by Diana Norman
Susan said: ‘And forgive me, Sir Pip, but we all know who’s doing the poisoning. Wherever me and Mme Angloss go, it’s the talk of the drawing rooms; chatter, chatter, gossip, gossip—makes you nauseous.’
The parlour re-formed itself around Makepeace. She thought: Tavern wench. Therefore a trollop. Lord, that’s a smart bitch—the judge will come to the case with his mind bent, whether he knows it or not.
‘I appreciate your concern, my dears,’ Dapifer said, ‘but if it’s a libel suit you’re after, it would merely compound the frenzy. And now excuse me, I have more important business to attend to. Lord Ffoulkes, Josh and I have an appointment to build a snowman.’
The three of them watched him go like parents remembering their own innocence. ‘Too good for this wicked world,’ Aaron said.
Makepeace thought how old her brother had become. Whether the tarring had done it, or whether it was exposure to the raffish sophistication of the theatre, he had been catapulted into middle-aged maturity. She was comforted that he looked well on it. She was suddenly combative again.
‘Well, I ain’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll give that Jezebel “tavern wench”. She ain’t the only one can use Grub Street. Me and my friend John Beasley, we’ll splatter her over the sidewalk.’ A sudden alarm made her grimace. ‘Was it on sale in Hertford?’
Aaron nodded. ‘We picked it up at the stage inn.’
It was apparent the next night that copies of Picknicks had circulated with speed among the manors and farms of Hertfordshire. A few invitees daringly sent their regrets to Dapifer—a sudden emergency at home. But most were too politically beholden to him not to come and dutifully trampled their moral repulsion under boots of self-interest and curiosity.
Makepeace, standing with her husband in the great hall, could see snow-bespattered cloaks being flung without regard onto the poor footmen in the screen passage as their owners’ eyes hunted for the first glimpse of Sir Philip’s tavern wench.
Some, hoping for a harlot in full garish fig, showed disappointment as they lighted on her. Others, equally expectant, rejected her as improbable and hunted elsewhere. Still others looked relieved—and these she marked down as people bearing goodwill to the House of Dapifer.
Susan had dressed her carefully for the occasion. ‘We don’t want to blind ’em, but on the other hand we want ’em to see we’re quality.’
In the end they went for simplicity, a closed, olive-green velvet gown, its bodice trimmed round the wide neck with gold-embroidered white linen that ran to a point over the stomacher, matching her cap. Her only jewellery was a cameo of herself that Dapifer had given her on a gold-silk neckband. Receiving an incoming tide of ruffled, ribboned satins, hired jewellery, rising hair fronts and plunging décolletages—some of them over unsuitable bosoms—as prescribed by the latest issue of Lady’s Magazine, she was a statement of restraint.
Guests with an eye for cloth and cut were not fooled but Sir Toby Tyler MP, guest of honour, was deceived into thinking her ensemble unsophisticated and, from the kindness of his heart, reassured her.
‘See, my dear’—this was to his wife during their introduction—‘Lady Dapifer has no need to run after the vogue to look pretty, nor to cost her husband a fortune in pursuit of it. Be modest, dear maid, and let those who will be fashionable, eh, Lady Dapifer?’
‘I’m going to kill him,’ muttered Makepeace.
‘You’ll have to stand in line behind Lady Tyler,’ Dapifer muttered back.
She had splurged on candles in an effort to warm the hall, with little effect; outside the direct radius of heat from the great fireplace it was arctic and she conceived an admiration for the sturdiness of her guests, especially those with bared shoulders, in not complaining of frostbite.
On the other hand, at dinner the tables sparkled with reflecting crystal and silver as brightly as the guests’ eyes at the food.
The footmen—Edgar and Sam had also been co-opted into livery and floured wigs—trotted like horses on a training rein in an endless ovoid between kitchen and hall with covered chargers of dishes: turkey, capon, roast beef, mutton, pork, stews with dumplings and wild boar pie. Makepeace had thought a hundred stomachs could not accommodate so much meat. She was wrong. Vegetable dishes had to be served individually, there being no room for them on the board. Wine sank in the glasses like water into sand and needed replenishing within minutes.
Sir Toby on her right hand amazed her with his capacity for Forc’d Cabbage Surprise as well as everything else and she agreed docilely that Americans were a troublesome people but deserved to have the Stamp Tax rescinded as long as they behaved themselves in future. Not having asked her opinion once, at the end of the meal he congratulated her on her sagacity.
When the tables were cleared, the small orchestra hired for the occasion came down from the minstrels’ gallery where it had been playing softly and took up its position on the dais for the dancing.
And here was Sir Toby again, wonderful man, bowing, puffing and indefatigable, asking her to lead the first set with him. It had been anticipated that he would and the orchestra had instructions to begin with a gavotte, which was as far as Makepeace’s dancing lessons had yet taken her.
She managed to prance through the quadruple metres before escaping to devote herself to those sitting out. There were still icicles to be thawed, especially among the elderly.
Assisting the relict of a cloth merchant to a glass of mulled punch, she was told acidly: ‘I suppose you’re used to serving drink, young woman.’ Mrs Higgs, who now ran her dead husband’s company herself, had once met Queen Anne and therefore considered herself entitled to speak her mind.
‘I surely am. Being a tavern-owner, I didn’t expect my staff to do what I couldn’t. As a businesswoman yourself, Mrs Higgs, you’ll understand that.’
‘Oh, you owned the tavern.’
That was better. It wouldn’t have done for the nobility but it warmed the representatives of a society interlinked with trade. Mrs Higgs was later heard to remark that Makepeace Dapifer might not have breeding ‘like t’other one, but she’s more our style, for all she’s foreign. A good, plain girl with a head on her shoulders.’
She was invited to dance again, this time by Dapifer’s agent, Peter Little.
‘Is this a gavotte?’ Makepeace had a tin ear for music.
‘A minuet, I believe.’
‘Ain’t learned that one yet.’ She looked around; the festivities had achieved their own impetus, she wouldn’t be missed for a minute or two. ‘Let’s get acquainted.’
They went up to the minstrels’ gallery and leaned on the fretted balcony to watch the swirl below. Peter Little looked down on it, frowning. Makepeace eased off her slippers. ‘See,’ she said, ‘I need to go round the place, learn about it.’
‘Would you really like to? Really?’ He was pleased; obviously, the previous Lady Dapifer had shown little interest in the estate.
‘Surely.’ She was a woman who liked to understand how things worked; she wanted to grapple the manor closer to her. What did the land grow? What rents did it pay? Were men like Sam the pigman given a wage or was their job a condition of tenancy? There were other Dapifer estates, how did they produce the wealth on which she lived?
‘Do you hunt, Lady Dapifer?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps. . . There’s a meet after Christmas. While everyone else is chasing the fox, perhaps you would accompany me in the trap and we could do the rounds.’
They stayed on a while; the scene in the hall was worth lingering over: a blazing tableau of light and colour. Susan was dancing with Sir Toby, Dapifer, sad-faced, with the vicar’s wife and making her laugh, Aaron with Mrs Higgs, a gallant little Lord Ffoulkes with tall Lady Tyler. Aldermanic stomachs bounced, breasts bobbed, sweat ran, wigs and coiffures uncurled. In a moment Makepeace must lead the way into the dining room where a buffet supper had been prepared by her poor kitchen staff. And these already bestuffed people would actually eat it.
; Heat created by energetic bodies rose up to the gallery and Makepeace found herself oddly moved, as if she had opened an interior door of an unwelcoming house and been confronted by the glow of a good fire. How irritating these people were and how unexpected. Observed from across the Atlantic, England appeared as lofty as the Dover cliffs and as little concerned with what it looked out on, a view confirmed by her reception here. But the men and women below had a rough humanity their ruling class did not; their indifference was more a lack of deliberation, or an innocence. So sure were they of their own fair play, they were surprised that other peoples were not in accord with them. Here, in its greed and good humour, was the England that built empires.
She had encountered the same breed in Boston.
‘Better wrap up well,’ Peter Little said, ‘for our trip, Lady Dapifer. Better wrap up warmly.’
‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I surely will.’
She and Dapifer stood in the doorway for the farewells, invitations to cards, to suppers, to balls, falling on them like the snowflakes which blurred the light spilling out into the speckled darkness.
As the lanterns of the last carriages disappeared among the ghostly trees of the drive, Dapifer said: ‘Well done, Procrustes.’
She grunted, stepped out of her slippers and limped to the kitchen to congratulate the bodies that lay slumped among its debris.
They hailed the Yule Log. They obeyed the Lord of Misrule. They buried the Corn Dolly in earth too frozen to be ploughed into more than a shallow furrow. They went through night-time orchards carrying flares that lit lichened boughs and faces pale with cold. Toast soaked in cider was lifted on a stick to a little boy seated in a fork of a tree, a fiddle struck up and they sang:
Old Apple-tree, Old Apple-tree,
We wassail thee, hoping thou wilt bear,
For the Lord doth know where we shall be
When apples come another year,
So merry let us be . . .
They discharged a volley from their flintlocks to waken the god of the apple-tree from winter slumber and went back to the house and drank lamb’s-wool from the wassail bowl so that, when they cheered ‘Sir Pip and his lady’, their misted breath came to her smelling of ale and spices and roasted apples.
Popish, pagan, polytheist, whatever it was, as she knelt in the freezing little church next to the cross-legged effigy of a crusading Dapifer, Makepeace knew she was as close to the stable in Bethlehem as she ever had been or probably would be. Usually her periods were as regular as the moon; now, for the first time since puberty, she had missed one.
The shire turned out again for the meet, greeting her like an old friend, splendid in hunting pink and black, the horses jostling on the manor’s front apron and so big she had to stand on tiptoe to present the stirrup cup to their riders. Hounds coloured like the weather flowed between the hooves, their tails wagging as if providing their means of propulsion.
Susan had decided to risk going and had a groom with her in case she wanted to retire early. She looked pretty on her sidesaddle, but precarious. ‘Sure about this?’ Makepeace asked.
‘No.’
Lord Ffoulkes bounced on his pony, impatient to start, watched by a wistful Josh. It was the first time the boys had been parted since arriving at Dapifers. Josh was going skating with Aaron, who couldn’t ride either. He troubled Makepeace because she didn’t know what to do about the child. Though she was as ignorant of art as she was of music, it was obvious the boy was gifted beyond his years in drawing and she was reluctant to betray his talent by subsuming it in domestic service. On the other hand, who’d ever heard of a black artist? For the time being, she’d hired Rev Botley, the incumbent of Dapifers’s church, to teach him his letters.
So many villagers had come to pursue the hunt on foot, she called up to Dapifer on his bay: ‘Do they get liquor as well?’
‘The question’s never come up.’ He resumed a more important discussion on scent with the master of hounds.
Feudal, she thought. He’s gone feudal. She sent to the kitchen for more mulled wine and made sure everyone had some.
It was bitterly cold. Sam the pigman knuckled his forehead: ‘Kind of you, missus,’ but on the whole the lower classes, too, were more concerned with scent and coverts than with democracy.
They tantivied away and the air was left to the cawing of rooks. Makepeace went inside and wrapped herself in cloaks and tied a velvet scarf round her ears under her beaver hat.
Peter Little drew up in his trap. He’d lined its floor with straw, providing his dog for her to rest her feet on and had borrowed a puppy to put inside her sheepskin muff as a hand-warmer.
They set off eastwards down the valley. The air was bitingly clear and ahead of them the next in the range of hills which undulated across this part of Hertfordshire was outlined against the blue sky as if it were pipe-clayed. Top-heavy snow on the hedges had frozen in the act of overbalancing and formed a curving frieze that sparkled in the sun.
Makepeace was shown the village’s strip fields, pigsties, cow byres, sheepfolds, most of them emptied by the annual winter slaughter.
Peter Little shook his head over them. ‘It’s inefficient, that’s what it is,’ he said. ‘Given a free hand, I could be using new methods, keeping the beasts alive during the winter with root crops, not slaughtering them every Michaelmas because we can’t feed them. I could double our production of wheat as well.’
‘How?’
He swung his hand in a generous arc. ‘Enclosure. Those woods should be cleared and the common should be fenced for arable land.’
New as Makepeace was to the country, the subject of enclosure had become familiar to her; it was the talk of the day. Some of the neighbouring landowners had already applied to Parliament for the passing of an act that would allow them to fence in their common land. To them, as to Peter Little, it meant efficiency, better production that would, in the end, benefit the country by cheaper corn, fresh meat all the year round and general stability of the food market. And themselves, of course.
But she’d also listened to villagers, the people who pastured their cow or goat on the common, fished its streams, used its firewood, eking out their livelihood through its use. To them enclosure meant dispossession. Already processions of displaced families were leaving homes they had occupied for centuries to seek work in the towns. No more orchard wassail, no goats on the green, no sun to tempt back from the darkness. It was the passing of an age. She said so.
‘And Dapifers will pass as well,’ Little said. ‘I tell you, Lady Dapifer, we either advance or go under. We must compete in this new world. Remain in the Middle Ages, and your children’s children will have nothing to inherit.’
She was alive to that now; the words went through to her belly where a child lay. ‘What does Sir Pip say?’ she asked.
Little blew out his cheeks, eschewing criticism of his master to the master’s lady. ‘Sir Pip has a great sense of tradition,’ he said, carefully. ‘He says the villagers have the same rights to the land that he has, they’ve been on it as long.’
‘He would.’ It was typical, lovable, of her husband that he should hold fast to his people and the ancient, ramshackle economy that kept their lives turning. It was also irritating. Her business instinct recoiled at inefficiency. If she were running the estate . . . Her ancestors had left England so that their children wouldn’t have to live in the Middle Ages. And I’m damned if I’m going to have mine return to it. Sad that people had to be uprooted but there was always a price for progress.
She broached the subject a few days later as she and Dapifer took a walk down the avenue through trees as still and as white as statuary. There had been more snow.
‘Peter Little’s been putting his hobby horse through its paces, has he?’ Dapifer said.
‘He just said the big estates either enclose or go under.’
‘I know.’ He surprised her. ‘Fugit inreparabile tempus. Irretrievable time is flying.’ He looked towards the vill
age hidden behind the park wall, the smoke from its chimneys rising as straight as if it was being pulled by the cold, dry air. ‘Herewith the last of the Georgics,’ he said, sadly.
‘New George on the throne now,’ Makepeace said, ‘and we don’t want it to be the last of the Dapifers.’
‘I know,’ he said again. They turned to follow the stream that fed the lake. ‘But we’d be taking the land my people, those people, have occupied for six hundred years. We’d have to compensate them hugely, then there’s the investment necessary for the new cultivation.’
‘I thought you was rich,’ Makepeace said. ‘It’s why I married you.’
‘I wondered what the reason was. But the wealth arises from income, not capital. I shall need such capital as I’ve got.’ He hesitated and then said: ‘I meant to tell you. I’ve decided to pay off the first Lady Dapifer. She’s agreed to drop the case if I pay her another hundred thousand.’
Makepeace stopped, appalled. ‘There ain’t that much money in the world.’
‘If I’m any judge it will barely cover her gambling debts. So you see, enclosure is out of the question, even if I were inclined to it.’
‘Why?’ She clutched at him. ‘Pip, you doing this for me?’
‘Procrustes, I didn’t bring you from America in order to see you dragged through arse-wipes like Picknicks, let alone the courts, for the amusement of the rabble.’
She let him go. She thought: He wants to spare me, he wants to spare his villagers. I’ll be damned if he spares her too. ‘Would you pay her if it wasn’t for me?’
He didn’t answer.
She said: ‘Don’t do it. Sticks and stones may break our bones but words can never hurt us, not you and me. We’ll fight her, Pip, you agreed. She hurt you enough in the past without mortgaging our future as well.’
From a branch overhanging the stream, a kingfisher dived into the twirling, icy water and came up with a wriggling arc of silver in its beak.