The Good Wife

by Eleanor Porter

  Was he brilliant or mad? I was not sure then and am not now; there was a dazzle in his thinking, but it was threaded through with wildness and perhaps that drew me just as much; the license he offered to defiance. I felt that if I scoffed, now, he might well overturn the table, kick the plate and punch the boy who hovered at the door. He strained towards godhead with both fists clenched.

  ‘So,’ I said carefully, putting my other hand over his, ‘being called so, chosen so, why are you not glad?’

  He threw his head back and laughed, too loudly. The other diners, a milliner and his family, stared a moment; then the goodwife pulled her children’s faces back to their dinners. Her pains were wasted, for in the next instant Talbot let out a great groan. The father coughed in disapproval; the dish boy jumped.

  ‘I am wrenched apart.’ Talbot cried, heedless of the attention he garnered. ‘I am a door; an angel and a devil stand either side to throw me wide open to their visions. And sometimes they take one another’s clothes and sometimes the visions, the visions blaze across my mind’s eye so that the stench of my own seared flesh chokes me.’

  The children stared with open mouths; the parents, crossing themselves, began to bustle them out.

  ‘Please,’ I whispered to Talbot, ‘calm yourself, or you will have us clapped in irons.’ I turned to the family, ‘Forgive my master,’ I said. ‘He is not well.’

  The woman lingered after the rest; with the stout authority of a merchant’s wife, she stepped forward and prodded at my chest. ‘He’s not fit to be abroad.’

  ‘Not fit!’ Talbot seemed to wake from his trance. ‘Not fit, madam,’ he said quietly, with a nasty levity, ‘the day is coming when Beelzebub will spit you, arse to snout and turn you on his fire and your children will smell the fat and their little mouths will water.’

  ‘Enough!’ I said, bundling Talbot from the room while she stood stock-still before him, slack-jawed as though waiting for the roasting rod indeed.

  Our dishes lay barely touched on the table.

  In the room Talbot flung himself down on the bed laughing, but I shook him by the shoulder.

  ‘Will you have us arrested? Arraigned as heretics? Have you no sense at all? You forget I know what it’s like to sit on a cart with a crowd jeering at me, with their fists twitching to fasten the rope. Do you want to suffer, is that it? Do you think it will redeem you? You can damn yourself but you won’t damn me. Tomorrow I’ll go on alone.’

  I expected him to blaze at me, perhaps to hit me. I was so angry that I think I did not care, but he said nothing. When I’d done haranguing he cupped my chin.

  ‘I’m sorry little Jabez. I burn things, I burn those I love. Myself most of all. Those people are nothing. See – I blow them away,’ and he blew over his hand. ‘Don’t leave me yet.’

  I was pacified, but I was still uneasy. All night I lay half awake, listening for any disturbance in the road, any warning footfall on the stairs. Talbot muttered and snorted beside me. I doubted she would let it pass; what would befall me if we were taken, my doublet and hose plucked over my head, my treasure discovered? We should have left at once. At some point in the night I went to the window to open the casement wide to the air. I was growing used to the sounds of a town at night; the rustle of a rat, a horse moving in its stall, the odd moon lurker or drunk – and later the subdued voices of those who rose before dawn to work. Above the houses opposite the stars were clear. I sought out Cassiopeia, where the new star had sat.

  ‘Come, look,’ Jacob had said one night in December, taking me outside. I had thought he meant me to notice the rime of frost that fringed each reed of thatch, and lay like down on the still branches, but he pointed up to the heavens.

  ‘I heard them talking of it at the Court,’ he said, ‘a new star, there, do you see? It is the first, they say, since the star at Bethlehem.’

  Later, curled together in the close darkness, I asked him if he feared the Judgement Day. ‘No,’ he said, ‘or only as other men do. My heart is not angry as it once was. I have my wife in my arms, and a good master and, God willing, soon a child – or two, or three – to fill the house with laughter.’ I nestled in the dark and smiled, because it was barely a year since we had settled and I did not dread my courses as I soon would, but I was not altogether easy, even so, and when I roused him with long kisses and drew him into me it was partly for his sure weight along my body to steady my disquiet. Then I felt him pulse within me and the rush of joy came for us both; the shadow unhooked itself a while and I was free. Oh Jacob, I thought now, I need the circle of your arms; how else will I avoid hurling off into the shrieking winds? And the thought came back to me that this was not so true as it once was. I could not step back into the shape I was, and perhaps he too would have changed. That though I loved him just as fiercely I was not so afraid as I used to be.

  I turned from the casement and looked back into the room, where a candle stub flicked monsters on the walls and the wrong man grunted in his sleep. I was merely painting my mind with doubts. When I found him, all would be simple once again.

  Before sunrise I took our bags to the stables. The ostler was asleep in the straw, but a half-groat had him up and cheery too. Waking Talbot was more difficult. We were so near my journey’s end now I had half a mind to disregard my promise and leave him to whatever his insolence brought on, but only half, and a lesser half at that. While he dressed I crept downstairs and into the kitchen for bread. How I blessed my hose and breeches – pilfering was never so easy in a skirt! When I reached our room my ostler was there.

  ‘You’d best go by the other stairs,’ he said, grinning. ‘There’s folks asking for you in the hall and one o’ them’s a constable.’

  If I had not been a boy I should have seized his dirty face and kissed him. I shook his hand and we followed him by the backstairs and a laundry door into the yard, where the horses stood waiting. Before we left I pressed another penny in his hand.

  ‘I like you,’ he called after me as we ducked onto the cobbles, ‘come back soon and marry my sister.’

  26

  The day began overcast and grew worse; a soft rain set in that whispered its way through all our clothes and dripped gently but remorselessly from our hats. Talbot had forgotten his affection of the night before; he complained of a headache, then cursed me for losing him his breakfast. I let Juno fall back, to be out of sight of his face.

  Much of the land either side had been enclosed for pasture and arable long since, but there were also wide wastes and mosses where the grass was broken by black scuffed patches that I was told would rarely bear a man’s, let alone a horse’s weight, but would suck you slowly down. The more you struggled the faster you’d be swallowed. Even the green heath had a brown bleakness to it that struck me with its foreignness. The sharp dark smell of the peat was alien in my mouth. As we climbed the wind whipped the rain into our faces and we rode into cloud, so that only the highway before us stood out clear and stony. Each step brought me closer to the city where Jacob lay, perhaps sick, perhaps a prisoner in some lightless cell. I tried to stop the excitement bubbling in my chest and the anxiety, too, that left me troubled in the midst of hope. The vision Talbot had conjured in the pond recurred to me over and over. A stony road, like this one, and bare moor rising behind him. The wind was blowing on his face in the sunshine and he held out his arm in greeting. If he was so free why had he not come home?

  Of course the vision might lie, or it might trick. This happened again and again in my book of tales – where fortunes were given but not understood. It could have shown him months, even years hence. I might have years of wandering ahead of me, or years of waiting, a prison widow, for his release. How would I live till then? I looked ahead at the mist-cloaked road for inspiration but could see only my hands on Juno’s reins. My hands, I thought, yes. I would find somewhere I could live cheap and earn what I could as a healer and a scribe.

  Talbot called me back to the present. He had dismounted by a broken cross to talk
to two men. I could barely understand them, but it appeared we had been misled by the cloud and ventured too far east, almost to Wigan, but the road now was plain north, we couldn’t miss it, even if the fog hid our own noses. We urged the horses on to go as fast as the road allowed, which was not much, rutted and streaming as it was. My companion seemed recovered and determined to ignore my wish for solitude.

  ‘Fine fellows,’ he said. ‘They told me the story of that cross. I think we were led to it; it concerns you almost point for point. There was a gentlewoman – there I allow it differs from your story – whose husband left her for the wars. How she pined for him, how she wailed when he did not come back to her! Do you see the likeness?’

  I frowned and turned my face away.

  ‘When he did not return she married a Welsh knight, just as you will marry me, and they carried on handsomely, swiving and singing till the day her husband returned indeed. Dressed as a palmer he came to her castle and she wept, for he looked so like her dead lord and the false knight whipped her for weeping.

  ‘It is not my story at all.’

  ‘Oh but listen, it returns to you. Her lord made himself known to his peasants and the false knight fled, but he was overtaken and slain. The gentlewoman was enjoined by her confessor to walk bare-legged to this cross once every week to beg forgiveness for her smooching and slabbering. Now, you see, how it touches you?’

  ‘I do not,’ I said, ‘and if it does, what about you? You cast yourself as the false knight whose throat is cut on the road?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘no man likes horns. Could you not steal wisdom with the gold you took? You are more green than June grass, more silly than a prodded hen. What do you think your bold horse boy, your centaur will think when he learns we’ve shared a bed from Worcester? Will he nod and say, ‘Oh, no matter, she was a boy then.’

  The horror of it struck me. I recalled Jacob balling his fists at poor Simon Fosbroke, then I looked at Talbot and remembered how deftly he handled a knife; they must never meet. ‘Jacob must never know,’ I said.

  He trotted off. ‘I’ll not tell him,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘cast the thought away.’

  I tried to, but the thought of Jacob’s jealousy fretted my thoughts with presentiments as unformed and troubled as the mist that swathed the road ahead. Talbot bounced forward whistling. I urged Juno on to catch him up.

  ‘Don’t presume too much on my gentleness, Edward Talbot Kelley. I know things about you too, remember. Enough for you to leave this world by the steps and string. Why do you take such delight in provocation?’

  He grinned and looked at me closely. ‘Why Jabez, I think you could be dangerous. I like you more and more. I meant it, by the way. You will marry me, by and by.’

  I snorted and fell back. You roll your fellow man like dice, I thought, to see how we will land. One day, perhaps years hence, perhaps tomorrow, you will pledge too much in the game and be required to pay.

  The afternoon at last shrugged off the cloud to reveal a long ridge to the right of us; it hung there for miles, like a wave waiting its time to fall. It was already almost evening when at last we neared the town of Preston. I was worried about Erebus, after the swelling a few days since, but it had not worsened. We stood the mares in a flowing stream before we approached, letting the water cool their legs. Then we clattered over the five arches of the Ribble bridge and so into the town. Talbot evidently knew the place and turned into an inn yard. When it came to pay however, he had but pennies in his purse and I must needs broach a sovereign.

  In the morning Talbot announced he had business in the town; I was glad enough to stay a night for it seemed to me that if Jacob had come south he must have passed through here. I spent the morning loitering my way through alehouses and poorer lodgings but although it cost me a fistful of farthings I learned nothing of any use or note. Even as I opened my mouth to question a potboy or an innkeeper I could hear what a goosish fool I sounded and the words curdled on my tongue. How could they remember such a one, each told me, with all the folk who passed through? And as far back as April – the cuckoo had come and gone since then. I might as well have asked the swifts bedding in the house eaves, or the sparrows skipping round the stalls in the market square. I could have wept, if it would not have betrayed me. Yet for the first time on the journey there was the echo of his presence in the air. At every corner I felt – as I had in those days of expectation in the village – that I might turn and find him standing before me. The hope and the dread of it gnawed my guts.

  Talbot lingered another day, insisting I went with him to the house of a rich clothier.

  ‘What has he lost?’ I asked, as we waited by the gates for a servant who evidently wished us to know, by his slowness, how little he regarded us.

  ‘His son,’ Talbot answered, bowing extravagantly to the liveried man, when at last he let us in.

  We were shown into a parlour with fine oak panelling and polished brass sconces, which were all lit, although it was the afternoon, so that the room was suffused with a stuffy radiance. The family – the clothier, his wife, and a grown girl – were waiting for us. Beside her husband the wife looked grey and insubstantial as though without the abundance of her skirts and ruff she would fade like a cloud into the air, but the girl eyed Talbot angrily. A large mirror was placed on a low table, before a painting of a fair young man who seemed caught in the act of smiling at himself. Talbot called for the doors to be closed and then he prayed and began his incantations, sweeping his arm across the mirror. Either side of him the parents sat rapt and staring. I watched the girl.

  ‘I see a city, there is a wide river, he crosses it, he knows his way. He is going to a tavern, he has friends there—’

  ‘—Which city, which city, man?’ the clothier butted in.

  Talbot looked up, as though surprised to see the room, ‘Why, Deptford, London,’ he said. ‘You should not interrupt.’

  Shock and fury washed across the girl’s face; as Talbot bent again to the mirror she let out a small scream and fell forward, pointing. ‘There is a devil on his shoulder! I can see it, I can see it Mother. It is whispering into his ear. Oh deliver us all from evil!’

  She lay on the floor shaking and moaning. Her mother let out her own scream and jumped to her daughter’s side.

  ‘What are you sir?’ the clothier cried, seizing Talbot by the collar. ‘Dear God, what have I let into my house?’

  For a moment Talbot looked nonplussed; he glanced at me.

  ‘Quick!’ I said in as a commanding voice as I could muster. ‘An evil spirit attempts to possess her, to prevent the finding of your son. Go mistress, please,’ I said, pulling the mother’s arm, ‘bring peony and betony to expel it. Don’t wait for the maid but go – it is assailing her. Please sir,’ I said to the astonished clothier, ‘pass me the crucifix hanging behind you, it will protect her. We must pray.’

  To my surprise he at once let go of Talbot and handed it to me. Talbot recovered his wits enough to begin a loud prayer. I bent down to the girl with the cross and whispered. ‘Go to, mistress, recant or I shall reveal all, aye and suggest they search for the letters.’ It was a gamble, but the glance she shot me showed that I was right. When the mother came back with a man behind her bearing the herbs the girl allowed herself to be garlanded and girdled as though asleep and then did a fine play of waking into sense.

  Talbot could barely keep from hooting when we’d left the house. He clapped me so hard on the back I almost fell.

  ‘My little Jabez, what a rogue you make. Admit how you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Very well, perhaps I did, a little. I wonder what he ran from. Did he look happy in Deptford?’

  Talbot’s face fell. ‘No, truth be told, he looked ragged.’ He paused to face me. ‘She might be right of course, for all she was his confidante. Perhaps there was a devil on my shoulder.’

  ‘The devil would have lied. I do not think you are a good man, Talbot, but I believe you have a gift: you see truth.’
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br />   He searched my eyes and nodded. ‘Yes. This is why you must marry me.’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘I have a husband.’

  ‘An’ if you don’t? Think, Jabez-Jane, what we could do together. What I could teach you. I will be famous. I could take you to Paris, to Bohemia, to Rome. You could breakfast on hypotheses and peaches.’

  I looked in my turn for mockery in his eyes, then frowned, for he appeared to be in earnest. ‘I have a husband,’ I said more firmly, ‘and I will find him.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  He was well enough recovered from the morning’s agitation to haul me to the tavern after supper to meet other ‘friends’ he had been dealing with. One was a lawyer, about thirty, whose fancy collar belied his sombre black. He had a sneering way about him and could not bring himself to notice me. To Talbot he spoke with an affected roughness as though to bulk his codpiece. I had met his kind before, both men and women, who mime a swagger but are always early for a hanging. The other was a slight man, a clerk of some kind, who had a habit of repeating the phrases of others like a gnat about the ear.

  The lawyer leaned confidentially forward. ‘So, Talbot, the deeds, all is in order, I trust? We can leave nothing to chance.’

  ‘Oh, no, nothing to chance,’ the little man put in nervously.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Talbot said, ‘you could trust me with your lives – nay better, with your wives.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the lawyer said, ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  ‘Do you think it might be wise,’ he added, dabbing at his mouth with a fine handkerchief, ‘to hire a man to ride with you? There’s Cockerham sands before you reach Lancaster and if you should be waylaid?’

  ‘Yes,’ the little man spluttered over his cup, ‘if you should be waylaid?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Talbot, ‘as to that, there’s no cause to worry. The letter will be in cipher by morning. As to the rest – I have my man Jabez here. He might look like a slender reed but he’s already slipped the gallows once; he’ll find a man’s pulse quicker than music. He’d sooner let out your life’s blood than show mercy.’