I took out Jacob’s blade and put it before me and kissed it.
‘Aye,’ Talbot said. ‘He’s after a man in Lancaster, aren’t you Jabez, and you mean to have his heart.’
‘I do,’ I said, looking Talbot in the eyes, ‘and neither God nor man will prevent me.’
The lawyer turned to me then with a look that was both perplexed and gloating.
‘What is your business with these men?’ I asked Talbot later as he sat over the desk translating a letter into a labyrinth of signs.
‘I tell you Jabez-Jane, they are base metal. I am turning them into gold.’
Later, in the dark, I wondered again how to fit together the parts of this man snoring like an ox beside me, whose fingers were dirty with corruption but who talked of angels and called down visions from the stars. And then I wondered at myself still more, at the thrill I had felt in my own invention in the face of risk. When we were young, before he had made peace with being in love with me, Jacob had shied away from my recklessness; he was right to fear it, for it had almost led me to the gallows. I must tamp down again. And yet, and yet, the bright world was so full of possibilities, there were so many thoughts to be spun out of air, so much to be known and learned. Talbot had offered me courts and cities, but I could never marry him, nor did he want me, not really; it was the story of his future that he loved. It was very well for Talbot, for any man. He could fashion himself a new fortune ten times over; I could not. I did not want to. I had a husband more dear to me than all the gorgeous spectacles the world could offer. I would give away the moon, and the stars, too, just to trace a finger along his collarbone and kiss the hollow there, below his neck. Somehow, together, we would build another life.
27
When at last we left Preston I was so nervous I could barely hold the reins: today we would reach Lancaster at last. Juno breathed in my restiveness and pricked and started at every fly. Over the smudged blue fells to our right the summer dawn streaked lilac. The air held the quiet expectancy of heat, but a freshness hung above the water as we crossed Savick brook and then the River Brock. By the time we reached the Calder, the slopes were washed with yellow light and shadow. Already heat licked at our necks.
‘Abate your burning little Jabez,’ Talbot said, swiping my cap from me, ‘the day will be blazing enough without it.’
The bright sun took away some of the bleakness of the place so that I could believe it beautiful after its fashion, black moss and marsh; the secret stillness of the reeds and the lonely horn of the bittern. After Garstang there was scarce a field of wheat. It was a pretty village, but we did not pause, for we wanted to reach the sands before the tide advanced, and only stood a little in the Cocker to let the horses cool their legs, before we pressed on.
Strangely, it was not the sea I noticed first, but the birds: a great multitude on the expanse of gleaming mud and sand; from a distance they moved and glittered like the water that dwindled in streams and pools all round them. We rode to the guide post and stood awhile, waiting for a man to lead us past the quicksands. I could see the birds more clearly now, but many were new to me and it was only later that I learned their names. Most were streaked brown and grey like the shingle on the sand, but there was also a jostling crowd of black and white oystercatchers and here and there, white and slender as the crescent moon, a tall egret. As I watched, three curlews landed near to us, and picked their way delicately to a shining runnel in the sand, their beaks improbable, drooping, until they jabbed sharply at the mud.
Soon the guide appeared, coming at a jogtrot towards us on a rough dark pony. A few birds lifted in alarm, like the scurf of a wave and then the bay erupted, flickering, shrieking until the air was a ripple of wings. This is a day for marvels, I thought, entranced; the soul approaching heaven must see a sight like this, the light of God glancing off a thousand thousand angel wings. Had Jacob passed this way, I wondered, and watched the birds take flight?
The man led us along a road in the sands only he could see. He pointed to slick channels which, he said, were not there yesterday and would be gone again tomorrow. Elsewhere the sand looked sound enough but he showed us how, if you stepped on it, it billowed like cloth. Takes years, he said, to know how the water wicks below the skin of mud and chart it, here – he jabbed a finger at his head. He’d been taking folk across the sands, here and Lunesands all his life, and his father before him, when they weren’t cockle-picking or fishing. ‘The land hereabouts is all water-wash,’ he said, ‘and the tidal sleck and the crusted ooze with all the dainty birds tripping at their ease is no more sound than the trumpery players put on to fool folk with their stories.’
We crossed the Cocker again; on the bank the horses sank so far into the sand their noses dipped into the water. This would be a death for a devil I thought, sucked slowly into the mud and sand, destroyed by your own struggle to be free.
‘It’s not the mud that kills you, often as not,’ the man said, ‘it’s the tide. It has a hunger in it when it comes in that it can’t slake, no matter how fast it swallows.’
He took us as far as Cockersand Abbey, where the land juts out with only a wide channel between it and the point across the water where winds of every compass blow the sere grasses.
‘I have never seen the sea before,’ I said to Talbot.
‘How could you have?’ he answered, ‘Now you have seen it, what do you think of it?’
I gazed out at the immeasurable horizon. Light danced on the water as though tickled by the sun, but I was not fooled. It rocked with the rhythm of the moon and stars and held us at naught. Only the wind, the breath of God, or His angels, could ruffle its surfaces. Beneath the blue dazzle monsters lurked; my father had told me tales of the whale, that the shipwrecked took for an island in the fog only to be pulled down into the green deeps; of the selkies, who sang in human voices and combed their weed-strewn hair, and of the mariners who hearing them could never be at peace again, but must stand in the shallows craning towards the waves, or hold a shell on their pillow all night for the hush of the sea in their ear. The water was blue as the leaves and fields are green, which is to say the colour dissolved and remade itself in a hundred different hues. Near us it was silver, but further out it slid towards the bright blue of the Virgin’s gown, or of my dead father’s eyes, that yearned always towards the promise in the furled sails of the tall ships that came up the Severn in his boyhood. At the horizon the rim was darker still and in the heat a haze was gathering; I could just see the white sails of a tall merchant ship. If I were a man, I would not hesitate, I thought. Who would not want to feel the heave of the waves beneath their feet and lean towards the rim of the blue world over a dipping prow, bound for the jewelled cities of the earth?
I turned back to Talbot and swept my arm across the bay. ‘It is too big for thought,’ I said. ‘It yields to us and defies us all at once.’
‘Looks fair enough from here,’ the guide said, turning his pony back, ‘you’d best get on now, there’ll be a storm afore dark I shouldn’t wonder.’
We turned inland along the sands that edge the Lune river, past ragged saltmakers at the sands’ edges, and over the mouth of the Conder. A string of brown geese like a loose arrow flew over our heads inland. It seemed a good sign. Only two or three miles further on lay Lancaster.
Soon enough, the grim brown castle came into view; all the immense hewn power of dukes and kings. Somewhere behind the walls, perhaps in the great squat tower, was the county gaol. The town was hidden behind. What do I do now? I thought. After so long, we were here. Crows wheeled round the castle walls. I felt so sick with fear that Juno, sensing it, came to a halt beneath me.
‘Haste yourself,’ Talbot called back, ‘the clouds gather and we need lodgings.’
I urged Juno to a trot and tried to smile away all my foreboding and ignore the thickening air. At the city gates a lunatic man mopped and mowed, wearing nothing but breeches. I could not help but stare at him; he leered madly back at me and lunged for Ju
no’s bridle, but Talbot struck him and he fell away.
‘Christ, but you’re a fool for every clapperdudgeon and feigning Abram-man you meet, Jabez.’
He was not feigning, there was frenzy in the man’s eyes. I shuddered with the thought that had made me pause. Could Jacob have become like him, struck from door to door, nameless, mouthing at the air? What would I find now I was here at last?
I took a breath; whatever it might be I would face it. ‘If you are above ground. Jacob,’ I said silently, ‘I will find you; however you have fallen, my heart’s darling I will bear you up – but don’t be dead, not dead I beg you.’
I passed under the stone arch and on into the city.
28
The evening air was soft and close; then, in the thick twilight, the sky ripped brightly open. Thunder rolled down from the fells above the city as though a giant were toppling peaks. We scurried for shelter to an inn that Talbot knew. All evening the storm continued; I had to put off trawling the taverns for news. Rain fell in torrents and the torrents flowed over gutters and cobbles, sluicing the town of its dirt and its ghosts.
The morning was clear and gusty, with the heat washed out of the streets. Talbot hailed me outside the inn. He was in conversation with a boy who’d walked from Wigan with a basket of cannel coals on his back. ‘Put a candle to them,’ he said, ‘and they burn straight off, any which way they are held, and they are not greasy like ordinary coal, but slick and shiny.’ Talbot picked out a piece bigger than a duck’s egg and declared he would go at once to get it polished.
The boy nodded, ‘It will show your face back to you better than a mirror.’
‘Aye,’ Talbot said, cradling it, ‘it will show that and more. Come Jabez, we have much to do.’
I shook my head at him, ‘I have my own business today,’ I said, walking off before he could answer. All along the street he called after me, but I flung up my arm in farewell.
All I knew was that Jacob had been stabbed in an alley, near to a tavern. I’d thought I could simply say I was the dead man’s cousin, wishing to visit his grave as I passed through, but I was met with bafflement, or polite condolences – or memories as windblown and devoid of colour as last year’s leaves. They remembered the scuffle and resented the hasty departure of the young lords – it was a tragedy, with the party so fine and free in its spending, though Master Croft could swear the devil blue. As for the knifing, it was rogues come up from Bowland; it was a Bury thief; they’d heard it was started at a cockfight past St Leonard’s Gate; it was over some rogue’s doxy; it was the bed-broker whose girl he hit; it was that he’d refused to pay; it was her brother – and whether rogue, pander, or brother, the murderer was always gone – to Liverpool, to London, over the Irish sea. Even the place was disputed – it was on Kelne Lane, no surely Penny Street, they’d heard it was the row below the Weary Wall. One by one the tavern keepers shook their heads and named each other as the house where he was laid. Even the sexton disavowed him; the parish clerk could show me the register if I’d like – he’d heard he’d been taken to be buried in a parish further north, or was it south, he was not sure, now he came to think of it – at any event, it was not here.
Sometimes when I poked at the memories they blew off like chaff, and sometimes it was as if I poked a bruise and eyes grew hard and blank as polished metal.
‘What do you expect?’ said Talbot that night, when I recounted the day to him. ‘You, a stranger, scratching at dirt that has been trod down safe so that respectable people can walk on it and not get their boots smeared. An’ if there was lying, and money paid down, all the more reason to resent any raking.’
‘If I were to offer money?’
‘Aye offer money. Pay enough and a mob will swear on the Bible they have seen him in the moon.’
‘Then will you scry for me?’
He took my hands and looked at me. It was clear to me he was struggling within himself. At last he nodded, sighing, ‘Though lately I have not felt the spirits whispering at my ears – but for you my little Jabez, tomorrow I shall try.’
We borrowed a mirror from the inn and set it so that the light falling through the casement would spring into the room. Neither one of us took breakfast, but spent the hours from dawn on our knees. When the sun was strong, Talbot drew a circle round us both and said the words and waited. Nothing. The surface reflected the sky. I was afraid in case I saw a crow fly across it, but there was only a vacancy. At last Talbot shook his head.
‘I am sorry Jabez-Jane. I am become so used to you I dread you finding your pigman. Perhaps it is that. Or perhaps the fairies are angry that I am making gold without them. Or it might be, of course, that he is not to be found.’
After he’d gone I sat on the bed. For a while I wept as though all hope was lost, but then I collected myself. Talbot couldn’t help me, but I could help myself. If he were no longer here there were people who knew what happened, who might be persuaded to say where he had gone. Someone would let something fall.
In all my imaginings I had only to gain Lancaster to find him. He was either on the road as it led north or waiting for me in the city. Sometimes, when my courage failed me, it was the fresh mound of his grave that haunted me, with its wooden cross. But never this quicksand of sympathetic rumour and untruth. Perhaps he had indeed gone mad and forgot himself and me. I spent the day enquiring of healers, apothecaries, cunning women. No one had been called for, nothing procured, no one paid to nurse him.
Talbot sighed impatiently. ‘Leave off your moping. You ask too many questions, go back to your taverns,’ he went on, ‘buy ale and wait and listen.’
I did as Talbot said and haunted the taverns and alehouses hour on hour, sliding greetings into talk with strangers. My master, I let slip, liked to be rid of me till evening. I was friendly, I asked about trade, about the harvest; I shared my jug of ale. I did not speak of Jacob any more, but occasionally made a mention of Sir Thomas, Edward Croft. I did not speak to women, neither the potgirls nor the wenches who sidled in when the sun began sinking; they looked at me too closely.
It surprised me a little, how easy I took to dissembling, how I could look in a man’s face and smile and lie. It surprised me too, how eager men were, finding me quiet, to hint at the dark corners of their lives. One day, I found myself thinking, if I ever earn my bread through offering physic I will remember this. Gently, I would nudge them away from their own concerns and back to talk of the trouble at Easter. Very slowly, like bits of a picture showing though whitewash, I learned things I had not known.
29
While I was about my business Talbot pursued his. It was not honest, I could tell that much, although I never knew the whole of it. There were title deeds – the gift of a suppressed friary near Kirkham, other houses, made out in the Preston lawyer’s name and in Talbot’s own name too.
‘Do you suppose anyone would be such a sot as to allow you to usurp ownership with these?’ I asked him.
‘Why not?’ Talbot smiled. ‘It happens every day. But that is not, quite, what I am after, at present. These will be security for loans, that’s all. You are not too nice for that, are you Jabez-Jane? With your dead men’s rings stitched in your drawers?’
The people at the inn treated him, I saw, with an exaggerated respect. Even I was bobbed and bowed to. A sly rumour had begun he was a wastrel cousin of George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury. After luncheon one afternoon he appeared with a lawn ruff and a fancy velvet doublet that hung down to his thighs, so thick in the July afternoon he looked basted for the spit. For me he brought a fine blue jerkin.
‘Don’t get a speck on it, or the hiring will cost double,’ he grunted, thrusting it at me.
That evening he took a private room. I was weary of sitting alone for bits and scraps from strangers and agreed to join him. After all, it was part of my story that I had a master to serve. We were gamesters, ale-knights, gallants – at least to those beyond the locked door. Before the potboy and the girl with the ale jug, Tal
bot was a gentleman losing great sums at cards. I drank more ale than I was used to, although by now I could stomach a bellyful. Near midnight I glanced into my bowl and saw a gaunt shock-headed boy grin back at me. He had wobbled into pieces before I knew him for myself.
My mind was unsteadied, but not only by the drink. When I was Jacob’s wife, I knew the names of things and their shapes. My secrets were the simples I gathered from the woods and fields. I had long since buried my wayward past. Jacob had walked into my trial and proved me not a witch but a wife, and when I took his hand and stepped out into the sunlight the world steadied beneath my feet and ceased its whirling changes. There were the seasons, the rise and fall of the sun, the properties of flowers, the day’s work, and, as present as breath, the promise of his body beneath his lockram smock, the scent of it.
Those were the years of the sun, of Jacob’s golden hair. Since losing him I felt I had fallen back towards the inconstant moon, that is now a curved blade and now a hanging pearl, but ever the moon still. I was a boy and a thief and I slapped thighs and threw curses and slept each night next to a conjurer of daemons. How could I once again be Martha, walking through the wet dew with Jacob? I tried to summon my old face into the ale-pot, but she would not come.
By the dark middle of the night I found I was on my bed with a candle burning and my thoughts still eddying like the water at Cockerham sands. I thought of my book – I had long since stopped calling it the Steward’s – with its gods and girls and heroes flowing into new forms as water flows around an obstacle. A girl became a cow, a tree, a spider. Was that what Talbot was after too; a friary became a scroll became a bag of gold? In my half sleep I saw the rushing tide at the Lune’s mouth, the turbulent roll of it, making new patterns of the bay. I was the grinning boy in the beer bowl laughing with the surge, and then I was the tossed foam on its back, fizzing into sea mist.
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