by James Meek
‘You summon the saints to justify your aversion to marriage, and the poets to justify your passion for the lover who provokes that aversion. You ne permitted me to finish. I spoke of the larger part of femininity. There is another part, whose members will joyfully allow themselves to be stolen from their families by a gallant lover before they may be married to a lubber of their parents’ preference.’
‘Yes! That’s I!’
‘No, Berna. Laurence hasn’t come to steal you. When he was here I’m sure he played the lover par amour very well. You ne know to whom he played before, nor to whom he plays now.’
‘You won’t make me cry, Pogge, although I know you wish it.’
‘He hasn’t come to steal you, so you’ve determined to steal yourself, and deliver yourself to him, wherever he is.’
‘Wiltshire,’ came Berna’s voice, small and rageous in the darkness.
‘I shan’t lend you no florins, but so long as you’re disposed to steal, you may have one of my gold nobles.’
‘Where are they?’
‘In my purse. Remember, I am measurable.’
Berna laughed and stretched, holding her arms straight back behind her head and clenching and unclenching her fingers and toes. It was hot and they lay on the bed without covers. ‘I shan’t never let no one measure me,’ she said.
TODAY I INQUIRED of the prior if he sensed the pestilence were the Deity’s final act with respect to his human creation. Would humanity be extinguished?
‘I predict,’ said the prior, ‘that you will perish. So Deuteronomy. And the music will cease, and the candles of the abbey will be extinguished, and its columns ruptured, and the Deity will abolish light, so that were a single member of humanity to survive, he would not possess the means to testify to its ruin.’
‘What of the last man?’ I said to the prior. ‘Who will receive his confession?’
‘We assume the final human to be male, but man’s was the prime nativity,’ said the prior. ‘Why should man be the last to die? Why should the final human not be female? Why should Adam not perish before Eve, and none remain except Eve for him to confess to? Eve’s was the primal vice, the rapture of the fruit. Were not it just for the last person left on earth, unconfessed, unabsolved, to be female?’
‘A terrible solitude for any human,’ I said, ‘to have no society except their conscience.’
‘Terrible and anticipated,’ said the prior. ‘Be cognisant that Canterbury determines the situation to demand an exceptional regulation, that in extremis the female may take confession from the male.’
NB Marc, the Dante by my bed belongs to one Konrad Schadland of Mainz. Do all in your power to return it, with a request that he absolve me.
IN THE MORNING Will asked his brothers if there’d been word from the manor, and they told him no, he must earn his bread with his back bent like any poor man, for it was a working day.
He took his weeding bill and stick, went by the back road to the demesne land, whet his bill and set to cropping golds and poppies in Sir Guy’s acres under corn. We saw him there hooded against the sun. He went inch by inch along the rows, set the fork and swung the bill and cropped the weeds one by one, right and steady. Behind him went a heap of small girls who gathered the blossoms that flew of his blade, and two thack-pot knaves to scare the crows. He ne saw nor heard Anto till the reeve was nigh behind him and spoke his name.
Anto asked him sharply why he was bent over the dirt in the sun when he must be on the highway to France that afternoon.
‘I mayn’t go till I hear from my lord,’ said Will.
‘Thinks you he comes out to the field in the sun to make his ends known to a hired man?’ Anto turned and went again to the manor house, fetching dust of the ground with his busy steps.
Will stood still and beheld him, tools hung from his hands.
Over his shoulder Anto called: ‘Would you be a free man and go to Calais, or sweat a scarecrow’s steading in the corn?’
Will ran after him to the manor house. The knaves followed and banged the pots, and the girls held up their barmcloths filled with blossom heads, but they stinted at the bridge across Sir Guy’s ditch, while Anto and Will went through the gate.
THEY WENT THROUGH Sir Guy’s hall, through laths of sunlight that came in through the narrow windows. The hall looked sluttish still after the masons of Coventry came the year before, took Sir Guy’s hearth off its old stead in the middle of the floor and set it under a brick pipe they called a chimney. A wonder gin it would’ve been had they fulfilled it, and two more chimneys at either end of the manor, but they went away when Sir Guy stinted the silver, to buy his daughter’s gown that was stolen.
Anto bade Will leave his tools outside and led him through the new door at the west end of the hall and into a room. It hadn’t no stead for bed nor dogs nor food-stuff, only a board and chair and chests and a cherrywood rood with a likeness of our Maker pined by his own weight. Sir Guy called it his privy chamber, chamber being room or cot or steading, and privy being that none of his household was to go in out-take him. When we’d asked Anto why Sir Guy would make a room to be alone in, if he ne slept there, Anto said he read the leaves of books, of which he had three or more, and wrote letters, and drank wine with the priest, and played dice with the high-born, and hid him from his daughtren.
Sir Guy sat on the chair at the board in hunting gear with one hand on his morning wine-crock and the other on the neck of the old alaunt, Canell. Nack the hayward stood on one side of him and Anto went to stand on the other. Will stood before them with his hands clasped, and bent and lifted his head. The three mole-hued greyhounds, Fortin, Pers and Starling, crope about like to one dog with three tails. Behind Sir Guy was a window scaled in glass and iron and at his left hand a brass box.
‘Ruth to lose a good ploughman ere harvest,’ said Sir Guy. ‘Worth it yet, do the French learn a Cotswold man can draw a bow as deep as any. The English archer’s the best on God’s mould, all be one in two a thief, and one in ten a murderer. You need to be quick, though, to be on the road by afternoon.’
Will said, always calling Sir Guy his lord, that he mightn’t go without a deed of freedom.
Fortin squatted and laid a turd in the nook and Sir Guy got up and went to him and pressed the dog’s nose to it. ‘Is that my thank for the rabbit liver you get of your master?’ he asked.
Anto said if Sir Guy would yield to Will’s ask, the fee mightn’t be less than five pound. The Muchbrooks nad paid the two pound owed by Ness, the lord’s bondwoman, for lying with Will when they weren’t wed; and to wed her Will must then pay his lord another pound for the loss of the bound children she wouldn’t never bear the manor.
Sir Guy straightened and pulled his lip. ‘The kind bonds that knit men together should rather be meted in love than ink and silver,’ he said. ‘The old wise me liked, when the lord feasted his men and shielded them with his sword arm, and they wrought the lord’s land for faithfulness alone, like the bond between father and son, when each was thankful to the other, and each gave the other worthship.’
Anto said Will was a thankless churl. The world was up-half down, and kind wit ne need look far to see what drove God to loose the pest.
‘Man ne owes to deem his maker,’ Sir Guy said.
He sat and opened the box. He took out a calfskin scrow, a feather and an inkpot and laid them on the table. He set the feather at Will.
‘Anto was wrong to say five pound was the fee for your freedom,’ he said. ‘You may hear me say you’re free for nothing. But ink and wax and calfskin is law, and law costs silver. Do you have five pound?’
Will said he hadn’t.
‘How then might you buy the deed?’
Will said he couldn’t buy it, and would go back to weeding Sir Guy’s field, and Hayne Attenoke would lack one bowman.
‘I hope you’re no stirrer,’ said Sir Guy. ‘That’s the shortest way to the gallows.’
Will said he ne stirred aught but the salt in his peas.<
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Sir Guy gave a kind of laugh, like to a pig found a fresh acorn. ‘I mayn’t give you the deed shot-free, but I’ll send it to my kinsman Laurence Haket, who’s been enfeoffed near Calais. Enfeoffed, understand? They gave him land. I’ll give you a letter for him, to bid him give you the deed once you’ve earned enough to buy it. You’ll find five pound and more in France. An English archer in France gets silver as lightly as a knave getting apples of a widow’s orchard.’
He held out his hand to Will and Anto bade Will kneel and kiss it and Will did as he was bidden.
Sir Guy said to rise, and lifted him, as if it were Will’s wish to bide on his knees. ‘Do me one errand on the way,’ he said.
He took a mouthful of wine and opened the box and dalve in it, but couldn’t find what he looked for. He went to the window and turned a key and the scales of glass set in iron swung out like a door. There was a garden beyond with green grass cropped short and a spring-well. Sir Guy’s younger daughtren played there with Bridget the housekeeper and the lord’s nift Pogge. Sir Guy called out to Bridget and in a handwhile a wench put through the window a stitch of cloth that gleamed where the sun caught it.
Sir Guy laid it on the board. On a white field were sewn scarlet roses and white lilies in silken thread. One hem was sewn in gold, and golden blazes ran through the field.
‘It was of such cloth my daughter’s gowns were made,’ he said. ‘The gown that was stolen and the second, that she’ll wear for her wedding. Keep your eyes and ears open, and get you tidings of the stolen gown, send word back to Outen Green, and we’ll muster men, fetch the thief and hang him.’
They sent Will out and in a stound Anto came to him with the letter, folded to the muchness of a hand and sealed with a grot of wax. Anto thacked him on the shoulder and said it was done, and he must be on the high road for France in three hour, and to gather his gear and ready his sins for church.
NACK STINTED US at the church door and let Will in and the priest’s knaves stripped him naked and washed him with holy water while the priest sang Latin and swung a crock of smoking reekles.
On the eve, Nack had gone to our women and told them we owed to see Will geared such that we not be shamed if he went forth, for whatever weird bode him in the south, in him wasn’t his worth alone, but ours. Now Nack came in with fresh clothes the women had sewn for Will, a shirt and breech with rood stitch on the hem, a grey kirtle, red hose and a red hood. We cleaned his shoon, that he’d bett with thick leather under-halves for a far fare, and we thrang into church.
Each of us was there. Even Sir Guy and his folk, that took their mass at Brimpsfield Priory, were in their stead by the south wall. We lacked only the lady Bernadine, who, us thought, would rather hight herself for her wedding, and Hab, who minded the pigs.
The priest came away from the altar and we kneeled for the confiteor. The priest called Will near and Will kneeled at his feet. The priest bade him clasp his hands together, bent to whisper in his ear and listened while Will whispered in his. We’d hear Will’s sins, but couldn’t, for he spoke too soft. He got shrift, and was shriven clean, and came away from the priest with his cheer clean and shining, and the women wept.
The priest came down from behind the rood-pale and led Will by the wrist to the likenesses on the north wall. On any other day we ne heeded the likenesses. We knew them too well. Yet now, tight together in the candle stink, it were as if we’d seen what they showed. When the priest spoke of Christ it were like to he told of a kinsman who’d gone out of Outen Green and fell in with uncouth churls that ne knew his worth, and scorned and slew him. It were like to we stood in the garden in Jerusalem, and smelled onion on false Judas’s breath when he kissed us in the murk, and felt the chill on our bare backs when the shirt was torn of it, the smart of flesh when the knotted rope struck, the uncouth spit wet on our faces, the weight of the rood like to a house-cruck, the hawthorns that pricked our brows and the nails that went between our hand-bones and foot-bones. It were like to we were pitched in the wind to hang like flesh on the butcher’s hook. And we saw him rise to heaven, like lightning shotten upward of the earth.
The priest went again to the altar. When the sacring bell rang we shoff up against the rood-pale and went on our knees and lifted our hands. Some of us saw our Maker in the priest’s hands and they at the back yall at the priest to lift our Lord higher. Buck and Whichday took Will by the arms and lifted him up out of the heap of folk, that he got good sight of Christ, for he that saw the Lord was shielded were he reft ferly of life. Then the priest ate Christ’s flesh, and drank of his blood.
After mass Will went from hand to hand, for each of us would wish him well, and give him some thing or useful word. His mother dight her hands on his cheeks and made a show of a smile, for she’d sworn to hold back her tears till he was gone.
Will walked away up the road with his pack on his back and his bowstaff in his right hand, the children after him. They stinted at the top field wall, and Will clamb over it, and ne looked again, and we couldn’t see him afterwards. That was how Will Quate left Outen Green.
When he’d gone we minded how mild he was with the old and children, how good a neighbour, how right he sowed and ploughed and sheared, how it comforted to see his cheer behind an ox-gang in the rain and hear his feet breaking ice in the puddles on the back road on a winter morning. We felt bare shame to let such strength and manship go, with his neb like an angel’s. And we felt bare glad the Green had such an offering to make. It lightened us to think us strong enough to send so handy a man away to where, the priest said, the Fiend had free hold. Let the world see, we kept no jewel back.
SOMEONE CRIED THE pigs were loose, and we ran to shield our orchards, and called for Hab, but he wasn’t there.
Whichday and Cockle bode at the church, and when the priest came out, Whichday went to him and said the night before he’d had a dream of Will walking through a cornfield ahead of him, but Will wouldn’t turn when he called, and did the priest know the meaning?
The priest was a ploughman’s son like us, who’d gotten Latin of the Gloucester monks. He said many men dreamed of their corn before harvest, and Whichday most likely feared hail.
Whichday said it wasn’t that. He lacked Will, and wished they hadn’t let him go. He’d know where he was, and what he did, and how he fared. Wasn’t there, he asked the priest, a way to ward dreams, to reach what you sought of them, not to be at the dream’s bidding?
The priest said man’s lot wasn’t to choose his dreams, nor win of them, and dreams fell upon us, like wild deer in darkness, while we slept. Yet there were some folk who warded their dreams, as shepherds warded sheep, and kept them as easy by day as by night, and won of them, as of their herd shepherds won wool. These folk, he said, were called writers, and they were close to the Fiend.
Yet, he said, there were holy among them. He told us he’d met a book in the getting of his priest-lore, a book by a man of Italy, about the life of Christ, and in this book was written of deeds by our Lord that weren’t in the gospel.
Like for one the gospel told how the Fiend tempted our Maker in the desert, and how Christ fasted, but the gospel ne told whence came the meat with which Christ’s fast was broken. So the man of Italy wrote a thing that seemed what our meek and simple son of God might do, that Christ bade angels fly to his mother’s house and fetch meat of her, and Christ, wrote the man of Italy, ate alone in the desert, with angels to serve him.
Whichday and Cockle were astoned. Cockle asked had Christ in truth sent home for meat to break his fast?
The priest said we mightn’t know, for the man of Italy ne wrote of what was true, nor what wasn’t true, but what might be true, by his conning of the lifelodes of men, and the things and deeds he minded, that he crafted with his mastery of dreaming into a likeness of truth.
Cockle said the man of Italy was a liar.
The priest pulled Cockle’s sleeve and asked was the seamstress who made it a liar, for making a thing out of flax in the likeness
of another sleeve, and calling it a sleeve?
Cockle said he’d like to see a man ride to Brimpsfield on the likeness of a horse.
The priest bade Cockle beware to call those who made likenesses liars, for the gospel told us how our Lord made man in his own likeness. And Cockle shouldn’t rue the way he was, for God had made so many likenesses of himself, it wasn’t no wonder his fingers slipped once in a while.
All this time Whichday stood and stared about and played with the two hairs on his chin. He said he would ward his dreams that night. He would make a likeness of Will Quate.
THE WORLD
WILL WENT THROUGH the wood beyond the wall till Outen Green was hidden from his sight. The sun’s light beshone the path in flecks. The boughs of the trees were still and the only sound was birdsong, Will’s feet on the earth and the creak of the pack straps on his kirtle.
Deep in the wood, the shapes of a man in white and a great dark deer seemed to go ahead of him, and he stinted, and they weren’t there, and he went on.
Feet came quick behind him, twigs cracked, and Ness came, neb red of running. She threw her arms around Will and bade him bide longer.
‘I must go,’ said Will. ‘I’ll come again in a year, if you’ll have me.’
‘I’ll have you,’ said Ness. She took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘Swear you won’t be killed by no French. Swear you won’t sicken of no qualm.’
Will swore it.
Ness fumbled in her barmcloth, took out a tin token and gave it to Will. ‘It’s St Margaret,’ she said. ‘She was swallowed by the Fiend in the shape of a firedrake, and after it swallowed her the firedrake barst, and Margaret stepped out of the skin unhurt, with every hair in its stead, and the Fiend was ashamed to have been beaten by a maid.’