The Good Wife

by Eleanor Porter

  ‘One that I have paid for, to save your ingrate life,’ I said, testily enough. There was a limit to the pity he could wring from me; some I needed for myself.

  He put a hand up to his ears. ‘What did you use? Bog moss? Was it clean or did you buy it off some piss pedlar? It is not enough by itself. You should have asked me how to make a poultice.’

  ‘Talbot,’ I said, standing over him, ‘do not make me the butt of your anger.’

  He hauled himself up and nodded and my heart felt for him as he shuffled his swollen neck and the bile in his gaze softened to misery. ‘Forgive me Jabez,’ he said. ‘Each day in that foul place I prayed that the door of the cell would open and you would come. It was so dark, Jabez, foul and dark every inch, so airless. The stone walls ran with sweat. I began to lose faith in the sun itself. Even your ploughboy would have been welcome.’

  I stood up and went to the casement. ‘I found him,’ I said without turning round. ‘He’s mine no longer; there’s a bonny girl with a child in her belly.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. I leaned at the window, twisting my hands, waiting for barbs, all basted about with cruelties, to fall, but he said nothing and I blessed him for it. When I looked back he was eating last night’s pottage, wincing as he swallowed.

  ‘We have not done so well, you and I,’ he said gently when I took the empty bowl. ‘All is lost. All. My books they told me were burned at Hornby and the stone, Jabez, that brought me angels: it was seized. Each time I asked for it I was told I should rejoice it had been returned to Hornby and could not be used to damn me as a sorcerer.’

  ‘Here,’ I said taking the stone from the bag where I had placed it. ‘I had it from the gaoler. And the books too, are safe. Buried, with what is left of your gold, not far from here. All is saved, but what I used to pay Babcock – that and the Hornby ring; Lady Elizabeth’s companion made me give that back.’

  The stone lay like an egg in his hand, black and deep as the vault of heaven where angels step out of the stars.

  41

  Talbot healed quick enough in body, with my tending, but his mind remained dejected, pious and melancholic or restive and cursing in turns. He did not stir from the room, but would pray for hours on his knees on the bare boards, berating himself for his pride and greed then bargaining with God for favour as though it were an apple and Christ a costermonger with a barrow in the street. I feared he would never go out again. I have lost more than you, I thought, but I said nothing. My ache for Jacob was my own. Every day cost me more money. I told the landlord he was brainsick and had food sent up.

  In the evenings, when the shadows began to web the four walls, he saw spirits, elves and fairy people, or the wraiths of the dead. ‘There,’ he would whisper, ‘the little people, in the hearth again,’ and I would look and see nothing but unswept ash. I held his hand, then, to keep his mind from stepping through. Sometimes he believed his visitors were spawned by hell, that they were demons trying for his soul; other times he swore it was simply that his mind was worn so thin it was like a piece of wafting gauze – the spirit world passed through it as easy as light or water. The showstone lay unused beside the bed; although he often laid his hand on it he would not use it. He had told me once that only God’s ministers, only angels could be summoned to the stone; I urged him to pick it up and question if these were indeed devils that beset him, but he was afraid. He had failed the angel in the stone, he said and dared not face it.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, one evening, ‘I will look. You say most scryers use a boy to do their seeing. I am almost a boy.’

  I sat on the bed next to him and picked it up. It had frightened me before, when I feared the vision it sent, of the bridge and the swan and the limping man, that it was commanding me to marry Talbot, but the riddle had been truer and more simple and more sad. My heartache left no room for other fears. Even towards death and the thought of death, I felt only numbness. The stone was round and smooth as an egg. I had felt it begin to open for me once; perhaps its black depths could open my eyes again to wonder.

  Talbot had twisted away from me in peevish misery but now he turned back and moved the candle to draw the light; dipping his finger in the wax drew a cross on my forehead. ‘On, Ell, Eloy,’ he chanted, ‘Eley, Messias, Sother, Emmanuel, Sabaoth,’ and I said the words after him.

  ‘You must say what you see, exactly,’ Talbot said. ‘You are the scryer now.’

  I cradled the stone in my palm and let my mind play across its emptiness. To begin with there was only blackness, nothingness, but then it seemed to me this nothing folded itself back and back until I looked into the abyss of night itself. I reeled at the horror of such unending space. I think I would have dropped the stone, or hurled it from me if Talbot had not grasped my shoulders.

  Slowly, a fog rolled across the darkness and swirled to a point of light that extended and became a dazzling scene of noble men and women, gilded towers, feasts and dancers; they dissolved as if they were made of water, of drifting cloud. Through the mist appeared a golden man – more beautiful than any I had ever seen. ‘Look,’ he said, and he scooped a handful of the red clay at his feet and fashioned from it a figure, a shining child who looked up at the stars, who became a labourer, a woman with child, a courtier, a king; round him lions ranged, bears, a deer, a mouse, a salmon river-leaping, a blackbird at its morning song – all the creatures of the earth and sky ravelling and unravelling. And the king crumbled back into the clay and became a scholar, a lawyer, a wild rogue, a one-toothed beggarwoman. Then, nothing – the stone was a black lump in my hand and my brain was giddy with pain and confusion.

  When I ceased talking and looked up, Talbot was rocking slightly; his eyes gleamed.

  ‘Do you see, Jabez? The golden man, the shining child, the fallen fabric of creation. It is a message for me to learn the language of heaven, to thread back to the golden world. You and I, Jabez, we will conceive the royal child; all the courts of Europe will be open to me.’

  I did not see at all, but I was glad the vision brought him hope. He was soon asleep. I laid the stone down and went to my own bed. How could so small a rock hold a universe within it? It made me shudder. I had hoped that it would show me Jacob – that I would see him thinking of me. I prayed to God to protect him and as I prayed images of the vision came back to me more gently; Talbot had misconstrued it all. What was it but the delicate glory of creation spun out of earth and falling into it again, as a bird threads the air with song that stays a while in the ear and then dissolves back into air. I picked up my book and turned to the story of Prometheus, fashioning man out of the earth and teaching him to gaze up at the heavens and ‘mark and understand what things were in the starry sky’.

  After the scrying Talbot began to recover his self-love and his trust in his great destiny. It was a trial, he said, of his strength and faith. Did I know the story of Pythagoras, who first taught that the planets moved by numbers, making music? The mob set upon him to tear him limb from limb; they set alight his house and he was forced to crawl away to die of hunger and despair. Or Socrates, convicted for challenging the pieties of fools? I let him talk on; it was foolish bragging, but there was some truth. The crowd had pelted him for conjury not for counterfeiting.

  When the light failed his apprehensions returned. Night after night he begged me to lie next to him and hold him to keep him safe from the night hag who gripped his throat and choked his dreams with horrors, and night after night I refused, till he said that I was colder than Diana and the moon and deserved to die alone in my barren bed, that when we were married he would roll off me in the heat of my lust till I cried for him to come to me. In truth I was not afraid of mischief; at times I even felt myself that I was cruel, denying him comfort. It was that when I lay alone in the darkness, I felt again Jacob’s head on my breast as we lay wrapped together on the fell, Jacob’s body warm against mine, and all the sorrow and the closeness of that night.

  After two weeks of this I went to a milliner’s and bough
t him a fine close cap, all stitched about with stars about the base.

  ‘Look,’ I said, holding up the stone for a mirror so that he could see himself, ‘not a whit of your injury shows. You may go abroad again without any fear of mockery.’

  He made a show of wincing at my using the stone for vanity, but I could see he was delighted, puffing out his chest as he used to do, smoothing his owl feather brows.

  ‘We must collect your books, Talbot, and your gold. I buried them well, but the damp of Autumn may find them out if we leave it too long.’

  ‘You go. I hate to walk. Children mock my gait. It would be more than I can stand, at present.’

  ‘I hobble as much as you. It is scarce four miles, but you might ride Juno if you wish.’

  I had to draw him out into the world again before I could leave him and I felt the bargain that I had to strike with him must be made in the open air. To my relief, he nodded.

  ‘And you must put on petticoat and kirtle, Jabez-Jane. I will not have my wife in breeches.’

  ‘I am nobody’s wife, Talbot. And it would look strange, don’t you think, to have a woman hold her husband’s bridle?’

  It was a fine September day and the low morning mist had risen from the fields. The leaves had the dark leathery look of late summer but there were flowers enough by the road and in the meadows – loosestrife, devil’s bit, selfheal. The hedges were clotted with blackberries and gaggles of children picking them. A small boy held me out a handful, grinning with purple teeth.

  ‘Never eat them,’ Talbot said, checking his cap, when I offered some up.

  ‘You’re like the old women in my village, who forbad them, said the trail of the serpent had passed over them. My father scorned their ignorance at refusing nature’s bounty.’

  ‘And what was he, your father, an educated man?’

  ‘He knew Latin when he was young, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  I said nothing; Talbot had already turned away to watch a kestrel that hovered like a hanging stone, then wheeled away towards the heather. How long was it since I had thought of my dead father, how he’d raged for years against our narrow valley and the tavern walls and never left them? I remembered a day suddenly, an afternoon; I was lurking in the hedge afraid to go home because Robert Tanner had caught me scrumping apples at the Hall and had sworn he’d tell my father, that there’d be a beating in it. I watched a beetle crawl across my hand in all its glossy armour as I sucked at the salt tears that ran onto my lips. Then a shadow moved across the light and I looked up to see my father looking down at me. He reached out with his big hands and pulled me out and put me on his shoulders like a queen. ‘Don’t be afraid Martha,’ he said, ‘they can spare an apple. The trick is how to take it.’ And he pulled from his pocket a bright pippin and passed it up to me. I was high, high, with the tall clouds above me and the sweet, crisp joy of the apple in my mouth.

  The peas and beans were still being picked, but the fields were shorn of wheat and barley.

  ‘You’ve missed the harvest,’ I said, as we began to climb up from the valley floor.

  ‘No, Jabez’ he said, venturing a grim smile, ‘I’ve been well cropped.’

  I found the distance post easy enough. We waited a little way off while a pedlar and his pack passed by, wishing him a good day, and then we turned off to the trees. I tethered Juno out of sight as before and pointed towards the dell. I could see Talbot weighing up in his mind whether to chastise my choice, but he let it be.

  A woodpecker flew before us. My grandmother called them yekkels, she’d point to their dipping flight: ‘There’ll be rain,’ she’d say, but it was hard to believe now, with the sun splashing light through the leaves and rippling the wood loam like moving water.

  ‘Look,’ I said to Talbot, pointing to the light and shadow, ‘your gold has spilled onto the forest floor.’

  He took my arm, grinning. ‘What children we shall have, Jabez!’

  We had reached the ruined cottage, and I sat down, weary. A robin on an alder tree nearby was singing its autumn song. I fancied there was a sadness to its chirping, now that nesting was done with. I remembered another ruined house, when I fled the mob with Jacob and we lay down together and a blackbird sang, full-throated, for the spring.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I will not marry you. I told you already.’

  I had half expected the fury he had shown me in the maze, but he too was weary. He sat down on a stump of stone, facing me and his face looked puzzled. ‘You said so, but surely,’ he said, ‘now you have been cast off – all’s changed? What else is there for you? We are to have a child. I have such power in me, Jabez – you have seen it. I need a mate who can assist me, scribe for me. You may even scry for me; it has to be, you must see that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want it. You shouldn’t marry. Not yet. You are scarcely begun. How would you keep a wife? You need to find a patron. You must be unencumbered; think what work you have to do – what teaching – all the creatures, all the matter of the world strung together in becoming; the earth conceiving these birch trees and their leaves falling into earth again. Or this robin, spinning the air into song.’

  He smiled. ‘That is the trouble with women. However clever, they mistake the whole for the parts – you have forgot the purpose, Jabez, how all things strive towards light, the material to the airy spirit, base metal yearning to become pure gold. I seek redemption.’

  ‘We differ,’ I said. ‘I don’t want perfection in this world. I like creation as it is.’

  ‘Mortal, decaying. Impure.’

  ‘Changing shapes as the clouds do. I will not marry you. You have a fierce fiery mind, Edward Talbot. You have taught me not to be afraid to think. I say I won’t go with you.’

  Yes, I thought, as he snorted his contempt and threw up his hands, you are like a wildfire. I would be fuel to you. He said nothing for a while, but stared at me with his owl eyes, ‘You know I never loved you as a woman,’ he said at last.

  I nodded.

  He sighed. ‘Very well, let’s fetch my property and my gold. What will you do now, Jabez?’ His voice sounded almost gentle.

  I swallowed. ‘I wish to go south again, to the grange given you by Elizabeth Stanley, and build it up and live there.’

  He frowned again. ‘But you said you wouldn’t marry me. And I’ll not live there. A ruin in a wood, with pigs and peasants for neighbours.’

  ‘I want to live there alone, as a widow. I want you to give me the deeds.’

  ‘What?’ His shout sent crows cawing to the fields. He had sprung up and was lowering over me. ‘You brazen bitch! Never!’

  ‘Very well.’ I stood up and began to walk back towards Juno.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to the tavern.’

  ‘And my gold, my property?’

  ‘Find it yourself,’ I said.

  It took an hour to make terms. More than once he fingered the knife at his belt, as though tempted to bring the blade to the argument, but I had no fear of that. He was like a torch that flares and does not last long. All I had to do was wait. He knew what he owed me. By the time we got back to Juno he was clapping me on the back and laughing at the trick I’d played him. I made him promise that on the morrow he’d come with me to a lawyer to have the transfer made just and tight.

  42

  Early, just before it is light, I whistle my dog Jack from his heavy sleep beside the fire and walk up the steep horseshoe curl of the valley to the ridge. This is soft country, where the land rolls in waves towards the Marches. The sides of the valley are wooded, but the gentle hollow at its heart is pasture. My neighbour has made me a present of three ewes; in the spring I will buy more. Today, each blade of grass is feathered with ice and the trees have branches of white bone. I am alone, but for Jack, but I have my ghosts about me – Jacob, my lost child. Is his son born yet, I wonder, his tender daughter? Does he hold her in the crook of his arm and look out on the dawn-flushed snow?<
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  Jack whines. He has scented a vixen and is eager to be off, but I put my hand on his head and hold him. He sniffs about my skirts in the dew. I am a woman now, mostly; I tell myself I have done with gadding, but I keep my doublet and hose and breeches in my chest and more often than I ought I saddle Juno and canter through the lanes, skittering the indifferent mud. Beside my bed, beneath the Bible, I keep my book of transformations.

  The house was not such a ruin as Lady Stanley said, or at least not all of it. I arrived in the golden twilight of an October evening and plucked myself an apple from a tree that hung over the yard. There was an old woman, Jennet, living there. At first she thought to curse me out, or scare me with stories, but when at last she trusted that I did not mean to throw her on the parish, she taught me how to read the place, which boards were rotten, where to net rabbits.

  There was no moat, old Jennet told me, it had been filled in by order of the church, to appease the ghost. Nobody had been in the old stone tower, not since he was a living man. It was a terrible tale she said. After the dissolution of the abbey that owned it the farm had been sold to its master, but he lived too well and took to thieving to pay his debts – a gentleman by day but by night a masked man on the highway – till a friend of his, riding back from Worcester, drew his sword and severed the wrist that had seized the bridle. What a homecoming was that, finding a mangled hand in his reins and on its finger his dear friend’s ring. As for the master, he died from loss of blood on the road. Ever since then he was forever coming home, leaping into the tower and over it, into the moat.

  The tale kept people away. I think she half believed it herself, but I broke the locks with an axe and went in, frighting a ghost owl from the upper landing, where an open casement gaped. There was a pelt of dust, and cobwebs, and rat litter in the corners, but the walls were stone and the timbers hale and the oak dresser laden with plate as though waiting its master’s return. Nobody in the village would help me to clear it, even for money, until the minister came to pray with me and bless it clean.