He was still avoiding her eye. “I’ve known for a long time what you think of him. I used to watch you whenever he came into the room. I knew how difficult it was, but I always thought you could carry it off. You can be pretty magnificent, Eloise, did you know that?”
“Godric, I think you’d better leave.” The distress she had felt this morning, talking to Imogen about Rushton, had been no more than a shadowy precursor of this. “Please, Godric. For your sake, I must insist that you leave.”
“Hear me out.”
Half sensing what was coming, she wanted him to stay as much as she wanted him to go: for she could feel the approach of the very thing she most desired.
“You had him fooled, like everyone else,” Godric was telling her. “Until the spring, about the time the idea came up for the mill. I noticed it first at Easter, when I happened to mention your name. The next day I watched him in church, watching you. He was careful, but not careful enough. That’s when I understood.”
Eloise was unable to think, or even absorb the full significance of what her horribly percipient brother was in the process of revealing to her.
He said, “Just before I came home last time, I had an argument with someone at the Abbey. Not an argument, exactly, but it made me realize I have only one friend. When you came into the stable yard I felt left out. I needed to be sure. I suppose I was punishing all three of us.”
“You are talking nonsense.”
He gave a faint, derisive, self hating snort. She had never seen him like this before. He appeared to be in an agony of contrition. “I am so sorry, Eloise,” he said. “What I did was unforgivable. I can’t even begin to say anything to Ralf, still less apologize to him.”
She understood clearly now. There was no girl in Rushton. The girl was in Mape. At the Hall. What Imogen had divulged came back to her, imbued with new meaning and entirely consistent with what Godric, quite independently, was saying.
He was too intelligent for such clumsiness. There had to be a reason why he was disclosing what she had not known. The suspicion crossed her mind that during his absence he had delighted in devising this new and more thorough form of torture. Was he proposing himself as her confidant? Or, even less tolerable, her accomplice?
“Has the petition gone yet?”
“Godric,” she said. “Just what do you take me for?”
He looked genuinely startled.
“In all but name I am betrothed to Sir Robert Ingram. Assuming your speculation about your friend has even a shred of truth, you would do well so to inform him. But I doubt there is truth in it. You are wronging him just as you are wronging me. He has neither said nor done anything to depart from perfect propriety. I own that at one time I acted coolly towards him. I had my reasons for that, none of which are your concern. I will thank you to keep your presumptions to yourself. Ralf may be low born, but he behaves like a gentleman.”
“And I do not?”
“You value your own acuity as much as you belittle mine.”
“Are you denying —?”
“How dare you?”
“Eloise, please, I —”
“Get out!”
The moment he had gone, she sprang to the window as if to put behind her as much of the house as she could, or even to melt through the glass itself and flee into thin air. Despite all her efforts to preserve her appearance for the dinner to come, hot tears began to flow. She was trembling with humiliation and shock and rage, cursing the heat that during their altercation she had felt rising to her cheeks. Now he would be convinced beyond doubt. Her reaction had guaranteed it. She had given herself away. She was as angry with herself as she was with Godric, and not just because of the stupidity of her reaction, for she now saw that she in her turn might have wronged him.
What if his contrition had been real? What if he had not known he was telling her anything new about Ralf? It must have cost him dear to come to her like that and lay himself open.
Eloise thought her heart would break. For the four months since Lady Day she had been pulled this way and that, struggling to keep control. Her mother, her three aunts, her father, Robert Ingram, the Earl of Leicester, the King himself, the whole panoply of state: all were ranged around her. Perhaps Godric too. The knowledge he had brought her only made matters worse. The certainty was frightening. It was alien to normal life, to tenderness or even friendship, to everything but raw compulsion.
She had felt it on the dike; and had been trying to deny it ever since.
He was somewhere out there in the rain. More than her next breath itself, she wanted to be with him. The anguish of their physical separation had become so strong that she thought of running downstairs to Bella: but instead of Ralf alone, with Hennet, she would find, on some rainswept downland track, Ralf with the Steward, the embodiment of her father’s household.
Iron-willed, Eloise dried her tears. Godric’s chamber was on the other side of the solar, overlooking not the churchyard but the farm. She was afraid he might already have gone from it, but his voice answered her knock.
She did not know what she was going to say to him, only that she could not leave matters as they stood, especially during an evening spent with him in the presence of her aunts and parents.
She opened the door to find him just behind it. He seemed surprised to see her, and immediately started expressing regret for having spoken as he had; she cut him short. He observed that she had been crying. This seemed to bring him fresh torment and he tried again to apologize. Once more she interrupted, still unsure whether he could be trusted or whether, any more, she even liked him.
She let him shut the door behind them.
It was as if she were meeting her brother for the first time in years. She looked at the young man he had grown into: taller than herself, spare, narrow-chested, the very image of a scholar with his pale, anxious face, the features so little like her own. His wispy beard he kept shaved. His fine, dark hair, somewhat fluffy now from the drying it had received, had been brushed and tied into a short queue at the back of his head. At Leckbourne he studied theology, that most difficult and rarefied subject; and he was still passing through the sevenfold grounding laid down for boys who would in their turn become teachers, pastors or ecclesiarchs. The trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The quadrivium comprised music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Godric had learned things she would never understand. He spoke Latin and could read the gospel in the original Greek. He and his classmates engaged in formal disputation with the master, sometimes so rapid and savage that the whole room, master included, burst out laughing. This Eloise knew because she had heard him telling her parents, at table or sitting in the parlour or garden; but in all the years he had been at the Abbey, sister and brother had never once had a real conversation about his new life, or indeed, until today, about anything of significance.
They had always been strangers. Godric had always preferred his own company.
He said, “Won’t you sit down?”
His chamber was smaller than hers. Her wardrobe stretched across the whole of one wall and was crammed with clothes; she had a chest besides, with a cushioned top which, like the comfortable chair by her window, she herself had embroidered with coloured silks and wools. Her damask counterpane, richly patterned with ferns and fleurs-de-lis, covered a deep, wide and luxurious bed, flooded with light on sunny afternoons. Godric’s window faced east and took the brunt of the winter chill. Instead of the pure air of the beach and sea, his room breathed the reek of the farmyard and stables. No rug, thick and tasselled, covered his floorboards. For his clothes and possessions he had only a press, without a door. This was not a bedchamber, but a monkish cell, shaped to the life of one who asked for and expected nothing. Eloise thought of the hermitage she and Imogen had seen in the woods, and of its builder, the mad recluse imagining he could hide behind an arm-thick tree. She felt her heart overflowing. It could endure no more. She could not help herself, or even speak: still standing before him, she found herself loo
king into Godric’s brown eyes and her tears could not be stopped.
He took her in his arms. It was such an instinctive thing to do that she was not at first surprised; nor, at first, did she know that she had given up the fight. It was over. Godric knew. With her face pressed into the clean, brown-twilled intimacy of his shoulder, she was beset by many sensations at once. She was afraid her tears would stain his tunic. She discovered that his body was warm and smelled vaguely masculine, of a musk like leather and horses. She was conscious of his soothing words, but did not heed them, for she was too young to have borne, for so long, such a burden alone. She had to have someone’s trust. It could be attained only with risk, vast, precarious and terrible, the antithesis of all her courtly training, of everything to which she had always clung fast. And slowly she came to realize that, except for Imogen’s careless and affectionate gestures, except for her father having once taken her hand, and for the incidental touch of dressmakers and maids, she had since early childhood had no contact with another human being.
She wanted Godric to hold her more tightly. She wanted him to enfold her, to shut everything out and make up for all the years she had lost. But he was not Ralf: he was her brother. She sensed hesitancy in his embrace, and as soon as she did, the worst access of her weeping began to subside.
He rummaged in his press for a handkerchief and sat down with her on the edge of the bed. When her tears had ceased, he took her free hand in his. He waited, delicately, before saying, “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to be done.” Having dabbed at her eyes for the last time, she crumpled the handkerchief into a ball of damp linen and gripped it as hard as she could. “Except this. Never mention the subject again to anyone, even me.”
“You have my word on it. Do you want me to break with Ralf?”
She shook her head. That was a sacrifice she could not ask, any more than she herself could think of driving Imogen away.
He said, “This is all my fault.”
“It’s no one’s fault.”
“If Letty hadn’t run off like that … if the tide hadn’t been coming in —”
“Don’t. It happened. I’m glad he found you. I’m glad you’re here.”
He smiled at this. “I’m glad I’m here, too. Eloise, I haven’t been much of a brother to you. Can we start again?”
“I think we just did.”
He raised her hand and kissed it. The gesture surprised her far more than his embrace. He said, “You’d better get changed.”
“Yes. Dinner.” She stood up to go. “Godric,” she began, meaning to voice her thanks; but he interrupted.
“Enough.”
Imogen was right about him. She knew him better than his own sister; so did Ralf. The scale, the generosity of Godric’s offer had dispelled her last trace of doubt.
He was smiling again, mischievously this time, and she felt herself returning his smile with one of her own: a wan smile like the first gleam of sunlight after an early spring storm.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
He looked down, towards her wrist, and back at her. “My handkerchief.”
* * *
In her own room, Eloise went through the motions of dressing for dinner. She removed and put away her robe and chose another, more formal, which she laid out on the bed. Pulling her silk shift over her head with a single motion, she tossed it in the basket and poured water from the ewer into its wide, matching bowl. She refreshed her face, neck and arms, and towelled herself dry. Choosing a bottle of perfume from the shelf, she opened its square-capped stopper and spilled a drop or two on her palms, which she then applied, as she always did, to her wrists, earlobes, neck and breasts.
The pressure of her hand on the sensitive skin brought her to herself: she had no recollection whatever of undressing or washing, and saw with surprise that someone – herself, for she had no chamber-maid – had already laid out her new black bliaut, the one her mother had commissioned in March for the interview with Robert Ingram.
The dreamy fragrance of her perfume made her hand linger on her left breast. She touched the nipple, knowing that it was becoming erect; her fingers spread, opening to support the breast itself, then slid across her throat and lightly caressed her neck, tangling with the chain of her silver crucifix. In that moment she acknowledged the sensation that, since returning to her room, had inexorably been rising within her. Triumph. All else could be set aside. She refused any longer to think.
She put on a fresh shift and returned the bliaut, on its hanger, to its customary place. The profligate expense and the extravagant and calculating indecision that had brought it into being were distasteful to her memory. In the costly softness of the material, the intricacy of the lace and the exquisite accuracy of the stitching, she saw all the wiles of her mother and aunt in their attempt, their successful attempt, to snare her suitor. In the event they had used not this but the cloth of gold. They had made her wear the colours of the sun, not the moon: yellow and gold, not silver and black. Dazzling: that was the word her aunt had used. Dazzled, gulled, cuckolded, he had duly been.
She would go through with it, of course, but she was not the sun, nor would ever be. She preferred the moon. Its rays drained the world of colour, bleached it, made it stark. Moonlight: the very word was pure and strange. Reflecting and opposing, the sailing moon illuminated or excluded, permitting no grey, condemning equivocation to a black as absolute as the samite of that deceitful robe. The moon’s was the innocent light of a land where all would be simple, even Ralf. Ralf who loved her, for whom she had to wear no jewellery but her cross. He had told Imogen nothing, except that she was very pretty.
So: he was brave, as well. Were it not for him, her brother would be dead.
Eloise broke out of her reverie. Time was getting on. Her hair would pass muster. She put on a white, collarless shirt and her dark-green velvet robe, pulled a pair of matching slippers on her feet, and from the leather case selected the double-stranded silver necklace she had inherited from her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Baroness, with whose name, Héloďse, she had also been endowed.
As she was about to leave, she remembered the ladybird. The rain was much abated. She would not be returning to her room before nightfall. If the ladybird were to have a chance of finding safe haven in daylight, she had to release it now.
The windowpanes were vacant, the woodwork, the sill. She looked among the roses in the bowl and lifted the fronds of foliage to search among them, but the ladybird was not there. With an unaccountable sense of foreboding, she unlatched the casement and fastened the hook so that the creature, wherever it was, should have a narrow means of escape.
Finally, with a single, uneasy, backward glance at the rose-bowl, Eloise opened her door and made her way to the great hall, downstairs.
8
“So at Lammastide, as each day,” Father Pickard continued, raising his face so that his voice echoed from the roof-beams, “we praise God for his everlasting bounty.” From his place by the altar, next to the Lammas loaf, he looked round the congregation. His eyes passed over Ralf and moved on. “Every day we say the prayer, but how often do we stop to think what it means? ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. In the Garden of Eden, God said to Adam, when he had eaten of the tree of knowledge, ‘Because you have eaten of that forbidden tree, the ground is cursed for your sake; in sorrow shall you eat of it, all the days of your life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to you; and you shall eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of your face shall you eat bread, till you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken: for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.’”
Ralf was standing beside his grandfather. Strangely moved by these words, simplified for a simple congregation, Ralf remembered his own days in the harvest-fields, the dust and toil; and he thought of the gravel-hard grain, wrested from a year’s labour and care, which could only be eaten when crushed and baked.
“God drov
e Adam out of the Garden, to work the ground from which he was made, and God placed angels east of the Garden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, lest Adam should try to go back, and eat of the tree of life.”
The priest turned to the Lammas loaf. Smaller than a normal loaf, it was so superbly made that it resembled a wooden sculpture, carved and varnished, perhaps, by a master smith. The honey-coloured twists of its surface were reflecting the light from the stained window, and were in turn reflected by the two great candlesticks of polished brass that stood on either side. The flame at the top of each tall, white candle was burning steadily in the drowsily scented, motionless air of the church.
The loaf had been placed on a linen-covered tray which occupied the central place on the altar-cloth, under the crucified figure of Christ. Betrayed, scourged, stripped, crowned with thorns, mocked, spat on, nailed to a wooden cross, raised up between thieves, and hanging now in all the sacred majesty of the Passion, he seemed to be gazing on the loaf as if it were the fount of mortal suffering.
What was a communion wafer, if not a piece of bread?
“But what man of us, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? If we then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will our father in heaven give good things to those who ask him? On this day we thank God for his precious gift of bread, and we pray to him for his help with our harvest, in token whereof we make this offering.”
Ralf knew that, after the service, Father Pickard would keep the Lammas tradition. He would take the loaf home and, with butter and cheese and, no doubt, beer, he would pull it apart and eat it. Ralf did not see how this could be a sorrowful act. If bread was to be eaten in sorrow, and God loved his children, why did he feed it to them every day? And why should his children continually have to ask him for more?
Or did the “bread” of the paternoster simply mean “food”? But the Latin word was panis, bread. Not esca, or cibus, or cibaria, or edulia, or even alimenta, but panis. “Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie”: give us today our daily bread. The meaning was unequivocal.
The Tide Mill Page 20