The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  For the town this might be a day of mourning, but for Squatters Row, never in any real sense part of the town, it was a jubilant occasion. Old Agnes had laid out six that day and tad four more to do tomorrow.

  ‘Of course I could’ve done the lot today but it don’t do to hurry. If you make it look easy they grudge your pay.’ She had bought bacon and ale for her supper, and was sharing Dummy’s fire because she was too busy to make her own. Dummy had spent the day grave digging and brought home a pig’s trotter for each member of his family and ale for himself.

  Just at dusk Peg-Leg arrived, begging to be told what had happened. He had been out of town for three days visiting a niece who lived in the country and had a tender conscience. Every now and then when he grew tired of the food doled out at the Alms Gate he would pay her a visit; she would feed him, mend his rags, call him ‘Uncle Jacob’ and restore his self-esteem. Sometimes her patience and his good behavior would last four, five days, a week; but sooner or later he would offend her and she would reprimand him, and he would return to Baildon, laden with the provisions which it eased her sense of responsibility to provide. On this evening, after an unusually brief visit, he was carrying a piece of pork, a dozen eggs, some flat oat-cakes sticky with honey, and a little sack of walnuts. He was easily drawn into the group and. the tit-for-tat bargaining, promising a share of his pork when it was cooked in return for a piece of pig’s head this evening, swapping some eggs for a mug of Old Agnes’s ale and sharing out the walnuts amongst the children.

  The air of festivity mounted until one child was bold enough to ask Pert Tom to put the bear through his tricks. Tom was not going to break an infallible rule for dwellers in Squatters Row.

  ‘Owd Muscovy, he’ve earned his rest today. Tell you what I will do, though. I’ll play you a tune on my whistle.’

  He played a merry tune and the children began to hop and skip in time to it. Peg-Leg said, with a trace of wistfulness,

  ‘Nice to be young, and sound of wind and limb. I was a rare one at a hornpipe once on a time.’

  ‘Young!’ cried Old Agnes scornfully. ‘I can shake a leg with the best. Aye, and after a full day’s work, too.’

  Gathering up her skirts and exposing skinny legs like knotted twigs and huge flat feet, she began to caper, calling to Tom to play faster, to play louder. Dummy’s wife sprang up to join her and their antics made even the deaf-and-dumb man laugh; he rocked from side to side, making a hoarse wheezy sound, like a pair of bellows whose leather sides had cracked.

  It was into this merry scene that Martin walked.

  He saw first the black ruin of what had been his home. Breath and heart-beat stopped; then reason took control. A few yards away was the leaping fire, a crowd about it, laughing and dancing to music. They wouldn’t be doing that if Kate and the children had been. … No. The eighbours were celebrating a near escape, Kate and the children were there … beyond the fire.

  He walked towards it and Old Agnes, spinning round, saw him, stopped dead, let her skirt fall, and stared. In a second they were all staring and silent; on the defensive, like cattle in a field when a strange dog enters. And he could now see beyond the fire. No Kate, no child of his.

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Old Agnes said, ‘we thought you was dead, too.’

  ‘Dead.’ He repeated the word. ‘Too? D’you mean. …’ The rest of the question could not be spoken; his jaw jerked convulsively.

  Old Agnes moved towards him and took him by the arm. She was suddenly sober and aware of how callous their behavior must seem to him.

  ‘Flared up in the night, your place did. But we thought you was dead too. … She… Kate was running round, hunting for you and crying. And with all gone together there didn’t seem much to grieve about.’

  He said, ‘Burned,’ but the shaking of his jaw mangled the word so that it emerged in a moan of anguish.

  Agnes tightened her hold on his arm.

  ‘Come and sit down, lad. Come to the fire and take a sup of ale. It’ll ease you.’

  He pushed her off and took a few staggering steps back to the buttress which had been one wall of his home, and was now blackened by the flames which had destroyed it. He leaned his head against the cold stone and so stood.

  He might have known. It was all part of his life’s pattern; every small mitigation of misery had been immediately followed by some new misfortune. An hour ago he had been given the means to make his family safe and comfortable for ever, so by some Devil’s logic it was inevitable that now he should have no family.

  He thought – She never had anything! And the tears came scalding into his throat and stayed there.

  Back by the fire, where the silence continued, though the eating had been resumed, Old Agnes eyed Martin uneasily, and presently made her second imaginative leap in the day.

  ‘Go and tell him you tried,’ she said to Pert Tom. Tell him you did your best to save them. Show him your hands. It’ll make him feel better to think somebody tried. Coming on us all playing the fool and making merry. … Go on!’

  Pert Tom rose and ambled over and stood beside Martin and said,

  ‘I did me best. Tried to save ‘em. Burnt meself. Look.’

  Martin neither looked nor answered, but he put out his hand and laid it on Tom’s shoulder. The bear-man could feel the ague-like shudder that ran through the other man’s body, and although he felt no guilt in the matter, something of Martin’s deep misery was communicated to him.

  ‘Once,’ he said, ‘a man that knew a lot about things, towd me burning to death worn’t as bad as it sound. Talking about holy martyrs, he was. He said the smoke sorta choked you and deadened your senses afore the fire took howd. Reckon thass true, too. They on’y screamed once.’

  Through the knot of pain in his throat, Martin said,

  ‘Pray God that’s true.’ He used the expression from habit, out of earnestness. There was no God, or such things could never happen. How had it happened?

  He forced out the question, adding, ‘She was always… so careful. I’d put in a good hearthstone, and clay round the smoke hole.’

  ‘I dunno. I woke up to find it all ablaze. Like I said, I tried, but that was too far gone, then. Burn meself. Look.’ Once again he held out his hands. Some of the blisters had broken through hauling the bear’s chain all day. All Martin could see was Kate, young and pretty, just as she was when she had come to join him under Tuck’s Oak. But he managed to say,

  ‘I’m deep in your debt for that much. Leave me alone now.’

  Tom went back to the fire.

  ‘He hev took it to heart,’ he said to Old Agnes. ‘Pity. I know more’n one man’d think himself well rid of his wife.’

  ‘They was different from most,’ said the old woman, thinking again of the Trimble.

  The fire burned low, presently every one save Agnes had left it. She took a good drink of her ale to give her heart and then filled the mug again and went to where Martin stood.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you drink this. I’ve had my losses too, and I know what I’m saying. Ale’ll ease you.’

  He made no move to take the mug, and she went on,

  ‘I been with death all my life, Martin, and folks in sorrow. Them that come out of it best take what comfort they can get and turn their minds to other things, even if thass only squabbling over the pickings. You can’t bring Kate back, nor go to her till your time come. So you must bear up and comfort yourself.’

  ‘She never had anything; nothing but worry and misery and toil. And all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t talk so daft,’ the old woman said sharply. ‘You couldn’t help being poor. I never saw a man more ready to turn his hand to anything. I never saw a better husband neither. I’ve said that a dozen times, seeing you so careful about fetching the water and the firewood and all. Come on now, lad, don’t add to your own load.’ She held the mug to him again. He took it, gulped down the contents and handed it back. ‘Now leave me,’ he said.

  ‘You come and lay down,�
�� she insisted. ‘You can lay under my rag.’

  He said ‘No,’ and flung himself down by the black ruin, the grave of all his love. The old woman sat down beside him, took his head in her skinny dirty claws and eased it into her lap. Her kindness, or the ale – it was a long time since he had drunk anything but water – loosened something in him. Tears came, and with them words, such a flow of words as he was never to loose again. Everything he said was self-reproachful, all concerned with the ruin he had made of Kate’s life, how he had promised that she should be safe with him and then robbed her of the only safety possible in this unjust world. Old Agnes hardly listened. She stroked his head and at intervals muttered a soothing word or two. ‘You couldn’t help that, lad. ‘Aye, I know, I’ve been through it myself, long ago.’ ‘Ah, that’s the way it is when you’re poor.’ And once she said, ‘Dying young’s no real hardship. Plucked off the bough, clean and sound. If you hang on you rot. I’ve seen ’em, Martin, riddled with rot, stinking like corpses, but still alive. Kate and your little ones are safe from that, they’re safe from everything now. We’re the ones anything could happen to. We’re in worse case.’

  II

  Pert Tom had been born into an age and a community as devoutly mystical, as thoroughly religious as any in the history of mankind. As a baby he had been baptized, as a child put through his Catechism. As an apprentice the only holidays he had known, the only landmarks in the year’s toil had been the festivals of the Church and the Saints’ days. As a soldier even his oaths had been religious, since without belief there can be no blasphemy; and as a bear leader he had never spent a whole day without passing through a town where a new church was building, or mingling with a group of pilgrims on their way to or from some shrine, or hearing a Friar preach, some convent bell ringing.

  Of it all he had absorbed and retained only one thing, as primitive and as personal as a savage’s devotion to his household idol. Pert Tom believed in St. Ursula. That same fellow soldier who had given him the information about the painlessness of death by burning had told him that St. Ursula was the patron saint of bears and bear leaders – an excusable piece of misinformation based upon the likeness of the Saint’s name to the generic Ursus, meaning bear. When a dead man’s ring provided Tom with the price of Owd Muscovy, he had thanked St. Ursula and adopted her as his personal Deity. The Holy Trinity and the rest of the Saints seemed, like most respectable people, to be against him and his fellow vagrants, but St. Ursula, whom he visualized as a stout, comfortable, vulgar, tolerant old woman, was firmly on his side. When a cunning idea slid into his head, it came direct from her; any trick he played had her nudging connivance; any luck that came his way was her work. She did not, like the rest of them, set a poor man any impossible standard of virtue. She made no demands. She entirely understood that he had meant Kate no harm and that it had been necessary to lie about the burns on his hands and face. Proof of her understanding and partnership was there, concrete, indisputable. Look how he had been rewarded!

  By April of the next year Pert Tom had some vague conception of just how full and rich his reward was to be, and it occurred to him for the first time, that he should make a gesture of recognition towards this Saint who had been so overwhelmingly generous to him. So when, with the spring, the fresh tide of pilgrims and tumblers and minstrels and vagrants came pouring into Baildon, he began to look out for an image seller, and before long found one.

  The image seller was of grave, almost priestly mien. He carried a tray of meticulously fashioned, beautifully coloured little images and a box of holy relics. He wore a hat with cockle-shells which indicated – in his case falsely – that he had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and his box contained, amongst other things a sliver of wood, purporting to be a piece of the true Cross, two thorns from Christ’s crown of mockery, and a two-inch square of St. Veronica’s handkerchief. Most of the figures on the tray were of the Virgin, the rest were of female Saints after whom girl children were named. What parent, having named a daughter Agnes could resist buying for her an image of the Saint, with the lamb at her feet?

  All the figures were made and fired and coloured at a pottery in Wattisfield, where clay had been dug and worked in Roman times, and they were all made by one old man, who, though he worked quickly enough to keep four salesmen on the road from April to September as well as supplying two settled dealers, one in Norwich and one in Walsingham, never turned out anything shoddy or slapdash. True, the colours of the Saints’ garments were a little gaudy, customers liked them that way, but the tiny faces were virginal and saintly, pearly-pale and wearing one of two expressions, gently smiling or gently sorrowful.

  On this bright April morning, Pert Tom, now a gentleman of leisure, with money in his pocket, halted and looked over the image-seller’s stock. He would know his Saint when he saw her, buxom, red-faced, her interest identified by a bear, or perhaps a goad, spiked collar or muzzle. There was no St. Ursula; the old man at Wattisfield knew his business; little girls in that district were named Catherine, Ethelred, Winifred, Edith, Agnes, Elizabeth.

  ‘You ain’t got what I want,’ Tom said reproachfully.

  ‘And who was you wanting?’

  ‘St. Ursula.’

  ‘Here y’are.’ He proffered a St. Ethelreda with her daisy emblem.

  ‘That ain’t my St. Ursula. She’d hev a bear.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A bear. Growler. Got a bit of flesh on her bones too.’

  ‘Oh! That one! Sold the last a day or two back. Great demand. Bring you good health, good luck. Tell you what, I’ll bring one on my next round. I’ll be back here for the Lammas Fair. You live here?’

  He must ask that, for an unpopular outlandish Saint, with a bear, would be quite unsaleable, and Pert Tom, though he had now been settled for five months and looked like being settled for the rest of his life, still had a vagrant look, something of the roadster about him.

  ‘I live here. All right. I’ll look out for you Lammas time.’

  There must be some special interest, something extra behind such choosiness, and it might be open to exploitation.

  ‘Of course, if you liked and was prepared to pay for it, I could hev her made with a bit of genuine relic to it – strand of her own real hair or something. Only that’d cost you, naturally.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two shillings,’ said the image seller tentatively, ready to abate the price should this odd customer flinch.

  ‘I could manage that. But I want her proper, bear and all. Not one of them poor peaked looking things.’

  ‘You should mind your tongue, remembering who these are. And if you want the hair then you’ll have to pay half down.’

  Tom paid, calling upon St. Ursula as he did so, to witness how heart-felt was his gratitude that he should take such a risk.

  Weeks after, on the morning of the Lammas Fair, he took delivery of his order with loud complaints.

  The old man in Wattisfield, who was a dedicated artist, had disliked being given definite orders; he had protested that though he knew more about the Saints than any bishop alive he had never heard of a St. Ursula who had dealings with bears. There was only one St. Ursula, a virgin, who with eleven hundred other virgins, had been martyred at a place called Cologne by some people called Huns. A virgin saint. And virgin saints were all slender, pearly pale, yellow haired, gently smiling or gently grave. He’d been making them for years and he knew. ‘Flesh on her bones,’ the very thought was a heresy.

  ‘But master, I told him two shillings and he paid one down. I promised him real hair.’

  Even the artist agreed that such a customer merited some consideration. But when it came to the point he could not bring himself to sacrifice his artistic integrity to the extent of making a Saint as buxom as a washerwoman. He made a solid looking brown bear to crouch at the hem of the blue robe and the inclusion of a flaxen curl cut from the head of his youngest grand-daughter cost him no twinge of conscience at all. If people were such
fools as to believe that their silver could buy hair from the head of a woman dead and buried for hundreds of years they deserved to be cheated. What could not be cheated or ever would be, was his own standard of workmanship.

  ‘Poor starved-looking thing! But for the bear I shouldn’t’ve known her,’ said Tom, handing over his money grudgingly.

  Still, there it was, he had bought the best that money could buy and St. Ursula, who had understood so much, would understand that the false representation was not his fault.

  He carried the little image home and set it on a shelf in the room that was his, the first room that he had ever been able to call his own.

  ‘Set you there,’ he said, ‘and enjoy all you was so kind as to give me.’

  He thought of how, in the next dark winter, when the snow fell and the mud lay thick in the roads, the flames would leap on the hearthstone and the howling wind would drop back baffled by the thick walls and the stout shutters, by the heavy door and deep thatch of the house that was already known as the Old Vine.

  No member of any Guild had laid a finger on the house. Martin had planned it and done much of the work, the rest had been done by unemployables like Peg-Leg and Dummy. The monks’ Old Vineyard lay outside the town walls where the Guild rules did not hold.

  It was a small house, two tiny rooms and a kitchen, but there was as much sound timber in it as in many three times the size. The walls were made of oaken posts, planted at eighteen-inch intervals. Smaller beams were set aslant, joining the bottom of the one post to the top of the next, and the triangles thus formed were divided again, horizontally. The spaces were filled in with laths and the whole plastered over, once on the inside and twice on the outside. A brick chimney in the centre carried the smoke from both rooms and from the kitchen hearth.

  ‘We’ll have our own fire,’ Martin had said, already aware that although he had bonded himself for life to the bear leader his enforced constant company would be intolerable. All that he had, all that he intended to have in the future, he was prepared to share with Tom, who had tried to save Kate, and with Old Agnes, who had tried to ease his hour of misery, but his fire and his bed he must have to himself.