by Tony Walker
He stroked her shoulder. “Then not shame, but think of me. It will break my heart to lose you.”
She shook her head. “You’ll not lose me, father. I shall visit.” She took his hand from her shoulder and held it. “Gowan is my true love, and one must follow where one’s heart leads.”
Her father’s brow darkened, and he looked down at his big gnarled hand in her soft white fingers. “Gowan Fell is not a good man,” he said.
She snorted. “And I’ve heard that one too. Because he lives a free life in the forest and pays no respect to the great and the self professed good, they call him a bad man.” She shook her head. “They call him a bad man because he doesn’t do what they say, not because he is one.”
Her father fixed her with his brown eyes. “I see your mind is set. But if he hurts you...”
She squeezed his hand. In a soft tone she said, “He won’t hurt me, father. He loves me. He is my true love and I am his; he told me so.”
“Many men say such things, Rebecca.”
She dropped his hand. “I thought you better than this, father. You shouldn’t try to poison my mind against my love, just to get me to obey you.”
He sighed. “I’ve never been one to force you to obey. Your mother calls me soft. Maybe I am. But I trust that your love for us, your parents, will remain and you will recognise how much we love you. Even your mother, because beneath her disapproval, she loves you too.”
Tears filled his eyes. She did not like to see her father like this; he was soft and gentle, yet always strong. But her mind was made up. She wouldn’t abandon her family. She wanted to come back and see her little sister and she knew that she could outlast her mother’s disapproval. In the end, they would come round and see she was doing the right thing. Her sister had given her a keepsake, one of her dollies. It was a badly made thing and cheap, but little Kirsten loved it, and it had been given with tears in the small girl’s eyes to ‘keep you safe in the wood.’
“I must go now, father. The way is long and I want to be there before dark.”
“Do you have enough food?”
She nodded. “Mother gave me bread and cheese and some apples.” Rebecca smiled. “She hated doing it, but she did.”
“She wouldn’t see you go hungry, no matter what she thinks.”
Rebecca stepped away, backwards.
“They say...” her father began.
“They say what?” She frowned - this was another ploy of his to keep her.
He shrugged. “I don’t believe in such things but...”
“Spit it out, father. You’ve begun some wild story, best finish it. Some story about Gowan no doubt.”
He didn’t speak.
“They say he’s a womaniser? Is that it?”
He shook his head.
“That he’s a wife beater?”
“No. I’ve not heard that. It’s what his father was.”
“His father?” She was incredulous. “A story about his father to put me off Gowan?” She shook her head more in pity than anger. “Father, you have to let me grow up.”
Then, seeing her mind was made to leave, he reached into his belt and gave her his knife. Good steel was rare in those days among ordinary folk and she knew he prized his knife.
“I couldn’t, father.”
He nodded. “You can. You’ll need a knife for all sorts of things. I have another.” He had but not as good.
She took it.
“Visit us soon, my lovely daughter,” he said.
She smiled at him. “I shall. May the gods be with you, father.”
“Remember to pray. Don’t forget your faith in God.”
She laughed. “I shall. But mine is the god of the woods and flowers, of the mountains and wild beasts.”
“Shush girl, don’t let the priests hear you say that.”
And she turned and walked off, leaving her father standing on the track at the edge of the Old Forest.
And he never did tell her the worst thing he’d heard about Gowan Fell’s father.
Gowan Fell’s house was hard to find if you were uninvited, but for those he made welcome, the way was easy. And Rebecca was very welcome. She knew the route — walk down to the small stream where the brown trout lurk, then over the old packhorse bridge dressed in moss. After two hundred yards on the narrow path, look for the lightning split oak and then strike out through the deep wood following the deer path until you find it. The house itself was a pile of turf walls amid fern and brier and the roof was of rough slate. “I shall make a pretty garden here,” she smiled to herself as she stepped into the clearing before the house.
Gowan Fell appeared from her right, silent as a beast of the wood. He put his hand to her blonde hair, and she jumped.
“You scared the wits out of me, Gowan,” she said in a mock scolding voice, but her smile was wide as he enfolded her into his chest.
His arms were muscled from his work in the forest and his skin smelled of wood smoke and the wild wood. He held her tight, and she melted into an embrace she could not break free from, even should she have wanted. His kiss was fierce, his lips parted and his mouth was hungry and passionate. His hand was to the back of her head and then his teeth were at her neck, kissing and biting. She almost swooned from the pleasure of it, but she said, “No, Gowan,” because that was seemly and even though she’d run away from her parents; they’d taught her what was right and what was wrong. She knew she shouldn’t give herself so easily. But she wanted to.
He took her hand and led her towards his cottage. When she dallied, thinking that she would only give him her mouth and her breasts this time, he tugged her with him. She put her hand on the doorframe to pull back; he was going too fast. But impatiently he turned and looked at her with his dark eyes — like glowing islands amid his black hair and his black beard. “Come,” he said, and she yielded and went with him into the dark cottage.
The cottage smelled of him; a musky odour that she did not find unpleasant. There were two rooms, the further one unused except for storage of his tools. She saw saws, axes, and other implements she didn’t recognise. This one room had his bed, a low thing of bracken and sheepskin. She glanced around. There was a cooking pot, blackened above a dead fire. Then he took her chin in his fingers, and smiling, with his other hand, began to unbutton her bodice.
“No, Gowan,” she said, putting no hand up to stop him.
He halted, as if listening to her objection. He raised a dark eyebrow and smiled to show his white teeth. “Very well,” he said, dropping his hand to his side. She went over to the bed and dropped the dolly her sister Kirsten had given to her to keep her safe in the wood. The thing’s cloth eyes stared at the ceiling and on an afterthought, Rebecca took off her cloak and placed it over the doll’s face so it wouldn’t see what was about to happen.
Gowan stood near the fire, the yellow light flickering on his handsome face. “Are you sure you don’t need a lie down?” he smiled.
Then she felt a smile growing on her own face in return. “Well, perhaps a little one,” she said.
The woodsman needed no further invitation. He undid her bodice and tugged at her blouse until her small breasts with their pale rose nipples were exposed. He took her to the ground, kissed her, kneaded her, suckled, and played with her breasts with the tips of his tongue. She was not a virgin; something her family did not know. For once, in the woods, he had come upon her while she picked bluebells and even then; she knew he was the one for her; her own true love, just like it said in the books.
Whenever she spoke of romance, her mother told her that love was for ladies, not ordinary folk, but Rebecca knew she was special. Not for her a life among the common people following their petty rules and hand-me-down beliefs, told what they could and could not do by priests and squires; she would choose freedom and to be her own woman.
And this was her choice. Gowan was her choice. It was her choice that he made love to her. Gowan began to remove her skirts and then her petticoats. She smell
ed him. She felt his weight. She sensed the strength in those arms. He was a real man — not like her father, kind as he was, but powerless. Gowan took what he wanted, and what he wanted was her.
The silken hair between her legs opened to his fingers, and she bit her lip and groaned involuntarily as he found her. And then in his impatience, he shifted on top of her. He took her by virtue of his strength and desire but it was her will to give in. Though truly she could not have resisted his strength.
Later, he dozed in her arms and she stroked his head. She felt his sweet breath on her chest. Gowan Fell, she thought; you are mine and I am yours. We shall be free here; we shall live a wild free life and the only laws we shall obey are those of nature and of love.
It was early summer when Rebecca moved in with Gowan Fell. He was charming and attentive. He brought her rabbits and pigeons to cook with wild garlic and the leaves of the forest. All summer long the bees buzzed, and the flies droned. Overhead, the doves cooed from the branches and the jackdaws argued as they went to roost on the warm nights. Rebecca and Gowan made love every night and in the day when Gowan was away working, Rebecca cooked and mended his clothes and set to work planting her little garden.
She went back to her parents’ house to visit and her father was glad to see her. Her mother was glad too but hid her gladness behind a look of disapproval. “No good will come of this Gowan Fell,” she said.
“I love him mother, and that’s that.”
Her father gave her seed potatoes, and she planted carrots and onions in her patch. He also gave her sweet peas and stocks to scent the evening air around the cottage.
Gowan made love to Rebecca fiercely and the animals and birds heard her cries of pleasure but paid no mind, because they knew well the sounds of love and death and could tell them apart. She liked to be taken as if she was a mare and he a stallion, or he a dog and she a bitch.
And so the weeks passed, and she was content with her life. She felt the spirits of the wildwood and when he was away burning charcoal in the deep forest, she would say her prayers to Brother Wolf and to Sister Moon. She washed his clothes in the creek to clean them of the grime and soot. Then one day she found blood on his shirt. She scrubbed it as best she could, but the stain was stubborn as guilt and could not be wholly cleansed.
She brought it to him as they sat around their rough table after they had finished rabbit stew, seasoned with her onions and thickened with potatoes and the barley her father gave her.
“Husband, (she had taken to calling him that because in the eyes of the Forest they were married, if not in the eyes of the Church) how did so much blood get on your shirt. I’ve tried to clean it but as you see—”
With a sudden snarl, he struck her with the back of his hand. She fell back, putting her hand to her lip and feeling the beading blood warm against her skin and tasting salt and iron in her mouth. He had never hit her before and she was dumbfounded.
“Gowan!” she said.
“Don’t ask me my business, woman,” he said, glowering at her, his dark brows a straight line and his brown eyes intense and full of fury.
“I only wondered if you’d been hurt,” she said “It was a lot of blood and I was worried.”
“My blood is my blood, not yours.”
And later, Rebecca wondered whether it was his blood at all, because she had seen him naked and he had no cut nor injury. That night he was rough with her and she did not like it. She called out for him to be gentle but he took his pleasure and when he was finished, rolled over to sleep. Rebecca watched him as he slept, as thoughtless as a beast, and her heart felt as if it had been pierced by the black thorn of anguish, as when someone we love takes their affection away from us.
The next day she visited her mother. The older lady was softening and gave her cake and China tea that Rebecca knew was expensive and her mother’s way of showing affection because she could never say “I love you” in words.
Rebecca considered sharing her heartbreak with her mother. Her brow furrowed, and she went silent. Her mother said, “What is it, child?” in as soft a voice as Rebecca ever remembered her using. In the end, Rebecca could not face the “I told you so” that would surely come, so she smiled and said, “This cake is delicious, mother. You must give me the recipe.”
Her mother’s face twisted, and she said, “And how will you bake a cake in the forest, daughter, with no proper kitchen and so far away from civilised folk?”
Rebecca frowned. Her mother would never change and Rebecca would never admit she was wrong, not to her mother. So she smiled thinly and said nothing.
At the end of the visit she kissed her mother dutifully and sent her love to her father. Then she made her way along the deep green roads of the Old Forest, back to Gowan Fell’s cottage.
He did not come back that night. And when he returned the next day he hardly spoke. He sat eating roast pigeon and licking the grease from his fingers by the fire. She went to him for love, but he brushed her off and later snored as he lay beside her. It was then she noticed a smell on him; one she recognised - the smell of another woman’s sex.
The next morning, he dressed in his fine fair clothes, though he said he was going to the forest as usual. When he set off to work at his charcoal burning, she decided to follow him. She crept a hundred yards behind him. She wore her brown dress with her cloak of forest green. If he had been paying attention, he could have noticed her because she was not skilled in the ways of hunting as he was, but his head was clearly full of something else and he whistled as he went.
When he came to a fork in the road, instead of going right to where his fires were, he turned left towards the hamlet of Hawkshead. She kept back and to the side of the path so she was close to the undergrowth of hazel and whitethorn and could duck in if he turned. Once he stopped to piss, the thick jet raising steam as he held his penis with the self-satisfied look of a man who is going to get what he wants.
Hawkshead was a poor place - near the great lake with the forest behind it. Rebecca wondered how she was going to observe him now he was in the village. She came to the outskirts, stepping tentatively. It filled her heart with anxiety at what she might see and she clutched the folds of her kirtle tightly in her right hand, the left to her throat as she watched him enter between the first houses.
She didn’t have long to wait before her suspicions were proved correct. A bonny dark-haired girl of her own age ran to greet Gowan Fell, throwing her slim arms around him. Gowan pulled the girl to him and kissed her deeply there and then.
Rebecca’s heart broke. Hot tears flooded down her cheeks as she turned and ran back into the forest. The ice of abandonment and the fire of jealousy chilled then scalded her chest. She wept as she ran. What was she to do now? She had cut herself off from her family, because of the faithless Gowan Fell. Her mother and father had been right all along. She could run all the way back to them, but how could she face her mother’s crowing victory and her father’s sad eyes? We told you so, her mother would say. Her father would hold her, and they would take her back, but her pride wouldn’t let her go.
Instead, she decided to wait and see what solution the morning would bring.
She did not sleep until late in the night. She heard the badgers snuffling outside her cottage and the bark of the fox deep in the wood. A shaft of sunlight woke her, that and the sound of someone knocking on the rough wooden door. At first she thought it was Gowan returned and her heart hammered, but then she realised he would not knock. A woman’s voice said, “Is there anyone home?”
It sounded like an old woman. Rebecca was in no mood to talk to anyone and she lay there while the woman knocked again. Irritation fuelled by heartbreak, made her finally sit up and shout, “What?”
“Ah, there is someone home,” the voice said. “Do you want to buy ribbons? Lovely silk and satin ribbons in all colours.”
Rebecca exhaled. Her natural demeanour began to surface, breaking the vinegar bitterness that had soaked through her. When she’d go
ne to bed, she had hated the world — men for their faithlessness and women for being their willing accomplices, betrayers of sisterhood.
“A minute,” Rebecca said. She stood hurriedly and pulled on her green kirtle, covering her underslip. Then she went to the door and opened it.
The woman was black-haired with strands of grey. Her face was lined and brown as if from years walking from town to town with her wares. She had a pack on her back and was already unloosening it and unpacking brightly coloured ribbons.
She took them in her hands and offered them to Rebecca. The girl shook her head and made to pull away, but she had never seen such fine ribbons. The colours were names she hardly knew.
The woman said, “Cerulean silk, and here carmine satin.” She gave them to the girl who wound them round her fingers and in-between, feeling their silky texture. “And here viridian, and here amaranthine. This is smaragdine, and this one is heliotrope, while this is icterine and this one, fuliginous black.”
Rebecca put her hand to her mouth and laughed. “Are these really words?”
The older woman laughed too. “Words made to charm a buyer.”
Then Rebecca smiled sadly and said, “But lady, I am no buyer. I have no money.”
“If not money, then food?”
“Poor fare that.” Rebecca pointed at the small cauldron by the fire that had the remains of the last stew she made.
“But better than none for a hungry belly. May I come in?”
Rebecca nodded. “What is your name?”
“My name is Blodeuwedd,” said the woman.
Rebecca said, “That is in the old tongue. What does it mean?”
The woman smiled. “I was Christened something else long ago. But long ago I began to follow the ways of the woods and changed my Christian name to something that was more meaningful. Blodeuwedd means flower face, and the owl was called that one time.”
Rebecca nodded. My great-grandmother spoke some of the old language, but she is dead now and none of us learned it.“