The Good Wife

by Eleanor Porter

  ‘You are a Talbot,’ the landlady said, brightening as she set down his beer, ‘you are of the family at Albrighton?’

  ‘Distantly,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well no matter how distant, it’s an honour to have you sir,’ she said. ‘You call if there’s anything I can get you.’

  ‘The Kelley branch, is it?’ I said when she had gone.

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Jabez-Jane.’

  ‘Did you know already, before last night?’

  ‘Of course. I had to shut the door to your landlady, or the whole house would have heard your raving. You make a good youth, I’ll give you that. I should call you Iphis – look him up in that book of yours.’ He leaned forward over the rough table and took my chin between his fingers. ‘A little androgyne. A royal child.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I am a student of alchemy, I search for the philosopher’s stone.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. I’ve heard the devil keeps it in his pocket.’

  He ignored me, ‘In the union of sun and moon, mercury and sulphur a child shall ensue who is an androgyne, a new creation, neither male nor female. How do you like your doublet and hose?’

  ‘I like it very well. I can sit astride Juno; the doors of the world are open to me and I may stride through and say, “where is my seat?” Only …’

  ‘Only?’

  ‘I am my husband’s wife. I am afraid I will forget how to walk in skirts.’

  ‘But not how to lie on your back. I don’t think you will forget that, Jabez-Jane.’

  I said nothing, but applied myself to the stew. It seemed impossible to me, now, that I could have imagined welcoming his touch, even for a moment. I was no androgyne, I was the cold inconstant moon and bright, golden-curled Jacob was the sun.

  Talbot was talking again, half to himself, ‘Sometimes in visions I see spirits; there is a hawk flies out of the sun; as he swoops he becomes a man, bright as Hermes, and then, when his bare feet touch the soil, he becomes a girl, beckoning me after. All is flux and change. Separateness is corruption; if I am to bend matter to my will I must learn how to undo identities. When I saw what you were I knew it was a sign.’

  ‘A sign of what?’

  ‘A sign that I should take you with me.’

  Before I could think how to answer I noticed how his intensity, or our newness, was drawing attention. ‘A drink for our friends here,’ I said to the landlady, gesturing at the three men who’d been weighing us up from the next table, muttering to each other in Welsh. They could have been shouting and it would have been all the same to me, but the beer worked, for they grinned and stepped over to us to raise the Queen’s health and our own.

  As he banged his cup with theirs Talbot shrugged off philosophy for mirth; he called for more ale and, with a sly glance at me, led the talk towards ever greater lewdness, till it reeked like a sow’s midden. The landlady brought jugs and frowned.

  ‘Your Wrekin,’ I said lamely, to bring some air, ‘it’s a fine hill. We were told the story of the giant.’

  ‘Ah yes, a fine clot-brained countryman of yours,’ Talbot said, ‘I believe it; the hill is shaped like a shovel of dirt.’

  ‘That’s a poxy tale,’ one of the men growled. His fellow said something to him in Welsh. I’m a fool, I thought; now we have offended them. I should have left them all to their boasts of cunnies and water-gates and quims. I spread my hands to pacify but there was a gleam in Talbot’s eye. In a moment, I thought, he will blurt some spittle that will end in a bloodied nose. And us with fine featherbeds I’ve paid for.

  ‘There’s another version of the tale we prefer here,’ the landlady said, coming between the men and offsetting their squaring up with her plump round body. ‘Though I daresay it’s less pretty, even, than the other. There were two giants making the Wrekin, but they fell to arguing, and then to fighting as men like to do. One took a swing at the other with his spade but his fellow ducked it and sent a raven to peck out his eyes. Bound and blinded he got stuffed under Ercall.’

  ‘That’s right,’ one of the men said, wiping his beer-frothed mouth with the back of his hand, ‘they say you can hear him weeping November nights, when the wind is high enough.’

  ‘Aye, if you’ve had enough ale,’ she said. By the time we retired we were all easy and friends again.

  It was as yielding a bed as I had ever lain on; I listened to Talbot turn fitfully in his sleep. Before we snuffed the candle I had challenged him over the way he had goaded the men, but he’d simply shrugged. It seemed to me he had a fascination, a thirst even, for disaster; he could not let things be. He was after the unravelling of things and perhaps that was a search to comprehend and seize hold of essences as he said, but I did not think that’s all it was. I remembered once coming along the lane in Hope on a high hot day, Jacob beside me, when we saw an adder curled on the warm stone near our feet, a puddle of coiled gold and black pinking. We stopped a moment to watch, as still as the snake; and the air, and the lane and the sunlight held its breath. Then Jack Robbins came up behind us and, seizing a stick, poked at the creature to pick it up; it slid into the grass. There was a smear of blood on the stone where Jack had wounded it. Talbot sought to understand creation and to be master of it, too.

  It was not the giant, but Talbot’s talk of androgynes that filtered into my dreams. I was a housewife once again, in my woman’s clothes, and yet I was a man, I had always been a man and nobody knew, not even Jacob, for didn’t I wear a petticoat? Every night I put off his caresses so that he could not know me, what I was. Then I was on the heath again, where I had seen him in the pool, there were butterflies all around me – coppers, and gatekeepers and marbled whites. The trees beside the water crawled with caterpillars, their branches dripped with chrysalids that shone like leaves of gold. ‘See,’ Talbot said, putting out his hand for me to alight on, ‘you are newborn, a painted lady and a male.’

  I woke after a while and could not sleep again and so I sat at a chair and lit a candle. It was not yet dawn; through the shutters the rain had given way to a thick mist. I opened my book and read the story of Iphis, whose sweetheart believes her to be the boy she pretends to be. Oh poor Iphis, I thought, as I read how she fears she will fail her darling on their wedding night: ‘amid the water’ she says ‘we shall thirst.’ Talbot is wrong, I thought, he wants the sexless world of souls, but Iphis and I, in our breeches and out of them, long for our lover’s arms. Our bodies burn and we cannot put out the fires they begin, no matter how they started. I blew out the candle and waited for morning to put aside such idle thinking.

  If Jacob was indeed alive, I thought, it might only be a week until I found him. How would we explain ourselves, what would we say? I opened the shutter a crack to see how the dawn went on, but there was only the paling mist; across the road a great linden tree loomed, like a giant crouching.

  23

  When the mist burned off the day proved fine, but the horses were weary and I so sore it was a relief to walk. Talbot, by contrast, was spry and eager, despite the quantities of beer he had drunk. He fair skipped about the horses as I trudged. That night we slept in a wood by a fresh brook. The next day we rode again, through pasture and marsh, past a fancy new palace a pedlar told us was Corbet Castle and so on to a flat heath called Prees where the butterflies were near as thick as in my dream. We bought bread and cheese from a farmer’s wife and sat among the grasses with the horses cropping contentedly beside us, the sound of their munching regular as a shearer’s stroke.

  Round my head red fescue and sweet vernal grass, silky bent and wavy hairgrass, spiked or drooped in the windless air. This is the world of the harvest mouse, I thought, lying back and looking through the forest of stems; the common is all England to her. Distance was only a question of perspective; every day I was drawing closer to him.

  Talbot interrupted me. ‘We know why you are travelling,’ he said, lying on his back a few feet away, ‘– you come to pluck your beloved from the warm thighs o
f a northern whore – but you have not once asked me my motive. Do you think I am drawn by your charms Jabez-Jane? I hope not, you are miserly enough with them.’

  I rolled onto my stomach and watched the slow progress of a beetle. Go to, I thought, with your bully words, you are not so brave, you forget how you wept on my shoulder in the night – but I said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘your interest is so keen it pierces. You know I was at Gloucester Hall, at the University…’

  I know you say you were, I thought, but I wouldn’t vouch you wore a gown and not an apron. I nodded.

  ‘I met a great many people there, men who shared my desire to know the secrets of things. I studied the work of Plato, Plotinus, Agrippa, Hermes Trismegistus – but these names mean nothing to you…’

  ‘You have called me a clotpoll and a peasant. I know no Latin, what could they mean to me? I have heard the name of Plato, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes, you are thick with clay and a girl to boot and one as flat-planed as a plank, which is to say hardly one at all. Why do you interrupt me so? At Oxford I impressed many – important men too – with my ability to draw aside the curtain of matter. I received many requests to scry, including one from a great lady, Elizabeth Stanley of Hornby Castle. Finding myself at liberty I decided to travel north to take up her gracious invitation.’

  I sat up, the common stretched away before me; beyond it lay Whitchurch, Cheshire and the north. The road was strewn with labourers, some with a scythe over their shoulder like a stem of hanging sedge. Already the hay was piling in the fields. It would very soon be harvest. Was Meg picking my peas, I wondered, were the beans come yet? Did Sally hold Meg’s hand and glance together at the road for me as I had done for Jacob? Did they lift the latch sometimes of a morning to check I was not come home, with a fire burning and a pot bubbling? I dabbed at my eyes; these were shallow, watery thoughts; I had made choices. If I had stayed there would be lace at my neck as heavy as an iron collar, Boult’s harlot, his common woman, decked in gaudy, scorned. The other thought, I tried to swallow down, I did not want to think it, did not want to touch my flat empty belly, but my hand betrayed me.

  Talbot was looking at me carefully. ‘Why, what is wrong with you? You are a boy remember. Is it your ignorance, is it that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘only that. I am a country mouse. It will be an honour to meet your great lady, if you’ll take me.’

  ‘You can clerk for me, if your hand is good enough.’

  I nodded and he seemed satisfied with that.

  I had never had a great deal to do with horses, except in the ordinary way of things, but I began to understand, with Juno, how it was that Jacob loved them. Talbot’s horse, Erebus, was a piebald, dark and light like her coat – and her master – but Juno was sweet and strong as honey. I held Jacob in my mind’s eye and stepped into his image to hold up each hoof to check for stones; I spread my hand in his hand over back and belly to feel for swelling or rubbing. When we stopped I gathered mint and rosehips and meadowsweet to put in their feed at night. Juno liked the mint especially, pressing her nose into my arms as I carried it in.

  It was easy, sandy country north of Whitchurch. We passed the pale of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Blackmere, named for its dark pool. There was a greater mere a little further on at Ridley that a carter told us was so thick with pike, bream, tench and perch a fisherman could catch a meal in his cap for breakfast. At Bunbury there was a tavern that took guests. It called itself an inn, and had garish painted cloths on the walls; Talbot spat when he saw our room, and inspected the beds for fleas before he flung himself down.

  I went down to the stables. The stablehand was a big, rough lad with hair that looked like bedding straw. He watched me as I went to talk to Juno and I didn’t like the way his eyes roved over me, but he said nothing, and nor did I.

  Erebus had a swelling and a graze on her foreleg. I challenged the boy that he hadn’t noted it, but he simply shrugged. ‘En’t nothing to fuss on,’ he said and wandered off.

  It did not take long for me to find comfrey and yarrow for a poultice. Juno could carry the bags tomorrow, I thought, my own weighed nothing. I became aware of a presence behind me as I applied the paste to the muslin; a man uncomfortably close and silent. I paused; Jacob’s knife was tucked into my belt, but I doubted I would be quick enough to use it well.

  ‘No, don’t stop. Go on.’ I sighed with relief; it was Talbot. ‘I’ve been watching you Jabez-Jane. I was curious. “Doesn’t the fool know I was an apothecary?” I said to myself. “Why didn’t she ask me?” But then I saw how quick and sure your fingers were. You are a healer, I think, and not a common one. Perhaps you are a witch.’

  I turned to him, too abruptly, startling the poor horse. Had my colour risen? It would not escape him; Talbot noted everything. ‘My grandmother knew herbs, she taught me a little of what she knew.’

  Talbot raised his brows. ‘So. You are more wrapped round and pasted than my horse. I think there must be a deep wound still healing. Did your grandmother tend your shackle wounds with comfrey too?’

  ‘She was dead by then, praise God,’ I said, remembering how night after night in the warm gloom of our cottage in Hope Jacob took strips of petticoat and spread them with the cool herb paste to swathe my swollen ankles. ‘Is there not treacle in Gilead,’ I would whisper, kissing his head as he worked. ‘Is there no physician? Would God that I had a cottage somewhere far from folk.’ ‘You have treacle, sweeting, you have a physician, you have a cottage far from folk,’ he answered me and the pain of his gentle fingers on my wounded shins was a keen, keen joy. Did we blaspheme, I wondered, taking the Bible so, is that why we are punished now? I did not believe it. Our Lord was not some mincing fop to be so easily offended.

  After supper Talbot and I attended evensong in the village’s ancient church. It was large enough to seat two hundred, although there were only thirty; all along the nave the pillars seemed as fine as threads, spinning arches up to heaven. It was hard to believe there could be narrowness of thought in such a place but I found it too grand for prayer. Talbot lingered; it was a relief to leave him. I wanted to breathe my own air and rid my head of his voice for a while, so I left him kneeling and wandered on to find a mere a half mile distant where, I’d been told, clouds of starlings swooped down at night. It was a large pool, fringed with reeds, that were echoed now in the water by the sinking sun. There was nobody about – the haymakers had gone home and beyond the rows of heaped hay there were only lowing cows. In the distance a shelf of hill stretched in sunlight and shadow across the horizon.

  There were the starlings, gathering and scattering over the sweep of the pastureland. I had never seen so many. They were a great cloak folding in and blowing out again; a black wind rising; the whirlwind of God rolling the dry chaff off the mountain. I flung my heart out with them; over and back they turned, as loud as a working mill, roaring and squeaking too as they came nearer. You could think them a spectre, I thought, a black spirit advancing over the worked land, except that they thrilled with life. If anything was holy it was this, this free flight together. Jacob would smile and take my hand; he understood, he had a feel for the poetry of living things; I could almost believe he stood beside me as I watched. The mere waited; a grey iron plate in the twilight. At last the birds turned as one towards it and blew into the reed beds like tossed autumn leaves.

  Dusk was thickening as I turned from the water back to the village, slyly felting the edges of things. Just before the village I heard a twig snap and glanced back, expecting to see Talbot’s thickset shape, but it wasn’t him. In the gloom I made out two slight figures. Boys, I thought, my hand moving to my knife. This was too small a place for mischief, surely. I quickened my step a little, aware that would only make my limp the more pronounced. Then a youth stepped out in front of me. My head came only to his shoulder.

  He grinned. ‘I like your doublet,’ he said. ‘You may step aside and give it to me.’

  I began to pull out
my knife, but in an instant he had my wrist. A hand reached from behind me and clapped my mouth, dragging my head back.

  ‘He’s a fancy type,’ the hand’s voice said, ‘I’ll swear he’s got gold in his drawers.’

  ‘Plugged up his arse more like.’ I recognised the voice. The stablehand.

  They began to drag me towards a hole of darkness at the side of the road. Oh God, I thought, they will beat me and strip me and then, oh God, I saw again the man on the common, the concentration on his face as he pulled at my wedding ring. I was at the lip of the road. The darkness was an absence, perhaps a well, perhaps the pit of hell; I could not breathe. Then loud uneven footsteps sounded from the village. The hand at my mouth slipped enough for me to bite down hard enough to make the youth scream.

  ‘What’s this, what’s this, friends?’ Talbot’s voice sounded amused.

  ‘En’t nothing, stranger,’ my attacker said over his shoulder. ‘Local business, you’d best be getting back.’

  Talbot had no light, he seemed patched out of darkness. Please be clever, I thought, or they will kill me. I could feel the boys tense. The one holding me flicked my wrist back hard and took my knife from my hand. Oh dear God they will kill us both, I thought, for they are three to two and I am less than one.

  It all happened very quickly. The boy had the knife and then he didn’t; he began to turn and then his head was wrenched back and Talbot had a blade held to his neck. The other two grabbed me.

  ‘You have a choice,’ Talbot said over my head to the boys holding me. ‘Release my man and disappear into the dark. I’ll let you all be, even this one,’ he prodded at the neck of the one he held with the point of the knife. ‘Or make trouble and listen to the sigh of a cut throat.’

  For one still second they hesitated, then they pushed me to the side and ran off.

  Talbot still held his blade to the first youth’s throat.