by Norah Lofts
You might have imagined that a man who set such high store by work would have been a hard task-master to his son. Nothing was farther from the truth. Mother had said that Richard was under his father’s thumb, but it was a most gentle, kindly thumb. ‘Leave that to me, boy,’ or ‘I’ll see to it,’ were words constantly on his lips.
All through that first autumn of my married life Richard and I just frivoled the time away. We took long rides, went to Bywater – where I saw the sea for the first time, and to Walsingham, and Colchester, Lavenham, Melford, Sudbury and Clare. Summer died slowly that year and in the fine warm weather the roads were busy with pilgrims and merchants and the people who made their living by amusing them. These last, the minstrels and tumblers and jugglers had a fascination for Richard; he would watch them for hours, even make a special journey in the hope of catching up with some particularly pleasing performer again, and seemed actually to envy them. Once he said,
‘Not to be tied to any place … don’t you think that would be pleasant? I’ve often thought that I should like to take my lute and just set out.’
‘You play well enough. But it must be a hard life, especially in winter. And not being tied to any place means not belonging anywhere. I know. I spent my childhood moving from place to place. I hated it. I always had to leave something behind.’ I told him how, once, at Rivington, I had almost tamed a wild cat out of the woods; he was so pretty, striped tawny and grey, with tawny eyes. We must have stayed there for some time, because I had got him to the point where he would come when I called – if I waited long enough, and take meat from my hand though he never would let me stroke him. At another place I had made a little garden; I’d planted gilly-flower seeds and meant to make some gilly-flower water and scent myself all over. We moved on when the little green plants were two inches high.
‘Poor Anne,’ Richard said. ‘You’ve always wanted to settle. I’ve always wanted to get away.’
‘From what?’
‘Ah. That I can’t tell you. It’s something that comes over me. I sit at the table sometimes and think there we are and here we shall be next year and next and next and I feel as though I were stifling. Then I think – If only I could take my lute and go, gather a crowd and play and play.’
For a moment he looked unlike himself, wild, altered, as though the wind were blowing through him, as though he could hear the music he dreamed of making. I felt left out, left behind.
‘It’s silly. I should hate it really, sleeping in a ditch or under a haystack.’
‘And rough company. And not enough to eat.’
One place where we rode often, was of course, Minsham. Mother, on my first visit had contented herself with asking was all well with me and I told her everything was wonderfully well. The second and third time she asked no questions, but on the fourth, I remember it well, it was in October, and Richard had gone out to join Father and Isabel in beating the walnut tree, Mother said,
‘You’ve not quickened yet?’
‘Two months… no three…Three months is not long.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No’; but her voice said the opposite. ‘But you should lose no time. You know what they say, and truly – For every year over sixteen there’s an hour’s labour with the first. You were sixteen last February. I bore my first a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday – they say women forget, but I remember it to this day, and I would not have you go through that and the extra hour. Get your first with all possible speed – the rest comes easy.’
‘It’s not a thing I can order.’
‘You shouldn’t ride so much. We are pleased to see you.… But unless compelled no married woman should set foot in stirrup for a year. It’s like junket – it will never set if you keep stirring.’
That evening, riding home, I was thoughtful. Once, on one of my visits I had been present at a birth. One of my Aunt Astallon’s attendants had had a clandestine love affair and had, up to the last minute, concealed her state, wearing a heavily pleated houpplard and joking about getting so fat. In the night, in the dormitory where six of us lay, her hour had come upon her, and nine hours later she was delivered. I could hear her screams still. And she was … how old? Getting on. Twenty-five perhaps. Yes, it worked out.
In the night, in the bed I said,
‘Are you afraid of hurting me? Is that it? Darling, pain now will spare me later. Hurt me. I want to be hurt.’
But we ended, as we always had, with me comforting him, pretending, pretending. Never mind. Next time. All will be well.
I still rode – though the days drew in; but I made excuses not to ride Minsham way, and I did not have to face Mother again until Christmas, when, at Master Reed’s invitation, she and Father and Isabel rode in to keep the Feast with us. They stayed four days, and we had a right merry time and I managed never to be alone with Mother long enough for her to ask me awkward questions. However, my father, who had remembered his first conversation with Richard – about hawks and hawking – had procured for him, as a Christmas gift, a young eyas tiercel which was to be trained, and eventually flown at Minsham.
‘A lot of riding for you,’ Father said. ‘Because if you want him to answer your whistle you must give him his beet as often as possible and whistle as you do it.’
Mother gave me what she no doubt thought was a subtle, sly look, a grimace that would have been noticeable a street’s width away. I nodded to show that I understood.
So the new year opened for me with a most embarrassing problem. Richard was riding out to Minsham twice a week, and always expected me, unless the weather was very foul, to go with him. And if I did Mother would accuse me of stirring the junket. Under the strain of making silly excuses, either to one or the other, I became bad tempered. His lute first, now his hawk I’d think to myself, he really never wanted a wife at all!
Once that thought had entered my head I never completely got rid of it again. Richard had told me how he had first seen me – at the time when his father brought the blue cloth; how he had fallen in love with me then and dreamed of me ever since. When I heard that story first I thought it was romantic, now, looking at it in the light of later knowledge I had a suspicion that perhaps he would have been content to let it stay a dream, just as he was content to dream about that other unlikely thing, being a wandering minstrel. He liked the idea of being in love, he liked my company, perhaps (may God forgive me the unkindness of this thought) the knowledge of my better birth and station added to the romantic idea; what he didn’t want, and had no need of was a real flesh and blood woman in his bed.
I rode out with him once during January at the time of the month when even Mother could not complain of my being in the saddle. Then, despite all his pleadings I made excuses until the next time the moon ruled my blood. That time, as she greeted me, Mother said, ‘What again!’
The ill humour into which this remark threw me was not improved by the tone of her conversation throughout my visit. Had I been eating green apples? Where, I retorted, would I find green apples in February? Don’t sit on grass. Lately, I snapped, there had been little temptation to do so.
‘You are so irritable,’ she said, ‘that I wonder if you are not already pregnant and deceiving me. Is that so?’
I was tempted to nod and so end it, but I had no wish to complicate matters even more, so I shook my head. She then went on to tell me two more helpful things. I should steep a pound of red meat in water, let it soak overnight, then squeeze it and drink the juice. And I should borrow a shift or a petticoat from a woman lately brought to bed, wear it without washing it for a month, then return it to her with a present of a new garment, red in colour.
‘What an old wives’ tale!’ I said.
‘Old wives are usually mothers and their tales should be heeded,’ she replied.
That afternoon, as we rode home, it began to rain and as soon as we arrived went up to our room to throw off our wet clothes. Flinging my soaked hood on the floor I said angrily.
‘It’ll be a long
time before I go to Minsham again!’
‘Why, sweetheart? I thought you liked to go.’
Suddenly everything boiled up in me.
‘How can you be so stupid and blind,’ I shouted at him. Then I began to cry, and mixed up with the sobs and the blubberings it all came out, Mother’s questions and admonitions, my evasions and pretences, my suspicions that he wanted a sweetheart but not a wife, everything, everything.
I had flung myself down on the bed, burrowing my face into the pillow and when I had said everything I knew that I had said too much. I lifted my head a little and looked at him. I was frightened. He had the wild look on him and had gone as white as chalk. Now I had thrown away what I had had, a loving and pleasant companion, I thought.
He said, ‘I’ll show you.’
And there, amongst the wet clothes and the messed bedclothes, in the fading light of the February afternoon, I lost my virginity at last.
III
Now for me no more riding horse-back; no green apples; no sitting on grass; retching and revolted I gulped down pints of red meat juice, and when, early in June one of the workmen’s wives in the huts beyond the stables was brought to bed I borrowed her filthy petticoat and wore it, flea-ridden as it was and returned it, in July with a fine red woolsey cloak. It all availed me nothing; the August moon ruled me, this year as last.
All this was my private concern. Around me things moved on. Master Reed had taken another stride forward, and was building again. His new notion was to bring over some Flemish weavers to ply their craft in Baildon.
The Flemings were, at this time, an unhappy people, subject to this rule and that as the fortune of war decided. Richard had told me how, on one of his visits to the Low Countries he had seen between three and four hundred people, men, women and children, being herded along the roads, like animals being taken to market. Their ruler of the moment, the Emperor, or the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy – I was never clear on that point – had decided that one town was too full of people and another too empty, so they were arbitrarily chosen and made to move.
With such circumstances prevailing in their home country Flemings were always willing to take service elsewhere. The best hired mercenaries were always Flemings, ‘routiers’ they were called. And the best craftsmen, the weavers, were unsettled too. Master Reed, who at set intervals made the voyage in one of his ships and visited his warehouse in Amsterdam, had engaged eight skilled men to come to Baildon and ply their craft.
A new building was reared, running out at an angle from the main house. The upper floor, very stoutly built to sustain the weight and thud of the looms, was to be the weaving shed; below it the weavers, all single young men, were to live. The weaving shed was a unique structure in that its walls were almost all window. The glass was very costly but Master Reed was sure that within four years he would have reimbursed himself. There would be no duty to pay on the home-woven stuff and he reckoned that he could sell it so cheaply that he would undercut everybody else.
‘I began’, he said once, ‘by doing smith work cheap. Then I offered cheap stabling. And when I went into the wool trade I was still cheap; I gave a little more for the raw fleeces and sold the baled wool for a little less. Now I hope to sell good cloth, cheap.’
I think that was the longest speech I ever heard him make.
The building was finished and the Flemings arrived in June – while I was wearing that horrible petticoat and trying to scratch myself without being noticed. And all through July and August Master Reed and Richard were dealing with the problem of language. Master Reed had learned enough to make himself understood in Amsterdam; Richard knew rather more, he had been inland as far as Bruges and being young had a more pliable mind. But the Flemings were difficult; they worked very well and needed little instruction or guidance so long as they were at their looms, trouble began when they took their feet from the treadles. They made straight for the town then, and in the town they were foreigners, everything they did suspect and resented; this they could not, or would not understand, so fights took place for the most trivial reasons or for no reason at all. They were woman hungry, and since no respectable females would have anything to do with them they fell into the hands of whores and harpies who cheated and robbed them. It would all have been different and easier had Master Reed been popular in Baildon; but just as he hated all the townspeople, they hated him and took pleasure in dealing him a knock through the foreigners he had imported. Once they were all inside the town wall when the gates were locked for the night and then arrested for being vagrants. By the end of August Master Reed was talking of finding someone capable of speaking to them in their own tongue and controlling them.
‘Some old routier,’ Richard said, ‘with a good hard hand. They’d understand that.’
‘And where would you find one, except on the road, a broken-down ne’er-do-well?’ Master Reed said.
Anxious to be helpful I said to Richard, ‘My father might know of one, or my brother. Mention it next time you are at Minsham.’
He still rode out there two or three times a week and I always sent a present of some kind, with some kind of excuse – we’d killed a pig and were glutted with pork, or this was a cake I’d made myself, or this was one of the first pieces of cloth from the Baildon loom. I did not go myself. Now that all was well between Richard and me I could send a downright frank message – ‘Tell Mother to remember the junket,’ I could say. And he could laugh.
Half-way through September he came back from Minsham with two pieces of news. One was that Isabel was to go to stay with Aunt Astallon and the other was that as soon as she had gone Mother was coming to see me; she intended to stay two nights in Baildon at least.
‘Is Father coming too?’
‘No. Your mother only. She said she had business to do.’
I sighed. What her business might be I could not guess; one thing was sure, she would find time to go into mine. Still, I braced myself. I was no longer playing at being married. Richard and I were married and in that assurance I felt I could face her.
She arrived riding the better horse of the two, the one Father usually rode and when I had greeted her I asked,
‘What happened to Mag?’
‘I’m going farther afield,’ she said, mysteriously. ‘I was on my knees the other night, with my rosary in my hands and the Blessed Virgin herself put a thought into my mind.’
I had a feeling that this concerned me, so I said, with levity,
‘That poor old Mag should be put to pasture?’
Dear Mother; she laughed.
‘No. That we should go to St. Edmundsbury.’
‘What for?’
‘Anne, you have now been married for more than a year. And you’ve been a good girl and followed my instructions. The time has come when nothing but a visit to St. Petronella can help us.’
‘St. Petronella? I never heard of her.’
‘Nor I, until I consulted the priest. Now there’s a thing you never thought to do, I’ll warrant.’ She looked at me gaily. ‘St. Petronella is the one for us. And how fortunate that she is so near.’
We had the solar to ourselves; and while Mother refreshed herself she told me all that she had learned from the priest.
St. Petronella, in her lifetime had been a fish-gutter at Talmont in France, and in a quarrel with a fellow worker had been so slashed about the face that no man could look on her without a shudder. So her longing for children was never gratified and when, after a long and holy life she died and was beatified she gave special notice to the prayers of barren women.
About a hundred years before I was born a Franciscan Friar found his way to St. Edmundsbury and was concerned by the number of lepers living in destitution outside the town. He wished to help them, but had no money, nothing but faith and his own resourcefulness. He made a cross of elm wood and carried it, preaching and begging as he went, all the way to Le Mans where he laid it on St. Petronella’s shrine amongst all the glittering votive an
d thank-offerings that covered it. He prayed that some virtue might pass into the wood. Then he carried it back and announced that virtue had passed into it. He set it up under an arch of rough stones and it had become a place of pilgrimage for childless women. As long as he lived he used the income of the shrine for the relief of lepers and when he died the Abbey took over the shrine and built a little house for the lepers.
All this Mother told me as she drank some ale and ate cake in the solar. I listened and thanked her for her interest and concern for me. Once I had resented her questions and advice, but now it was different. Nevertheless, when she said,
‘We’ll go there, together, tomorrow,’ I protested.
‘What excuse can we give?’
‘Why excuse? You can give your real reason.’
‘It is a matter that is never mentioned, not even between Richard and me. As for his father…’
‘Nonsense! Not to mention a thing is not to say it does not exist. I’ll warrant that Richard and his father have watched you with eyes as keen as mine, and been as greatly disappointed.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
‘Never mind, we are doing all that we can. And the priest assured me that the Saint had worked some wondrous miracles.’
I announced – brusquely because I was embarrassed – that on the morrow Mother and I intended to ride to St. Edmundsbury. Richard put out his hand and squeezed mine, understandingly. Master Reed looked at me sombrely out of his sad eyes and presently, when we chanced to be alone for a moment, said to me,
‘Anne, I know the purpose of your journey, and I wish you well. But…’ He hesitated and then said, jerkily, the words coming out of him in a rush, ‘Don’t count too much upon it. Miracles …’ he paused again and looked down at his lame leg and the thick-soled shoe, ‘They work in a queer twisted way,’ he said. ‘And I can’t for the life of me see how what you’re wanting could be other than straightforward. And I don’t believe they can be that way. Miracles I mean.’ He touched my shoulder and said, ‘Perhaps your faith is greater.’