The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘Me too,’ says Arundell. ‘Mine is the best site in town, just along the way, on the corner of Bimport and Tout Hill.’

  ‘Then we are in competition for the spoils.’

  Arundell made a snorting noise.

  ‘Perhaps. But this is all provisional, for me. Great men do not live in towns, they build their residences in the countryside, surrounded by hundreds of acres. I am acquiring as much of the Abbey as I can, and will develop the sites for profit, and live in the town for a while as lord of the borough. But I have my eye on Wardour Castle.’

  ‘And I have my eye,’ said Tregonwell, ‘on the manor of Milton. I may have to pay the Crown a thousand pounds for it. And I intend to buy in some of the Abbey plate, and some furniture, if it is not all spoken for in London before I can arrange matters. I do rather fancy the Abbess’s chair.’

  ‘I,’ said Arundell, ‘am acquiring the manor of Tisbury, the greatest prize, with a lesser manor which I will sell on. I am not interested in the baubles, I leave those to you. Our great rebuilding will be all about light. You will see, the walls of my house will not just have openings set into them, the walls will be the supports and settings for great windows flooding my high chambers with sunlight, moonlight …’

  They are watching, as I am, a young woman in a green hood with a bundle on her back and leading a black dog on a rope, accompanied by a commonplace man.

  ‘That is the one who assisted the Abbess,’ said Arundell. ‘I saw her a while ago wearing that green hood. Pretty woman.’

  ‘That one is no maid. And she is a little fool,’ said Tregonwell.

  Arundell was not sufficiently interested in Tregonwell, or in the woman in the green hood, to enquire further.

  ‘I must tell you I have an idea for the great rebuilding,’ said Tregonwell, ‘about the function of a cloister. It could be adapted to a great house …’

  ‘I think,’ said Arundell, interrupting him, uncaring, ‘that I will seek out a workman and take a wander down to the Abbey Church. I want to check how much of the painted glass has been salvaged without damage. I gave full instructions, but I fear they may have smashed a good deal of it. That old painted glass would look well in a hall. Some of the plain yellowish glass might be useful too. Will you walk with me?’

  ‘I have to see a man about a dog,’ said Tregonwell.

  I hear boots on floorboards and slip back down the stairs, out of the gatehouse, and hide. Tregonwell emerges, shouts for his horse, throws his legs across its back, and rides off in the direction taken by Dorothy and John Winterbourne, with Finbarr. He will not catch them up.

  The destroyers have now taken half the roof of the dorter. The chamber is filthy and strewn with stones and timbers. It is time to go. But not quite yet.

  I sit on the ground outside the gatehouse with Gregory, his bundle beside him. He is chewing on a pudding. He is lucky, he is going with the Abbess to Place Farm in Tisbury. He is concerned for me. He gives me advice on how to walk the roads safely:

  ‘If you get lost, follow a river and it will bring you to some place with people. Keep your eyes peeled for bridges, which are there for a reason, and church towers. Do not travel after daylight end. Avoid hollow ways where the trees meet over the path. Bad spirits.’

  And then he jumps up, picks up his bundle and runs from me, because the Abbess’s coach is there at the gatehouse. Her boxes and bags are being loaded.

  Then I see her, Dame Elizabeth Zouche, the last Abbess of Shaftesbury, in her fur-lined cloak and high gable hood, with her little maid and Sister Isobel, and the Steward – and, now, Gregory. She passes within three feet of where I stand but she does not look at me. She looks straight ahead. I do not move towards her, I do not raise my hand in farewell. After a while I hear the coach rumbling on the cobbles, and then, nothing. She has gone.

  It is time for me to go too.

  It is tempting to sleep my first night away from the Abbey curled up with Dorothy and Esther and Little John and Emilia and the two Winterbournes in their cabin. Finbarr would jump all over me and lick my face in the old way. But that would only put off the evil hour. To avoid fresh heartbreak it is better to go. I see in the late afternoon light the precinct overrun by destroyers and looters. I hear hammering and the harsh rasp of saws.

  But still I did not go. When it grew dark, I climbed the stair back up to the dorter. The roof over my cubicle and the next was still there, but just beyond was open sky, and a half-moon, and stars. There was a drip-drip-drip from some leaking eave.

  I had retained my novice’s habit, hoping thereby to avoid the groping hands of the destroyers, who tend to waylay any unwary female after dark. Now I unrolled my old brown gown from the bundle of my home clothes and put it on. I put my knife in my pocket. No more veil, no more wimple. No more tightness and restriction. Just a headcloth, loosely, round my head and neck.

  With the dropping of the novice’s habit, everything else fell away. I was somebody else now. Who is that person? I was emptied out. I had my own clothes, I had my emerald dolphin. What else, from my previous life?

  Did I still care about Peter Mompesson? Dare to be truthful. No, I did not still care about Peter Mompesson. I shall always remember our coupling as something unutterably sweet from long ago. That is a sober way of saying that he gave me pleasure and the taste of what love is. I would like to taste love again.

  But what about my son, my Peterkin?

  Dare to be truthful. This one is harder. Our time together, his mouth at my breast, was short. It would only confuse the little boy were I were to erupt into his life and attempt to reclaim him. Perhaps much later I might come to know him again. At the very least I would like him to know, one day, who his mother is.

  In truth, the loss of Finbarr meant more to me right now.

  The change had taken place without my realising it. I had been carting around old thoughts like so much baggage, without examining them. More than once I have had a dream about a house that in the dream I know well (although in my waking mind I do not know it at all), with one chamber leading into another and, at the end of the suite of rooms, the enfilade as Master Tregonwell would say, a locked door.

  I sat on in my cubicle for a long time, having no new thoughts but venturing into a new space. As if my mind were a chamber swept of dust by an invisible hand, an angel, or the Blessed Zita, leaving this clear void. Maybe this is something like what my Melancholy experienced when she danced, and wept, and smiled, and could not explain why.

  I do not know what is behind the locked door. Maybe it is only a store room. Unwanted baggage has to be deposited somewhere. Well, I shall discover.

  I was just thinking, I should try and sleep, in my damp bed under the damp blanket, when I heard footsteps coming along the dorter in my direction. My first thought was that it was a destroyer on the prowl. I fingered the little sharpie in the pocket of my gown and sat still, planning how to kill him if I needed to. This was not a new thought. I would have killed Master Tregonwell, had I the courage. My heart beating, I stepped out of my cubicle, shivering, and looked into the darkness down the length of the chamber.

  By the light of the half-moon I made out a figure coming towards me. The footsteps were too light and quick to be a man’s. It was not one of the destroyers, nor any man, it was a short woman in a cloak and hood carrying a bundle.

  ‘Agnes Peppin? I know you are there. I saw you mounting the stairs. Is that you?’

  It was Eleanor Wilmer.

  I am relieved to see her, or rather to see that it is she and no other.

  ‘Come,’ I say, ‘come and sit on my bed, I will take the stool.’

  She sits on my bed. Even in the quarter-light I see how she narrows those great eyes of hers and purses her mouth.

  ‘Before we part, I wanted to tell you that I do not like you. Ever since you came to the Abbey you have been consumed by jealousy of me as if I were a poison.’

  ‘Why on earth would I be jealous of you? Is this your notion of a joke?’
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  ‘You knew I wanted to be the Abbess’s assistant and you inveigled yourself into her favour. You stole that from me. On purpose.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I saw you lying in the orchard with Robert and Dorothy. I saw you go to Robert’s lodging the other day, I saw you come out again. I wanted Robert. I could have had him. You stole him from me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were jealous of my closeness to Our Lord Jesus Christ. So you mocked my love for Him. I know it.’

  Water outside my cubicle drips from above.

  She leans forward and snatches at the chain round my neck. It breaks and she grabs it with the emerald dolphin dangling. She runs off towards the reredorter stumbling over fallen stones and before I can reach her she has thrown the dolphin down one of the holes into the sewer beneath. I catch up with her and peer down into the hole. It is black dark. I put my whole arm down and scour the foul water but it is useless. The dolphin is small, the sludge at the bottom is deep and disgusting, the water is running fast. My emerald dolphin has gone.

  The dolphin was my passport to a possible future life. It had been given to my mother. It was proof of who we were, she and I.

  Besides which, it had monetary value.

  Besides which, I loved it. The dolphin was my most precious possession.

  I do not scream, or attack Eleanor, or scratch her face, pull out her hair or stab her with my knife. I am numb and dumb. She too. We face each other in the dim light.

  ‘How did you know?’ I ask eventually.

  ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘What I had, the dolphin – which you have just …’

  I cannot put into words what she has just done.

  ‘Anne Cathcart told me about it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We go back into my cubicle. My right hand and arm are filthy and stinking. I use my white veil to wipe myself and throw the veil into a corner.

  Eleanor had said that I was jealous of her closeness to Jesus Christ. That annoys me. I say to her:

  ‘It is true that I believe Christ loves everyone equally and that one cannot buy his greater love by excessive manifestations.’

  ‘You understand nothing. You do not know anything about love.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’

  But indeed, how can I be sure that I understand anything about love?

  Eleanor reaches inside her clothes and brings out a bottle of wine. It is Holy Communion wine, I can tell by the shape of the bottle.

  ‘Do not distress yourself,’ she says. ‘It is unconsecrated. It is just cheap red wine. I stole it from the sacristy.’‘

  ‘How will we open it?’

  She smashes the neck of the bottle on the stone floor and snaps off the spikes from the neck of the bottle with a loose stone. Oh, Eleanor!

  ‘Do you have a cloth?’

  I pull off my headcloth and hand it to her. She wraps it round the jagged neck of the bottle and takes a long swallow and then passes it to me. She begins to talk, and continues to talk as we pass the bottle between us.

  I talk too. We talk all night.

  This is what she told me.

  Her father was assistant to the Treasurer at Sherborne Abbey. He was kind, but busy, and he has died.

  ‘When I was little I sometimes could not eat, I do not know why, and my mother used to put my food on a shelf and serve it back to me next day. In summer it was speckled with flies’ eggs and mouse-dirt, in winter it was frozen. When I tried to eat it I was sick, and then my mother would shut me in the cellar and tell me I could not come out until I had eaten the food and also the vomit that was upon it. I knew I could not do that. I thought I would be in the cellar for ever.’

  In the end someone always came and let her out, her younger brother or her father. Her mother behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. Other times, she shut Eleanor up in the fowl coop, where she could neither stand nor sit.

  I always knew my mother did not like me. But what were a few beatings with a broomstick, compared with what Eleanor suffered?

  ‘Why were our mothers as they were? Why could they not love us?’ I ask her.

  ‘I think they were sad and angry, but not really with us. And no one’s mother ever loves them enough.’

  The bottle passes between us.

  ‘I would be a loving mother,’ I say.

  And then think of Peterkin, who had been given away. I correct myself.

  ‘I am not a good mother. I have a son whom I may never see again.’

  I explain. We drink more wine.

  ‘And I had a daughter,’ says Eleanor. ‘No one knew. I was quite a stout girl, and it did not show. When I thought it must be my time because I was hurting I went out into the fields by the old castle and birthed her there under the trees. I thought I would die. She was scarcely bigger than a squirrel. I bit through the cord. I looked at her and she was dead. I lay there holding her in my hands, dead. I pulled on the cord connected to something inside me and pulled out the mess. I do not really know what that is. I threw that and the sticky dead little thing into the river, and rinsed my hands. And then I went back home. I was bleeding, but my mother thought that was my normal courses. I told no one.’

  ‘Poor Eleanor. That is very hard.’

  A word is clanging in my memory.

  ‘But then why did Father Pomfret start to say “infanticide” just before he was stopped?’

  ‘Because I confessed to him that I killed my newborn child.’

  ‘But you had not.’

  ‘No.’

  I roll my eyes and take more wine.

  ‘I will tell you.’

  *

  Her explanation was repetitive and contradictory. It took a long time. She is such an extreme person. She was all too ready to lavish her love on the father of her child, but he ran from her. She was young then and he was younger still, sixteen years old, a church musician with all his life before him. So great a hunger for love and attention as Eleanor has may be a heavier burden than the most people can carry. I remember her asking Robert to dance with her and how he pushed her away. Eleanor exudes desperation.

  No one in the world can love Eleanor enough. God is love so He would love her as no one on earth ever would or could. She unloaded all her love on to God and on to his son Jesus Christ. To receive His ineffable love and forgiveness, and to achieve unity with Him, it was necessary for her to be a great sinner because there is more joy in Heaven, the Gospel teaches, over one sinner that repents than over any number of the observant faithful.

  I think that’s what her reasoning was. It is hard to be sure.

  Her great sin, which would elicit Christ’s unconditional love, was that she had killed her child.

  Except she hadn’t.

  When she confessed this to Father Pomfret she was not telling a lie. She believed it to be so when she said it. She had to believe it. It was part of the bargain she was making with Christ. Perhaps because she is a Treasurer’s daughter she thinks in terms of contracts, bargains, profit and loss.

  ‘But Eleanor, God who knows everything would know that you did not kill your child.’

  ‘God understands everything and He understood my necessity.’

  I never heard anything so convoluted, yet there is a mad kind of logic in her thinking. Mary Amor had said: ‘If men and women were not sinners, there would be no need for redemption.’

  ‘What did Father Pomfret say to you?’

  ‘He said I had committed a mortal sin for which I would do penance for the rest of my life unless and until I achieved perfect contrition.’

  ‘And did you achieve perfect contrition? Did he give you absolution?’

  ‘After a long time, many months, he did.’

  I was more confused than ever.

  ‘But Eleanor, you had committed no mortal sin at all.’

  ‘I have now. It was I who killed Father Pomfret. I could not have him shouting out that word about me when it was not true.’

>   ‘You killed him with what, with your little sharpie?’

  I see it hanging from her belt in its leather sheath. Her hand moves to touch it.

  ‘It was easy. You would be surprised. I came up behind him in the nave and thought, if not now, when? He turned towards me before he fell and then I stabbed him again, from the front.’

  ‘What did you feel at that last Vespers when you gave out the Magnificat, with his body lying only few yards away?’

  ‘As if I had leapt from a high place and had not yet hit the ground.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I still have not hit the ground.’

  I cannot remember whether Eleanor had another bottle of communion wine about her person or if the first bottle was miraculously inexhaustible. I do remember telling her that I had wished to kill Master Tregonwell, and had done so in my mind many times.

  ‘Anyone can kill,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘I know it. I would have killed whoever came upon me here this night, had it not been you.’

  ‘And when I had killed Father Pomfret, I no longer needed to think that I had killed my child. He gave me absolution, after all. Listen, Agnes – I am wondering now if the absolution of mortal sin is transferable, like a credit note. May I perhaps believe that he absolved me of a crime that had not yet taken place?’

  ‘You mean your murder of him?’

  I laughed a good deal at that, my hands covering my face, and she laughed too. I said before that in the End Time we laughed at all the wrong things. This may have been the most wrong thing we laughed at.

  ‘God rest his soul.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Eleanor.

  She unpinned her veil, pulled off her grubby wimple and her cap, and I saw her black hair. Even cut short, it waved and turned up at the ends. Crisp hair that would fall gracefully however wild the weather. She saw that I was admiring her. She turned her head, her eyes slanting.

  ‘Why did you dislike me so?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you disliked me so. And you infuriated me. You woke the Devil in me.’