‘What do you think Jabez, shall I kill him? Or shall we rouse the constable, and give the ropemaker some trade?’
I was bent over, my heart battered at my ribs so that I could hardly breathe and behind my eyes all was lights and squealing as though the starlings were swirling in my head. When I was myself again I saw Talbot had put the blade away and the youth was on the ground groaning, reaching out to grasp the knife, my knife, that lay dull as a stone on the road where it had fallen. Talbot waited for his fingers to stretch round it, before he stamped on the hand, picked up the knife and handed it to me.
‘What is your name?’ I said with the knife in my hand.
‘William,’ he said, snivelling.
In my head I saw again the body of the boy I had buried and whose shirt I was wearing now, the lockram stiff with sweat. ‘Leave him,’ I said to Talbot. ‘I am none the poorer and I know the shadow of a noose too well to wish it on another.’
Talbot looked at me and nodded, then he kicked the man hard and took my arm to walk back.
‘That was cruel, surely, to kick a man who lay grovelling at your feet.’
Talbot clapped me on the back. ‘For a thief and a juggler you are an unsalted fresh fool. Did you want him to come sneaking behind us with a sharp greeting for your gentle heart?’
He sounded happy. Blood excites you, I thought. Once again, I wondered if this was what it was to be a man, but then I checked myself – tonight, at least, I should be glad of it. If Talbot were less of a wolf I would be lying in a ditch.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I should give you something in return. My true name, it’s not Jabez, it’s—’
‘—Don’t tell me your name,’ he said.
In the morning when we came to depart, our horses had not been got ready. Talbot raised his brows at me when our landlord bustled through to apologise that the stablehand was gone.
‘He’s my sister’s boy. I don’t understand it. He fell in with a bad sort a year or so ago, but all that’s behind him, not missed a day’s work in six months and her that happy that he’s keeping to the stony path.’
I was glad. I did not like to think of his oafish hands on the mares.
24
It was a bare ten miles to Northwich. Talbot was eager to get there; he had decided to scry in the market for money. The dirt of the road weighed on him, he said, and his spirit called on him to use his sight; besides, he wanted gold. I thought he was merely bored, and told him so, but after he had come to my aid so well I felt I should not cavil overmuch. If he chose to sell his gifts like a common lot-teller then so be it.
Three miles after Bunbury we entered Delamere forest. To our right was flat heathland, but to our left the land was wooded and hilly. We were told that the place was rich with fallow and red deer but we saw none, till at the skirt of a wood, two bow shots away, five or six red hinds appeared with a great horned stag among them. It was a beautiful creature, its antlers reaching out and up as though in celebration. It made me think of old Robin Hood the outlaw, living freely under the oak boughs, but Talbot scoffed at me. ‘There’s not a hide, but it belongs to someone – every pike, every bream in one of these dark pools is counted and the loss to be paid for.’
‘There is no freedom, but in wealth,’ he said.
‘Is that true?’ I said, ‘Do you believe that to be true?’ We had entered a stand of trees and I looked at the sun filtering through the great elms and oak and dancing on the brook that ran across the road. We dismounted to let the horses drink.
‘There is freedom in all this,’ I said. ‘Look at the light, how it ripples through the leaves and bounces on stone and water. I don’t need gold to feel the joy of this.’
‘You need food in your belly,’ Talbot said, ‘and no dog at your heels. But you are right, in part. The history of the world is a falling off from light. This world of rocks and trees and beasts was created when light splintered into pieces. It shattered as a crystal does, into infinite intricate forms so that everything in the universe has order and harmony in relation to everything else. Do you understand?’
I shook my head.
‘Think of it like this,’ he went on, ‘have you ever looked at a dandelion and noticed the arrangement of the petals, ring upon ring, or seen the lacework of a flake of snow? There is a pattern in creation and it is the pattern in the mind of God. That is what I search for in the stone. The language of God, that when it is mastered will restore base metal to gold and the human soul to godhead.’
He was staring at me intensely, with a fire in his eyes that excited and appalled me. ‘Do you understand?’ he said again.
‘You wish to rival God,’ I said. ‘I do not think it can be right to poke into the mind of the Creator and seek to change what He has made.’
‘Matter and men’s souls are never at rest, Jabez; we are so far corrupted that the last days are at hand. I seek to understand the architecture of creation, its arithmetic – do you see? To step into the harmony and number of creation and so shed sin. The greatest mind in our land has said this: “And in our soul number beareth such a sway, and hath such an affinity therewith that some ancients hold man’s soul to be a number moving itself.”’
I turned to Juno’s quiet dipping and drinking in the stream. The architecture of creation, it was a beautiful phrase. I thought of the high pillars of the church in Bunbury, how they made an airy lightness out of stone. Sometimes when Talbot talked I felt myself on the edge of revelation, if only I would let go a little more and follow. But something held me back. There was such a strange opposition in Talbot, with his brawling, his bull neck and yet his power to weave pictures on water out of light itself. He was a belligerent, greedy man, but he saw things others could not see.
‘So is it real or spiritual gold you seek?’ I said at length, ‘I don’t think you can be after both.’
He had been stooping to look directly at me, on a level with my eyes. Now he stood and swore. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘How could you hope to understand? Listen. Do you believe in spirits?’
How could I not, having seen them? ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘There is the world of spirit and the world of flesh. And although we are forever dying, the spirit which animates us, that does not die.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’
‘So it is with gold; it is both the massy element and the spirit of purity.’
‘They are at odds,’ I said, climbing back on Juno to prevent his response.
How I have changed, I thought, discussing alchemy in a strange forest with a cutpurse philosopher and not only that, but venturing to disagree. Was it the doublet and hose that let me face the world instead of sitting askance like a lady? It wasn’t only that, I thought. It was partly Talbot, too. He cared so little for the customs of the world.
A little further on the trees thinned and we started a skylark from the grass. Up and up it spiralled, as though threading a necklace of the sky; each note a blue bead. I watched it till it was no more than a speck of dust in heaven; yet such a quantity of song – bright plaits of it.
Talbot paused, following my gaze. ‘See?’ he said, ‘how it makes its melodies of air? The whole world is a lyre, if we could but listen. All separate things within it are strung in order and harmony. If the lark can play it, why shouldn’t I learn the fingering?’
I smiled. I liked the image – rocks and trees and humanity itself rippling with song. Far better, I thought, that creation be made of music than of minted gold. My soul vibrated with the tiny bird’s roundels. We watched until she dropped herself down and down into the heath. There, hidden by the furze, in a leaf-lined hollow, lay her nest. The thought of it gave me a foolish pang; good luck little mother, I thought. I hope you fare better than I.
A couple of miles before Northwich, Talbot’s mare Erebus cast a shoe and we thought it best to walk, despite Talbot’s wish to hurry. The road was busy and I found myself next to a woman with a basket strapped to her back and a baby tied in fron
t that wailed piteously. Her husband fared no better, clanking with pots and tools and a scrawny boy on his shoulders. Ignoring Talbot’s hissed objections, I put the boy on Erebus and the woman and her infant on Juno. When I gave them bread her blessings and thankings made me uncomfortable.
‘I’m no gentle sir, madam,’ I said. ‘I’ve been as poor as you, albeit without the babes to feed. My master here is a scryer, he is bound for the market to cast visions.’
She gave him a nervous glance but soon fell talking to me, over the cries of the infant. Her name was Ann and they had grown up on a manor near Tarvin to the east, but over years the commons and the wastes were shrunk and hedged till there was nowhere to graze their cows and then no cows to milk. ‘Been making cheese in my family since Noah went to sea,’ she said, in a voice that sounded surprised at her own story. ‘Whole village came together to make it and sell it, had always been so, sent it off to Chester. Now there’s only the master’s cows and the master’s cheese; barely a soul left in Aldersey where my mother was born and raised.’
I glanced at Talbot. ‘Your gold at work in all its purity,’ I said to pique him.
‘Aye,’ the husband said, as though I had spoken to him. ‘It’s gold right enough; rich men hold it in the hand and watch it breed. The master’s house grows faster than a molehill in the night and he dresses his daughters in satin. There’s nothing left of my father’s house, not the old elm tree that whispered me asleep in summer and creaked like the moon was splitting in a storm, not the shippen where we kept the cows. A man can’t wander as he would, or catch a fish for his dinner, but he’s hedged and hemmed about till he feels he must trip on his own thoughts. And they call it bettering and improvement.’
While he talked I looked more closely at the baby. Any fool could see that it was sick. ‘What ails the child?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Ann, beginning to weep, ‘her guts – this last week she has had such a gurry on her, I am afraid she won’t last.’
‘Have you tried fennel?’
‘Some, but there is none to be found.’
‘Wait,’ I said, stopping Juno and searching through my pack, ‘I have some and more, that might help her.’
Talbot came up behind me. ‘Will you start doctoring every child that has the skitters on the road? God’s truth Jabez, we will never advance an inch. I will lose the market.’
I frowned at him for an answer and searched out my bag of simples. ‘Here’s more,’ I said, ‘and chamomile and bloodroot – that will help her most.’
Taking them she began to weep in earnest. ‘We’ve nothing to give you,’ she said.
‘That’s of no consequence.’ I said. ‘What will you do?’
‘I’ve a cousin at Northwich in the salt trade,’ the man answered. ‘We can bide with him a while and get work, God willing. They need no end of hands, my cousin says.’
They stopped to see to the child and as Talbot was keen to press on we mounted, but Ann called me back.
‘You might tell your friend,’ she said, ‘to go careful and avoid the market. The sheriff and the aldermen are godly men and won’t have players in the town, I doubt they’d suffer a sorcerer.
They looked a piteous sight when I looked back to them to wave. I should have given them money. If Hope was barred to us we should be like them; houseless, hungry, hoping for whatever work we could find. Perhaps, I thought bitterly, it was as well that I had miscarried; better that than watching the child starve. I had thought so much of finding him and not at all of how we would live, then. It was so easy to become like chaff, winnowed out, cast aside. But we were young, we would find positions. Perhaps even here, in the saltworks; there was plenty of work the man said.
25
We smelt Northwich before we saw it: woodsmoke and brine and the middens left by the fires. It sat bitter on your tongue and in your lungs. For all that, the town beyond the brineworks was pleasant and prosperous looking. Talbot took his horse to be shod and I wandered for an hour down to the river Dane and the saltworks.
Off Seath street a great brine pit fed the wich-houses. Channels led to vast barrels in each house and these were used to fill half a dozen pans in which the salt water was set seething by the fires beneath. I stood in the swirling exhalations and felt the sweat run down my face. A shrivelled old woman showed me how she and the other wallers leaned through the vapours to scoop up the salt and set it in wicker baskets to drain. ‘Our backs are planks of pain,’ she said, ‘from the stooping.’ Each breath scorched; when I coughed I feared I should never have the strength to breathe again; the walls and the bodies ran slick and wet; the salt stung my eyes and raked my skin. Only the drying crumbs in the barrows gleamed white and sinless, belying the foul fumes that begot them. ‘These are the last days,’ Talbot had said; maybe he was right. This was as far from the golden threaded music of the lark as Satan’s burning caves from heaven. All about me curses, limbs marked by burning, red-rimmed eyes. They must have no fear of hell, I thought, for this place is hell already. The beldam accompanied me out and when I gave her a silver penny she cackled through all her yellow teeth and bobbed me a curtsey as though I were a lord.
‘My lad Thomas had a look of you, till the mustering men took him,’ she said. ‘Years now. He en’t coming home, though please God he’s living. It’s no good for a woman on her own.’ Then she brightened. ‘Plenty o’ work here for a lusty boy like you.’
I nodded, though the likeness in our stories made me shudder. Here was work indeed, but the thought of Jacob taken from the good fresh air to tend a fire pit was more than I could bear to think of. I wished I had not come.
Talbot, when I found him, was in as much a hurry as I was to be gone. ‘Your charity was to some effect, Jabez. I don’t know if you stopped the child voiding, but I think you may have saved me a whipping.’
That night we lodged in Manchester, a busy town with a single parish church rebuilt only half a hundred years ago. I went to bed, but Talbot was restless and declared he was going out to find a jade who would let him read the fortune reflected in her eyes – and if he could not, to play dice.
At some point in the evening I opened my eyes to find him on his knees by the bed feeling at my clothes for money. When he saw me staring he grinned at me and held up a ring.
‘Put that back,’ I said, ‘it isn’t yours to take.’
‘It’s a pretty thing, don’t you think?’ he said, turning it in the light of the candle. ‘Did you pull it from a dead woman’s hand, or was she alive to watch you?’
Deep into the night I heard him fumble at the door and stagger in. He lurched into the bed cup-shotten and stinking. ‘Jabez’ he said, clumsily grasping my backside, ‘let me use you like a boy; it would not be adultery; you’ve such a pretty arse.’
I spread a blanket on the floor and slept there.
The next day was a Sunday. I would have gone on, after the service, but the horses needed rest and Talbot was seized with holiness. I was woken by his loud repentance.
‘You should ask forgiveness of me, first,’ I ventured. Piety gripped him like a pair of tongs. He glowered at me but did not stop. It appeared I was a portion of his sin.
‘I had never heard how ale could bring a man to holiness,’ I said, as we walked to church. ‘If only the rain were beer we should all be saved.’
He glared again. ‘Don’t you fear damnation?’ he said.
I opened my mouth to say I feared truly, when it struck me I did not. Once upon a time I had flung myself into water to cleanse the world of my wickedness. It seemed so long ago. If God loved me, as the scriptures told me He did, I could not think that He would hurt me. Hadn’t He, even then, sent Jacob to pull me from a slimy death into his warm arms? ‘Care not then for the morrow,’ the gospel said, ‘for the morrow shall care for itself.’
In the sermon the minister suited himself to Talbot’s temper; he was all about judgement. ‘“And whosoever,”’ he declaimed, ‘“was not found written in the book of life, was
cast into the lake of fire.”’
I could not listen; in my mind I heard the skylark playing on the lyre of creation. The verses in my head were flowers: ‘Consider the lilies of the field,’ the gospel said. Yes, I thought, I will.
At supper in the small dark parlour of the inn Talbot’s mood lifted, although he was still as sour as bad ale. It was a warm night, but he shivered and said he was cold. I fetched a blanket for his shoulders and gave over hating him.
‘Do you truly believe we are in the last age, as the minister said?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do. The signs are apparent. Even in whatever dunghill you have crawled from you will have seen them. The comet that blazed last winter.’
‘I saw it. It was like a chariot, like the story of Phaeton careering through the sky because he could not manage the horses of the sun.’
‘Why, how you gobble Ovid. I am not talking about pagan stories, Apollo’s bastard son, but this world, now. There was the comet, that was a sign. Five years before that there was the star.’
‘The star.’
‘Yes, dammit, a star in winter, a new star, the first since the birth of our Lord. I tell you I felt it tug me. I gave over grinding leaves like a common drugger and set out for Oxford. It is the stars that rule us Jabez.’
‘I pray to God, not to the stars.’
‘You wouldn’t understand. How could you? You are like a snail thinking it can understand a castle because it carries a house upon its back. Know this. There is a divine order, that falls from the Creator, through the angels and the stars, even to the stones beneath your feet. Each has its place and influence.’
‘Strings of the lyre,’ I said, ‘I understand. The note sounded by a star vibrates through us.’
‘Yes!’ he said, his eyes flaming, ‘I am called to step through worlds; to talk with daemons and angels; to learn the notes of our first Maker, the pattern of Creation.’ He leaned across the table and seized my wrist. ‘In the days of destruction I will be one of the golden makers of Jerusalem.’
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