This could not go on. It was not fair to him, or even to her. She would have to set him straight, but she did know how to begin. Having walked all the way in stunned silence, they regained the terrace.
“Well?” said Henry.
They had forgotten to look at the gnomon. Eloise was herself about to dissemble, when Ralf said, as if nothing whatever had happened, “Imogen’s right, I’m afraid, Henry. Her brother’s not cut out to be a saint.”
9
Now that he understood why she had ignored him for so long; now that he understood what had passed between them on the dike, in church today, and this afternoon at the Hall; now that he understood the pleading in her eyes as the Baron’s gathering had come to its end, Ralf was almost more perturbed by his own phlegmatic calm than the certainty that she, who was so beautiful, knew that she was loved and loved him in return.
It was not so much calm as compaction. His mind was flattened as though by a great weight. Sitting on the bench, or indeed on the dike, it should have been simple to have reached for her, but he had had no more freedom of movement than she. They were crushed by the leaden mass of her nobility. For all her father’s condescension this afternoon, Ralf knew that he and his family would never be invited to share a table with the Baron’s friends. Even her aunts had stayed away; and the gathering had ended sooner than might have been predicted from its relaxed and intimate tone. Ralf’s father had been aware of this. He had said nothing, but Ralf by now knew him well enough to judge the words he did not say as much as those he did.
Her betrothal was part of the burden, indivisible from it, and at least as heavy as all the rest put together.
Neither pragmatism nor reason could help him. Trapped among the layers of his mind was his hoard of memories going as far back as their first meeting. Today, across the tablecloth, or walking on the lawn, or, most of all, sitting with her by the pond, he had captured many more. These could not be infinitely compressed, but every time his mind strove upwards the burden bore down with equal force.
To seek relief he threw himself into physical activity. His father protested that he should not be working on a Sunday and that, tomorrow, labourers would arrive. Ralf said what his father could not deny: the labourers would be better used at the site. Once Ralf had changed his clothes and gone to the farm for the loan of a handcart, Linsell began to help him.
Wrapped in one of Jacob’s old sails, and placed as close as possible to the rear wall of the privy, the packing-case containing Linsell’s tools had been standing in the garden since the end of June. It was exceedingly heavy.
“Leave it, Ralf. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Just one lift and it’s up.”
His father gave him a searching look. “Are you all right, Son?”
“I want to get started. We’ve been waiting so long. Since Alincester.”
He said, “I know what you mean,” and Ralf glimpsed the anger he had till now so successfully concealed. Ralf thought of the muddy road to Rushton, the comfortless room in the sawyer’s house, his mother at the quern. A surge of some powerful, nameless emotion, like gratitude, filled his breast.
Linsell held up a forefinger, enjoining him to further patience, turned, and went into the cottage. Watching him as he stepped inside, Ralf remembered their conversation in the morning darkness, last March, once they had crossed the white-railed bridge. He had told his father about the ruined mill and the Molarius, about the licence and the tithe. The money went to the Church, Godric had said: to Bishop William, to the Diocesan Panel and the Beadle.
A moment later Linsell emerged with Jacob, who, a little while ago, had come downstairs from his bed.
“Don’t strain yourself, Dad,” Linsell said, as the three of them crouched down, each to take a corner. “Just drop it if it’s too much.”
“What? I could lift this little thing on me own. Why didn’t you two ninnies tell me you wanted it shifted?”
“Ready? Up!”
Pulling his fingers away at the last instant to prevent them from being trapped, Ralf saw the bed of the cart take the weight of the tools. The wheels bit into the gravelly soil of the path.
“Want a hand with shoving it?” Jacob said.
“We’ll manage. Thanks.”
Jacob, the job done, nodded and went back inside.
* * *
The old byre allotted to them by Mr Caffyn stood in the pasture by the staith-track, a hundred yards east of the farmhouse and within sight of the Hall. It had once provided shelter for twenty cows, but in the days of the fifth baron a new milking-parlour had been built adjoining the farmyard. Unlike the three in the marsh, this byre had fallen into disuse. It was used now only as a “glory-hole”, as the Bailiff had termed it, showing Ralf and Linsell the wooden stalls, most of which were full of rubbish. “Them partitions can all come out,” he had said. “Do what you like.” Once a few tiles had been replaced, the roof would be sound, even if it did sag; and the big double doors needed only a new set of hinges, a bit of patching, and to be rehung. The rent was a halfpenny a week, deductible from the payments on account.
Among the clutter in the stalls were some serviceable or salvageable things which the manor wanted retained. The rest would be thrown on the farmyard midden or burned, either straight away or later, at the Hallowmas bonfire. Linsell had undertaken to sort the contents into four categories: obviously keep, obviously discard, keep for Hallowmas, and decide.
Having helped push the rumbling cart past the village green and Hall, two or three hundred feet down the staith-track, and through the pasture gate, he helped guide the packing-case to the dirty stone floor while Ralf raised the handles to tip the cart-bed. They had chosen the place where the roof-tiles above were most continuous.
“I’m not sorry to get this lot under cover,” Linsell said.
“Shall we open the case?”
“We’ve got no wrecking-bar.” He glanced negligently along the stalls. “Got everything else, by the look of it. Why d’you think they kept all this stuff?”
Ralf shrugged. The understandable parsimony of the serfs had evidently infected the Bailiff, who managed the farm.
“We’ll open the tools first thing,” said Linsell. “What about the barrow? Do they want it back tonight?”
“I’ve got it for the week.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“I think I’ll stay on for a bit. Make a start.”
Linsell again subjected him to a searching look. “It’s the sabbath, Ralf. We shouldn’t really have moved the tools.”
“I won’t be long. The vesper bell.”
His father grunted. “You’ll be in by dark, I know that.”
As soon as he had gone, Ralf was free to resume his thoughts of Eloise. He needed time alone. He still could not believe what had happened. But the next step, if there was one, was as tangled and complicated as the contents of this first stall. He tugged at a weathered batten of wood, tossed it towards the doorway, and extricated a bundle of worm-eaten bean-poles. Some broke as he pulled them out. Clambering over the pile, ascending nearer to the thickest cobwebs of this province in the kingdom of the spiders, Ralf began hurling out rusted buckets, pots, the broken head of a rake, a bent ploughshare, another, yet another, a bulky thing which turned out to be a mildewed scarecrow, a bundle of rotted rope. As he threw them, he directed long objects, such as this hoe, with a final, cantilevered push: sometimes, but more often not, trying to achieve accuracy in where they landed. The four indistinct heaps began to grow.
He was thinking of the horseshoe pond and the white lilies with their yellow stamens. Their flowering season was nearing its end. Many of the petals had fallen, leaving in place of the flower a single spherical green fruit.
There were water-lilies, both white and yellow, in the Great Marsh, in some of the purest freshwater rhines near the road. The floating leaves, wavy at the edges, circular but for a single split, made platforms for dragonflies. The dragonflies belonged to the Seigneur, the le
aves, the flowers and every fruit. His pond was a piece snipped from the marsh. It enclosed the stone bench just as the manor enclosed the Hall, just as he himself enclosed Eloise.
The first stall had emptied. There was no next step. She would be married next year. He should not have begun to say what he had. She had been right to stop him.
Ralf went to the heaps in the doorway and started going to and fro in the early evening sunshine, carrying the unwanted objects outside. Wood for the bonfire he stacked against the wall. The rest he formed into a pile. Some of the cattle were watching him incuriously. Most went on as before, tearing up grass and munching it. One raised its tail and expelled a loud, untidy stream of steaming urine.
He felt a midge on his neck and slapped it.
There was a glimpse of yellow, movement, on the other side of the hedge. Someone was passing along the staith-track. Eloise.
She reached the gateway and raised the latch. Keeping by the post to avoid the worst of the mud, she entered the field and resolutely crossed the remaining yards to the doorway of the byre.
He had brought this on himself.
She had changed her clothes yet again. This afternoon’s pale-blue had given way to a yoked dress in fine linen, grey and yellow. Instead of slippers, there were calf-boots on her feet.
In a firm voice he had never heard before, she said, “I must talk to you.”
“Of course.”
He wanted to tell her that he already understood. Then, perhaps, he would be rid of the pain of seeing her like this. She could go straight back to the Hall and compromise herself no further; and he could deny the suspicion that he had been half hoping that she, alerted by the rumble of the cart, had come to a window and seen his father and himself going by, had subsequently seen his father leave, and had then watched him working or heard, while he had been throwing objects towards the door, the clattering he had made.
Were it not for the determination in her expression, he would have said she was extremely agitated. Without speaking, she walked past him and through the doorway. She, at least, did not want to be seen from the Hall.
Ralf followed.
She turned to face him, in front of the case of tools.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You know why I’ve come, then.”
“Yes.”
Her expression softened. “You’re a sweet boy, Ralf. Don’t think I’m not flattered.”
Ralf wondered how a dog felt, once it had been whipped.
“I must obey my father. Has Imogen told you —?”
“I understand.”
“You don’t. He once said to me, ‘None of us is free. Only God. Only God is free.’”
Suddenly, he was tired. He became aware of the accumulated dust and grime on his hands and clothes. Probably there were cobwebs in his hair; or bits of straw. His delusions fell away. A few words of Latin did not make a gentleman. He was a rustic, a Saxon scarecrow, quite unchanged: a hauler of crab-pots and sweeper of sawdust.
Her face softened even more. She said, “Do you forgive me?”
Even now, some of the dust he had raised was still hanging in the shafts of sunshine let in by missing tiles. The wind had dropped, there was no movement in the air, and yet the motes were drifting as if there were.
He looked at her, into her eyes. Earlier, while working, he had wished for an invasion or earthquake, for any disaster that would overturn the order of things. Now it had happened, but it was not the world, but himself, that had been overturned. The dust had yet to settle. She remained. He had been lost.
“Please answer me, Ralf.”
He must have taken a step forward, or even two, because she tried to shrink away. Her retreat was unexpectedly blocked by the packing-case. She registered no surprise. It was as though she had moved back only to encourage him forward. This close to her, he saw ambiguity in her eyes, contradiction, the enigma of the feminine. She was like the sea. The tides, the waves themselves, advanced only to retreat and retreated only to advance. Breaking on the shingle, the tumbling water drew back on itself, both augmenting and discouraging the following surge.
“What are you doing?”
There was no going back. She was both sea and beach. The long, long fetch of his ocean comber, conceived far away on another shore, deepening with the moon and wind, was ending its last mile, growing unstable as the seabed rose. As his two hands found hers he could feel the calming breath of land on his cheek, but her perfume, exhaled from her very substance, steadily more intoxicating, undermined him into further recklessness. Her eyes, her lips, were suffuse with permission; and yet she resisted. The obdurate gap between his face and hers was being maintained by nothing more than an aristocratic effort of will. But even this was deceptive, the reef between will and willing, and he sensed rather than saw her slight but sure accommodation, the accepting change in angle, that would entice his mouth to merge with hers. At the last moment her eyes closed as if in expectation of bliss; and it began.
The wave, their finally conjoined flesh, dissolved in a warm, smooth rapture which subsided only to be renewed with greater force, and yet a greater, all along the shore. They were joined in a language of light. It flooded like the saltings as they filled, drowning doubt. The difference between them was dispelled. The man, the woman, the land and sea, became sky.
The sweet, tactile pressure of her lips on his reduced, lingered, and was gone. She buried her face in his shoulder and clung to him even more tightly. Still lost in her perfume, he nuzzled her earlobe and neck. Her hair smelled of rosemary. Her clothing had been newly laundered. And, incredibly, she was in his arms.
“Ralf,” she said. “Oh, Ralf, we mustn’t.”
These words, and the wetness of her tight-shut eyelashes, allowed the weight to reassert itself. The beating he would receive, his punishment for this kiss, would be fully in proportion.
Eloise had descended to this territory of the serfs, the cow-house, and for love had accepted him among the debris of the farm. She was not Mary Ibbott. Her resistance and now her despair belonged to the oppressive mountain of her life. Behind her lay her father, the court, the monarch: all the power of the throne. The avalanche would carry her forward, rolling over Ralf, and leave him crushed.
But this was not entirely a cow-house. He had started to transform it into a workshop. And it had been their kiss, that other wrecking-bar, that had broached the case of his father’s tools. The project had begun.
Set against the Crown, it counted for nothing, but it was all he had.
They drew apart.
“I love my father,” she said. “I’d never hurt him.”
“Nor would I.”
He thought of him as he had been this afternoon, happily presiding at his canopied feast, and felt guilty. Ralf saw that he himself loved the Baron, in his fashion, much as he loved Father Pickard, despite the Diocese.
He said, “You ought to go.”
At any minute the cowman might cross the field to halloo his herd to milking.
She was watching him as if they would never meet again. Just as his father had done, Ralf raised a forefinger; but, instead of prescribing patience, he held it to his lips and gave her what he could of an encouraging smile.
“My lovely Ralf,” she said, in tears.
“Go.”
She moved past him, touching his hand, and he stood and watched her leave.
* * *
August and September saw the main autumn passage of the wading birds. Each day new migrants poured into Mape, swelling the numbers at the lagoons, on the grazing, on exposed mud by the reeds, and above all in the estuary. Thousands would stay for the winter; the rest would pass on. At the ebb, feeding busily, they spread far across the mudflats, by day or night. They lived to the rhythm of the tides, and as the water rose they sought out secluded places to roost: on islands, in the higher saltings and grass-marsh, and among the shingle-ridges of the beach. At the flood, aerial flocks of knot and dunlin fumed across the harbour.
Each flock was like a single entity, hissing as it passed, swirling in unison so that it was one moment dark, showing backs, and the next white, showing bellies and underwings.
The waders brought the harbour alive. Curlews, whimbrels, godwits, stints: there were far more kinds than Ralf could identify. Their voices, all different, spoke of desolate places and the journey yet to come. He had always liked the evocative call of the greenshank, a ringing tew-tew-tew which carried for half a mile or more. August was the time of most greenshanks, twenty or thirty, and it was their cry that became, for him, the signature of the mill.
Barges brought many of the things the workmen needed. From Rushton came wheelbarrows, billhooks, baskets, picks, shovels, and timber for the shed. From the quarries at Maidstone, via the Medway, came a thousand tons of Kentish rag which were dumped on the foreshore, ready to be hauled or carried across the dike.
From Southampton, by horse, came Mr Ryle, to make tests on the soil and advise on the composition of the bund. Its line was to cross the adjoining lagoon. Some of the ragstone would first be used to divide the lagoon and allow the eastern part to dry out. The bund itself was to be made of soil from the pen base, with added chalk and clay and an expansion core of crushed bracken. As the bund proceeded, its inner face would be proofed with ragstone and flint rubble, sealed with lime mortar.
The reeds in the pen were harvested. The scrub was cut down and burned, making smoke that drifted across the harbour like flocks of knot, leaving a wasteland of mud and roots. The roots were levered up and added to the fire. Linsell set a target, a piece of board, on the north-trending dike. One of the Baron’s foresters arrived with his bow. With the thinnest twine tied to his arrow, he shot the course of the bund to the far side of the lagoon. The hauling of rock, by men and horses, began; and with it the digging.
Each man was to be paid a penny a day. Any who worked four days was paid for five. At first it was not always possible to find twenty diggers. The manor was building the access track, in chalk, and the harvest overrode all else, but as time passed and word spread it became necessary to turn men away. More barrows were bought and the force was increased to thirty. Ralf devised a schedule showing who would work when. It quickly became filled to the end of November and beyond. Some diggers from outside Mape found board and lodgings in the cottages. For the others a camp was set up on the village green.
The Tide Mill Page 22