Though liked, he was considered an oddity by our neighbours, because he had more wit than the rest of them put together; as soon as I was old enough to distinguish wisdom from folly, I saw this and honoured him accordingly.
‘I reckon your press has earned a rest,’ he said, twinkling. ‘We’ll use the old one.’
