At length I yielded and took her by the reins. I would take her as far as the road, I thought, it was better so, she was not fit for the wilderness any more than I. Now and then she inclined her head to me or nickered for affection or for oats. After an hour or so of hesitating this way and that, but ever making east towards the sun, we reached a holloway that climbed from the common into oak woods. I could have left her there, but in truth I’d found her a good companion. My pack pulled at my shoulders, why not fasten it to her back a while, I thought, at least to the top of the rise? The lane pitched so steeply; with every step my legs grew heavier. I felt drained of blood, weaker than a day-old lamb. Barely a third of the way up I had to pause to lean against the bank. At this pace I would not reach Worcester by nightfall. I would grow sick.
I glanced at the soft saddle. As if she understood me the mare shuffled alongside the bank. A rock poked out like a mounting block. I hesitated, then swung myself stiffly up. Jacob had taught me how to ride – on tired nags and broad-backed shires, never on a stirrer such as this; I felt the power of her back beneath me, but she moved as smoothly as a gliding swan. Over the crest our track joined a wider road sloping gently to the north and east. All the country was laid out before me and a gentle breeze whispered to my spirits to lift; the mare picked up her pace.
We ambled down. The slightest pressure from my legs and she fell into a trot, but the lilt was easy. By and by we passed a straggle of farmhands who doffed their caps and made way and did not meet my eyes, but swept their gaze approvingly across the horse. It was only a crumb in my mouth, but I knew the taste of power from it – to be above the herd of men, with all that sleek strength beneath me, any moment ready to break free of the caterpillar pace of days and hours, throw the miles like grit behind us. No wonder men grew giddy with it and forgot that it was only borrowed might. ‘A little further,’ I said to the mare, ‘a little further yet and then I’ll walk.’
The high road when we reached it was wide and easy, meandering with the Teme to the city. There were more travellers now and eyes more ready to appraise me as I passed. However much I liked the elevation I knew I must get down and walk again and find a means to give her up. I’d passed farms and two fine manors with parks rolling down to the road, but I was wary of stopping. By noon, however, I judged I must be within a few miles of the city and could wait no longer; every furlong risked discovery. There was no help for it; I would have to leave her by the road.
We stopped in the shade of a spreading elm; I was debating with myself whether to loop her to a branch or leave her be when a shadow touched me. I turned round. It was a woman of middle age, in a costly black riding dress and a high-brimmed hat with a red plume. There was a weary looking man behind her, leading a grey palfrey. ‘You, boy, is that your master’s horse?’
Fear bloomed in me and wilted just as fast. She was pointing her crop at me, but had eyes only for my mare.
‘Madam, it was my guardian’s horse,’ the words tripped out freshly, like water from a spring, ‘but he died on Easter Day. I am to sell it in the city, tack and all, to pay my mistress’s debts.’
She pursed her lips. ‘You may sell it to me now and save yourself the trouble. My man, William, has had a fall. Horse just buckled underneath him. I want her checked out. How old is your mare?’
William had already begun assessing the mare, pulling up her lips to check her teeth.
‘She’s seven years old.’
‘Twelve if she’s a day,’ William answered. His eyes did not leave mine; they were half closed; he did not need to hold my jaw to know me for a liar.
I turned away from him to the lady. ‘Madam, forgive me, but this is hasty,’ I said. ‘My mistress said to go to Worcester, to find out a dealer she knows.’
The woman drew herself up and pointed her crop at me. ‘I am Lettice Cowarne of Lulsley Court. Lulsley Court, tell your mistress that.’ She looked over at William. ‘I will give you three pounds for it. Pay the boy, William.’
‘With your leave, Mistress,’ William said, stepping up to me and leaning his face close into mine, so that all my uneasiness returned. ‘What was the name of your guardian, boy?’
I was not such a fool as that. I had read the name stamped on the saddle, but I flinched all the same. They might be neighbours for aught I knew. ‘George Overton sir.’ I tried to sound indignant.
‘And what was he and where was he?’ He pointed a finger at my chest. I could barely breathe.
‘A respectable man, sir,’ I squeaked, ‘as any that tread ground. He was a draper.’
‘Come, come,’ the lady put in, to my relief. ‘Don’t play the constable, William, it doesn’t become you. And no man should look a given horse in the mouth as they say. The boy has an honest face. He’d hardly parade the beast on the highway like this if he was a common thief. We have company tonight; I must get home.’
I bit down on my eagerness as William counted out the gold and I caught myself before I bobbed a curtsey. I could not bear to look at the mare as he led her off. Till they were almost out of sight and the road curved round a hill he turned and stared back at me. If he wheels her round, I thought, I’ll jump the hedge and run. Did he know me for a girl, was that it? Or was it that he guessed the horse was pilfered?
Either way, by two in the afternoon I was within sight of the walls of Worcester and then its beautiful six-arched bridge. There were people coming and going all about me. I mingled myself among them, marvelling at the towers and walls. I was a free man, and rich to boot. Within a yard or two I had companions.
‘Young sir, do you need a bed? I know an inn.’
‘Here, sir, I think you dropped this?’
‘A fine young fellow like you must be wanting work?’
Coney catchers, one and all. I gripped my bags close and ducked them, blessing Mary of Bromyard for teaching me to hide my gold.
17
When I was a girl I had longed for the city, but in my mind it was always Gloucester, where my father had first been rich and then been ruined; where my mother had been hanged. Later, when the gallows sought me in my turn, I was taken to Hereford and then to Ludlow, but that was not a time, of course, for looking about me; on such a journey you see little but walls and faces and the filth of the gaol. Turning away from the crowds now I found myself in a damp, close alley where the reek of piss and rot recalled the cells. I had to steady myself on the grimy wall. As soon as I had found my way back to the light I set about getting a bed and safety.
There was a widow, I was told, in a narrow house near the cornmarket, who would let me a room for as long as I had money in my pocket. She looked me up and down as though doubting I knew the feel of a penny, but when I paid her a week in hand she grew civil and led me, wheezing, up the tightening stairs, to a narrow box with a bed and shutters that gave out on the street. ‘Would I be wanting my dinner brought up?’ she asked me, with her hand leaning heavy on the latch, ‘or would I share with the others in the parlour?’ ‘The parlour,’ I said quickly, to her evident relief.
My fellow boarders were apprentices, full of gripes and chatter. At first they eyed me with open curiosity and tried to tap me for talk, but they soon decided I was a sullen fellow and let me alone. The pottage was good enough, but my stomach was knotted and I could only manage a little. I went back up to the room and turned the key.
I flung myself on the bed to think what I should do, now. Rowland’s John had told me Jacob was attacked in Lancaster, but was he there, still? Lancaster, the north, they were only words to me – a place where wars and rebellions were born. What kind of monsters lay between here and there? A city was too broad a goal. Dear God, he might have left already! To travel so far and find he had left before me – I should be lost, my heart would wear away. What if all my wanderings proved bootless and Jacob returned to an empty cottage wondering what I had become, called a horned man wherever he went? I prayed for some vision to show me where he was, but nothing came. There were only the flies jagging a
bove me, turning lazily round and round as though spinning on the axis of my breath, or the fruitless circles of my thought.
Had I brought this on myself? In the village they would say that I had lost the child because it was born of sin; it could not stay, the poor thing, with a maimed soul; my losing it was proof enough I had lain with the Steward. The room was stiff with heat; I could hardly breathe. Even with the shutters open the air barely moved; I kept so still I fancied myself like the dead boy I had covered over with soft earth and flowers. Perhaps I deserved rest less than he – hadn’t I taken his wrongs upon me when I filched his things? I was like the sin-eater who passes the bread over the corpse; the boy had gone into the earth innocent and I had dressed myself in all his sins.
The chandler who had been kind to me, the farmer and his wife, the draper – what right had I to any of their pennies or their gold? Instead of taking off like a rustler I should have returned the money to the constables, discovered if my companions had been left stripped and trussed like swine – or if their throats were cut. Would you even know me Jacob, lying here in breeches stuffed with stolen gold? Your thinking was never muddied with dishonesties as mine has always been; when a path was tangled you hacked at it to make it clear, you did not seek to go round or under as I did. In my place you would give back the money as best you could – but you would not be in my place; you would have stayed and fought with the rest even till your throat was cut. And that is not fair either, for what good was I at fighting and how, being a man, how could you know my fears or the bleak understanding when my womb was torn? ‘You have no right to judge me,’ I said to his stern face.
At last the baked air cooled and the shapes of things softened in the twilight and I drifted into sleep. It was not Jacob, but the others who leaked into my dreams. I saw the farmer’s wife, lying in her bed, shaking with fear at every shadow that leapt from her candle; the draper’s hand trembling over the cloth, worse, cowering behind his door when the creditors came knocking; Mary, the chandler’s daughter, forced to marry from the loss of stock. In my visions they became mixed up with my father, drunk in the gutter, stumbling through the dark to his bitter bed, cursing Fortune’s wheel that cast him down and crushed him like a fly in the dirt; at dawn once again dragging himself upright to the workshop, spitting the crabbed flux from his mouth. There were mornings when I brought him ale and bread and watched him in the shafts of light that fell through the open door sitting at the spoke horse or bevelling the angle of the felloe ends without barely a need to measure. He answered Fortune with the work of his hands as though he could not let alone what bruised him, seeking the beauty of the wheel’s roll when it was true and just.
I woke to the sound of rain on the tiles above me and a creeping dawn. The thatch I was used to did not patter so; I liked the sound, being warm and dry beneath it. The bleeding had stopped. I sat up; it did no good to laze and mope. What was done was done and after all it was not I who had pulled a knife or threatened any Christian soul, nor taken their goods – the horse aside – and I pushed that out of mind; they were none of them such gudgeons as to stuff all their wealth in their purses as I had lately done. Below me the sounds of voices and wheels, dogs and chickens began to thicken. Even if I had not known, the bustle would have told me it was a market day.
From the window I watched the people on the street. The men, especially, how they walked and bantered. All my life I had lived with men; my father, Jacob, and yet it seemed to me that I had never noticed how they moved – the swagger in the walk, the spread stance talking, even the way they flung words into the air struck me as different. I thought of Jacob walking. He did not swagger, there was a gentleness in everything he did, but when I stood and walked along the room, positioning my gait to his – as much as my lame leg would allow me – I felt how his stride, the easy poise of his hips and chest spoke of a strength, a confidence that the world was there to be embraced. Whereas I – at even my most defiant – had learned I was allied to shadows, to stooping, to the circumference of a skirt. ‘Look,’ I made his spirit say to me, positioning his hands upon my shoulders, ‘this is how to stand now you are a man, this is how you hold your chin.’
I ventured out and bought a length of soft lawn to bind up my breasts and some good linen drawers. I had my hair cut short and close. I practised pushing my voice from the back of my throat so that it grew harsher and deeper. Then, directed to a draper, I bought a whole set of clothes to appear as a sober scrivener or clerk, top to toe, slops and doublet and all. I was lucky, for he had a set that fit me and I did not have to risk standing for his measure. The boy’s things I kept, all but the doublet. The draper swindled me on the price, but I was glad to be rid of it; it held the scent of him so keenly each breath felt like a haunting. The streets were busy with buyers and sellers, to advance at all was to weave a dance in and about – a woman with a tray of pies, a man with a load of pins, a gaggle of apprentice blacksmith boys who snickered as I tripped out of their path. It made me pause – did they mark my counterfeiting? I stepped into the lee of an inn gate to let my cheeks cool. A butcher’s man crossed near me with a brace of fowl, into an onion girl, upsetting her and her load both.
‘Look where you go, you stinking jade,’ he shouted, shoving her aside, although it was he who’d usurped the path. Every way I looked men forged ahead and women dodged them and although the lesser man gave way for the greater, all in all each sought to go straight like an arrow or a knife. Even bowing a greeting there was a stage laid claim to, a pageantry of air, so different to our dipping. I must be like a bull calf I told myself, bred to plough straight, be the earth cledgy or frozen.
That night, after my landlady’s broth, I found a tavern where I could sit near the back of the low room and watch the company. The market had brought fiddlers, or perhaps they always played, and one after another men and women too stood up to sing. I knew many – who doesn’t know the jest of Robin Hood? – others were new to me, but not to the company; they raised their cups in readiness when the singer began ‘King Lear and His Three Daughters’ or ‘Henry Martin’. I drew myself into the gloom of the wall to listen. One of the minstrels stepped forward.
‘It was a gallant knight,’
He sang.
‘loved a gallant lady,’
And his voice was so deep and mournful I was afraid I would betray myself by weeping.
‘My love believe not,’
The abandoned lady pleads with her knight.
‘Come to me and grieve not, wantons will thee throw.’
‘Oh, it’s a long one that,’ the girl said, bringing me another pot of beer, ‘he’ll be at it a quarter of an hour.’
‘Hold your peace,’ I said, losing the story and straining to pick it up – the lady abused, abandoned, but so constant that when he is taken falsely for a murder she offers her life for his. He is condemned to walk before her to the scaffold but he cannot lift the sword to strike her; it is only their loving embrace, her thousand kisses at the scaffold that moves the ruffians to pity, so that the cruel harlot is exposed. The words were weak enough, but all the pain and pity of love was in his voice; when he had done my eyes brimmed. To lay down her life so piteously! I would do it too, I thought, if only I could. To my surprise the girl was back watching me.
‘Look at you,’ she said, not unkindly, ‘have you never heard a bit of heartbreak before – or is it your own case you’re sorrowing after? I don’t care for that one anyhow. It’s always the whore gets hanged. Give me a tune with a jig in it, less of your maudlin ballads. You need to go easy,’ she nodded at the beer, ‘not used to it, are you? I’ll bring you some pie.’
She was right, it wasn’t like the ale at home, the room had gone dizzy, it rocked a little as though a wind had caught it. When she came back I grabbed her hand.
‘Will you sit with me a while?’ I asked.
She laughed and glanced back at the bar. ‘It’ll cost you,’ she said, plumping herself down.
I tried to rememb
er what it was I had to say.
‘You’ve a nice hand,’ she said, turning it over, lifting my wrist to her lips. ‘Are you lonely?’ Her voice was cooing, soft. ‘I don’t go with men, you know.’
‘Nor I with women,’ I said, smiling. The pie was good; it had begun to clear the fog from my vision and I turned to look properly at the girl. She was younger than I, although it might have been the dancing candle and the dimples round her mouth. There was a flush on her cheek. I pressed my hand to her neck, to feel for the King’s evil. She caught at my hand, laughing.
‘I have a room,’ she said.
‘Do you sweat at night?’ I asked.
She stood up affronted. ‘I’ve a mind to slap your chops and have you thrown out on your backside.’
‘Sit, sit,’ I said. ‘Forgive me. You mistake me – I was apprenticed to an apothecary – I cannot help searching out ailments. Please, sit down and talk to me.’
I placed a coin on the table. Two. She sat again, but a little stiffly. ‘There en’t’ nothing wrong with me.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, course not, you’re as pretty as a daisy. My name is Jabez.’
‘I am Mercy,’ she said. This was better. The fiddlers started up again, a reel this time and some started pushing back chairs for dancing. ‘Jabez,’ she said, ‘That’s an old name for a beardless youth.’
‘My mother bore me in sorrow,’ I said, giving her chapter and verse, ‘and I pray to God to bless me and let His hand be with me and He grants my prayers.’
She tilted her head a little. ‘Does He so? What’s your business young Jabez?’
‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said, for there seemed no need for lying. ‘My brother. Not here – in the north, in Lancashire. My family think him dead, but I believe him living still. I mean to find him and bring him home.’
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