The Good Wife
Eleanor Porter
For Chris
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’
Were it not better,
Because that I am more common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man,
A gallant curtal-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will.
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
Rosalind, As You Like It 1.3,104-113
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Historical Note
Book Club Questions
Acknowledgments
More from Eleanor Porter
About the Author
About Boldwood Books
1
Again the clay on my tongue. Wet and bitter, and the roaring weight of the slope piling on my chest. If I scream, the sludge will slide through my lips and press at my throat till I gag. But I must scream.
In the blackness I opened my mouth.
‘Martha! Martha! My sweeting, my coney! You are safe, safe.’ A man’s voice, gentle and close by my ear; he lifted his arm from my bosom and stroked my face until the hill retreated and I knew myself. I was in my own bed and Jacob beside me. All the horror of years ago, when Marcle Ridge crumpled and fell on me, was done with. It was only the dead were buried now.
We lay close. I breathed in the scent of the straw and lavender I had packed in the tick; the hay smell of the horses Jacob carried with him. I turned in the darkness and kissed his warm face.
‘They will pass, Martha, these dreams, they always do. It is the month, is all. It throws back its memories. It’s like the plough unfolding what was hidden.’
The month. February, when even winter was dying. It was my father’s worst month too. He would drink till his face scattered in the ale and he did not know himself. Each year, in the weeks after Candlemas, it felt to me as though the dead stirred; they looked for the bones that had been hurled about when Marcle hill fell down. They came into my dreams and whispered that I should be with them, for hadn’t I too been laid in the cold earth, wasn’t I the one who had pulled at the land with curses till it tumbled down?
For three days the ridge had roared and then advanced, ripping Kynaston chapel and its yard of graves, pulling the fields along like blankets, with the terrified ewes bleating and ancient trees wrenched like pegs and put down somewhere new. I had been out thieving wood and young Owen, closer to me than a brother, had been shaken out of his bed; the slip picked us and scattered us and covered us over. It was the freezing mud that I tasted again in my dreams, but what came after was worse. Someone, my good neighbours said, must have brought down God’s house, torn His hill, struck Owen dumb with terror. I must have lain with the devil. How else would a youth like Jacob turn from a golden sweetheart to embrace a small dark cripple such as me? Eye-biter, they called me, sorceress, Satan’s whore, abomination. They could barely wait for the gallows.
‘Whenever I close my eyes she’s there, Jacob, the night-hag. The mire puddles in my mouth and chokes me. It is as though there is no light left in the world. I’m sorry. I was never afraid of the night before.’
‘Come’, he said, ‘come outside with me. I must be at the stables soon.’
We stepped out from the cottage. The day had been a wet one and at first I placed my feet warily, but there was no need. Above the cleeving field the sky was clear. The stars sparked as though they’d been flung up by the chiselling frost. We laced hands to trace the constellations, the great bull, the hunter Orion with his girdle, the leaping hare, the hounds who chased after it forever. The great dog burned brightest. I liked it that the most flaming star in the whole of heaven was given to a cur. Nobody stirred in the lane, there were no sounds but the owls, and the yearning bark of a fox. We were alone with the vault of stars and all the world round us. I shucked the dread from my shoulders.
‘See, Martha,’ Jacob said, wrapping my cloak about me, ‘there is light even in the blackest middle of the night. All that life is over, gone. We live here now, in Hope.’
It was an old jest between us, but I couldn’t help smiling. After the acquittal, he had come to fetch me. He had a position already. He was to be a groom on the Coningsby estate – the clerk of the court had helped him to it out of pity for us both. I should have rejoiced, but I sat on the floor of my cell and looked up at the flies that buzzed in the narrow slit of light from the window and felt I would never leave prison, not really. I was the Witch of Woolhope by then, there was a ballad about me, or so the guards said, although they couldn’t whistle it. Wherever I went folks would revile me and call me all to nought. But Jacob sat down beside me in the dirt and took my filthy hand to his lips and smiled. All will be well Martha, he said, you’ll see. I am taking you to live in Hope.
Weak as we both were, it took us two days walking. It was the dog days of summer and the roads were thick with heat. As dusk fell I picked loosestrife, corncockle, willowherb, campion and we lay down on a bed of flowers. At Leominster he asked directions and I understood. Hope under Dinmore, in a crook of the Lugg before it falls into the Wye.
The harvest had begun when we arrived. Rain threatened. No doubt my reputation came before me, but when I limped out to the fields to help with the gleaning, the village was too busy to take much note. The women simply nodded me a welcome. At the harvest supper we took our places like the rest and shared the cup, and if people were a little quiet near me, or cast a glance or two at one another, it was far less than I had feared.
I fell into loving Jacob in the unfledged days when trouble seemed a game. I owed him my life three times over. He drew me out of the earth when it buried me; out of the water when I went mad and sought the moon in Pentaloe Well; then out of prison when he spoke for me in the court. The days of my imprisonment are blurred except that one. For days I had given depositions; I felt emptied of words. The cell was all murk, but in the walk between the prison and the courthouse I passed a garden full of roses, pink and red and white. It seemed like a picture of a far-off land. I don’t believe I was afraid any more; they hadn’t enough to hang me after Owen stepped out of his cottage white-gowned, white-haired like an angel and stilled the mob by calling out my name. The chief charge remaining was that I had bewitched Jacob into loving me. In his fever, I was to
ld, he raved against me and the devil both. They read the words out in the court. He was too ill to testify himself they said; it was thought he might die. It was likely I would receive a year in prison. If I survived that I was free to starve wherever I wished, so long as I was not a vagrant. I felt as lonely as the shrinking moon I watched for through my bit of window, white and cold, with the gaping emptiness of the night round her always.
Then, as all was nearing a close, I heard a rustle in the courtroom and stirred myself to look up. Jacob – gaunt as a ghost, pale as one, but walking without a stick. I had not practised on him, he declared, he had chosen me freely, though in defiance of his mother. It was enough to set me free.
I was a wife. We agreed I should not work with herbs and healing. Hearing of my past, people came to me from time to time for charms and preparations, but I put them off, almost always, except when I could not bear to turn them away. It is just a little knowledge I have, I told them, nothing your own mother doesn’t know. My fingers ached to be busy, to collect simples again; my skirts brushed seeds and leaves that had power in them and I let it all drop into the mud. I would be Jacob’s wife now, not Martha Dynely, prickly and unwelcome as a thistle in pasture. In the evenings, when the work was done, we sat together and I taught him letters on a slate, or sometimes we lay down and I traced them with my fingers on his back, his thighs, or with my tongue in the hollows of his ribs.
It was good to walk the paths and not be known, or barely, even if my history was all about me still, like the echo of a cry. Whenever a child mimicked the roll of my bad leg an older one would whisper and the mocking stopped. I tried not to mind it, for Jacob’s sake, because he was determined not to notice it at all. One spring night I walked out to meet him in the grazing fields and he pulled me up on a nag that was kept for the serving men and began to teach me to ride. All my life I had been little Martha. Suddenly I was taller than a bishop in his hat. I felt the strength of the horse beneath me and all the promise of distance and speed. There, he told me, you are not lame, you lack a horse, is all.
Perhaps I could have lived like that forever, for as long as I was allotted, in the turn of the years and the warmth of Jacob’s kisses. It was only when the nights were at their blackest and the rains did not let up that the mare-hag came. In Februaries like this, when the land was numb, strewn here and there with bedraggled jags of snow. In the visions I was buried still; even when I woke it seemed to me I was not far enough away from the sucking mud. Often I sought him then, pulling the strength of him onto me, into me, until we both dissolved. You need a child Jacob would say, giving voice to his own longing; then you’ll feel whole again. Sometimes I did not bleed for months and we waited and prayed; I collected nettles, feverfew, St John’s wort, spoke charms over us both. He turned his face away from the fear that my womb was cursed, but the fear grew; I could see it sometimes, in his eyes. We talked of it less and less. This year, whenever the nightmare stopped my mouth with her clammy hand, he lit a candle or persuaded me outside as he had tonight, until the quiet earth and the stars steadied me.
We stood a long time in the pricked darkness without the need to speak. Slowly, clouds drifted back across the stars. An early cock crowed; it would soon be morning.
‘You must shift, Jacob,’ I said. ‘You said there was more company expected.’
‘Yes, tidy me nicely Martha. I’m to dress his lordship’s horse today. I had better practise my bowing and scraping.’
After he had gone I saw he’d forgotten the food I had put by for him. No matter, I thought, I could take it up to him myself. I left early, lingering near the drive in the hope I might catch a glimpse of his lordship and the company riding out. I had rarely seen Thomas Coningby and never close up; for the last year he had been in Italy. Folk said he was a fine young man. I loitered behind an elm for a space, but the cold was too much for me. We would have more snow. The frost held, but there was no sun: all was iron grey.
I turned into the path that went round to the back of the stables and as I did so the lords and ladies at last came past in a clatter of shouting, velvet and leather. I pressed myself against the wall so as not to be seen.
Jacob was in the yard. I could see he was smiling. When he caught my eye he ran to me and scooped me up.
‘Martha my honeybird, my sweet heart’s root, Sir Thomas himself has just been here. He asked if it was I who had taken the stone from the chestnut that had threatened to go lame last week and when I said yes – fearing he had found fault with me – he nodded and smiled and asked my name. “Well, young Jacob Spicer”, he said, “if you handle women as you handle my horses you’ll not lack for company”. Then he told me to wait for him, said I could comb her down for him tonight, that he might have a job for me.’
All afternoon I waited, unsettled as a fly. At nightfall he burst in, brimful of news and pleasure. The young lord was travelling north with his friend Edward Croft on business of the Earl of Leicester. He would need a good groom. They would be gone a month, two at the most.
‘Oh Martha,’ he said, ‘it’s what I have dreamed of. To serve such men directly! It will be the making of us both.’
‘He will dress you up in livery to match his horse and all the fine ladies will admire your leg.’
He tossed his head back and threw a mocking glance at me and grinned. ‘I think so. And they’ll tender me their lily-white hands so that I can help them mount. I hear they like that.’
I laughed, although I felt a little queasy. He did not know how fair he was, or see the grace that drew men and women to him. What would I do here, alone for two months with the spring not yet come? I put on as joyful a face as I could. He was right, of course, it was a gift sent by Fortune herself. Who would not welcome it?
That night I did not dream of the hill but of my own cottage, of turning in the night and finding Jacob gone, of an absence like a door wrenched open so that all the winter winds could rush and enter. When I woke I had to put out my hand to feel that he was there, warm and gentle beside me in the bed. I rose and lit a candle; for many minutes I stood and watched the soft rise and fall of his breath and the smile that hovered at the corners of his mouth.
2
There was no moon the night he left. All the frost had wilted and the roads and fields were lined with a grey slubber. I walked with him to the stables and waited while the horses were saddled up and clattered into the yard. Jacob was a fine stableman; I could see why the young lord had picked him out; he had a way of talking that the horses seemed to understand. They bent their heads to him and snorted. In the light of the lantern their white breath smoked about his face.
At last he turned to me, smiling, ‘Come here, Martha, we have a little time still.’ I followed him up a ladder into a corner loft and sat back against the straw.
‘Pinch out the lamp,’ I said, ‘we don’t need that.’
‘Don’t we, wife? The last time I was with you in a stable loft you near pulled a knife on me, remember?’
‘Ah,’ I whispered, ‘I remember husband, but that was before I had learned to lie with you.’
‘Did I not make you an honest woman then?’
‘Oh no, our talking always ends in lying.’
‘And how does that begin? Like this?’
‘Aye.’
That moment – with the smell of horses and mould, with the horses snorting and stamping below and the men calling and cursing as they fitted the packs – I think it held the keenest joy I have ever known. The knowledge he was about to go made the wonder of it sharper. In the soft darkness there was only his breath on my cheek as we kissed one another’s faces, tracing the contours and the hollows, pressing the map of one another into our lips. It is his arms, his holding me, I thought, that keeps me whole; only that. Without that the sorrows of my life, and my own wild soul will hurl me into pieces. I will be like the Gabriel Ratchets people tell tales of, the restless hounds forever howling across the whipped skies, unable to find my self.
Jaco
b sat up. ‘It is only two months little mouse. I shall be back before you hang a garland up for May.’
‘I hope so indeed!’ I said, ‘or who will take me out a-Maying and help me stain my brown gown green?’
‘Ha! My Briar Rose still.’ He brushed the straw from his hair.
‘Jacob, lad,’ a voice called, ‘have done and come down, they’ll be here any minute.’
He bent towards me, suddenly earnest, ‘I don’t doubt you. All the same, be wary whom you trust Martha. You know the Steward’s fondness for making bastards. No, don’t take on. If any call you into their house a healing, make sure there’s a woman by. Bolt the door, nights, and don’t walk abroad.’
‘I will obey, my lord. I’ll not stir from my hearth nor lift my eyes from the earth for fear of dishonour.’
He threw his head back in his old way, narrowing his eyes. I placed a finger on his lips before the hasty words came. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Don’t let’s quarrel, I cannot bear you to leave on a quarrel. Come, Jacob, I am tame, you have tamed me quite. You are much more likely to be tempted than I.’ I put my hands round his face. ‘Morning and evening I shall hear the culvers cooing their constancy and I shall sing with them of mine. Be as true to me as I shall be to you.’
The Good Wife Page 1