I went from door to door, street to street, every day, rain or shine, with my basket of merchandise. I knew the sad story of the old lady whose husband had been caught in a millwheel and lost two limbs and his senses. I knew which child had been ailing, which wife had been wandering from home, which family had the lease on their tenement foreclosing. I came to understand better about the circumstances of people’s lives. Sister Mary Amor, God rest her soul, said to me once that nothing is wasted, however trivial the task. There is always something to be learned which will turn out to be of use at some another time and in another situation. I believe this. My experience may seem to me sometimes so haphazard as to be meaningless. But nothing is wasted.
Jack did not work the markets alone. He had with him a partner or employed man, I know not which, who did the loading and unloading, the fetching and carrying, and arranged the display of goods. Meanwhile Jack cajoled the passers-by and attracted a crowd.
This other man’s name was Colin. He was quiet, brown-skinned and black-bearded. He wore a blue cap. His dark eyes often fell on mine. Sometimes we exchanged smiles, complicit in amusement at the antics of Jack and Eleanor. Or so I imagined.
Jack began to stay the night in Sherborne on market days, instead of trundling off in his wagon God knows where. I do not know what Colin did. Eleanor, unlike myself with my book, really did steal away to meet a lover. She would leave our apartment to find Jack in the darkness, returning around dawn. Fortunately Master Palmer, the old man downstairs, was a heavy sleeper and was never woken by Eleanor thudding past his mattress and up the ladder-stair to our room. She had never been slender, and had somehow put on flesh since we left the Abbey.
I became unhappy. I liked her company less. We had little in common except our work, and even there the division of labour contrived to separate us. Around our third midsummer I told Eleanor that I was planning to leave Sherborne, and find another place to be.
I thought we would have a rational discussion about our futures. I was wrong. She gasped and flew into a rage.
‘What? What? What are you saying? You cannot abandon me! You cannot go! We belong together for ever!’
And more of the same, on and on, pacing our small chamber up and down, back and forth, arms upraised, eyes flaring, hair standing on end – an animal.
I was horrified at what I had unleashed. I cowered on the floor, wrapping my arms around myself. I thought she was going to attack me.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. I am so sorry. I will not go. Of course I will not go. I will not leave you.’
Eleanor snatched up our little axe. I waited for her to bring it down upon my head. I was inert, a piece of wood, stock-still, beyond fear as a freezing person is beyond cold.
She placed her left hand on the stool and brought down the axe upon it. She screamed and cast the axe aside. I leapt to my feet to see what she had done to herself. I grasped her left wrist and held it upwards. She had chopped off the tips of her two longest fingers, the middle finger and the ring finger.
She was crying now, breathing badly. She was frightened. Her fingers began to pour blood. I laid her upon our bed and found cloths and bound up the fingers tightly. One of her finger-tips lay on the stool, the other on the floor. Knobs of flesh. I picked them up and threw them out of the window. I went down to the pump in the yard, brought up water and cleaned up the blood on the stool and the floor.
In the morning we did not refer to what had happened, or rather we did not refer to why it had happened. It was as if she had suffered a misfortune which had nothing to do with anything or anyone. We cleansed and re-wrapped her fingers every day as the stubs healed, forming crusts and scabs.
‘Don’t pick at your scabs,’ I told her.
When the scabs came off the new skin on the stumpy finger-ends was red and shiny. It hardened.
It was not I who left Eleanor. It was Eleanor who left me.
One night after that summer’s end, she made an announcement. We were as usual in our attic chamber. She was sitting on our stool with pen and paper on her knee, the inkpot on the floor, and a rushlight close by. She was doing our accounts for the month. I stood at the mansard window, looking out into darkness, into nothing, and thinking of nothing.
‘I am going from here tomorrow,’ she said.
I turned back from the window and stared at her.
‘Whatever do you mean? Where are you going?’
‘I am going with Jack, wherever he is going.’
I still stared. She explained. She spoke as if she had planned exactly what she would say to me. Jack loved her, Jack was ‘the answer’.
‘What does that mean, Jack is the answer? The answer to what? What is the question?’
If I did not know, then I did not know, she said. She would leave with me half our profits for the month. Then she rose and put her arms around me.
‘You and I,’ she said, ‘are something else. There is no one like me for you and no one like you for me. Wherever you are, I shall always find you.’
A promise, or a threat.
I went to our bed before she did. She was shambling around in the dark, putting together her belongings. I was bewildered. I never loved or trusted Eleanor but I was in thrall to her for good and for ill and together we had made a living and a life. And what was I to do now? When at last she came to the bed and lay down close to me and put her hand on me, stroking, I did not respond.
I was not tempted to beg her to stay. And so we lay like figures on a tomb, saying nothing. She turned the other way and was soon asleep. I was a welter of confused feelings – relief to be rid of her, and fear of the future, and the pain of rejection, which is sharp. It is a vanity, and ignominious. Rejection from whatever quarter triggers some old, unhealed misery.
Do not pick your scabs.
I was wakeful for a long time, so that I was fast asleep in that time before dawn when Eleanor left. I found in the morning a heap of coins on the top of the stool, my share of our marketing.
I had no desire or reason to remain in Sherborne. I threw out Master Palmer’s slops and spoke to him kindly. I was never unkind to that old man. I gave him some milk, and walked round to his sister on Cheap Street, and told her that we were leaving. She must look after her brother herself now, or find other tenants. She shrugged her shoulders, barely looking up from a heap of old coats that she was sorting. They were men’s coats. I wish that I had bought one. I am often cold.
I went to say goodbye to the Winter Sisters. They had reconvened in Long Street after their summer scatterings. It was early November.
‘Stay with us,’ they said. ‘Why not? You are one of us.’
But I could not, and I was not.
I admire the Winter Sisters, they are good, but there is something about them that almost disgusts me. A complacency? Something visceral. Their workroom is heavy with that sweetish odour which permeated the dorter, the refectory, the parlour at Shaftesbury Abbey. The smell of women. I am a woman as the Winter Sisters are. Though – this is how I explain it to myself – I am female, strongly so, but not feminine. There is a difference. Further than this I cannot say because it is beyond my understanding and power of expression.
Sister Isobel would probably allow and then disallow in herself the thoughts I had about the Winter Sisters. The pool at the bottom of my mind is murky. I never know when vicious fish will leap, nor what they will cause me to think or say. I am myself superficial, an insect on the pool’s surface. A crane fly, a water boatman. What do I know? I did know that I did not want to cast in my lot with the Winter Sisters and become one of them, ‘one of us’. No.
I decided to go home at last to Bruton.
I was in a hurry so as not to miss my place on the timber-cart which would take me as far as Wincanton. I unlatched the house door and there, almost colliding with me on the threshold, was Colin, smiling.
‘I was about to knock,’ he said, taking breath to say more and still smiling. I did not let him finish.
&n
bsp; ‘You must excuse me, I cannot stay, or I will miss my chance of getting away today.’
I kissed him on the cheek, I think to soften my brusqueness as I attempted to push past him with my bundle.
Colin stepped back, swept off his blue cap, bowed, and gestured me to pass with flourish of his hand and the grace of a gentleman. The smile on his face twisted into a mask of disappointment.
I just ran, and thought nothing more of it at the time. I did not give Colin another thought as I took my place – I should say, my perch, and very uncomfortable it was – on the long timbers destined, I would guess, to be trusses and roof-beams, on the flat six-wheeled cart. The driver, sitting at a distance in front, nodded and did not speak. Off we went. A bumpy ride.
The timber merchant put me down beside the church in Wincanton. Go left at the crossing, he told me, take the road north, over the river. When you have a choice of tracks, take the left-hand one, it is not far to Bruton, maybe eight miles. If you become confused, ask at a farm.
So I started to walk. My bundle seemed heavy. I have more clothes than I used to have, and still the lion tile, and Mary Amor’s piece of silk (which admittedly is weightless). Also my rolls of writings and copies of documents and letters which I brought away from Shaftesbury Abbey, and my books. One is entitled The Birth of Mankind about how babies are gotten and born, very enlightening. I bought it in Sherborne market. I also have the Bible in English, and the Chaucer. Books weigh one down but I could not leave them behind.
I found myself as I walked re-living the encounter with Colin. What had he intended to say? What was he about to ask? To take a stroll with him? To go with him, as Jack was going with Eleanor, and to be his sweetheart? I saw again his eloquent dark eyes and his smile and remembered our wordless sympathy.
I had behaved thoughtlessly. A path not taken. I could not go back, what is done is done. Yet if a person is ceaselessly moving along it is better to have an end in view and I did not. Colin and I could have leased a piece of land, and made a good life.
I hardly know the man. Such regrets were ridiculous.
But I felt lonely. No one on this earth, that day, knew or cared who I was or where I was of what would become of me. I call it ‘the loneliness’, not just ‘loneliness’, because it is a sickness that sometimes comes upon me, as on that journey.
The loneliness came upon me sometimes during those nights in Sherborne when Eleanor was out with Jack. Within the loneliness comes a flash of terror – an absolute terror of something just beyond my vision, too dreadful to confront. Perhaps it is a glimpse of Hell.
I imagined putting an end to my life. I have heard of women drowning themselves. But the river at Sherborne, running in the valley a short walk down the track from our lodging, is shallow. I knew I could not do that. I did sometimes think of seeking out a wise woman and acquiring a poison. On bad nights I had it all planned out. I would take twice or thrice as much as the wise woman told me, so as to make sure.
But then, on other nights, Eleanor’s absence seemed a blessed respite. I am not sad by nature. I am sad in circumstances in which any normal person might be sad.
When I need to cheer myself up I read about the Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales. This makes me laugh aloud. She is like Mistress Agnes Perceval in that she talks a lot, the words streaming out of her. Her words however are very naughty and entertaining. It is all about marriage and sex. She has had five husbands – three good and two bad – and would marry for a sixth time if she found another good one. Jesus Christ himself, she says, did not speak against serial marriages, ‘not bigamy nor yet octogamy’. What are men’s sexual organs put there for, other than urinating? Chastity is a virtue that cannot be practised by all, or there would be no more children born, and chastity is not for her. She rattles on merrily about the private parts, about men’s ‘instrument’, a woman’s ‘equipment’, her ‘belle chose’. That is French. I wonder whether Chaucer knew women like the Wife of Bath, or whether he was just delivering himself of his own opinions.
And so I walked from Wincanton to Bruton with my books, sad and then not sad, lonely and then not lonely, as the sun was obscured and then, low in the sky now, shone once more. I walked in deep dark hollow ways with branches meeting over my head and fallen leaves squashy beneath my feet, then up and out across open fields.
I met drovers with sheep, and a woman. I saw her from afar, a tiny figure coming towards me. As the distance between us lessened I saw she was wrapped in tattered cloths, her head covered, her back bent, walking slowly. This was somewhere near the village called Shepton Montague. You do not pass another traveller on the road with no greeting. I asked her if I was on the right road for Bruton. She told me I would have to bear right at the next division of the track. That would bring me down into Pitcombe, and up again, and then down again, into Bruton. I was reassured, though I did stop at a kind of tavern in Shepton to check again, and accepted some small beer from the landlord.
I never asked that woman where she was going, walking the roads like myself. But not altogether like myself. She had whiskers on her face. She spoke as if she were unused to speaking, the words like obstacles in her mouth. I do not think she was a nun, not ‘one of us’ as the Winter Sisters would say. Some people just walk the roads, going from nowhere to nowhere, homeless vagrants, filling the time before death.
I reached Bruton, my home town, late on that November day. Low grey light, no whisper of wind, and the scent of decay. In the lane down into the town I trudged through sodden mats of beech leaves. Unseasonably warm. A few leaves, ovals of rose and gold, clung to branches overhanging the hollow ways. One gale would carry all away.
I crossed the river at Legge’s Bridge. It was already shutting-in time. I walked on round into the high street. I kept my hood up, wishing neither to be recognised nor not to be recognised. The few people that I encountered, scuttling home before the light failed, all mumbled a greeting but they did not know me and I did not know them. There were changes. Some dwellings I remembered as makeshift hovels were rebuilt with stone-framed windows and long lintels above their doors. One or two had fragments of stone carving set into the walls. All this adornment must come from the Abbey, I thought, and I was right. It gave some dignity to the dingy street.
When I came down to the end towards the market cross and turned my eyes to my parents’ place, I saw desolation. Garbage was piled high up against the warped and splintering shutter. It cannot have been opened for a long time.
As I hesitated outside the door at the side, I was greeted. It was Mistress Joan Dempster, who had delivered Peterkin. She looked older, but then I suppose so did I.
‘Agnes Peppin – is it you?’
She laid a hand on my arm.
‘Wait. Do not go in just yet.’
And she told me that my father was no more. He had died around Michaelmas. Died of what, I asked, my armpits prickling, my blood draining away.
He had no disease, she said, that one could tell. His wits were astray. His father and grandfather had gone the same way. I had not known that. He lost the will to live, said Joan Dempster, when he was told that Master Berkeley was calling in the lease of his butcher’s shop. Everything that belonged to the Abbey now belonged to Master Berkeley. His intention was to demolish the shambles and rebuild the row as workshops – masons’ yards, a wheelwright, a forge, a paint shop – to serve the needs of the construction of his new mansion on the Abbey site.
‘Your father’s understanding was gone. He fell into unreasoning rages. He threw pots and knives around and banged his fists on the walls and growled and shouted. It was hard on your mother. She would sometimes run out into the street to escape him. In between times he sat silent.’
All I could think was, I shall never see my kind father again. He was lying under the earth in the churchyard.
She told me that she was bringing bread and onions and apples to my mother, as she did whenever she could. My mother did not eat well, she said.
‘And
she?’
‘She has not long to live. She has given up trying.’
She put out her hand and stroked my cheek.
‘Come and see me,’ she said, ‘tomorrow. I am still where I was, up the hill.’
I took the bag of food from her and pushed open the side door into my old home. I saw in the smoky shadows the familiar place, unchanged, a feeble fire burning in the middle. The air was sour. I saw the high shelf with our same utensils upon it, and the chest, the three stools, and sitting on one of them my dear father, his back bowed, leaning forward, arms folded on his knees. He looked smaller, shrunken, sunken.
No I did not. That was in my imagination. He was not there at all. But I saw him all the same. His leather jerkin hung on its nail. In a wooden box beside his stool were as always his butcher’s knives and cleavers, piled up higgledy-piggledy. They were real enough.
I saw against the wall a mattress, and lying upon it my mother, under a fleece. By this time of year, Blossom our cow would have been rustling and stamping beyond the partition. But silence – no cow, and no dog to bark at my arrival. So quiet. Old Ratter would have died long ago.
‘Mother. It is I, Agnes, your daughter. I have come home.’
She stared, she stretched out her arms. I ran to her and embraced her and kissed her hands. She did not speak. In desperation I busied myself, and looked about me, and found in the store in the yard some tired roots to add to Mistress Dempster’s onions. I made up the fire, and hooked the pot over it, and made soup as the night came down. I found bowls and served the soup to my mother and myself with chunks of the bread.
‘So much,’ my mother said. ‘Too much for me.’
I ate and she did not.
‘This bread is too hard,’ she said. ‘Take it away.’
She asked no questions about the end of Shaftesbury Abbey – did she even know, or had she forgotten? – nor about where I had been since then, nor what I had done, nor what my plans were.
I did not sleep much that night, as I lay on a pallet close to my mother. I had been living all this time as if I were alone in the world. That night I suffered fresh pain from my torn-up exposed roots. My father, my mother – my son.
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