by Betty Burton
Fred inwardly finished the sentence. Enigmatic? Two women in one? But before he had time to reply, the subject was taken from them by the weather.
They had cut off across country, and were now on the old Roman Road which was high up and, in parts, a bleak no-man’s-land. On either side was open downland with no sign of habitation as far as the eye could see. The grey cloud that had earlier been a slab overhead, had become lower and turbulent. A strong wind got up.
“Did you feel rain?” Fred asked.
“Yes, big drops.”
They fastened weather-capes about them as they rode. They urged their horses, galloping into the wind, cloaks ballooning beneath the flapping capes. The sky quickly darkened. Large hailstones came like flung handfuls. The horses, with nothing to protect their eyes, flinched and jerked as the ice stung. The men hunched into the head-on storm.
“I didn’t expect this.” Fred shouted. “I thought we should easily make King’s Sombourne.”
“Can you see any shelter?”
“Isn’t there an inn somewhere here?”
“Yes, near the Garlick signpost.” Will’s words were almost carried away. “It’s about a mile off to the left.”
There had once been a hamlet on the old Roman road, but that had fallen victim to enclosure long ago, so that what had once been the ramshackle homes of cottagers were now heaps of rotting wood, clay and flint, grown over by bramble, dock and old-man’s-beard. Whether one called it the determined independence or the pig-headed stubbornness of one family, the fact remained that several generations after the destruction of the hamlet, the inn still remained.
Isolated, kept going by means of a minute piece of growing land, by poaching, brewing a good ale and sheltering travellers like Fred and Will who had underestimated the distance they had to travel and the freakish weather on this moorlike terrain, an innkeeping family had staggered on from generation to generation, picking a living from their tight-fisted circumstances. Now it had deteriorated into scarcely better than a hovel.
Before Fred and Will reached shelter, a whipping wind with hail and rain for its cat-o’-nine-tails scourged and drenched them. A man was holding open the door of a decaying stable.
“Get you in, masters. The boy’ll see to the horses.”
The two drenched men handed over their horses to the care of the man and ducked through the low doorway of the inn.
It was a low, beamed-ceilinged, oblong room with a hearth, window and two doors each as a central feature of the four walls. Fred was immediately reminded of the house-place at Croud Cantle, except that here there was the more usual cottagers’ stamped floor, giving the place a characteristically earthy smell. At one end was a rough dresser holding a variety of ale-mugs; beside it was one tapped and one untapped cask. There was a small fire on the hearth, which a woman was blowing with squeaky bellows. When they entered, rubbing their faces with their fore-arms and shaking their cloaks, the woman gave them a rotten-toothed grin, then returned to breathing the fire into life.
Will and Fred removed their outer clothes.
“There,” said the woman, pointing to a settle and indicating that was where they should put their clothes. “Come, come.” She rose from her knees and pulled stools close to the fire.
They sat before it, grateful for the smoky blaze.
The woman went out and clattered about in the adjoining scullery. Then the man came in.
“Jonah Smith, sirs. For my sins, keeper of this place. You were lucky to be near to us, sirs, or you would a had a good soak. Where were you heading?”
Surprisingly, his speech, although having broad-vowel Hampshire about it, was not like a countryman’s.
“Salisbury, but we thought to reach King’s Sombourne dry.”
His silvery untrimmed beard and hair receding each side of a widow’s-peak gave him the superficial look of a man older than the forty or so years his physique and brow suggested. Although he had some kind of damage to foot or ankle which caused him to limp, he was an erect, handsome-looking man, except for a dent in his skull – not a scar, but an indentation that started at his eyebrow and ended somewhere under his abundant hair.
He drew ale into three large pots, shook and sprinkled powders from various small tins, then mulled the brew with hot irons from the centre of the fire. The ale hissed and steamed a fragrant cloud.
“There sirs!” He handed Fred and Will the steaming drinks and joined them as though one of the company. “Bess won’t be long with your food. You might as well settle, this won’t blow itself out this side of midnight.”
“Very well. We shall put up here for the night and start away early.”
The woman hung a pot over the fire and in half an hour the three men were enjoying a good rabbit stew.
When they had finished eating a boy came silently in, cleared the table and went silently out. From his height, he appeared to be about eight or nine years old, and although he was unwashed and unkempt, with coarse nails and hair as long as a girl’s, his fine features and large eyes showed that he was likely to grow into manhood with striking good looks.
“That’s a fine looking lad,” said Fred. “I have a boy about the same age. Your son?”
Smith made a laughing sound. “Is there any man knows the answer to that old question. Yes, he’s as near my son as any man’s.” He stood two mugs of ale on the table. “Take your ease, sirs. I shall see that Bess has got out blankets. It’ll be two cots in the front room, if that will serve?”
Fred agreed that all they wanted was a night’s shelter and rest, and that anything clean would do. “I never like to pay to feed another man’s fleas,” he said.
Smith limped off, leaving Fred and Will to share the red glow in the darkening room.
They talked a bit about the adjustments they would have to make in regard to their King’s Sombourne and Salisbury visits, then sat each gazing into the fire, Fred smoking one of the long pipes that Smith had made ready and placed on the hearth.
The boy came in with an armful of thick logs. Fred tried to draw him into some kind of exchange, by asking him whether he was good with a sling, did he have a good dog of his own, the kind of question a boy would respond to. But this boy answered only in yes-sirs and no-sirs. He made up the fire and retreated.
On the logs that the boy had placed carefully on the fire-bed, bark and bits of dry ivy flared and cracked, moisture oozed, sap frizzled, then little whistles of steam escaped from the cut ends giving off the aroma of apple-wood. Fred and Will gazed at this display so intently that you might think that log burning was a new phenomenon.
At length, Will said, “What I said earlier – about Judeth. What do you think?”
“It’s what she thinks that is relevant. You say she doesn’t know . . . you haven’t implied . . . anything about marriage?”
“No, nothing.” There was a short silence. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think it would complicate her life.”
“Complicate?”
“Yes. But if she were to marry any man, then it should be a free-thinking man with radical views.”
“You know that I am that. What do you mean about complicating?”
“Up to now her life has been simple enough to allow her to be the two women. I said, didn’t I, that she was neither fish nor fowl; what I suppose I meant is that she is fish and fowl. She is only at the beginning of what she could become. Did you know she is trying to write a book?”
Will shook his head.
“What she has done is nothing better than imitating, but that doesn’t matter – she is experimenting. She needs . . . she needs to go on living without complications. If she were to marry now, then it should be to a man who could cook and scrub and sew – and see to it that she had no responsibilities such as children.”
Will looked thoughtfully into the cats’–tongues of flame licking the apple logs.
“What did you mean about her hands?” Fred asked.
To have revealed himself to
such an extent whilst riding beside Fred, speaking the words into the open, anonymous downland, high up on the old road, had been like speaking aloud to himself; intoxicated by articulating what had, till then, been vague thoughts. But face to face in the gloaming room, illuminated by the bright fire, Will felt restrained, embarrassed almost. What he had wanted to say about Judeth’s hands seemed suddenly too suggestive, too revealing of his own carnality.
“I hardly know,” he said.
“I do.” Fred paused a moment. “I think of it as her Mary Magdalene quality.”
From Will’s expression he seemed about to protest.
Fred smiled and put up a hand. “No, no, don’t misunderstand. Any woman with two unexpectedly different sides to her nature is doubly attractive. Mary Magdalene must have been so after she had anointed Jesus’s feet. That is all I mean. A parson’s wife serving in a gin-shop, a duchess performing high-way robbery, a farm-girl who reads Othello for pleasure. Hands that deliver lambs and write journals.”
“Do I take it from that, that you find her attractive?”
For a moment, Fred’s instinct was to rebuff his junior, put him in his place for taking liberties from their situation, but he quickly realised that in this they were equals. They each had equal call upon the other over questions of Judeth.
“I have known her for seven years, from a child. She has been under my roof scores of times, alongside my own children. I have as much concern for her future as though she was Peg.”
For a while there was silence, except for the twin sounds of rain pattering on mud and crackling from the fire. Where the inhabitants of the inn had gone they had no idea, but there was no sound from them. It was entirely dark outside now. The room had become a confessional.
Eventually Fred said, “Mrs Warren was the jolliest girl in Blackbrook. I was the most solitary man . . . lonely almost. She brought me to life. I have been alive ever since. Molly and the children are all in all to me.” He gazed inwardly.
“Our desires are terrible traitors, aren’t they? Well, in marriage they are. I tell you, they desert you – leap upon you when you’re least expecting. Disloyal, faithless things, desires. You will perhaps think it a dishonourable thing to say of a woman, but there is no sensible reason why they are not attacked in the same way as ourselves. I occasionally look at Molly when she’s in company, playing up like a girl, and wonder what prankish thoughts she is secretly plagued with.”
It was as though the two men found themselves outside normal society, otherwise Fred Warren would never have spoken such private thoughts. The isolated inn, the monosyllabic woman, the silent boy and the dubious feelings they had about the man; a feeling of remoteness, their two faces each illuminated for the other in the dimness of the room – it was as though they were, for the now, not bound by the accepted codes. It was only this feeling that gave them temporary liberation, lulled them into exchanging of confidences without even thinking whether they would ever regret such openness. It was an intimacy that men suspect women of sharing with one another, and long for themselves: the indulgence of admitting to anxieties and emotions, talking of them to someone of one’s own sex.
“The bonds of marriage are conscious, civilised – mature, I suppose you could say. Wayward desires are not really any match. Even the best of marriages is not easy.”
Silence again.
Then, “I would be less than honest if I said that I have not thought of Judeth once or twice . . . for a brief moment . . .” he trailed off. With a trace of aggression, “If you expect to be any different, however faithful you are . . . The thoughts leap at you, leap. The only defence is to forearm; keep minding of what misery is caused by a moment of indulgence, of weakness. A marriage is always under attack, you know.”
Fred appeared to have come to the end of his train of thought, and for several minutes only the rain and the hissing and creaking from the burning logs disturbed the quiet.
Then Will said, “It was in the town office that I came upon you. Quite accidental.”
Fred looked puzzled.
“You and Judeth. I opened the office door. Ah sure, but you didn’t see me. You . . . she . . . you were holding her.” For a moment the image flashed at him, and he received a spurt of curdling jealousy.
“Ah.” Fred nodded. “Yes, I know the time. She had learned something about her father that few of us could take without breaking down. I shan’t tell you about it. That is for Judeth, if she wants you to know. It was nothing of the sort that you have been thinking. It goes to show how little we know one another. Not only you and me – all of us.”
The explanation came to Will like a draught of heart’s-ease.
“No, I think I’ve always got you for a better man than that.” He smiled. “It was all the fault of me jealous thoughts that came leaping on me that day.”
A door banged in another part of the house.
Time and place reassembled around the room.
Intimacy retreated.
Fred took up another pipe and lighted it, Will rose, stretched and went to look out of the window.
The two men mended the small cracks they had made in their own emotional defences.
They could hear Smith’s voice, the rattle of fire irons and pots, then Smith came into the room.
“Without lights, masters? I told Bess to see to it before we went out.”
He offered no explanation about where they had been, but his shoulders were damp, leggings and boots were wet, and his face was flushed from being outside.
Fred protested that they were happy enough in the fire light.
Smith lit some old-fashioned rush lights, and a tallow candle or two.
“There, sirs, that’s more civil. Andrew has seen to the horses and we shall have a brace of pheasant – fresh I’m afraid, but Bess is good with a pheasant, I can say that in her favour, if nothing else.”
He drew off more ale and once more joined them as though of their company, this time discussing the merits of his ale and the details of his brewing methods, pressing them to try mead and other of his country wines. There was no doubt that the man was skilled at producing all manner of alcoholic beverages.
From the scullery came the cranking sound of a spit turning and an occasional word from the woman, and soon the smell of roasting. In a while the boy came in with knives, a loaf, cheese, butter and apples. Then the woman brought in a dish with three crisp-skinned birds, and a bowl of potatoes that had just come from the ashes.
“Ready,” she said, and retreated.
Again Smith acted as though they were his invited guests.
“Please, sirs, join me.”
The two men did so readily. The food looked and smelled appetising. Smith carved the birds and handed round the floury potatoes. It suddenly occurred to Fred that perhaps they had been mistaken: perhaps the place was no longer an inn and they had intruded upon a private dwelling. But then he recalled that Smith had mentioned other travellers, though he behaved like no inn-keeper Fred had ever come across.
“What about Mrs Smith and the boy?” Fred asked.
“Bess? She’d never eat in the presence of such gentlemen as yourselves, sirs. No more would Andrew. They’ve rarely been in the presence of strangers for longer than five minutes.”
Smith apparently had no such objections and ate and offered with the social grace more likely to be found in Fred’s own circle than in this decaying inn on the old Roman road.
Later the boy came and cleared away. Fred and Will said it was an excellent supper, but Smith apologised for the freshness of the pheasant.
It occurred to Will that the earlier disappearance of Smith and his subsequent reappearance with wet clothes and three fresh – very fresh – snared game-birds were connected. It was by no means the first poached pheasant that Will had enjoyed. The knowledge that someone had put one over on a landowner gave flavour to game-birds that no amount of hanging could impart.
Smith filled half a dozen churchwarden pipes and drew some fin
e brandy from a small keg.
“Your healths, sirs. It is a pleasure to have someone to sit with after a meal. I like to hear what is going on elsewhere, being we’re so remote up here.”
The inn-keeper seemed to have rapacious need of companionship and related every story in a grandiose manner. He clutched at Fred and Will’s attention, wanting to know all about the unrest in France; and when Blackbrook was mentioned he questioned them upon every detail of the place. He related at tedious length how the blow to his head had “caused him to drink Lethean waters”, how he had come to the inn, how he had “perfected a brew that was, as you can judge Masters, bettered by none”, and how his limp was from being recently gored by a bull. They talked until the rush-lights guttered out and the fire became a red glow on the white ash-bed.
Will would have preferred to retire early and go over in his mind what Fred had said about Judeth and have some thoughts about the future, but Fred liked nothing better than to sit before a red glow and talk.
When they retired for the night, Smith thanked them warmly for “putting a light to wicks of memory that had been snuffed out.”
“It’s an ill wind,” said Fred. “We have done a day’s good deed. I could not bear such isolation.”
“It is the woman and the boy I should think needs a good deed done to them,” said Will.
“That’s true,” said Fred, then after a minute, with a wry smile, “’Tis a pity that you aren’t a man to cook and scrub and sew, for you would fit my requirements in a husband for Judeth in respect of a free-thinking man with radical views.”
Smith had been right, the storm did not abate until Fred and Will were soundly asleep. They set off early. The boy brought out the horses, their flanks shining and manes brushed like thoroughbreds. Will gave him a gratuity. “Andrew, you’re very good with horses, my own father would be pleased to have a lad like you about the place. I never came up to his standards of grooming.”
For the first time in the eighteen or so hours they had been there the boy showed some response. He smiled broadly. Will had a warm moment of recalling Mr Carter and Jude at the party. He longed to see her again; the day spent at the strange inn meant a day longer that he must wait to see her. The boy’s smile brought back to Fred and Will a sense of normality. They mounted their horses. “Fermity teeth,” said Will, and after a second or two Fred remembered and they rode away laughing with greater gusto than the comment would normally have warranted.