The Good Wife

by Eleanor Porter

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘About the minotaur.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Ariadne, waiting for her lover to come back to her, only for him to cast her off with nothing but the salt wind and the gulls for company.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t like to read that part, where he abandons her.’

  ‘Left her weeping without a second thought, although she had saved him from a wandering death, from wasting away in darkness. But Bacchus found her and comforted her and set her in the stars. So it ends well, I suppose. I’ve often wondered though… ‘

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘All those mortals made celestial. It’s a desolate kind of glory.’ He flung himself down on the grass beside me.

  We sat in silence for a moment with the thought. It was strange to be talking to another soul like this, about a book, about ideas. Even more so to be talking to a man who, however he had come by it, was learned as I could never hope to be. He spoke to me as to another student, almost as an equal. How fine that was! If only for that I would have pardoned his coarser side and kept company with him, but I would not tarry. ‘Master Talbot,’ I said softly, ‘I cannot stay here. Will you sell me Juno?’

  ‘You should have given him a thread to follow, little Jabez. Not that it will make any difference, of course. The minotaur has probably had him, and if it didn’t, he’ll go where he chooses. One way or another we’re alone.’

  The words seemed more pitying than cruel and his voice was flat. All the spiteful energy of this morning had drained from him. ‘Have the horse,’ he said. ‘I paid for her with your loot. Or wait for me a day and I’ll come with you.’

  ‘You’re not staying?’

  ‘My head aches. The gold that should purify us turns us into rotten meat. Sometimes I hear devils whispering at my ears and when I pray to God’s ministers to defend me a battle begins inside my own head. Did the devil ever send you visions little Jabez?’

  There was an urgency, an intensity in his eyes that I could not help responding to, if only because he appealed to me as someone who could understand. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But I have had a vision sent by an angel too, it saved a boy from dying in the snow.’

  ‘I am at war with my own soul. Satan draws me to the tavern and sets my mouth watering. He makes me a whoring knave and a brawler and then I have a thirst for darkness so thick no stars will pierce my soul with remembrance of God…’

  I grasped his hand in pity, ‘You should kneel and pray—’ I began, but he pulled away and interrupted me.

  ‘Spirits take me by the hand and tell me angels will reveal all to me and sometimes I think they serve God and sometimes that they serve the devil. A worm has crawled into my head.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, taking his hand again, ‘pray.’

  For a moment he looked at me with that strange, suffering gaze and then he shook himself, patted my arm and pulled himself up. ‘I will,’ he said, lumbering off towards the house.

  I supped with the children that night, for Talbot declared himself fasting and Smallbone was about the town somewhere. Although I tried to win them over with smiles and chatter they stared at me warily and would not speak. At length the girl asked me if I should like to see her doll, Nan, who had a lace collar. As she passed her brother she pinched him so hard he cried out and ran straight into his father who swore and shook him for a blubbering wretch. I would be glad, I thought, to leave this house.

  21

  The next morning, at first light, Talbot was shaking my shoulder. There was water dripping from his hair and he smelt of clay.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I am ready to look for your ‘brother’. I have purified myself in the river. Follow me.’

  He led me east, over the bridge and up onto soft downland towards the town of Kidderminster. Though his pace was quick I found I could keep up; I was relieved but at the same time it seemed wrong, almost, how soon my body could heal and forget. After less than a mile we encountered a small round pond.

  ‘Here we wait for the sun,’ he said.

  I lay back among the cocksfoot and the quaking grass. Now that midsummer was come the land was turning hay golden. A cloud of coppers danced above my head; I lay so still some lighted on my waistcoat. The air was thick with wings and bee-rich humming. I could almost forget myself and be happy, I thought, lying here with the sun warm on my face, even with the want of him, like a tear in my chest, reminding me of the keenness of life. I was a little nervous at what I might see, but more excited than afraid. It seemed impossible to hear of ill tidings with all this flutter of life all about me.

  ‘Why do we wait?’ I asked, pulling myself onto my elbow. Talbot was kneeling.

  ‘For the sun to rise until the mirror of the water can drink down its light and speak to me.’

  ‘What do you mean speak? Isn’t it a picture that we’ll see?’

  ‘All things send forth threads. Creation is a cloth in which all is woven – nothing material or immaterial exists of itself but is woven into the whole. The world is spun from light.’

  He frowned – it was clearly an effort to speak; it interrupted his prayers or enchantments. It seemed as I watched him that he was weaving a door of air to step from the swaying grasses and the butterflies, towards the light itself. He bent his head and crossed himself many times and then, taking me by the hand he rose and drew a circle round us on the ground next to the pool. Last of all he took a talisman from about his neck, a triangle of beaten gold inscribed with symbols and muttered over it, but I could not understand the words. It felt to me that the air was charged with spirits and I prayed in my heart that what we did was holy.

  ‘Tell me the name of the man you seek.’

  ‘His name is Jacob Spicer.’

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘look upon the water.’

  I looked. There was the blue sky with clouds like rolled fleeces; our own two faces at the water’s edge. Nothing besides. I had feared a horror, but not this. Jacob, I thought, don’t be lost to me. Dead or living show yourself; even if you lie in the earth and your eyes are sunken holes and the worms crawl through your mouth I must see you. Nothing. We waited. A chill crept down my spine; it had not worked. The cloud passed and the water gleamed with sunlight; and there – suddenly – in the golden mirror I saw a figure tossing with fever. My Jacob, his cheeks flushed and the curls on his forehead wet with sweat. A hand placed a cooling cloth on his face. Bless that hand, I thought. Then it seemed the vision blinked. I saw gaunt grey fells and stone houses; he was standing there on the road with other men and the wind whipping about him. He turned towards me, stretched out his hand and smiled.

  I fell to my knees, shaking. Talbot laid his hand on my head as though to bless me. ‘I saw him,’ I said, when I had got back to my feet and recovered breath enough to talk. ‘He was ill, but now he is strong again, he was on a road with bleak hills all behind him. Did you see the same?’

  He shrugged. ‘I saw the slate grey north and a young man praying in a room with the shutters thrown open and the sound of children in the street.’

  I felt drunk with certainty and hope and seized Talbot’s face and kissed his forehead. ‘Oh, you have saved my life!’ I said, ‘If ever I can, I swear I will save yours.’

  ‘Bold words, little Jabez,’ he said, a little amused. ‘You must be ever so fond of this brother of yours.’

  ‘Yes, I am. The world is all darkness without him. But he is alive, he’s waiting for me. I saw him stretch out his hand to greet me. We could set off this afternoon.’

  Talbot frowned. ‘At any event, it appears he is alive still. Stop jigging so, I need to rest; my brain seethes. We will go tomorrow.’

  On the way back he barely spoke and then only to tell me to let him alone. He had a headache, he said; he had work to do for Smallbone. I left him to it and strolled about the town buying necessaries. At a butcher’s shop I collided with two girls with baskets on their arms. The nearest cast me a look up and down.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m sure,
’ she said, giggling and cocking her head at me. ‘You a ’prentice?’ I blushed; she was flirting with me; even as a girl I was not used to flirting.

  At supper Talbot had revived his energies but not his humour; he had the malicious glint in his eye I had seen before.

  ‘You should stay here with me,’ Smallbone said, thrusting his fork at Talbot’s chest. ‘That’s a tidy bit of money you’ve made me and I could put more such business your way. Let the boy follow his goose chase on his own.’

  Talbot wiped Smallbone’s spittle from his doublet. ‘I would go mad,’ he said.

  For a moment Smallbone stopped chewing and his small blue eyes narrowed; the air wavered nervously. Then he leant forward and clapped Talbot on the back. ‘You’re a mad bastard already.’

  Talbot drained his cup of wine. ‘Come John,’ he said, ‘Let’s get drunk.’

  I walked with them as far as the tavern door, then wandered up and down the few streets in the dying summer evening. I passed an apothecary’s shop. The girl had taken me for an apprentice. What kind of a life might I have had, I wondered, if I had been born to breeches? Could I have run away to the city, learned a trade, become my own master? It was not impossible. Men remade themselves all the time. And why not women, too – or at least why shouldn’t I? I thought of Talbot, how he grasped at life and talked of books as easily as bacon. There was a wildness about him but also a freedom in his thinking that drew me. I could learn from it.

  In the close heat of the night, as we lay side by side, listening to rats in the walls, I asked him what business he had been doing with Smallbone.

  ‘I copied documents for him.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  There was a silence; I thought at first he had fallen asleep, but he began again, ‘I copied leaseholds and altered the terms in ways favourable to him. I am a forger, a counterfeiter, Jabez, I make false claims.’

  I was silent. I knew what he was saying, but it was not altogether true, for I had seen Jacob myself, woven from the rays of the sun.

  He moved nearer me, his sour breath on my face. There was enough light from a high casement to cast a glitter on his eye. I did not want to argue, so I said nothing. ‘Do you judge me?’ he said, seizing my shirt at the neck. ‘You, with other men’s rings sewn into your shirt, other men’s gold in your hose. You are like Gestas, pinned to the cross next to our Lord, reviling Him.’

  ‘You are drunk,’ I said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘No.’ he said. ‘I ask you again. Do you judge me? Think, Jabez, how easily I could kill you.’

  His hand was at my throat, but oddly, I did not feel afraid. One of the verses my father loved came into my mouth. ‘“Whoso is partner with a thief hateth his own soul.”,’ I said. ‘“He heareth blasphemy and telleth it not forth." It is you, Talbot, you judge yourself.’

  ‘Yes.’ His grip loosened and his head fell on my chest and he was sobbing. ‘Spirits talk through me,’ he said, his face pressed to my shoulder and the thin blanket. ‘I am like a mirror and I throw back the image of this world or the other, the spirit world that lies beyond, but I do not know, sometimes I do not know, if it is a demon or a minister of God that speaks through me and throws its images onto my mind.’

  ‘How can it but be through God,’ I said, ‘if you find what is lost and mend what was broken, and if you pray, as I have seen you do, and fall to your knees and beseech God’s angels for their help, as I have seen you do?’

  ‘I think I am like glass,’ he said, balling my shirt into his weeping face, ‘and I have no form or colour but by reflection. You cannot know what it is to see into the world of light, to long for it, body and soul both, but be unable to step through into it.’

  ‘I know what it is to love,’ I said. ‘That sounds like love.’

  He lifted his head and propped himself on his elbow, his face very close to mine. Somewhere above us a board creaked and a man was snoring. ‘It is beyond love, it is the light of God, the promise of a union with the light.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘That is something else; I do not think I want it, not yet. I want earthly love.’

  He was a looming shadow, and then suddenly his mouth pressed down on mine, softly and then harder, more urgently, and I did not know what to do, for a second, because I was a boy and because I pitied him. He rolled onto me, heavy and lean and his hands were stroking at the bindings on my chest. I felt him grow hard through the thin linen of his nightshirt and for a moment, just for a moment, I thought how easy it would be to close my eyes and make-believe him to be Jacob and take him in, to feel the good hard reach of a man inside me. But he was not Jacob. I pressed my palms against his chest and pushed him gently off, back into the dark.

  ‘You want this,’ he said, kissing my neck so that I kindled despite myself. I pushed him harder.

  ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He groaned and rolled so that he lay with his back to me. After a short while he groaned again. ‘Good night,’ he said. He was soon snoring.

  I lay on my back and stared up at the pale slip of moon which had risen above the casement. ‘Jacob, forgive me,’ I said up to the moon. I had erred, more grievously than before perhaps, because I felt in truth no revulsion and no shame. I saw again the vision from the pool, Jacob in the road with his hair blowing and his hand stretched out in greeting. ‘You left me in spring,’ I said to his smiling face, ‘and now it’s gone high summer and the green leaves are not salad-pale any longer but coarser, darker, from being in the wind and rain. There will be scars, dearest Jacob, when we meet again; we must be careful how we touch them.’

  22

  We left while the town was still mostly asleep, or eating its breakfast. Neither of us mentioned what had passed in the night. He knew I was no boy; that was clear enough, but though I wrestled back and forth with how to broach it I couldn’t bring myself to speak. He was surly, sore-headed, but had made no move to expose me before Smallbone or, after we had turned north, to separate.

  The good weather of the last few days had broken and a steady rain was falling; if it lasted the farmers would be anxious for the harvest, for the grain was already tall and yellow in the fields. But I was grateful, for we could pull our hats down over our eyes and avoid one another the easier. Before noon we came to Bridgnorth with its steep-sided castle bedded into the hill; beyond it a street stretched north with such galleried houses the downpour fell like a curtain through the middle of the street and we were able to dismount and avoid it. Talbot hadn’t said a word to me for the fifteen miles from Bewdley, but now we were elbow to elbow; I on the outside, where every cart spewed up gutter water over my hose.

  ‘It amuses you,’ I said, noticing his face lighten each time I was smattered.

  ‘It does.’

  We neared a grubby-looking tavern, but the man who stepped out from the yard gates and offered to take our horses and dry them down while we ate looked decent enough.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Talbot said, as I handed the reins over.

  ‘We need to eat,’ I said. ‘I will buy you your dinner.’

  Talbot grabbed the man by the shoulder and snatched the reins back off him. ‘Get you gone, pizzle-nose,’ he said to him, ‘before I kick your arse.’ He turned to me. ‘You are green indeed,’ he said. ‘Anyone could see he was a prigger. He might as well have been branded. Do you think a hovel like this would have an ostler waiting at every corner?’

  The man had melted into an alley and my indignation with him. ‘Juno,’ I said to the mare, ‘I apologise.’ I turned to Talbot. ‘Thank you.’ I said. ‘Forgive me. Can we not be friends?’

  He spat at the ground. ‘You’re a skinny wretch and you make a better Jabez than a Jane,’ he said, but his tone had lost its edge. ‘Have it as you will. Your harlot purse is less delightful than your gold.’

  It was slow-going, but at least we were no longer at odds. The road curved round old woodland and through cornfields stained with rain. At last the pelting stopped an
d the cloud rolled back; we were rounding the Wrekin. It loomed above us, triangular as the talisman Talbot wore about his neck and tangled with woods and ominous. Talbot told me it was dumped by a Welsh giant intent on drowning all the men, women and children of Shrewsbury by dropping his spade of earth in the river. It was a long road and the giant grew tired of walking; finding the town still out of sight he asked a cobbler directions. The old man was clever; he showed the giant his sack of worn-out shoes. Shrewsbury was such a distance, he said, he’d worn the leather of each pair through on the journey. The giant groaned and dropped his spadeful of dirt and went back home.

  ‘Why did he want to kill so many people?’

  Talbot shrugged, ‘He was a giant, it is what they do. Or perhaps,’ he went on, ‘looking down from his cave in the mountains the giant saw the noise and filth of man and longed to wash the earth clear and clean.’

  I thought of the people, going about their haggling in the marketplace and then noticing a shadow fall, thinking the sun only gone behind a cloud perhaps, but looking up to find earth sliding from the sky and the water already bubbling over its banks towards them, and the giant peering down at their panic and their scurrying as a boy watches an ants’ nest he has kicked. It didn’t happen, but the townspeople still look anxiously at the sky; there are always giants.

  I had never ridden so far in my life; I was so weary I thought I might faint in the saddle, but I felt how any expression of weakness would please my companion and said nothing, until I could bear it no longer. We stopped in the town of Wellington at a friendly place, more alehouse than inn; it had a room above the buttery with two soft beds and a thick stew for our supper.