He was sure of one thing, and of one thing only.
Eloise had smiled at him.
* * *
When she reappeared she had changed not just her slippers for calf-boots, but her dress for a summer riding-habit in cream linen, belted, with three-quarter sleeves. Her plaits, formerly coiled into a net at the nape of her neck, were now hanging to her waist. At close quarters, Ralf saw that the sun had lightened a strand or two of her hair and taken the winter paleness from her forearms, face and neck. He took in these and other details one by one, anxious not to give the impression that he regarded her proximity as anything out of the ordinary; but when she bent to help Godric with the final fitting of her saddle, he was able for a few seconds to admire her without restraint.
He still treasured his memory of her in the Long Barn, last March. Before this afternoon, he had imagined that she could never be more beautiful than that. Basking now in the afterglow of her smile, watching her competent adjustment of the straps and buckles, he saw that he had been wrong.
She stood by while Godric, holding Hennet’s bridle, positioned the mare next to the block and told Ralf how to climb into the saddle. “Feet back a bit in the stirrups. Keep them there. It’s dangerous to put them in too far. Think what might happen if you fell off. You’d be dragged.”
“Right,” Ralf said. The saddle enclosed him, rising before and behind; despite his unaccustomed height from the ground, he felt reasonably secure.
“Take the reins.”
Ralf did so, and realized that nothing now prevented Hennet from bolting, from doing whatever she wanted: but she remained still, merely tossing her head to dislodge a persistent fly.
With an easy expertise, Eloise placed her foot in the stirrup, grasped the pommel, and raised herself up to sit sidesaddle. Godric too mounted.
“Ready, Ralf?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Eloise duly started forward. At the open gateway to the yard she turned to look back; and drew in her horse while Godric issued further instructions. “Just dig her in the ribs,” he said. “She knows what to do. Hennet, come on!”
Ralf had already twice dug Hennet in the ribs, and did so once more, with the same result. He saw Eloise watching him and returned her amused expression with one that spoke of good-natured frustration; at which she smiled again, this time for him alone. With that, Hennet decided to put one hoof in front of another and was bearing Ralf forward.
By the time they had reached the village green and turned down the staith-track, Ralf felt more confident that he would not fall off. Godric had checked the girth-straps again, and Hennet had taken charge of him completely. She seemed to answer only to Godric, who, as the width and surface of the track allowed, rode alongside with such exhortations as: “Bit higher with the reins. Not too much.” Then he said, “Shall we try a trot?”
As Ralf learned to let his body follow through, as the muscles of his legs learned how to respond to the stirrups, Godric cried, “Better, Ralf. Good!”
All this was happening in a dream of disbelief: but every time he looked ahead there was Eloise, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away, splashed with light through foliage or out in full sun, riding so easily and so well, so elegantly, that she and her chestnut palfrey might have been formed solely to fulfil this midsummer eve and make some ancient prophecy come true. She was drawing him on, towards a phantom mill that as yet existed only as part of this same dream.
She was interested in the mill: this much he had learned. Last night she had discussed it at length. Ralf had informed Godric, and Godric had informed her. They must have spoken of him, used his name, while Godric imparted some or all of what Ralf had said about the earthworks, the proofing, the piling, the culvert and sea-gates, the various designs for the wheel. How much of this had she retained? And afterwards, lying in darkness, had she thought about the mill then? Had she thought about him? Did she know the mill was for her, and for her alone?
Surely not. But why, suddenly, was she so different? Above all, why had she agreed to come?
The dream opened out into the two-hundred-acre field, deserted now but for crows. There were poppies among the wheat, and camomile and scarlet pimpernel along the wide track which made long and short zigzags past the field-strips, turning its way to the path under the windbreak and the eastern dike. Well before the first furrow had ended, she dropped back and the three horses proceeded at a walk, side by side, Ralf in the middle, Godric on the left.
Godric broke the silence. “You’re in my sister’s debt, you know. She persuaded my father to go ahead with your mill.”
“Hardly that,” she said.
“I had it from Papa. He said he was wavering.”
“He never wavers, Godric, and well you know it.”
Ralf tried to absorb this new revelation, to make it fit. What had happened to her? Or had something happened to him? He knew he ought to say something. Only thus could he establish this conversation as normal: only thus could he make himself accept that her contempt for him had melted away. He knew he ought to speak, but did not know how. Then Godric, his friend, came to his rescue.
“Do you like teasing your sister as much as I like teasing mine?”
Ralf said, “How far do you go?”
“To the limit. Always.”
“Shame on you.”
Godric laughed. “For heaven’s sake, Ralf, that’s what sisters are for.”
“I always treat mine with the utmost respect.”
“Good for you,” said Eloise, smiling at Ralf’s straight face, while Godric renewed his laughter. “What a paragon you must be.”
“I claim no virtue. I’ve learned the cost of teasing her.”
“Oh?”
“It’s too terrible to relate.”
He had never heard her laugh before. “I must take lessons,” she said, still smiling, and her eyes engaged his, with no significance for her; but for him, for one without hope or remedy, for whom the whole time since the stable yard had been a continuous miracle of light, those dark eyes were too much to bear and he looked away.
Everything in the torrid, dike-shielded heat of the field had become unusually distinct and particular. Time itself had slowed. Independent of the Ralf who was talking and listening, his inner self tried to make sense of the afternoon. Nothing fitted except the certainty he had been carrying consciously since the Long Barn and unconsciously since his first visit to the Hall, since his first meeting with Godric, or even since the world began.
He loved her. The rest was nebulous, like the mill.
* * *
Eloise had known perfectly well who had been in the stable yard. Not only had she seen Ralf coming to the Hall, but she had heard Godric going down to greet him. She had heard them talking indoors and out; and suddenly her embroidery, her aunts, her whole arid life, had become intolerable. Between the summer heat and the knowledge that Ralf was only yards away, she had been pulled irresistibly outside.
She was supposed to want Robert Ingram, what others wanted, on her behalf but mainly on theirs. Ever obedient, born and trained to it, she was guided always by duty: to her parents, the baronage, and her country. Now that her father had revealed the desperate politics of the match, her duty weighed so heavily that sometimes, in the safety of her bed, she could stand it no more and gave way to tears. The loneliness she had known all her life had become absolute. Her prayers were met with disapproving silence, as if God himself had ordained the union. It would happen. The extortionate price demanded of her father would be found.
The mill would produce it. And it was she who had ensured, finally, that the mill would be built. Her father had asked her advice. As she had answered, she had thought that her duty was speaking, and it was: but at the same time she had known that the mill meant Master Grigg, and Master Grigg meant Ralf. The mill would bring him back to the manor and keep him here, at least while, bit by bit, he was helping to construct her dowry.
Seeing him in the yard, she had come
to her senses and almost managed to get away unscathed. Then Godric had trapped her in conversation. She had been made to stand there, succumbing to the physical presence of the shy and very beautiful young man whose sweetness had infused her soul. At Godric’s lacerating remark, wishing they could be friends, she had found herself looking into Ralf’s eyes: and had been unable to resist further.
So she had consented, and in excitement had changed her clothes, wondering what might please him and win him to her cause. Even then she had known she was being weak, and unfair, and that for the sake of everyone she should go back to the dayroom and send out her excuses with the Doorward’s boy. Her answer to herself had been to remove her crespine and let her braids swing free.
Never before had she felt like this. Sobriety and control had governed every moment of her life. Recklessness was something new. If only for one hour before her captivity began, she wanted to be with Ralf.
His manner towards her was wary, and well it might be, given her usage of him. That he seemed not to detest her was a measure of his good nature. Before leaving the yard she had tried to convey apology in her looks, but he had remained unmoved, and, constrained both by the narrowness of the staith-track and her own doubts, she had let Bella walk ahead while Godric rode with Ralf or brought up the rear. Once they were in the field, there had been no choice but to overcome the fluttering in her stomach and rejoin them. She had been too nervous to speak first: Godric had provided a way in, and she had perceived the beginnings of forgiveness among Ralf’s replies, almost confirmed when he had made her laugh. But still he was avoiding her eye, from shyness, resentment, or both. Was he only being agreeable to her for her brother’s sake?
The path beside the dike, having left behind the shade of the windbreak trees and the arable field, narrowed among the scrub ahead. The horses would have to walk in line. Increasingly unsure of herself, even regretting her decision to come, Eloise at the critical moment surged forward so that she led the way and could be alone. She needed to collect herself.
What on earth had she been hoping to achieve? What had she expected? Her feelings for him were a flimsy scaffold of presumption, raised on the childish but overwhelming fantasy, conceived at the age of twelve, that he, and he alone, was destined for her. She had felt that she had known him already, even at their first meeting; that she had been waiting for him to return to her and resume what had been left unfinished. Somehow the sea was involved. They had dwelt together on some northern shore, now no more than the dimmest memory: and had been wrenched apart. How, she knew not, nor when, nor why. She only sensed that she had known him at another time, and he had known her, and whatever it was between them continued and had yet to be made perfect.
She had seized on every characteristic fitting her fantasy and discarded the rest. His Nordic complexion, his surname, his father, his sister: all these sprang from the pagan forerunners of Rollo, those supposed dwellers by the sea. He was artistic and practical, intelligent and hard-working, like the men who had assembled Rollo’s fleet; but he was also gentle and reserved, quite unlike the ones who had sailed it up the Seine.
In reality, what was he?
Eloise had never imagined that she could be jealous of Mary Ibbott. Since Lady Day she had been vigilant, but had discovered nothing to confirm her fears, and had even seen signs of mutual dislike, as last week, in the churchyard. Besides Mary there seemed to be no one else, in the manor, at least; and now that he was permanently here, Rushton was no longer a threat.
“O God,” she breathed, realizing the madness of these thoughts, just as if there were no Earl of Leicester, no Gascony, no Dover, just as if Ralf were free to pay his addresses and she to receive or decline them.
She should not have come. She would go back, claim a headache: and indeed the sun was extremely hot, the air behind the dike thick and still, smelling of marsh-gas and rotting seaweed, and Bella’s hoofs were sinking ever deeper into the black, half dry mud of the trail.
Eloise turned and looked behind, and was forming the first word of her excuse when Godric cried: “Better get off here, Eloise! The path goes up the bank in a minute.” To Ralf he said, “Hennet will stop when my sister does. Don’t try to dismount on your own. I’ll help you.”
But it was Eloise who, having slipped to the ground ahead of Godric, took hold of Hennet’s bridle and let Ralf climb down in safety.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re very kind.”
“Not at all.”
“You’ve done really well,” Godric told him. “We’ll make a horseman of you yet.”
“I just sat there.” He smiled again; and she, included, wondered if he was not merely being agreeable, but might like her a little for her own sake.
They tethered the horses to the bushes, and her chance to feign a headache was lost. She saw that it was far better to act rationally and give rise to no speculation on Godric’s part. Besides, what harm could it do to walk with the two of them along the dike? She truly wanted to know about the mill. More than this, she felt an urge to get to the top, to feel the breeze on her face and look out over the harbour mouth to the dunes of the point that bore her family name, and, where they ended, to let her eye rest upon the anonymous, and inexhaustible, comfort of the sea.
3
The previous evening, after telling Godric about the latest specification for the mill, Ralf had, at his request, given him on the way back the original and now largely obsolete drawings. The new ones were bigger and more detailed, made on paper rather than parchment, and to go with them were many pages of calculations and costings.
Now that the required volume of the pen was known, the easiest part had been estimating the cost of the bund. Its length was to be a hundred and twenty yards and its mean height twenty-six feet, giving a volume of four thousand five hundred cubic yards and a weight of nearly ten thousand tons. One man was reckoned to dig five tons of soil a day. Using a workforce of twenty men, it would take a hundred days for the digging alone: a hundred and forty to include barrowing, placement and proofing. At a daily wage per man of a penny-farthing, the labour came out at just over fourteen pounds eleven shillings.
The usual daily wage for a labourer was one silver penny. By paying a premium, they would be able to attract workers from outside the manor as well as serfs from within. If Mr Caffyn wished to contribute fief-days to the digging, his payment on account would be reduced by a penny-farthing for each one worked.
To the labour had to be added the cost of mortar, packing-stone, and the thousand tons of imported rock which would make the three sides of the pen erosion-proof. The existing dike had been proofed with Cornish granite. At sixpence a ton, barge-delivered, Kentish ragstone was currently the cheapest suitable rock. Together with the mortar and flint rubble for packing, the load would cost thirty-two pounds. Linsell’s adviser was a man named Ryle in Southampton, who would supervise the earthworks for a fee of thirty shillings, bringing the total to forty-eight pounds. Adding a tenth for contingencies brought the estimated cost of the pen to fifty-two pounds sixteen shillings.
By letter Ryle had introduced Linsell to a milling engineer in London, Josiah Parfett. Having agreed the terms under which he would be consulted if the project were to be authorized, Parfett had recommended a wheel-size, and a figure for water consumption of two hundred thousand gallons an hour.
Ralf had helped his father to make a survey of the site. This had established that a head of nearly five feet of water could be achieved at the lowest neap tide. The area of the pen followed from this and from Parfett’s figure. The survey had also provided the angle of the turn in the dike, and this determined the shortest length of bund needed to complete the triangle.
Last night Godric had professed himself fascinated. He knew little more of mathematics than Ralf himself, whose prior experience had only been of the addition, subtraction and simple geometry used in bench carpentry. Linsell’s knowledge derived from Master Hampden and the masons who had raised the Cathedral. Having gli
mpsed its potential, Ralf now burned to have it for himself, and to go much further, to know what Diccon and Parfett knew. Mathematics was like Latin, the future Latin, purer and more important, the language of engineering, and Ralf daily badgered his father for lessons.
Walking the narrow path along the top of the dike, the lady, as etiquette required, was protected before and behind by the gentlemen. Godric had taken up the rear, leaving Ralf to guide a way through the encroaching grasses and the stems and foliage of yarrow, alexanders, curled dock, and sea-aster.
It was a quarter of a mile from the horses to the site. Godric did most of the talking, now and then imparting information about the mill, referring sometimes to Ralf, who could then legitimately turn and look at Eloise while he replied, or even stop walking altogether: as he did when, far out over the lagoons, he noticed the lazy and magnificent flight of a large, dark-brown, cream-headed bird of prey.
“Marsh harrier!” he exclaimed, pointing. “Can you see it?”
“Yes,” she said, after a moment, taking the line of his arm, standing closer than she had ever done before. “Yes, now I can.”
“It’s a hen. Or a young one.”
“How do you know?”
“The males are quite different. Grey on the wings.”
“You must have marvellous eyesight,” she said. “I shouldn’t have seen it on my own.”
The bird dropped into the reeds, and was lost. Ralf, no longer distracted by the harrier, realized that he and Eloise had just had a conversation, natural and unforced; that she had paid him a compliment, not only accepting but glad of his company; and he realized for the first time, standing beside her like this, how well suited they were in height and build. “They nest out here,” he said, more hesitantly. “And in the Great Marsh. There used to be two or three pairs, in all. Probably still are.”
“We found some chicks once, years ago,” Godric said. “By the Long Cut. In the big reedbed. Do you remember, Ralf?” To Eloise, he said, “Ralf knows all the birds and flowers.”
The Tide Mill Page 15