The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  ‘So then, Nicholas, she said, “Daren’t is a strange word to use to me. What have I to fear? That you remove her from this house? I assure you I could fill her place ten times over and with girls well-dowered.” Dowered is a word I hate the sound of. Before she could toddle it was dower, dower, dower. Hearing the word then, on top of all else, maddened me. I said, “Then, if you’ve nothing to fear why daren’t you let me see her?” And she said,“If you suspect me of hiding her in this house, search it. It is unusual to make a man free of the house, but if it will set your mind at rest, you may have my permission to go anywhere and conduct your search.” And I thought to myself, there’s been ample time for that woman at the door to carry warning and have the girl hidden somewhere. So I said,“I thank you, Madam. That I will do.” And I did.’

  He drained the mug and set it aside and began to twist his hands together. He had big hands, calloused and seamed with ingrained dirt which no amount of scouring would ever remove; but they were oddly skilful; he could splice a broken thread on a loom as neatly and delicately as any of the weaver who made the care of their hands an excuse for never handling a tool. Now he moved his hands as if he were trying to wrench out his fingers one by one.

  ‘I went everywhere, not once only, twice, three times, turning back in my tracks in case they had Maude on the move. My boy, if she’d been the size of a bobbin I couldn’t have missed her. Dorter, storeroom, chapel, cellar, everywhere. And it all so poor; I swear our bed in Squatters’ Row was softer and warmer than any in that house; and as for their storeroom, it was pitiable, braxy mutton and weevilly flour such as I wouldn’t offer any seaman of mine to eat. And in the end back I was in the little cold room and she waiting for me, saying “And now will you perhaps accuse me of spiriting the girl away?” Then she said she’d tell me what she would have at first if I had asked her. According to her the singing at Clevely is an offence to the ear and an insult to God, so Maude and one other – the only ones that can carry a tune – are sent to Ramsey to learn better and come back and teach the rest.’

  ‘Enough to make any man angry,’ I said. ‘But why blame yourself? Your suspicion might have been correct. You acted rightly.’

  He moved one eyebrow.

  ‘You think so? I felt all in the wrong. And I apologized. She took advantage of that. She talked about Clevely, all the improvements that must be made; how in the past it had not been a nunnery in the real sense of the word, just a place where women lived and worked together and went to chapel when the milking was done or the butter made. She’s going to alter all that; and her great need is money. Five pounds a year, she was good enough to say, was generous enough when Maude lodged there and worked to earn her keep, but since then, as I, a business man should know, money had lost some value and the noble was worth but six shillings nowadays. She talked to me like a huckster. What did I propose to do for Maude when she took her vows? And there’s Maude thinking that all the world outside has gone awry through love of money. And me, that always called a dower a bait for knaves. I’d have done better, Nicholas, to have sent her to Beauclaire with the promise of a dower on a tag about her neck. A knave would at least have seen that the bed he had to share with her was soft and warm.’

  ‘What did you promise?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m not that much of a fool. I tell you, we bargained like a couple of stockfishmongers. I said I wanted Maude to come home and see the state her mother was in, and I wanted one last good talk. Then, I said, if I could be sure that her mind was made up and no hope for it, I’d give a dowry they’d talk about for years. And so I will, but I must be sure first. She said that was fair enough and Maude will come home as soon as she’s back from Ramsey.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Oh, that depends on the singing.’ His voice took on a sardonic note and then changed. ‘And she did say one other thing, whether to set much store by it or not, I don’t know. She said the visit to Ramsey would do Maude good, aside from the music, to let her see a properly conducted house, because that was how Clevely would be in future and discipline must be accepted meekly. That sounded to me a bit … but there, they have such a way of wrapping things up, half the time they mean something other than you’d think.

  He shuddered suddenly and held out his hands to the fire.

  In the morning he woke with a cold, of which he made light; the Minsham shepherd, he said, had a much worse one the day before and was out in the snow making a lambing pen. Giving this as an excuse for not keeping to his bed, he sneezed through the day, saying after each bout of sneezing, ‘There, that cleared it.’ He went to bed early with hot brick to his feet and a basin of onion gruel inside him. He’d budged many a cold with such simple remedies.

  This one refused to be budged. It resisted even the curative measure of a day in bed, and by the third day had settled on his chest. He drew his breath with a wheeze and a rattle, and spoke with a hoarse croak. But he held that it was nothing but a cold, he’d had many worse. A linseed poultice was what he needed; surely to goodness somebody in the kitchen could make a linseed plaster.

  The cook made it; and also a concoction of honey, vinegar, horehound and cinnamon, upon whose virtues she was prepared to stake her own.

  I took upon myself the application of the poultices, since, with Phyllis minding Mistress Reed they were short-handed in the kitchen. When I put it on hot that evening for the last time and settled him for the night, he seemed easier, and still most resolutely cheerful. But his cough, a rattling, ineffective effort to clear the clogged rheum from his chest, kept me awake most of the night. Three times I made a fresh plaster, plied him with the mixture, warmed a cup of milk.

  ‘I shall get the physician to you in the morning,’ I said. He made no protest. Surprised and a little frightened by this I thought that perhaps I should fetch the priest, too.

  I wished that that could have been done in a more casual, less ominous way. But the Old Vine was not a house where the priest was a visitor; we had nothing to do with Baildon, our parish was Flaxham St. Giles, and the church, and the priest’s house were three miles away. Sir Andrew, the priest there, was elderly. To send for him was to hint that things were in a bad way.

  I might have spared myself these cogitations, for in the grey dawn of the fourth day, when my master roused from an uneasy restless doze, he stared at me for a moment as though he did not recognize me and then said, his voice more hoarse and weak than ever,

  ‘It’s beat me, my boy. I want the priest. Make my confession and my will at the same time.’

  ‘Sir Andrew?’

  ‘Yes. Send a good horse … pillion.’

  ‘I will. But you mustn’t lose heart, you know. You’ve got a stubborn cold and you can’t throw it off as you did when you were younger. I’ll get the doctor to you, too.’

  He wheezed out something about a waste of time, and something I didn’t quite catch, about a hawthorn tree. Then he coughed and hawked and spoke more clearly for a moment.

  ‘You mustn’t fret. I’ve had my day; and it’s a long time since Kate went.’

  That name, as much as anything, convinced me that he was dying; dying men look back over their lives, they say, back to their very beginnings. And Kate, whoever she was, must have belonged to his youth; I had never heard anyone mention her, though in the yard there were one or two who claimed to remember his wife, ‘a queer body’ who’d never settled down in Baildon, but gone to her own people and then come back to have her baby and died when it was born. Her name was not Kate, I’d heard it, once, I think, and it was outlandish.

  The thought that Martin, my master, was about to die fell on my mind and clove it in halves, like an axe coming down on a billet of wood. On one side there was all concern for my future. He had no heir except a girl in a convent; I understood the business, he trusted me, and liked me. Surely I must be provided for. But he had spoken of giving Maude a dower which would be talked of for years; and if he thought he was dying it would matter very little to him
whether she stayed at Clevely or not. Blood, when the test comes, is thicker than water and I could well imagine him saying that it was all to go to Maude.

  On the other side of my mind there was no material consideration at all. I just realized how much I held him in respect and esteem, how much, whatever happened, I should miss him, quiet, solid and sensible. True I deceived him a little and robbed him a little, sometimes railed at him in my mind for being slow and stubborn and old-fashioned and fussy over details, but I knew his worth; and although his honesty had not made me honest, and his kindness had not made me kind, he had shown me a standard against which I myself and any other man I ever met, would measure very small.

  Having sent for the priest and the doctor and seen the work in the yard begun, I went in and carried up a new poultice and then a piece of clean parchment, the quill and the inkhorn. I looked down at these and thought – Instruments of Fate. A few scratches one way or another and a whole future is settled and sealed. I was tempted to remind him that to leave a fortune to Maude would be to make sure that she stayed in Clevely for life. Without saying much he had limned that new Prioress for me; she would be capable of settling, in the way she wanted it, the shilly-shallying mind of any girl so richly dowered. When it came to the point however I found that the words would not be said. Instead of speaking I fluffed up his pillows, and then went and fetched my own to add to his, so that he was propped almost upright, and seemed to find relief so.

  ‘You’re very good to me,’ he croaked.

  ‘I’ll remind you of those words at Lady Day,’ I said lightly. I drew my wage then. He saw the joke and smiled. But he said,

  ‘I’ve seen my last Lady Day.’

  A pang ran through me, for him, for myself, for all poor people who must, in the end, face the unknown dark. Kings, nobles, clerks and swineherds, all laid level at last, the songs sung, the good meals eaten, the kisses forgotten and done with. A great hunger for life took me. I decided, all in a moment, that I wouldn’t darken another day of my life by hankering for anything; if he doesn’t leave me a farthing, I thought, I’ll still be alive, and young, capable of enjoying myself.

  The priest arrived, red-faced from his ride in the wind, carrying a bag of embroidered linen.

  ‘I am sorry indeed to find you thus,’ he began. Master Reed dismissed me with a glance and I went out, closing the door.

  The woman who cooked for us all caught me on my way out of the house. What, she asked plaintively, should she do about dinner, and supper moreover; it was four days since anybody had given her an order and she’d managed as best she could, with bits of this and that, but now she was at the end. With the mistress gone silly and the master taken to his bed whom could she ask but me. ‘Thass all very sad, but when they come in, all them great hearty men, they ain’t to be put off with sorrowful words and tid-bits.’

  That, I knew, would be the last thing that he would wish. His attitude towards food was extraordinary; very abstemious himself, he was always careful to see that his table was spread with good food and plentiful. Yet the waste of a crumb worried him. I had often noted his incongruity and concluded that he was a man who, in his time, had gone hungry and knew the value of food.

  And now, once again, my severed mind bothered me. By the time dinner was on the table … oh, let us not think of that! Dying can be a long business. They’ll come in hungry; and this is one of the days in their lives, in my life; all of us being rushed along by uncheckable time towards the moment when food will concern, will please us no more.

  ‘You say you’ve been on the makeshift,’ I said. ‘To put it even, what is the thing they like best?’

  ‘Salt beef and dumplings.’ She was beautifully certain about that. ‘But that’ll mean opening a new cask of beef. You say I am to do that?’

  ‘Yes. Open a new.…’ I broke off, hearing overhead the imperative banging of the stick which I had placed by Master Reed’s bedside so that he could summon attention.

  ‘Cask,’ I said, ‘and plenty of dumplings.’ I took the stairs two at a time.

  It was the priest who had done the banging. When I entered he stood there, the stick in his hand. He gave me a sidelong, curiously shamefaced look and then looked down at the carved knob of the stick.

  ‘My hands,’ he said. ‘All knotted with old age and stiffness. It’s as much as I can do to write my name nowadays.’

  And probably, I thought swiftly, as much as he could do at any time. In some places and in some circumstances very little learning was demanded of a man anxious to take orders. And that little, unpractised for thirty or forty years in a country parish, would shrivel to nothing.

  Master Reed, coughing and hawking, said,

  ‘You do the scribing, Nicholas.’

  The priest threw me another look, faintly hostile. I knew how he felt; there was no real need, in his opinion, to have the will written down. Dozens of men every year disposed of their property by word of mouth – a nuncupative will as it was called – and when it came to the attesting of such unwritten testaments there was no word that carried so much weight as a priest’s. I accuse Sir Andrew of nothing when I say that had I not been there with my ready pen, he could have called two gaping oafs from kitchen or yard, listened to Martin Reed’s wheezing expression of his last wishes and later on very easily proved that on his death bed the wool merchant had turned very pious and left most of his goods to Holy Church. That had been done a thousand times and would be again. The number of Chantries in the country, served by idle, self-indulgent priests who could not even remember the names of those for whom they were to sing Masses, and by whose bounty they lived, proves that.

  In this case, here I was, seating myself sideways, awkwardly against the chest where I had set the writing things, leaving the table for the cloth, the wafer and the wine of the ritual.

  Master Reed, in a voice that sounded like an ungreased wheel in the distance, said,

  ‘First I want every man who’s worked for me five years or more to have three shillings and fourpence; those less long, twenty pence.’

  Before I could set down a word the priest said,

  ‘A written will should be properly made. This is no way to begin. You commend your soul to Almighty God and then say that you are of good mind and memory.’

  ‘You can both see. I’m short of breath. We’ll get the main things down. Trim it up afterwards.’ Master Reed signed to me to write, which I did hastily.

  His habitual economy of words now served him well; the sentences, though barely audible, were brief and clear. Calling me his ‘faithful servant and good friend’, he left me the premises, the good will, tools and instruments which would enable me to carry on his business as woolmerchant, weaver and smith. His two ships and his flocks were not included in this bequest, but he left me twenty pounds in cash for immediate expenses. Out of the profits of the business I was to pay, each year, three pounds to Sir Godfrey Blanchefleur, the elder, and ten to Anne Reed, widow of Richard Reed deceased, so long as they should live.

  It was easy enough to keep pace with his dictation because of his frequent pauses to cough and gather breath. Having written that I looked at him, hoping to convey my gratitude in a glance, but he was staring ahead, frowning. He drew a rattling breath and went on.

  Everything else of which he was possessed, the house, his ships, his cash money, the sheep-run at Minsham and the flocks; two house properties in Baildon Saltgate, the Great Field at Horringer, the freehold of ‘God Spare Mariners’, an inn at Bywater, were to go to his dearly beloved grand-daughter, Maude Reed.…

  The name emerged in such an inconclusive way that for a second or two I was certain that he was going to add some conditional phrase. Holding the pen suspended I looked at him again and as I did so a bout of coughing racked him. When it was done, he said,

  ‘That’s all.’

  Slowly I placed the full stop which would hold Maude in the nunnery. There was a little silence, broken by the priest’s rasping voice, saying with
genuine horror,

  ‘Such a will a heathen might make. No mention of Holy Church, of alms or charity or so much as a Mass for your sinful soul. My son, I bid you think again. For your own sake.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I,’ Sir Andrew’s voice conveyed his affront. ‘I want nothing, except to ease your passage through Purgatory and give you credit at the Last Judgment. You, Martin Reed, like the young man who came to Our Lord, are a man of great possessions. I would not have you, like him, go sorrowful away when all the reckoning is made. And of this will I say that a Saracen who had never taken the Body and Blood of Christ upon his tongue might leave it behind.’

  Master Reed had sunk a little further back into his pile of pillows and half closed his eyes.

  ‘Sir Andrew,’ I began, in an expostulatory voice.

  ‘Be silent!’ he said. ‘You were brought in to write and well you have done it. I have his soul to care for. Martin, for your own sake, make a gift to the Church, one of your many properties. One third to buy Masses for your soul; one third for the poor; and one third to be used at the priest’s discretion. At Flaxham we have no bell.’ He added the final words with a disarming simplicity.

  ‘Then let it be the Minsham sheep run, that being nearest to you.’

  ‘I will see that the Masses are faithfully said.’

  I scratched the sheep run out of the list of properties that were to be Maude’s, and thought how the Prioress would grudge it, could she but know. I added the bequest to those already written, with details of its disposal. Then a thought struck me.

  ‘You have not named those who should execute your will, sir.’

  ‘You,’ he said, wearily. ‘And Sir Andrew, here, if he is willing.’

  ‘Right readily. And the bell, Martin, shall bear your name, with some reminder. “Pray for the soul of Martin Reed, whenever you my tongue shall heed” or something like that.’