by Ann Swinfen
To Anne the story of the poor couple from Nazareth, with their fragile infant son endangered by Herod's wrath, brought humanity and warmth to her faith. Mother and father and child. The simplest peasant could understand them as well as the greatest scholar or king. Yet this new fierce religion of the Elect seemed to have cast aside the human heart of Christianity and turned its face instead to the cruel and wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament. They spoke of punishment and hellfire more readily than kindness and love. Love, she had come to realise, was the foundation of all her belief, in life and in morals. And so she celebrated Christmas with her people, her household and tenants, in joy and love. If punishment should follow on its heels, she was ready to confront it, though the attack from the crowd after the trial had terrified her.
The final celebrations of the season were held on Twelfth Night, when they ate the traditional great cake which Hester had baked, with its bean for the king, pea for the queen, clove for the knave and rag for the slut. Grumbling a little still, Hester had accepted that Agnes was now part of the family, though Anne had seen her once or twice make the sign of the horns behind Agnes’s back. The whole household gathered in the great hall that morning, to partake of ale from the best Venetian goblets and to eat the fruit cake from plates of silver: the rich Christmas cake stuffed with hazelnuts and apricots, figs and walnuts and dried cherries, crystallised peel of lemons and oranges, and sweetened and scented with honey and nutmeg and cinnamon and allspice and cloves. The cake was cut into pieces, then each piece was wrapped in a napkin and placed on a tray. When all had chosen their pieces, they broke them open amid much laughter, to see what part they should play for the day. Irish Brendan was king and young Margit queen, at which she blushed and stammered, not knowing which way to look. The clove fell to Ralph, who declared boldly that he would much rather be knave than king, for knaves might do as they pleased.
‘Well said!’ cried Richard, tossing him up in the air. ‘Let us all be knaves!’
‘Have a care,’ said Bess, ‘he has just eaten that monstrous big piece of cake.’
‘But who shall be the slut?’ said Nan. ‘Not I.’
Then Dick picked the bit of cloth out of his cake.
‘I am the slut. Can I be the slut? I thought it must be a maid.’
Richard seized one of the aprons from the back of a chair and tied it around Dick’s waist, and placed a dish clout on his head for a cap.
‘A very fine slut indeed,’ he said, ‘if somewhat rough of countenance. Now, Brendan.’ He advanced on Brendan with a cushion in his hand. ‘As king you are obliged to wear a cushion as a crown for the rest of the day.’
Brendan accepted his crown gravely, seated on Master Swynfen’s great carved chair, where the kissing ring winked above his head, spinning slowly in the draught from the Yule fire. He was still wearing the cushion much later when they went out all together to the orchard as it was growing dark, the adults carrying wisps of straw.
‘What is this strange pagan rite we are to practice now, lady?’ he asked Anne.
‘Nay, it’s no such thing. We’re going to burn the moss off the orchard trees. This is the best time of year to do it, when the trees are dormant, and no harm can come to them. It keeps the moss from taking the goodness from the fruit.’
‘I never heard of such a thing.’
‘We’ve always done it at Swinfen.’
It was the custom for the lord of the manor to set light to the moss on the first tree, an ancient apple tree whose great limbs were bowed by the years but which still bore an ample crop each autumn. Everyone stood silent at the edge of the orchard. At first, Anne could not understand why they waited, and then she realised that they all looked her as the lord, with the right of first fire. She took out her strike-light and lit her wisp of straw, then touched the frost-dry moss with it.
The fire lay amongst the curled moss for a moment, no more than a winking spark, then glowing ribbons shot forth from it, licking up and down the trunk and along the branches, wrapping the whole tree in a cloak of fire.
‘You’ll destroy the tree!’ cried Brendan.
Anne shook her head, running from tree to tree with her straw, and the others followed her. Soon every tree was alight, and Anne paused alone at the far side of the orchard, gasping and elated. The orchard was on fire! The very trees seemed to dance, their flaming limbs outlined against the black dark of the winter sky. This might be no pagan rite, but she felt like a priestess baptised and reborn by fire.
It was as well that Swinfen lay at a distance from both village and town while these dangerous practices were taking place. Since her defence of Agnes Lea, Anne knew herself to be vulnerable, for she had drawn attention by stepping outside the role to which her birth and station assigned her. From the time she had returned to Swinfen, she had defied the proprieties and scandalised many. How innocent now seemed that first act, of riding alone into Lichfield and attempting to buy hay in the market! Yet that had offended many of her neighbours. While some had accepted that the absence of their menfolk during the war forced upon wives and widows many of the tasks that would be regarded as unseemly in time of peace, Anne’s readiness to assume the direction of the estate, and even to propose new schemes, went beyond what was acceptable. For was not Thomas Pott at hand? And men enough of her own blood, though far away in Kent? The Sylvesters still refused to pay the rent for Thickbroome, and Anne knew that she had no recourse but to go to law. She doubted whether she could win her case, for too many of her own rank now looked at her askance. Even Mary had grown cold again, and Thomas seemed uncomfortable in her company.
By the time she stood up in the Lichfield courthouse, she was already marked out. Since that day, she had been treated with reserve and even hostility by her wealthier neighbours, though the poor turned to her more than ever. It was fortunate that the severe winter weather meant that she had little contact with society outside her own domain at Swinfen, except for the weekly visit to the church at Weeford. There she was forced to endure several sermons in which the Puritan minister ranted against scandalous women, sermons unmistakably directed at her, sitting prominently in the Swinfen Hall pew at the front of the church. In her heart she rebelled. It might be justice to call a whore a scandalous woman. She did not think it right that a woman who defended an innocent in a court of law should be so described. However, she dared not show, by word or even expression, that she raged against the minister’s words, even when he raised his finger and pointed at her, there in front of all the congregation. In the new state of the nation, such a man as this had unknown powers, and for the sake of her family she dared not defy or offend him.
After church, when by custom friends and neighbours gathered to exchange courtesies and news, the congregation avoided her, the women whisking aside their skirts when she passed, as if she might contaminate them, the men staring through her with haughty insolence, as though she had vanished for ever from the sight of decent people. She had not ventured again into Lichfield, for fear she might be pelted with worse than stones and horse dung.
Late in January, the weather turned so severe that it was impossible to take the household to Weeford for services on Sundays, for they were snowbound. Anne greeted the snowdrifts with relief, for they spared her the weekly public humiliation. Instead, on Sundays she extended the normal daily prayers that she conducted for her household to an hour and a half of Bible readings, prayers, and psalms. Brendan attended these, as he attended the daily prayers, like any obedient servant, although Anne still suspected that he belonged to the Romish faith. Yet she had no intention of betraying him.
Despite the fact that this winter there was an abundance of food and fuel, after her year of hard work and careful provision, Anne found herself a prey to melancholy as January drew towards February. As soon as the weather improved in the spring, Dick would leave for Oxford. He was eager to go. For him it was a chance to escape the restraints of home and embark on a new and freer life, but Anne recognised it as the first
parting of many from her children. One by one they would leave, the girls to marriage, the boys to the universities and the inns of court, perhaps for the younger ones to a career as a merchant in London, where they might earn their own fortunes. None would be like Bridget, crippled and unmarriageable, and so destined to remain at home for life.
Anne was grateful with all her heart to have Bridget at home, for she could not have nursed the two older Swynfens as Bridget did, while she carried the whole burden of managing the estate as well. Joane Swynfen seemed lost forever in her twilight, childish world, but along with so much else she had forgotten her old dislike of her crippled daughter, and now depended on her totally. There had been no violent attacks now for many weeks. Bridget had discovered that, although her mother’s mind had lost its adult reason, her fingers, strangely, still retained their skill. She found Joane silks and pattern books and set her embroidering again, and from her needle flowed riots of flowers and fruit and meticulously rendered geometric designs, better even than any work she had done when she was in her right mind.
‘It’s as if,’ Anne said to Bridget one day, ‘all her mind has drained into her fingertips. For while she has the mind of a child, this is no child’s work.’
She held up an embroidered bed-hanging stiff with the crowded images of strange entwined beasts and foliage, which reminded her of carvings around an ancient church door.
Old Master Swynfen had gained a little more movement, a little more speech. To listen to him striving to put together words into a coherent utterance drove Anne into an agony of pity and impatience. It would take him whole minutes to form a single sentence. Yet she knew that he was still there, locked inside the prison of his body. He enjoyed listening to Bridget read to him, and sometimes Nan took a turn. She had grown into a thoughtful girl, rising ten now, and the only one of the family apart from Bridget who seemed able to interpret her grandfather’s wishes before he could grunt out those distorted words.
After her sad discovery of Agnes’s ruined cottage, Anne had decided to keep this news from the old woman, who, since the trial, had become frail and helpless, even handing over the care of her beloved goats to Brendan. He referred to them as ‘those accursed devil’s spawn’, but took great trouble with them, and insisted that only he and Agnes knew the correct way to make goat’s cheese. He would bring it to Agnes for her to sample, and they would engage in long discussions about the methods of cheese-making from the milk of goats and ewes, which both swore to be superior to the cheese made from mere cows’ milk.
Apart from this, Agnes sat all day in her chair in a corner of the kitchen, with the elderly Peterkin on her lap, who seemed at last to have abandoned ratting for the quiet, unstirring life of the aged. Anne was apprehensive for Agnes. All her fighting spirit had drained away from her. It was as though what she had told Anne many months ago was true, that she could not breathe away from the moor. Anne had promised herself that she would have Agnes’s cottage rebuilt in the spring, but in her heart she feared that the old woman would finally fade away before spring ever came.
Anne herself had taken to spending a good deal of her time alone in her chamber reading. She had always disliked the dead heart of winter, the long bitter nights and overcast days, when it seemed that sunlight and warmth would never return to the earth. In London there had been many diversions to help her forget this misery—plays, concerts, dinners with friends, and gatherings at the house in St Ann’s Lane with John’s political colleagues. Last winter she had been so occupied, every waking minute, in ensuring her household avoided starvation, that it had left no opening for this melancholic mood to seize hold of her.
Now that her household was safely provided for, she seemed to have lost her bearings. In the mornings she could scare drag herself from her bed, although at night she lay awake for hours, listening to the silence in the room. Jane now shared a room with Mary and Dorothea. Without the soft sound of her breathing in the cradle, the air in Anne’s room was as uninhabited as the grave.
To tell truth, she knew well enough the real source of the melancholy. The days and weeks had passed since Mathew Moreton had passed on the news of John’s release from Denbigh, yet there had been no further word of him. Henry Stone had eventually reached home in late January, travelling by easy stages in a coach, for he was still weak from his injuries. When he arrived in Walsall, he wrote to tell her all that he knew, but in substance it was no more than she had already learned from Moreton. Paradoxically, it seemed almost better when she had known that John was imprisoned, first at Stafford and then at Denbigh. Now he had vanished. Sitting in her chamber and looking out across the frozen lake, at a landscape so lost beneath snow that field blended with forest, Anne thought with dread how much worse the winter must be in the Welsh mountains. Little by little she was abandoning hope that she would ever see John again.
Lying curled up in the hollow oak, like some poor beast which has found a quiet place to nurse its injuries, John gradually became aware of light. He did not wake so much as swim back to the surface of consciousness from a great darkness that had overcome him with fever and hallucinations. He felt light-headed now, slightly dizzy, but for the moment the fever had abated.
Where could the light be coming from? He was aware of it before he opened his eyes, confused at first about where he was, and why something sharp was pressing into his back. Gradually, he opened his eyes and saw, no more than a foot from his face, a rough surface of pale grey wood. Then he remembered the oak tree which had partially spilt apart at the base, the outer bark curling protectively around the edge of the opening like an arboreal lip, the inside of the hollow space walled with the vulnerable naked wood of the tree’s heart. It was a protuberance of this wood that was causing the pain in his back.
His limbs had become locked into a death-like rigour, so that he had to unfold them one by one, like the legs on a collapsible gaming-table. When at last the shooting spasms in his joints allowed him to crawl on all fours outside the tree, he saw that the snow had finally stopped falling. The heavens were still clouded, but the brightness of one area of the sky indicated where the sun stood. The east lay on his right hand.
Would he have remained in the tree, gone to earth like a dying animal, if the snow had not ceased and a faint sun appeared? He did not choose to ask himself. Outside the tree he took deep breaths of the sharp air, then scooped handfuls of the snow into his mouth, where they melted into thin trickles of water. It did not satisfy his thirst, but his mouth felt a little less like a sawyer’s pit. He shook the dead leaves off his cloak and brushed down his breeches. During the time he had sheltered in the tree, his boots and feet had dried, but the leather of his boots had hardened and cracked, and already he could feel the snow soaking the blanket linings. He rummaged in his bundle for a few of the last raisins, and ate them one by one, chewing each as if it were a piece of meat, to fool his aching stomach into believing that he was feeding it. He retrieved his hat from the tree. It was a sorry wreck, like some bit of flotsam in a London gutter, but it would warm his head a little. His simple preparations complete, he hoisted his pack on his back and started off, heading towards the morning sun. The old wound in his leg began to ache as the blood flowed through it again, so that he found himself treading tenderly, like a lamed horse.
After he had been walking for about two hours, not following any track but setting his course purely by the direction of the sun, he began to feel that the ground was sloping downwards in front of him. It might be no more than a gully between two peaks, or some small upland valley, but he allowed a small flame of hope to kindle in his mind that he might have reached the eastern edge of the mountains, where they began to fall away into the border country between Wales and England. Had he felt stronger, he would have tried to climb a tree to see if he could make out the ground ahead, but he knew that in his present state he would never manage it, so he continued, planting one foot doggedly in front of the other with care, for if he turned an ankl
e or fell amongst twisted roots and fallen branches concealed by the snow, he would never be able to escape from the forest.
From time to time he scooped up more snow for water, but he allowed himself nothing more to eat until the sun was directly overhead. The clouds had begun to clear, and the sunlight danced off the frozen crust of the snow, like candlelight off some crisp confectionery of spun sugar, adding to his sense of unreality. For he felt as though he were moving through a dream landscape, beautiful but menacing, which might at any moment turn to nightmare. He was dizzy with hunger and the lingering effects of his fever, so that when he found a small stream which was partially free of ice, he lay down and drank from it out of simple gratitude, not seeing at once that it might have some other significance. After his first drink of true water for days, he ate his very last heel of stale bread, which he dipped in the stream to soften. It was rash, perhaps, to eat it, but he reasoned that it would swell in his stomach with all the water he had drunk, and thus give him an illusion of having eaten well.
It was only as he was slowly chewing the last precious fragment of bread that he realised how the stream might be of use to him. Most streams, he reasoned, unless they disappear underground or into bog, will flow downhill to join a river. And rivers flow down into valleys. As this stream was flowing eastwards, there was a chance that it might be flowing down towards the river that Dafydd had told him ran through Llangollen. He decided to follow it, at least for as long as it seemed to be running eastwards.