Lark Returning

by Lark Returning (retail) (epub)

  Without speaking they walked up what had once been the main aisle of the abbey church, littered now with massive carved stones from the fallen roof and spire. He followed her as she picked her way to a broad stone staircase on the right-hand side that rose up to a stout wooden door halfway up a smoothly dressed wall. She pointed ahead. ‘We go up that stair, that’s where I live.’

  Inside the room behind the heavy, iron-studded door it was dim because there was only one small window, and it was darkened by the branches of the ancient yew outside. Blaize blinked to clear his eyes of the acrid sting of smoke from a fire that was burning in a huge, ornately carved fireplace. Alice, Jane’s mother, sleeves rolled back over her forearms, was kneading dough at a deal table in the middle of the floor. He saw that she had handed down her strong frame to her daughter.

  Surprised at having a visitor, she stood staring at Blaize, her hands covered with flour.

  Jane explained, ‘Mother, this is the Frenchman Uncle Tom found on the hill, I met him walking in the woods down by the river.’

  The older woman looked hard at Blaize. ‘You’ve not run away again, have you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not this time. I came over from Melrose with a party to help build a wall over there…’ He gestured westwards to where he knew his friends were working under the direction of a red-faced landowner and his sullen steward.

  ‘For Mr Glendinning? He’s building a wall now?’ The woman and the girl looked at each other anxiously.

  ‘Yes, he wants to enclose his estate, he said. In France we’re pulling down estate walls. Here you’re building them up.’

  The woman made a sound that could have implied either agreement or disapproval as she turned to a wall dresser to pick up a large blue and white jug.

  ‘You’d like some buttermilk?’ she asked, and without waiting for his reply poured out a cupful and handed it to him.

  He was starving and accepted it gratefully. Pulling snowdrops had proved hungry work.

  For the first time in months he felt happy, hungry and vigorous. This magically peaceful place where the only sounds were birdsong was having a therapeutic effect on him.

  ‘Your daughter says you’re a healer,’ he said, handing back the empty cup.

  Alice smiled sweetly. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I make up cordials and draughts for local folk or for their animals if they’re sick. My mother did it before me and her mother before her.’

  ‘So your recipes are old? You use herbs?’

  ‘Yes, herbs and other things as well. If it helps people it makes me happy. It’s good to help.’

  Blaize looked at Jane, who was putting the snowdrops into a large earthenware jug.

  ‘Does your daughter make medicines as well?’

  ‘Jane helps, she picks it up the same way as I did. But you’ve got to have the power – you only know if you’ve got it when you start. Jane’s got to go to the fields now because her father has to have a bondager to share his work.’

  Blaize was curious. ‘I’d never heard of bondagers before today… is it summer work?’

  Both women laughed ruefully.

  ‘I wish it was,’ said Jane. ‘No, I’m out in all weathers and in the winter it can be very cold and wet. If you saw me with the straw ropes round my legs and the mud up to my waist, you wouldn’t think I was a dairymaid.’

  ‘We all work for Mr Glendinning in the big house where you’re making your wall,’ explained Alice. ‘He owns the farm. His steward hires the hinds and he won’t take on a man unless he has a woman to work with him – just like my brother, the shepherd, has to have a dog.’

  ‘And my mother has to work in the fields at harvest time for this house,’ said Jane. ‘That’s our rent – mother’s harvest work.’

  Blaize looked round the big room and as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he could see that it had a fine arched stone roof with carved columns, and masterly rosettes at the top of each column. One of the rosettes was a wreath of holly, another a deeply carved rose, and then a lovely open sunflower that brought back memories of French fields in summertime. Whoever carved that sunflower must have been a Frenchman, he thought.

  ‘But I thought you said your family had lived here for centuries. Is it not your own home? Does this place too belong to that man with the red face?’ he asked Jane.

  Alice replied, ‘My husband’s family have lived here a long time, ever since the last monks left. But they’ve always been tenants. Until a couple of years ago we farmed about thirty acres of the land round about for ourselves, but when Glendinning bought the big house, he took back all the lands of the tenant farmers to make his spread into one big place.

  ‘So now we don’t farm on our own any more – we’re labourers and we’ve got to make our bargain with Glendinning every year. If he wanted he could turn us out at term time, but so far it’s been all right because my husband is a strong man and a good worker and we’ve got a strong son and a hard-working daughter. We’re a good bargain for a farmer.’

  Jane’s face was sad as she listened to her mother. This was obviously a topic that deeply concerned all the members of the family.

  ‘We wouldn’t want to leave here,’ she told Blaize with an anxious note in her voice. ‘I was born here. My father was born here and his father before him. It never seemed to matter who the old abbey belonged to – we lived here and paid our rent and we were left in peace. But now everything’s changed. Some of our neighbours who were tenants too have lost their land and they’ve had to go away. Some went to Canada! I couldn’t bear to go away from here.’ She shuddered at the thought.

  Her mother became very brisk, returning to the kneading of the dough.

  ‘Don’t you worry about it, lassie. It won’t happen and if you don’t want to leave here, you’d better get back to the fields. That steward’ll be watching who’s working and you’ll catch it if he finds you’re not there.’

  The girl rushed away, grabbing a piece of cheese as she went.

  When she’d gone her mother said to Blaize, ‘She worries a lot about us leaving this place. I try to keep her mind off it. Come on, I can see you’re hungry. Sit down and I’ll feed you and then you’d better get back to work as well.’

  As he ate he talked to her, telling her about his capture in Spain and about his longing to get back to the war. He asked about her life and about her family and for an hour or more they exchanged opinions and information. This made a bond between them. He found he admired the woman as much as he had admired her brother, the shepherd. When they parted, they were friends.

  * * *

  Jacques was greatly relieved to see Blaize coming up the path towards the working party.

  ‘I thought you’d bolted again,’ he said, wiping his brow with his vast forearm. ‘I’m glad to see you back. Where have you been?’

  Blaize was a different man to the one who had grudgingly accompanied the working party that morning. His face was changed, his step lighter, his back straight again.

  ‘I met a family who live in a ruined church down there,’ he said, pointing over his shoulder, it’s like a secret hiding place… a sort of fairyland. I’m not sure I didn’t dream it.’

  Jacques roared with laughter. ‘You’ve met a woman, I knew you would. You’re just as human as the rest of us after all.’

  * * *

  ‘I’ll come with you again today,’ Blaize offered the next time a wall-building party was being made up, and when they got to Charterhall House he said to Jacques, ‘When lunchtime comes, I’ll take you across to the abbey and introduce you to the woman there. She’s a healer and would enjoy talking to you about medicines.’

  Alice liked Jacques very much and invited both of the Frenchmen to visit the abbey house any time they were at Charterhall. She also introduced them to her husband, Adam, an upright, solemn, grey-haired man who resembled his brother-in-law the shepherd who had brought Blaize back from the hills. Like the old shepherd too, Jane’s father had a deep respect for bo
ok learning, and had he been born in another class of society, would have made a scholar and a savant. His hunger for knowledge, unsatisfied by his brief schooling to the age of twelve, still burned strongly after years of labouring in the fields and he passed this hunger on to his children, to his daughter as well as his son. At night, when work was finished, the family sat round their majestic hearth and took turns reading to each other from the books of devotion they had collected over the years. They told Blaize and Jacques about their evenings round the fire, but the Frenchmen were never able to join them then because they had to be back in their lodgings by sundown and could not risk breaking their parole.

  Alice, her husband and her children grew to like the handsome Frenchmen and to respect them for their fervent loyalty to the Emperor Napoleon. When they heard accounts of the war and Boney’s evil ways from people who had access to newspapers, the Cannon family were able to take the more outrageous of those tales with a pinch of salt.

  Jacques teased Blaize about his devotion to the people who lived in the ruined abbey.

  ‘It’s that girl, don’t deny it. She’s a fine big girl, as tall as you, and she’s the marrying age. You make a magnificent couple. That’s why you don’t need to slip down to Nanny’s like the rest of us.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. The girl’s just a friend. Anyway her mother told me she’s spoken for in marriage by a local lad and I’m a married man, don’t forget that.’

  Marie’s letters, written on fragile paper in her childish hand, came from time to time, full of gossip and details of her outings with her sisters or the last embroidery she had finished. He read them quickly and thrust them aside – not impatiently, but because they brought back the image of his wife to him. She was small and pretty in the way he thought women should be, pale-skinned and tiny-featured, with delicate hands and dainty feet.

  He did not want her to be clever or well read, for he had always found sufficient mental stimulus among his male friends and did not seek a wife who wished to discuss his work or matters of intellectual weight. Marie’s music, her watercolour painting, her sewing and her continual domestic warfare with the servants was sufficient as far as her husband was concerned.

  The enforced chastity of captivity did not worry him either. His spirits had been depressed for so long that the need for a woman was low in his priorities. The other prisoners, including Jacques, openly patronized a trio of amateur prostitutes who had set up thriving businesses in Melrose. Nanny Pawston was the favourite among them because she was the youngest and the lustiest, the wife of a soldier who was away fighting for Wellington in the Peninsula where so many of Nanny’s clients had been captured, perhaps by her husband’s regiment. She often passed Blaize in the town’s high street, flirting her eyes and her skirts at him as she went by for he, the most handsome of the captives, was a challenge to her. He had never risen to her bait. In truth, if Blaize had been looking for a woman he would not have looked at Nanny and neither would he have looked at Jane, who was too strong, too unflirtatious and reserved, not sufficiently skilled in the arts of coquetry for him. He regarded her with almost as much awe as he regarded her mother. It completely escaped his notice that when he appeared in the abbey house, she flushed scarlet and her hands trembled with excitement at the sight of him.

  * * *

  They were cutting hay one morning in late June, bending low with flashing sickles over the tall grass with its bounty of pink clover, yellow-hearted daisies and purple vetch.

  ‘There’s your Frenchie over there,’ teased Maggie Maxton, the prettiest, cheekiest member of the gang of eight bondagers. ‘He’s waiting for you. I fancy you’ll be off to France when this war’s over, Janey.’

  Jane’s heart thudded in her ribs as she lifted her head and saw Blaize standing beneath the hedge at the side of the field. His jacket was slung over one shoulder and he was wearing a white open-necked shirt that showed the strong sinews of his neck and the lines of his straight shoulderbones. The hand she raised to wave to him shook slightly with the strength of her emotion and she dreaded the sharp-eyed Maggie seeing how she felt. He was gazing at the bondagers and she wondered if he were comparing her to the other women in the field, for they made a romantic-looking group in their hats decorated with flowers or love tokens, their print blouses and striped skirts. But there were many of them far prettier than Jane herself – little Maggie, for example with the dark-fringed, doll-like eyes that she rolled with such devastating effect at the local lads. How Jane wished she could look like that and be able to make Blaize smile at her the way all the boys smiled at Maggie.

  She knew that her terrible, heart-wrenching love for this Frenchman was futile, for he had told her mother about his wife in France. But though her love was useless and unreturned, that did not stop it burning painfully inside her. Thoughts of Blaize kept her awake at night.

  She went to work every morning wondering if she would see him that day. And when he did appear, the sky miraculously lightened even on the dullest days. He brought the sunshine with him.

  As she walked across the hay field towards him she knew that her man, Jock Hepburn, was watching her. She could see his red-haired figure among the men loading haycarts near the field gate and the intensity of his stance told her that he was burning with jealousy. Poor Jock, they had been promised in marriage for the past two years and in her bondager’s hat she wore the double looped love token of straw that he had made for her last autumn. Jock always made her feel protective, for though he was large and strong, he was a vulnerable soul. His mother was Big Agnes, the forewoman of the bondagers, a massive woman with forearms like a blacksmith’s and a face so weatherbeaten that in summer it looked as if her nose was made of copper.

  Agnes Hepburn had never married and the identity of Jock’s father was a secret she kept to herself, but people said that one of the hinds she was bonded to when she was very young had forced himself on her, raped her in fact. She was very bitter and scathing about men – all of them that was except her Jock and a few of the men, including Adam Cannon who was her close friend, with whom she worked.

  Jock was twenty-one, two years older than Jane, a large, gentle giant of a man with a ruddy face and red hair. She thought that when he was old he would look exactly like her father, and loved him for that. Unlike Adam Cannon, however, Jock was ambitious and dreamed of getting his own farm one day. ‘When we get married you’ll be mistress in your own house, you won’t have to work in the fields to pay the rent. You’ll have a servant girl and people will touch their hats to you,’ he often told her, explaining why the wedding would not take place until he had more money saved up.

  She did not mind waiting, for she had not been ready to marry and settle down even before Blaize turned up. Anyway, she didn’t believe that Jock’s dreams would ever come true. They would never achieve landowning status and when he talked about it, she smiled and put her fingers on his weatherbeaten face, saying, ‘Don’t work too hard, Jock, life goes past and you’ll never know it’s happened.’

  Then Blaize walked out of the wood and took her heart. For the first time she knew what it was like to be devastatingly, painfully in love. She would have gone away with the Frenchman if he had not a penny – providing he really wanted her. But of course he did not, and she had the pain of that to suffer.

  He grinned when she walked up to him, and held out a bunch of pink campions to her. ‘Put them in your hat,’ he said, ‘they’ll look well against black.’

  She accepted the flowers, glancing anxiously over her shoulder to see if the steward had noticed her taking time off from the hay cutting. ‘I can’t stay talking to you, but I’m glad you came today,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d go over to the abbey and have a look at my mother. She’s not well and she won’t tell me what’s wrong with her. Perhaps she’ll tell you.’

  ‘I’ll go there now,’ said Blaize. ‘They won’t miss me from the wall gang. You come when it’s your break. How long do you get today?’

  ‘We get
two hours – they need that time to rest the horses,’ Jane told him wryly.

  He walked through the coppice where they had first met, the green velvet of the sward beneath the silver-barked beech trees carpeted now with bluebells instead of snowdrops, and as always his heart rose when he saw the ragged parapet of the abbey wall above the yew tree. Every time he came here he felt as if he’d walked into another world.

  Alice did not hear him walking across the soft grass of the yard for she was sitting on a hard wooden chair beneath a line of pear trees trained along the cloister wall and she was asleep, her head drooping in the sun while the bees from her carefully tended hives droned round her. In sleep her face looked yellow and strained, and Blaize felt a tug of concern in his heart at the sight of her.

  He gently touched her limp hand and she woke with a start.

  ‘I’ve come for one of our good talks,’ he said and she smiled at him, but her smile was weary.

  ‘Sit down, I’ll get you some ale,’ she said and struggled to rise from her chair.

  He held her back. ‘No, sit still, I’ll fetch it myself. You look tired. Let me look after you for a change.’

  It did not take long to discover what was wrong with Alice. Indeed she was very matter of fact about what ailed her. In a resigned, matter of fact tone she told him, ‘I’ve seen it often enough in other women – the lumps in my breasts, the pains, the bleeding, the sickness. My mother died of it and there was nothing she could do. I’m dying of it too but I don’t want to worry Jane, she’s so tender-hearted.’

  ‘I was afraid it might be something like that.’ Blaize slumped down on his heels at the side of her chair. He knew she would not appreciate him pretending to make light of what she said. ‘How long do you think it will take?’ he asked.