by Maria McCann
‘I will come down,’ called a voice inside the room. We stood aside as the Mistress swept past.
‘Going down!’ Caro whispered.
‘Going to be fawned on for a present she made,’ I returned. ‘I had as lief not see it.’
‘Should I not go to your mother, after?’
I hesitated. ‘Let Mother see her darling boys first.’
‘Very well. Come here, Signior Jacob—’ Caro put her face up, and from her kisses I did not pull away until we heard a door open downstairs.
‘You are lucky to get me. So my mother says,’ I murmured as we listened for the sound of the Mistress coming back up.
She pinched my cheek. ‘I’d say the luck’s all the other way. My Lady has promised more—’
‘But it is agreed,’ I said, surprised. Lady Roche had already settled a dowry of thirty pounds on Caro, who said over and over that the Roches were none so bad after all, while I thought the money would be best spent in getting away from them.
Caro explained, ‘Other things. There’s a gown for the day, not so old, neither. Earrings also. And I am to have a chaplet from the gardener, with roses, or gilded wheat and rosemary.’
‘Earrings? You have not had your ears pierced?’ I did not want my wife’s lobes punctured to suit the Mistress. Lifting the edges of her cap, I was reassured to find them still whole.
She laughed. ‘The loan is only for the day. We will tie them on with silk.’
‘I would gladly have got you a gown,’ I said. ‘But we are to have an espousal, not a church wedding.’ And I dislike the Mistress making you her poppet, I thought.
‘Yes, but since we are to be espoused de praesenti, where’s the difference?’
‘I mean only that—’
‘O Jacob, you will not be thwart, I hope? There will be a bridebed and all, why not a gown? Besides, her lending it is a sign of high favour!’
‘She may well favour you. No maid else could endure her white lead and belladonna.’
Nonetheless, I found myself smiling back at her. Her gown had been hard earned.
Caro went on, ‘It is all of blue. For constancy. And heeled shoes, with silver thread—’
We kissed again.
‘Shall I not have the ring inscribed?’ Caro wheedled. ‘Eh, Husband?’
‘No,’ I said at once. We had already been over this. I did not want a ring at all, preferring a simple and godly joining of hands before our friends, but I had bent so far to her wishes as to purchase one. I would not, however, have some doggerel such as Our Contract, Was Heaven’s Act cut into it. I had done much that foolish custom requires: gloves had been purchased to give to all our friends, and a fine embroidered pair for Caro herself. In this last instance, Zeb had threatened that if I did not give way, he would shame me by furnishing the bridal gloves in my stead. I had also presented her with wedding knives, those scissors as necessary as the groom himself. All of it was very much against my will, not through meanness on my part, for I grudged the cost of nothing that I thought seemly, but I disliked this courting of good luck through gew-gaws and trifles. What have Christians to do with luck? Nor would I have garters pulled off by her bridesmen, or stockings thrown about in the bridal chamber. The others complained that without such brothelry (which they called merriment) it was hardly a wedding, but no matter for their whims.
My love linked arms with me. ‘What will you wear, Jacob?’
‘My best coat, the one you know with the mother-of-pearl buttons, and a lace collar to my shirt. I have had them ready a month and more.’
‘And favours?’ she coaxed.
‘Aye, favours,’ for I had gained my point over the ring and other trash, and I knew that without these trumpery bits of ribbon her woman’s soul would not be satisfied.
Caro squeezed my hand. ‘We will look like gentry.’
‘I am gentry.’ My own words surprised me. Having been a servant so long, I had near forgotten.
‘But not idle like some we know.’
‘Let us hope,’ I said, ‘that he will be away, or dead drunk in bed.’
My Lady was coming back up the stairs, grunting from a stiffness she had in the legs and hips.
‘Madam, may we go down now?’ I requested. ‘Caro has not yet been seen by my mother.’
‘What! Most certainly you must go. She is in the garden with your brothers, near the lavender bed.’
‘You are all kindness.’
We bowed and curtseyed, then scampered downstairs like children.
Mother was just where the Mistress had said, standing between Zeb and Izzy.
‘I always forget how pale your mother is,’ said Caro as we crossed towards them. ‘Where is her part in you, Black Jacob?’
‘The eyes.’
‘So much?’
‘More than she has in the others. Zeb and Izzy have Father’s complexion entirely. Yet folk say I am the most like him.’
Mother turned the grey eyes which were under discussion sharply upon her future daughter as soon as she perceived our approach. Caro curtseyed with a graceful sweep that not even Mervyn could have faulted, but to no purpose: there would never be liking between these two. My mother bristled like a dog’s back. For Caro’s part, as soon as she came out of her curtsey she drew herself up, Youth against Age.
‘You have met Caro before, dear Mother,’ I tried. ‘Now you meet her as a dutiful daughter.’
Caro smiled.
Mother’s glance raked her up and down as if seeking cracks in her skin, as she said, ‘I will scarce know what to do with a daughter. My babes have all been boys.’
Izzy shot me a sympathetic glance.
‘I had hoped we might put you to bed at home,’ Mother said, turning on me. ‘But you will not want that.’
‘That was our first wish,’ I assured her, Caro’s head bobbing up and down in agreement. ‘But the kindness shown, and such gifts – a servant is not a free man—’
My mother inclined her head so slightly that one might not say she nodded.
‘The Mistress has given me a gown against the day,’ put in Caro. ‘And a pair of—’
‘She has been most kind,’ I hurried to conceal the last loan.
Mother pounced. ‘A pair of what?’
‘Earrings,’ faltered Caro.
‘Earrings for a serving maid.’ My mother stared into the sky, her mouth sulky and closed like that of an old fish.
I was stung. ‘Say rather for ‘my wife.’
‘Your mother thinks I intrude myself among my betters. Give you good day, Madam.’ Caro turned and walked away.
‘Are you now content?’ I burst out. ‘I mean to espouse her, and you had best—’
‘Mother, will you come and see my garden?’ Izzy almost shouted. ‘The Mistress has given me a plot for myself, and I take cuttings of the rare plants.’
‘Indeed, Isaiah, that will be very pleasant.’ And off she went with Izzy, leaving me and my betrothal to come about as we would.
Zeb grinned. ‘Caro is too pretty for her, and you too amorous. That sets her on edge.’
‘Amorous? I did but speak!’
‘It shines out of you.’ He gave a sly laugh. ‘For all she says, methinks she would scarce welcome the bridebed at home. And then, she once hoped we would marry better.’
‘Then you must look for trouble, when the time comes.’ If Mother behaved thus with Caro, she would surely take a whip to Patience.
‘I have ample trouble at present.’ Zeb’s eyes grew miserable.
‘Be easy,’ I said. ‘Patience cannot be at Champains. She will be found in time.’
He glanced at me in surprise. ‘I have been thinking. Perhaps you are right, and I drove her away—’
I shook my head. There followed a rare moment of peace between us.
‘Ah, well,’ Zeb said at last, ‘Mother will come round. Directly you and Caro quarrel, you’ll be her own sweet boy.’
‘We won’t quarrel,’ I replied. Zebedee clapped me on the sh
oulder and we began strolling back to the house.
‘Have you seen the ceiling?’ Caro pushed open the door of the unused chamber that was to be our married quarters.
I looked up. I had seen it often, without much interest. Now the other servants had cleaned both it and the walls, revealing the fantastic images that crowded there: a shameless hotch-potch of the pagan and Papistical, a whirl of naked and semi-naked forms intended to give the eye the impression of an ascent into the air above the house.
‘Sir John’s taste exactly,’ I pronounced.
‘O no,’ Caro corrected me. ‘Older than that. Godfrey says Sir John’s father hired a foreigner for the painting.’
‘And how do you like it?’
‘Not at all,’ she said at once.
I gazed on the bloated babes carrying lyres and blowing trumpets, the swags of painted stuff and grapes piled up here and there. In the centre, a bare breasted woman conversed like the strumpet she was with two men, one on either side of her. All three were seated on thrones shaped like shells and coloured gold.
Caro pointed. ‘That’s a goddess, the Mistress says.’
‘You are prettier than she.’
My love wrinkled her nose. ‘She is coarse. In need of stays.’
I said, ‘Izzy told me these were painted so that the children conceived here might be beautiful.’
Caro burst out laughing. ‘What, Mervyn—?’
Laughter seized on me also. ‘Why, yes. Look there—’ and I pointed out a chubby infant swilling wine from an upturned horn.
‘Mervyn must have been made in the great chamber.’ Caro wiped her eyes. ‘The ceiling there isn’t fit for a maid to look on.’
‘You will get used to this one,’ I said slyly, and saw her blush.
The espousal was fixed for the next day. My Lady was to send her coach for our ungracious mother, and since our fellows at Beaurepair were also our guests, servants were come in from a neighbour’s house to help Mounseer with the food. Poor Mounseer, he was the only one of us not to have a holiday. But he had consolation in the form of Madeleine, a young Frenchwoman employed to dress hair. Her thankless task was to spin gold from the thin and greying locks of her own mistress, and now she had been borrowed and was to try her skill with ours. I had heard Daskin present himself to her the day before, and since then there was no good English spoken when these two were together, nothing but parly-voo, the two of them talking so fast you might think the words bad been banking up in them and were bursting out like the autumn floods. Thus my spouse was freed of brushes, false hair and unguents for one day – a mighty sacrifice on the Mistress’s part. I owned it freely, it was extraordinary how she liked Caro. She was a woman who should have had a daughter.
‘We are made, you know.’ Caro squeezed my arm. ‘She’d let none but me have this chamber.’
‘True,’ I answered her. ‘But when Sir John dies, and he does his best to bring it about, it will be Sir Bastard in the saddle. He’s itching to debauch the maids.’
She sniffed. ‘Do you not think I might refuse?’
‘Would you had heard the talk in March, my love, when he brought his cronies and I waited on their late-night drunks. How the amorous propensities are heated by struggle, and not struggle in play neither.’
‘Ah.’ Her face sobered. ‘He’s one you have to watch, certes.’
‘What, has he touched—’
‘No, Jacob! He does no more than look. While his father lives, we should stick here. I am laying by money.’
‘Are you sorry to change your first bridesmaid?’ I asked. We had been forced in courtesy to ask Patience to carry out the first bridesmaid’s duties, decking our chamber and the rest with flowers against the day, since neither of us had a sister or cousin who could decently claim precedence.
‘Only if she be really lost,’ Caro said. ‘But there will be two bridesmaids. Peter’s sister Mary will take Anne’s place and Anne will stand in for Patience.’ She smiled at me as if to say, Fear not, all will be done.
I eyed the heathens in their painted Heaven. Soon they would look down on our embracings, and I promised them good sport. Though I had never had a woman I understood perfectly what to do, and had an edge on me keen as a new blade: she would not find me shy or cold. We would sleep wrapped in one another, and wake to—
I caught Caro’s eyes on me and flushed.
‘The place will be sweet with all the flowers they can find,’ she said. ‘There were more in July, but—’
The door swung open, making me jump. It was Zeb. I expected a grin and the inevitable jest about inspecting the bed but his face was rapt as if from some vision.
‘Jacob, I heard—’ he corrected himself, ‘and Caro – I heard something they kept from us—’
‘Is Patience found?’ cried Caro.
‘No, Sister. Listen. Sir Bastard was in the West, was he not?’
‘What’s that to us?’ I demanded. ‘What care we where he is, so be’s not here?’
‘Jacob, Parliament has gained Bristol.’
I whistled.
‘That’s why he’s been so curst of late,’ Zeb went on excitedly. ‘He’s come home with his tail between his legs.’
‘When was it?’ Caro asked.
‘The tenth of September. That’s the fourth in a row: Naseby, Lang-port, Bridgwater and now Bristol.’
‘They are going to win,’ I said. My brother and wife-to-be stared back at me, unspeaking.
‘I heard him telling the Mistress about it,’ said Zeb at last. His eyes shone. ‘They are all frighted now. There were stores lost from the whole of the West at Bridgwater, and Fairfax got between the King’s army and Bristol.’
‘And took Bristol itself! O brave Fairfax!’ I could have capered with glee. ‘To put down their precious Rupert.’
This prince was the King’s own nephew, and had sworn to hold that city for His Majesty. There were many who considered him a kind of evil spirit, for he was monstrous tall and fearless in battle. What was more, he had been seen to converse with a familiar in the shape of a white dog, and though this dog had been killed at Marston Moor, yet the man continued cunning beyond mortal power. Once, I had overheard some guests say at table that had the King but been advised by Rupert, the upstarts and the common sort would have been crushed utterly. Now Fairfax had crushed him.
‘We are going to see new times,’ murmured Zeb. ‘But fields of dead, first.’ He turned to go out, pausing at the door to add, ‘They slit women’s faces at Naseby.’
‘Lord protect us from the Cavaliers!’ Caro gasped.
‘It wasn’t the Cavaliers did it, Sister.’ Zeb cocked an eyebrow and was gone.
I pictured a face slit across. The blade would rip up lips and cheeks, catch in the gristle of a septum on its way to the eyes. Caro was saying something but I could hear nothing of it for the pounding in the back of my head. Suddenly my father spoke there and in my breast all at once, saying, I have pursued mine enemies, and destroyed them; and turned not again until I had consumed them.
Amen, I answered him in my heart. It was needless speaking aloud, for I had found over the years that he made himself known only to me, and though the Voice might shake the flesh on my bones, yet none but myself could hear it.
FOUR
Espousal
The night before my wedding I was restless, jostling and kicking poor Izzy until at last he pinched me. There are few things so lonely as watching while others sleep; I lit a candle and stretched out on my back, staring round the room and thinking how odd it was that I should never again lie there. The ceiling in our chamber was unpainted, but its plainness was crazed and fissured into shapes like those seen in clouds or maps, the surface throwing up ridges and crevices as the yellow light lapped against them. A smudge in the far corner was a cobweb which had been spun in Patience’s absence, and over the bed there was the familiar three-branched crack which I had seen every morning and night since we left Mother’s cottage in the village.
&nbs
p; Zeb had told me he could not remember our old house, with its pear trees and the lozenges, gules et noir, set in the window of the room where we slept as boys and where perhaps young brothers might be sleeping now while the Cullens, dispossessed, stewed in a fusty servants’ chamber at Beaurepair.
Zeb. I had spoken gently to him, and he to me. I judged my brother and myself to be natural opposites, blended of quite different humours, yet as I lay there something I had not thought on in years came back to my mind, and ruffled it. When first we moved to the big house, Zeb and I slept together in the bed I now shared with Izzy. My elder brother turned in with Stephen, a lad who was since dead of eating tainted meat, and it seemed to me that there had been kindness between Zeb and myself. On saints’ days (the Mistress still kept these, and though heathen they were not unwelcome to us servants) I had been fishing, and swimming, with him; I was sure it was Zeb, and not Izzy, who had once made me laugh so hard that beer came out of my nose and I was sent down from table. Was it when Stephen died, and Peter came, that my brothers had changed places in the chamber? It might be that Izzy had wanted the change, for Peter snored in tiny grunts like a dreaming dog; but Zeb and I were never the same again. He withdrew from me; I began to find him wilful and spoilt.
Our room was that night too hot, as it was most nights from April to October, and the grey of dawn showed that, though the casement was open, mist beaded the inner panes. The scent of hard-worked bodies hung in the air like the whiff of some disagreeable mushroom and I wondered how many pints of sweat I had breathed in over the years, along with essences of feet and farts and garlic. My Lady’s grand chamber smelt of rose otto and occasionally, when Sir John had paid his wife a visit, of wine, while the room set aside for myself and Caro had as yet no perfume but emptiness and dust. I turned over and sniffed the pillow, finding my own smell mingled with Izzy’s, and thought, Clean linen for us tomorrow, and for some reason the red glass came to mind.
When our young master, as we called him in the presence of Godfrey, might be fifteen and myself perhaps some two years older, a Venetian visitor brought him a birthday gift – a newfangled glass cup from an island where the people are expert in the crafting of such things. It was presented at the midday meal, first to Sir John that he might look at the workmanship. Standing behind the Master, I craned my neck, marvelling and longing to touch. The thing was like blood frozen and carved, all even, pure and crystalline, a scarlet flower with chains of bubbles intertwined in the stem.