by Norah Lofts
Griselda, in response to this truly noble offer, turned upon Mistress Captoft a glance that was at once dull and wild.
‘They can manage,’ she said. She took Godfrey by the upper arm and turned him away. He twisted himself free, stepped back to face Mistress Captoft and made a little bow.
‘Good day, Mistress Captoft. Thank you for the cake.’
‘Really, her manner was most peculiar,’ Mistress Captoft said to Father Benedict, whose aunt and housekeeper she was held to be by all but the lewd-minded who thought she was too young, too gaily dressed for the role. ‘She was quite abrupt to the child. I always thought her over-doting. And to me she was rude. Then, after hurrying away, without so much as a good-day, she stopped and stood staring. As she sometimes stares at the graveyard.’
Father Benedict, born to be a scholar, had never been much interested in his parishioners and finding the Intake people on the whole faintly hostile and curiously evasive had lost what little interest he had ever had. But he liked supper table talk, however trivial. Mattie had a soft, dove-like voice, very soothing; and sometimes her comments were sound and shrewd. An unusual and very pleasant combination.
Half way along the single track which led past the church and the priest’s house to Knight’s Acre, Griselda had stopped and stared.
There it is; the place I sold myself for. Sir Godfrey brought me here. He saved me from that horrible inn where I knew nothing but squalor and hardship and degradation. I saved his life there, because he looked so much like the carved saint in the church and I couldn’t bear to see him dragged into the barn to die. I saved him while he lay in the barn and afterwards on the long road back from the north. He could never have managed. So I came here riding pillion on the horse I stole for him and Knight’s Acre was heaven to me, with Lady Sybilla so kind. I knew nothing about love then—I’d never met it in any form… In all my life I only met it once and that was too late. I married Henry Tallboys because I wanted to stay at Knight’s Acre; the one place where I had been happy and felt secure. He married me because the place was in such a muddle that only the firm hand of an indisputable mistress could get it on the right lines again. It suited us both until the day when Henry was at market, that flipperty girl, hired to help me, out watching the hunt and only Tom… Tom Robinson to help to deliver the baby. Then I knew how wrong I had been; refusing Tom’s shy offer to take a walk amongst the bluebells; accepting Henry’s offer of marriage which was in reality no marriage at all. Always, always, if he could side against me, he did. I was never first with him; never in all my life have I been first with anybody—except Tom, who is dead.
The extreme climax of self-pity, everybody against her, everything gone wrong, might have lifted had Griselda walked into the kitchen and found it as bare as she had left it. Earlier in the day she had hidden most of the available food, left them to starve, to come to their senses and to a realisation of how important she was. The slightest evidence that she mattered, was, however little loved, indispensable, would have steadied her tottering mind.
What faced her as she entered the kitchen was—like everything else in life—wrong. Warmth and the smell of freshly baked bread; and that little bitch, that little bastard who had once stolen Godfrey and tried to hold the family to ransom, taking a pie from the oven and saying something silly about blackbirds.
Suddenly something happened inside Griselda’s head, inside her bones. She was tough, she had survived life as a beggar girl, raped in a ditch at the age of six; she had survived the austere life in a convent orphanage and after that, worse, maid of all work, unpaid prostitute, at an inn. She could bear this, though she felt weak and had to hold on to the table while she tried to explain, did to the hearing within her own mind, explain that this was her kitchen and though she had deserted it at midday as a protest against the various wrongs she had suffered, she had come back to cook now, that Joanna had no right to be wearing her apron.
They—Henry and Joanna—pretended not to hear or not to understand. She spoke more loudly, forcing herself to ignore the weakness, the dizziness, the incipient nausea. Well, if they wouldn’t listen or understand, they must be shown. Leaning heavily on her left hand she managed to move her right, pushing the new loaves to the floor. This is my kitchen! I do the baking here! How dare you take my place? Away with your rubbish! Give me my apron, you little slut…
It came out as babble, the slurred words running into one another. Don’t stand there staring, pretending not to understand.
They stood and stared. Only Godfrey moved, sidling away to take shelter behind Henry. Then with another wordless roar, Griselda bore down upon Joanna, meaning to snatch the apron. Henry remembered that other time when Griselda had become violent and attacked Joanna with such ferocity that she had almost killed her. He acted swiftly, seized both his wife’s work-worn hands in one of his own and with the other grasped enough of her clothing to lift her from her feet. She struggled wildly and screamed. Godfrey began to scream, too, and Joanna turned to comfort him, saying the first thing that came into her head.
‘Mumma is just being funny, Godfrey. You should laugh, not cry.’
Griselda was borne away to the accompaniment of the hysterical laughter of her son.
Henry carried her to the room which she had chosen when she decided not to sleep with him any more. It happened to be the one in which, many years earlier, his sister Margaret, merely dim-witted and harmless except for her obsession about men, had been confined. He pushed her inside, backed away, snatched the key from inside the door, inserted it into the lock on the outside and locked her in. He was surprised and a little ashamed to find his hands unsteady. He’d lived through many things far worse than an incoherent display of temper. Here on this very stairway he had stood, taking careful aim—taught him by Walter, with the bow and arrow made for him by Walter—and Walter, unrecognisable in his new blue jerkin and behaving in an incredible way, had fallen dead. The hardening process which, now completed, made him seem aloof, imperturbable, unfriendly, had begun then. But it was something imposed upon him from the outside, a suit of armour donned as defence against the world; it was not part of his true nature and in many ways he was far more vulnerable than he appeared to be.
He was not surprised to find himself very hungry—every major crisis in his life had been followed by fierce appetite. He tackled his pigeon pie with zest, admonishing Godfrey, still precariously balanced between tears and laughter, to eat up. ‘She’ll be better in the morning,’ he said.
‘What about her supper?’ Joanna asked, without solicitude but as though referring to the feeding of an animal. She hated Griselda, less on account of her behaviour to herself than because of the way she treated Henry, doing her best to make him miserable.
‘It can wait. Give her time to calm down.’
‘I’ll take her something presently.’ Again not because she cared whether Griselda ate or not but to show Henry that she was not frightened. She’d been six when Griselda had set about her with murderous rage and even then she’d hit back as savagely as she could. Since then she had grown a lot!
‘No!’ Henry said sharply. ‘You’re not to go near her. Neither of you. Mind that. We’ll see how things turn out.’
How would they? In his mind he tried over various phrases: temporarily distraught; demented; possessed of the Devil.
He was an illiterate man. Sybilla, convent-bred to the age of sixteen and an apt scholar, had tried to teach him to read and write but the business had bored him and he had been content when he could sign his name. But she had read to him and told him stories; his vocabulary far exceeded the range of the words he used every day.
He was not sure that Griselda was merely temporarily distraught. Looking back he thought that he could see signs of a mind gone sick and getting worse, on the lines of a physical illness.
It had begun on the day of Godfrey’s birth. She’d turned against Henry then and, with even more rancour, against the girl—Leonora—who had, quite unintent
ionally, been absent at the critical moment. It was unreasonable. So had been her behaviour towards Joanna. The poor child had done the baby Godfrey no harm; she’d simply taken him, snugly wrapped, and hidden him and made a piteous attempt at blackmail—they could have their baby back if Robert could come from Moyidan where everybody was so unkind and he was so wretched. There’d been some inexplicable link between Joanna, Tana’s daughter, and Robert, Sybilla’s son, born on the same day but Henry had treated lightly then Joanna’s claim to see, to know what was going on at Moyidan. She had been proved right. In the end Robert had run away—and never been heard of since. Back to Griselda; though Henry had gone straight to the hiding place—one he had used in his time—and brought back the baby, who had not even woken, Griselda had again been unreasonable in holding an undying grudge. Silly, too, about Godfrey as he grew and wished to explore, to share in the life of farm and yard. He must never go beyond that part of the yard well within view of the kitchen; he must never have dirty hands or clothes or ruffled hair. Maybe, Henry thought, indulging for once in the self-examination which his busy life, the mere struggle for survival, ordinarily forbade, I have been at fault there; let her have her own way too much. But, self-consolatory, he thought that over bigger issues, like taking in his brother John and Young Shep, he had been firm. And by being firm had perhaps turned Griselda’s brain for good and all. But could a man turn from his door his own brother, ill and fallen on evil days. Merely to humour an ill-tempered wife?
Joanna moved about with none of the bustle or noise with which Griselda had performed such tasks. She had already lifted the scattered loaves and given them a perfunctory brush with her apron. All loaves had a smearing of the faggot ash on their undersides; these were no different; Griselda, working her fingers to the bone—dismal expression—kept a clean kitchen floor. Now, the meal over and the platters clean, she lighted one candle from another and said, ‘Godfrey should go to bed.’
‘Where?’ For as long as he remembered the little boy had slept with his mother.
‘You can share my bed, son,’ Henry said.
That was good. A possible forerunner of a new way of life. Something to be immediately exploited.
‘Then tomorrow may I go out with you? To the field?’
Henry said, ‘Yes,’ well knowing that if tomorrow Griselda had recovered there would be argument, dispute, another row.
Upstairs, in the room that darkened from dusk to night with the steady inexorable progress of the first heartbeat towards the last, Griselda sat on the bed and knew that her every action, her every word had been sensible. Henry, Joanna and even Godfrey were all in a plot against her. Pretending not to understand what she said or why she acted as she did. Picking her up as though she were a wild cat. Locking her in as though she were mad. And she the only one in the place with a grain of sense! That thought spurred a further burst of rage: she beat on the door and screamed: took off her shoe and hammered the floor. Knowing all the time that it was useless. If they pretended not to understand they could pretend not to hear. Ah, but wait until tomorrow, she thought, cunningly. Tomorrow, dinnertime, when Jem Watson would be in for his dinner. He’d hear and ask what was amiss: he was one of the nosiest people in the world. Henry would be forced to act then; release her, make up some plausible tale—to which she would give full backing. Otherwise there’d be such a tale round the village by suppertime. Griselda knew how proud Henry was, in a quiet way, of his good name and his reputation. He wouldn’t want a scandal. Come to that, nor did she. A few good thumps tomorrow, a scream or two, easily explained if she and Henry told the same tale, and she’d be out of this. She thought: I must save my strength for tomorrow. Fully dressed except for one shoe she went to the bed, huddled the blankets around her and soon fell asleep, completely exhausted.
Downstairs, Henry said, ‘You’d better get to bed, Joanna. I’m going across to the other side. There are some questions I want to ask Young Shep while he can still talk.’
‘He isn’t going to get better, is he?’
‘I’m afraid not. Good-night, Joanna.’
He was now as cool and aloof to her as he was to other people and for that, she thought, as she raked the fire low and left the pot of breakfast oatmeal not to cook but to ripen in the lingering warmth, she was to blame. It was a month, now, since that scene in the wood. When she thought of it she could still smell the ripe warm scent of blackberries.
Henry had explained that he had arranged for her to go to Stordford, a grand house where she would learn all that a lady needed to; and she’d said she’d sooner die and had given proof of it by running to one of the three pools and throwing herself in. It had not been just a dramatic gesture; she would rather die than leave Henry and Knight’s Acre. They were her life.
Henry had plunged in after her, dragged her out, revived her, and when she was herself again his mouth was on hers. All in a muddle, she’d mistaken this last resort of the resuscitation of the drowned for love. She had responded, embracing him ardently using endearments that she hardly knew that she knew. He’d been… shocked? disgusted? Anyway, different, ever since then. Formerly he had called her my Sweet, or Sweeting, even Darling, terms more properly applied to one’s wife, but who could possibly use them to somebody as waspish and scolding and nagging as Griselda? Now he didn’t use such words at all. He called her Joanna; in the last month he had been to market twice but he had not asked her to go with him. Such a pity; they’d had such fun, such a closeness on market days. Even when what Henry had to sell brought in less money than he had expected and all that was to be bought cost more, she’d been able to cheer him, make him laugh.
And of course, Joanna thought, resolutely hopeful, time would tell. She’d counted on that before Griselda finally went so mad that even Henry was bound to take notice. In her opinion Griselda had been demented for years. Now she was locked up; would probably pine and die. And even if she lived on it wouldn’t matter, so long as she was out of the way, leaving Henry and Joanna together. That was all Joanna asked at the moment; her dream of happiness did not reach to having a ring on her finger and being able to call herself Mistress Tallboys.
And one thing was certain, she thought comfortably as she climbed the stairs; Henry was now dependent upon her to cook and keep house. There’d be no more idiot talk about exiling her to Stordford to learn how to play the lute and do embroidery.
Henry went heavily and thoughtfully across the yard towards the other part of his house. He, too, recalled that scene in the wood. The trouble was that every time he was obliged to be brusque and off-hand with the child, it was a reminder. He’d believed her dead, driven to suicide at the thought of being sent to Stordford. Desperately he’d set about restoring her in a way he had once heard described by Walter and, like everything Walter had ever advised, it had worked. Under the pressure of his hands, the breathing of his mouth, Joanna had come back to life and changed from a woebegone child to an ardent woman, caressing him, using such expressions of love—heart of my heart and similar terms—that he was shocked. The disgust was for himself, for the instant response of his body. Quickly mastered; never repeated but a shaming memory. To a child, not yet twelve years old; a child he had always regarded and treated as a much younger sister, tried to protect from Griselda’s hostility. He’d always found her company congenial, too. He was anything but a jovial man and she was far from being a gay, prattling child but they had in common a keen sense of the ridiculous; sometimes, with no word spoken, a look, a lift of the eyebrow, shrug of the shoulder, small movement of the hand was enough.
Poor little girl; upon a few careless words, a few acts of protectiveness and many a good laugh, she’d reared a shining fantasy, spun herself a fairy tale. She was fond of tales.
Think about sheep, he told himself sternly.
It was true that ever since Young Shep had gone off, years ago, the Knight’s Acre flock had not flourished; foot-rot, liver rot and scab—most injurious to the fleeces. Henry had tried to be a goo
d shepherd and, once upon a time, he’d had the help of Tom Robinson who was good at everything he undertook: but he was dead now. He’d survived the plague but it had left him weak and ailing; finally he’d ended so frail that he could only give Griselda a bit of help in the kitchen; and when he was past that and took to his bed, she’d been very kind and tolerant; very different from the way she had been towards anybody else who lived at Knight’s Acre and did not pull their weight.
Henry stepped into the silk-hung room and saw that John had indeed been busy. The dust and the cobwebs were gone and the room bore more resemblance to the one which Henry Tallboys had once regarded as the most beautiful room in the world.
Young Shep—but I must remember not to say that! Years and years ago, in the lost mists of youth, Henry had said ‘Young Shep,’ and John had rebuked him, saying, ‘He has a name, you know.’
Young Shep lay on one of the divans, propped up on pillows, purple, scarlet, rose pink, primrose yellow. He looked ghastly, skin the colour of tallow except where, just under the eyes, there was a flush. Not of health, of fever.
Aware of the falsity, Henry said, ‘Good evening, Nick. I am glad to see you out of bed.’
John, hovering, slightly aggressive, said. ‘I told you he was better.’
Better? A man plainly dying but making a great effort to hide the fact from his friend.
‘I hoped I could pick your brains a bit—about sheep.’
Again that false heartiness.
‘Anything I know,’ Young Shep said. He produced a smile which might have emphasised the death’s head look, but strangely did not; it was a sweet and genuinely grateful smile.
It was necessary for Henry to keep his attention on sheep and refuse to remember.
On that divan where the dying shepherd lay he had known one night of love—his first and his last but such, he was sure, as few men ever knew; the consummation of years of boyish adoration of the beautiful lady from a far land, exotic, mysterious, with whom he had fallen in love at first sight. It was Tana who had saved his father, Sir Godfrey, from slavery in some heathen country called Zagelah and done so at such risk to her own life that she had been obliged to flee too. She’d been pregnant when she arrived and six months later had given birth to the girl Joanna, child of a Spanish knight, now dead. Nothing, widowhood, pregnancy, motherhood, had detracted a whit from the fascination which she held for Henry. And in the end he had possessed her; with absolutely no idea that she had once been his father’s lover; that Joanna was in fact his half-sister. Tana was so young and the father-come-back-from-the-dead had seemed so old.