Jude

by Betty Burton

  The produce-market was held close to the abbey in the open square, which from centuries of practice had been divided into specialist areas. The hutches and baskets of fowls in-lay in one place, those for the pot in another, sellers of iron pans and skillets further along, and so on.

  The Nugent stand was outside the Star Inn, which was just right. It was inside the market-square, yet close to the Motte Road. Jude helped Bella unpack and lay out their stand. Bella knew that what she offered was as good as any and better than most. A few people tried haggling, but those who knew Croud Cantle produce knew what they were getting; pretty good value. Bella was good at her job. She could smile, banter or confide to suit a particular customer, and from the moment they arrived they were kept busy.

  By the time the abbey clock struck eleven ponderous times, the bulk of their stuff had been sold.

  “If you want to go up the Star yard, you’d best go now,” said Bella.

  “Will it be all right if I have a walk round?”

  “You make sure you’m back here be the time it strikes the half-hour then. We don’t want to hang about no longer than we got to. It an’t holiday.”

  Was that enough time to find somebody? Then, hearing the shriek of a pig being stuck, she thought of Gilly Gilson. He worked at slaughtering on market-days. He would be sure to know where she could start asking.

  She found the butchers’ shambles and pushed her way into the chaos. Animals in a frenzy from the smell of blood; men with hazel-switches shouted, whipping at cattle for no better reason than that they held hazel-switches, forcing the herds through small gates; the sound of clubbing; animals shrieking and lowing, and more men shouting. Raising her voice above the noise she asked one or two men for Gilly, but received only shrugs in reply, until a man who was slithering mounds of pig-entrails into a trough shouted, “Wickham”, which Jude took to mean that Gilly was over at Wickham market.

  Back in the street, Jude saw that she had used up ten minutes already. Blackbrook must surely be full of people who could read and write. But then it occurred to her that a Blackbrook person wasn’t any good. It was too far. She thought that if she walked up and down the side-streets something would come to her. She walked, noting places where book-work and letters appeared to be daily business.

  Did she dare to go in one and ask? If she didn’t ask . . . What could she say? “Have you got anybody lives near Cantle who can write?” “I want to learn . . .” It sounded silly. What would people think of a girl ..? Before she thought twice and her courage failed her, she plunged into the lobby of a place where she saw people at desks and knocked on one of the doors.

  She waited, her mouth dry. The door was ranted open by a red-faced man in an old-fashioned wig that was askew. He, seeing that it was just a village child, wiped from his mouth the smile that he had ready for the client he was expecting.

  “Yes?” He breathed alcoholic, market-day breath over her.

  Before the man’s aggressive stare, she capitulated. “Oh,” she said, and went quickly away. The solicitor’s door slammed. A clock chimed out midday. She raced back to the Star corner.

  “Half an hour means half an hour!”

  “I’m sorry Mother, I was just . . .”

  “No ‘just’ anything. We an’t here for pleasure. We shall be finished up in about an hour. I’m going up the Star yard and on round to see Fred Warren about the seed he was supposed to get for me.”

  Jude began loading things into panniers. She was furious with herself for being such a great, stupid lump. What do it matter looking a fool? What do it matter if they get cross with me asking stupid questions? What counts is finding somebody.

  Next time I shall find out what all the other places are.

  One or two people came to make purchases, but the rush of market-day was over. Jude was sitting staring into space when a man came and asked for Bella. He was not all that old, not as old as her mother. He wore a rough woollen coat and breeches and a loose worsted waistcoat. His hair was unpowdered and bobbed to collar-length, like a joiner or some other craftsman. He had a thin, nice face.

  “She won’t be long. Can’t I get what you want?”

  “Are you Judeth?”

  “Yes sir, I am.”

  “Not necessary to ask, you look so much like Mrs Nugent.”

  Jude did not know the man and was not sure how to answer. His speech was lovely, not broad, a bit like Rev. Tripp’s. He was pale and tired-looking.

  “It’s about the seed. Mrs Nugent made an order and . . .”

  “Are you Fred Warren . . . Mister Warren? The seed man?”

  “Yes, that’s who I am.” He had a nice, friendly smile, not at all like Rev. Tripp’s.

  “She has gone to find you.”

  “Ah! I wondered if I might miss her if I left the yard. I tell you what Judeth, I will leave the seed with you and put it on the Croud Cantle account. I know Mrs Nugent does always like to pay coin, but just this once . . .” He took a little book from his pocket and made an entry.

  “Well, Judeth, no doubt we shall meet most market-days now you have taken over from Miss Jaen.” He gave a little bow and turned to go.

  “Mr Warren?”

  He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

  “Where do you live?”

  He closed his eyes and wagged his head and said in a joking tone, “For my sins, at Motte. There also live Mrs Warren and our four children.”

  “Mr Warren, could you teach me to write?”

  “Write?”

  “And to read too.”

  Fred Warren’s eye scanned Jude’s anxious and eager face, his expression slowly taking on something of a hungry and penniless person who, having found a piece of gold, wants to shout their good fortune, whilst at the same time holding back for fear someone claims the find.

  A man of vision. An idealist crushed into the mould of a low-waged grain-merchant’s assistant for two-thirds of his day, and a poverty-stricken family man for the other third. Fred Warren felt elated. A girl from the back of beyond, from Cantle! A girl who had not even been to Blackbrook market more than a couple of times. Who lived the harsh, barefoot life of a farmgirl. She wanted to write!

  He seemed to take so long in answering that Jude felt a flush creep up her throat and into her face.

  “How old are you, Judeth? Do you know how old you are?”

  “A course I know. I shall be twelve come this June.”

  “What does Mrs Nugent say to it?”

  “About me wanting to learn? She says it will pass.”

  And it would. It would indeed pass. Fred Warren knew that it happened, often. That, frequently, seeds of interest are sown in the minds of children who are then sent into fields to throw stones at crows. Everywhere, little children scratch and scrawl wherever they find a lump of chalk and a bare surface, yet what ploughboy, what cottager milk-maid or woman yoked to pails ever did more than perhaps trace something on a steamed or frosted window-pane?

  If Fred Warren did not protect this child’s tender shoot of enthusiasm then the frost of apathy, resignation and fatigue from labour would blast and stunt it. However difficult it might be, Fred Warren was determined to feed and tend that shoot until it could safely be left to grow and blossom into whatever it was that had just germinated.

  Fred Warren’s own tender plant had been an enthusiasm for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, though at the time he had not heard that cry. His was not blasted by frost, but had been wilted by a youthful heat of desire and consequential mouths to feed.

  “If I got your mother to agree, you would still have to do your same work at home.”

  “A course I would.”

  “And most of the time you would have to get on by yourself.”

  “A course, I shouldn’t mind that. Just as long as somebody told me what to do.”

  “I’m not promising. Depends on what your mother says.”

  “Oh yes, Fred Warren, and what depends on me?”

  Fred was one of the few peo
ple Bella trusted in business; consequently she liked him. Not that it showed much in her manner, but it showed there in her eyes, and in the time she was willing to spend standing there gossiping when there’s work to be done.

  “Judeth was asking me about learning.”

  “I dare say she was. I dare say she been asking half Blackbrook. She got a bee in her hair. She always been the same. Won’t never take no for an answer.” Bella began clearing up and indicated to Jude to do the same.

  “I shouldn’t mind giving her a hand.”

  “I’d a thought you got enough on your plate.”

  “It would only be the odd hour or two.”

  “You can’t afford to work for nothing.”

  “It would not be work to me.”

  “Maybe not, but it’d be taking time you ought to be spending planting your vegetable plot or something. You got a lot of mouths to feed.”

  Jude kept quiet. She saw that Bella could be persuaded by Mr Warren, and if she put a word wrong her mother would squash the idea, and it would be no good raising it again . . . For goodness sake, Jude, you an’t on about that again? I told you I didn’t want to hear no more.

  “What about a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon?” Fred suggested.

  “And what about Mrs Warren?”

  “Ah.” He had not thought that far.

  The panniers packed and the donkeys harnessed, Bella was ready to start for home.

  “And you coming to Croud Cantle regular. And on a Sunday.”

  Jude could see it all slipping away.

  “Couldn’t I go over to Motte, Mother?”

  “Inviting yourself are you?”

  “That’d be all right. I’m sure Molly would not mind at all.”

  Bella clicked her tongue at the donkey.

  “You better find out.”

  Fred Warren walked beside them as they left the market-square, not wanting to leave the idea to shrivel.

  “If Molly does not mind, will you agree that Judeth can come? Just to give it a try? Just for a couple of hours. Perhaps you would let her have the donkey so she wouldn’t be away too long?”

  Jude saw that it was possible. Mother could be persuaded.

  “I couldn’t let you do it for nothing. You would have to take something. And your wife’d have to say it’d be all right.”

  Jude found the week till next market-day endless, but she had sense enough not to bring up the subject. By the time they next saw Fred Warren, Bella had worked out in her mind what would be fair payment in produce for his time, and what extra to give so that Molly Warren would have no cause to complain, it being Sunday and all.

  Surprisingly, Jude found that the places Jaen had occupied in the routine of Croud Cantle were quickly filled. Jude became more reliable. Perhaps it was that she felt her responsibilities more, now that she was Miss Nugent, or that she did not want Bella to regret having agreed to the lessons.

  Next market-day, Fred Warren said that Mrs Warren was quite agreeable to Jude coming early on Sunday afternoons, when she took a bit of a rest anyhow, and would no doubt be delighted when she heard of the barter arrangement that Bella suggested.

  It was a good many years before Jude realised how fortunate that, of all people, it was Fred Warren who had taken her under his wing: what if Rev. Tripp had known a moment of generosity or conscience!

  Fred’s only family, when he was a child, was a reclusive aunt so set in her ways that when she found herself, at the age of forty, sole guardian of her dead widowed sister’s eight-year-old boy, she got him a place at Blunt’s charity school where she was sure he would be better off. And in many ways he was. The crabbiness of Blunt’s schoolmasters was little different from that which he would have found in his aunt’s home, but at least he received an education, and a good one at that.

  At the age of sixteen his aunt gave him one hundred pounds and not at all a bad piece of advice – to look for work in any business that dealt with food, but not to grow it. People always had to eat, but the growing of food, animal or vegetable, was governed by weather, disease and infestation. Buying and selling had a different set of problems, but as these were not so much in the hands of nature, they were more readily coped with. She had not taken Governments into account, but the main tenet of her argument – people always have to eat – made sense to the sixteen-year-old Fred Warren.

  In Blackbrook, Barnabas White, a corn chandler and general dealer in anything that grew and would turn a farthing, was looking for a clerk. On discovering that young Warren was not only able to keep books and that kind of thing, but also had one hundred pounds, Barnabas White offered to accept Fred’s hundred pounds and make him a junior partner. Young Fred was impressed by the title, Junior Partner, and satisfied with his good luck at being taken into a business dealing in grain, the most basic of foods. He took the job, handed over his fortune and became an overworked clerk, sleeping behind White’s little office for three years, until he married Molly Tarrant, the youngest and jolliest of nine of a Blackbrook grocer’s nine children.

  Fred Warren was generally known for being as decent a fellow as ever stepped foot in pair of boots. He was a catholic and voracious reader, which led him into an interest in politics, religion and philosophy. He never had time to study deeply, but read every pamphlet and attended every meeting that he could.

  When he asked Molly Tarrant to marry him, he did so partly because she was good company and he was lonely, and partly because he thought that life would be more comfortable for him, even if only in a couple of tiny rooms. He had not bargained for the overwhelming desires in both himself and Molly, and very quickly they found themselves with a family which, in spite of Fred’s slow betterment, kept them poor. At the age of twenty-six, with four small Warrens to feed, the barter of lessons for generous produce was therefore welcome.

  The payment, though, had little to do with Fred taking on the young, ignorant farmgirl, whose desperation to feed her mind had shown so clearly in her intelligent face on that first encounter in Blackbrook market.

  Jude started straight away on the following Sunday, and kept her bargain with Bella that she would work earlier and later to make up for some of the lost time.

  After her first lesson she could recite the alphabet, and returned home with it written on a slate. By the next Sunday she could put a name to every letter. After each lesson, Fred Warren gave her work to do during the week. Jude was serious and enthusiastic. She wanted to learn everything at once.

  The frantic spring planting was over and the hay was not ready, so occasionally there was an hour when Jude could get away on the Downs, usually Tradden Raike. On a June afternoon, just before her twelfth birthday, she took her slate with her and climbed the steep raike, intending to write from memory some of the words she had been taught.

  It was just the weather she loved, hot and steady. When it was like this she never complained, even when the butter would not come, or the flints in the soil burned the soles of her feet as she hoed between the bean rows, or the water-pails had to be dropped ever lower in the wells. Hot, steady weather meant clear sky, where the blue of it changed subtly throughout the day. What she liked was to lie on the slope of one of the hills and do nothing but look.

  She reached one of her favourite places, close to where she had wept on Jaen’s wedding-day, but lower down the slope. The layer of soil that covered the hills surrounding Cantle was thin and did not cushion or spring lushly; its thinness pleased Jude. She liked to sit here rather than in the soft meadows in the valley bottom. You can feel their muscles and bones, Jaen had once said. Jude scratched the hill like the back of an animal.

  “I can feel your bones,” she said aloud.

  Now that it was June, the leaves of the different grasses had become glossier. Some had grown and shed seed, some were at the stage of hanging out tiny tongues of pollen and others, like wiggle-waggle grass, still purple. The chalk-hill flowers of early summer were open. Fragile blue campanula, pale blue scabious, blue, b
lue speedwell, yellow vetch, yellow toadflax, cornflowers, cranesbill, a few spider orchids and the low, flat thistle that thrived on Tradden.

  This was the first time she had come to the hills as a woman; her first flow had come about six weeks ago. Today was her second. It seemed to Jude to be more important than the first, which had been a bit bewildering and restricting, for all Bella’s common sense advice. This time Jude was poised and tranquil; she was a woman and could never be a child again. She would have been quite pleased to have gone about telling people. She wanted them to know. “I am a woman now,” she would have liked to say. “This isn’t a child’s body, you know, it is a woman’s.”

  Why did it all have to be so secret? She had known what happened to change girls – she had always shared a bed with Jaen – and had not thought it much different from the seasonal changes in the animals. But now she knew that it was different. It was mysterious and beautiful, the way it had all been designed.

  Why was there never a sermon about how wonderful it was for a child to suddenly turn into a woman? They went on so much in church about God’s gifts, the good earth; they talked about death; there were celebrations for marriages and baptisms. There should be a special day for becoming a woman, or at least a place in the service, same as speaking banns or taking communion. She imagined her own dignity as she stepped forward. I should have my hair parted and drawn up on top and wear a plain dress with a dark corset bodice, a fichu, white stockings and my shoes with the buckles. And I would not have my head covered.

  “If there be new women here, let them come forward and be blessed.”

  “I am a woman.”

  “Let us praise the Lord for this new woman, Judeth Nugent.”

  “Amen.”

  “There are meats and wine and dancing to celebrate this new woman.”