by Maria McCann
The pedant cut in. ‘You, Sir,’ he cried, ‘I hope you never do offer violence. I should fancy that when you resent something there are few men would stand against you!’
I tried to make myself clear. ‘My word was repent, not—’
But the fool was listening no more than before. He invited Ferris to join him in roasting the stranger.
‘I imagine our tall friend here generally carries the day. Crushes all opposition, hey?’ He made to feel the muscles in my arm and I knocked his hand off my sleeve. How I did not knife him there and then is still a wonder to me.
Ferris smiled grimly. ‘You would indeed do well to avoid his resentment. But suppose our friend – you understand I speak of him only for the sake of an example?’
The other man nodded. Ferris shot a look at me which filled me with dread, and continued, ‘As you remarked, Mister – Cullen? – is well equipped to compel obedience. But friendship, love – these are not to be compelled.’
‘But what has this to do with evil habits and repentance?’ asked the schoolmaster.
‘I mean that repeated offences, even when they secure forgiveness, drive out love. And from that I came to say that one may compel obedience but never love.’
‘That’s every husband’s tragedy, eh?’ smiled the other. ‘Still, obedience is much in a woman.’
‘A dog’s virtue,’ said Ferris, turning his head away as if sick of the talk. ‘Those who would enforce it should marry with the beasts.’
The schoolmaster hawed, decided that my friend was joking after all, and settled back in his seat with a philosophical sigh as if to say, Well, what of it.
The darts Ferris had shot into me now poisoned my breast with the most intense fear and shame. I again felt the sheets pulling on my thigh as I ground my weight into him. A woman thus put to it can call for help. He could not, and as he tried to grapple with me I got a hold on his arm and set about enforcing obedience—
‘Mister Ferris!’ I cried. Some of the other passengers broke off their chatter at the sudden loudness of my speech. ‘You are in the right – love is, is—!’
He raised his eyebrows in mockery and I remembered a knee in the small of his back. My throat closed up.
For a moment the sea-grey eyes rested on mine. I stared back, pleading with him, but he dropped his eyelids and shut me out. The coach staggered over the uneven ground and I had to go to the window, heaving and gasping with my own vileness. Back in my seat, my forehead wet with perspiration, I watched his head roll against the wood behind him, studied the shape of his mouth.
The schoolmaster was grown very quiet and had perhaps at last some glimmer of what he had stumbled into. Much I cared, just then. I was already burning alive.
Passengers got out, got in. The people with the baby left us and were replaced by a withered crone who stank of piss. At one stage, having nodded off, I woke suddenly with the feeling that something was wrong. Ferris had moved to the window. There he spent the rest of the journey, staring out of it, dull grey light clinging about his cheeks. Motionless, he put me in mind of a statue I had seen somewhere, but no sculptor would give his statue a face of such sullen intensity. The schoolmaster had long since reached his destination, leaving Ferris and myself strangers again.
A fine spray speckled the seats and floor near the window. He had guessed the weather aright. I saw the yellow hair darken, little drops running off the ends of it. Ferris stayed where he was. Once he had looked up to me with dripping hair, his face bright with candlelight, and brighter with love. When was that?
We slowed as the coach splashed through country roads brimming with ruts and rainwater, and the wheels sank into clay. At the thought of wet huts and clothes to endure along with my shame and pain, I was tempted to jump from the coach and walk back to London. I could seek refuge with Harry. But I caught myself in this delusion, that I had been secretly hoping that Ferris would leap from the coach after me. In truth I was more likely to stand in the mud and watch him go out of my life forever, staring back at me from the window with his statue’s eyes. I was not made to be loved. The flesh was a different thing; once I had thought none would ever look at me (that was when I lived always with Zeb) but even then – I pulled my thoughts away from Caro. In the army was Ferris, and then the glances of the London people had told me that I was far from ugly. But I was afflicted with an ugliness of soul that no physick could correct. Though Ferris stayed unmoving at the window, he was leaving me, just as surely as if I were got down into the road while the coach rolled away.
The door was pushed open and he stepped down; I heard the splosh as he landed outside. The driver handed him his pack and he slung it across his shoulders as he marched away, slipping a little on the wet ground. My pack took longer to untie from the roof of the coach. By the time the swearing coachman had dangled it down to me and I had fastened the thing in place, Ferris was some fifty paces off. I followed without much spirit, trying to read his walk for signs of relenting. He held himself as upright as the pack permitted and went at a fierce pace, recalling to me that first day in the colony when I had given him too heavy a load and he had set his jaw and carried it. It came to me that with such resolve he had the makings of an excellent soldier. But then again I thought not, for soldiers must obey.
The first person I saw was Hathersage. He looked up from his hoe as Ferris approached and they waved each to the other, then Hathersage ran towards my cruel friend as if he were the Prodigal Son, shouting the news to the others so that in a short time Ferris was surrounded by an eager group. I saw hands clutched, embraces, kisses pressed on dear Brother Christopher. They waved to me, too, and smiled in my direction, but none would quit him to welcome me, such a difference they made between us. O Brother Wisdom, I said to myself, did you but know what this man, that you fawn on, did with me in London every night but one! The things he freely yielded who now, if we were in Hell together, would not give me a gentle look!
I came up with them. They still had hold of Ferris, who was answering their questions in his ragged voice. Aunt was in the way to recovery and we had brought back some newfangled tools. His sincere thanks for their prayers, which had doubtless been effective. Had there been any sign of movement from Sir George? Was all well with the crops?
The colonists greeted me with a civil but cursory word or two, before turning back to their darling. Only Susannah sought me, moving away from the huddle and holding out her hand with pleasant frankness. ‘Well Brother Jacob, I trust you had good cheer in London? Brother Christopher says you have new knives and axe-heads in your pack.’
‘He says true.’ I lowered my voice. ‘And something for you, Susannah.’
‘For me? A gift?’
I would be glad to get away from Ferris and his disciples.
Inside the dry space of the tent I laid the pack down and began unfastening the strings.
‘I can’t think what it can be,’ she mused. ‘Did I ask you for something?’
‘Close your eyes and hold out your hands,’ I said.
She did so. ‘Hurry, Jacob, I’m mad with curiosity!’
‘Now don’t expect silver and gold, for there’s none,’ I warned her. ‘Sniff, can’t you smell anything?’
She snorted. ‘Lavender, is it? You brought lavender?’
I laughed at her puzzled face. ‘Here.’ I put a washball in each outstretched hand.
‘Ah!’ As her fingers closed on them her eyes opened and she turned a smile of pure joy on me. ‘You are too kind. Too kind.’
‘An easy errand.’ I had covered the rest of the washballs and did not intend to leave them in the tent. ‘The only thanks I require is that you be so good as not to mention them to anyone,’ I warned, for I had no wish to share with the others.
‘Not even Catherine,’ she promised, and at once stuffed the things between her breasts.
‘Thank you, thank you, Jacob.’
She whirled about to go like a much younger woman, paused, ran back and kissed my hand befor
e dancing out of the tent. I was left smiling despite the pain between myself and Ferris. I could tell by the business-like way she had stored my gift in her bosom, anything but flirtatious, that he was wrong about her being soft on me, but I thought I might count her a friend. The odd thing was that I had never intended to make such a gift, yet her fair greeting when the rest could scarce spare me a word, being all of them wrapped up in Ferris, had called to something in me – a sudden need to share and be thanked. How did men make themselves loved, I wondered. I had passed all my life with men who were loved but I seemed never to have learnt the lesson.
Left alone, I began to unwrap the axe-heads. They were beautifully keen and heavy. I balanced the largest on my palm and tested the edge with my thumb. No wonder, I thought, that lords and ladies chose to the by the axe rather than the noose. I laid out the deadly things on one of the crude tables knocked together by Harry, until there should be time to fit them with stocks.
I was just searching for a good place to store the knives when I heard the words ‘such an assault’ spoken by someone, perhaps Jonathan, outside the tent. It was followed by the words ‘like the beasts’ and I knew the second speaker, whose voice cracked with contempt, for Ferris.
There was not time to feel anything save the terrified certainty that he had accused me. Sweat burst out all over my skin and my legs turned to water. Trying to keep upright, I clawed at a pile of baskets near to me, and the two men entered just in time to see myself and the baskets drop together.
Jonathan and Ferris were kneeling either side of me, Jonathan fanning my face with my hat.
‘All’s well,’ he said soothingly. He held up my hand and I saw I was clutching a long-bladed knife, as if I had been in a fight. I wiped my brow, letting the knife drop to the grass.
‘You were lucky. Could’ve fell on it,’ Jonathan explained as if to a child, and indeed I was very like one, a child confused and horribly afraid of being found out in my wickedness. His voice and manner, however, were gentle.
Ferris, on the other side, had placed himself a little further off, letting the other man touch and fan me. He stood up now, and, saying to Jonathan, ‘He overdid the drink last night. That’ll be the root of it,’ went out of the tent.
Jonathan whistled. ‘Have you and him fallen out, then?’
‘Not for the first time.’ I did not want his curiosity or sympathy, and I was trying to find a way round to the question burning my tongue. At last I hit on, ‘Where were you? Just outside?’
‘Aye. Telling him about Sister Jane.’
I showed my incomprehension.
‘Didn’t Susannah tell you? I saw the two of you come in here—’ his expression grew sly. ‘Perhaps you’d other things to talk about.’
‘To the point,’ I begged. ‘You were talking of Sister Jane?’
‘Sister Jane, or Mistress Allen as we called her at first, came to us the day you left for London. Myself and Jeremiah went to the inn to see was there any word from you, and on the way back we came on two men and a young lad, all set upon the one woman. In broad daylight.’
I almost smiled with relief, but kept a sober face to ask who had done the thing and why.
‘None knows who they were. The lad was no more than twelve, a right little spawn of Satan he must be! Thought she had some money, it seems, but she had none, so they beat her right in the road. When we ran up they shogged off.’
‘They were three against two,’ I remarked.
‘Not good enough odds for them.’
So Ferris had kept his humiliation to himself. I struggled to fix my mind on Jonathan’s tale and show myself properly impressed.
‘And Sister Jane is become one of us?’
‘Oh yes.’ Jonathan’s head jerked up and down for emphasis. ‘She’s had to. She was in no condition to be wandering on the road – apart from being beaten, I mean. Even with one of us either side, she could hardly get along.’
‘She was sick?’
Jonathan paused, enjoying himself. ‘We put her with Hepsibah directly, for it seemed there was no time to be lost, and by night there was a child born.’
I gasped. ‘And lived?’
‘Aye, that he did! The beating brought him on too soon, but he looks set to live. God has sent us a good sign – the uplifting of the oppressed and the coming of a little child.’
It was extraordinary what I had contrived to miss in my brief time away.
‘A great mercy,’ I remarked. ‘And will we see more of these heroes, think you? Could they be from the village?’
‘Discharged soldiers, most like. Here, can you get up now?’
I took the hand he extended to me and found that I hardly needed it. ‘She didn’t greet Ferris,’ I observed as I got to my feet.
‘No, most likely feeding the child. She’s not an ill-looking lass, under the black and blue, but you and I are spoken for, eh?’
Again the spear of terror through my side before common sense told me he meant Susannah. ‘O, are you there? Ferris is under the same mistake,’ I told him. ‘You’ll find out your folly in time. By the way, what of the other sister? Is she betrothed to Hathersage?’
‘That you must ask her.’ He smiled at me. ‘There, a better colour in your cheeks. I’d best get back to my chopping.’
‘Many thanks, Jonathan.’ Again I turned to the pack and this time emptied it apart from the precious washballs.
Making for the door, I met Ferris coming in with his own pack. He stepped round me without a word, and I thought, If you want me to beg you will wait a long time. Yet had he said to me, Beg, I would have thrown myself on the ground, and I walked away from the tent straining my ears lest he should call me back.
Some of the washballs I had meant to give to him. Instead I packed them in my bedstraw, hoping they would not be eaten by the little creatures God sends to torment us. Having hidden them I opened the hut door, and in came a fine rain. Water dripped from the turf roof and I determined I would not work in the fields that day. Something disturbed the rooks and they swirled in a cloud about the edge of the wood and settled again. The whole scene filled me with disgust at this foolish project, the filth of our daily lives, the risk we were wantonly running from Sir George. I had blinded myself, delivered myself into the hands of the Philistines. It came to me that there is more than one kind of blindness, and I recalled the last sweet night we had passed in London, thinking that had I known it was our last I would have savoured it like a water drop in Hell. I had not known, and the joy was fled, and I had broken the thing between us. I lay on the bed, looking out at the colourless sky, and gave myself up to sorrow.
‘Will you eat?’
Someone was standing at the door of the hut, a woman; that much I could make out though it was almost dark. I blinked and thought I recognised Susannah’s build.
‘Jacob, will you eat? I kept some back for you. Jonathan says you fainted.’
‘Not exactly.’ It was indeed Susannah. Behind her, a couple holding hands, who must of course be Catherine and Wisdom. Only wait, my turtledoves, I thought. It never lasts.
‘Are you ill?’ Susannah went on. ‘Jacob?’
I sat up and considered my condition. The headache of the morning had unclenched and there was a sensation of faint hunger where before had been nausea.
‘Rabbit,’ came Hathersage’s voice. ‘Jeremiah worked the snares while you were away.’
At least it was not beans. I stood up and stretched. ‘Thank you, friends.’
We squelched over the sodden grass, trying not to slip. I wondered if I must now square myself to having Susannah, and not Ferris, as my dearest friend. That would be walking on wooden legs, and I would choose London and Harry rather than bear it, or rather not choose, for I could not bear it.
The fire was lit and most folk, having eaten, were sprawled about in talk. Jonathan was singing and though his voice was sweet he had much ado to remember the words, so that I ended by wishing he would stop. It was like the army, looking round a
t everyone but seeking only one. He was nowhere to be seen, and I sat among my brothers and sisters eating my heart out with a pain I could not share.
Susannah put a bowl of boiled rabbit and greens on the damp grass next to my hand. ‘Come, get this down and you’ll feel better.’
‘Will I?’
I took up the bowl however, and a spoon she had brought me, having now lost the one he gave me at Winchester. The meat was not bad, and – wonder of wonders – there was enough of it.
‘Jeremiah has luck with the snares,’ I remarked.
‘Not bad,’ she replied. Then, touching my sleeve very softly so that none but us two perceived it, she went on, ‘Brother Christopher eats nothing.’
I considered this, and her touch, in silence. Jonathan began on a new song.
‘Supposing a friend carried a message?’ she asked softly.
My throat tightened at this kindness. ‘Then you would be my messenger, Susannah. But there’s nothing to be done.’
‘Pray,’ she advised me. ‘Pray, and wait.’
I wanted to ask, Pray to the Devil? For surely God could not want things mended between him and me.
As if reading my mind, she went on, ‘Implore God for the best thing for all of us. What that best thing is, let Him decide.’
‘I am so sinful, have such difficulty in humbling myself to His will,’ I replied, half smiling.
‘We’re all in the same boat there,’ she said. ‘As for humbling you, He can bring that about without your aid.’
‘Food and a sermon,’ I teased her. ‘My thanks for all of it.’
‘Here, have some cheat.’ She offered me a chunk of the hard bread. ‘I have been thinking of you this last week.’
‘Of me?’
‘I was reading in my Bible and I made a note of the place, look,’ and she pulled out something from her bosom. I looked surprised and she laughed. ‘I do take things out as well as put them in. The washballs are gone.’
I took the piece of paper she offered me but could not read it in the dark, so folded it and put it up my sleeve.