by Norah Lofts
‘You didn’t like Richard Reed?’
‘There’s nothing about him to like or dislike. Truly, Anne, I’d be more at ease if you were… if it was a question of marrying the father, old as he is.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s a man. There’s something about him. You could see that he was being civil, for the boy’s sake; he wanted us to take to the idea and know you’d be… well looked after. But in his heart, he didn’t care; he thinks he’s doing us a favour!’ This, which she should have mentioned with irritated scorn, she brought out as though it were admirable. ‘The boy’s grown up in his shadow, pampered, made much of, never had to shift for himself. You’d have the upper hand of him in no time.’
I thought what an astonishing thing to say – in that complaining manner!
‘Would that be so bad?’
She flung something into the cupboard and turned round.
‘Yes. No woman can be happy with a man she can master.’
I suppose what I thought showed plain on my face.
‘Ah, but we weren’t always this way,’ she cried. ‘Not this way at all. Why, I’ve sat amongst the other women and looked down as Blanchefleur rode by and he’d look up and I’d go hot and cold and almost choke with pride because I belonged to him and he was the strongest, boldest….’ She gave a little shiver and hugged herself with her arms. ‘You were nearly born on the road. We were at Rivington and he said, “I’m off to Beauclaire in the morning”. Just like that, and I knew I’d be in the straw next day or the one after, and I knew that if I let him go alone there were plenty at Beauclaire that would be glad to see him ride in by himself. So I said, “I’m coming too”. And he said, “D’you think you’ll hold together so far?” And I said, “I shall hold together so long as I have to”. And I did. And he liked me the better for it. That was the time Lady Warwick threw him her glove – but he wore mine for all to see.’
There was something, even after all those years – so triumphant in her voice that it made me feel as I sometimes did when trumpets blew. She spoke of what I understood; I had so often sat in the humble back seats of the Ladies’ Gallery and watched the knights ride by saluting the ladies who threw them favours. I’d dreamed of one day having a knight of my own…
I put that thought away.
‘Richard has been under his father’s thumb,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t judge from one visit.’
‘It isn’t in any way what I want for you, or what you should have. Anne, if you’ll try once more, I’ll persuade your father to sell Jess and you shall have a brand new gown.’
‘I will marry Richard Reed and have two new gowns.’
How long these arguments and this indecision would have lasted I do not know. My Uncle Bowdegrave, staying at Rushbrooke, helped to clinch the matter by, for once, remembering his poor relatives and sending us a haunch of venison.
Mother looked at it calculatingly and said,
‘Now, if we were proceeding with this business, we could ask the Reeds to supper. It won’t keep, so we must make up our minds.’
‘You know mine,’ I said.
‘And mine.’ That was Father, speaking quite firmly.
‘Well, only theVirgin knows when next I shall have meat in the house for five people. I think you’re being a stubborn, hasty, foolish girl and I only hope you won’t live to regret it.’
So she capitulated and Richard and I met.
II
Within a few minutes of our meeting I was certain that Mother’s slighting remarks about Richard were due to prejudice, and, perhaps a little to jealousy. He was such a very handsome young man, and so elegant, with a charming smile and the nicest manners in the world. I think my heart went out to him at once, just as I thought that if only he’d had breeding how Mother would have praised him, and said I was lucky. And what is breeding after all? Largely a matter of money and land and staying in one place long enough to establish a name and a family; or pleasing the King and getting some honour conferred on you. I’ll warrant that if Richard could have gone to Westminster, calling himself by some Norman French name and played his lute he would have pleased the King so much that he would have been knighted straight away.
Old Master Reed was lame of one leg and had grown crooked as well as solid with the years; his face was weathered and deeply lined, he looked as though he had been too busy all his life to take much pleasure in anything. Beside his father Richard looked like a young larch side by side with a gnarled old oak.
The supper party was much easier and merrier than I had expected, largely, I think, because Father, when Mother was worrying about having only the one dish, had said,
‘There are times when wine counts for more than food.’
‘This is one of them – and we have no wine.’
‘I’ll ride over to Ockley and borrow some.’
‘Don’t say for what reason. Nothing is settled yet.’
Sir Stephen Fennel, bless his heart, gave Father some good Rhenish, which made everyone cheerful and un-embarrassed; even Mother so far relented as to behave as if Richard were a very eligible suitor who must be charmed. After supper she bade me fetch my lute and play a little. A little is what I played, just as I danced a little, played Nobbin a little, embroidered a little. I had no ear and no talent, but I had mastered four or five pleasing little tunes.
While I played Richard watched me, and I could see that he loved me. I remembered something I had forgotten – Father saying some words about Richard having seen me and would look at no other girl. That had a smack of romance to it, like a minstrel’s tales, and as I played I looked back at him under my lashes. Presently he rose and crossed the hall and sat down by my feet, and at the end of my last tune took the lute from me and said,
‘Allow me now to play for you, Mistress Anne.’
I had never, anywhere, heard anyone play like that. It wasn’t just music, it was something more, like being under a spell, so that when it ended you sighed and your spirit settled back into your body again, a little painfully. You could have loved him just for the way he played the lute.
He ended his special music and gave us back our souls and then said,
‘Now the tune that everyone knows. Will you sing?’
He struck up ‘The Pleasant Month of May’ and we all began to sing. Under cover of it, Richard said to me,
‘I saw you once. I thought you were the most lovely lady in the world. Will they let you marry me?’
‘They must. They shall. Or I will be a nun.’
Afterwards, when more of the wine was being served with some little saffron cakes, Mother came to me and said,
‘Well. Are you still of the same mind? The old man is pestering your father for an answer.’
I could hardly speak for the fullness of my heart. I had made my choice in a blind rage against the way the world had used me, and I had picked this jewel.
After that it was settled, and Mother began seizing every opportunity to send messages to every branch of the family. I could imagine, in all those distant places, relatives of all degrees putting their heads together and agreeing that at last my parents had come to their senses and done something suitable to their estate. In their relief they all sent me gifts of great generosity. Ironically, Mother’s remark about my Aunt Astallon giving me a new gown, proved to be prophecy for she sent me enough of the best French velvet for a wedding dress; that inclined me to think that she had been dreading my next visit almost as much as I did. With the gifts came excuses for not making the journeys to bring the families to the wedding, and that was just as well; but the Fortescue cousin in whose household my brother Godfrey languished, gave him permission to ride home – hoping no doubt that the wool-chandler had a daughter. When Godfrey did arrive he was leading a pretty grey palfrey, my present from that branch of the family.
The Reeds had no relatives at all, and Master Reed, talking over the wedding with Mother, said that he wanted nobody from Baildon at his son’s wedding. But he professed
himself willing to provide a feast, so the few guests we had – mainly friends of Father’s, who came to see what the poor fellow could find to spread on his board, were vastly and pleasantly surprised.
Martin wore mulberry-coloured velvet, the tunic edged with fur, and the one thing that marred my day was to hear two old men, hawking friends of Father’s, muttering about it.
‘In my young days nobody less than a knight could wear miniver; and if he tried to it was ripped off and sold for the benefit of the poor.’
‘Times change.’
‘So they do, and not for the better.’
I hated them for thinking the old days, when someone like Richard mustn’t wear miniver fur even if he could afford it, were better than these more enlightened times.
After the feasting was done, Richard, his father and I rode to Baildon. I was thankful that owing to our circumstances there could be no public bedding. During my various visits to my relatives I had assisted at these grossly indecent rites, and I knew that I should find them agonizingly embarrassing. Yet, when we reached the house which I had never yet seen, and stood uneasily in a small solar, most elegantly furnished, and drank a last stoup of wine from the silver cups which Mother had mentioned, I realized that the public bedding ceremony does serve a purpose. The lewd talk, the thrusting of fertility emblems upon the bride, all the jokes and the laughter and the ducking away from those who try to undress the newly married couple, help to break down the reserve between them, and once they are in bed, with the curtains closed, half the work is done.
If even Master Reed had been a little drunken and hearty and slapped Richard on the back and said, as I have heard fathers say, ‘Well boy – to your work!’ that would have helped. But he only looked at us, rather sadly, I thought, and raised his cup and said,
‘I wish you happy.’ And when he had drunk his wine he went away; and we were two strangers, left alone. Then Richard said, as though I were a visitor who had come a great distance,
‘I expect you are tired. Come.’
He did take my hand, however, as we climbed the stairs and still holding it he led me into a room far more comfortable than any I had ever slept in, for even at Beauclaire, being young and a poor relation I had always shared one of the worst rooms. He pulled on my hand a little, so that we stood close, and he put his face to mine. We were cheek to cheek.
‘You belong to me. I never dreamed it could happen.’ There was a kind of exultation in his voice, but awe as well. I realized that he was as nervous as I was myself.
‘I belong to you and you belong to me,’ I said. ‘Are you happy?’
‘So happy that I am frightened.’
I thought that a strange thing to say, but very touching, too. I put up my hand and pressed it against the other side of his head, forcing our faces closer.
‘There is nothing to be frightened about. And if there were it is I who should be frightened,’ I said that rallyingly.
He said, almost in a whisper, ‘I would never do anything to hurt you. Never.’
Was it, I wonder, the fear of hurting me that made him fail? He loved me, I loved him, we were both sound and young.… But it was no good.
It was an odd circumstance that I, who at Minsham had been so clear-sighted, so contemptuous of all pretence, should change my nature with my name, and whole-heartedly begin to play a game of make-believe. I had not realized that I was so truly the daughter of my parents; here was I, pretending that all was well, pretending that I was a properly married woman, just as Mother always pretended that some day something would happen to restore our fortunes, and Father pretended he was a landed gentleman. I discovered another thing about myself too, I was hotly passionate. There were times when I felt that out of my own eagerness I could make it happen. This time! This time! I would think. Now! Now! Poor Richard, groaning and sweating, as puzzled as I was myself, would eventually fall asleep, and then I would cry, softly, secretly, and rather ashamed. I would accuse myself of being ungrateful, too; for apart from this one thing my new life was wonderful, better than I had ever imagined life could be.
The sheer comfort we enjoyed was a lasting joy and an amazement. People might laugh and sneer about merchants and their new money; they knew how to live, how to build and how to furnish. There was more warmth and softness at the Old Vine than in Abhurst, Beauclaire and Rivington rolled into one. As for Minsham Old Hall, I was soon wondering how I had endured the stone floor, the unglazed windows, the draughts that stirred your hair even as you sat by the hearth.
The Old Vine was really two houses, divided by a wide cobbled passage which was entered by a doorway, big enough and high enough, when it was fully open, to allow a pack pony loaded, to trot in. On the right of this passage was that part of the house which Master Reed had built first and lived in when he was starting his business. Richard took me over it and showed me how it had been. His father had had one room, his Uncle Tom the other, and there had been a kitchen for cooking and that was all. After some years, rooms had been built above all these apartments. One of them had been the room in which Richard had learned his lessons, he said.
Because I loved him, everything about him, back to when he was very young, was interesting to me, and when he pointed to the door and told me that, I was interested to see the room.
‘The servants sleep there now. You don’t want to look in there,’ he said.
‘I think you hated your lessons,’ I said, teasingly.
‘No. After a week I liked my lessons, but I hated my master. Sometimes even now, I dream –’
‘Oh, so do I. My Aunt Bowdegrave, teaching me to dance, and saying I had two left feet and would never find a husband…’ I cut that off sharply and said, ‘I was ten years old.’ Something that I could never find a name for had made me withhold from Richard all the story of my humiliating youth. I wanted him to desire me, so I must always seem to have been desired. ‘Little she knew!’ I said gaily.
‘In those days I used to sleep here,’ Richard said, moving to the other door. ‘When Father made the office downstairs, Uncle Tom moved up. He’s not my real uncle, but I still call him that. He was Father’s partner once. He’s bedridden now and a bit…’ He tapped his head and made a face. ‘But if you like to see him.’
‘I want to see everything.’
Richard opened the door and said,
‘Uncle Tom. I’ve brought you a visitor.’
The old man in the bed must once have been big and stout, he had shrunken and the flesh hung on his bones in heavy folds There was a musty, old-man smell in the room, and, added to it another, even less pleasant, which, as I moved towards the bed I knew came from a great, badly-cured bear skin which lay across the foot of the bed.
Uncle Tom’s eyes were bleary and his stare vague at first but when I was near enough, something quickened in them and he grinned. I’d seen his like before, hobbling old dotards until they catch you behind the screen or in a lonely passage.
‘A pretty one, too. Cure for sore eyes, you are, little mistress.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and smiled and for fun bobbed him a curtsey.
‘Aye, and better still, saucy.’
‘Anne is my wife,’ Richard said, a trifle stiffly I thought.
‘Your wife, eh?’ That seemed to take a little while to sink in. Then he said, ‘You’re lucky Dick; allust hev bin. Right from the first. Like your Dad. Well…’ he looked me up and down and I had a sudden, disconcerting certainty that he knew about us. This going over the house took place on my second or third day there and the thing was, naturally, still raw and tender, in the forefront of my mind. ‘See you do right by her,’ Uncle Tom said. ‘Make the most of your chance while you can. You shrivel and dry up afore you know where you are.’
Richard took hold of my elbow and said, ‘Come along.’
That was the old part of the house.
On the other side of the central passage the rooms were larger and higher. There was the solar, with the window which looked out int
o a garden, with a plot for herbs, and some fruit trees and roses. Behind the solar was a dining-hall, where, every day, at dinner and supper, we and several of the workmen and apprentices sat down together. Except that it lacked a dais it was like the hall of a great house. Richard, his father and I sat at a solid oak table which was never moved; the rest had trestles and boards which could be set up or taken down according to the number of places required. The food served here was good and plentiful and to me, delicious; but there were always other dishes, cakes, fruits and sweetmeats, in the livery cupboard of the solar.
Above the solar and dining-hall were the bedrooms of the family.
Across the yard were stables and lofts, the shed where wool was stored, the ‘floors’ where the fleeces were picked over. There was a smithy, a cow byre, a pigsty and a hen roost, a round house for pigeons and a pond. Thirty years ago, Richard said, when his father had started, there had been nothing at all, just a field full of old vine stumps. It seemed to me a lot to have built up and set working in thirty years, but that was not all; Master Reed had two ships on the sea, a warehouse in Amsterdam, and, of course, the sheep run at Minsham. He would have been justified in being very proud of his achievement, but I never saw him give any sign of being so. Except that he loved Richard, was kind to me, and apparently faithful to his old partner, he showed very few signs of any emotions; he was never angry, he never laughed, he never seemed to be in a hurry and he was never ill. Richard said that he was a strict, but just employer. It took me a little time to learn that his settled scowl, and silence and somber looks were not due to ill-humour, and to the end I was always disproportionately pleased if I could coax a smile from him. I often felt a little sorry for him; he worked so hard, every day, from dawn to dusk, just, it seemed, for the sake of working; rather like an old horse at a mill wheel or a well, which will go round and round, plodding at the same pace, whether it is being driven or not.