In the second week of August two more barges arrived from Rushton, bringing a cargo of scorched and tarred spruce-trunks for the piling. The next day another barge appeared, also black, bigger than any that had come before. It carried a team of men from Portsmouth and their marine pile-driver. The sheers, a tripod of spruce sixty feet high, were fitted with a complex pulley and a chain-drawn cylinder of rock, encased in steel. Blow by blow, between the tides, this hammered the piles into the foreshore along the curved line of the screen.
The yells of the ganger, the brawn and unity of the haulers, the daring and boldness of the rigger who, without a second’s thought, would climb up to free a tangled chain: these combined to exercise in Ralf a peculiar and deep-seated pull. He would watch, when he could, the cylinder slowly rise. It would hang tightly against the block, awaiting the ganger’s warning shout. The release would be thrown; with a flailing of chains the cylinder would fall, striking the flat face of the waiting pile; and, constrained by the ring-guide, the unimaginable power of the impact would be transmitted down the trunk and into the mud and stones. This was engineering in action, and he was enthralled.
He had found his vocation. To the greenshank’s cry, he worked in any weather, from first light to dusk, not caring what he did or how dirty he got. Often, wearing no more than his linen braies, he would become covered in mud. At high tide even his braies would be discarded when he and the other men jumped into the water to clean off.
They deferred to him. He was the master’s son, and his thoughts were his own, but still he found a form of comradeship with them.
Under the August sun his skin turned brown. Sometimes he surprised himself with his own strength. And, in every moment of the day, he was possessed by Eloise.
From Imogen he learned that the Baron’s petition had been received and was awaiting the royal consent. Ralf was made to listen in church as the banns were read. Soon the sanction would be granted and the betrothal would become binding. Any who violated it would be committing an act of treason. Death was the penalty: beheading for a noble, and hanging, drawing and quartering for a commoner.
He saw her only at church. She never looked his way. Week by week she retreated further, and with each retreat his carapace of resignation grew thicker and heavier.
But beneath it, Ralf was on fire. His former petty trials were forgotten. Only rarely had he known passion in himself: at Alincester, when the workshop had failed; in the seablite, when he had started his run towards Godric; and, perhaps, in his short-lived fury with Aholiab Peake. Those disorders had been nothing. The further she retreated, the more intensely his torment burned, feeding on itself, feeding on him. His scruples for the Baron and propriety were driven to higher and higher ground. When nowhere was left for them, they too went up in flames. At bedtime, exhausted by his labours at the site, he would fall instantly asleep, both fearing and longing for his dreams. Once, they had been largely chaste. No more. The background, the setting, was always the mill: the mud, the greenshanks, the burning roots. The sheers became an engine of siege, or decapitation, and piecemeal, hour by hour, they were building the barrier that would for ever keep him from her.
In daylight, he saw the prosaic line of piling finished. The spruce trunks were set a hand’s-length apart and would stand three feet above the highest spring. To them were nailed overlapping sheets of heavy canvas. Tarred sandbags were heaped against the canvas and confined in a stout net of tarred rope. By the end of the first week of September, Linsell had satisfied himself that the screen was watertight and the pilers were released.
The dike opposite the screen was widened, reinforced, and dug out for the foundations of the house. These were formed of flint-rubble and mortar, faced with re-used granite on the outer slope. Into them were sunk pillars of oak, tenoned into heavy oak sills, two feet deep, mortised in turn to take vertical studs. At the level of the first floor, and then the second, the studs were tenoned into horizontal bressumers that carried the floor-joists. The uppermost studs were tenoned into horizontal wall-plates that carried the lower end of the roof-rafters. There were twenty-three pairs of rafters, supported by graceful tiebeams and principals arranged to transmit the weight of the roof not only through the studs to the ground below, but also, in proportion to its size and strength, to every joint of the frame itself. The roof had been given a single dormer facing north, and half hipped gables at east and west, to provide more storage space.
From sills to roof-ridge the mill was thirty-nine feet high. At this alarming elevation, with a new perspective on the landscape, the harbour, and the sea, Ralf worked beside his father and four other carpenters, on ladders, in slings, or sitting astride beams, dowelling joints or nailing riven oak spars along the rafters, for the thatch. Up here the breeze was stronger, the air even more clean. The autumn was on its way.
Midway through this process, towards the end of September, Godric, with his father, paid another visit to the site. Like Ralf, they thought the proportions of the skeleton mill-house harmonious. Godric returned to the Abbey without so much as Ralf having, through his presence, laid eyes on Eloise.
All that month, Ralf had been anticipating its twenty-ninth day, the feast of the archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. Michaelmas, the third quarter-day of the Christian year, was celebrated with a banquet in the Long Barn for everyone in Mape. She was not there. Nor was she watching the procession of children which snaked round the green. The leading child was a boy of nine, dressed in white and bearing a painted wooden sword, in commemoration of the passage in Jude where Michael contends with Satan for the body of Moses. The procession started at the Hall and ended at the church. And even there, throughout the concert of harp music and plainchant, throughout the hymns, throughout the unheard sermon on the Book of Jude, Eloise did not once look in Ralf’s direction. Her aunts and mother surrounded her like a bodyguard. Though the day was fine, they all left directly after the service.
Alone, he went to the workshop. This was where he had kissed her, on Lammas Day. Like a fool he had acquiesced and let her leave. If a serf ran off and could evade his owner for a year and a day, he would be free. Without money it was not easy. Very few ever tried it; even fewer succeeded. But it was possible. A serf could do it, and so could they, but for them the limit would not apply. They would have to run away for ever.
Ralf took up his smoothing plane and adjusted the blade. Though this was a holiday, all he wanted to do was work. He knew it was irrational; he knew the mill had nothing to do with her, but work was the only thing that gave him ease. As the afternoon yielded to an early autumn dusk, he poured all his heart and skill into every stroke. The whisper-thin shavings curled up from the throat of his plane and fell away to the workshop floor. He was making the jambs of a window-frame. This one would go in the dormer, overlooking the lagoons.
He lit the lamps. As he opened his vice with a whirl of the screw, Ralf admitted to himself what he had denied till now. Part of him was coming to resent her.
Forgetting how, at every turn, he himself had behaved, he blamed her for his pain. Today her withdrawal no longer seemed heroic, but a venal act of indifference, or even cruelty. This work, building this monument to a mythical Eloise, was finite. One day soon there would be no more of it: the mill would be complete. Soon after that, she herself would be gone. She would vanish into the world of privilege, and he would be forgotten.
The next afternoon, a barge from Rushton brought the weatherboards for cladding the walls. In the days following, working from the ground upward, Ralf and the others steadily covered the frame, using lost-head brads alternately toed at thirty degrees. Linsell insisted on standardizing the interval between each course of wood, providing each pair of men with a five-inch gauge. Ralf soon saw the reason for it: the parallel shadows of the overlapping boards made a pattern. The higher the boards climbed up the face of the mill, the more regular and pleasing the pattern became.
The whole building was pleasing, apt, right for its location and p
urpose. Even after his years at Rushton, Ralf had not understood quite how deep his father’s talent and knowledge ran.
The thatchers arrived, four middle-aged freemen who included a pair of twins. Most of the thatch in Mape and the surrounding manors was their work, marked by a fluid style in the finish of ridges, dormers and gables. Long ago, they had re-roofed Jacob’s cottage. They worked in nothing but reed, the best material, producing roofs that might last a hundred years.
Linsell wanted a simple design, with a plain ridge, which was to be finished in sedge. While the thatchers applied their bundles and wielded their rakes, knives and leggetts, the carpenters laid the floors in the house below. The underside of the thatch was coated with lime plaster, to reduce the risk of fire. The shutters were fitted, and then the three external doors, and the house became weatherproof.
It had three floors, not counting the shallow basement void. Under the rafters was the granary floor, where grain would be kept ready for grinding. Below that was the stone floor, for the millstones. On the ground floor would be the meal-bin and the frame for the gears. Descending even lower was the pit for the pitwheel, the first cog, to be driven directly by the axle of the waterwheel.
The largest of the rooms on the ground floor would be set aside for later use: the manor was planning a lathe. Its power would be provided by a secondary layshaft, belt driven. Another, small, room served as a porch.
The stone floor comprised two rooms. The smaller, at the west, would be used for storing sacks and tools. On the eastern side would be the hurst housing the millstones, and the millstone crane which would allow the runner to be swung aside or removed for cleaning and maintenance. A sack-flap – a trapdoor with paired, upward-opening flaps – would allow the flour to be brought up from the meal-room below, using a hoist driven by the wheel.
The granary was served by an external door opening under a salient beam which overhung the dike on the village side. Using a second hoist, wagons would be unloaded here. The finished sacks would be removed from a corresponding door below. Besides the granary, there was on this floor a second room, with its dormer window overlooking the lagoons, which would accommodate the miller and his assistant: their hours of work would be determined by the tide.
October remained largely dry. The diggers made steady progress throughout the month. By dusk on Saturday the thirtieth, about fifty yards of embankment had been raised. Of those, half had been proofed. Work there was ahead of schedule.
The men returned to the village through the gathering dark. The access track was finished now. The fresh, glaring chalk of its surface ran beside the dike all the way to the two-hundred-acre field, where the existing, zigzag, track had been widened to take big wagons, its corners smoothed. Those serfs with reduced strips had grumbled so much that the manor had offered payment or the exchange of these for demesne strips elsewhere. For reasons of sentiment as much as the improvements they had made to the soil, most of the serfs had settled for the money.
The air felt damp and chilly. It was over. She had gone from him. The mill-house had been built. She had not even waited for the machinery.
Walking on chalk beside his father, Ralf thought the track underfoot so white that it seemed they were walking on hard-packed snow.
10
Like Lammas, the Christian observance of All Saints or Hallowmas had been adapted and rendered harmless from an older festival. For the English now, the first of November was the day when the souls of departed saints were remembered. Hundreds of years earlier, it had marked New Year’s Eve, Samhain, the pagan Feast of the Dead.
This was the time of the final harvest, when surplus beasts were slaughtered and laid down to salt. The Sun God, becoming feeble, was descending into his time of greatest mystery. Samhain opposed and counterbalanced Beltane, Mayday, the spring rite of fertility. It fell at the hinge of the year, belonging neither to the old nor the new, when order became chaos and re-formed. The ancient shamans had then felt closest to the divine, seen their most transcendent visions and made their most accurate predictions. The sacred burial mounds had been opened to welcome the return of the dead, and to light their way huge beacons had been torched. They had consumed the debris of the year; the past itself. The heat and flame had also held back the oncoming winter, an act of human defiance in the face of the gods. In even earlier times, the slaughter had not ended at beasts.
Wisely, the church elders had not forbidden the lighting of beacons. Every year at Hallowmas, bonfires still burned on village greens.
The bonfire at Mape was made at the eastern end of the green. Supervised by the Bailiff, it was assembled over a period of at least two months, a mountain of fuel heaped around a low framework of timber. Besides scrap, driftwood, hedge-cuttings and poplar brashings, the Hallowmas fire devoured anything combustible which the villagers wished to be rid of and which would not do for a domestic hearth: leaky barrels, soiled straw and thatch, sometimes an old shallop or punt, broken ladders, and even verminous clothes, which were thrust into the middle of the heap with long sticks.
No captives were sacrificed or consigned to the flames. Instead the children warmed their hands and roasted chestnuts in the ashes. The seers’ drugged trances had been replaced with harmless games of future-telling. The young girls of the village placed hazelnuts at the edge of the fire, each one named for a potential suitor. As the nutshells grew hot the traditional chant was heard: “If you love me, pop and fly; if you hate me, burn and die.”
Eloise knew these words, though even in childhood she had never sung them herself. Once the fire was going, she and her family would emerge to mingle with the crowds on the green. It was the custom for the manor to provide food: hot, unleavened bread with butter and honey, baked apples, and three or four roebucks. These last would be roasted at the Hall, basted with a sauce of reduced red wine and capers, sliced, and served to the revellers from broad trenchers.
“Do have some,” said her Aunt Béatrice, who had just eaten a piece. “It’s very good this year.”
Eloise obeyed, taking the smallest morsel she could find. Leaning forward to protect the material of her pelisse, she put it in her mouth.
They moved away from the trenchers and stood among those watching the dancing. To the ragged music of two pipes and a drum, and brightly lit by the fire, nine or ten couples were attempting a circular manoeuvre. Few of them seemed to know what to do. There was much laughter, especially from the spectators. The dance broke down, only to be started again.
Having reached the logs at its centre, the fire had taken on a life of its own. The flames were reaching ever further into the clear November sky, sending up crackling sparks as if to make new stars. In the east, over the Hall, hung a sliver of moon, its horns to the left. Above the sparks, above the squirming billows of underlit smoke, the sky was black.
Eloise did not want to get any nearer to the firelight than this. She was afraid of encountering Ralf. For the same reason, she had not attended the Michaelmas banquet.
The wedding was almost a year off. She knew she could not hide herself till then, so this evening she had agreed to accompany her aunt to the green. Their presence was expected, though she was already wondering how soon she could reasonably withdraw. There were at least two hours to go before dinner: the bonfire had been started at dusk.
The taste of Hallowmas venison brought back other childhood memories, none particularly happy, but Eloise already felt subdued. The royal sanction had arrived on Thursday.
It was inscribed on vellum, the first letter illuminated, and bore the careless signature of the King. Below that, hanging from a red ribbon at the left-hand corner, the royal seal had been precisely impressed in matching wax. The document had been brought by a royal bearer and handed with due ceremony to the Baron, from whom a receipt, just as elaborate, had been exacted.
The words were in Latin. Her father had translated them for her. She could no longer recall more than a few fragments. “Concerning a petition laid before us … be it kn
own by all men … that the betrothal of Robert, knight, firstborn son of our most loyal vassal and kinsman, Hugo Ingram, the Duke of Kent … is hereby in the sight of Almighty God sanctioned and approved … given under our hand this twenty-fifth day of October in the Year of Christ, 1258 … Henry, by the grace of God king of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou …”
Since her introduction to Robert Ingram in March, no subsequent meeting had been arranged. It would serve no purpose, and might cause awkwardness or difficulty. This was the usual practice. The next time she saw him, he would be joining her at the altar.
She was being coached in every aspect of the family into which she would marry: their genealogy, the deeds and exploits of their most famous sons, their titles and honours, their estates in Kent and elsewhere, and the splendour of their houses in London and Oxford. She was being schooled in the nuances of etiquette when dealing with the family and the court, both as the wife of Robert Ingram and, later, as the Duchess of Kent. Aunt Matilde, a widow, had lately taken her aside and informed her in graphic terms of her conjugal duties, which, in sum, comprised pleasing her husband in any way he commanded. That might include submitting to the King or one of the princes.
All this Eloise had accepted with outward stoicism. She was by nature undemonstrative, and was learning to keep her feelings not just hidden but secret.
Three days ago, on Friday, her parents had left for the London court. Her sister-aunts, Mildred and Matilde, had accompanied the third sister, her mother, leaving only Aunt Béatrice. Even Godric was away.
The Tide Mill Page 23