The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  Fair enough. But Jesus told Martha she was wrong. He told her that she was bothered about many things, whereas ‘Verily only one is needful. Mary hath chosen that good part which should not be taken away from her.’

  Jesus was unjust. Someone always has to prepare the food, and serve it, and clear it away, even though there will always be something else more interesting and enjoyable that she would prefer to be doing. That is how life is. That is what life is. Mary was selfish, sitting with Jesus, drinking in his words, leaving everything that had to be done to her sister.

  Hugh and John insisted that nothing was more important than attending on the words of Jesus. Still, someone has to get the dinner and wash the pots. At home, I was Martha and did not like it. Though even if I had the courage to be Mary, there was no Jesus in Bruton at whose feet I might sit. Hugh and John did not quite qualify.

  When my birth-pains began it was night. No one saw Mistress Dempster the midwife coming to our house. Mistress Dempster is quite young, her mother was a midwife before her. She has dark and warty skin and a crooning way of speaking. My father fetched her from her bothy up in the woods and then absented himself till morning.

  Mistress Dempster brought Our Lady’s Girdle with her. It was our most solemn relic, kept in a gold box in the Abbey chapel. I had never seen it, though I knew that pilgrims to Bruton Abbey had to pay to kneel in veneration before the gold box and receive blessings from Our Lady. It used, in olden times, to be lent to women heavy with child who had to go on a journey.

  ‘I begged it from the Sacristan’, she said, ‘just for the one night.’

  It is a little shocking that the Sacristan allowed this. A sign of the times. Or maybe, as Jeanne believed, Mistress Dempster is a witch.

  ‘You may be the next one to be going on a journey,’ she said, ‘from what I feel in my bones.’

  She unwrapped the Girdle it in the firelight. It was just a broad ribbon of thin red silk fading to brown, transparent.

  ‘The King’s own mother, they say, wore it for her lying-in. And I have been shown pictures,’ said Mistress Dempster, ‘where Our Lady is wearing it. She favours red.’

  I touched the Girdle. The roughness of my fingers snagged on the frail stuff. She hung the Girdle from the high shelf where we keep our cooking pots, securing it with the foot of a skillet, so that I could see it from my mattress.

  My baby is a boy. He is perfect. He was born, for the record, just before dawn in mid-February 1535. He lies in the bed with me, and I feed him, and talk to him, and touch him everywhere on his little body, and he is mine and I am his. I call him Peter. Peterkin.

  After a month my mother wrapped him up and took him away. I feared she would. I did not ask her what she was going to do with him. Some of the answers she might give were so terrible that I would not want to hear the words. Perhaps she was going to lay him down in the woods and leave him there.

  She turned at the door and said, ‘He is going where he ought to be. It has been arranged.’

  She was too angry with me to tell me what was going to happen to my child.

  ‘Tell them his name is Peterkin.’

  It was Mistress Dempster who let me know that Peter Mompesson’s sister lost her husband in a flood, and then their new-born child died, and she had breasts full of milk and much sorrow. I know the sister by sight, she looks healthy. My child was to become her child. She was living now with Peter and their father up in Brewham. My baby would be growing up under the eye of his own father, who would be also his uncle. My father had gone up to Brewham to make his peace with his old enemy’s grandson for the sake of my child.

  A farmhouse, full of light and warmth, and the voices and bright looks of Peter and his sister. Peterkin in a cradle by the hearth.

  I too had breasts full of milk and they ached and leaked. I hid my face under my blanket and the stony feeling came into my heart, which is still there always. I was shut outside everything that I wanted. I was forbidden to see Peter. Being at home was an exile.

  When my father told me I was going to be a nun in Shaftesbury Abbey, it was a relief of a dark sort. A gateway opening on to – I knew not what. I had no religious vocation. But it would be a new life in a new world. Above all, there would be books.

  ‘But how can I go there? A girl like me? They only take in the well-born. Not the daughters of common people.’

  I felt ashamed for implying that Thomas Peppin, my dear good father, was lowly born.

  ‘You are well-born. Through your mother.’

  Then he told how my mother’s father, my grandfather, was a FitzJames, cousin to Sir John FitzJames of Redlynch – a big man in our parish and a big man in the great world. This cousin had sired the child who became my mother with his own stepsister. The little girl was fostered out with a Redlynch tenant farmer.

  ‘I was stockman then at Redlynch. I saw your mother when she was fifteen. I knew what she was and I said I would marry her.’

  He paused, and then:

  ‘Agnes, your mother was lovely as a flower.’

  Her father agreed, and set my father up in the butchery in Bruton on a lease from the Abbey on condition that he was never approached for money or for anything at all, ever again.

  My mother’s mother, afterwards, married a Hibberd. The Hibberds, said my father, are numerous around Tisbury, on the other side of the Forest, in Wiltshire.

  ‘I never met her at the time. She was not interested in her little bastard.’

  But after my baby was born, my father went to Tisbury and called upon her, and she proved not so hard-hearted. She paid a visit on my behalf to the Abbess of Shaftesbury, Dame Elizabeth Zouche, who was her distant kinswoman. Apparently the Abbess is often in Tisbury because Shaftesbury Abbey owns a big property there, Place Farm.

  ‘Can this girl read?’ the Lady Abbess asked my grandmother Hibberd. ‘Can she sing in tune? Is she healthy? Is she well-made, not deformed or ill-favoured or an idiot? We cannot take in any more unfortunates.’

  My father did not explain any of this easily. Short, broken sentences. Pauses, while he passed his big red hands over his face. At the end, sitting on the stool with his elbows on his knees, clasping and unclasping his hands, he looked straight at me.

  ‘Now you know.’

  All this time my mother had been lying on her mattress with her face averted. So intent was I on what my father was telling me, I had forgotten she was there, though it is her story more than mine.

  She said, ‘Does Agnes have to know all this?’

  ‘Agnes has the right.’

  I said that it seemed to me like a tale one might be told, a fairy story.

  My mother sat up.

  ‘There are stories like this’, she said, ‘in every family, down all the years all the way back to the beginning. The tales people tell are about what has always happened. Misbegotten children hidden or abandoned or done away with. Especially girl children. Like me. Or growing up fortunate and marrying well – the fairy-tale ending. With something horrid added, a witch, or a beast, or a spell or a curse. Story-tellers only half-know what happens. Like children.’

  I never heard her say so much at one time before. Whatever it was that made my mother not like other people, she was not witless.

  ‘Fairy tales,’ said my mother, ‘teach children what to be afraid of.’

  ‘I do not think I am afraid of much. Maybe of something or someone pouncing out at me in the dark.’

  My father grew impatient.

  ‘Give her the – thing – that you have.’

  My mother, groaning, got up off her bed and rummaged in the chest where we keep cheeses and spare cloths, scrabbling right down to the bottom, and brought out a small black bag. She threw it to my father. He stretched out an arm to catch it, and missed.

  It fell at my feet where I sat on the ground. I pulled the drawstring apart and in the bag was a curved stone on a silver chain. I held it to the firelight. It was carved into some sort of fish, with a turned-up snout and a
frill down its back. When I turned it between my fingers I saw that the underside was polished, and glinted deep green.

  It was an emerald, my father said. An emerald dolphin.

  ‘Don’t you remember them carting in the new bell for the church? No, you were too young. That bell has a dolphin scratched on it, the dolphin is the FitzJameses’ – there’s a word for it – it means that there’s a dolphin on everything that has anything to do with the FitzJameses.’

  Emblem. The word he wanted is emblem. Or crest.

  If my mother had been married off to a gentleman, I would have been somebody else. I would have been a gentlewoman. But I cannot wish that my father should be any other than he is.

  ‘Your grandfather gave it to your mother on the day she rode away with me, to be married.’

  He may have had some fond feelings after all, and wanted his child to know who she was.

  I wore the dolphin on its chain round my neck under my clothes from that day onwards, even in Shaftesbury Abbey, until my enemy in that place tore it off me.

  Jeanne and I returned to our lessons with the two young canons, and so heard more about what was going on than most people did. Hugh and John were consumed by events, and could not stop talking about Abbey affairs, often over our heads. So we knew that Our Lady’s Girdle was taken, a short while after my mother took Peterkin away. It was purloined by one of the King’s Commissioners, whose name was Dr Richard Layton.

  Poor Abbot Eley announced this grievous happening from the pulpit of St Mary’s. I was not there, but no one for a while talked of anything else – that is, until there was something else to talk about, which was that the King was taking a new wife, a Lady Anne Boleyn, while his wife Queen Catherine still lived. When we prayed now for the health of the Queen, the Abbot said, we must think of the Lady Anne and not of Queen Catherine. I was in the church on that occasion. His voice had no expression at all.

  I did see Dr Layton on the day he arrived. He rode with two other gentlemen down the High Street. They greeted no one as they crossed the bridge to the Abbey, as if Bruton people were animals and did not require a greeting. The ridiculous thing was that a second King’s Commissioner turned up later the same day, equally eager to take inventories of the gold and silver and to persuade the Abbot to make it all over to the King. This second Commissioner was called Dr Leigh. He was young and haughty and rude.

  ‘He foully abused the Abbot – a man of God and old enough to be his father,’ said Hugh Backwell, ‘for not being present in the gatehouse to welcome him when he arrived. But the Abbot had no warning that he was coming.’

  Hugh also witnessed an encounter between the two Commissioners in the Abbey cloister, with Dr Leigh poking Dr Layton in the chest and accusing him of interfering.

  But Dr Layton had arrived there first. ‘Go and boil your head!’ he said to the other.

  They came to blows. One of them might have been killed had both not remembered how much was at stake to their own advantage in the share-out. ‘Greed brought them to their senses’, said Hugh.

  The Abbot was impatient with pushy Dr Leigh. ‘That means more letters of complaint about our Abbot being sent to London, and we know what was written in them.’ The Abbot of Bruton was obstinate and difficult, the Commissioners reported, almost as obstinate and difficult as the Abbot of Glastonbury.

  Dr Layton, it appears, called the Girdle, our holy relic, ‘a quaint curiosity’.

  ‘He sent it up to London to Master Thomas Cromwell himself.’

  Hugh and John exchanged long meaningful glances but said no more to Jeanne and me about Thomas Cromwell. I had never heard that name mentioned before. Later I heard it all the time, as if he and not the King were in charge of all that happened.

  I never did, in all the time to come, set eyes on the fellow.

  The London people, said John, probably put less value on the Girdle than on the gold box in which it lay, now doubtless on Master Cromwell’s writing table.

  I was, then, the last woman in childbirth to benefit from its power.

  In June, the month in which I left home, Bruton was full of whispers. I have to say that it always is. Which tradesman’s business is failing, who has acquired a better strip on the town field, who is pregnant and by whom, which tenement is about to become available, who owns that neglected piece of sloping pasture at the top of St Catherine’s Hill, what exactly Mistress White said about Mistress Green which has caused the husband of one to assault the husband of the other behind the White Hart, leaving him so much bleeding meat.

  These whispers were different. The reason we no longer see the Abbot around the town, they said, was because he had been forbidden by the Commissioners to leave the Abbey precinct. Could that be so? His enemy John White was in jubilant mood. I saw him one night on the street, surrounded by his cronies, shaking his fist at the Abbey and shouting up at its walls:

  ‘I’m coming to get you, Eley!’ and then, ‘Don’t think you can escape what is coming to you!’

  They were throwing stones against the gatehouse, which nowadays is kept closed and barred most of the time. I felt shocked and ran away.

  I myself entered the precinct of Bruton Abbey for the first and only time shortly before I went away. My mother was called in the middle of the night to lay out an old canon. We went in through the wicket gate between St Mary’s Church and the Abbey, the one through which Hugh and John passed when they came to give us our lessons. We were admitted by a lanky canon with shreds of red hair around his tonsure whom I did not know. He introduced himself as Richard Halford. He led us straight to a high chamber lined with beds which was the Infirmary, and where by the light of two rushlights we began our work upon the corpse of a small and shrivelled man, a dead elf.

  Canon Richard Halford remained in the chamber, prowling about, keeping an eye on us, all the time that my mother worked on the elf. I passed her what she needed and brushed the bluebottles away. Bluebottles sense death from great distances. Within half an hour of a last breath the first bluebottle arrives, blundering its way through closed doors and shutters. They go for the face. That is why we pull a cover over the head at once, and not for any reasons of respect or propriety as many believe.

  Canons came and went in the room while we worked, crossing themselves in deference to the dead elf, and speaking to Richard Halford in quiet urgent voices. I pricked up my ears. I am such an eavesdropper.

  ‘Our father in God, our Abbot, is not sound. He puts us all in danger. I have received enquiries. What can I say? What answers can I give, when I am asked if I have heard him speak against the new Queen?’

  That was Richard Halford.

  Another voice: ‘Abbot Eley is a man of God and his own man. He follows his conscience.’

  ‘We each have a conscience. They do not lead all in the same direction. John White has a conscience, and a grievance, a dangerous combination. He has made accusations. John White would be happy to see the Abbot’s head parted from his shoulders. In the times we are living in, each man must look to himself.’

  ‘I have no doubt that you will, Brother Richard, no doubt at all.’

  *

  I travelled to Shaftesbury with my bundle of spare clothing on a cart, squashed between bales of wool. Jeanne came with me for company, and would travel back with the carter. We left during the night. It was dark and misty when my mother and father stood in the street outside our shop and kissed me goodbye. It was the longest journey I ever made and I slept most of the way, having been anxious and wakeful the whole night before.

  I awoke at dawn, before we reached the town, and heard larks. We must have been passing through open fields then. The carter dropped us off in the market place. I have been in some of the villages near Bruton, but never in another town. Shaftesbury is much bigger and noisier with wagon traffic and shouting and swearing and dogs barking and children howling, and the roads thronged, as if it were a Fair Day every day.

  The carter set us down in the market place. We had to a
sk the way to the Abbey. We followed a high wall and the backs of buildings along a street they called Bimport and came to the gatehouse, its entrance wide enough for wagons. It is like a real house, with rooms above and to the sides. I hugged Jeanne and said goodbye, and knocked at the smaller door set into the gate. And so I entered Shaftesbury Abbey.

  2

  SHAFTESBURY ABBEY

  Shaftesbury Abbey is a town within a town. In my first days there I frequently lost my bearings. If I try to gauge its extent in terms of the fields and closes I know around Bruton, I would guess it covers about four acres. There is more Abbey property in the town, beyond the walls – an orchard, a farm, a school for girls called the Magdalen and, on the Market Place, the Broad Hall where nuns from the Abbey serve soup and bread to the poor, like an inn except that no one has to pay. The town, up on its high hill, is one great crossroads, with ways running steeply downwards in every direction.

  Our home in Bruton is two rooms – one of them the shop – with earth floors and the midden outside the back door. At the Abbey there is space and light and air, even though it is so ancient. It was founded by King Alfred for his daughter hundreds of years ago. Another King gave the Abbey the village of Tisbury in Wiltshire, and another gave the manor of Bradford, on the River Avon. That is only the beginning of the long list of the Abbey’s lands and manors, mills, forests, fisheries, and God knows what else. There are special words for everything here, and these are the Abbey’s ‘temporalities’. They are managed for profit. Hugh and John told me some of this when I went to say goodbye. They were impressed that I was going to Shaftesbury Abbey: ‘Rolling in money.’

  What are called the Abbey’s ‘spiritualities’ are the rights to collect tithes and appoint parish priests. These too bring income to the Abbey. So not very spiritual at all.

  Once there were a hundred and twenty nuns living here. Including myself, there are now only fifty-seven. The special word for the senior nuns is ‘Obedientiaries’. They hold named positions with particular responsibilities – the Cellaress, the Chambress, the Infirmaress, the Sacrist – and the Prioress, who is the most important nun after the Abbess. Since the Abbess is often away, and has so much business to see to, the day-to-day running of the place is overseen by the Prioress.