The Wilding

by Maria McCann

  ‘God! He’s not bothered with the likes of me. The Dark Gentleman gathers in all the rotten fruits God lets slip and He makes something of them.’

  ‘He’ll make cinders in Hell of you. Why d’you call him a gentleman?’ I waved my hand to indicate the cave. ‘Is this how he keeps his promises?’

  ‘You don’t know what I asked, and whether I kept my side of the bargain.’ I didn’t like the way she looked at me as she said this. ‘I’m not afraid of Hell, Sir.’

  ‘Then you should be – you should be. But go back to the soldiers.’

  ‘From Him to them, eh?’ she said as if I had made an excellent joke. ‘Well, one evening I was hiding in my chamber and I heard them shouting. I don’t know what’d happened; something stirred them up. A band of them came out onto the green and down by the stream, all fighting drunk. They had muskets stored in the Hall, everybody knew that, and I heard shutters snapping to, double-quick, in case something should come crashing through the windows. I closed my shutters like the rest, but I peeped from behind them. A few of the soldiers started banging on drums, bawling that they were for King and Country and that fighting men must be fed. I can hear them now.’

  ‘What did they do, attack?’

  She shook her head. ‘They wanted mutton. I don’t know who had sheep to spare – we were short of everything – but mutton they got. I tell you, Sir, the Devil’s the Prince of this World. They roasted it, too, right there in the Hall. They opened the windows, else they would all have choked, but the ceiling was black with fat and soot. I’m told the place stank months after.’

  That was war, I thought: men sinking into beasts, ruining a fine building for the sake of a few mouthfuls of leathery, unhung mutton.

  ‘And then, Sir, they sent word that they must have a woman to dress their meat.’

  I whistled. ‘I hope the villagers sent a man cook.’

  ‘You’re very green, Sir,’ she said shortly. ‘So was I, at first. The men of the village came out into the lane, to talk without their wives. I heard them settling on who they should send.’

  ‘Not their own womenfolk, I’ll be bound.’

  ‘Oh, no! There was a woman, married but she’d been whipped behind the cart more than once; it was when I heard her name that I understood. Their plan was for the soldiers to go to her one at a time, her husband to stand guard. They – the soldiers – were gone back into the Hall by then, and someone went to them to make the offer, but it wouldn’t do. They wanted the woman sent in to them, and nobody with her. The villagers dursn’t do that, though, not even to a whore, if her man didn’t consent.’

  I was feeling sick.

  ‘So they were at a loss. Then the soldiers started firing through the Hall windows. They said it was to let the smoke out, but really it was to frighten folk.’

  I recalled the altered casements I had seen during my waks.

  ‘And then my door opened –’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No –’

  ‘My sister came into my room, and she dragged me downstairs and out into the street and handed me over.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She handed me over.’

  We sat looking at one another in the faint light of the lantern. I was speechless; I had thought nothing could shock me more than her revelations about herself and Robin, and now I saw I had but dipped a toe in the river. Joan went on, ‘I’d no one to defend me, no husband, no brother. She told them I was able to dress any amount of flesh – those were her very words. I hear them in my dreams, Sir.’

  Surely this was itself a dream – this cave, this cracked voice out of the darkness, this terrible tale that went on and on. I tried to marshal my scattered wits.

  ‘What of Robin? He wouldn’t stand by and permit that, surely?’

  ‘I screamed for him but he never came. I thought they were in it together, to palm off his child on the soldiers – I cursed him to Hell. A long time after, I found it out: how he went to the stable, thinking the horses might be frightened, and when he came back I was gone, and he never knew. He found out too late, you see.’

  I trembled. If I rose now and left the wood, in a very few minutes I would be standing before the Hall doors, perhaps as Harriet had stood and watched them close behind her sister. At that thought I could scarcely breathe. My mouth filled with spit and I felt I must get out of the cave. Outside, in the icy air, I leaned against a tree and vomited. There was nothing in my belly, only a little sour froth, but the heaving took some time to subside. Afterwards I felt emptied out, not only my guts but everything inside me, as if I were hollow.

  How pitilessly had the soldiers dealt with the girl brought to them! And yet there were things in this story that shocked me more. Let me be clear. I was not, am not, disposed to forgive or gloss over the men’s wrongdoing. I say only that what turned me inside out like a glove was the notion that one sister should deliver up another – no matter what the provocation. I wept a little, not even sure I was weeping for Joan. Perhaps it was for the world.

  After a while I went back into the cave and sat down.

  Joan said drily, ‘You don’t like my tale, Master Jon.’

  We were silent a minute or two, until my thoughts began running on the consequences of what had happened. I asked her, ‘When were you released? Did someone from the village rescue you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anybody! How could people go up and down past the Guild Hall, knowing you were inside – seeing in through the windows?’

  She said quietly, ‘There’s a room without windows. They took me there.’

  ‘God have mercy.’

  ‘They shoved me outdoors the next morning. I could’ve crawled on the ground, I was so broken, but I came out walking upright. There’s pride in everything – in everything. So I held myself up, and as I was descending the steps I saw our neighbour, who had always been kind to me, coming along the lane. I can’t tell you how my heart yearned to her; I greeted her and as soon as she saw me, she turned away. I went through the village, and it was the same everywhere – nobody would even look at me, much less embrace me or even take my hand. The wives twitched their clothes away as if I were poisoned.’

  ‘But all that happened against your will,’ said I.

  ‘Folk had to believe otherwise, Sir, or what were they to think of their own good selves?’

  ‘And you didn’t go to Robin?’

  ‘I didn’t know, then, how my sister had tricked him; I thought he’d betrayed me. I went to the field where the camp-followers were, and I passed with them out of the village.’

  ‘And now you’re back –’ Something here occurred to me, something that, caught up in the story, I had not thought of until now. ‘Joan. Has anyone from Tetton recognised you?’

  She shrugged. ‘One time, Master Jon, I was driven away from End House and you were at the window. What did you see? Nobody. A beggar with her head bound up.’

  ‘Perhaps; but I didn’t know you then. What about the women who visit here?’

  ‘The lovers of the Gentleman? They –’

  ‘Lovers of – Good God!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘They don’t call themselves that, Sir; not at first. They don’t wish to be seen, you understand; we sit in the dark.’ She gave a wheezing laugh. ‘Besides, the young don’t see the old. If you live to my age, you’ll find that out.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But stop this talk of the Gentleman, d’you hear me? You’ll bring down trouble on yourself.’ Joan looked sulky at this. ‘I have to get my bread, Sir.’

  How pitiful and disgusting that a woman gently raised should be forced to ‘get her bread’ thus. There must be monies and goods remaining that had once been Joan’s and I had a good idea who had profited from them. I said, ‘When will you reveal yourself to Harriet?’

  ‘Never!’ Joan squealed.

  I was not expecting this reply. I said, ‘But you must, if you wish to get back what’s yours. How else can it be done?’

  ‘You’ll tell her
nothing about us, Sir! She’d hunt us out.’

  ‘Then how can your money and property be restored? That is what you’ve come back for, is it not?’

  ‘Tamar spoke with Robin about it.’

  I sighed and said gently, ‘Yes. But your best chance now is for Harriet to acknowledge you.’

  ‘She never will.’ Joan’s face looked so stubborn and vengeful as she said this that she could have been one of the Rebel Angels; and indeed, she was fighting under the colours of the Gentleman. ‘She’s had her chance; they’ve all had their chance. I was the salvation of this village!’

  ‘Shh – blasphemy –’

  ‘Denied, handed over to the soldiers, like your Christ!’ Her eyes glittered. ‘The people here devoured me, body and blood … and they’ve denied me for nigh on thirty years.’

  * * *

  Walking back to Aunt Harriet’s house in the thickening dusk, I moved like a sleepwalker, twice tripping on dead wood but luckily catching hold of a branch each time. I was, however, very far from asleep. The inside of my head buzzed like a hive, while somehow my feet placed themselves one in front of the other and carried me along the path.

  Once I had an aunt by marriage, cold, wealthy and commanding. Now another had been foisted on me – sister to the first, shadow to her substance – and along with her, a daughter, whore to half the village and also to a certain young fool from Spadboro. Our family was certainly more numerous, these days, and to my mind, at least, it was grown a perplexing torment. My father could be said to share the same blood as Robin, which meant Robin’s blood ran in my veins; and if Robin were Tamar’s father, then Tamar and I …

  But there I was caught again. Either she was Robin’s, and my bastard cousin, or the child of a soldier and nothing to the Dymonds. From Joan’s account, there seemed no way of telling; my doubts could never be resolved. Damn Joan, couldn’t she tell by looking at the girl? Women are said to know these things by nature. A great deal hung upon it, for if Tamar were indeed Robin’s child, and Harriet’s niece (or should that be stepdaughter?) then provision must be made for her. Modest provision, I mean, not to be compared with the rights of a legitimate heir. A difference must be maintained. Still, we are taught to exercise compassion, to sinners as to the godly. Even bastard children must be clothed and fed.

  *

  Getting no further with Tamar, I began to puzzle over Aunt Harriet, and here I found myself oppressed by the most chilling thoughts. I could picture her, fury that she was, so enraged that she scarcely knew what she did, dragging Joan into the lane, frantic to shame and punish her – and afterwards, trembling, sick at the betrayal the village men had witnessed and that Robin must surely discover. I saw her overwhelmed by guilt and fear, knowing her evil could never be blotted from God’s book – in short, utterly undone.

  Lord knows, this picture was horrible enough. Yet I was soon visited by another so shocking as to seem the prompting of the Gentleman himself, namely that Harriet had acted not in frenzy but in cold cunning. If her sister were with child, how better to make her miscarry? If not with child, surely she would be afterwards; and what surname could she give the babe except perhaps ‘Legion’? It was as Joan had said: there was nothing for her to do but vanish. Harriet had visited on her a destruction so terrible that, like the cities of the plain, nothing remained to show where she had been.

  Even these vile imaginings were not without a grain of comfort. Since Tamar was come into the world a sport, a wilding, I would wish her to be the child of the abduction, bitter though that tale was – a thousand times more bitter than my father’s. It was infernal selfishness in me, but so it was. Tamar must not be Robin’s child; else, what should I think of my good self?

  * * *

  ‘Where have you been?’ cried my aunt, barging towards me as I made to go upstairs. ‘There’s a hogshead gone bad.’

  I was taken aback. The must had been as clear and sweet as any I had pressed, and I had taken care in preparing the barrels.

  ‘It’s vinegar,’ said Aunt Harriet. ‘You can’t have burnt enough sulphur. And when I want to talk with you, the boy tells me you’ve gone out walking. In this weather!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunt.’

  ‘What use is sorry? We’ve never had vinegar before.’

  ‘Then you’ve been fortunate,’ I assured her with feeling. ‘I could boil it with raisins and honey – that might help. Or you could use it as it is.’

  ‘What, a hogshead?’ she retorted. ‘I could supply all England with vinegar!’

  Ah, I thought to myself, you could do that without the cider.

  Speaking to Aunt Harriet was now become an ordeal, and not only because she was so disagreeable. Knowing what I did, I could scarcely endure to look on her waxy skin, her pale blue eyes, her fading but still golden hair. Before, these had spoken to me of a life lived in comfort and plenty; now, they seemed the attributes of a carved and gilded tomb figure, a chill, heartless creature. They say the Gentleman appears to women in the guise of a handsome, mannerly lover. His hair is not gold, but the colour of night; his eyes sparkle and burn; his nakedness seems made of fire. Yet when he performs nature on a woman, all she feels inside her body is a deathly cold. My aunt had something of that same dismal quality; I could see why Joan called her one of his chosen.

  Despite this aversion, which was so strong as to cause me distress whenever I was in company with her, I could not leave End House while my work remained to be done. By ‘work’ I do not mean the pressing (though there was all that to do) but my true work that had taken me there, the discovery of Robin’s guilt and the making of his reparation.

  ‘I’ll have a l look on h’ I said. ‘See if it can be saved.’ My aunt did not deign to thank me but nodded and went on her way.

  *

  In my chamber I washed my hands and face and lay down to think. I had done so much thinking in the last day or so that my brains might wear out, at this rate, before I was thirty.

  The addled hogshead could be seen as a blessing in disguise in that it gave me more labour. My aunt had not so many late apples as early ones, which meant that in the ordinary course of things my time at End House would shortly run out. I was up to that, and had already resolved to delay the cider-making in every conceivable fashion, a cheat made easier in two ways: firstly, I was assisted not by Binnie, in whose interest it was to finish up and move on, but by Paulie’s boy. Secondly, not being paid, I had no conscience about spreading my labour thinly. I would therefore divide up the apples into as many combinations as my aunt would stand for, taking much longer than the task required, all under cover of making drink fit for a queen.

  The question now weighing on me was: how was I to move forward? What should I do next?

  I thought I knew enough already to piece together Robin’s crime. Putting together impressions I had gleaned from my father, from Joan, from Tamar and from Rose Barnes, I understood him to be a man inclined to the sins of the flesh, a handsome, sensual, weak-willed fellow, but capable at the same time of kindness and a lazy, slack-twisted kind of love. Cruelty had no part in him, any more than it had in my father. Feeling himself near death, he had at last found the courage to write a new will and to protect Joan and her child in a way he had never yet dared. But the will was lost, or he had not had time to write it, and now Robin could not lie at peace in his grave.

  What did he know about Harriet’s part in the affair? I pictured her greeting as he returned to the room; she would be pale and self-possessed and ask after the horses. The next morning she would discover that Joan was not in her chamber, and then would come tears, and the discovery that her sister was gone off with the soldiers. She would no doubt tell him the girl had been desperate, because ruined – she would not fail to twist the blade – and that they must cover it up. Robin could scarcely imagine what had taken place in his absence; if the villagers had any sense they would hold their tongues. Still, he was my father’s brother, and most likely shrewd in his way. In time, when it was
too late, he might make a guess that came somewhere near the truth.

  When it was too late … how, after that night, did he go on living with Harriet and with himself? The mystery of other people, their souls opaque and infolded as cabbage leaves, here so overwhelmed me that I felt all the hopelessness of my task, but I pulled myself together. It was of no consequence how he lived with her. That was past.

  What I already knew fitted with what he had written to my father: her rights. Joan’s rights? Or Tamar’s? What might they be, in his eyes? Some part of his inheritance? Something he bequeathed them in his will, a will lost or destroyed before my father could reach Robin and take it into his safe keeping? But how could the dying man imagine that Joan and her child would ever come back to claim what was theirs?

  Perhaps he already knew them to be near. Perhaps he was amongshese who, looking on a wizened beggar woman, were able to see not only what she was, but also who she had been. Had Tamar revealed herself to him before his death? Had he known her by some trick of the face or voice? Why did he –

  Why did he die?

  If Joan and Tamar knew that he had altered his will, then they stood to benefit by his dying. How easy for a tender nurse to slip something into his cordials! On the other hand, if he had had no time to alter his will, or no knowledge of who it was who nursed him, only one person would benefit from his speedy departure: that figure in marble, Aunt Harriet.

  This was like sinking into nightmare. I sat up, as if to shake off my thoughts, and as I did so I recalled something: Joan’s dragging herself up from the bed when she first thought she might be with child. Only now did it occur to me that this was most likely her old chamber, and that since coming to End House I might have been sleeping in the bed where she passed her ‘one sweet day’ with Robin. I looked round me: nothing but dim, chill corners, cobwebs and dust, and I shivered in the thickening darkness. Their fire, if it burned here, had left no blush on the sheets, no fragrance in the air. Stones outlive people; they have no passions to wear them out.