by Maria McCann
Sitting wrapped in the cloth, I waited for my skin to dry off, not yet ready to go back to the rest. Fears distracted me, and there was none I could share them with. All the last fortnight, over and against the futility of poles and sods and planks, I had been sorely tormented by the nightmare. Unable to move, I saw Ferris run over the fields of Hell and there fall, dragged down by demons. The Voice had whispered again and again that my cruelty had made a desert between us, and my deceit would be the end of us entirely.
I was slowly, sadly getting by heart my lesson, namely that I would never again be privileged with him. The secret that was Caro was eating within me, yet how could I open it to him – such an ugly wound as that? I pictured myself telling him of the wedding night, saw his eyes sharpen with bitter understanding, and I shuddered. There remained but one small and miserable hope. If I waited, practising humility, a day might come that would make us friends again.
The sun was now entirely gone from the wood. Beginning to feel cold, I dressed as quickly as my damp limbs would let me. There would be no talk of Caro. Sloughing off the skin of falsehood would not do, for as the tatters were peeled away they revealed fresh sores beneath. If he would only put his arms round me, press his forehead to mine as Izzy used to, and say, ‘I forgive you,’ I would serve for him as that other Jacob served for Rachel, not seven years perhaps but all the time Sir George allowed. All he knew now was that I had seized hold of him. He refused to remember that I had loved him soul as well as body, loved him in the army before there was anything fleshly between us. He could not see this, because the first time he found me stretched out and the boys cutting my hair he knew what I might be to him. Cruel, to put the water to my lips and then take it away. My lover was a good man, and passionate, and unjust.
We ate after darkness had fallen for the sake of the cool air. I sat apart, watching the cooking fire and the figure of a woman, who could only be Susannah, moving back and forth as she tended some rabbits being stewed in a pot over the flames. At least, I guessed they were rabbits, since we had rarely anything else.
Jonathan and Hepsibah were on the opposite side of the cauldron, facing towards me: I could see their cheeks all orange. From time to time Jonathan jabbed the air with his finger to give emphasis to his speech. Catherine and Hathersage, shameless, were still in the dairy. I wondered did he have his hand, or something else, up her skirt. Earlier I had heard Jeremiah telling Caro about a Christmas pig-killing he had seen done so badly that the meat had been spoilt, and the slaughterman’s head plunged in the midden by the enraged family who had looked forward a whole year to the roast. Caro’s squeals of laughter vied for loudness with those of any dying pig. But now they had moved themselves closer to the fire and I was free to rehearse a speech which I could never deliver, a confession and declaration of love in one. I repeated it until the words were grown into my tongue.
A body dropped wearily onto the grass at my side. Ferris. I was at once torn between the pleasure of his sitting there, and the fear that he would soon go.
My friend’s face was mostly in shadow, but I could see the liquid gleam of an eye, and the edge of his mouth, curving upwards. A gentle look. I waited like a boy for him to speak.
‘It is good to have the dairy finished,’ he began.
‘Aye.’
‘A weary job. But for you, we’d be at it for weeks to come.’ The smile had got into his voice.
My heart quickened. The words were something like praise of my strength, and that way lay everything I wanted. I could not help myself, but turned towards him eagerly. ‘I do what I can.’
A few seconds passed. Ferris sniffed and laughed. ‘Lavender! You’ve been scrubbing yourself again?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘I never met one like you for washing. You’ll wear out your skin.’
‘You had your own bed from a boy. I always had to share with others and I didn’t like their smell.’
‘What, not your own brothers?’
‘More when we went for servants. Too many men stinking in one hot chamber.’
‘Everyone sweats.’ He said more softly, ‘I’ve seen you sweat in your time.’
Something in his voice made me think not of work, but of his thighs and belly slippery against mine. The scent of stewed rabbit blew across the grass, bringing spit to my mouth.
Ferris shifted position and breathed in sharply.
‘You are hurt?’ I asked.
‘Only a blistered foot.’
‘Rest it.’
‘It is nothing. In any case, I must go for Becs’s letter.’
‘I will.’ I tried not to sound as if I were begging. ‘Let me go, Ferris.’
‘That’s a thought. Hold, Jacob, I can give you the money now.’ He fumbled in the dark and pulled up a purse from his belt. ‘Take whatever’s here – and some drink at the inn, you’ll have earned it.’
His fingers brushed my palm in giving the purse to me.
‘Will we ever hear from Sir Timothy Heys, think you?’ I asked, afraid he would now go away. My breathing was uneven; I wondered if he heard that.
He sighed. ‘No. But Sir George will keep faith all right.’
There was a hollow bong, bong: Susannah beating the side of the cauldron to call people to their food. Ferris and I groaned as one, tired after the day’s work and almost fain to sleep on the grass rather than rise and eat. We struggled upright. I waited as he stood stretching his arms and legs, until he was ready to walk back with me.
We sat down by the fire and I held out his plate for Susannah to put rabbit onto it. She took my own dish with a wrench and gave me no more than anyone else. Usually I hoped she would be the one wielding the spoon for in general she favoured me when there was anything good to be had.
‘You have this,’ said Ferris after a while, putting half of his rabbit stew by my knee. He sprawled on his back in the grass. Almost at once I heard his breath catch, the beginning of a snore, and his arm, suddenly outflung, narrowly missed the food. I moved the plate away and watched him sleep, so near, so open and undefended, that desire sharpened in me like the knife he had held to my throat. ‘Come, Susannah,’ I urged. ‘I spoke the truth as I saw it, without respect of persons.’
Susannah looked up from the cauldron, which she was scouring as we spoke. I saw charred bones from the previous night’s rabbit among the ashes. Fresh little clouds raced across the sky.
‘Where’s your loyalty?’ she demanded. ‘All we asked was a piece of stone, and you spoke against it!’
‘You still got it,’ I said.
‘No thanks to my friend Jacob. The money wasn’t yours! I guess you wanted him to spend it on you.’
I walked away a few yards to hide my anger. Ever since the debate about the marble Susannah had been cold with me. She was unjust; it had never been my intention to thwart her.
‘Susannah, let us be reasonable—’ I turned to see her scrubbing the pot so furiously that her cheeks shook in time with her hand. Her jaw was clenched and her skin shiny from hair to breast. I saw from this bodily frenzy that had I been a woman, she would have flown at me. Susannah and I would have torn each other’s hair and might well be friends again after. Ferris had once warned me in the New Model that being so big I should bear myself meekly, for a man insulted by me could not strike out and get it over with. When I laughed at this he grew insistent, telling me of men shot by their own side on the battlefield to pay off some longstanding score. Now I saw that women were to men as those others were to me, and this was why they resorted to poison. I stared at the cookpot.
‘Even Jane spoke up for us,’ Susannah ground out between her teeth.
Before I could stop myself I said, ‘Don’t get in too thick with Jane.’
‘I could say the same to others,’ she grunted.
The breath caught in my throat.
Susannah started on the outside of the pot. ‘You don’t go to him any more, do you?’
‘Susannah,’ I implored in a whisper, te
rrified lest someone in the huts overhear us. ‘Don’t destroy me utterly for the sake of a marble slab.’
‘Well?’ She did lower her voice somewhat. ‘Is it off with the old and on with the new?’
‘There is nothing less likely,’ I said. ‘Myself and Sister Jane!’
Susannah stopped her scrubbing and stood hands on hips. She frowned as if about to say something.
‘Well?’ I said.
She shook her head and rolled the pot along the ground until she found a dirty part. She then commenced rubbing at it. I could not make her out. Perhaps Ferris had been right after all, and there was more in this than injured friendship.
‘I may talk with her but that’s as far as it will ever go,’ I said.
‘It’s nothing to me what you do,’ she returned. The frantic scouring slowed, softened, as if she were trying out her hand against the metal. At last it halted altogether and she stood staring at me. There was some obscure matter in that look. If it were a declaration of love, I thought, I would not stay to hear it.
‘Enough of Jane,’ I said. ‘For the marble, I humbly beg your pardon – nay, more—’ I knelt on the grass and smiled to her. ‘Come, hit me, and be friends after.’
Susannah left the cauldron, strode up to me and stood within striking range. She rolled up her sleeves over full, fleshy forearms, sturdy from years of lifting, and it came to me that she might well break my nose.
‘Understand me,’ she said. I looked up into her face and saw the loose flesh hanging in swags, making her aged and ugly.
She went on, ‘What I know I will keep close.’
‘Your kindness, Sister—’
‘You’re not the only one to consider. But Wisdom has come close to stumbling over you, so has Catherine, and I decoyed them away. Now, you may watch out for yourself.’
‘There is nothing to catch me at,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say there was, I said I will do no watching out for you. Understand?’
I nodded.
‘Remember, then,’ she said.
‘Enough! Come on, I’ll close my eyes. Hit me and get it over with.’
I did close them, stiffening my jaw in anticipation of the blow. I heard her step back, and I clenched my fists. Nothing happened. The thought crossed my mind that she would kiss me instead, and at this idea I could not help smiling.
‘You’re a fine big fellow, eh?’ There was new anger in her voice. ‘Presenting yourself like that. Stinking with pride.’
‘Do it,’ I said.
She cleared her throat twice, raking the phlegm. Was she going to spit at me? I wanted to say, ‘Hurry up,’ but was prevented by a sudden fear that she was waiting for me to open my mouth so she could spit in it.
I heard a sound some feet away. Perhaps someone else was come. I raised a hand to cover my lips. ‘Susannah?’
Silence, apart from a soft wind in the grass. I opened my eyes to see her walking to the cauldron. She began scouring it again, her back to me. Scrubbing dry lips on my shirt, I got up hoping none had seen us.
About mid-morning Ferris took me over to the sough.
‘Supposing Sir George lets us live,’ he began, ‘we should consider winter drainage.’
‘Jonathan says this is beyond repair,’ I said.
He smiled at me. We were standing on the edge of the tumbled pit, the ruins of his first great project. Grass lay in limp ribbons over what had been bare earth, and at the bottom of the bowl there was a kind of quagmire, the water thick and greenish.
‘A frog Heaven,’ he said. ‘Still, it drained off the field a bit. You can see the difference.’
‘The frogs will put you down in their histories,’ I answered.
‘Though men will not. That’s your meaning, eh? I will never be famous.’
‘Famous men have bad deaths,’ I said.
‘This is a sough, Jacob, not the Tower of London. Do you think we could smooth out the sides and make it a pond?’
We walked around it. ‘The field could do with more,’ I admitted. ‘But will we be here in the spring to profit by it?’
‘No,’ he said at once.
‘Then why, in God’s name?’
‘To see the thing through to the end.’
‘I don’t see the good of it.’ I hacked at the edge of the sough with my foot and some crumbling clods dropped away into the slime at the bottom. ‘Unless Sir George has died,’ I said. ‘He’s choleric, by all accounts. Or he might be gone to war.’
‘The heir will be no kinder to us, God rot him.’ Ferris clapped his hands together. ‘Forget them. I have a notion of a long trough between here and the field, lined with tiles. There are Dutch ones to be had in London, an excellent design.’
He looked up at me, eyes bright, then faltered. The word ‘London’ festered in the air between us.
‘You will go see Aunt and bring back some tiles,’ I said, as a man might say,’ ‘You will go to Paradise in my stead.’ It was a feat of courage to bring out that word ‘you’ in place of ‘we’.
‘This time.’ He looked kindly at me. ‘But when Aunt is better, Jacob, you could fetch things. And stay a while in town, since you like the place.’
I nodded, unsure what London would taste of without him.
‘Well,’ he went on. ‘I propose that we begin the ditch now. We will have to break off for harvest, but we should do what we can before the ground grows hard.’
‘For nothing?’ I asked. But I began to warm to the idea. Did he mean, I wondered, that the two of us would work apart from the rest? The hope aroused by that thought was agonising.
Ferris said, ‘Worst of all would be to fail of our own cowardice.’
We walked towards the centre of the camp.
‘The corn is coming on well,’ he said.
‘Too dry. We need rain.’
‘Have you been for the letter yet?’
‘I will do it now.’ I went towards my hut to collect the money, feeling an unease somewhere at the back of my head. It was not the Voice, but something else, and it picked at me like a needle probing a wound. At the doorway I stopped and looked back.
Ferris was watching me. ‘Are you going now?’
‘As I said.’
My unease grew. Was it because he was come round so quickly after so great a rage against me? Or it might be an ill omen. I would be struck down by someone on the road, maybe even the three who had preyed on Caro: a cudgel on the back of the head and my peace with Ferris sealed forever. I started across the field towards the inn. At the hedge, where we had watched Harry and Elizabeth disappear with their anvil and mule, I looked back. He was standing motionless near the huts. Having rounded the hedge I waited a few seconds and then looked again. Ferris had moved off towards the wood. I hesitated. To go back for no good reason was to act the fool, and I should have the whole journey to make again. Best fetch the letter, if there was one.
It was hot work walking. I endeavoured to overcome the turmoil in me by admiring the swell of the hills and the deep colour of the fields on either side of the road. How wonderful, I thought, if a man could walk here and say, All this is ours, for we work it, instead of This land all belongs to My Lord So-and-So. Then we might stroll or dig or sit us down to rest with a fishing rod, and no one to drive us off. This is ours, as far as the eye can see. No working for hire, for the good things of the earth would be our own. Ferris had said no freedom by Act of Parliament counted unless a man could readily find himself in food and other necessities, instead of selling his body to another to get coins before he could feed. And he further said that it was surely no part of God’s plan, if God there be, that the creation should not eat unless they could lay hand on a piece of metal (a thing in itself inedible) stamped with a tyrant’s name and likeness. For what was the money, in comparison with the man starving for the lack of it, but a lifeless, soulless part of the creation? And the man but the finest and most precious?
Fine and precious he was. I crushed down certain images which, b
orn of my heat and the few drops of encouragement he had lately sprinkled on me, were springing up more and more luxuriant.
The pamphlets were right, I reflected. Though the reading of them brought us to grief, they were the work of righteous men. Then I thought how the colony was also the work of a righteous man and would bring me more grief. With suchlike thoughts I tormented myself the rest of the way.
Heat swarmed up from the walls and flags as I entered the yard of the inn. A huge rambling rose clung wantonly to one wall, sweetening the blend of horses and sour yeast which hung about the place. As always, the inner part, dark after the sun, brought on an attack of blindness until the eye steadied itself. A pale young girl came down the stairs to tell me that the landlord was in the back talking to the ostlers, and did not allow her to give out letters to people.
‘But he will be back directly he is finished,’ said she.
‘Then give me some ale if you please.’ My throat was like sand. I went to sit in a corner booth and she brought me the drink. I could no longer shake off the feeling that had dogged me ever since I set out for the inn. Well, I had not been attacked on the road and I did not think it would come to that on the way back. Could there be a letter to say that Aunt was dead?
There was a juddering at the bar door as someone tried to come in but was hindered by the bottom end of the door catching in the frame. A crash followed as it flew open, freed by a kick, and banged against the wall on the inside.
‘God damn it, go tell Hector he’s to come and take care o’ this now,’ came an exasperated voice. ‘I told him Tuesday—’ the angry noise broke off and I saw the landlord’s face behind the bar, peering over towards my booth.
‘Come for letters,’ the girl said. I swallowed the last of the ale and advanced towards them.
‘Ah yes, sir, I recall you.’ Though the man smiled, his eyes were all over my torn and stained clothes. ‘Is Mister Ferris unwell?’
‘Nothing serious. He has a blistered foot, and would rather I did the walking.’