He glanced at me pointedly to be sure I had his meaning. It wasn’t hard to guess. When he spoke again his voice was oily. ‘You should not suffer for your husband’s crimes Martha Spicer, nor should the child you carry.’
Rowland held my arm as we walked back. ‘I lived in Lancaster a week, more, as a young man,’ he said.
I frowned at him, surprised, impatient. What was that to me?
‘Unless I’m much mistaken, there’s but one parish church – St Mary’s, there en’t no parish of St James.’
12
That Boult was lying was clear enough, but what lay behind the lies I had no idea. I was not such a fool as to think that he would tell me, however agreeable I made myself to him, but I nursed my anger because it kept despair at a length. Hour on hour I fed it. With innocent Meg beside me I lay and fancied myself conjuring a monster out of darkness, a giant who ripped men’s limbs and chewed their bones. I sent it striding down the lanes to mangle the Steward in his goose-feather bed. At times I half believed he had contrived Jacob’s death to have me a harlot in his house to own and use at will.
Jacob was loved. No end of folk brought their gifts and sorrow. There seemed no sly allusions, no round suggestions I had found another bed, although I knew well enough that was a nod to decency, no more. The visits kept the days busy and for that I was thankful. More than that, they drew me back from madness. To each I repeated that it was not true, the story put about, it could not be true. And if it were not true, a voice within me whispered, if the manner of his death was falsely told, perhaps he was not dead at all. It was Annie Bartlet who voiced the secret stirrings of my heart.
She sat down across from me after handing me bacon and good wishes from her parents. I was weeping again and she waited for me to stop, or perhaps for her own eyes to settle. ‘I know you did not wish for this, whatever the Steward might have in hand,’ she said, more honest than her neighbours. ‘Convenient for Boult, though en’t it? I can guess what kind of rent he’ll be after.’
‘I’ll make a doll,’ I said, ‘and stick it till his heart’s blood dribbles from his mouth.’
She nodded. ‘You don’t want to let folks hear you saying things like that. Especially you, with the past you’ve had, and the noose missing you once already.’ Her slyness was all gone and she took my hand. ‘Have you thought, Martha – if how he died en’t true, maybe he’s still living?’
I stood up and leaned my forehead on the wall. ‘Of course I’ve thought of it, Annie. A hundred thousand times. If I had any cause, any cause at all to hope it might be true…’
‘Well, it’s only an idea, mind, but it’s St Mark’s Eve tomorrow night, when the year’s dead troop into God’s house. You might watch from the church porch to see if Jacob is among them. If he stayed within then you would know. If he’s ill but not dead, and not going to die, he’ll come out the church again, that’s what folks say.’
I must have looked askance for she went on, ‘Not all do see, of course. My mother watched time and again for my grandmother, she was such a creaking door, biding with us year after year, but she didn’t see a thing, even the year Gran was took. I’ll come with you if you like.’
I knew the practice of waiting to see what souls were called. I’d even tried to sneak and watch myself as a child, the year my grandmother took ill, but my father had cuffed my ears and told me not to be softheaded. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘tomorrow night. St Mark’s, why not? I’ll do it, Annie. Thank you. But alone, it will be better alone. And please, I beg you, don’t tell a soul.’
It was not forbidden, but not approved either. There had used to be a place, purgatory, where dead souls suffered before they were judged clean enough for heaven; it was close enough to the waking world for the spirit to step back through, to warn, or to punish, or to beg for justice, but that was all done with now. Our souls, we were told, jumped into fire or light at the moment of our death and the spirits men saw were devils’ business. Perhaps in church we believed that to be true, but not at night, when the lanes were dark and the owls called, or the fire flickered and shadows jostled at the house eaves. We knew how the dead yearned, how they were knitted into hearths and hollows. How they lingered. Jacob would not consent to heaven without leaving me a sign. Didn’t my own heart lodge in his? I would have felt the tug of his crossing. And if he lay yet on the shore with death creeping like the tide his spirit would show me that, too, whether he was doomed to go over or return.
The next night, therefore, as soon as it was dark, I set out for the church. Sally had wanted me to keep little Meg by, but I could not risk her fretting again, or following me. It was a damp night, and cold for April, and the low mist that hung above the graveyard seemed an exhalation of the dead. There was not a soul about. I pulled my cloak tight and sat under the yew to wait among the graves. A man coughed on the lane below and cursed and spat; then there was nothing but the owls and the distant shriek of a vixen. The old porch loomed blackly. Now and then the clouds thinned enough for the wan moon to bleach the stone and pale the mounded graves. I leaned my back against the rough trunk and cursed myself for a fool. The dead lay all round, young and old, why shouldn’t Jacob have joined them? What was I doing, acting on the words of a giddy girl like Annie? And what if I were to see him among the lately dead of the parish, or those that were to die this year – could I bear that? I should haul myself home to bed now, I told myself, and pray out my folly on my knees. But telling myself made no difference; I did not move, though the minutes slipped into hours and my bones ached with damp and stiffness and the silence drew its folds about me.
A sharp breeze blew off the hanging mist and the moon stared bleakly down at me with all her stars about her. Let me see him, I begged her, even if he is to die, even if he has been cold in his grave for weeks, let me see him come. Let him haunt me every day of my life. It felt to me that for these few hours God leased the white-cast world to the moon; within the church He reigned with book and cross, but out here in this bare world of silver and shadow, stone and death, the moon was allowed her rule. But night would soon be over and nothing had happened. I huddled into myself, part of the darkness of the yew.
Perhaps I blinked, perhaps the dread and the cold confounded my wits – all at once it seemed the moonlight thickened. Shapes, human figures, appeared before me; it was no dream, I would swear it on the Bible. There was the vicar, or the spectre of the vicar, holding the Bible, the graves and the holly hedge quite clear through his surplice. Behind him a cluster of familiar forms, shuffling silently, each wrapped in a white winding sheet. My heart caught in my mouth, for there was old Rowland, with a dark stain above his eye; Annie Bartlet’s mother, so thin and spare her collar bones were ridges beneath her sheet and – oh sweet Lord – there, taller than the rest, his thick curls glistening, Jacob. I could not move. I could not call to him; even the motion of my breath had paused. He was as bright and real as the moonlight on the stone; there were hollow rings round his eyes and he stooped as though even spectral steps exhausted him.
The group entered the church and from within there came the hum of prayer. I was caught between life and death, unable to feel, to move; I was reduced to the vision I had sought. The moon shone on, insensible. For a long while nothing happened; if I had been capable of thought I should have lost all hope, but then a woman – I knew her – Sarah Pugh, a grandmother, issued from the church; she was made of moonlight as before, but dressed now in her own clothes. After her, nothing, at first nothing, then a man, a young man, leaning on a staff but looking about him as though new awakened into life. Jacob, unburied, alive, and yet no more himself than a painting. He did not turn to me, but passed on, out of the churchyard gate.
How long I remained there I don’t know. At length I became aware of two black eyes watching me – a badger, paused in its saunter to the hedge. Its gaze was quick with life. I hauled myself upright and it turned away unhurriedly, sniffing through moonlight and shadow alike. What were spirits to the world of rich rot
and loam, to the whispers of earthworms? The strange stupor which had fallen on me lasted into my dreams for the few hours till morning, but I woke with a fierce new conviction: Jacob was alive.
13
There was the question, of course, of what to do. A week slipped by, then another. May began, and all the young people, and most of the old, rose before the dawn to gather flowers – and some returned with green-stained gowns, smiling into the morning. ‘I shall be back before you hang a garland up for May,’ he’d said before he left. I drew the shutters and sat with the green ring Meg made me, shredding the petals. I must be like the beaver and build a dam that could hold and check my sorrow. He was alive, the vision said – but he might be ill, grievously ill yet. How long might it take him to recover himself and reach me? He was likely lying in a fever in some filthy lodging house, where the rats were loud in the walls and there was no one to care if he lived or died. If I could only reach him, if at the least I could send him word he was to be a father! I had last had my courses late February; I was at the most only three months gone. By July, I told myself, he must be home by late July when the baby, mothlike, would begin to quicken.
Slowly the attention I had been given fell off, until only Sally and little Meg and old Rowland checked on me daily. Young John could hardly bear to look at me and more than once I spied him crossing the orchard or a field to avoid an encounter. As if I would hold him to blame!
I was careful to tell no one what I had seen, not even Annie when she came calling the day after, saying only I had dreamed he was alive. In part this was because I did not trust myself to lie about the others I had seen making their doleful way into the church – or not to lie well, so that it could not be worked out of me. Pious folk might say it was a visitation sent by the devil, but that was not true, I could not think it, for what would that mean for Jacob? Rowland had lived a long full life, but if any man were truly good, it was him – I did not want to think he had only a few months left to live and Annie’s mother too, though I did not know her nearly so well. Knowledge of what will be is a heavy burden, it left you yearning. In my healing I had always turned from conjuring work; I did not want it now, except to know the truth about my husband. How could so many have been so rash as to risk the vision, I wondered, till I remembered my own case and the urgency I felt that had leapt all risks and would leap them again and again. Whenever I saw Rowland his ghost hovered like a shadow in my mind’s eye, with the black gash in its forehead.
‘You’ve picked up well, young Martha,’ he said to me one morning. ‘I’ll admit I was fearful for you, but your eyes have got their boldness back, or some of it, leastways, if you don’t mind me saying.’
I could hold my peace no longer. ‘He’s not dead. I am sure of it.’
Rowland frowned. ‘I feared it might be some such tale. Better than the other. Ah child, is that likely? Boult may be a rascal, but would he lie a man into his grave? Think Martha, what purpose would it serve?’
I hesitated.
‘No, not for that even. How could he, at such a distance? I agree that not all the truth has been told, but you must not rot your mind with fancies. There’ll come a time, soon, when you’ll need to look about you.’
Rowland hadn’t said what he meant by better than the other, but I knew clear enough. Boult had lingered for me after church on Sunday, saying loud enough for all to hear how when I was ready he would send a man to help me move my things, that there was work in the dairy and two good rooms above it. I was not blind to the looks and the nudges behind me while I bobbed and begged for leave to stay till harvest. He did not answer. It was not to be borne, but I did not know what was to be done about it. I knew that once I had left the cottage and my good neighbours, I was lost. My black ribbons would not protect me; if I could stay put till I grew big, surely then, I thought, he would not lay hands on me. I did not reflect, goose that I was, how he used my pregnancy against me. I carried his bastard the murmur said. He had breathed the rumour into being; he had now only to blow a little for it to grow like a wave at my back. I could not hope to halt it; I would be washed up at his feet.
Meg came back to stay with me, because I was afraid. Other people, even Sally, skirted round Jacob’s name as though to say it would set back healing, but Meg did not know this. She liked to ask me questions when we lay down to sleep.
‘Are you still sick from the baby?’
‘No, not so much now, Meg.’
‘But is it Jacob gave it you or Master Boult?’
I turned towards her. ‘What have you heard Meg?’
‘Oh, my Pa says it’d better be the Steward’s now and Ma Sally says however could you say so and Pa says if she’s got any sense in her head she’ll get herself set up because it don’t matter what the truth of it is, everyone believes it’s the Steward that’s knocked out the apple.’
‘What do you think Meg?’
She was quiet so long I thought she’d gone to sleep. ‘I don’t like the Steward, nuncle.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘and nor do I. I wouldn’t let his baby grow in my belly.’
By and by, hesitantly at first, folk came again to ask healing of me. Perhaps, I thought, if I could keep my home, I could get by till Jacob returned to me, working charms and herbs for my bread; after all it could be any day, morning or evening – a cart would rumble by and stop. I told Meg to be listening out for wheels. But the days went by and he did not come.
It was almost more than I could bear, to go about my days, thinking of him without friends, or money, ill to the point of death; I would go to him, I thought, but then buckled at the distance and the difficulty. What if we missed each other on the road? Even if I knew where to find him it was so far – if he were ill when I set out he would be either well or dead by the time that I arrived. And the road was no place for a woman, let alone a woman with child. I had more than myself to think of now. Better far to trust in his return. But again, what if he could not travel? If they had left him a cripple and declared him dead for ease’s sake? The more I reflected the more it seemed the most likely story. I remembered the cell in Ludlow and the trial and how he had broken out of a sickbed and a locked door to recover me from death itself. My belly might not show for two months yet, maybe more so’s anyone would notice, and we could be back in Hope by then. Back and forth I went with my thinking, like a scrabbling hoe, and more and more I returned to the thought of leaving.
Twice I saw Boult face to face. The first time I was at the river where it drops down into a washing pool. Meg poked me in the ribs and pointed across the water. Boult was standing in the dappled sun on the farther path, watching me. I bent my head and said nothing, rubbing grit into the wool to shift the dirt. At last he passed on. The second time I was returning from weeding peas. There was a group of us, but I was a little apart, less because of my hobble than the cloud that hung about me. It was a golden afternoon and the girls all wore circlets of lady’s smock, herb-robert, buttercups. I trailed a rope of goosegrass I feigned not to have noticed Meg sticking to my back. If it stuck till I reached home, I thought, it would be useful for the trouble old Margaret was having with her waters. Boult rounded the corner on horseback, all smiles and courtesy. He lifted his hat to Annie and the other girls.
‘What ladies have we here? Queens of the May?’
They giggled and curtseyed. I hung back, hoping foolishly that he would not see me, but he drew alongside and bowed low towards me.
‘Mourning becomes you,’ he said, low enough to pique the listening ears. ‘I am growing tired of games, madam. The rent quarter begins at midsummer. You must be in my house before then.’
As soon as he’d gone Annie slipped back, and threaded her arm through mine, arching her eyebrows.
‘He is a toad.’ I said.
She nodded, ‘He’s very like a toad. You must find your way to the jewel in his head.’
‘I will kill him. I will mix hemlock in the cream and drip it on his fat lips.’
Annie paused
then and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t be a fool, Martha. You must ask a high price while you can.’
I shook my head. ‘Jacob is alive,’ I said. ‘I feel sure of it. He will come home.’
The next morning Boult’s man, Richard, arrived at my door with a skirt of fine blue lawn and a collar of lace. There was a letter too.
Mistress
After I saw you yesterday I could not rest. You are as far above the rabble that you live among as the falcon is above the mouse. Do not deceive yourself you hate me. That will not last. Think. Your husband is dead, you have no family. Come to me and I will cover you in gold. I will provide for you and for my bastard child. Mine, I have said it. Such pride in such as you, a cripple, with the scars of irons on her legs! Gather your things, I will send a cart after the shearing. Fie madam, have a care, I will not suffer humiliation.
Richard was leaning against my door, watching me with a grin. He gestured at the room with his chin. ‘Nice cottage this. Shame you won’t get the benefit of that thatch. Still, you’ll be tucked up nicely at the house. He’ll poke you ragged for a while then he’ll tire and get another one. Best not anger him.’
After he had left I put the letter to the fire. A kind of stupor took me; I willed myself to consider what to do. Would he truly put me out of the house? The question was an idle one, he had said so. I watched the flames lick and mumble at the wood and saw a future unfolding. For a brief while I would seemingly be cossetted; during the days I would dress in silk and bathe my hands in rosewater; if I charmed him long enough my child might be sent to school. Every night I would lay myself out for use; his damp pink flesh, the rank smell of his sweat in the sheets, worse, I would be expected to chaff his damp limp piece to action. Countless women had endured this since the dawning of the world; I knew I was no better than they. This was not the worst, however. Boult would tire. It wouldn’t take long; it would begin perhaps as soon as he rolled off me, aware of my disgust and the darkness that waited just beyond the lamplight. Then what? The pox and poverty and a child I could not feed.
The Good Wife Page 9