The Lonely Furrow

by Norah Lofts

  She’d told him all he needed to know but all the time she had been conscious of the incongruity of it; this handsome, dignified man, with his beautiful voice, turning baker!

  ‘Can’t you get somebody to do for you?’

  ‘Oh, I shall in time. Once Christmas is over.’ He did not again explain about Katharine’s unexpected departure; but he did give his rare and singularly sweet smile as he added, ‘Until I find somebody, the boy and I must eat.’

  Godfrey and the miller came in; both aglow. It had pleased the man to show, the boy to see, how the mill worked, how the flour was sieved.

  ‘I helped, Father. Didn’t I?’ He turned his sweet, confident smile upon his new friend.

  ‘You did that. Good as a ’prentice.’

  Then the boy’s eye fell upon the bread… Please, can I have a piece?’ Except for those infrequent occasions when Griselda’s rage with life in general had touched him for a moment, and lately father’s criticism of the handling of Guard, Godfrey had never known anything but indulgence, so he made his request with assurance.

  ‘You’ve earned it, by all accounts,’ the woman said, cutting him a great crust of bread unlike any that had come his way before; for who should have the best, most finely sieved flour, if not the miller’s wife?

  He ate it with zest and was then aware that something had happened. What? A moment before, the miller and his wife had both looked at him smiling. Now their faces had changed, though they were both looking at him still. Was it wrong to have asked? Apart from Mistress Captoft’s little offerings he had never eaten a bit of food outside his own home. So how could he know? He must ask Father.

  ‘That boy was hungry,’ the miller’s wife said, with surprise in her voice.

  ‘Never knew a boy that wasn’t,’ said her husband.

  Don’t talk about, don’t think about, boys. Married ten years and nothing to show for it; though they were both healthy and hearty and fitted together as hand to glove.

  She’d done what was to be done. Prayed, of course. Gone to Bury St. Edmund’s and taken a long look at the famous white bull, one glance at which was supposed to bring fertility. Consulted a wise woman, drunk her potions and crawled three times under a low crooked branch; borrowed a petticoat from a woman who had borne eight and reared four. Finally she had made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham—a long journey for people of her kind—and the last lap of it walked barefoot.

  All useless. They’d put the thought away; never spoke of it; pretended not to care. But it was such a pity, with the mill and some savings to leave.

  What Godfrey had sensed was a momentary dropping of this pretence. Watching the boy gnaw hungrily into bread of her making affected the woman exactly as showing how the mill worked had affected the man.

  She said suddenly, ‘I’m going to Canterbury!’

  It was a name known, like Bethlehem where Our Lord was born, or Calvary where He died. Or like London. Far off the mind’s map.

  ‘Thass the wrong time of year,’ the miller said. He’d hoped, been disappointed, hoped again, been disappointed again so often that now he would not lend himself to it any more. ‘Spring is for pilgrimages.’

  ‘All the better,’ the intrepid woman said. ‘The fewer asking favours the more notice Blessed St. Thomas can give.’ She looked out of the window and saw that it had begun to snow and she thought, undeterred—The harder the conditions, the more I show my faith. I’ll walk knee-deep if that is what is asked of me.

  For Joanna the snow had begun earlier, at a point where the wind from the east had finally failed in its battle against the wind from the north. As always the snowfall, bringing its own potential disasters and difficulties, released a slight, spurious warmth; she was soon wetted through to the skin, but not so rigidly cold, and the big black horse gave no trouble now.

  Here was Baildon, the church by whose buttresses she and Henry had stood, enjoying their pies; the market place, all veiled by the snow; the way out of the town, known as the Saltgate; then the road, partially sheltered by the trees of Layer Wood. Turn into the lane, down into the water-splash… The horse showed an inclination to stop there and drink but she forced him on. Not far now and he could have everything, buckets of water, a mangerful of oats.

  Turn on to the track; the church, the priest’s house and then, now plainly seen, now obscured by the whirling snow, was Knight’s Acre. Exactly as she had in her nostalgic hours remembered it.

  The place where I was born!

  And of all the women who had approached, in various circumstances and with wildly different feelings, Joanna, though she had no way of knowing it, was the only one who could feel just that link with the stark, slightly forbidding house. Sybilla, for whom it had been built, had thought it over-large; Tana had thought it small; Griselda, at first approach, had known a faint feeling of homecoming, having very vague, childish memories of such a house. Mistress Captoft had approached it in a business-like manner, a place in which to live, a place to manage and eventually to leave; Katharine Dowley knew it to be a horrid, haunted place. Of all the people in the world—now that Robert was dead—only Joanna and Godfrey could claim Knight’s Acre as their birthplace.

  Tears which Lady Grey’s cutting remarks and other evidences of disfavour had failed to provoke now ran scaldingly down Joanna’s cold face; but they were tears of joy. She was home! In a minute she would see Henry. And nothing, nothing would ever get her away again.

  She had still one obstacle to overcome. Guard was on guard. As his breeder had admitted, he was not yet fully trained, and he had been subjected to the petting which was held to be ruinous, but he knew that the house and yard had been left in his charge and that it was his duty to challenge, if necessary, defend. He stood, alert, in the yard and from time to time went on patrol, doing so in a curious manner. He never went through the usual opening of the yard, between the end of the out-jutting house and a kind of mound. For him it was the worst of the three bad places and he could only face it with Godfrey’s hand on his collar. So when he left the yard he went around the other out-jutting end of the house, through the garden to the front, along the track on the far side of the house until he came, from a different direction, to the bad place again; then he turned and retraced his steps.

  The other bad places were in the hall and on the stairs but he was never alone there, though once or twice he’d been worse than alone. He’d been with a woman, herself so frightened that he could smell the fear on her. She wasn’t here now.

  He stood in the yard, having just finished one of his patrols, when he heard sounds; not the ones he was awaiting. Different. Strange. He moved as near the yard opening as he could go without stepping into the bad place and waited. A horse and a rider, both unknown. Had he not, as his breeder had said, been a bit slow to learn, or had he fully completed his training, the dog would have known that people bent on mischief did not approach in this fashion, open and confident, coming by right, coming home. So from the yard side of the entry he stood and challenged but the intruder came on; Guard braced himself to defend.

  Sir Gervase’s best horse, though considerably reduced in spirit by twenty-six hours on the road without food or water, had enough strength left to resist the urging forward towards an unfriendly dog. He jibbed and tried to turn, repeating almost exactly the action of another horse in the same place, action which had led to a fatal accident. Joanna’s mother had been taken unawares. Her daughter was not. Nor was she in a mood to tolerate a second’s delay for she had seen, between the swirls of snow, that the chimney was emitting no smoke, which meant no fire, which meant no meal. Something badly wrong and she had been right to come.

  Guard, muzzle wrinkled back to show sharp fangs, eyes gleaming green, found himself face to face with himself as Joanna, brought almost broadside on by the horse’s attempt to turn, leaned low, her face a mask of hatred, too, green-eyed, sharp-fanged… Wolfish, as Lady Agnes had remarked.

  She said, ‘Get out of my way,’ and
thought what to do if the brute disobeyed. He wore a spiked collar; one twist and he’d choke! Menace from the intruder and the proximity of the hated place were together too much for the half-trained dog; he backed away. Joanna pulled the horse round and they entered the yard. Anxious as she was to get into the house and find out what was wrong, she was obliged to dismount slowly and clumsily, almost immobilised by stiffness and cold. She entered the kitchen with the stumbling, uncertain gait of a very old woman.

  She spared only a glance—and that a glance of recognition. The kitchen was exactly as she had seen it. She stumbled across the hall and heaved herself upstairs, fearful of finding Henry in bed. His room was empty and his working clothes lay tumbled on the floor. For a moment relief was as sharp as pain; then apprehension struck again. This was not a market day in Baildon. So where had Henry gone in his tidy, market-going, church-going clothes?

  Not—oh, God!—not to his grave. Her mind rebutted the hideous thought. No! I should have known! I should have seen that, too. She had seen him injured in some mysterious way and the next thought that came into her head was that Henry had gone to consult the physician in Baildon. And the next immediate thought was about her own state. Unless she changed immediately from these wet clothes, she would need a physician herself! Wet clothes, as she knew and believed, for it was a belief shared by all classes, could lead to anything, from stiff joints to the lung-rot.

  She found, not what she wanted but what was needed, in the room that had been Katharine’s. Two summer frocks, clean, and the old working one. Hastily she stripped and, snatching a blanket from the bed, towelled herself dry and almost warm. Then she put on all that Katharine had left. Shoes. No good, far too big. But she remembered the rule, instituted long ago by Sybilla and adhered to by Griselda; dirty footwear left by the kitchen door and indoor shoes donned. Moving more briskly now, the friction of the blanket had restored her circulation, she padded, barefoot, into the kitchen and found that the rule still held. A pair of small slippers, Godfrey’s? Yes, of course, fitted her well. Re-clad, re-shod, she thought first of the fire which—as was the way with fires—was less dead than it looked. A core remained and fed, poked into activity, it began to blaze with every flicker showing more of the desolation which had overtaken this once-so-orderly place. There was the big black pot, swung aside on its hook, and in it, under a shroud of congealing fat, a lump of meat and some peas like pebbles. In the larder the carcass of a fowl which only people in sheer desperation would have tried to eat. No bread. No flour. And what could one do without flour to make even a pancake or a hasty pudding?

  One could pull the black pot over the fire and hope that further cooking would soften the hard meat and the peas. And one could begin to restore the kitchen to some kind of order.

  Henry halted by the sheep-fold and left two of the four loaves which the miller’s wife had given him, refusing his offer to pay, some flour from the new sackful and the cheese and frying bacon which Joseph had requested and which he had not bothered to stop and deliver on his way to Nettleton.

  The bacon looked so meagre that he felt he must apologise for it.

  ‘Just to tide you over,’ he said. ‘I’ve got another side in the smoke hole. I’ll bring it up tomorrow.’

  ‘If this lay—and it will—don’t you fret about me, Master. Worst come to the worst, I’ll kill the other old tup.’ He looked at the snow, now falling heavily, and at the sky. ‘This’ll be bad but we’ve lived through worse.’

  Back in the waggon, Henry thought about the sack of flour which the miller had heaved in so easily. The thought of hauling it down, carrying it to the larder and after that climbing up to take the fresh side of bacon from the smoke-hole, sent a pang through him.

  That is sheer fancy, he told himself sternly. You are making altogether too much of a trivial hurt. How do other people with a real disability manage? Think how active David was with his lame leg!

  The curtain of snow was irregular, sometimes indeed the flakes appeared to drift upwards. In one such interval he saw his home plainly, smoke issuing from the chimney. All it conveyed to him was the idea that the fire, left very low, had flared up during his absence. There was nothing to warn him of anything unusual as he drove into the yard. A more experienced dog than Guard might have indicated the presence of a stranger in some fashion but Guard was overwhelmed with delight at the sight of Godfrey and had no other thought.

  Thinking of the sack, and at the same time despising himself for his weakness of will, Henry took the waggon as near the kitchen door as possible, which was not very close for at some time in the past Walter had occupied some of his scanty leisure in laying a kind of platform of flint stone, so that Sybilla could feed her hens and even reach the well without stepping into the mud.

  ‘May I put the horse and waggon away?’ Godfrey asked.

  ‘You may.’

  ‘Then you can have just a little ride, Guard. Up, boy, up!’

  ‘Bring the bread when you come,’ Henry said, and dragged the sack on to his shoulders. The pain knifed him.

  There was now enough snow on the cobbles to muffle his footsteps and Joanna was scrubbing the kitchen table. A number of things, each small, had combined to reassure her. The ease with which the fire was revived was proof that it had been lit that morning. Then she had thought: That poor horse! After all I promised him! There was an empty place in the stable; one horse, the old one she remembered and which seemed to remember her, stood there, half asleep, but there was evidence in the manger, and in the freshly dropped dung, that there had been two there earlier on in the day. The waggon was gone. Put this alongside the fact that there was no flour in the house, and no bread, and it was more than likely that Henry had gone to the miller’s wearing, as he always did when he stepped off his own land, his decent clothes. Godfrey’s absence was not significant; Henry had this fixed idea that the way of life which he had deliberately chosen for himself was not suited to other people and might well have sent his son elsewhere, as he had sent Robert and herself.

  When the door opened they took one another by surprise.

  His surprise greater than hers because she had been prepared for the haggard, pain-stricken look just as she had been prepared for the state of the kitchen. He had had no warning at all. His face was scored by the marks of pain and others, more grim, his determination to ignore it; a stern set mask of endurance which changed as he dropped the sack just inside the door, not reflecting the relief he felt at shedding the load, not to welcome, but to blank dismay. Total, absolute.

  She’d come—or so she had imagined—to help, to rescue him from whatever troublesome situation he was in. She had intended to say: It is all right, Henry. I am here, I’ll see to it all. The words were still-born.

  Henry said, ‘Joanna!’ No gladness; no welcome.

  They had sent her home. By that impulsive, thoughtless acknowledgement of a completely nonsensical betrothal he’d ruined her prospects, he thought, and here she was in a filthy old frock scrubbing a table; the very fate he had tried to save her from.

  Joanna was thinking, too. Better not mention that inner eye about which he had always been so sceptical. Better not mention the betrothal; nobody, not even Henry, could have greeted the woman to whom he considered himself betrothed in quite that way.

  ‘They sent you home?’ he said. Quick, quick, a plausible tale.

  ‘Nobody sent me. I came of my own accord. I incurred Lady Grey’s displeasure and was given a punishment that was intolerable. I will tell you all, later. That is flour? Good! We can have dumplings.’

  Godfrey came bursting in, ‘Father, there’s a strange horse… Janna!’ He flung himself at her, just as Guard had flung himself at him. Between Godfrey and Joanna a curious relationship had existed; for a long time Griselda, his Mumma, had stood between them and as he grew the boy had seen the girl doing all the things he longed to do, working in the yard and the fields, going with Father to market. Then for a short time, with Mumma dead, he had been allow
ed to work—as well as he could—and to play with her. She knew a lot of games. He sensed, with a child’s sure instinct, that she had no great feeling for him and that he had no hold on her. She’d play if she wanted to, otherwise not. He was not important to her, as he had been to Mumma and, soon after, to Mamma-Captoft.

  Nevertheless, he had missed her and was glad to see her; eager to see the connection between her and that horrible horse.

  ‘He tried to bite me when I took our horse in, Janna did you really ride home on him?’

  ‘How else?’

  They talked about Guard, too.

  ‘How did you get past my dog?’ In some indefinable way Godfrey felt that Guard had not quite lived up to his name and had proved Father right about spoiling by petting.

  ‘Oh, he had sense enough to know that I belonged here. How long have you had him?’

  That led smoothly on to the story of the rough men, his own heroic behaviour on that memorable day; how Mamma-Captoft had gone away and taken Katharine with her.

  The child’s eager chatter, his complete ignorance of all undercurrents, eased the awkward situation. There was no need for Henry or Joanna to say much over the poor meal; even supplemented by the dumplings and recooked, the ill-prepared pork and peas were something to satisfy hunger and no more.

  Covertly, now and again, they glanced at one another and quickly glanced away.

  Two years! He’d aged by far more. Even now, with lines of pain and the lines of determined effort easing away a little and the look of absolute dismay gone. Just above his ears the fawn-coloured hair had a few silvery streaks in it and cheek-bones, jawbones and the bridge of his nose were sharper. None of this made him less desirable.

  In her he saw almost no change at all. A mite taller perhaps, maybe two inches. He’d always thought that she was pretty and too fragile-looking for the life she had been obliged to lead, out of doors while Griselda lived and then here in this kitchen—the life he had always thought so unsuitable and done his best to alter. So far as he could see Stordford had left no stamp on her at all.