I came up into Shaftesbury by Tout Hill. The carrier let me off at the hill’s foot, having business out of the town. He told me that his cousin Jacob, a cheese man, would be leaving Shaftesbury for London the next day, soon after noon. He would be seeing his cousin in the tavern later, and would alert him. He told me where I would find his cousin’s cart in the morning.
‘How will I know him?’
‘You will see the cheeses. And Jacob wears a red cap.’
It was near day’s end, but not yet dark. I saw a big stone house under construction, with towers in the corners. Workmen were still scrambling on the scaffolding in spite of the lateness of the hour, carrying up stacks of stone roof-tiles held together with straps as if they were books. They must have been appallingly heavy. This must be Sir John Arundell’s new mansion. I was standing there watching, hoping he was paying those men generously, when one of them shouted down to me:
‘Fancy a shag, Mistress Pretty?’
I moved away fast and in the wrong direction. I finally found myself walking along Bimport towards the Winterbournes’ house, sweating with nervousness. The way I came, I had perforce to pass the Abbey gatehouse.
I saw that the window-glass was gone from the chamber above it, and that the great timber doors had gone too. I averted my eyes. I was not ready for this yet. I walked on. The Winterbournes’ low dwelling, to my relief, still stood unchanged. I hesitated before the door, as I had hesitated with Dick and Weasel on my first visit, not knowing what I would find.
I knocked, and heard a dog barking. I recognised that bark. The door was opened, I saw not by whom, because Finbarr – after standing stock-still for a second, her ears raised, was upon me – leaping, licking, scrabbling at my gown, and ripping a hole in it, her tail wagging so violently it seemed her rear end would fall off, whining and yelping, beside herself. I was beside myself too. Only when she and I calmed down and she was back on her four feet could I look around me.
There is much always said about unhappiness and misery, and little about calm and contentment. There they were, in that one dark chamber cluttered with withies and baskets, and with the playthings of children and, on the shelf with the pots, a pile of books. Emilia had a baby in her arms, her little John was banging with a wooden spoon, and Dorothy’s Esther was up on her legs, running around, as pretty as a flower.
And there, there, was my Dorothy Clausey, plumper and rosier than I had ever seen her, and pregnant. We hugged one another, and wept and laughed, and I marvelled at the children and held Emilia’s baby, a girl. We told each other scraps of our histories since we parted. Dorothy was using the abandoned Magdalen house to teach children to read. The two Johns have expanded their business, selling their basketry as far away as Salisbury market.
Then the Johns came, filling the place as if two trees had entered the room. The silent John took a pitcher and ran to the alehouse to have it filled. We drank it all down, and the jug went back to the alehouse a second time. Did we eat? I cannot remember. I do not know how far the night had advanced before the fired died, the mattresses were laid out in all remaining space, and we lay down, children and mothers and fathers and myself all together.
I have no way of telling whether one John belonged to Dorothy and the other to Emilia, but I rather think not. Who can say? Emilia held her baby close. She would have to feed her during the night. Finbarr curled up against me and did not stir till dawn. I slept more soundly than I had for months. Compared with the doings any one night among gentlemen and ladies of the great world, this was nothing at all. We would seem to them so much human vermin. Yet this was a whole world, the whole fine world that they made for each other.
But it was theirs and I could not have remained among them. I did not really want to.
Early next morning, Dorothy walked with me round the remains of the Abbey. We did not take Finbarr. Holy Trinity, the townspeople’s church, still stood, isolated. Plants, even trees, were sprouting from the tops of the Abbey ruins. We stood in the roofless space that had been the nave, among stumps of pillars. The shock of being there once more was not so great. In truth, I felt almost nothing. The life and the lives that those buildings had contained, and the pains and passions of generations of sisters, had all been wiped away. Nothing is for ever.
‘We will remember, though,’ said Dorothy.
‘So much as we need to,’ said I, thinking of the bad times – Dorothy with baby Esther in those first dreadful days, for example. I did not dare to ask her if she heard anything of Father Robert Parker, though I would have liked to know.
‘I think all the time,’ she said, ‘about what happened here and to all the other monastic houses. Have you ever thought, Agnes, just sometimes, that it was perhaps – perhaps – necessary? That it had to happen? That it was correct, a correction?’
No, I had never thought that for one moment. I was startled. But there was some thread of a thought beneath what she said which I could not trace or pursue. Her question was not the right question, or not for me at that time. My old question came back to me: ‘Who was to blame?’
We were standing side by side, wrapped in our cloaks, in the sisters’ graveyard, littered with loose stones and overgrown with weeds and scrubby bushes. I looked across to piles of rotting lathes where chantry priests’ dwellings had stood, and asked, ‘What happened to Dame Joanna and Dame Philippa?’
She said they survived the first summer and died the following winter.
‘I used to go and see them sometimes, and take them food. They ate like birds, handfuls of grain and scraps of crust. They shrank, they were like ancient children. I blame myself for not visiting them more often.’
She stood silent for a moment, and then:
‘I am ashamed. I failed in charity.’ She put her hands over her face.
She raised her head and told me, her face turned away, ‘It was I who found them dead.’
It was a hard winter, with weeks of freezing temperatures and hard frost.
‘There was much sickness in the town and many infants and old people died.’
In former days, people looked to the Abbey for everything and found it – shelter, medicines, food, fuel. How could Dorothy possibly think that the catastrophe had been ‘necessary’? She was not thinking such thoughts now. She was making a kind of confession to me.
‘I postponed going to see the old dames, and the longer I left it the harder it became. I was afraid of what I would find. I made the excuse to myself that my first duty was to our own little household. Life outside a community makes us selfish.’
She was distressing herself, which was not good in her condition. To reassure her, I said, ‘I think it is not selfishness. It is a matter of survival. The survival of the little unit for which each is responsible.’
‘Selfish.’
She put a hand on her belly.
‘The babe is leaping and I cannot stand now for very long, I need to piss all the time and I need to sit down.’
She raised her skirts and pissed. Then, walking slowly now, back along Bimport, she told me how she at last made her way over to the old ladies’ dwelling. The door was open. Frost had crept in over the threshold. The two wizened forms lay together on a single pallet, the thin blanket covering them also speckled with frost, and stiff.
‘Their bodies were frozen hard.’
‘They had to die’, I assured her. ‘They were together, as they wanted. It is all right.’
I told her what my mother once said, that dying from cold is not hard. It is just a closing down, from the extremities inwards, until the cold reaches the heart. Towards the end there is no awareness of cold, or of anything at all. There is no pain as the soul takes flight.
Back in the Winterbournes’ house with Emilia and the children, everything was warm and normal. I asked when Dorothy’s baby would be born, and she and Emilia discussed the matter in a desultory way, holding one another’s gaze, knowing what they knew, whatever it was that they knew.
‘If it i
s a girl,’ said Dorothy, ‘I shall call her Agnes.’
I was pleased.
It was hard to leave, but at noon I bade them farewell to and with difficulty crossed the road to make my way towards the spot where I was to meet the cheese-merchant. It was market day and it was raining. The roadway was filthy with slush and ordure, crammed solid with herded beasts and handcarts and wheeled vehicles and strings of packhorses, the droves cursing.
I gained the other side and chanced to look back. I saw Finbarr standing in the Winterbournes’ open doorway, and she saw me. She sprang forward, wriggling through the traffic. She ran straight into the path of a growling, grinding eight-wheeled wagon piled high with stones. It was moving slowly but was so heavy that it could not have stopped in time even had the driver thought to stop, which he would not, not for a dog, and even had he seen her, which he had not.
No one was to blame.
The wagon lurched on leaving Finbarr a bloody mash in the mud, to be run over no doubt again and again until at day’s end her remains were cleared away with a shovel.
There was nothing I could do. I went on my way to find the cheese-merchant.
She was only a dog, I said to myself over and over, on the long journey east towards London. She was only a dog. If I had not chosen to return to Shaftesbury I would never have seen her again anyway. And she was doubtless not the only dog who was run over in Shaftesbury that day. She was only a dog.
She was Finbarr. We had known each other since she was a starved and flea-ridden pup. We had been together with Dick and Weasel, who loved her. We had known each other better than I knew any human being. I fingered the gash her claw had made in my old brown gown and I have never mended it. I still remembered her trusting body against mine at night.
Finbarr, good dog, good dog, Finbarr. Of course dogs have souls. If Finbarr does not, neither do I.
Jacob the cheese man with the red cap was pleasant and comely, even though he had about his person a pungent odour of his cheese, great rounds of which were stacked behind us, wrapped in greasy grey cloths. Business in Shaftesbury, he said, had improved greatly since the new men began building fine houses on Abbey property. I did not ask whether he provided Sir Thomas Arundell, and I did not tell him that I had been a nun in the Abbey, at least not then.
The bulk of his wares were destined for the markets, taverns and great houses of London. He told me about the village of Cheddar, where he comes from, and how his cheeses ripen in caves in the rocks all around. Caves are good because caves are damp and the cheese does not dry out, and caves maintain the same temperature all the year round. There was more, much more. He could and did discourse for hours on end about cheese. One learns a great deal of useful general knowledge on the road. Cheddar is in Somerset, and he knew of Bruton.
It was all perfectly companionable, and the rain ceased, and the cheese man took my mind off Finbarr. We trundled on until after day’s end, then found stabling and adjoining straw mattresses in a drovers’ hostel. We made our supper of bread from a bakehouse and hunks of his strong cheese. As a result I slept well.
Before I slept I gave in to the cheese man’s desire. Why not? I too have desire. He was guileless, like a grown-up child. After our first sleep we talked for a while, and I told him my name – ‘I am Agnes Peppin’ – and that I had been a nun, or rather a novice, in Shaftesbury Abbey. That ignited him all over again. Then we fell asleep again until dawn.
I smelled of cheese that morning. My crotch and armpits reeked. I washed myself under the pump in the yard. I helped him to fit his oxen into the shafts, and off we went on our way.
Jacob put me down on a broad highway at a crossroads well outside the city of London itself, although there were people on the road, and coaches and carts and strings of horses going in both directions. We joined the road from a track from the south-west. I told Jacob I was making for Hay Hill, which is where Anne Cathcart has her establishment. Hay Hill meant nothing to me. It might as well have been on the moon. He halted the wagon and sat there with the reins drooping and his red-capped head also.
He asked me if I would change my mind and remain with him, and continue with him into the city, and be his companion in life. He had the cottage in Cheddar, he said, where he was born and raised. There was a pear tree, and a pond. And the cheeses and the caves. He had aunts and uncles and cousin who would welcome me.
‘It will be a good life.’
He raised his handsome head and looked hopefully into my face.
Without hesitation I said no, I could not do that, and I thanked him. I did not as an excuse say that I was still the Bride of Christ because I might have laughed, and he might have been bewildered. I just said no.
He nodded, stayed a moment, nodded again, stayed some more, then helped me down from the wagon and handed me my bundle.
I think Jacob was a person who did not ask much of life, other than making his cheese and selling his cheese. I think he did not really expect me to go with him. It was a long shot. I hope by now he has found a woman to love him. He is worth loving.
‘That,’ he said, pointing with his switch, ‘is the King’s new deer park. It was always, before, the park of Hyde manor. It belonged to the monks at Westminster Abbey. Anyone could walk through there. I used to stop off and graze the oxen. When it happened, the same as to you ladies at Shaftesbury, the King took the park from the monks and stocked it with game and put that fence around the whole of it. But people still call it Hyde Park.’
‘Last time,’ he said, ‘when I came this way, I saw the King and his gentlemen on their horses hunting with their hounds. I am sure it was the King.’
That was a big moment for him. A glimpse of the great world. I feel bad that I turned him off so abruptly. He was a decent man. Though truth to tell, I was much relieved when my bleeding appeared at the proper time. It would not have been convenient to bear the cheese man’s brat. It would have been a boy, and he would have smelled of cheese.
‘You need to take the right-hand turn here,’ he said, ‘down that lane, keeping the park always on your right. If you kept on and on that way you would get to Westminster and the river. I’ll be keeping on the old highway eastwards, into the city. I could take you on further, you could maybe find Hay Hill that way more quickly but – I prefer to say farewell to you now.’
He had his pride.
‘So we are not yet in London? This is not London?’
‘No, but it is not altogether the countryside anymore either. They are building along the sides of the roads all the way into the city. You’ll want to turn off for Hay Hill before the next big crossing of the ways. It’ll still be open fields to the north, with tracks up to farms. You’ll need to ask.’
I walked on, with the park palings on my right. Every now and then I asked passers-by for Hay Hill, and always it was a little further, and a little further, and night was beginning to fall. When at last I identified the turning, the track was flat, not a hill at all, and I still did not know how to find Anne Cathcart’s house.
I encountered a gentleman on horseback. I called out to him and he reined in his mare.
He looked blank. The name Cathcart meant nothing to him. I told him, recalling her letter to me, that it was perhaps a kind of lodging house, or place of entertainment?
‘Aha! You’ll be meaning Mistress Arundell’s establishment.’
Mistress Arundell? What was the meaning of that? Maybe I had been misdirected. Maybe this was all a terrible mistake.
I could not miss it, he said.
‘A long low farm place on the left of the rising track just where it becomes steep, with flambeaux lit on each side of the entrance. Big timber doors with a wicket and a bell-pull.’
He gave me a quizzical look, doffed his hat and trotted off down the lane.
It was as he said. Ten minutes later I was in Anne’s welcoming arms. That night I slept in what was to be my own chamber, a loft up a crooked wooden stair, under the thatch, with a window looking out on to farmland
. There were birds and bats and other creatures in the thatch. They were active in the night but I never minded their scrabblings and scutterings. Room for us all. There was a door from the lobby at the foot of my stair to the back of the house, so that I could come and go without notice. This turned out to be a godsend.
8
HAY HILL
The noise and bustle of Anne’s house came as a shock. Her hall room was long and low-ceilinged, the floor flagged with stone. A dresser was piled high with pewter plates and wine cups, and rows of tankards on hooks. There were half a dozen long trestles with benches, and small tables for private encounters. Candlesticks stood in clusters on the trestles and tables. After dark the room was a cavern of flickering lights. It was not luxurious but it was peculiarly seductive. And there was a routine which was not hard to pick up. This place became my home from home, even before I met my Thomas.
The guests, or clients, or customers, or whatever they were, would begin to arrive immediately after daytime end. Many were regulars, greeting one another and settling into ongoing discussions which seemingly had no beginning and no end. The food was not elaborate. The speciality of the house was mutton pies. As the night advanced the trestles became overloaded with platters, fragments of piecrust, with tankards and goblets, with ale-jugs and wine-bottles. There were always more men than women. The women did not sit apart. They talked and laughed and argued with the men, and were free and open in the way they laid their hands upon a gentleman’s sleeve, or on the nape of his neck, or on his thigh, as they sat wedged close together on the benches.
At first I recognised no one among the guests except Master Piers Perceval. There was no reason why he should remember me and he did not. He seemed to have a special position in the house, strutting about in a hostly manner. He was proprietorial in his attitude to Anne.
She had her eye on everything, chivvying the serving girls, sitting momentarily at this table or another, drawing some shy young man or woman into the conversation by making them laugh at something she said. Anne looked confident and comfortable. Anne was in her element.
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