John Saturnall's Feast

by Lawrence Norfolk

  At last they were dismissed. The children surged out, John at their head as always. But this time, at the gate, he stopped. At the sight of him, the little ones stared. Cassie emerged with Tobit, Seth and Abel. A scowling Ephraim followed with Dando. John stood his ground. Then he saw Tobit's heavy brow crease. Dando's eyes narrowed. He had been wrong, John thought suddenly. Cassie's challenge was a trick. He was a fool. They would fall upon him. But the boys looked at one another. Tobit stepped forward.

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ Tobit blurted out.

  ‘There was blood all over,’ added Seth.

  ‘Cassie said you stopped breathin,’ Dando told him. ‘But she prayed and you came back.’

  John stared, not trusting himself to glance at the girl. But as the children turned between himself and Cassie, a sceptical voice sounded.

  ‘That so, Cassie?’ Ephraim asked. ‘You prayed him to life?’

  Cassie turned a guileless gaze on the older boy. ‘You doubting me, Ephraim?’

  ‘You prayed for the son of a witch?’

  Ephraim looked about at the other children, seeking their support.

  ‘For Witch-boy?’ He appealed.

  But no one moved. No one raised a hand against John. A scowl darkened Ephraim's heavy-browed face.

  ‘You take me for a fool,’ he spat. ‘But Ephraim Clough's no fool. Warden Marpot knows that.’

  Cassie favoured Ephraim with her most radiant smile.

  ‘God chooses his messenger,’ she said. ‘That's what Brother Timothy told me.’

  The dark-suited boy shook his head but the little ones were already edging forward, crowding around John as if a fierce animal had wandered down from the hillside and begun tamely nibbling the grass on the green.

  ‘Is it true your ma charms snakes?’ Peggy Rawley asked, clutching her doll.

  ‘Was your pa really a pirate?’ demanded the youngest Riverett.

  ‘Or a blackamoor?’ added an undaunted Bah Fenton in her whiny voice.

  Then they were all around him, jabbering and questioning. John stood in their midst, nodding or shaking his head, a bubble of happiness swelling inside him, growing and growing until he feared it might burst.

  ‘So who turned the water in the old well sour?’ asked one of the Suton girls.

  ‘That was Marpot, moving in next door to it,’ said Seth.

  Cassie shook her head disapprovingly and Ephraim's scowl returned but the other children laughed. Then Seth took out his cap, threw it high in the air and looked across their heads.

  ‘You playing then?’

  It took a moment for John to understand. Then Abel added his voice.

  ‘Well, John?’

  He played drop-cap and catch on the green then fives with Seth's ball against the back of the church. He ran races around the pond and played hide-and-seek among the trees of the Chaffinge orchard. When the shadows from the well lengthened, he walked up the back lane with Cassie and Abel and it felt as if his feet barely brushed the ground. He floated over the stile and the clods of Two-acre Field. As they rounded the far corner, Cassie reached down and picked a pebble from the soil. She took out a purse embroidered with crosses and put the pebble inside.

  ‘That was good what you said,’ John said shyly.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘About praying for me.’

  ‘I did pray for you, John.’ She gave him a smile. ‘You want to know what God said?’

  John nodded.

  ‘He said you'd help me.’

  ‘Help you how?’

  ‘He said you'd help me find the witch,’ said Cassie.

  ‘What witch?’

  ‘The witch that took our Mary. Up there.’

  Cassie looked up, above the hedge that marked the edge of the field, all the way up the slope to the dark line of trees at the top. But before John could ask more, the clanging of Marpot's hand-bell came from the direction of the green. Abel trudged up, his boots crumbling the clods.

  ‘Brother Timothy's calling,’ he told his sister with a grin. ‘Don't want to keep him waiting do you, Cass?’

  Cassie gave her brother a pitying look then turned without another word. The boys watched her run off across the field, her brown wool dress flapping about her legs. Abel turned to John.

  ‘She tell you she talks to God?’

  ‘She said she prayed,’ John said awkwardly.

  Abel snorted then shucked off his blue coat. Picking up a stone, he weighed it in his hand.

  ‘You know how to throw?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘Want to learn?’

  ‘This was a garden once,’ John's mother told him. ‘A long time ago. Everything a body could need grew here.’

  The dew soaked their legs, their limbs casting long shadows in the early morning sun. His mother carried the book in her arms. The promised lessons had begun.

  ‘Whose garden?’ John asked, looking up the slopes to the wood. ‘Buccla's?’

  His mother shook her head. ‘There was no Buccla.’

  ‘But the witch . . .’

  ‘There was no witch.’

  ‘But people say . . .’

  ‘People say lots of things. I knew a man once, he could say what he wanted in every tongue under the sun. None of them were true. Come on.’

  They climbed until the trees in Joan Chaffinge's orchard looked like sprigs of clover. Beside the stocks, the animal-pound seemed hardly big enough for an ant. Tiny cottages and houses fringed the wedge of the green where the old well stood like a thimble. Around it the bare patches of Saint Clodock's Tears pocked the grass. Across from Old Holy's house, people waited by the new well with their buckets and churns. Behind them, a row of beech trees screened Marpot's house and the Huxtable barn at the back. His mother opened the book.

  ‘Look here. Foxglove.’ Her finger circled a cluster of trumpet-like forms then pointed to a nearby stalk of purple bell-flowers. ‘Foxglove's for the heart. This one beside it, that's lady's bedstraw. Good for cuts. Here's tansy, and juniper, and rue. There's meadow saffron. That's for gout. Self-heal flower soothes burns. Loose-strife calms oxen. You drape it on their horns, so people say. Do you believe that, John?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘That's right. Now look how it's written . . .’

  They sat together high on the slopes, heads bent over the pages while her finger traced the alien shapes, her soft voice sounding them out and making him repeat them.

  ‘See? It's not so hard.’

  As their expeditions multiplied, his mother's herbal became his horn-book where he learned his letters, matching names to the pictures in its pages. His schoolroom was the overgrown slopes. There roots and stems hoisted their bright pennants while the book's black lines broke out in a hundred shades of green.

  John scrambled up and down the terraces and banks, hunting out the secret breaks in the thickets or crawling through hollows woven from sharp-spined stems. Blackberries lured him into sun-pricked chambers. Old byways closed and new ones opened, drifts of nettles surging forward then dying back. The sun beat down until the grass on the green parched. But on the high slopes the rank stems sprang up as lush as ever. Springs ran beneath the turf, his mother told him. Enough water to fill a river.

  Together they pulled peppery watercress from the edges of marshy puddles and grubbed up tiny sweet carrots, dark purple under the dusty earth. Clover petals yielded honey-beads and jellylike mallow seeds savoured of nuts. Tiny strawberries sheltered under ragged leaves and sweet blackberries swelled behind palisades of finger-pricking thorns. John licked the blood-red juice off his hands, his demon savouring the taste.

  ‘The gum from these will take away any pain,’ his mother told him in a high meadow of poppies. ‘You mix it in a draught. Just a little, mind. People dream themselves mad.’

  Cow parsley was just as dangerous. ‘Tug any harder on that,’ his mother told him, ‘and one of us'll drop down dead.’

  John snatched back his h
and but his mother began laughing. ‘Don't pull up any mandrakes either,’ she wheezed. ‘Or wish too hard on any four-leaved clovers. Don't believe every old story you hear.’

  She meant the witch, he knew. But his mind went back to Ephraim Clough's claim and wherever they might have been before the village. For behind that question John sensed another mystery. A face whose features never resolved. He had asked her only once who his father was. Her reply had been given so bitterly he had never dared ask again. I never knew, she had told him. He couldn't speak his own name without lying . . .

  Each day they climbed higher. The ridge of the Spines looped in from the west, the hillsides dotted with sheep. From the foot of the hills, the marshlands of the Levels stretched south and west. Zoyland Tor rose among distant peat-fire plumes and flat pastures cut by the long channels of the rhines.

  Christ stopped at Zoyland, Father Hole had told them once. He planted a thorn with Joseph of Arimathea. Now herds of wild buffalo grazed the marshes. So Jasper Riverett said. The Romans had left them behind. To the south, the Vale of Buckland stretched away, dotted with villages which followed the meanders of the river. The higher John climbed, the further he saw until, reaching the banks of thorns, he and his mother looked out over the whole Vale.

  John had never seen so far or imagined there was so far to see. His eye followed the river's wide meanders until they narrowed then thinned to a silver thread. In the furthest distance, a ridge rose and a tiny gatehouse broke the tree-line. Then, framed between the squat turrets, he spied a greater structure.

  A great house seemed to break through the verdure and stretch two wings like a vast stone bird struggling free of the earth. Tiers of windows rose to a bristling plateau where domes and little towers jostled with cupolas and spires or dropped to invisible courtyards. Behind it rose a taller tower, its steeply raked roof pointing up like a blade. A church steeple, thought John. He turned to his mother.

  ‘What's that?’ he asked.

  ‘Buckland Manor,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Where Sir William lives?,

  ‘I reckon he must. No one's seen him outside it in eleven years.’ Eleven years, marvelled John. His entire life. ‘Never?’

  ‘Aren't many who've seen him inside either. He forbids his servants to look at him. So I heard.’

  John looked out again at the house, his gaze fluttering over the ledges and eaves as if he might catch a glimpse of the elusive Sir William. But there were so many distant windows and tiny roofs. Another mystery, he thought. Like the book. Like the names of the plants. Like Cassie.

  There she was, far below, her bright white bonnet in the meadow, crossing to disappear inside the beech copse. Then another movement caught his eye. In Two-acre Field, a tiny figure let fly invisible stones at the Huxtables’ scarecrow. John grinned. The mysteries vanished. Buckland's Champion Stone-thrower was practising again.

  They practised together now. Every Sunday after church he and Abel stood together beside the new well and aimed stones at the old one. They threw their missiles along fast flat arcs to hit the tumble-down walls with a crack or lobbed up pebbles, trying to land them in the old bucket.

  ‘You keep your elbow high,’ the blond-haired boy instructed John. ‘Give your wrist a flick at the end. Like this.’

  He held John's arm at the required angle. Sitting on the parched grass behind them, Cassie called the misses and hits, mocking or encouraging as the mood took her. ‘You aiming at the church, John? Or was that one meant for Flitwick?’

  John flushed under the girl's taunts and praise. Abel rolled his eyes. From the old well rose the wet winding-sheet smell he remembered, as if their assaults disturbed the dark water below. When the sun rose higher, they moved into the shade and took Saint Clodock's Tears for their targets, lobbing up missiles to land on the bare patches of earth. John gathered stones and stole glances at Cassie who pulled off her bonnet or flapped her brown dress to cool her legs.

  They threw until their arms ached then joined Seth, Tobit and Dando. When the heat grew too fierce they walked together up the back lane, around Two-acre Field and through the hedge by John's secret way. They dashed water from the trough into their mouths or doused each other or sheltered in the shade of the beeches. John sat between Abel and Cassie, swapping secret looks with the girl while Abel and the others gossiped. The talk swirled about them as if the village would shroud them in a cloak of words: the brown bottles Old Holy bought from the packhorse driver after Lady Day, or what Maddy Oddbone had got up to with a man from Flitwick, or how John Lambe had made his latest peace with Ginny . . .

  Only Ephraim's presence disturbed John's contentment. The older boy loomed over him, rolling his eyes if John chanced to speak and offering mocking looks. But the other children shrugged or pretended they had not seen. Cassie chewed at her blackened nail. Why, John wondered, did it never heal? So the afternoons passed. Then Marpot's hand-bell sounded, calling the faithful to prayer.

  The Lessoners wore dark jackets or shawls, black skirts or breeches without buckles or buttons. Every Sunday afternoon at the clanging summons they gathered in the long low cottage at the bottom of the green: the Chaffinges, Jim, Eliza and Ephraim Clough's families, the Fisheroakes and most of the Fentons, Mercy Starling and Cassie and the others. Behind the dark wood shutters the devotees knelt to chant psalms, listen to Marpot preach and mete out punishments to the offenders among them.

  ‘They strip them naked,’ Abel told John one Sunday. ‘Cassie told me.’

  An unbidden image rose in John's mind; of Marpot peeling off Cassie's brown wool dress. Her pale freckled body.

  ‘All they get is a sheet,’ Abel went on. ‘They didn't wear nothing in Eden, Marpot says. All they ate was what they picked from the trees. All they drank was water.’

  Dando Candling nodded. ‘Our pa says if Marpot loves Eden so much, why don't he go naked himself?’

  ‘Maybe he does,’ chipped in Seth.

  The boys sniggered. From inside the cottage, Marpot's voice sounded.

  ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying: if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days. And whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until evening. And everything that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: everything also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean . . .’

  ‘Gideon didn't want to make him Warden,’ Seth went on. ‘The Cloughs argued him into it. Old Holy just went along.’

  ‘He got the Ale banned too,’ muttered Tobit. ‘After what he did.’ John looked away, remembering the black-clad figure on the roof. The villagers’ torchlit faces.

  ‘Ain't banned this year,’ Dando piped up. ‘Gideon was telling my pa.’

  Abel grinned. ‘Marpot won't like that.’

  Marpot's voice fell silent. In its place rose a toneless chant. But out of the drab recitation, a clearer melody rose high in the air. A girl's voice soared above the others: Cassie's voice.

  She had been teasing him that first time, John thought now. There had been no more talk of witches since. Nor of John's help. The boys looked over at the shuttered and stone-tiled cottage, the sun beating down on its roof. It would be hot in there, John thought. He imagined them kneeling in rows, chanting psalms in the gloom. And Cassie singing to heaven.

  It was late afternoon when he regained the hut. His mother nodded and smiled when he pulled open the door. No interrogations awaited him now. He no longer crept past her concealing the latest harvest of scratches and bruises. Every mornin, they climbed the slopes together. Looking down, they watched the grass on the green parch until Saint Clodock's Tears disappeared in a desert of brown. But on the high slopes the summer heat seemed to draw deeper greens from the soil. John and his mother swished through carpets of vetches and fescues or pushed their way through the bushes, splashing through springs that broke through the turf and flowed through the grass in secret cascades.

  In the afternoons his mother climbed towards the cordon of brambles. Then
John took his own routes along ancient weed-ridden beds where he hunted out herbs or scavenged for strawberries. Rabbits scattered at his approach, their white tails flashing as they vanished into the brush. On the hottest days John sought the shade of elders and ashes until his mother reappeared, tramping breathless down the slope, her collecting bag bulgin, back to the hut. There the book awaited him.

  Every evening he pored over the pages, his tongue forming the unfamiliar words. Squinting down at the letters, John made his way among groves of date palms and meadows of crocuses. Eyes aching, he pushed his way through stands of medlars and plums then orchards of apples or cherries or pears. A flick of the page and fantastic creatures reared out of a sea: great finned fish, huge eels and long-tentacled monsters. A steep-sided island showed above the waves.

  ‘That's Zoyland Tor,’ he exclaimed, and saw his mother nod.

  ‘All around there was a sea,’ she said. ‘All about Zoyland and Mere, the sea used to rush in every winter. But when the salt washed out, the grass grew even thicker. The brine floated, see? The sweet water sat underneath.’

  The ancient pages rose among the others, palisaded with strange letters and words, the faint script hardly more readable than the footprints of birds. He read until his eyelids drooped. But as his head dropped, he fancied he caught the sharp savour of sap beneath the chalky dust of the pages, or the heavy perfumes of blossom from the orchards of plums and pears and apples.

  The summer grew hotter. In church, the Lessoners sat together in a dark-suited clump. When a red-faced Father Hole announced the Ale and told the story of Saint Clodock, Marpot's faithful muttered among themselves. But the priest seemed not to notice when they tutted or Aaron Clough made the sign of the cross. The priest swayed slightly while the rest of the villagers fanned themselves against the heat and smiled when Old Holy stumbled over the words.

  Each morning, louring clouds gathered above the Spines and advanced over the Levels. But as the sun climbed in the sky they burned to wisps that twisted and disappeared. The heat lodged itself in walls and settled into the ground. In Two-acre Field, the corn was hardly up to the scarecrow's knees. The water in the new well sank until a dropped stone hardly made a splash. The Lessoners’ red faces scowled in the hot church. Seated beside his mother, John glanced behind at Marpot. But the man ignored him, seeming not to see John or his mother. He stood at the back as if he had never led the others up to the meadow, his blond hair bright against the plain black of his suit, his unblinking blue eyes watching over his followers. Leaving church on Rogationtide, John looked out to the west and saw a black line of thunderheads nudge the ridge of the Spines. He was about to tell his mother when Jasper Riverett's voice sounded.