by Norah Lofts
She padded her way, silently, down the stairs, into the kitchen. A walk she made twice a day in the ordinary way, tripping lightly, but tonight, in the silence and the loneliness, a dragging effort which, to her momentarily disturbed mind, held the creeping threat of old age. When I am old, crippled, dead, what will become of them all? What will become of The Sailors’ Rest? And my property? I must make a will—but to whom shall I leave it all? David? But he is only younger by a few years. That would be no solution… She carried this wretched problem into the larder and immediately shrugged it aside for there, on the shelf, was a ham.
She had no knife but she needed none. At the narrow end of the well-cooked ham the meat had come away from the bone and just lay there, ready to be plucked away, not in slices, in hunks. Mistress Captoft pulled, crammed the meat into her mouth, ate as though she had starved for a month and immediately felt better. Strong, restored, good for another twenty years! It was a recognised fact that any woman who got over this particular hurdle lived on and on. And why should she worry about the future? God had brought her here; He would take care of everything.
Carrying the candle in one hand, a piece of ham in the other, she retraced her steps and was at the foot of the stairs when the door knocker banged. Without hesitation she set the candle on a little shelf and slid back the heavy bar, greased by David to make it run smoothly.
Destiny blundered over the threshold.
Dan’s much anticipated evening had been a disaster. He’d begun moderately and sensibly, with a couple of mugs of good ale at a house in one of the lanes, a recognised drinking place which sold liquor only. There a mere hint of his other need brought simple instructions and he found himself in the house by the tan yard; the house belonging to Katherine Dowley’s cousin. Here he was supplied with a drink for which he had not asked and was not required to pay. ‘It’s on the house, mate,’ John Dowley said. ‘lt’ll set you up like nothing you’ve ever had before.’ He enlarged, in a gross fashion, upon the manner of setting up.
For John Dowley it had been a hard winter. His eldest daughter—the mainstay of the establishment—had got herself a husband; his second had run away. His third was quite old enough in the eyes of everybody but her mother. That down-trodden woman had suddenly rebelled in a shocking way. ‘Over my dead body, till she’s twelve,’ she said, and was prepared to back her defiant words with force, armed by anything that was to hand. Then that fool Katherine had arrived. She brought a little money with her but then the snow began, traffic with the inland ceased, shipping, except for a few battered ships seeking shelter, was at a stand-still; and food prices doubled. When the land roads and sea roads were open again, he had only Katherine to work with and in the end he had talked her round; for, with nobody to say a good word for her, she had failed to find a job. She had finally seen the necessity but she was doing the business no good. One dissatisfied customer had expressed his complaint in plain language. ‘Any time I want to bed with a sack of chaff, I can do it in my own barn. Free.’
Resourceful, John Dowley had found a way to get round this situation.
Dan Rush was sipping it now. It looked like water, had no particular taste or smell, just a faint oiliness on the tongue. Dan had moved about quite a bit; he knew ale, weak, medium, strong; he had from time to time drunk wine, red and white and yellowish and on even rarer occasions some stuff called brandy wine.
He sipped this unknown stuff, waiting for it to take effect—not that he needed it. John Dowley knew the effect. It made men unaware of whether the bulk in the bed behaved like a woman or a sack of chaff.
Dan was aware that this was not what he had promised himself. And after that there was a gap, even in what he remembered. He came to full consciousness lying in the gutter. Being sick. After that he felt better, though angry because the body bought and paid for had been such a bad bargain, so unresponsive. It was night, but a moonlit night, and in the quietude he could hear the sea, the waves coming in, breaking, and then the outward, dragging sound. He set off towards it.
At one corner there was a stone drinking trough, meant for cattle or pack animals. He stopped by it and drank, splashed water on his face. He was sober enough to realise that he had been drunk. Had he been robbed, too? Yes. Not a farthing left. It was common practice. Brothels and thievery went together. Few men complained. Ordinary decent citizens didn’t wish it to be known that they had frequented such places and men just passing through had no time to bring a charge. Sailors least of all.
But just wait till morning, Dan thought, and that man by the tan yard would have something to think about.
The water had the curious effect of making him drunk again and lustful again. But it was dead night now; everything must wait.
And here, opening the door to him was a woman. Lightly clad, smiling, saying. ‘You are very late.’
He fell upon her like a tiger.
Apart from that horrible affair at Intake which Mistress Captoft had pushed to the back of her mind, and had almost forgotten, there was nothing in her life to prepare her for such an assault. She’d had loving parents, a kind if ineffectual old husband, a gentle lover. She should have been helpless, managing at most a scream, but as her loose robe fell open and her night-shift tore, the real Mattie Captoft took command. She even remembered which side the big man’s head had lolled. She went limp, deceptively, put up a soft hand in what might have been a caress and then pushed with all her might. If his neck clicked again she did not hear it because he yelled as pain shafted through him. His hands lost their grip and stood there, huge and helpless as he had been when he arrived. She skirted past him and opened the door again and pushed him out and down. No effort at all. A child could have done it.
She closed and bolted the door quietly, hoping to keep all secret, hoping that David and all the other men were too sound asleep, would perhaps only half-wake, attribute the cry to a couple of mating cats who did sometimes make such human noises that two or three time Mistress Captoft had been almost sure that the function of The Sailors’ Rest had been mistaken and that an unwanted infant had been left on her doorstep.
In this hope that the noise might be ignored, she picked up her candle and turned towards the stairs and there was David. Very lame without a shoe. Wearing nothing under the snatched up quilt.
She was very conscious of the torn shift and of the marks on her neck and bosom—not kisses, bites. She tried to pull the edges of her robe together and was surprised and dismayed to find that now she was more tremulous than she had been when she first rose from her bed. Her mind was shaking, too, wavering between a desire to laugh and a wish to cry.
David seemed to take the stairs in three hops, put his arm around her, and said. ‘Did he hurt you?’
‘I hurt him!’ she said, and laughed, but too unsteadily to deceive. He guided her into the little parlour and sat her in a chair; then he went back for the candle, carefully knotting the quilt around him. Back in the parlour he poured wine and held it for her to sip. She would have been incapable of holding it herself. He did not ask what had happened, he seemed to know without being told. He said, ‘Why did you open the door? So late.’
‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know he was still out. People do come at night. Sometimes.’
‘And I’ve told you and told you; not to go to the door alone after dark. Why didn’t you call me?’
‘I was there. I’d been to get something to eat. There was the knock. I answered it. I didn’t think, David. I didn’t know how late it was. I was still confused. You know how I am when my headache lifts.’
‘You should have called me for that, too. Something like this was bound to happen, sooner or later. You so pretty and kind and a rogue in every dozen. And what a rogue’ll see—in us—is a woman with no man to protect her and a man with no authority.’
Some rancour, older than that inspired by yesterday’s little affair, sounded bitterly in his voice. It was just the damned money, he thought, just the damned money which she had and he
had not. All the wrong way round. Not, he realised sensibly, that money was responsible, except indirectly, for this state of affairs. He was to blame. He’d suggested this refuge for sailors; partly because he felt strongly about the seamen’s plight but, in even greater part, because he didn’t want her to go burying herself in a convent. The last place suitable for her. But he had not visualised her here, the one woman amongst so many men. The dangerous situation he had done his best to make harmless by his own behaviour, by his insistence upon the behaviour of others, by making everybody think that Madam was practically as holy as the Virgin Mary. And he had been very vigilant. But the landlady of The Welcome To Mariners had a carrying voice and though, thank God, Madam had misunderstood, David had understood only too well.
He’d given her an opening; it was for her—because she had the damned money—to make the next move.
Mistress Captoft, able now to manage her wine cup with one hand while clutching the edges of her robe together with the other, took one of her impulsive decisions. Why not? He is completely devoted to me; honest, industrious, clean. And apart from that lame leg—not a deformity, the result of an accident—a fine figure of a man.
She did not think, and if the thought had ever occurred to her she would have repudiated it with scorn, that the near rape had fired old hungers which she had thought never to feel again.
She said, ‘That could be easily remedied, David, If you would ask me to marry you.’
That decision at least she was never to regret. Happy ever after. For once it was true. David absolutely the head of this house, a stern but genial autocrat; and Mistress Fuller no longer craving for vicarious motherhood. Just in time; on such a narrow edge of time that she found it, for a while, difficult to decide whether it was pregnancy or the end of all that, presently knew and presently bore a good strong boy. They named him Benedict for, as Mistress Fuller explained, two Davids in one family would be a bit confusing. ‘And the name will commemorate a relative of mine of whom I was once very fond.’
At Intake, life drifted on, busy and for a time uneventfully. Peter Wingfield’s visit had left no trace; the word betrothal was never mentioned. Occasionally Joanna thought that perhaps Henry was waiting for her birthday in June. She would be fourteen then. Now and then she had the darker thought—that it would never be mentioned. Henry looked at her often, sometimes broodingly, often fondly, but never in that particular way. However, as day followed happy day, she became resigned and told herself that it did not matter; that she would be content if things could just continue as they were; to be with him, here at Knight’s Acre, would be enough. She rejoiced in being free again; in every change which the lengthening days brought to the fields and to the woods. She resisted all his suggestions for hiring what he called kitchen help. ‘Why? Don’t I manage to your liking?’
‘You manage splendidly. But I don’t like to see you doing such rough work.’
‘When I complain it will be time enough to change. After all, your mother managed single-handed for years.’
‘And I didn’t like that either. It aged her. And how do you know about my mother and the hard times? You were not even born.’
‘Tom Robinson told me. All about the plague, how the one good old servant died and your mother had the nursing to do, as well as the work.’
Henry looked at her curiously, wondering whether Tom, resident here in the house when Sir Godfrey came back after that long absence, bringing Tana with him, had ever noticed anything which he himself—younger than Tom—had missed, blind as he was by such conflicting emotions, infatuated at first sight with the beautiful lady from Spain and disgruntlement at losing his place as head and mainstay of the family.
Not that he needed proof, in words or reminiscences, of the thing which the young squire from Stordford had seen and spoken of in all innocence. It was there and he could see it now as he looked at Joanna and Godfrey—and at himself, in Sybilla’s small looking glass. Allowing in differences in sex and in age… the family likeness was strong.
And it had been just as strongly marked, Henry now realised, belatedly, between Joanna and Robert. Now and then people had said that they might be twins—the girl bigger and more lusty, as girls often were. They were born on the same day but to different mothers; Joanna a full term baby, Robert premature, hardly expected to live; Tana had suckled them both and for some people that had explained the exceptionally close bond between them. Wet nurses were supposed to leave a mark on their nurslings. That was why they were carefully chosen.
What Peter Wingfield had, in innocence and ignorance said explained everything—even that scene in the wood, Joanna flinging herself into his arms and declaring a love which, in her innocence and ignorance, she had misinterpreted. It explained, too, the shame he had felt because for a moment his body had responded. He had thought it was shameful because she was so young. Now he knew differently.
Apart from this burden of knowledge and how it would affect the future, Henry enjoyed that spring, too. Joanna’s housekeeping was on the happy-go-lucky side; there was always something to eat but no trouble made of it. Even the inevitable mending she tackled with goodwill.
‘Somebody once complained that my stitches were like hedge stakes,’ she said, snipping off the thread after making a patch. ‘And so they are. But they hold.’
The casual, happy, drifting time was disturbed by something that neither Joanna nor Henry had foreseen. It was the first Wednesday in June and, with Godfrey, they had gone to market; the last market day before the sheep-shearing and the haymaking ended such outings.
On the way home—at the end of a financially satisfactory day—Joanna had referred to that other day when that horrible boy Richard Tallboys of Moyidan had had such a well-deserved thrashing. And at the end of the journey, turning into the track alongside the house, she said, ‘Well. Speak of the Devil!’ For there Moyidan Richard was, being held at bay by the dog which had found that with this intruder there was no need to venture on to the hated strip of ground. A snarl and a show of teeth were effective.
Leaning across Godfrey, Joanna grabbed Henry’s arm. ‘Don’t keep him, Henry. He’ll spoil everything. Send him back where he came from. Remember how he behaved last time.’
‘We must just hear what he has to say for himself,’ Henry said. ‘He may have nowhere else to go.’ He did not feel particularly welcoming. Even at a time when he felt sorry for the boy he had been unable to like him much; there was something surly, uncouth about him. Inclined to whine, too. And, of course, he had stolen in Baildon and told lies about his treatment at Henry’s hands. And there was truth in Joanna’s words about spoiling everything. Henry thought in a flash about what would be spoiled—the easy, friendly, happy atmosphere that had prevailed here for hard on six months. Joanna loathed the boy and would not hesitate to show it. There would be rancour again. However, Dick was family and there was no choice. And maybe school had improved him.
They were now level with the entry, where Dick stood, leaning against a rather poor horse which showed signs of having been hard ridden. Forcing some heartiness into his voice, Henry said, ‘Hullo, Dick. This is a surprise. Hop down, Godfrey, and tell your dog it’s all right.’
Consciously showing off, Godfrey did so. His own recollections of this cousin were very vague, for Dick’s stay had been in Griselda’s time and she had disapproved of him almost as much as Joanna did—but for different reasons—and had kept her son apart from that pauper, as she had insisted upon calling the heir to Moyidan. Godfrey had heard about him, even this very afternoon, and was somewhat surprised to see that a bad boy could be so big, so almost a man. And rather handsome, too.
Poor old Lady Emma had thought her grandson the most beautiful, wonderful thing on earth. He was the child of first cousins—a thing forbidden except with a dispensation—but she got her way around that, because her son Richard had fallen in love with Sybilla’s dim-witted daughter and wouldn’t eat until he was told that he could marry her. Since the boy h
imself was little better than half-witted, Lady Emma had lived in dread of what such a marriage might produce. She knew nothing of the drover’s encounter with one of the Little People on a warm, wild-strawberry-scented afternoon. That Little Richard, as she called him, was strong and sound and in full possession of his wits had been such a surprise, such a relief that she had doted upon him slavishly.
She would still have thought him handsome if she could have seen him. In height and precocity of maturing, he was typically a Tallboys, and there were black-haired, dark-eyed men in her family. And she would have attributed his surly look to the treatment he had suffered since her death. Possibly she would have been right. The boy himself thought that nothing had gone right with him since his grandmother died.
And nothing was right with him now. Joanna was as unfriendly as ever and when he offered to carry something that she was unloading from the waggon, she spoke to him for the first time, four words. ‘Look to your horse!’
Uncle Henry was more civil but he asked too many questions.
‘Now tell us, why were you sent home?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, Uncle Henry, I don’t know.’
‘Had you given trouble?’
‘No more than usual. No more than any other boy. Just a prank. We were starved, you see.’
‘You don’t look starved,’ Henry said.
‘It was not the food at school that kept me going. There was an old woman who came in from Windsor with loaves and pies. And she was a cheat; sometimes there was no meat in her pies. She tried that trick last week and one of the boys said that if she had sold meat pies, with no meat, on the open market, she’d have been in the stocks but because she was in the school yard, we had no redress. So we punched a hole in her basket and put her head through it.’