by Norah Lofts
It had been, in part, a very successful operation. She’d forced her way in, charmed the Bishop of Bywater who was dining with Sir Richard that day and got Robert away. But only for a little time. In the blizzard which had spoiled her whole plan, which was to smuggle Robert into the empty rooms on the other side of the house, Robert, despite all her care, had died in the poor shelter she had found. She’d covered him with leaves and bracken and come home and never said a word. For quite a long time she had avoided the use of Robert’s name; but there it was; she’d been young then; the wound had healed and her hungry love had fastened upon Henry. To the young, death was something to be survived.
And Henry was thinking: Suppose when I was Godfrey’s age, romping through the Long Gallery, the Gardens, the Maze at Beauclaire, my aunt Astallon’s palatial home, somebody had come up to me and said, ‘Your mother is dead.’ Not a pleasant thought but one to be faced with honesty; it would have meant very little. It was only later when, two against the world, he and his mother had come together, bonded by common misfortune, allies in the fight against poverty and disaster.
‘You may well be right,’ Henry said. And she was; for informed that his mother was dead, that he would never see her again, Godfrey said, ‘Oh!’ and then, with hardly a pause, ‘Next time you go to market, can I come?’
“We’ll see,’ Henry said; on the whole relieved that Godfrey had made so little fuss; for John was making fuss enough for a dozen. Crying, making self-recriminatory statements, most of which Henry did not understand, and refusing to eat.
That at least, Henry did understand and, losing patience, he said, ‘Look. Starving yourself can’t help Young Shep and could hurt you. It was lack of food that brought you to such a low state as you were in when you arrived here. You’ll make yourself ill again.’
‘I only wish I could die.’
Henry could only wish that John might pull himself together and be, feel, better once the funeral was over.
Mistress Captoft was also concerned about the funeral. She had suggested—sensibly, she thought—that the one committal service might serve for both. Stubborn as rock, Father Benedict said that except in times of pestilence or war, mass committals to the grave were wrong. In ordinary times each soul must be regarded as individual, coming at birth to house in a separate body, and when the corporal frame broke down by accident or disease, still a separate entity to be committed, as such, into the hand of God.
Interments took place after nightfall; Mistress Captoft was glad that at this time of the year dusk came early, so that he need not spend a long evening in waiting about. He yielded to her plea that he should stay in bed until dinnertime and afterwards he rested. He said he felt much better and well able to perform the double task that awaited him.
He had never been an assiduous parish priest; he had never, as old Father Ambrose had done, gone visiting houses in the village or stood after Mass by the door of the church asking after the health of the absentees—a habit which the people, mistaking the old man’s motives, had resented—but he was a conscientious man and thorough, and he missed no word nor movement as he performed the two identical ceremonies.
When he came in he seemed none the worse. A heaped fire and a cup of warm, spiced wine awaited him.
‘Get me the Parish Book, my love.’ She brought him the rudimentary parish record, sometimes called the Kin Book because the original purpose in keeping it had been the prevention of incestuous marriages. Father Ambrose’s predecessor had been so careless about it that it seemed as though during his twenty years in charge there had been few marriages, fewer baptisms and no interments at all. Father Ambrose had been far more scrupulous and had recorded everything in any way to do with the parish; but as his sight had deteriorated, so had his writing; his last entries were practically illegible, sometimes written across each other.
Father Benedict wrote a clear, scholarly hand and now he entered the date and recorded that he had buried Griselda Tallboys, wife of Henry Tallboys of Knight’s Acre, and Nicholas Shepherd from the same house. He wrote firmly, allowed time for the ink to dry and then closed the book.
‘This may be the last entry I shall make,’ he said. And smiled. After that he ate, with more appetite than he had shown lately, two coddled eggs.
He went, comfortably, to bed; bag of hot salt, mustard plaster, soothing drops. Until they took effect Father Benedict and Mistress Captoft chatted cheerfully. She would leave in two days’ time. During the following week he would resign his living, which meant going not to Moyidan but all the way to Bywater because the Bishop of Bywater now had complete, if only temporary, control of that rich family manor.
Since Father Benedict’s uncle, Father Thomas, had lived through all the changes there, Father Benedict and Mistress Captoft had a rough kind of knowledge of what had happened.
Sir James Tallboys, indisputable head of the family, had died, leaving his wife, Lady Emma, in full charge of the land and of the grandson, the heir. Aware that she was carrying about within her a disease incurable, she had sent for a nephew, Sir Richard, brother to Master Tallboys at Knight’s Acre. And he’d spent lavishly, lived like a lord and come to grief. The Bishop had stepped in, settled the debts, taken charge of the manor and of the heir—now at Eton College. So when Father Benedict resigned his living he would have to approach not a member of the Tallboys family, an ancestress of whom had founded and endowed the church, but the Bishop who might show some curiosity as to the cause of the resignation.
‘And if he does,’ Mistress Captoft said with some asperity, ‘it will be the first sign of interest he has evinced in all the time you have been here.’ She had fiercely resented the Bishop’s negligence, having been certain all along that he had only to spend a few minutes in Benny’s company to realise how wasted he was in this remote, barbarous place.
However, it was all over now. Stooping over the bed to kiss him good-night she thought that one of the first things she would buy in Amsterdam would be a fine big double bed. Always, up to now, they had been careful to preserve all the outward forms of convention; separate rooms, small single beds.
He was dead in the morning. Lying just as she had left him. Afterwards she found comfort in the thought that he had died in his sleep without pain but that was no comfort at the moment.
Ah, Intake said, when it heard the news, everything goes in threes. That was so rooted a superstition that when a man or woman broke something useful, two useless things, even two twigs, would be broken to ward off the curse.
Old Ethel, first with the news and for once the centre of interest, said with spite, ‘Carrying on like crazy, she is. You’d think she was widowed. Take me. I was with the good old Father more years than you could reckon—and he was took sudden, too. Did I wail and weep? Though I lost my home and my job, too, and was cast on charity.’ She threw an ungrateful look at the relatives who had given her grudging shelter.
Old Hodgson, a village Elder, and one of those who had reason to be grateful to Mistress Captoft for one of her doses said, ‘Mark you! She was related to him.’
A woman said, ‘Only nephew. Take me. My brother over at Muchanger lost three boys at a go. Smallpox. I never acted crazy.’
There was much interest but little sympathy. Mistress Captoft, with money of her own, her fine clothes, her headdresses, her grey mule, had incurred deadly envy in women who never had a penny of their own. They earned; yes! Work like an ox in the fields, in the yard, in the house; cook, mend, spin, bear and rear children: all unpaid labour. There were good husbands and bad, sons kind or unkind, but one and all they held on to the purse strings. If you were lucky you might get a present now and again but some man chose it and paid for it and wanted thanks for it. And if it was stuff for a gown it was always the wrong colour. The women of Intake envied Mistress Captoft; and the men did not like her. Far too masterful, starting with the men she’d hired to add to and improve the priest’s house. She’d hired them from outside, a fact which, with grand inconsistency,
had been resented. Asked to do a bit of building work on the little low house or to dig enough of the long neglected glebe to make a garden, the men of Intake would have asserted their independence in a variety of ways, choosing their own time; their own pace, demanding extortionate wages. Mistress Captoft brought in hirelings, slaves, landless men who could be harried about. And the jobs had been done in no time.
Curiously, the one person in Intake who came to offer real sympathy and, more, help, was Master Tallboys, whom Mistress Captoft had never much liked, thinking him cold and aloof and utterly unhelpful to Benny’s career as she had once planned it.
But now here he was, grave, stolid, kind. For when in her agony of loss she screamed at him: If only you had kept your mad wife under control, none of this… he showed nothing but a desire to help. He’d ride to Moyidan, he said, and tell Father Thomas and ask him to come and conduct the funeral; he’d send a message to Sawyer about the coffin; he’d see to everything.
And she needed support now. Proud and independent as she might appear to be she had never, so far in her life, faced any serious challenge; fond parents, doting old husband; a period when, if a woman could be said to have a career, she had had one; after that, Benny and all the little subterfuges, the good management, the self-control upon which she had prided herself. Always, somewhere in the background, a man. Now nobody.
A strong stone tower in collapse left more of a ruin than a wattle hut, Henry reflected. And Mistress Captoft’s collapse was absolute.
There was not a place in the little house which had not a fresh blow to strike as soon as she entered; here he sat at his books; here I cooked his meals; in this room, my bedchamber he came to me; in the other he died. And perhaps most painful of all, the little narrow room where the mad woman had struck the lethal blow and in which now lay, so carefully and hopefully packed, what she had planned to take with her to Amsterdam; the silver cups and plates, wadded with the fine linen in a leather bag. More linen and a few clothes bundled into a kind of sausage, enclosed in sailcloth. Meant for Amsterdam! Unbearable.
‘And I do not know where to go,’ she said to Henry.
‘I always understood that you owned property, Mistress Captoft.’
‘So I do. But leased. And I could not live…’ The two farms, with houses which her kind old husband had bequeathed her were, if anything, more isolated than Intake; and the sheep-run had no proper house at all.
‘Well,’ Henry said in his practical way, ‘there is no immediate hurry. If I remember rightly it takes a little time to install a new priest. And there are houses for sale or hire in Baildon. I have to go to market next week. Would you like me to look around?’
‘I don’t know. I cannot decide or plan. I just do not know.’ All her talent for management, her ability to organise had gone, no more substantial than the whipped cream on top of a custard pie.
Full responsibility for her Henry was prepared to shuffle off. After all, Father Thomas at Moyidan had been Father Benedict’s uncle and Mistress Captoft had been Father Benedict’s aunt; so they were, if only by marriage, related and families must hold together.
As he was holding to John, irritation weaving its way through concern. There was an expression—nursing one’s grief—and that was exactly what John was doing; sitting about, hands idle, eyes vacant, taking a bite of this, a bite of that, never a whole meal, though Joanna was doing her best.
It was true that he must go to market on the Wednesday; he had two pigs ready for slaughter; one for sale; one for house use.
‘Come with me, John. It’d take you out of yourself.’
Nothing could do that. All very well for Henry. What had he lost? A scold; a shrew, a mad woman. Whereas I…
‘I couldn’t,’ John said, tears welling up again. ‘Just the sight of people, alive while Nick is…’ He went, choking and stumbling out of the kitchen.
Godfrey said, ‘You promised, Father, that next time you went to market, you’d take me.’
Rasped by his failure with John, Henry said, ‘I made no such promise. You’re old enough now to get things straight.’ That was the way Walter had talked to him; and what was wrong with it? Yet he felt compunction, looking at his son’s wide blue eyes, hurt.
I must not take out on this poor little boy, this motherless little boy, my exasperation with these two people who cry so easily.
‘Of course you can come,’ he said.
Baildon market was really three, the big general market, a wide space dominated by the church and the inn; the beast market with the shambles adjoining it and, at a little distance, the horse market. In the big market Henry halted to get Godfrey out of the waggon. As he did so he had a sharp memory of the days when his nephew, Richard of Moyidan, had come to market with him. There’d been a time, just after the church took possession of Moyidan, when the boy had been sadly neglected; his loving godmother dead, his idiot parents dead, his unofficial guardian, Sir Richard, gone back to London. Henry had taken him in, against Griselda’s loud protests and much against Joanna’s wishes. And he’d been badly rewarded! So now, presenting his son with a farthing, he said solemnly, ‘This is for you to spend. You can buy yourself a cake or pie. You can look at things but you are not to touch. Do you understand me? You can have whatever your farthing will buy and nothing else.’ Young Richard had gone around pilfering for quite a long time before he was caught, thus disgracing the family name. ‘I’ll pick you up by the church,’ Henry said, and drove on to sell his pig.
On his way he passed what he and Joanna always referred to as the rubbish stall, kept by a man with so glib a tongue that Joanna once said, ‘He’d sell you Knight’s Acre, Henry, if you stood there long enough.’ Amongst the jumble of broken or inadequately mended things there was sometimes an article of which a handy man like Henry could make use and Henry decided that on his way back from the beast market, he’d see what was on offer.
‘Is that a lute?’ His mother had had one and played it beautifully; she’d tried to teach all her children, only John had taken to it and Sybilla’s lute had gone with him when he left home.
‘Right you are, sir! Beautiful thing and in splendid condition. Not a broken string. Untuned of course. I have no ear. Try it, sir.’ The battle was half won if a customer could be persuaded to handle any article. He pushed the lute into Henry’s hand and turned to persuade a woman that a cooking pot, properly tinkered, was as good as, even better than, a new one. ‘Where it’s mended it’s thicker, you see. Last a lifetime.’
To Henry, never enamoured of any lute, this one was anything but beautiful; shabby, chipped and dirty. But with a clumsy stroke of his thumb he assured himself that some sound could be produced and he thought of John who had been obliged to sell his own beloved instrument somewhere on that long hungry journey home. A lute might cheer him a bit, rouse a spark of interest.
‘How much?’
“Well, to anybody else, it’d be seven shillings, sir. But I can see you’ve taken a fancy to it and I like to see a thing like that go where it’ll be appreciated. Say three and at that I’m robbing myself.’
Most customers enjoyed a haggle. Henry, despite his perpetual lack of money and need to exercise the utmost thrift, thought haggling undignified. The price was extortionate but he paid.
Godfrey was waiting. As he clambered into the waggon, Henry asked, ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’
‘Oh yes. Except for the dog. It danced but the man was rough to it. I didn’t like that. So when he came round with his cap I, didn’t put my farthing—you did say it was a farthing?—in.’
Rough was about the most derogatory word in Godfrey’s vocabulary. Drilled into him by Griselda who, so far as her son was concerned, had only two standards of behaviour, rough and otherwise.
‘So what did you spend it on?’
‘I bought something for you, Father. I don’t know what it is but the woman said it was nice. And more than a farthing but I was a pretty little boy and could have it.’
Shyly he p
roduced an orange.
Such a luxury that Henry had not been within arm’s reach of one since, at about the age his own son was now, he had left Beauclaire, that rich place where luxury was commonplace. Oranges came from Spain. Henry could remember his father saying that there they were common as apples in England and grew on peculiar trees which bore sweet-scented flowers and golden fruits at the same time. In England oranges were rare and very costly because picked when unripe and hard they shrivelled; picked ripe and luscious, unless the ship that carried them had a favourable passage, the wind behind her all the way, they rotted. Not a cargo to appeal to the ordinary ship’s captain who preferred to carry the oranges in preserved form. Rendered incorruptible because, saturated with sugar, this concoction was an even more costly luxury. But Henry had known it and, short of a miracle, his son never would.
Henry’s thought teetered. Beauclaire, so rich and splendid had, despite all his uncle’s endeavours to be neutral in the war between York and Lancaster, been utterly destroyed; whereas Knight’s Acre, bare, humble, poor, had survived.
One could think a lot in almost no time at all and Godfrey had not been aware of any lapse. ‘The woman said it was nice to eat.’
‘No doubt about that. We’ll share it with Joanna.’ Then a rush of feeling came over him. That his son should have spent his poor farthing… ‘You’re my boy,’ he said.
Godfrey said, in exactly the manner with which he had accepted the news of his mother’s death, ‘I always was. Wasn’t I?’
John recoiled from the lute.
‘As though I could…’ Another proof of Henry’s complete lack of understanding.
Disappointed, but now skilled in concealing any emotion, Henry said, ‘It’ll serve as firewood!’ Inside him something cried—Three shillings for what could be gathered, for nothing, at the wood’s edge.