The Wheelwright's Daughter

by Eleanor Porter

  At length there was a wide opening and I felt my way out. I realised I was in the tower that must have been the beginnings of the Hall, before Sir William’s ancestors put aside their armour. Or that is how Miss Elizabeth liked to tell the story. This top room was used only for storage now. I groped my way in the dark around the walls, and soon came to a door. It was locked. I had escaped one prison to find myself in another. It was too much. I sank to the floor and hugged my knees and moaned like the lonely wind that whined through the flues and the dead stone hearth. But then I gathered myself and continued around the room, crawling over great piles of furniture. At last, on the far wall, I found another door, and on this one I could undo the bolts.

  Outside was a high, clear moon and that kind of silent glow that snow gives off in the night. There must have been a heavy fall, for the land was all smoothed over with hollows and dimples. Even the trees were white and laden. And all was still, as though the world were waiting to begin. I was free, with a great lump of ham to boot. It felt good to be raised up above the country, all the fields beneath me and the cottages and the sleeping people. An owl shrieked and far off I saw it slide across the night. The moon was bright and hard and the stars were brilliants. I gave off a shriek like the owl and flung out my arms. How good it would be to sweep over the ignorant land with the eye of an owl that could see a mouse moving in the thatch and all the secrets beneath it.

  Then a man stepped out from the stableyard and paused and looked up. He must have heard my foolish shrieking. I shrank back into the stone. The whole world rolled back into silence and waited while he stood stock-still and looked up towards me. Even the owl had stopped its haunting. I could not tell what the man saw. Finally he crossed himself and carried on. Getting down was not so hard. I was light and quick; I had scaled trees far more troublesome than Sir William’s house.

  I kept to the hedges, thinking to avoid any night wanderers. I quite forgot that there’d be men out checking the sheep in the snow. I was singing quietly to keep me from feeling the cold, and watching my footing, when a man loomed up before me.

  ‘Begone, fiend, I’ll none of you,’ he shouted, lunging at me with his staff.

  Blackthorn bark and poppy seed,

  Thistledown and water weed

  Send the witches off full speed.

  ‘For the love of the Lord Jesus, William Leigh, leave off with your stick and your charms. It is only I, Martha.’

  He cocked his head slowly and peered at me in the half-light, frowning. ‘Martha, Martha Dynely?’

  ‘Do you know another?’

  ‘And you are not a demon, or a witch?’

  ‘Can you not tell a girl from a fairy? Would a demon leave such tracks in the snow, or have such cold fingers as I have?’ I reached out and touched his hand. He flinched a little, but let me touch him. Poor Will, he was still not sure. He rubbed at his eyes, which were set too close together. People said his brain had been squeezed when he came into the world, and that was why he was never quick.

  ‘You look a sight, girl, all soot like one of the devil’s own. You’d best be careful,’ and he flicked his head back towards the village.

  I thought he meant my father, but it was worse than that. He was not the only one abroad before dawn. I scrambled back down to the track and through the hedge. Directly into the narrow black shape of Father Paul.

  I curtsied and tried to step around him, but he grabbed my wrist.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘I called on your father last night, to remind him of his duty in the law. He was not civil and you were not there.’ He pulled me closer to him. In the glimmer of the night his face was all shadows but his breath made a white cloud. It smelled of meat and sour wine. I tugged a little at his arm and he drew me closer still, till I looked up at him. He was peering intently into me as though looking for something, his tongue pushing at his lower lip. I don’t know if he found what he was looking for, but he suddenly threw me off so that I fell into the snow at his feet.

  ‘Miss Elizabeth has a simple trusting heart, and Sir William might be content to let you loiter around his house, but know this: I am watching you.’ He pointed at my heart. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written: Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.’

  I was afraid, for it seemed he could see into my heart itself and knew all my thoughts of thievery and flying. I got to my knees in the snow and lowered my head. ‘Father, forgive me and bless me, make me humble before the Lord.’

  For minutes I stared at his skirts in the snow, not daring to lift up my face. Then suddenly my head was seized and thrust down into the snow and the ice and mud beneath it.

  ‘Fetch out the dirt within you, Martha.’ I felt the ice and stones cutting at my face, and his fingers clenching and unclenching in my hair. ‘Martha, while there is time.’ His voice was strange, choked. And then just as suddenly I was released. I heard the soft pad of his footsteps in the snow. He was gone.

  Nothing was more welcome to me than my bed that night and the oblivion of sleep. When I awoke a short while later my father was by my cot staring down at me. I was afraid to speak. He stood as still as the man in the stableyard and stared. How I wished again to be gone, to hurl myself free. Even in the half-light I could see the grim set of his mouth, the fury tightening his eyes. I forced myself to meet his gaze. For a minute we defied one another, while his fists clenched and unclenched. Then he shook his head and left.

  6

  Ashes

  I was sullen with the boys and they were sullen with me, throwing glances at the soot on my dress and the cuts on my face. I suppose they thought I had been beaten. I remembered Miss Elizabeth’s promises to visit the class and shuddered, but she did not come. At the end of the morning Owen sidled up to me and lingered while the others ran off. As the last one left he took my hand in both of his, pressing bread into my palm. I stuffed it into my pocket and hugged him. He felt so slight he might have been a fairy.

  There had been no one in the yard when I had come that morning, but I feared now to step into it. One of the men had looked up at the tower in the moonlight and had crossed himself in fear. Any one of them might look at me more sharply than the boys had done and craft a tale about what they saw and store it up for telling. I sent Owen a little ahead to scout who was there, but as I hovered in the doorway he ran back calling me.

  ‘Martha, Aggie’s here.’

  I looked, there was Aggie, with her back to me, over the other side of the yard. I watched her twine a golden plait in her fingers. Even Miss Elizabeth’s gown could not have dulled her hair. She was talking to Jacob, who leaned up against a wall and smiled as she talked and twisted her hair. He saw me before I was even out of the doorway. He frowned as he took in my stained cloak, and no doubt my cut-about face too. He muttered something to Aggie and slunk off, hands deep in his pockets.

  Aggie turned, and started at the sight of me. There were a couple of other men, who paused and chuckled. She pursed her lips and came and put an arm around Owen and greeted me coldly.

  ‘You are needed at home, Owen. You must come along with me.’

  We had been close as peas, Aggie and I, but as we grew older she grew more at ease with folk and I did not, till she said I was a sloe and my tongue was sour. But there had not been this coldness between us before.

  ‘I can walk along with you, Aggie. I should like to see your mother – is she doing well? She wanted some herbs off me.’

  ‘No, Martha, that’s quite all right. You must be busy here,’ and her glance travelled down the length of my dirty cloak.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Aggie,’ Owen put in. ‘Of course Martha can come with us. Mother would like to see her. She just had a fall in the lane is all.’

  ‘No, Owen,’ I said, ‘go home with your sister. I have to put the room in order.’

  Aggie pressed her mouth into a thin hard line and turned, pulling Owen with her. I watched them for a moment and then I couldn’t help blurting out, ‘It’
s not what you think, Aggie, it isn’t. Please.’

  She turned. ‘Then what is it? A fall in the lane? There’s old Will Leigh. Father was out checking sheep and met him at first light. He said he’d seen you flighting over the snow, scarce leaving tracks, all lit up by the moon, like you were the devil’s own sprite.’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  ‘He’s an addled old fool, but look at you, ragged and sooted. What were you about? Did you go with the gypsy fiddlers Sir William brought over for the feast?’

  ‘Aggie, no, I wouldn’t. Please…’

  She was pulling to go and Owen was resisting. ‘You’ve got to say sorry, Aggie,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a baby, Owen – what do you know?’ She looked me full in the face, and some of the stiffness went out of her. ‘You have always been my friend, Martha, but sometimes I think I scarcely know you.’

  I watched them leave, Owen turning and grinning anxiously as he was yanked away. The yard was empty. Slush dripped from the eaves and puddled at my feet. It hadn’t long stayed white, the world.

  There was so little chance of passing unobserved that I did not wish to risk walking back along the lane. I climbed up the slopes instead, muddying my cloak still further with snow melt. They had sown the winter wheat already in the low fields and snow bones lingered in the furrows. Up on the ridge, the branches dripped and plopped. Meltwater stung the cuts on my cheek. I had thought myself so lucky to escape uncaught last night; I had thought myself unscathed. As girls Aggie and I had made one another crowns of buttercups and wild garlic, pinching the stems with a nail and threading the stalks through. Buttercups for her because her hair was golden, spike-flowered garlic for me because she said my hair was night and belonged to the moon. We’d play round the lane till Grandam called me home. How I missed my grandmother.

  It was a while since I had sat at her grave. I dropped down by Hooper’s Oak and headed for the chapel. She was buried not far from the great yew that towered over the dead, protecting them from witches. Some of the boys had thought me a witch before. Now they believed me a whore to boot. There was nobody in the graveyard. Snow lingered in scraps and patches and the ground was sodden, but I kneeled anyway, and rested my head against the stone. If she was alive she would have scolded and soothed me. She would have mixed me up a poultice to heal my cuts and helped me clean my clothes. Then when they were drying she would have sat by the fire with me and spun me stories with the wool rippling into thread before her. Some of the stories were about my mother. I liked those the best.

  There was a winter, when my mother was very young, my grandmother had told me, when it had snowed for weeks. Their cottage was a mile or two outside Moccas. There was no road and the drifts got so bad my grandfather could not get back to the cottage. One night brought a blizzard that banked up the door so heavy they couldn’t get out but by the window. ‘Your mother jumped up and down with delight’, Grandam said, ‘then sat and stared out at the folds and the billows for hours, called the snowfall the kiss of the north wind.’ A robin came and lived in the hollows underneath the thatch. They fed it oatcakes till it was tame, but then one morning they woke to the sound of water dripping and a new yellow sun. The robin flew out the opened door.

  My grandmother had been full of such stories. A few remained with me, but, more and more, when I tried to hold them they melted away.

  My knees were numb. I clambered stiffly to my feet. As I raised my eyes, I saw him, Father Paul, sitting on a bench my father had made. It should not have been a surprise, of course – this was his church – but it hit me as unjust that I should encounter him again so soon. He gestured to me to sit beside him. I could not civilly refuse.

  ‘I have been watching you. It is good to pray. There’s a simple piety in coming to your grandmother’s grave at such a time. But you must not make an idol of the dead.’

  I said nothing. It seemed that nothing was required of me. It was hard to reconcile the terrible figure who had ground my face into the stones with this quiet man. My head ached. I slipped my fingers beneath my legs to warm them and let him talk.

  ‘I fear I was harsh with you last night. You appeared in the moonlight ragged and filthy, as though you had been belched from hell. I had been thinking of you. The Lord Jesus challenges me with you, throws you into my way, your whole body charged with blackness. There is meaning in it. I pushed you into the snow to redeem you, do you see? Do you see? How could you thrust such sin before me?’

  He got up and stepped back a little, regarding me solemnly. There, only a few feet behind him, my grandmother lay, as dead as my mother. I barely followed his words, but they wrapped me in loneliness. Without thinking, I reached my hand up to my cheek.

  He was still talking. ‘I didn’t mean to cut your face. Never before I came here have I felt how much the world is riddled with death.’

  I looked up. He was no longer looking at me, but somewhere out into the fields. He seemed half to have forgotten I was there.

  ‘Last night I ate with the company at the Hall. It was snowing thickly as I walked there and in the darkness I caught sight of a sheep in the ditch. I thought to move it out of the drifts, which would no doubt soon come, but as I approached I saw it was long dead. More than that, the carcass was crawling with maggots. I cannot get them out of my mind. This is what we are. A foul act begins us; we end in the procreation of rottenness. The sun itself is a breeder of maggots. And all the time the flesh calls to us with its appetites. I looked at the meat on my plate and I was appalled. It sickened me. It was such a relief to leave the company, to be in the cold clean snow and the moonlight. Then the devil flushed you out before me, breathless with degradation.’

  His voice was almost pleading. I wished I was anywhere else.

  ‘I am not what you think me,’ I began, for the second time that day.

  He started when I spoke and I felt I should have stayed silent. His tone changed abruptly. It was friendly now, almost conversational. ‘No, in the light of morning it came to me that you must have been helping his lordship with his chimneys. He has some very large chimneys at the Hall.’

  I nodded uneasily.

  He went on, ‘Perhaps there might even be tunnels or some such, connecting old parts of the house. Did they have you cleaning them, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said eagerly, ‘yes, I was cleaning, in the cinders.’ If Father Paul himself cleared me, nobody would dare so much as mutter.

  He was smiling down at me. ‘Cleaning tunnels, strange old spaces in the house?’

  I felt the heaviness return. ‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘nothing like that, just the cinders and the brassing in the kitchens.’

  His smile wound itself back in. ‘Are you very sure? Think about it, Martha. Count up your friends.’

  It was both an offer and a threat. .

  7

  Plans

  As soon as I was home I scrubbed and mended my cloak and gown and set them by the fire to dry, and I teased out my hair with the comb my father had made me for my last birthday, all carved with pretty flowers. Then I set about the broth, dropping in pieces of the ham I’d taken from the Hall. I did not hear my father come in. His voice startled me.

  ‘Where were you?’

  I opened my mouth. It occurred to me that I had not thought what story to tell him. He leaned down over me; the light from the flames played over his face. His voice was low and angry.

  ‘I got work, up at the Hall…’ I began, and then faltered, for he had raised his hand to slap me.

  ‘Don’t lie to me! Not me, you hear? You can lie to the others – yes, and I know you do. It’s all the same to me if you damn them to hell, but don’t try it with me. I came back last afternoon and found you not returned. So yes, I thought you were working up at the Hall.’

  ‘It’s true, Father. Miss Elizabeth—’

  ‘I am speaking!’ he shouted, grabbing my shoulders, his face an inch from mine. ‘Late on, Widow Spicer came nosing round to borrow a flint, or some
such tale, and said she was surprised you had not lingered up there yesterday as there was that much work, with all the fine people coming, and were you not back yet, indeed? You’d best be careful, she said, what with the gypsies staying to entertain at the gathering.’

  ‘Why, how dare she—’

  ‘Oh, she dares, all right – what’s to stop her? She’s a soul as spotted as an eel and as slippery; she wants us in the mud so she can wriggle out and claim more light. And you help her.’ He let me go and paused as though the words were stopped in his throat. I watched his hands, clenching, unclenching. I hoped he was done, but in a breath he’d turned full at me again. ‘You come crawling back, ripped and cindered, scaring up old Bill like a dark spirit or some kinchin harlot out of her ditch. You want that? You want every lumbering oaf and his wife to snigger as you go by? By God, I should beat some sense into you.’

  ‘Do you think they don’t snigger already?’ I shouted. ‘Do you think they don’t hear you when you come back roaring, Father?’

  I took a step back as I said it; he was sure to hit me now; his face grew twisted and ugly and he raised his right arm. For a second he hovered and I thought he would stride right through the hearth to knock me down. But then his hands fell to his sides and he spat on the floor.