by Norah Lofts
Never mind! Six months of the three-year sentence already served and at the end of it Knight’s Acre and Henry.
The Knight’s Acre about which Joanna dreamed—and was to continue to dream—was being changed, both within and without.
Soon after Christmas one of the Bishop’s officials arrived with a message. After all, his Grace had succeeded in disposing of the rest of Joanna Serriff’s property; but not for cash money, for stock, of which his Lordship assumed that Master Tallboys would wish to take charge.
Henry was first astonished and then angry. ‘What do you mean by stock?’
‘Animals, Master Tallboys. Sheep, pigs, cows, steers. Oh yes, and a young horse.’
Of all the stupid, clumsy arrangements, this was surely the worst! Mid-winter, after a disastrous summer, with both hay and corn harvests well below standard.
‘And what am I supposed to feed them on?’
‘May I continue? A proportion of the property was sold for money. I have it here.’
He was plainly accustomed to dealing with vast sums for he shot, out of a leather bag, more coined money than Henry had ever seen at one time before as though offering a sample of beans. Enough to buy fodder for many animals for a long time. But what animals? Surely to God, if he had to take charge of them, regard them as part of Joanna’s heritage, keep them, rear them, breed them, he should have had some say in their choosing. He could just imagine what he would get; the wrong kind of sheep; cows with only two working teats, steers which somebody had hoped to keep alive through the winter and then found an unprofitable business. And a horse, young, but already ruined by ill-handling.
Oh, if only he had learned to write! Left with nothing but the spoken words which might be garbled, Henry said. ‘You may tell his Grace that I regard this as a most unsatisfactory arrangement. Say that. Word for word. That is an order.’
From time to time, without intention and without knowing it, Henry could pluck a word or a phrase out of the past. Nothing to do with what he appeared to be, a farmer, clad in homespun, illiterate, so that messages must be carried by word of mouth. Walter, long ago, had noted this oddity in Henry who, trained by him to disregard chivalry as an outworn thing, sometimes came up with phrases like ‘Upon my honour’; ‘I pledge my troth’. It was another language, almost.
‘They are all good beasts,’ the Bishop’s messenger said placatingly.
Unplacated Henry said, ‘That remains to be seen.’
Astonishingly they were good. The first to arrive was a flock of sheep, all of the right kind. Henry could not have chosen better himself. Black-faced, long-legged. And with them came what Henry knew he needed, a shepherd, knowledgeable, single-minded; a gnarled-looking old man but spry, accompanied by a shaggy, sly-eyed, slinking dog called, very rightly, Nip. But for the old shepherd’s gruff, incomprehensible order the dog would have nipped Henry.
‘I’d like to stay with them,’ the man said. ‘I don’t hold with flocks you can’t count. I know all these and if agreeable to you, Master, I’ll stop with them. I can build a shack for myself…’ He had already looked about and seen what Intake offered; down by the river, willows in plenty and willow boughs, being supple, made the best foundations for a shack. ‘I’d like my dinner regular, and say… a shilling a week…’
He could have earned more but on uplands, vast wide places from which people had been driven to make room for sheep. He thought that Knight’s Acre looked cosy, enclosed, more what sheep-folds had been before everybody went mad and began to look on sheep as so much wool, so much mutton. He knew it must be so; they were wool and mutton or breeding ewes and rams, that was the way it went. But somehow, for no reason at all, this place seemed to offer a chance of something a little more human. He did not crave the company of his fellows, his sheep and his dog sufficed, but he liked to be within sight of dwellings. Here only the width of the track separated the fold from the church and the adjoining house; Knight’s Acre was in full view and some of the roofs of Intake were visible. He had a feeling of having come home.
Other animals arrived and Henry realised that the Bishop had done him a singular service. Months of searching markets at Baildon or Bywater or visiting farms and manors could not have produced so many first-class beasts. Faintly below the surface imposed by repeated disillusionments, some of the old ambition woke and stirred. He might yet attain a moderate prosperity.
Within doors it looked as though prosperity had already arrived. Mistress Captoft moved into the main house as soon as Joanna left and proceeded to reorganise everything and to spread comfort, even a certain elegance around her.
She could have servants, now! Throughout her association with Benny it had been wise to manage with casual help—like old Ethel who came, did the roughest work and departed. Servants pried and listened, were prone to gossip, inclined to invent what they did not know.
She decided against seeking servants from Intake—not because it would be useless; she was unaware of the enmity that existed between the village and the house; but because she knew from experience that servants within walking, or even running, distance of their homes were for ever wanting to visit; my mother is ill, madam; my sister is having a baby, I must go. And if it wasn’t going it was coming, relatives of every degree dropping in for a chat, a good warm up by the fire and a bite of whatever was going. And there were smugglings out from the larder. All this Mistress Captoft knew from ruling her husband’s comfortable house. She would seek servants in Bywater, a good mule-ride away.
She handed over her mule to a stable-boy in the yard of The Welcome To Mariners, and then went into the inn. The morning, though sunny, was cold and a glass of mulled wine would be welcome. Also inns were centres of information.
In this inn something quite extraordinary had happened, a fortnight ago but not forgotten—never to be forgotten because of the gross ingratitude. And the shock. And the giving a well-conducted house a bad name…
Katharine Dowley; age uncertain, neither young nor old; entered service at The Welcome To Mariners in the most humble capacity; worked herself up, became cook, very good.
Dozens of customers, all expecting the best and each to be served as though he were the one person in the world. Offer a perfectly spitted roast and what about the fresh fish for which Bywater was so famous? Have the fish ready and the brutes had already had fish earlier in the day or yesterday; what about a change, grilled lamb?
And no limit to the hours. Travellers on land in the ordinary way timed their journeys more or less; but a ship depended on the wind, could come in at almost any time.
Subject a woman, conscientious by nature and very slightly hysterical at times, to this kind of regime, year after year, and something was bound to go, to give way.
It had given way very late on an evening when a customer asked for roast duckling and Katharine Dowley, whimpering and howling—‘like a dog locked out or locked in’, the landlady said—had brought the duckling in, not on a dish, on the practically red-hot spit and flung the whole thing in the customer’s face.
Fortunately no great damage had been done; but naturally Katharine Dowley had been summarily dismissed. She had gone back to the Lanes from which she had come.
The Lanes were a feature of Bywater about which little was known. Towards the sea the little port showed a pleasant face. The inn, some solid, respectable houses occupied by solid, respectable citizens. And there were the shops, in streets running off at right angles, shops which offered, in more plenty and at cheaper prices, some goods from abroad. The Lanes, as Mistress Captoft realised with a flashback memory towards Dunwich, were a different thing altogether. Hovels, crowded together, upheld by one another, in which lived the poor; not poor as country people were, with a cabbage patch and onions, often a pig, sometimes a goat. Here no such palliatives to poverty were available. Young men, or tough older men, could go down to the harbour and offer their arms, shoulders, legs to the business of bringing a weighty cargo ashore. And women, ages ranging from the
too young to the too old, offered the services of their bodies in a different way.
It was a sinister district and malodorous, but Mistress Captoft entered it without shrinking and without trepidation. She found Katharine Dowley still, after a fortnight in such a filthy place, looking clean and, though miserable, calm.
‘Suddenly, it was all too much. That’s the long and short of it, Mistress. Never a proper night’s sleep. And now… Twenty years,’ she said, ‘twenty years’ hard work, all wiped out and forgotten. That one time remembered and handed about so’s nobody’ll ever want me again.’
Except in one way, which she didn’t fancy, the thing she had tried to avoid, preferring work at the inn, kitchen slut, cook’s assistant, cook. And no chance to save; always on her heels the clamorous, growing family which, when she was chucked out, had not been welcoming but had indicated, in the most deadly way, how she could and must earn enough to make a contribution—if she wanted to stay here. To Katherine Dowley, Mistress Captoft appeared like a shining angel; a deliverer.
Thus fortuitously provided with a woman who could cook, Mistress Captoft thought wistfully of a serving boy, neat and nimble like the ones her own family and Master Captoft had employed. She visualised him in tawny hose and jerkin; a well-scrubbed boy between eleven and fourteen years old, waiting upon her and Master Tallboys in the hall and making himself generally useful. There were, no doubt, boys of that age in the Lanes who would have been glad of a good bed and two meals a day but she was wise enough to know that in such a district any boy, by the time he was eleven, would have acquired bad habits. She decided to wait a bit, until she chanced upon a boy, poor but of decent family, whom she could train in her own ways.
She walked back to the inn where she intended to dine upon fresh fish, a luxury now unknown at Intake, though Master Tallboys said he could remember the time when an old woman, with a donkey, had occasionally brought fresh fish as well as the salted or dried kind. Apparently she had brought the plague, too; and died of it herself, just in the lane. Nobody had replaced her.
Mistress Captoft would dine upon fish straight from the sea—probably herring with a smear of mustard sauce; then she would go out on to the quay and buy fresh fish, hurry the mule home and give Master Tallboys and the child a delicious supper.
Somebody at the comer of the inn’s forecourt said, ‘Mistress, of your charity…’
She turned about and confronted a beggar who did not look like a beggar. Young; not a day over thirty, poorly clad, but clean and tidy and with no obvious disability. Thin, certainly, her rapid assessing look informed her, all the face bones prominent under the taut skin, sea-blue eyes rather sunken.
She was not an indiscriminate giver-of-alms. She had lived in Dunwich which was infested by beggars and she had learned to harden her heart, except where children were concerned and even that kindly attitude had shifted a little when she learned that beggars often borrowed, hired, bought or actually stole children in order to appeal to the soft-hearted.
She knew that there were genuine cases of men unemployed because sheep-runs were proliferating and that acres where many men had once ploughed and sown and reaped were now in the charge of one man and a dog. There were the partially blind, cripples, people who had fits, but alongside them were those who were merely idle. Face to face with this man, who did look hungry, she said, briskly, ‘Surely an able-bodied man like you could find some better way of making a living.’
One of her beliefs, oddly at variance with her sheltered upbringing and her inherited income, was that, cast out upon the world with nothing, she would not have been reduced to beggary. She would have made brews, baked bread, checked tallies, done miles of stitching, dug and hawked cockles, scrubbed floors… Anything.
The man reacted to her astringent remark. He said, ‘Tell me one, Lady. Tell me where a lame man is wanted—and I’ll be there. Ready and willing.’
‘In what way are you lamed?’
She was prepared for some horrible sight; a self-inflicted sore; some trivial cut or blister kept open by diligent irritation by sand or wood ash. And sometimes the so-called ‘sturdy beggars’ would stop by a shambles where animals were butchered and daub themselves with blood or stick bits of completely inedible offal on to their arms, legs, faces.
None of that trickery here. As the man bared his leg Mistress Captoft immediately saw how lame he was and why. The bone of his left leg, mid-way between knee and ankle, had been broken and not set even by some unskilled but sensible woman like herself. Nobody had known enough, or cared enough, to lash the broken leg to a broomstick! As a result it had knit in its own way, at a slight angle, and his left leg was some two inches shorter than his right. The man had done his poor best to remedy the fault by tacking a wedge of wood to his left shoe.
She saw instantly what was wrong with that. Not flexible and not graduated. In any shoe there should be a difference between heel and toe.
‘What happened?’
‘A cask broke loose. In a storm.’
‘You are a sailor?’
‘I was. Since I was about seven. I know no other trade.’
‘Could you learn?’
Learn what? It was all too plain that he was not going to get anything from her, though she’d looked likely, good for a farthing, so he allowed his anger with life to sound in his voice. ‘Who’d take a man of my age as an apprentice? Who’d lay down the premium for me? Everything’s tied up, either with the damned Guilds or some family.’
For a second his eyes showed some animation, then reverted to their expression of dull despair. ‘Once you’re beached, you might as well be dead,’ he said.
Keeping her dignity and her calm—unusual as it was for a beggar to swear until finally turned away—Mistress Captoft said, ‘Walk ahead of me to the inn door.’
‘Even that I can’t do,’ he said angrily. ‘The landlady warned me off. She didn’t like her customers being accosted.’
‘You are about to be one,’ Mistress Captoft said. She was a woman of impulse and had decided that having seen him walk, whether or not she considered him likely to be useful, she would buy him a good dinner.
He was lame, would always be lame, but a properly made shoe would mitigate his disability.
He ate hungrily but not grossly and refused a second helping.
‘Mustn’t overdo it after a long fast,’ he said.
She then told him of the job she had to offer. A boy’s job really but there was no reason why it should not be done by a man; waiting at table, mending fires, keeping silver bright, that kind of thing. A good home and a shilling a week.
Somewhat to her consternation—for this was, after all, a public place, his face twisted, his jaw began to tremble and his eyes filled with tears, two of which escaped and ran slowly down his hollow cheeks.
‘There, there!’ she said kindly. ‘Don’t upset yourself, David. If you perform your duties—none of them heavy—to my satisfaction, I shall have done myself a service, too.’
Knuckling the tears away, he said in a broken voice, ‘I’ll serve you to the death, Madam.’
She began to issue instructions. He was to find a cobbler and have his shoe built up with leather. Two and a half inches on the heel, one and a half on the sole.
It would no more have occurred to her to provide transport for a maid-servant within walking distance than it would have done to anyone else. But it was a long walk for a lame man. So, as soon as his shoe was improved, David was to go round to Tanner’s Lane, to the cottage next the tan yard, and tell Katharine Dowley not to start walking first thing tomorrow morning but to come to the inn yard and join him. He was to hire a carter to bring them to Intake. She explained where that was; on the road to Baildon. There was a turn-off to the left, avoid it, it led to Moyidan only. Eventually there was a turn-off to the right; avoid that, too. It was the Baildon road; keep straight on, along a narrow lane with trees on each side, and there was Intake. The house itself could not be missed.
She h
anded over money for the cobbler but not for the carter. That she would pay, she said, at the end of the journey. It was the general rule, for carters were notoriously tricky; paid in advance they got drunk and either did not turn up at all or were days late, with some excuse that the horse had fallen down or a wheel had come off the waggon.
Riding home, with enough fresh fish for two days in a rush basket, Mistress Captoft thought with some complacency about her hirings. Neither quite ideal; a woman of uncertain temper, a man with a lame leg. But both so grateful.
‘I never take that road,’ said the first carter whom David approached.
David misinterpreted this as an admission of ignorance of the way.
‘I can direct you,’ he said and, oblivious to the change which had come over the carter’s hard, weathered face at the mention of Intake, he repeated what Mistress Captoft had told him. And surely it was a journey any carter would gladly undertake; such a light load. One woman with a small bundle, a man with nothing at all. No strain on the horse, no weight on the waggon.
‘I never travel that road.’
‘Why not?’
‘Thass my business. Find somebody else.’ The carter had never told anybody what had happened to him on a midsummer day, ten, eleven years ago. He’d never forgotten it either; it had profoundly affected his life.
Taking his ease, lolling on the sun-bathed bank of a little stream with a dock-leaf full of wild strawberries as an end to his dinner, he’d been visited by one of the Little People, wreathed with flowers and so loving that no mortal woman had ever since been of any use to him. To this day the sight of the big white daisies which she had worn, a crown on her head, a garland about her neck, or the smell of strawberries could take him straight back to that enchanted afternoon, the delight, then the fright, he had trodden on forbidden ground; and then the way she had run after him, crying: Take me with you.