The Lonely Furrow

by Norah Lofts

  He did not know that his son was now at Eton, being flogged into shape…

  What he did know was that never again would he travel that road. So he said, Find somebody else. Which David did without difficulty.

  Now Mistress Captoft wallowed in gratitude, a thing she needed as a plant needed water. It was a weakness in a competent, self-assured woman—the desire to serve and to have her service recognised. One of the things which had alienated her from the people of Intake had been their marked ingratitude. She was clear-headed enough to admit that many of her doses had been provided for a double purpose—to protect Benny from going out to administer the last rites to somebody with a belly ache. Try this first. Very often it worked; but what thanks did she get? Yes, the patient was better. The dose was all right. It did the job. One of the most poignant stories in the New Testament—something with which Mistress Captoft was more familiar than most because Benny’s life work had been an attempt to dovetail the four Gospels—was the one about Christ healing ten lepers; one came back to thank Him; and He had said, ‘Where are the nine?’ If the Son of God would ask such a question, be so sensible of man’s lack of gratitude, why not mere Mattie Captoft?

  However, now in the kitchen were two intensely grateful people; both wrecks, both saved. By her. She was reasonably sure that Katharine, wakened in the dead of the night, would rise and, without so much as a secret feeling of resentment, do whatever was asked of her. As for David, his devotion was dog-like.

  About Master Tallboys she was not so sure. She’d come back hot-foot from Bywater with fresh fish for supper and the news that she had found two servants. He’d seemed a bit dubious.

  ‘I fully realise that you could not be expected… I intended to look around, ask around Baildon, next time I went in.’

  ‘Well, now you will have no need to do that.’

  Personally, he thought the engagement of two fully adult people, one of them an experienced cook, was somewhat in excess of their needs but to say so would sound mean.

  ‘What wage did you agree upon?’

  ‘Now, now, Master Tallboys, you must not give that a thought! Both Katharine and David are my servants—not more than I should have had had I set up house on my own. Any small service they do you is paid for by your providing bed and board.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Henry said. He had money, now, but not to squander. He had fodder to buy until sheep-fold and pasture sprang green in mid-April. And when John left, as he fully intended to do at winter’s end, he must be provided for. And when the day came for Joanna’s dowry to be handed over, he was determined that the money invested in Knight’s Acre should be seen to have been as well invested as that entrusted to Sir Barnabas.

  No friendliness had ever existed between Knight’s Acre and Intake but interest in Knight’s Acre was keen in the village where most people were interrelated and anybody’s business was known to everybody. Anything to do with the big house was news; and Jem Watson was the one who carried it.

  Lacking more accurate information, he attributed all the signs of new prosperity to Mistress Captoft.

  ‘Ah, she proper rule the roost there and no mistake. And they don’t eat alongside us now. No! Fire in the big room now and the table set—you’d think the King was coming. Silver all over the place. Him at one end of the table, her at the other, Master John and the little boy between. Still, give the new woman her due, the grub is better nowadays.’

  ‘And what do the new man do?’

  What didn’t he do? With a few good meals behind him, every mouthful a strengthener, the adjusted shoe on his foot and burning desire to serve in his heart, there was practically nothing that David couldn’t do. He had told Mistress Captoft that he knew no trade but the sea, and that was true in a way, but sailors knew almost everything. Many ships carried livestock, to be cherished and coddled until the death blow came; so he could feed bullocks and pigs; he could milk a cow. Given space and the right tools he could make butter and cheese. Any sailor worth his salt knew how to deal with wood and in no time at all David had built a proper bullock yard. With every bit of outside work he did, something of his manhood, so sadly humiliated, sprang to life again; and his gratitude to Mistress Captoft who had made this… rehabilitation possible, deepened.

  ‘Hop about like a flea, he do,’ Jem said, with the lazy man’s disapproval of one less sparing of himself.

  There was time to gossip, the winter days so short, and now around the shared firesides was a new listener, an encouragement to the dragging out of old tales. The new priest, Father Matthew, had done what Father Ambrose, trying hard, and Father Benedict, not trying at all, had failed to do: he had become one with his parishioners. He came of the same stock, knew about animals, especially pigs, he had a hearty manner and an earthy sense of humour. And although he never actually said so, they sensed that he was no fonder of Knight’s Acre than they were themselves; his lack of fondness showed itself in the avidity with which he listened to the hostility-tinged talk. His dislike, if so strong a word could apply to a feeling so shadowy, was based on the fact he hadn’t taken to Henry, cold, aloof, superior and that, thick-hided as he could be in certain areas, he had sensed Mistress Captoft’s scornful disapproval.

  The Intake people’s hostility was older, deeper rooted. It went back to the time when Sir Godfrey, taking only what was indisputably his own, had come and built his house there. On a site which had once been a farm but long left derelict, ever since an outbreak of the sweating sickness, so long ago that no one had even a memory of it. What most did remember was that the untitled ground, and especially the great oak-tree around which the house was built, had provided space and food for pigs and a few goats. Pigs thrived on acorns, goats liked the self-sown saplings.

  The building of Knight’s Acre had put an end to that. The grievance had begun there and presently found other things to feed upon.

  Take the common land. Sir Godfrey had pastured his great horse there—as was his right, common land was common land—but a thing of that size ate a lot and was, in addition, very dangerous. Once when Gurth went to fetch in his donkey, the warhorse had as good as attacked him. Great yellow teeth, up-lifted iron-shod hooves.

  Then Sir Godfrey, and his dangerous horse, had took off to some war somewhere and stayed away for years and years. The whole place had been ruled and run by a man called Walter, a horrible fellow.

  Ah. Hadn’t he one time tried to rape Bessie Wade—then a servant in the house—and hadn’t the Lady Sybilla stood up for him when the Elders went to complain. Lady Sybilla had said nonsense, she had been there all the time; she didn’t believe a word.

  And what happened to Walter?

  To that there was no answer. Nobody knew anything more about Walter, dead, than of Walter alive. He’d just gone off, they said.

  What they did all know and remembered with hatred was that after all those years Sir Godfrey had come home and taken three quarters of their common land to make his sheep-fold.

  No credit was given him for the fact that he had left them a quarter of it.

  Then he’d died, got killed fighting up in the north somewhere and one of his boys—no, not Master Tallboys up at Knight’s Acre, his brother, Sir Richard—had swooped down and upset everything. A priest—Father Matthew was aware of some sidelong glances—yes a priest but a lawyer, too, and he’d found flaws in the parchment which his great-grandfather—or his great-great-grandfather had given them.

  Ah; that had been a proper old confluffle; you had to trace your family back and then either buy or get out. The fact that their status had gone up a notch, that they now owned the land they tilled and were entitled to call themselves yeomen, affected the Intake people very little.

  Now and again, during these most interesting talks, Father Matthew tried to bring up the question of his glebe. Glebe was the ten acres of land which was, by custom, attached to every church.

  His was wilderness, neglected for many years and, since he could see that serving a church s
o poorly endowed, he and the ugly, rather dim-witted boy whom he had brought with him as his servant would be largely dependent on the produce of the glebe, he was anxious to get it ploughed. It was when he mentioned the glebe that the Intake men tended to remember that it was time for bed or that some job awaited them elsewhere. An ox was lame, a plough needed repair.

  Father Matthew did not press the matter; he had a peasant’s patience. One day, when they knew and liked him better, they would volunteer. Meanwhile he managed to buy a pig and on the bit of the glebe which Mistress Captoft had made into a garden, though she had taken away as many of the roots as she could, the ugly boy was growing onions, cabbages, peas, beans. They’d survive. Anything rather than widen the gulf between priest and people which had plainly existed in former times. More people attended Mass and observed their other religious duties than ever before.

  *

  ‘I can’t pretend to favour this,’ Henry said. ‘You’d be better off here with a warm bed and sound food—and doing light work about the place.’

  ‘And going mad?’ John asked. Light jobs about the place and Nick’s songs lost for ever. He knew, with a knowledge not of the head but of the heart, the lungs or the bowels, that restored as he might seem to be, he had no time to waste.

  ‘Mind this,’ Henry said, ‘wherever you are, if that cough comes on again, make for home. Don’t wait till you’re on your last legs.’

  When that time came, John thought, he would simply creep into a corner and die; it was only his determination to get Nick back to England, back to some kind of comfort, that had kept him going all the way from Padua to Knight’s Acre.

  He thought Henry’s parting present—ten nobles—miserly. Henry felt that he was stretching generosity and brotherly responsibility to the extreme limit. When the Bishop’s man had tipped out all that shining money on the table one of his first thoughts had been that now he could clear another field, hiring the labour; now he would do it himself, so every penny he gave John represented an incalculable outlay in toil and sweat.

  He felt the need for more land because he had a belief, inculcated by Walter, that arable ground was more reliable than livestock, so subject to disease. A dead animal was a dead loss whereas even the worst harvest left the fields waiting for next year’s, which might be better.

  At Stordford Lady Agnes had finally and reluctantly taken to her bed. So long as she could hobble, with the assistance of a sturdy servant, down the stairs, she had done so, eager for the life and bustle in the great hall or the spiteful talk in the solar, but now she needed assistance on both sides and the stairs, originally built with the idea of defence, were too narrow. Lady Grey could have made room for her on the ground floor but had no intention of doing so—old, ailing and often irritable, relatives were best at a distance.

  On the other hand, Aunt Agnes must not be allowed to feel neglected; for she was wealthy and had no children of her own. There was always the possibility that she might will her money to the Church. So each morning and each evening Maude and Beatrice were required to make a short routine visit with a curtsey and a greeting and a little conversation. Their great-aunt considered Maude very dull and Beatrice insipid—partly, no doubt, due to their being over rigidly disciplined by their mother. Lady Agnes was one of the many who could never see why her gay, pleasure-loving nephew should have married such a dour, charmless woman. Joanna was under no obligation to make these visits but, at first urged by Maude who liked and admired, almost loved her, she had gone and somehow, just by being there, had lightened the whole atmosphere. She had a way of saying things, of seeing the comic side, nothing much that you could put a finger on or a name to, just different and refreshing. Also, she was lovely to look at and, like many old women who had once been pretty and then with age grown wrinkled and grey, Lady Agnes liked girls to be comely—myself when young! Presently, if Joanna failed to appear on one of these twice-daily occasions. Lady Agnes would ask why; what was she doing; where was she? Be sure to bring her next time.

  She regarded the summer-weight dress which Lady Grey had provided for Joanna with a mixture of disapproval and bewilderment. What exactly was wrong with it? In her day the old lady had been devoted to clothes, had cut and stitched many of her own dresses. The answer she gave herself was: Everything, but in a subtle way. Granted the stuff, though of no quality, had not been skimped, there was plenty of it but in all the wrong places; where it should have taken on a smooth, flowing line it looked—constricted. A dress deliberately designed…

  ‘It looks like a sack,’ Lady Agnes said.

  ‘So I thought, at first sight. It made me feel that at any moment I might be put on the scales and weighed and my quality tested between a miller’s teeth.’

  ‘About the colour nothing can be done; but the shape could be altered to great advantage. Bring me my basket.’ Every lady of quality had such a basket, a pair of scissors, a fat cushion stuffed with sawdust and a little pounded beeswax to save needles and pins from rusting even in the dampest weather; skeins of wool, spun very fine, and silks.

  I am old; I am lame; but I still have my eyesight and the use of my hands. I can make something of this sack!

  And after this another. No girl could manage with only one dress. What was Gertrude thinking of?

  The girl was useless with a needle—she’d have been handier with a hay fork, Lady Agnes concluded, little guessing how near she was to the truth. But when the no-colour dress was re-shaped and made gay with embroidery, she remembered that she had many dresses—never to be worn again. But before she parted with one of them she must know that it was necessary, that the object of such charity was an object of charity.

  ‘Are you so poor?’

  ‘I am not at all poor, Lady Agnes. My mother, a lady of Spain, left me a considerable fortune, part of which Sir Barnabas is handling; and part—in another place.’

  Oh, and the green grass springing on the pasture and the sheep-fold at Knight’s Acre; Layer Wood, a haze of green and a flood of bluebell. In the fields the young corn, stroked by the young wind. The violent homesickness which she thought she had mastered surged up. She had overcome it before and could again, could now. Obediently, but without much enthusiasm she opened the chest where the old woman’s dresses lay, smelling of lavender and rosemary and thyme—and age. Sad.

  ‘Red,’ said Lady Agnes, ‘is for the very young—or married women. Yellow? No. You would look as sallow as Maude. Tawny would suit you well but that is a winter colour. Ah, that is what I had in mind. Hold it against you.’ It was midway between the young green and the bluebells.

  Lady Grey was not particularly pleased that her intention to make Joanna more ordinary-looking should have been frustrated by an old woman’s whim. On the other hand she was not displeased that Joanna, wearing the sea-green silk and looking far from ordinary, should catch Lord Shefton’s eye. He was not what she wanted for either of her daughters, rich though he was. She still cherished the hope that both her girls, plain but well-trained and well-dowered, would make happy marriages. Lord Shefton was far too old. There was something to be said, in some cases, for marrying a rich old man who would die and leave you a widow, wealthy and still young enough to re-marry. But this particular old man had a son by his first marriage which had been to a very young girl; too young perhaps; she’d died in childbed. His second wife, again young but slightly older than the first, had borne a son and a daughter before she met with an accident, strange enough to warrant an inquest. Left, unaccountably, alone in one of his more remote houses, she’d fallen downstairs and cracked her skull; without disarranging her head-dress or her skirt. Death by misadventure… But there were rumours that the second Lady Shefton had been on the point of running away. One story said back to her own family; another said with a lover. Unnamed; possibly Scottish. Gertrude Tetlow, sitting, neglected in corners, Lady Grey, ruling in her own house, had not missed much and though she was prepared to entertain Lord Shefton, one of Barnabas’s business associates, she certa
inly did not wish him to take a fancy to either of her girls whom she loved in her own fashion. Far too much to hand them over to old men with rotten teeth and stinking breath… Really so bad that when, as was his due, he sat on her right at the upper table and with courtesy—his manners could not be faulted—helped her first to the dish proffered by a page down on one knee, she felt slightly nauseated. She told herself, as sternly as she would have told a child or servant—Tainted breath cannot affect food. But the feeling was there, a repulsion, and she was glad that the rheumy old eyes focused on Joanna.

  Time plodded on. Or raced. And presently Joanna had served three-quarters of her sentence.

  *

  ‘A bit near the river, and all shut in,’ Joseph, the old shepherd said. ‘What we need is a bit of drainage.’ A lifetime ago, Walter had said almost the same thing. Intake was not the place for sheep.

  ‘Then we’ll drain.’ And that was hard work, too. But it fitted in with the clearing of the other field; an abundance of twigs and small branches. Dig the trench, and another and another, across the sheep-fold, lay in the bundles of twigs and small branches, end to end so that they carried off surplus water towards the river.

  ‘There’ll be less foot-rot now,’ Joseph said.

  With the house running so smoothly, Mistress Captoft could turn her attention to the garden, to giving some elementary lessons to Godfrey and to the completion of a remarkable piece of embroidery which had occupied two generations of Captoft women. In the early days of her marriage, before she became so busy with Master Captoft’s affairs, she had worked on it herself. Then it had been rolled up and forgotten, though she had taken it with her to Dunwich and then to Intake. Whoever had planned it had been artistic and ambitious—and no prude. It had been designed to hang on a sizeable wall and even had Mistress Captoft, in Dunwich or Intake, made time to work upon it—servantless as she was—it would have been difficult in such small rooms with Benny’s books always on the table. It depicted the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, almost life-size, standing under the Tree of Knowledge—every apple and every leaf in place. There were other trees, too, and every known flower, every known animal.