“I will.”
“A little at first, then more. Don’t be too visible for a week or two. Then we can spread the word by other means. De Braux is one of your most bothersome opponents, is he not? Worse than his late father, God rest his soul.”
“May I say that we express our fealty by different means?”
The King’s smile became benignant. He ruled absolutely, by divine right, but he was also constrained by the baronage. Nothing ever happened if the barons opposed it. Much of his energy was spent in trying to control them. He was well aware of the flux of opinion, the alignments and realignments, the unadulterated plotting, that went on in his court.
Gervase decided it was both unnecessary and impolitic to mention the Pope. He had learned this week that Henry had altogether barred Cardinal Pellegrini from Westminster, and would deal with him only by letter.
With an inward smile of his own, Gervase suddenly recalled the name of the showy blooms on the table in front of him: sweet william.
“Do tell, de Maepe, how is your dear wife? We haven’t seen her for a while.”
“She is in good health, thank you, liege.”
“And your daughter …”
“Eloise?”
“Your youngest, set to marry Hugo Ingram’s boy?”
“She also is well, and, may I say, greatly looking forward to the ceremony and her presentation at court.”
“A notable beauty, engaging and quick-witted besides. At least that’s the word Hugo brings from his son.”
“Margaret and I are very proud of her, liege.” Gervase hesitated. “Though I have to say that the marriage may be contingent on the affairs of my manor.”
“How so?”
“I am building a mill.” As economically as he could, he explained the position.
“Ah,” Henry said, when he had finished. His smile was now as cynical as Chevalley’s had been. “It sounds intriguing. We should like to see it.”
The King was known for his fascination with the new-fangled. Gervase was instantly on his guard. A royal visit – especially as part of a progress – would be enough to wreck his finances altogether. The King had been to Mape once before, but informally, and only for hunting the few wild boar that still lurked in the reeds and oakwoods. “We shall of course be honoured should Your Grace deign —”
“Don’t worry, Gervase. That is one honour we shall, for the present, spare you. But as a matter of fact, we shall be for a day or two next September with your neighbour, Lord Angmer. There may be a chance to look at your tide mill then.”
Gervase remembered what Angmer had told him about the King lusting after Asug, his principal goshawk. By now it would be fully manned, and a very valuable bird indeed. Henry’s passion for short-winged hawks even exceeded his love of riding to hounds. “Of course. As Your Grace desires.”
“If this ludicrous case ever does come to our bench, it would be helpful for us to have examined the bone of contention.” His amusement had returned, in full. “Lord de Maepe.”
“Yes, liege?”
“We forbid you to look so downcast. You know we’d never dream of disappointing Hugo’s boy.”
10
Gervase could not remember when he last had felt so pleased with life. He was sleeping all the way through the night, every night, and waking refreshed. His appetite had improved. He viewed the antics of serfs and courtiers alike with paternal forgiveness. His burden had been lifted. A fortnight after his deliverance by the King, he realized that his twenty-five years of worry had been a test of character. He had survived it and emerged intact on the other side. He was more than intact. He was rejuvenated. And, to his astonishment, he found that he was also happy.
The verdict was a foregone conclusion. As the days passed and his mill drew ever nearer to completion, he wondered why he had ever doubted it.
He visited the site often when he was at home. He liked being there, talking to Master Grigg or to Ralf, discovering the way his mill was to work. He liked musing on his future profits, the wood-turning venture, and the novel participation of his serfs. Above all he liked musing on the Bishop’s reaction on that fast-approaching day when the verdict would be handed down. Sweet William, indeed!
In the third week of July the paired burrstones arrived from Antwerp aboard the Ooievaar, a Dutch bark calling at Rushton. Grigg supervised their transference to a coastal barge and travelled with them to Mape. It took twelve serfs to manhandle each one from the derrick, over the dike and up into the hurst room. The stones were fitted and the millstone crane installed. Parfett made a final inspection and, satisfied, presented his account.
On August the ninth, eleven days before the inauguration, Gervase got up before dawn to see the screen opened. The empty pen had grown rank with weeds. Before Grigg would let any water through the penstock, the pen had to be repeatedly filled and emptied so that the weeds would be killed and any debris flushed out. To this end the two great sea-gates, hinging upwards and attached to the inner wall of the pen, were now locked open.
The morning was chilly. Gervase shivered, wishing he had eaten more breakfast. Thick mist hung over the marshes, and except for a faint, pinkish glow on the eastern horizon, the sky was grey. Summer was already waning. Though the harvest was at its height, reaping would not begin till the dew had dried, so there had been no shortage of volunteers to help with today’s task.
Gervase remained on the dike with Master Grigg. Ralf led the team of serfs charged with dismantling the wall of sandbags. Armed with knives, they made short work of the tarred netting, which was bundled up to be taken to the village by oxcart. Useless now, it would be added to the Hallowmas fire. The sandbags were removed one by one, passed in a human chain down the foreshore and twenty yards across the firmer mud, then slashed open and the contents emptied out. The bags too, like the canvas barrier and a heap of scrap timber, would go back to Mape to be burned.
Nothing was being wasted. This appealed to Gervase’s sensibilities. As far as cereals went, his manor would very soon be self sufficient. He would be obliged to no one to have his grain made into flour. He would no longer have to trust the integrity of strangers, for he would have his own miller, chosen by and responsible to Walter and himself. Advertisements had been sent out to town-guilds as far away as Dorchester. Walter had already had one reply, and would be interviewing the candidate next week.
“Did you know, Master Grigg, that the Church is trying to make me buy a licence for your mill?”
“No, my lord. I didn’t.”
“The dispute has gone to court. But they haven’t a chance of winning. Not one. I have it on the highest possible authority.”
Apparently Grigg was unsure how to answer. He remained silent.
Gervase did not know why he had said something so indiscreet. The words had arisen from the growing sense of joy filling his breast. They had formed themselves unbidden and had demanded to be imparted to this most reliable, conscientious and self effacing of men.
“I’m no friend of the Bishop’s,” Grigg announced, after a long pause.
“Why is that?” said Gervase, taken aback.
“He ruined us. When my children … when Ralf was little, he ruined us, right enough.”
Gervase had not forgotten the Bishop’s comprehensive hand-washing over the timber-merchant, Acklin, who had been hanged for stealing the King’s oaks. Pontius Pilate himself could not have done a better job.
“Ralf was in the cathedral school. He was on course for Dorley. He’d have been at the University by now. Bit better than being a woodsmith.”
At the end of this last sentence Grigg’s voice cracked, just as it had when Gervase had released him from his contract. Gervase had never suspected him of such deep and long-held feelings: of such rage. In an instant he understood the genesis of the mill. For Linsell Grigg, it was an act of revenge.
From here, sideways on to the screen, they could see Ralf clambering about on the sandbags, directing the serfs but also working with them, as hard as them
, making sure that all went smoothly.
“He’s a fine boy,” Gervase said, thinking with a twinge of envy about his own sons. It took all of them to muster the qualities – manly independence and intelligence, dogged industry, radiant health, physical beauty – invested by the Almighty in that one favoured, almost luminous, being.
“He is.”
“I’m glad you were brought to Mape,” said Gervase, and again the words were coming of themselves. “Despite the Bishop. Because of the Bishop.”
By the time the last bag had been emptied, the tide was already dispersing the sand. Ralf and his men returned to the dike.
The harvest called the serfs away. Presently there arrived the two carpenters who were helping to finish the interior of the house. The Griggs joined them, and Gervase was left alone.
Knowing he should return to the Hall, knowing there were sundry matters claiming his attention, he yet remained to watch the tide.
For the first time in a year, it found ready passage through the threshold of the screen, foaming and swirling through the gaps between the spruce-trunks. It reclaimed the foreshore and reached the edge of the ashlar tailrace below the wheel. It encroached on the sloping stonework, progressively wetted the lowest paddle of the wheel itself, and started climbing the low sill of the sea-gate wall.
Gervase had never before heeded this miracle. He had never observed it closely, or given thought to the lunar mystery that lay behind it. How did it work? Why had God ordered it so? Without tides, the oceans would be a lifeless expanse of water moved only by the wind. The moon was their breath. The cycle of inhalation and exhalation approximated to twelve and a half hours, so that high water crept a little later each day, and never recurred at the same time and at the same height for months or even years together. By making the cycle irregular, God maintained in the motion of his seas the infinite variety of his whole creation.
It was wonderful, truly wonderful. No man could conceive the weight of water, the raw power being eternally squandered on the beaches of the world.
Through native genius, Master Grigg had captured a speck of that power and turned it to the welfare of God’s children. If any mill in Christendom deserved the name “sacred”, this was it. What arrant nonsense were the laws of men!
Gervase moved to the other side of the dike. There he witnessed the very first pulse of salt water spilling through its designated gaps in the wall. Feeble as it was, it took the unsuspecting forest of groundsel by surprise, splashing it, darkening and being at once absorbed by the dusty soil of the pen. The weeds were doomed. That wave was followed by one lesser, and a lesser yet, and then by a greater, which produced as it fell an authentic swash of the sea.
He looked up, half expecting to glimpse a face at the dormer window – Ralf’s, for some reason, had suggested itself to his mind – but he, more sensible than the lord of the manor, was so certain of the tides and his father’s skill that he did not even feel the need to watch.
A moment later Gervase heard hammering inside the house. With one last, excited glance at the pen, he descended the shallow stone steps beside the cart-ramp, to the hitching-rail by the workshed, and his waiting horse.
* * *
High tide on the day of the inauguration was due at half-past two in the morning. Unobserved, in the night, the sea-gates went on admitting water until just before the tide turned. Their own weight then resisted any further inflow. As the sea-level dropped, the increasing differential pressure of the water in the pen clamped the gates harder and harder against their frames.
So well had they been finished that, by morning, when the spectators began to arrive, the leakage amounted to no more than spurting spray, shaped and angled in various directions according to the imperfections in the wood.
The gates were made of seasoned oak, caulked and tarred like the hull of a ship. Ralf thought that the millhouse, fronting the calm expanse of water in the pen, was itself like some odd sort of vessel, now waiting to set sail. With a single revolution of its ashwood tommy-bar, the penstock turnscrew would start letting water through the jet. With three more, the jet would be operating with maximum force. While the millhouse remained stationary, the rotating wheel and runnerstone would make their own linked but separate voyages; and send their gushing wakes down two chutes, one into the meal-bin and the other out to sea.
By the time of the morning’s second bell, the sun had come out and there were well over a hundred people on the dike. The Baron made a short speech, imperfectly heard by those furthest away, but no one seemed to care. They had come not for speeches, but to see the wheel turn.
To Ralf’s surprise, Father Pickard blessed the building and sprinkled holy water in the porch. And then the Baron called attention to the lintel there.
Ralf had not been sure about the last-minute, private commission the Baron had given him, to carve a wooden plaque without his father’s knowledge. A few minutes ago, while his parents had been elsewhere, Ralf had hung the plaque from some temporary hooks.
He had made it from a flawless blank of heartwood yew, as blond as her hair. The style and sequence of lettering had been most carefully specified by the Baron. The words were not to be in Latin, still less in courtly French, but in English:
IMOGEN’S MILL
Ralf had feared his parents might be upset. He had been wrong.
“Are we all ready?” the Baron said. “Shall we start the wheel?”
Ralf felt a restraining hand on his shoulder. He had been about to go inside and open the turnscrew, as arranged. His father had stopped him.
“My lord,” Linsell said. “Let the honour go to your own daughter.”
This notion met with the approval of those in earshot. Not without a reluctance that perhaps only Ralf perceived, Eloise came forward. She was wearing a summer dress in cream linen, adorned by a small brooch in amber and gold. Her hair had been woven, with a cream-and-brown ribbon, into the single long plait he liked so well.
Without speaking, they climbed the iron ladder to the middle floor and the silent stones.
The spring and summer had been kind to Eloise. Except for the trouble Ralf saw in her eyes, she looked as lovely now as ever she had. She could almost have been the same girl he had seen in the Long Barn, moral and pure, a maiden, her life unruined.
“Hullo, Ralf,” she said, once he had helped her from the ladder.
He did not answer: he could not.
“What … what am I supposed ..?”
“That handle. Turn it. No, the other way.”
While the village waited below, he watched her slender hands gripping the bar. Her knuckles whitened as she struggled to make it move. She was not strong enough.
Ralf stepped behind her and took hold of the bar himself, enclosing her body with his own. With a tumbling rush of recollection he inhaled her perfume and the freshness of the rosemary rinse she used in her hair.
“Ralf, don’t!”
“Run away with me. We’ll go anywhere. Abroad.”
“You know we can’t. I can’t.”
Having started the bar turning, he moved back and let her continue. Below, unseen from here but visible to the onlookers, the penstock shutter had begun to rise. Under the pressure of four thousand tons stored up behind, the culvert became a maelstrom of deflected spray. A solid sheet of sea-water was pummelling the first of the waiting paddles. To avoid it, the paddle moved away even as the sheet deepened to a torrent; and as it moved away it committed its following neighbour to the same treatment. The same again, and the same again, and the same again, and slowly the wheel was coming alive. Cheers rose from the watching assembly. Gaining momentum and shedding waste water as it went, the wheel performed its first full, its first magnificent revolution, transmitted across and upwards, through the gears and shaft and spindle to the rind and its stone: faster, yet faster, and faster again.
While the damsel rattled against the shoe, Ralf brought the tentering-screw to the mark. The speeding runner descended a sixteenth of
an inch. He reached up and opened the bin-sock, in which a pint or two of last year’s wheat had been placed. The grains slipped down through the hopper and shoe and on into the eye. Almost at once, flour began cascading from the gap between the stones.
“Be my wife.”
It was hopeless. Her brown eyes did not need to tell him that.
“I’ll always be your wife.”
With that she headed for the ladder. Ralf let her go. The last of the sample had already been ground. Raising the stone, he gathered a handful of flour from the chute, went into the sack-room, opened the external door, and was just in time to see her emerge from the porch and rejoin her father.
Everyone seemed to be talking at once, but the roar of the penstock made it impossible for Ralf to hear any words. Waiting for him, Linsell looked up.
Ralf opened his hand and, as he had with Eloise, let the puff of flour go. It drifted a yard or two and vanished in the wind.
Linsell emphatically clenched both his fists and grinned. Ralf made himself grin back.
He returned to the stone-room. Their labour had been rewarded, and now it was over. Nothing more than finishing and tinkering remained to be done. Six weeks from today his parents would be leaving Mape.
His eyes unfocused on the wooden floor, Ralf put his hands where hers had been and began to turn the bar in the opposite direction.
11
Chevalley had been right about the Bishop’s case. It had been referred upwards yet again, and now could go no higher. Subject to the usual procrastination and delay, it was scheduled to be heard on Friday, the twenty-third of September.
The hearing might last fifteen minutes. Gervase was not required to attend, and he had no wish to make a special journey to London in order to do so. His time was better spent at home, where the preparations for Eloise’s wedding in October were under way.
The harvest was in and being dried, ready for grinding. A miller had been chosen, an agreeable widower named Pegg, who had previously worked at a priory in Kent. Stephen had sent letters to every lord within carting reach, detailing the most reasonable terms on offer at Mape. Gervase himself, in person, had invited Frederic Angmer to bring his corn there, using, he realized afterwards, the phrase “my mill” rather too often.
The Tide Mill Page 37