by Norah Lofts
Outside the snow, now determined, fell heavily. Every flake was welcome to Joanna, if to nobody else. It would hinder the pursuit and give her time to convince Henry of two things. That she was indispensable here; and would never, never go back.
‘Milking time,’ Henry said. He stood up, walked into the dairy, came back with a bucket, walking in the ordinary way, no limp, no concealed limp.
But not to be ignored was the sack of flour dropped just inside the door, not taken into the larder and emptied into the bin. That routine act she performed herself, quite easily because although she had that delicate look she was actually as strong as steel.
What about bacon? Had Mistress Captoft, so busy and pernickety only two years ago, actually gone off leaving Knight’s Acre with no bacon; no ham in the smoke-hole?
She had not. Joanna climbed up and fumbling about in the dark cavity, found a half side of bacon and a ham. The ham could stay there for a time, she thought, but she unhooked and hauled out the side of bacon, rubbed it clean and with a knife sharpened on the hearthstone cut rashers so thin that at the touch of a hot pan they would contract and crisp.
When Henry came in he brought a spade with him.
‘If this goes on through the night it’ll mean digging our way out in the morning.’ He noticed that the sack had gone and the bacon brought down. He protested that he had intended to see to both these things, presently; yet he was glad to be spared the effort and was ashamed of himself again. He remembered how, working with him and Jem Watson in the fields, she had always strained herself to the utmost, making up for lack of size and strength by sheer determination. He decided that over his mysterious injury he had been weak-willed. And that called up a very ancient memory indeed: Sir Godfrey coming home here to Knight’s Acre—his first return—wounded in the knee. He’d been glum, full of self-pity, irritable. And he had limped. Limped right up to the time when he was invited to go to a tournament in Spain and then the limp had vanished overnight and his usual sunny, optimistic temper had been restored.
Contrast that behaviour with that of his mother, Sybilla, who had taken a fall which had lamed her for life, never coddled herself, never complained. He really must, he decided, make an effort to follow his mother’s example, rather than that of his father, and to begin now by being more resolutely cheerful.
It was not difficult, for Joanna had set herself out to be entertaining. She had always had, even as a child, an eye and an ear for anything ridiculous and a gift for mimicry; she’d lightened his mood many a time.
Godfrey offered her an opening. He’d exhausted his account of what had taken place here during her absence and now, happily stuffed with fresh fried bacon and more of the excellent bread, asked, ‘What have you been doing, Janna?’
‘Learning tricks. I’ll show you one.’ She stood up, selected a wooden bowl, placed it on her head, walked the length of the kitchen, made a curtsey, turned, came back and sat down again on the bench.
‘That looks easy,’ Godfrey said.
‘You try!’
He poised the bowl on top of his head, took two careful steps and dropped it.
In Lady Grey’s voice, Joanna said, ‘How can you ever acquire graceful deportment? Come here.’ She gave him two purely playful cuffs about the head. ‘Now try again and remember, no supper until you have managed it.’ He recognised the smacks for what they were; and in all his life he had received only two or three smacks from Griselda—quickly compensated for by some small treat. He’d never encountered what he still thought of as roughness until the rough man had jabbed the poker at him. But he had the ordinary child’s appetite for drama—and no Tom Robinson to satisfy it with stories.
‘Did she hit you, Janna?’
‘No. I could do most of those tricks—even when it came to carrying the bowl with water in it and not a drop to be spilled. Poor Maude was clumsy from nervousness. Now and then I pretended, to shield her. Lady Grey couldn’t well hit one and not the other for the same fault. There were other punishments.’
‘What?’
‘Missed meals; poor meals; no riding; no tennis. That sort of thing.’
Henry had taken no part in this conversation but he had been listening. And thinking of all the beautiful, butterfly ladies at Beauclaire. Had they all been similarly trained by a process not unlike the harsh breaking-in of young colts? It was something which he, eager to get Joanna into a different, easier way of life, had certainly not visualised. Speaking after a long silence, he asked, ‘Joanna, what did you do to incur a punishment that was intolerable?’
She was prepared for that question, knowing that sooner or later it must arise. And she was cautious. Lady Grey might not wish to reclaim her but the big black horse had an owner; somebody from Stordford would track her down and, arriving at Knight’s Acre, have a story to tell. Her story must not conflict. And since Henry, in the moment of meeting, had seemed to wish to ignore their betrothal—more sophisticated, now, she knew that unwitnessed it was meaningless, she had ready a story in which Lord Shefton and anything to do with betrothals played no part at all.
‘I offended her ladyship. How? Why? Who knows? I did it constantly. But this time the punishment was extreme.’
Ruthlessly she sacrificed Lady Agnes. No mention of the relatively happy hours of reminiscences exchanged; no mention of the proffered gift of the garnet ring.
‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘being set to wait upon a cross, demanding old woman, completely confined to her bed. In one small, malodorous room. I slept on a servant’s truckle bed. What food was carried up to us, she had the best of. With Christmas being celebrated in the hall. No servants to do anything.’
That was another trick she had learned at Stordford—how by leaving something out here and emphasising something there one could tell a story actual enough to be uncontradictable and yet not much like the truth. The ladies did it all the time. It was not difficult for her to make life at Stordford, where she had been genuinely miserable, sound a great deal more horrible than it had been. Henry, listening, thought that this was not all what he had intended. He also decided—as Joanna hoped he would—not to send her back there.
‘Did you learn nothing of use?’
‘Oh yes. To read and write and keep accounts without the aid of tally sticks. I failed with the lute. Her ladyship said I was all thumbs. As to embroidery, she was not prepared to waste good silk on me. I patched linen and darned. Hours and hours.’ She sounded very plaintive and withheld the information that the length of time spent was due to her dilatoriness and that usually Maude, so devoted, furtively finished the task set.
She did not mention Lord Shefton; that was too close to the betrothal which Henry, from a distance, had acknowledged and thus saved her and yet, at the moment of their meeting, seemed to put away. She needed time.
Henry did not mention Lord Shefton either. It was just possible, he thought, that Joanna had been less than fully informed; Lady Grey sounded quite capable of making such an arrangement, merely asking the girl, belatedly, whether she was betrothed. Getting a displeasing answer and venting her spite.
It was a subject better avoided.
And it was avoided while the snow fell, for about twelve days. Such a snowfall as even Joseph the shepherd or Old Hodgson could not remember. It was the most hampering kind of all, dry and fluffy, no midday sun came to melt it a little, no midnight frost hardened it so that it could be walked upon. In the low house at Intake it was up to the eaves and at Knight’s Acre level with the high set windows.
Morning after morning Henry, aided by Godfrey who used one of the small spades which Walter had made twenty years earlier, dug a path to the well, the byre, the pigsty and the stable. Father Matthew and his ugly boy kept a path clear between the house door and the church and, at the rear, to their pigsty. In the village men dug paths to their beasts, to their neighbours and to the river. It was possible to scoop up snow and melt it but the water thus produced had a curious flat taste and was considered to be unhe
althy.
It was a time out of time and at Knight’s Acre there was no hardship. They had food enough; apart from tending the animals there was no work to do. Joanna spoke of games played at Stordford and Henry said, ‘My mother had such toys. They may still be in her chest.’
And Henry vaguely remembered similar games, played at Beauclaire, never at Knight’s Acre; everybody too busy. Pretty things; painted cards, cubes of ivory with black spots; a chequered board upon which small carved figures moved this way and that. His mother might have kept them at the bottom of her clothes chest.
Father Matthew and Tim had little in reserve. At best their housekeeping had been haphazard. Before disaster fell upon Intake, and before the priest had been forced to regard all the grown people there as enemies, the village had supplied his small needs. Apart from what he’d been offered in friendly fashion, he had always paid for what he had, a little coarse flour, a bit of belly pork.
Now, cut off, he had the remainder of the sack of flour, given by Master Tallboys, and the bones of the old sheep. Tim, whom the whole world had despised and rejected, did wonders with those bones, cracking them to get to the marrow, boiling and boiling them into a kind of glue, onion flavoured while the onions lasted.
Down at Bywater, Mistress Captoft’s ideal arrangement for opening The Sailors’ Rest on Twelfth Night had miscarried: not because her workmen were dilatory or she and David lacking in foresight. The weather was to blame; the east wind bringing battered ships in and preventing any seaworthy vessel from leaving. And word of her enterprise had spread about. As soon as her furniture was seen to arrive and smoke issue from the chimney, she was besieged.
Inevitably there were applicants who had never been to sea in their lives. Mistress Captoft, cautious of beggars, knowing many to be fraudulent, yet saw them as pitiable with that keen wind fluttering their rags.
She was grateful to David when he said, ‘Madam, best leave this to me. Once open it to all comers and half the beggars in England’ll be on the doorstep. People like that’—in a word he dismissed all who were not seamen—‘can go anywhere. The religious houses give them alms. I was thinking of sea-faring men who have got to be here, waiting for a ship or chucked out, sick or injured. Best leave this to me. I can tell a sailor a mile off.’
Very willingly she left the business of selection to David.
She had enough to do.
For one thing she was obliged to make a penny do the work of two; a new experience for her. Paying the five years’ rent in advance, buying the absolute necessities for the house and paying for the repairs had practically exhausted her savings. It was in no way an alarming situation, for her rents were due at Christmas and her reliable agent in Dunwich would send the money to her promptly. There would also be, as David had said, men straight from the sea and able and willing to pay a little. No such had yet appeared; her household so far consisted of men much in the state in which she had found David, or men off battered ships driven into Bywater by the east wind. They would not be paid until they were back in the port from which they had embarked and although some ships’ masters did their best for their men, some vessels were unsafe and many stores were ruined.
Mistress Captoft found herself shopping for food at the worst time of the year and for the most expensive commodity of all—fresh food.
David did not know what caused scurvy, the sailors’ scourge, though it was known on land, too, in winter, especially among the poor; he did know what cured it. Any fresh food, anything that had not been salted. In his time he’d seen chance-come-stuff, fresh fish, fresh meat, a basket of cabbages, a few onions—and down in Spain, oranges or lemons—work miracles on men apparently dying, their sight failing, their teeth dropping out of spongy gums, their legs too weak to support them.
To the rear of the old house there was what had once been a garden. The various transient tenants had not tended it and weeds had overrun whatever had once been planted there. Nettles and a small plant which, broken, had an onion smell, but no fat, swollen root. Next year this garden would be cultivated, there would be rows of cabbages, onions, carrots. Plots of herbs. Next year the apple crop would not fall into the grass and nettles; whole, unblemished fruit would be gathered tenderly and stored; bruised or wasp-bitten ones sliced into rings—all the injured part cut away and strung on strings, dried in a cooling oven and then hung up.
But this was this year and Mistress Captoft must do the best she could for what was, in reality, a large family which grew as the weather worsened and the east wind flung battered ships into Bywater and then the north wind held up any ship not southward bound.
Leaving, as David had suggested, the sorting of seamen from others, she had said, ‘Try, David, to find at least two men who can cook. Men who will stay.’
He had found two, both like himself, beached through an infirmity more obvious than real. One had an empty eye socket—unsightly, but did that matter in a cook? The other had only half a hand but like many maimed men, given a chance, he could do as much with one hand and a half as any other man could do with two. Both evinced the gratitude upon which Mistress Captoft had counted, both were prepared to make the most out of little.
In fact, the men in general were splendid; well worth helping, Mistress Captoft decided, as she literally tightened her girdle, losing flesh as she shared not the privation, exactly, but the limited food.
The snow did not pile up in Bywater as it did further inland. It fell, lay for a while and then, with each coming in of the tide, cold as the water was, seemed to melt away. What was happening only a mile or two from the coast was made clear by a brisk, active young man who had a home to go to. He stayed overnight, paid his fee, expressed his thanks and set out for Stratton Strawless where his home was. At dusk he was back talking of snow ankle deep, knee deep, thigh deep, and worse with every step. Soft fluffy stuff, ready to gulp down even the most determined man.
Then Mistress Captoft understood why her rents had not arrived from Dunwich.
Even in this terrible weather now and then a bold, or desperate, fisherman would venture out in search of herring. The hauls were small, so near to the shore, but brought in, silvery blue and often still half alive, were the subject of sharp competitive demand. When the price rose to the incredible height of a penny for six, Mistress Captoft decided that she could no longer afford herrings. David then remembered a time when a whole crew of scurvy-stricken men had been saved by some edible sea-weed. He could not remember its name but he would know it again, he said. So he and some able-bodied men searched the beach but failed to find the kind they were looking for. David realised later this was not the same kind of coast as the rocky shore where the life-saving weed abounded. This flat sandy shore did, however, at low tide, yield food of another kind and even in blizzards men would go out to dig cockles. Others walked miles in search of nettles for, though the garden had seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, with so many men, some in desperate need of green stuff and all craving it, even nettles were scarce.
The men, as Mistress Captoft never tired of saying, were wonderful during this time when storm-battered ships kept putting into harbour and none went out. They would rather eat half, they said, than that some poor fellow should be turned away; as for lying two or even three to a narrow bed, ‘Don’t you fret, Madam. We lay closer than this aboard.’ Mistress Captoft shared in their resolute good humour, was in a way enjoying the shifts and contrivances. She had abandoned her little parlour which now had three makeshift beds wedged in amongst the ordinary furniture. And a man sleeping on the settle. Just occasionally, however, she would wake in the night and think uneasily about the debts she was incurring—no household could survive without flour. She would wonder, too, how long this extraordinary weather could continue; and how long her credit would last. She was not yet well-known here—or known only as what Bywater people called half-cracked, a woman who had bitten off a lot more than she could chew. She had heard of a man who had killed a pig and when she went immediate
ly and offered to buy half of it, to be paid for later, her best ring as a pledge of good faith, he’d looked at her very oddly indeed. More, perhaps, than other people, those who lived in a seaport were suspicious; for there was a pattern of thought that the sea offered a quick escape to cheats and debtors. All outsiders were suspect and anybody you hadn’t known from childhood upwards was an outsider.
Such night thoughts she put resolutely away and thumped her straw-stuffed pillow—her down-filled ones had gone to contribute to the comfort of sick men. God had brought her here, every step guided; He would provide.
The men made things; apparently aboard every ship there were slack times when a man must occupy himself as best he could, with whatever skill he had, on what material was available. Sitting in The Sailors’ Rest by the good fire of driftwood, they still made things. Trinkets. Useful things. Spoons with handles, beautifully carved, combs of bone indistinguishable from those of horn or ivory, crucifixes as realistic as Father Matthew’s, necklaces of shells, little salt boxes with hinges of cloth or leather—salt must not come into contact with metal, instant corrosion was the result of that. Many of these things, lovingly worked over, were presented with a kind of gratitude that approached love, to Madam. She wallowed in the gratitude she had always craved. Now she could wallow in it; they were all grateful; they all called her Madam; they were her children, they must be fed. But Bywater was now like a town under siege. Everybody within the narrow area that was not snow-covered had either marketed what they had to spare or was hoarding up, for fear that this terrible winter would never end. The market on the quay was deserted.
The cooks at The Sailors’ Rest had stopped making bread and reverted to what they called hard-tack. ‘Take longer to chew, Madam, and stay by you better,’ the one-eyed man said. ‘But of course, I’ll make you a proper loaf.’