by Adam Roberts
It was a dangerous time, they all knew. It would be so easy for Stan to report back to Father John that they were not co-operating, or that they were enemies, or spies. It would be a simple matter for Stan to have Ted and Henry expelled from the farm, or to have them killed, if the whim took him that way. Henry thought, in her heart, that the main reason he didn’t was that he was too lazy to want to manage things on his own. But Angie was fearful of her place, and did what she could to placate the new man, and Ted talked him through all the strategies they had developed to coax up their crops. Henry understood that she was the unpredictable element, the one person liable to say something untoward and jeopardise the new state of play. For a month she was able to keep a lid on her feelings, but then Stan started casting unmistakeable glances at Ted’s oldest daughter Carol, and Henry felt her anger settle into dangerously sharp and stable shapes in her chest.
She could kill him easily enough. Ted had made a still out of an old metal tank salvaged from a wreck on the M40, with the rust carefully sanded off, its iron body heated in a fire to bend it and to melt new seams. It was not perfect, but it distilled a drinkable barley-gin, and there was a surplus of this for valuable trade. Stan liked to finish his days with a tipple, and often snored the night through dead drunk. It would be easy to polish him off then. Henry thought back to that time her Mammy had been unable to get rid of fist-happy Jim, and had, she assumed, squashed out his life with a pillow one night. But if Stan died, even if it looked like natural causes, Father John would make an exhibition of punishing them, just for the strength-show of it.
She could strike back against these men, and could even get away, but by striking she would bring terror down upon the people she left behind.
It was frustrating. Soon enough Stan began fucking young Carol, and though it was clear that Carol wasn’t happy about it, she put on a brave enough face. What were the alternatives, after all? One night Angie confided to Henry that she’d personally schooled her daughter in strategies that would sexually pleasure Father John’s man without penetration and the resulting risk of pregnancy, and that if none of those held him off she was to use a vinegar pessary she had given her in a small clay bottle. That was the moment Henry realised she couldn’t stay on the farm. Not stay and keep her mouth shut, at any rate. Sooner or later she was going to say something that would have deleterious repercussions for the whole family.
Rather than risk it she took herself off.
There was a tiny smallholding on a low hill, sarcastically known as Stately. Until recently it had been occupied by an elderly couple called the Chans. They’d barely subsisted and had for several years depended on charity top-ups from the rest of the Borough, but eventually Mrs Chan died, and a week later Mr Chan died too. Old Denny, the closest the Borough had to a recognised deputy of Father John, had appropriated the moveables and the few chickens, but nobody much wanted the hut. So Henry moved into it, re-thatched the roof, cleared out the soot-clogged stove, and using her brother’s name as credit purchased two goats and half a dozen chickens. And that was where she lived for the next three years, summer and winter; keeping herself to herself, perfectly well aware that the rest of the community regarded her as a crazy old crone. She lived on goat’s cheese, eggs, nettle-soup and nuts, and she grew small squares of grasswheat that she hand-ground into flour in a stone bowl. Sometimes she visited the various farms and compounds, or went as far afield as Bicester, and she acquired a reputation for medical expertise based on nothing more than the fact that she could read the surviving medical textbooks. But it meant that she had a place in the community; some bare bones status and role. There were some farms she never visited, of course. Old Denny’s and Mam Stringley’s for example.
She dreamed of her daughter Rose often, and wondered where she was now, and if she was still alive. And once she dreamed of her long lost sister Jenny, who had shouldered a pack and walked south and had never been heard from again. “Come south,” said dream-Jenny. “Your destiny is not there, it is down here.”
One thing Henry had never believed in was destiny. And she couldn’t go anywhere. She couldn’t leave.
Or, she couldn’t yet.
She visited Ted often, and for a while it was pleasant to come home, but Ted himself was growing angrier and more bitter, and during one visit it became clear that Stan was augmenting his pleasure with young Carol by, from time to time, fucking Angie as well. Nobody told Henry this: of course not Ted, and certainly not Angie herself, but Henry could see it in the way people related to one another. She could read the day-to-day despair, the sheer ghastly nothing-to-be-done-ness of it all. So she withdrew to her small hill, and sat there day by day, like the fool in the old song people still sometimes sang, and didn’t go back to the farm for a long time.
Stan was gathering a full one-third tax of all the farm’s produce and sending it directly back to Father John by cart. The reason for the extra tax became clear soon enough: Father John was going to war, and a big war too. This was not a defensive fight against possible conquerors. This, the Borough gossip said, was a war of conquest. He was striking north, to secure his borders and expand his territories. The stories were mostly about faraway battles and rumour distorted by distance and what they call the ‘Chiltern whispers’ whereby stories mutated when passed from mouth to mouth. But there were aspects of it that were real enough to Henry’s community. All farms now had to cough up a huge portion of their produce, carted away to feed the soldiers. And it wasn’t just provisions: Father John’s recruiting squads visited each town in turn, went from farm to farm, and when they rode away they took sons and brothers with them.
One recruiting officer said, “You should be happy, you lot. Father John is securing the future. One less mouth for you to feed, and when he comes back he’ll have a whole new set of skills. You’ll thank John, one of these days, when the whole land is peaceful and we can all get on with life.”
‘Securing the future’ was the slogan. Old Bill, known locally as ‘Gerontius’, although nobody could say why, laughed about this one evening in the tavern. “Securing the future? Ah, but why should I put myself out for the future? What has the future ever done for me?” This was accounted a notable bon mot, and went all round the Borough. Inevitably it made its way back to Father John’s men, and they did not view it with amusement. Instead they dragged Gerontius out of the cottage he shared with his daughter and grandchildren and hanged him from the tree by the Common Pond. People stopped making jokes about the war after that.
Jokes, thought Henry. They’re nothing but trouble.
For half a year the war was the only thing anybody talked about. There was no official news, and the only rumour came from unreliable sources—tinkers and tramps passing through, who would say anything for a bowl of soup or a pint of beer. But families were desperate to know how their menfolk were doing, and seized on the slightest hint.
There was still no official news. And then one day Ping Flannegan from Marsh Gibbon farm, a buck eighteen years old and handsome-of-face, came hopalong into a Bicester tavern with one leg missing and a crutch under his armpit. He’d lost his pin in the fighting, he said; and as people clustered around him in the bar and supplied him with drinks, he talked about where he’d been, and what he’d seen. In the event it transpired that he hadn’t seen very much: mostly, he said warmaking is a lot of walking, and sleeping rough, and going hungry, and getting bored; and then it’s five minutes of terror and excitement and concentration all tangled around one another as guns go off and people yell and you run towards, or run away. At any rate, he’d lost a leg when a mechanical slingshot had broken from its place and crushed his knee. And he spoke of other losses too. He’d seen young Tor Stringley get shot in the face, a quarter of his jaw knocked clean away by the bullet, and red flesh and white bone revealed to the universe, and you could even see the honeycomb of the inside of the cheekbone and the way the roots of the teeth fitted in their little cubicles. Tor and he had been brothers in arms on acc
ount of having come from the same neck of the woods, and he—Ping—had been right next to him when he’d been shot. He’d taken three full days to die, and hadn’t stopped screaming that whole time. He’d even screamed when he slept, or, if not screamed, then made this sleep-wail, or moan, or noise at any rate. Finally he’d died and would somebody go tell Mam Stringley please? Because he—Ping—wasn’t up to that task.
The news about young Tor’s death reached Henry of course, soon enough. She felt nothing. She thought about this as she chewed on some wild onion. She might have felt satisfaction at the sense of karmic retribution, or she might have felt sorrow for the young life thrown away, but actually she felt neither. She imagined people in the town bringing her into the story.
“Wasn’t there some story about him, Tor, and that crone who lives up on the Stately? What’s her name? Whatever happened to her?”
“Henrietta?”
“Did he? What a horrible thing to happen to an old woman!”
But of course nobody was talking about her, or connecting her life to young dead Tor’s. Nobody paid her the slightest mind.
The next thing to happen, though, was a surprise: Old Denny himself, riding a donkey, bringing a sack full of goods as gifts straight to Henry’s door.
“Long time since you and I had any kind of chat, Den,” said Henry, coming out of her front door.
“I’ve come to talk,” said Old Denny, “and offer you some good things to eat and keep. I don’t expect to be welcomed with open arms, of course.”
“I’ve turned Jew, and won’t eat pork,” Henry told him. But he had no idea what Jew meant. He couldn’t read and had little curiosity about things outside his immediate day-to-day. So he only gawped in incomprehension at her statement. “Sit down there,” she told him, “and talk.”
“I’ll not small the talk. I’ll come to the point,” said the old man, “and you’ll do one of two things. You’ll say yes, and then we’ll be friends, and I’ll have my people bring you quantities of good things often. Or you’ll say no, and I’ll leave you be, and you and I need never interact ever again. That’s all: a simple yes or no.”
“The older I get,” said Henry, “the less I find simple yes or no ever truly addresses the complexities of things. It’s always a mixture of the two, though, isn’t it?”
“No games,” said Old Denny. He looked drawn, older than his considerable age. His white hair was now thin and striped over his head like zebra stripes against his brown scalp. “I know you love your games. But. This is about my son.”
“Hal,” said Henry.
“I know he jumped you that time, when he was a kid, he and Tor Stringley who’s dead now, in the wars. And I beat him, like I said. And did he ever do anything to you again?”
Henry thought of the years of insolent grins, and swaggering, and the way he would sometimes encounter her when he was with his friends and they would all immediately whisper together as soon as she had passed them. But she said, “No.”
“So he learned. He was fucking stupid, of course he was. But he learned his lesson. Now, I don’t expect you to love him. But I do expect you to understand that I do love him. You had a daughter with that lackwit fellow—dreamy man, don’t remember his name.”
“Me neither,” Henry said, deadpan.
“I know he stole your daughter off, and I’m sorry for that. I daresay it hurt your heart. He was a no-good, that geezer. But here’s the thing: my boy is married now, and a good husband. He has a kid of his own and he’s a good father.”
Henry didn’t say anything to this. She waited for Denny to speak. Finally he did.
“People round here think I have the ear of Father John.”
“I’ve heard as much,” she said.
“Henrietta Taylor, believe me when I say I’ve never so much as seen Father John. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like.”
“I understand he has a moustache,” Henry said. “And an avuncular look.”
“It’s true,” said Old Denny, scowling in puzzlement at this, but pushing on, “that I used to have an in with Maxim. You know Maxim? Who comes round the Borough from time to time, with Velma and Jonno and that other young guy, Pat? He calls himself Father John’s number two, does Maxim. That probably isn’t the truth, but he was high up, high enough up, in John’s command I think. And he and I were friends. I did him some favours, and did what I could to keep the peace. For everybody benefits if we keep the peace, Henrietta, not just Father John.”
“I know Max,” said Henry. “He has a kind of hump, don’t he?”
“He says it was a war wound, won honourable in battle, but it always looked like a hump to me. Still, when he was the overseer, and when I did what little I could to keep the peace for Father John, I was in his good books. When they came for fighting men last time I said to Max, ‘My boy’s soon to wed, don’t take him,’ and I gave him some money. And Max said, ‘Plenty of other boys in the Borough.’ And so he didn’t take him.”
“Lucky for Hal,” said Henry. “Not so lucky for the other boys.”
“I’m not in Max’s good books any more.”
“Why not?”
Old Denny sighed. “People in this Borough think I’m a canny politician, but I’m not. Not that I love Father John, you understand. Only that it’s better to have order, better for everyone, and a strong chief ruling is more stable. So I helped, where I could, and took advantage for my family when I could. But that’s all. I’m a simple man. Max thinks I’m a devious man, and he has grown more and more certain I’m seeking to replace him. I’m not, I’m truly not, but that’s what he has come to believe. So now he won’t listen to me.”
“And you think he’ll press your son into Father John’s army.”
“I believe and fear it.”
“And you believe there’s something I can do to stop that happening?”
“Stan lives with your brother. The whole Borough knows what’s going on there. And, all credit to him, Ted has played it well—he ingratiated himself with Father John’s man, and now Stan relies on him. If anybody has Father John’s ear in this Borough it’s your brother, now.”
“So why not talk to him?”
“He hates me,” Old Denny said.
“You think I don’t?”
“I think you’ve maybe still a pond of resentment in your heart, over what Hal and the Stringley boy did to you. But I think something else about you, Henrietta Taylor. I think you’ve always cared about what’s fair. And I think you know, deep and true, that I tried to do right by you, afterwards. I came out and met you when you and your brother and the dreamy man came to my farm. You could have shot me down, but I came out alone. And I apologised to you and told you I’d thrashed the lad—which I had—and offered payment. Now, it’s true you were too pride-bruised to take the payment, and I make no judgement on that. But you must accept I tried to treat you fair, by my own lights. And I know that fair matters to you.”
“Maybe it does,” Henry conceded.
“Now, I know you could tell me to fuck off, right here and now, and then my Hal would go to war, and probably get killed. That seems like a bankrupting price to pay for him grabbing you one summer in amongst the trees, all those years ago. And maybe you don’t care about Hal, and I wouldn’t blame you—you ain’t seen how he’s changed, how he’s grown, how much better he is. But if that happens, it will break my heart, and I ask you, as one old person to another: help me.”
Henry looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “Pond of resentment is a fancy image. In my heart, you said?”
Old Denny looked uncomfortable. “You know what I mean.”
“I do. So shallow a pond could not endure, over all these years, without a stream to supply it.”
“And there’s been no such stream?” said Old Denny, hope starting in him.
“I would go to talk to my brother,” said Henry. “Only it’s a tiring long way for an old woman to walk, from the Stately, all the way down to his compound.”
“My donkey can carry you,” said Old Denny. “Take my donkey, with my blessing. Have him.”
Henry nodded. “That’s very kind of you, Denny. That’s very kind. But still there’s one more thing.”
And at this, Old Denny’s bargaining expression came over his face, and you could see that it made his heart glad. Now, for the first time in this awkward conversation, he knew where he stood. He was making a deal with Henry, just like he’d made a thousand deals in his life. The fact that Henry was bargaining with him meant that she was going to do what he asked of her, if only the price could be agreed.
“What one other thing, Henrietta Taylor?”
“I’d be afraid to go through these woods and over these fields riding so fine a donkey with nothing to protect myself with.”
“You want a weapon?”
“Your family owns some of the finest crossbows in the Borough,” Henry noted.
This was not mere flattery. Old Denny had several rifles, of course, but he didn’t trust them; and he personally built and tooled a set of crossbows, with double-plated wire crossbow strings and a solid wind-up trigger. He had salvaged a set of brass rods from somewhere down near Didcot one summer, and these harder bolts combined with the stronger string, meant that his bows shot harder and penetrated deeper.
Denny pulled his crossbow from his back. “It’s yours,” he said. “A woman needs protection going through the woods, no question.”
She rather admired the straightforwardness with which he made this not-in-so-many-words acknowledgement. Henry drew out the moment a little longer. Holding the crossbow in one hand, she tried to lift it, and said, “It’s very heavy, for an old woman to haul about.”