by Betty Burton
“Why, Mrs Nugent, you’ll have me up before the Magistrate enticing me to do such things as stealing Estate holly.”
Observing her mother flushed from the wine and smiling, being indulgent, joking even, Jude thought: She’d have been a lot happier if Jaen and me were sons.
The sky was blue as June and the air sharp enough to spike the hollow behind the bridge of the nose if one drew breath too deeply. A hoar-frost of frozen dew clothed bare trees and hedges in imitation foliage and worked lace edges on the deodars and cypresses in the estate park. At this time of year the sun was too low to melt frost on the lower slopes of the enclosing downs, but gave green tops to them for an hour or two. The air was so clear that the bells of Winchester cathedral could have been heard by anyone on the top of Old Marl, which was unlikely on a day when gentry and labourers alike walked no further than to bow heads before the nearest altar.
Will and Jude walked briskly cross-country, down through the Croud Cantle plots and meadow and across the corner of the estate field from which Jude had run three or four months ago. They talked quietly, agreeing on the fineness of the day, the good that this heavy frost was doing to the land, the large number of rabbits there seemed to be about, and the marvel of how tiny birds like snipe which don’t weigh hardly nothing at all manage to keep fat in winter when other birds sometimes fall starved from their roosts.
The holly bush was lush with berries and Will took a branch that was bristling out into the track at Raike Bottom.
“Are you all right now to be walking uphill?” Will asked.
“I’ve been part the way up Tradden.”
They started up the gentle slope.
“We’ll turn back as soon as you find it too much.”
“This is Judeth Nugent – not Bella.”
He turned a smile on Jude. “Isn’t she the one, your mother? That day,” he hesitated for a fragment of a second, remembering another image of that day, “when I was hold’n down the branches and she was pick’n off the crab-apples. She was telling me everything from how to make cheeses to how to charm away warts.” Will laughed, “I couldn’t get a thin word in sideways if I’d a tried.”
His view of Bella was so at odds with the real Bella that Jude felt confused. She did not even know that Bella could charm warts, let alone talk so that a person couldn’t get a thin word in sideways. Jealousy, possessiveness, reproach. If she told him what her mother was really like, how would she appear in his eyes? Yet she wanted him to know about the coldness and the rejection. She wanted him on her side, to herself. There were niggling, mean thoughts rushing through her.
“It’s a pity she wasn’t like that at home.”
“Is she not, then?”
“No.”
“I can hardly believe that. I was just thinking when she was cutting up the goose that she was like me own mother – it was never father who took the carving-knife in our family. Mother stands there like queen o’ the tribe. I’d not felt so much at home for a long time.”
“What is your mother like?”
They were walking uphill, Will carrying the holly-bough over his shoulder. He laughed. “Well, I tell you, there’s times when she’s as prickly as this and I should a had sense enough to pick this on the way back.” He put the bough down. “I’ll get it later.”
Free of the holly, he unceremoniously took Jude’s hand in his. “Mother? Dark, darkish, middling in size, I suppose you’d say. And she would always call me Billy. I’m reckoned to take after her in looks, so you can tell she’s a handsome woman.”
“Be serious. What is she like? What kind of woman is she?”
“Seriously, she’s never got over being cut off from her home and family. There’s never a day passes without she’s talking about home. Home! Seriously I think that, deep inside her, she’s bitter – no, no, not bitter, resentful. No, you’d get the wrong impression of her. She’s angry. Ah, that’s what. Father’s a bit like that, too, but I think he’s like it because he feels useless. You know, always seeing to horses that nobody rides. The waste, extravagance, that kind of thing. But her anger is because we were moved over there on a whim, you might say, just to be there in case anybody of the Berol family fancied a week or two there for a change, and she had no choice but to go with me father.”
As he had been telling her this, his hand had been clasping Jude’s, hard. “She’s probably been living in Ireland now longer than she did in Hampshire. Yet she still talks about being sent off, like sheep to market, to a land where they can’t talk King’s English. It’s as though they only landed yesterday.”
They had reached that part of Tradden where the gentle slope ceases and the climb becomes more steep. Where nothing ever grows taller than eighteen inches or so except for clumps of willow-herb in summer and the humps of brambles, now winter-bare revealing the structure of their shape. In them brown clots, where, in the early part of the year, pairs of neat wrens had made bulky homes, and garden warblers had woven clever structures. Will and Jude stopped spontaneously and looked down over Cantle.
“We’ve come further than I thought. Is your leg all right?”
Jude nodded absent-mindedly.
He suddenly realised that he held her hand in a tight grip. He relaxed his hold, then said in his more usual soft tone, “Oh, look at your white fingers, I must have stopped the blood.” He felt her knuckles with his lips. “You’re frozen.”
Jude drew towards him and shared the warmth of his cloak, which he held out, wrapping it about them both.
The few touches and kisses that they had exchanged had been like the first when Jude had been cleaning up after the fox: gentle, spontaneous, playful almost; the sort of kisses Will had exchanged plenty of times.
But not Jude.
The experience of being this close to somebody desirable was nothing dewey-new to Will. He had wrapped his cloak about girls before. The only difference now had to do with this tense, strange, enigmatic girl. A certain heightened sensuousness; a perplexing importance. They stood side by side, their eyes directed upon Cantle, but not seeing.
Whilst she had been disabled and, more recently, since returning from Blackbrook, Jude had often been engrossed in thoughts about herself. She was trying to tease out a tangled and knotted mass. Her emotions were like sinews or fibres that were constantly dampened, softened, then dried out and hardened. Brittle. Unreliable.
Early in the summer there had been all the softening hope of assuaging her thirst for knowledge through Young Harry’s books, and the unadmitted fear of what would happen if she started down that path. Don’t push me, she had said to Fred Warren. Yet had she been honest with herself she wanted to be pushed, not to have to decide for herself, to be faced with a fait accompli.
The softening and hardening stresses: firstly of meeting Mary Holly; then the physical and mental breaking through Bella’s barrier, putting an arm round her mother, listening to her history with Tomas Nugent. Then meeting Lotte Trowell on Bell Tump, quickly followed by the complexity of feelings when Fred had comforted her. It seemed as though all through the long, burning days of last summer and the weeks of hard labour without a break in the weather, her emotional fibres had been so stretched that they had snapped on the day when she had wildly run on to Tradden.
Again, now, on the same loved and lovely swelling of the chalk downs she felt panic. The damsel-fly was out of her familiar, shielding, distancing shell. At the same time that she was feeling apprehension and the urge to escape from the brace and buttress of Will’s firm warmth, she instinctively kept close to him, tempting and testing herself. Tense. Wanting. Needing. Her old hunger – to touch and be touched. Not knowing how to deal with intense feelings. Afraid, yet fearless.
Will’s thoughts were uncomplicated, his action straightforward. Beginning with a kiss that was not gentle or playful.
On New Year day, Will Vickery made a brief visit, but it was a visit in passing. It was a round-about way of passing, for he could have taken the coach from outside th
e Star at Blackbrook, close to his lodgings, but preferred to pick it up on the Corhampton Road and leave his horse to be stabled at the inn there.
Barnabas White wanted to know more about the possibilities of using steam-power in the handling of bulk cereals, and as the north of England seemed to be the place to find out he was sending Will as his eyes and ears.
Will stopped for only half an hour at Croud Cantle, and with Hanna chattering and Bella wrapping delicacies to sustain him on his journey, the lovers could exchange only conventional words and colliding glances. All three came out of the cottage to watch as he attached Bella’s package of little gifts to the horse’s saddle. The mud of the yard was frozen hard and breath spurted white.
“Let’s hope the ground have thawed a bit be the time you gets back,” said Bella.
“Ah, to be sure,” agreed Will, standing with his back to Bella and looking directly at Jude. “Springtime and the grass soft, it’s a time to look forward to.” He limited his smile to his eyes as he looked at Jude. She reddened at the meaning of his look and pulled her shawl close over her cheeks.
“But I haven’t any intention of bein’ away till then.”
The New Year brought a surprise to Molly and Fred Warren. The combined facts of something being not quite right ever since her last confinement, and the regular use of a brew of pennyroyal and bitter, herbal concoctions (sold under many different labels such as Special Restorative for Women), had led Molly into the certainty that Sam would for ever be her youngest. After ten years she felt that she could relax into matronhood.
Fred’s first thought was that it would be rather good to have a baby about the house again. Molly’s first thought was that she hoped she might not be so long in labour this time and that it might be a girl who would pay for dressing pretty.
The baby would be born in July and would be known, like many another, to be the result of its parents having been Fair Mondaying the previous October.
On Christmas Day, when Jude had lain upon the bones of Tradden, cushioned by frosty grass and beneath the warm, flesh-covered bones of Will Vickery, the possible consequences of the liberating joy of their loving had not occurred to her. She had thought many times about what had happened to Jaen, but if that lesson tried to get through now, Jude ignored it, and in the contentment and ease that followed she felt nothing but well-being and confidence.
Fate? Chance? Good fortune? Something ordered the fallow, last of Jude’s December moon-cycle days to coincide with that Christmas Day. Jude never had even one day’s disquiet. No waiting for the days to pass, no bitter remorse, no promises of the deaf god of women, none of the anxiety and disquiet that had followed Jaen’s day with Dan Hazelhurst. Not that Jaen had emerged from her casing as fully-mature as Jude: Jaen had not been ready and her fragile wings had been damaged, never allowing her to fly again.
It was not until Jude heard, soon after Will had gone North, of the unexpected Warren baby, that the full realisation of how easily and with what recklessness, abandonment and impetuosity she had endangered her own ambition to be, do . . . something – she did not yet know what. Except she did know that it was not to live her life like Jaen, Mrs Warren, or the Cantle girls she had watched in their cow-like apathy last harvest day.
The fact that Jude did not say much when Bella told her what she had heard about Molly Warren’s condition from market gossip, had little to do with that news, but more to do with a sudden flood of understanding. Understanding of Jaen, of Bella, of Lotte Trowell and even of her father and of herself.
Judeth Nugent, who believed herself to be unlike others, now saw her true likeness to them. She saw how easily anyone may be carried away by passion, by desire, by the old need – to touch and be touched. She saw, too, the knife-edge on which she had been poised on Christmas Day. She had not realised it until now.
How Bella must have been carried away by Tomas Nugent! Even after he had abandoned her for five years, she had seen him and again submitted to her need for him, and perhaps would have taken him back yet again if he had returned. There must have been a moment when Tomas looked at Bella as Will Vickery had looked at Jude, arousing such a heady force that the real world – of December frosts and anguish – became, briefly, inconsequential.
She saw that Jaen’s need was probably much like her own; remembering how they had always huddled close in their bed, not knowing that their vague unsatisfaction was to do with their absent father and a mother who could not bring herself to take the risk of showing love again, even to her children.
Jude understood about the ecstatic moment when young Charlotte Holly had been unaware of anything except her passion for her master.
How near she had been to finding herself stepping blindly into the quicksands of a life like Jaen’s or Bella’s. She had taken one step into the sucking marsh and her foot had been guided to a small patch of firm ground. If the hand of a god had saved her, she had no faith that it had been that of the father-God who spoke to the Reverend Archbold Tripp. It must have been some more ancient deity, whose bones she had often felt beneath her and whose four breasts were Tradden, Beacon, Old Marl and Winchester.
January this year began with daytime skies that were as blue and high as summer and which, at night, were overwhelming to anyone out after dark. Infinite black plush and glitter. Clear, brumal air, carrying the terrifying shrieks of vixens on heat far across the Hampshire countryside.
It was the time when humans gave way to nature in the management of the soil. After harvest it had been roughly turned and left in clods for frost to break down. This January the sunny, clear, bitter-cold days went on and on. Frost penetrated the land, deeper and deeper.
It was the short break in the crop-growing season when repairs to implements and fences were done. Usually Bella was here, there and everywhere, ferreting about in every corner for rotting wood or sagging fences. This year, though, she spent a lot of her time indoors: she did her usual work in the dairy and storehouse, but left Jude to see to the rest. Guilty and sharp-tongued at Jude’s tentative enquiry, was Bella all right?
“I can have a few twinges, can’t I, without everybody making such a ta do of it? I an’t as young as I was – none of us is,” she snapped. What Dicken had said about the Master having her stuffing knocked out was becoming more noticeable.
“What’s up with the Master, Miss Jude? She look like an old ’umpety hen ’smorning.”
“You better not let her hear you say that.”
Dicken pulled a knowing face. “My eye, I knows better’n that and that’s a fac’.”
They were working on saving a huge old cherry tree that had provided fruit and preserves for years, but had been battered and broken in a storm. Jude and Johnny-twoey were holding up a heavy branch whilst Dicken sawed at it. They were shapeless with garments against the cold.
“Miss Jude?”
Dressed in an assortment of old jackets and anything else that came his way, his chilblained and chapped hands wrapped in rags, Johnny-twoey spouted white breath as he took more than his share of the weight. Although still by no means talkative, encouraged by Hanna he had recently been slowly coming out of his shell, but he never spoke without the preliminary, asking permission: Mizz Nugent? Miss Jude? Hanny?
“Yes, John?”
A moment of pause as the three of them got over the hurdle of his new naming.
“Miss Jude?” The little shock of suddenly being John caused him to forget the arrangement of words he had formed before venturing to say them, and blurted out instead, “When the Master’s too old and Dicken’s gone, what’s going to happen?”
What’s going to happen?
“Dicken’s not going, are you Dicken, not yet?”
“Can’t last for ever, Miss Jude, and that’s a fac’. I’m older’n the Master by a bit.”
What’s going to happen?
“Three score year and ten, at’s what the Book says we’m due for . . .”
What’s going to happen?
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�� . . . but there an’t many as I knows gets their proper share. I sometimes asks my old ’ooman who gets them years which an’t used?” – Dicken’s own wit always had caused him a good many laughs – “and she says they’m give to passons and jukes and the like of they . . .”
What will happen!
“ . . . and I reckon she got something there, for I never knew a passon in these parts that didn’t have five or six year above his own share. Well, I says to her, it must be the good Lord as looks after his own, and she says, or Old Harry,” he indicated horns with his forefingers, “and I says, perhaps it’s having a good swig of communion wine every day. When you comes to think on it, there might be some’t in that. Jukes and that lot, you don’t catch they drinking no ale nor cider, oh no me boys, t’s all red wine, and tell me if it don’t stand to reason at red wine helps your blood, and your health’n’strength’s in your blood.”
And so, as often happened when Dicken got going, the original topic or question got covered in the moss of his garrulity and was forgotten.
As soon as she had an excuse, Jude left them to get on with the clearing up and wound-painting of the old tree.
It was Saturday. Except in the seasons of planting, thinning, harvesting, Saturday afternoon had become accepted at Croud Cantle as an afternoon to be taken at a more leisurely pace, when some of the less arduous tasks were undertaken. In winter Bella attended to hives and skeps; in summer to collecting any swarms and later on to the killing of them, then to taking the honey. In spring they collected elderflowers and may-blossom to make the quick wine, the fizz and sparkle of which was always echoed in Jude’s feelings, as the chalk-hills and the Cantle valley seethed with regeneration.
At this early part of year she had often used her precious bit of leisure for reading or writing up her journal. Often she would try to persuade Hanna that it wasn’t unfair to have a reading lesson on a Saturday. If only she saw what fun reading and writing was she wouldn’t find it hard to learn, but Hanna – firm, square, Estover Hanna – would rather tidy shelves or help with the bees.