Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  I have such little feet. My hands are rough and calloused with broken nails. When I first arrived, I saw my finger nails were permanently striped with dirt. Now I am trying to keep them clean. I take one of the hazel twigs we use as toothbrushes, and sharpen its end into a point with my knife. The other children think this odd and imagine that I must have ulterior motives. Perhaps I have for I am waiting to meet Vespasian in person. Tilda thinks he is her whole world, but I have yet to see him for myself and I feel an absurd anticipation.

  Upstairs one room under the rafters is the bedroom to us all and downstairs the only space is a living room, of sorts. When there are faggots to burn, we build a fire across the central stone slab. There is no chimney. The cooking fire smokes but we sit around it and watch the pictures it plays along the walls. There are benches either side of a trestle table, a flat earth floor, straw bundles like cushions, one special chair, two stools and a narrow day bed of knotted ropes strung between a wooden frame and sagging beneath woollen wraps. There is no other furniture. The little windows have no glass but plank shutters close us in at night and when it is cold or wet. We think we are cosy. We think we are lucky.

  Being Tilda is a growing delight to me. She is happy to be alive with a joy I myself have never known. We play with the other children, chasing and squealing, throw a ball made from tied pig skin, mark the street ahead with pebbles and hopscotch to market. Between such games, we steal. We are very good at it.

  Richard, who thinks I am queen bee, was nearly caught this morning but the hue and cry missed him as he slipped down to the river and hid on a barge tied up to the bank. Little Stephen, who will surely be remarkably handsome when he grows up but for being slightly cross-eyed, stole hot bread and two pies from the street behind the Little Market. It is a dark narrow shop gorgeous with perfumes, medieval fast-food, and a luxury both to buy and to steal. I cannot believe how delicious all this food is and without sugar or additives somehow everything tastes wonderful. Walter, Osbert, Gerald and Hugh, the other four boys, are all older than me. Isabel is the oldest of us all and a little vain. I do not resent her good fortune in being Vespasian’s chosen. It seems justly inevitable.

  There had been word of his return, riding up from Dover shepherding a troop of soldiers and a cart load of injured. “Vespasian will be back tonight,” said Isabel. “It’s such an age he’s been gone. I’ll sleep well again at last.”

  Tilda and I sigh into the long shadows. She said, “I know you’ve missed him.”

  “So have you,” Isabel said. I noticed the smirk. Tilda didn’t blame her. Nor do I, but I am becoming a little irritated.

  “We all have,” I said, which was true enough.

  “I shall be covered in kisses tonight,” said Isabel, with exaggerated smiles. “One for each day he’s been gone.” Tilda said nothing, though in fact we have never ever seen Vespasian kiss her, not even once. He was usually nice enough to Issy but quick, practical copulation never included the chivalry of romantic kisses.

  The boys crowded round. We were roasting apples over the fire, skewered on twigs. Richard’s twig burned through quickly and his apple dropped into the ashes. I pulled it out for him, then licked my scorched fingers. He beamed at me. So easy to inspire adoration in the wrong person. Vespasian sometimes calls fire aqua nostra, which Tilda does not understand, but then, he says a lot of things which are totally obscure to everyone. I don’t understand it either.

  The fading winter is noticeably warmer than my own, but each evening ferocious draughts freeze my toes. I wear woollen gartered stockings to my knees beneath a coarse linen camise and then the long wool of my stolla, while my shoes are cracked leather, soles very worn with holes in the tops, but shoes none the less. Most disturbing to me was the absolutely lack of any underwear, but Tilda considers this normal and is perfectly comfortable without it.

  There are other things that trouble Tilda not one jot, but discomfort me enormously. There is neither bathroom nor toilet in our little house, and no means to find either nearby. We use chamber pots without much privacy, and empty them into the street. There is no underground sewerage system although some properties access cess pits, but I am gradually becoming accustomed to all this, and to the smells too.

  I don’t mind the rats. Their intrusive faces, scratching and scampering, echo our lives. They are good mothers. I’d have fed them scraps if I had more food myself. There are also cockroaches and fleas, lice and bedbugs and I mind them a great deal more. Tilda does too, though they seem unavoidable. Itching is a daylong exercise and we all have little bloody spots and scabs on our bodies.

  It is strange to experience real hunger. Often in my past life I have said I am hungry. Now I realise it was never the truth. I simply desired food in acknowledgment of approaching mealtimes, my body demanding to eat through habit. Hunger is something else altogether. Hunger hurts.

  In this time when I am Tilda, I have gone twice up into the forest to find herbs to flavour the pottage and soups. Stealing pies cannot happen every day. Nor do we spend the money we steal, if we can help it. Most of these cut snippets of silver pennies are kept until Vespasian returns.

  They call it a forest, though much of it is lightly treed and some of it is pasture. It seems that since all forest automatically belongs to the Crown, the good King John can declare almost any free land to be forest, even if it is sparsely wooded. It then becomes forested in name only, immediately belongs to him and is strictly controlled by law. I walk under the huge open branched trees and watch the pale winter sunshine glitter in the spider’s webs. Sometimes I forget to look for the food I have come to collect. Wonder is more important than efficiency.

  Climbing the grassy rise to the edge of the woods where the freemen’s cottages are surrounded by neat rows of beans and peas, staked and tied and growing in the sun, I could escape London’s reek a little, though here the vegetable gardens were fertilised with fresh manure and not only from the animals. Tilda always spoke to the skinny swineherd who tended the local lord’s pigs as they scrummaged for acorns under the first shadowed boughs of the forest. He was Mat, the pig boy, about seven years old though he didn’t know exactly, and looked small for his age. I doubted he ever got closer than the smell to his master’s roast pork on the spit. I had given him an apple I’d stolen, when the pigs began to fight. Scrawny little things like their guardian, they were all bones with angry pink eyes and tight dirty little tusks. Their sharp trotters scrabbled in the dry earth, heads down, butting, tails up, squealing and snorting. One caught the other with a side swipe and cut a bloody slice from its haunches but I went running back down to the cover of the city while Mat strode between them with a high child’s shout and a sharpened stick. I could hear Mat laughing behind me.

  Running was now something I could do best of all, with the warm breeze in my long hair, narrow hipped and my toes all fleet and as light as leaves barely touching the ground. If I was caught stealing I could escape any hue and cry. Long skirts made no difference. I could feel the strength in my small calves and the spring of my thighs, a young body all fresh and rushing with energy. As Molly, it was an age since I had run under the sun. Molly was older and lived a walking life, full bodied with hips, breasts and a tired back. Tilda still knew the joy of self-made speed. With no intention of spending three days and nights in the stocks, her flight was her defence, but it was also her pleasure.

  Each of Tilda’s days is exciting to me and even the stink fascinates. The gentry walk the dung strewn streets with rose scented handkerchiefs held to their noses but I am simply delighted not to smell petrol and diesel, the smoke and dirt of industry and the reeking claustrophobia of a thousand bodies crowding around.

  I know that I am still me. I am Molly Susans who leads an affluent modern life, bathes each day and owns a DVD recorder. But I am Tilda as well, who has no surname and remembers no father. I live in London; it is the year of our Lord one thousand, two hundred and six and I am one of a band of thieves, all children, who risk our
lives to live.

  I have been here just a few days in Tilda’s mind and heart and body. With Isabel’s gloating in my ears, I snuggle into the straw, scratch absently, stick my grubby thumb in my mouth, and squeeze my eyes shut. When I wake, I will at last truly meet Vespasian, who is expected to return this night.

  Chapter Five

  But when I woke I was Molly again. Immediately I felt a grinding lurch of disappointment. It was then I realised someone was screaming in the distance. The distance came nearer. The scream was raw and guttural and it expressed a terror even I had never known. I sat up, aware of a thundering headache, couldn’t put my hand to my head – simply – it was the wrong head.

  Becoming Tilda had seemed more right than strange. After years of glimpsing her world and then weeks of vivid merging, I had become her with a sense of absolute belonging. Now switching back to Molly, whom I still called myself, was far more alarming. I was in pain and confusion. Rocking sideways, I tried to attach to any sense of reality which might float past me, gripping even at the pain of the headache as a focus of who I now was. Feather pillows, sprung mattress, wallpaper, long curtains. The telephone beside my bed. It was ringing. I didn’t answer it.

  The screaming had stopped. I had no idea what I had heard or in which world it had occurred. I might have been screaming myself. I rolled over and winced; bad neck, bad head. Now I was able to recognise who I was. I could scratch my nose, rub my eyes, massage my forehead. They all belonged to me and Tilda had gone, taking her small body and her small consciousness with her.

  I wouldn’t have got out of bed for hours if Bertie hadn’t come rummaging at the door. “I’ve made tea, sweetie.” A pitiful request for attention. He’d always done this in the past after I’d found him out in some wretched wrongdoing. Not that a mug of tea was going to wipe away his infidelities, but for years I’d somehow accepted those sad and silently symbolic pleas for forgiveness. He always made tea like dishwater anyway. I asked him later if he had noticed any strange or disturbing noises earlier that morning. He hadn’t. Self absorbed though he was, the terrified scream I had heard would surely have impinged even on him, had it come from this world. So it had been Tilda’s world. Or no world at all. He said the storm which had blown me through time, had been just yesterday. That alarmed, then reassured me. For Tilda it had been four days back, the four days that I had been her.

  Bertie had now made the spare room into his bachelor pad which I thought rather eccentric, though even more of me than of him. When he had girlfriend trouble, and they usually discovered his defects a lot quicker than I had, Bertie made tea, cooked me lunches and did more housework than he ever had while we were married. It was bribery. He paid for the opportunity to discuss his problems, to talk about himself and get the attention he yearned for so deeply, and which was probably the cause of his endless unfaithfulness to me in the first place.

  “Bertie, you’re boring.” He looked as hurt as I had meant him to be, and shuffled off. I knew I was going crazy but that somehow didn’t matter much. I was a little curious as to how I had driven myself back from the deluged slopes of the hills and into my own home, presumably managed practical things such as eating and drinking, and then got myself into bed – all while I was busy being someone else in a world some eight hundred long years lost.

  I’d adored my cottage forever, bought with book royalties well before marriage, my own little pride and security. Heritage listed, which bound me to restricted repairs – a good excuse to wallow in its cosy character with not too much housework. So pretty, so comfy, a little too worn and a little tatty, but sheltering accumulated conveniences. Yet now it was medieval discomfort I wanted, and a squalor that would have horrified me in my own home.

  Each night I hoped to dream myself back into Tilda. At least I hoped to visit, to peep through and to discover whatever had happened. I worried, endlessly imaging obscure possibilities. One idea cemented and I became convinced that the ragged and dreadful scream had something to do with Vespasian.

  Dream snatches brought the man’s threat into focus. One night in the half state of that foggy intangible where reality meets sleep, I saw his eyes searching and briefly I was Tilda again. Vespasian’s eyes were heavy dipped and beneath the long curve of black lashes, his pupils were huge. I considered them eyes which have seen too much, both of life and within himself. He was furious.

  Tilda knew the signs. She knew his every expression. Perhaps she knew why he was so angry, though I did not. He was honing the iron blade of the dagger he kept always in his belt, the whet stone between his knees. But he was watching Gerald. Gerald sighed and left the room. Vespasian remained tight lipped and did not speak. One candle was a guttering tallow glimmer in the far corner and the main light came from the low fire. It flashed suddenly on the thick gold of Vespasian’s ring, the only ornament he ever wore. The brilliance caught his eyes, turning the black into sudden scarlet. I thought him devilish.

  Tilda had waited, watching him for a moment before slipping outside, careful not to attract his attention. It was dark with no light in the street except the maze of milk white from the heavens; the spilled spangle of winter stars. Gerald was leaning against the water barrel, his arms crossed over his child’s chest, his lower lip in a defiant pout. Isabel and Richard had followed him out to try and cheer him up. “No good sulking,” said Richard. “He’ll forget it eventually. You know he always does.”

  “Not until a day gone, at least,” said Gerald. “And I shall feel wretched and ignored until then. It will ruin everything.”

  We were all miserable when Vespasian was angry. “Only Issy can get him back into a good mood,” I said. Isabel was looking particularly pretty. She had washed her hair and without the wimple, it hung loose in shining curves.

  “That’s up to him,” said Isabel, prim.

  Richard and Gerald were staring purposefully away, declining to discuss such vulgar matters. “No it isn’t,” I said. “Go and climb on his lap. Best wait until he puts his dagger away perhaps, just in case, and then go and sit on his knee. Flounce, the way you do. Blink a lot and simper. Look provocative.”

  Isabel giggled. “What would you know about such things?”

  Tilda tried to imitate Gerald’s derisive snort. “Go and take your over-tunic off and undo the neck of your stolla,” I said. “Cleavage is a wonderful medicine for the gripes.”

  I was asleep, Molly in Molly’s bed, snuffling peacefully within my own private dreams, when Vespasian’s eyes interrupted me again. If they had been black in anger before, now the threat was cold controlled fury. I could not see his whole face, just the glitter of his eyes, with the soft menace of his voice. “If you ever,” he said, each word distinct but quiet as a whisper, “do such a thing again, I will take my belt to you. Do you understand?” Tilda said nothing. She was in bed, as I was, and Vespasian was standing over her, looking down. “If you wish to emulate the habits of a pimp,” he continued, “you can leave this house and I will find work for you on the streets. But it is not my libido you will service, nor my life you will ever interfere with again. Do you understand?”

  Tilda nodded with a sniff. It was all she could do. She stifled the tears and nourished a determination to revenge herself on Isabel, who must have told. She did not blame Vespasian. She never blamed him for anything.

  I woke the next morning with the knowledge that I was sane. No lunacy could have made me invent these people, especially a man I had begun to loathe.

  It was Wattle who Bertie was having problems with now, the special someone he had been faithful to for several tottering weeks. “What girl has to suffer with a name like that?” I asked him, though half absent. My thoughts remained always partially in the past.

  “She chose it, it’s her stage name,” said Bertie. “She’s an aroma therapist and juggler. I mean, that’s got to be an interesting combination. And she’s gorgeous, Mol. Even you’d like her.”

  I did like her actually. He brought her home to meet me twice, a bi
t like bringing the girlfriend back to meet your mother, only I was his ex-wife. Wattle should have been called Willow and she was sweet with green eyes and a rather firm chin. She believed in the power of oils and perfumes. I wondered what she would have made of the scent of medieval sewerage.

  I think Bertie was actually in love. We sat together in my living room with the lights down low and the flames of the fire painting black and red pictures across my ceiling. It reminded me of Tilda’s world, her cooking fire and the children’s faces, avid and hungry, cuddling close. It had snowed again, spring clinging to late winter’s bluster and the crunch of it outside was the only sound. Snow isolates worlds into an unnatural hush. I felt abstract shiftings. I was suddenly nervous of breathing too deeply. I’d only had two glasses of wine, but I stopped drinking. Wattle curled into the corner of the big couch, black hair against cushioned bronze. “But I’m not ready,” she said. “I’m not ready for commitment. It didn’t work for you two, did it?”

  “Oh, I don’t count,” I said. “Perhaps we married too young. Bertie needed more than I could give him. Besides, I’m a ratty impatient bitch. But you’re patient and kind. My head was always wandering off, planning books and following odd trails so Bertie felt neglected. You’d be nicer.”