The Wheelwright's Daughter

by Eleanor Porter

  ‘My father says there’s not been November rain like this since King Henry’s time, even longer. Pentaloe Brook is become a river.’

  ‘The bridges over by Sollers Hope have gone.’

  I set them to working then, or I tried to, chalking out letters on the slate. Most of them fidgeted or ignored me, however much I cajoled or threatened. They had no use for letters and no fear of the rod, either. They were used to that. Miss Elizabeth would come and test them, and for each that could read the Bible verse she showed them she promised to pay me an Angel. An Angel for a saved soul, she would say, with a small laugh, because it was as close as she ever came to a joke. Near two years of teaching and I’d only held the silver Angel in my hand the once. It felt good, but my Owen was worth more. He spoke the verses clearer than a priest, eight years old or no.

  From the first day he had worked at his writing sternly, as though it were a hound he had to train. And now he was master of it. Often I would let the others play at bones and Owen and I would sit together reading from the books Miss Elizabeth lent to us. We copied lines and songs to scare away the nightmares that came to visit him at night. Miss Elizabeth called him gifted. She wanted to send him to the Cathedral School in Hereford, but her father would not pay and no one else had been found to offer. I told myself I wanted him to go, and I did, too, but there was a part in me that could not bear the thought of it.

  Halfway through the morning and the boys were snarling through the alphabet. I couldn’t blame them: the cold had taken our feet and hands. They could barely feel the birch on their palms when I struck them. It was unbearable to be so still. They would have run off if they’d dared. Instead they looked at me with stupid resentment, stubborn as the donkey Goody Reynolds had brought with her when she came to live with her sister, though it did no work.

  A shadow fell across the doorway and the boys looked up. Jacob Spicer walked in, hesitantly, holding his cap.

  ‘Mistress Elizabeth has given me leave to come to the lessons, Martha, days when work’s not so heavy, seeing as I’d like to learn myself.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, and pointed to the back bench, next to Ned Stolley, who if he got to the end of the Lord’s Prayer would be doing better than a Stolley ever should.

  He looked confused for a minute, but there was nowhere else to sit so he had to perch on the low bench, knees almost up to his ears. The boys laughed, and I couldn’t help smiling too, as I stood over him with a slate. Jacob Spicer, who’d stood with the other boys all last year and curled his lip if I passed him on the road. I remembered the dance two years back, when he’d put out his leg and tripped me, while his mother looked on and said nothing.

  ‘Well, Jacob,’ I said, handing him Miss Elizabeth’s book, ‘I am sure you can’t have grown so tall without learning something, so why don’t you show us what you know?’

  I pointed to the passage that Owen and I had been reading, ‘The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.’ Jacob took it and stared at it a long while. The boys began to nudge each other.

  ‘Here, Robbie,’ I said, poking a boy on the next row, ‘help Jacob with this first word.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Robbie. ‘That one’s easy. It’s “the”.’

  Jacob reddened and bent down further over the book.

  ‘You’re supposed to read it,’ I laughed, ‘not wipe your great red nose upon it. Do you not know anything at all?’

  He sprang up and kicked the ridiculous bench, sending Ned reeling in the dust. For a moment he loomed over me, furious, and I stepped back a little, in case he turned and swung a clout at me. But then he straightened himself and narrowed his eyes, thrusting the book back into my hands. ‘I beg your pardon then, Martha,’ he said. ‘It was a foolish wish.’ And he turned and left.

  The boys went quiet and did not need me to shout at them as I did. Clowns are there to be laughed at, I said to myself, but I didn’t believe it. Through the open window slit I watched him walk out into the yard. I thought to call him back, and ran down the ladder after him, but by the time I reached the doorway he was the other side of the yard and striding off towards the warrens. He might be the dolt next door, as Father called him, but I had no right to talk to him as I had. I had forgotten how he had grown into a man.

  As I turned to climb back up I noticed a box of apples I’d not observed earlier. There was nobody about and so I took some up in my skirts. They were wizened, red little things, sweet to taste.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing them out to the boys. One by one they solemnly returned them.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Martha,’ Ned Stolley said, ‘but we’re not taking apples off of you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘There’s no one to see, and I’m hardly likely to tell, since I took them myself.’

  The boys glanced at one another awkwardly.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Ben Ladding said at last. ‘Who caused them apples to be there? I didn’t see no apples this morning.’

  The others nodded. Ned Stolley muttered something to the boy in front.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘What’s that you said?’ I had to rap him on the neck before he’d answer.

  ‘My mother said we was to be careful around you, that’s all,’ he muttered. ‘Apples is the devil’s own fruit. Everyone knows that. And yesterday you slipped a curse onto my cousin.’

  ‘Your cousin is an idiot and so are you,’ I said, and took a bite of my apple.

  ‘You wrote out a curse on him,’ Ned went on.

  ‘Your Harry can hardly put on his boots for fear of treading on a fairy,’ I said. ‘Tell me, if I were at the devil’s work would I have run into God’s own house? The paper I gave him had nothing but holy words upon it. Your cousin took fright at a line of scripture.’

  ‘You told him you made a doll of tallow and straw,’ Ben Ladding put in. ‘That weren’t out the Bible.’

  Then Owen got up from his bench and came to me and took an apple and stood in front of the class and ate it. ‘Martha’s no witch,’ he said. ‘I’d lay my life on it.’

  ‘The life of a Simons child ain’t worth that much, though, is it?’ Ned muttered loud enough for all to hear.

  ‘If I was a witch,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be stuck here, schooling the straw-brained sons of men who’d piss on their own mothers’ heads for a penny. I’d be dressed in silks with brilliants in my hair, and pies and cakes for dinner. While all of you are lying grunting in your beds I’d be careening through the night, turning cartwheels over the stars themselves.’

  I think I said all that. I would have said it, too, if I hadn’t just then looked out to the yard and seen an old tinker woman crossing. She’d come round before with her bundle of knives and pans. Last time I saw her she’d been spreading them out on a cloth for a group of gossips, smiling and nodding as they’d picked up one blade after another. Oh, she could see they had good eyes: they could pick out the best and no mistake. And when they’d put one down her hand had darted out to seize it and she’d stroked the shiny blade, while she carried on nodding and smiling, nodding and smiling. Where she came from or where she went I did not know, or what she thought of the housewives she fawned on. No doubt she slept in ditches and barns and went without food as often as not. It was late in the year now for her to be tramping, that’s for certain.

  She was not in luck. A servant bustled out of the house and shouted at her to be gone. When she lingered he pushed her by the shoulders and stood there watching her go. She took each step slowly, as if her feet were bleeding.

  To my surprise the servant didn’t turn back to the house but began purposefully striding towards us. A moment later he was calling from the foot of the ladder.

  ‘Martha Dynely,’ he shouted. ‘You’re to wait on Miss Elizabeth directly after the lesson. Directly, and remember to scrub the filth from your boots.’

  ‘There now,’ Ned Stolley said, ‘she’s heard about your cursing and your goings-on. Happen you’re for it, happe
n—’ but I cut off his jibing with a sharp crack of the birch.

  4

  At the Hall

  There had once been a moat all around the Hall, so my father told me, but now it only stretched around three sides, and a little more. Handsome steps at the back of the house led down into Miss Elizabeth’s garden, but I took the path that snicked from the stableyard to the servants’ door. The man who’d brought the message opened the door to me; he stood for a moment on the threshold regarding me without a word before finally he let me in.

  ‘You’d better have scraped your boots. ’

  I followed him across the entrance hall and down a corridor to the scullery. He pointed to a stool.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, smoothing himself down. ‘And don’t touch anything.’

  I peered across into the kitchen. It was clear that great preparations were afoot. Only a yard the other side of the kitchen door was a long table, with tray after tray of tarts upon it. I could not see the cook or his boy, although I could hear voices from the dairy.

  The tarts gleamed. The smell alone made me tickle-headed. Butter and almonds. The tops were decorated with little leaves and stems of pastry. I had never seen anything so fine. Tonight, at the feast, the ladies and gentlemen would hold them between their delicate fingers and take a nibble. They’d pat their stomachers and refuse a second: ‘Oh, you must excuse me, I couldn’t possibly.’ There were at least fifty on the trays. I glanced around. Nobody was about. I stuffed one in my shift and sat back down. And just in time, for a second later a door along the corridor opened and the servant reappeared. He beckoned to me to follow.

  It was not the first time I had been inside the Hall. Once, last year, Miss Elizabeth had taken it into her head to give me a tour of the house ‘like a lady’, and I had followed her from room to room, as she reeled out information about the house and the furniture. There was such brightness! Colours I had only seen in flowers and the sky. I should have liked to stroke every hanging, every chair, every piece of silver, but Miss Elizabeth caught at my hands with a dart of her nervous fingers when I reached out to touch some brocade.

  There was one room, in particular, that had thrilled me: the great chamber at the top of the main staircase. All the treasures in the world were gathered in that room. The walls were hung with painted cloths. Miss Elizabeth had told me the stories. Not Christian ones at all, they were from the ancient world of the Greeks, who saw gods in the winds and the water. The king of the gods made himself into a swan to take a girl; and a boy saw a goddess naked and was drowned for it. There was a low table on which, Miss Elizabeth explained, Sir William played chess. Tiny carved figures were laid out on its chequered board. It was a game of the court and everyone manoeuvred and might be killed or changed, but not the king. He stayed the king; when he died all was lost. The pieces, she said, were made in Turkey, where it was always warm and the air was sweet with spices, but the people did not know God.

  It was into this room that the servant led me. Nothing had changed except that the light from the windows was weak and grey and a bright fire burned in the grate. Miss Elizabeth was seated at a writing table. Father said she could not be more than seven-and-twenty, but I thought she looked more than halfway old. Today her gown was of buttercup yellow, which paled her little face and made ashes of the piled hair that I usually thought so pretty. There was always something of a bird about the way she perched. I could see that now she was more than usually anxious. Her grey eyes continually flitted to the window and the door as she talked.

  ‘So you’ve come, Martha. Good. I have a letter to write and I have hurt my wrist.’ I noticed that she was holding her arm carefully, drawing her fingers back and forth over her right wrist. There was a cut, too, just below her hairline, heavily covered in powder. ‘You can write it for me. Come, sit down here. You have eaten, have you?’

  I glanced up. ‘I would be grateful—’ I began, but she cut me off, talking in that quick way she had, glancing hither and thither. ‘Nonsense, child, you are doing me a service. Your father is well, I presume? And your students, I hope they are making good progress?’

  ‘He is tolerable well, ma’am, and—’

  ‘That’s very good, very good. I shall visit one of these mornings, I certainly shall. You are ready? You see the quill is sharpened for you. There is so much to do today, I feel quite distracted. One of our visitors is riding to Shrewsbury tomorrow so you see it’s essential, quite essential, that I write to Mary now.’

  I sat myself down on the stool she pointed to, with the quill poised over the ink, endeavouring to appear less baffled than I felt.

  ‘“My dear Mary” – write exactly what I say, Martha dear, Mary is my cousin… Stop, stop, I am explaining. Only write what is intended for the letter. Really, child, I had not thought you stupid.’

  I bowed my head. She paced around the room for a while, then went on, ‘Mary is my cousin… more to me than a cousin. After my mother died I lived with her under my aunt’s care, in Ludlow, more than I lived here.’ She smiled and paused in her fretful pacing. ‘We swore we would never be parted. We were like David and Jonathan. Have you ever known such friendship, Martha?’

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ I said, ‘I believe so. I am very fond of Owen.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a gifted child, but that’s not really the same.’ She put a hand to her head, pressing gently at the cut. ‘I feel a need to talk, and I know you will be discreet.’ She paused again and after a moment I realised that an answer was expected.

  ‘Of course, ma’am.’

  ‘Of course. And I am aware that you and your father stand a little by yourselves. We have had to speak on your behalf more than once…’

  ‘We are very grateful.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ She laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘You are a clever girl, Martha. I doubt things have been easy for you. Since your grandmother died I fear you have lacked advice. You are nearly grown. You must leave off scuttling over the fields like a fox. And the godless baiting of other souls.’ She gave me a sharp glance and I did not dare ask what she had heard. ‘You must learn to use your gifts to further God’s plans, not to thwart them. I speak this as your protector, Martha. I feel I have earned some right to counsel you – as your poor mother might have done.’

  ‘Miss Elizabeth,’ I ventured, ‘did you know my mother?’

  ‘No, of course not. She died before you came here.’

  ‘I thought, perhaps, seeing as Sir William knew my father in Gloucester, that you might have met her when she worked in a lady’s house.’

  ‘No, I knew nothing about her, nothing at all.’ Her voice had grown sharp, but then she softened and patted my head. ‘Do not dwell on such things, child. It was all a very long time ago.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘To the matter in hand.’ She leaned over me and looked at the blank paper, chewing at her lip.

  My dearest Mary,

  Forgive my long silence. My eagerness to give you news is proven by the strange hand in which this is written. I have engaged a village girl as I can scarcely sign my name. What a month I have had! It rains so much I believe the air has turned to water. My father rants about bridges lost and roads near past repair. He cannot spare a man to ride with me, and quite forbids me to stir abroad. I spend days walking the gallery, watching as the rain pelts the last leaves from the trees. All my comfort is in prayer and in reading. But you don’t need me to write of that. You ask for news. Where should I begin? Which of all my nothings should I share first? The new minister, he shall be my burden.

  He is a university man, very ambitious, I believe, a protégé of Bishop John. I have seen him several times and he talks earnestly of the souls in his care. He is shocked at the lingering of superstition hereabouts. I fear there will be battles with Papa. Oh, Mary, he has the voice of an angel.

  I glanced up. Miss Elizabeth had started her pacing again and when she turned towards me her face was flushed. ‘How is Father Paul regarded in the village, Martha? How do you fin
d him?’

  ‘Well…’ I said, not sure how to answer, seeing as we all saw him so different, ‘Richard Simons and the other wardens speak very highly of him. He is a God-fearing man and no timeserver. For myself, I am rather afraid of him.’

  ‘Yes, that is as it should be, Martha. He has explained to me how he seeks to inspire a proper fear of God’s justice. The parishes hereabouts have grown lax. I’m afraid my father is to blame. He has ever been a friend to custom and carousing. Pick up the quill, we must return to the letter. I was describing Father Paul… Begin.

  He is quite a young man, about our own age, tall and lean, with a searching look in his eyes. When he reads the scriptures the holy words flame into the world; it feels as though you are quite opened up before him, that he sees into every byway of your heart. But yet he is gracious in company. He talked for an hour together with silly Margaret Beauchamp about her sister’s wedding. There is a restraint about him I believe is gentleness. He let slip one day that his father was a ruthless man who would beat him bloody for a trifle and that it trained him to be vigilant to contain his own excess and that of others. He works his fingers earnestly together as he speaks, as though the faith in him urgently presses to be released into the world.’

  She stopped talking and I turned to her. She had lost her fretfulness and stood quite still, and distant. For the first time I thought her handsome. When she caught me looking she smiled quickly.

  ‘Continue, Martha.

  Father, of course, refuses to admire him. You, my dear, and I, rejoice in all that my father likes to deplore. He is civil to the vicar but no more, and when I ask his reasons he merely snorts that the dogs don’t like the man. Of course not. Father Paul is a town man, not used to baying and licking. My father needs to make peace with the bishop, but he will not see it. Rather he flouts him at every turn, and sets on his men to do so, too. Poor Father Paul cannot but do his duty and report back to his patron. He has confessed to me that he finds his position difficult, to say the least.’