I turned to Owen. ‘Let’s see those pies you pilfered,’ I said.
There was more dancing later, but not with Jacob. I saw him approach before the next set, but I turned to Tom who happened to be by, and he gave me a grin and ducked me a bow. Tom had always been a friend to us. He’d been a drinking man, but it did not turn him sour. Many’s the time he’d lugged my father home and helped me lay him on his bed. Then a year or so ago he’d stopped going to the alehouse. I think he and my father had had words, for he did not come by any more either. But he was always friendly to me. He was older than my father – there was as much grey as black in his beard – but he was no less strong for that. He swung me around as though I were a half-peck of corn and he threaded through the line more dainty than a courtier. I had a great desire to tell him our plans, but I had promised Father I would breathe a word to nobody.
‘You must dance with the young folk, Martha,’ he said as we finished.
‘Oh, I do, some,’ I said, ‘but there’s many that don’t like me.’
‘Don’t like you? Oh, you kimet child, they’d like you well enough if you let them. Anne Boleyn was little and dark; that turned King Henry’s head.’
It was very pleasing to hear him say so, though we were all of us warm with ale. The night and the dancing and the fine rich food gifted everyone with beauty. I had never been pretty. The Widow had said so bluntly enough, and the boys found me too plain or too fierce to want me as a partner. My father was a handsome man, or had been, but I did not look like him and though I was dark like my mother I knew by the way he stared at me sometimes and sighed that he looked for her in me and could not find her. Still, I felt myself glow with pleasure.
‘You look happy, Martha,’ Jacob said when he swung me in the four; he sounded surprised. ‘You were content enough to dance with Tom, I see.’ He began to say something else, but my arm was taken by Ezekiel Tucker, who trod on my toe, for he’d grown a little tipsy, despite his Mary seizing the cup off him whenever she could.
Soon I sought Aggie out to walk home, for the hour was late. There could be no dancing on Christmas Day. We could not find Owen anywhere in the barn, although most folks had wandered home and the fiddles were sawing out carols. We stood outside in the yard and made him out over by the barn opposite, where the plough oxen were housed against the winter. As we approached Aggie got ready to scold, but Owen put his fingers to his lips and we noticed Jacob behind him, swaying a little. ‘Jacob said we could come and watch the oxen to see them kneel in prayer for the birth of our Lord. He says there’s ever so many have seen them Christmas night. Some say they can talk.’
We glanced at one another. I could see Aggie hesitate between duty and curiosity. ‘I don’t think—’ she began.
But Jacob butted in, ‘Come, Aggie, it is holy, I swear it is. Yes, a kind of worship, God’s Holy Hiwacle.’
I knew that kind of talking, although Jacob slurred with a smile dancing on his lips.
‘Martha,’ he turned to me, ‘you’ll come.’ He grasped my hand and I caught Aggie’s and we ducked into the barn. It was dark inside, with a soft musky animal darkness, but Jacob had a lantern and he led us to a corner piled with fresh straw where we could make out the sleeping beasts. They stomped and snorted at our coming in, but Jacob spoke gently to them and they settled. We sank down in the straw and watched. In the distance we heard the bells ring out midnight: Christmas morning. Owen squatted up on his haunches, eagerly leaning forward, but Aggie and I sat down with our backs to the wall, Jacob between the two of us. He kept hold of our hands. We breathed the rich heady smell of the straw and the beasts; I was aware of my body in an easeful way, and of Jacob’s warmth beside me, but it did not feel lewd or wrong. We were brothers and sisters in the darkness and the oxen blinked at the lamplight and seemed to recognise us. We stayed stock-still, not speaking, not counting the minutes. All of us, all four, it seemed to me, had stepped from the meddle of ordinary time. It was the hour between night and morning, on the holiest of nights. The oxen looked right at me.
‘We should kneel,’ I whispered, and Owen nodded and got down on his knees. I glanced across at Jacob and Aggie. Jacob’s head leaned back against the wall, Aggie’s leaned on his shoulder. Both were quite asleep. I love each of them, I told myself, as I endeavoured to kneel without disturbing them, why shouldn’t they love one another? Owen smiled and pointed, before he bowed his head. One of the beasts had dropped down too. A thrill went through me: it was kneeling, at this hour of His birth; it had dropped to its knees! Its eyes were as deep as Pentaloe Wells, where the water descends into blackness. I edged forward under the rail and laid a palm on its blood-brown neck. I could feel the pulse of its life beneath my fingers. Such power and stillness, and the hot moist breath clouding my face. Somewhere far off folk were bidding each other good night and merry Christmas; the fiddles had fallen silent. All that was left of the lantern was a soft yellow glow. I leaned my forehead against the shaggy brow and let myself sink into the darkness and the understanding of the ox. There was a holy magic around us. He spoke to me of strength and the pull of clay and the fiery flower that bloomed and died each day, and of labour and rain, and my own heart spoke and he understood that too.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that – seconds, perhaps; perhaps minutes – but then there was a hand on each of my shoulders pulling me back. Jacob had woken, sober enough now. Quietly he ushered us out to the cold starlit night with all its hard clarity.
‘What in God’s name were you doing, Martha? Are you mad? Did you fancy a goring? I should not have taken you, any of you. Entering the stall of an ox like that!’
‘It spoke.’ I said, smiling round at them. ‘It spoke.’
Jacob raised his brows and gave a low whistle. Then he shook his head. ‘To no one but you, Martha, no one but you. It was a foolish venture. Come, I’m stopping here tonight, I’ll wish you all a merry Christmas. You should get on home.’
We set off. Aggie giggled. ‘Not but what I do believe it does happen,’ she said, ‘but, Martha, do you think it might be the wassail cup and the ale?’
‘I wish it’d spoken to me,’ Owen said.
Oh, Owen… I could scarce look at him without shame. How could I leave him, how could I? I hugged him close. ‘You don’t need beasts,’ I said. ‘All God’s angels will speak to you.’
11
The Simons’ Baby
Two days after Christmas, well before dawn, Aggie was banging at our door, hollow-eyed and drawn. Their mother had given birth the evening before to a baby girl. Neither mother nor baby were well. Richard Simons was praying and Father Paul had been called. There was a mixture I had given Mary Tucker when she was sick after her Thomas was born. It was not so special, but after she got better so quickly people talked about my preparations as though I had an uncommon gift with herbs. Could I make it now, Aggie asked, could I help?
It took me all morning to assemble it, for I ran out of yarrow and had to walk over to Putley to beg some off an old woman I knew there. When I reached the Simons’ house Father Paul was there again. Agnes was praying beside him. The winter light fell across her as she kneeled and she looked like a lady cut in alabaster kneeling at a tomb, except that her nose was red with weeping. I thought of the chiselled saints in the chapel, with their smashed-up faces. It made me shudder. Owen glanced up at me and smiled, but Father Paul carefully did not. I was grateful for that. One of the gossips put water on to boil and let me up. Owen’s mother looked like all the blood had been drained from her body.
She had been doing well, one said, for one with so little strength in her, till the fever came and she began raving. Now she was bleeding again. The baby, they said, when I asked, seemed to be out of danger, although she could not be cured of being a girl, and old Simons would not get over that.
I took Ann Simons’ hand. I did not think she could see me, but after a few minutes she smiled.
‘You’ve been a good friend to Owen, Martha. Look after him.’
‘You’ll pull through, neighbour,’ I said. ‘You’ll be baking by Candlemas and dancing in May.’
I gave the women instructions for the herbs to be added to the caudle and I gave them the preparation I’d brought for the baby, too. It looked a weak little thing to me, and so it proved, for Ann Simons grew stronger day by day, but the child did not. Only a few days later Father Paul was summoned again to the house, this time to christen the child before she died. Ann named the baby Martha, for me. She was convinced that it was I who had saved her, that my herbs had brought her back to life, even though I could not save little Martha.
The bundle looked pitiful, as it was lowered into the earth. There were few mourners. Father Paul scowled as he looked around and saw how few. The villagers would be preparing for Plough Monday. Another idolatrous superstition, he declared, that had no place in a good Christian life. I held Owen’s hand.
‘All is vanity,’ Father Paul intoned. ‘All go unto one place, all are of the dust and all turn to dust again.’ The rain fell down as he spoke until he seemed only a pillar of black. Or perhaps I was weeping.
‘She barely cried,’ Ann whispered to me. ‘She took one look at this sinful world and turned again to God. It was a mercy.’ She was very pious, Ann. For my part, I could not see how the poor child’s miserable life could be held a blessing. But I said nothing.
Widow Spicer, never one to miss a funeral, was more forthcoming. She leaned forward. ‘Yes, Ann,’ she said. ‘She will be better off with Him. I often praise God for giving me just one child, so that I could feed and clothe him decently and bring him up to be a strapping lad. Perhaps, having been spared, it will teach your husband to leave you alone at last.’
I pressed Owen’s hand harder and looked down. ‘I do not doubt that she means well,’ Ann said to me later, ‘but her words have a bite to them.’
‘Forget her,’ I said. ‘She has no teeth at all.’
I was wrong, of course. She had teeth. She was a dragon, or she knew how to wake one up. In the end who was the greater witch? I watched her leave the funeral with Jacob and wondered at her being his mother. It struck me I had very little understanding of him. It was no doubt because of Aggie that he took pains to be my friend. We were not alike, at all. We were forever at odds. The warrens and the horses compassed his world about and he was happy for them to. Why did he unsettle me so? But we would soon be gone; in Hereford it would be easy to pry my thoughts free.
12
Plough Monday and the Foxhead Fool
There were six crowded onto the plough. They whooped and hollered as people threw their coins, and their teeth looked white and strange against the blacking. Before them, the Bessy and the Fool mopped and mowed around the bells and the flute and the fiddle. The rain let off and a weak sun smiled a little. I found that I was smiling too, at the young men jostling and pushing at the plough and the Bessy holding up her bosom.
I remembered how I liked it. The men with their blacked-up faces, the Bessy, the Fool, nobody themselves and the world topsy-turvy. When I was a little girl, I followed the plough. There was always a rabble of children behind it, hoping to catch a ha’penny at Wall House or Cockyard Farm. None of that for me any more: now I made sure that I had put aside a coin to pay them. The Widow was already at her door, looking pleased with herself, as always. I saw her sister, Goody Reynolds, was with her. Hags, both. One of the young men would be their Jacob, though at this distance I couldn’t tell which. Well, so be it, I could not forever avoid him.
The Fool had a fox’s head, rich and red. You could not see his face at all. It was usually old Will Leigh, loon that he was, but he’d been taken ill. Father said that they’d even come to him to ask him to play it, but I think that must have been in jest, for there was nothing more unlikely. ‘As if I’d don old skins,’ he scoffed, ‘and prance through the village to humour their swinish practices.’
The Fool laid down the sticks to dance before our house and they set to, even though the mud was thick and slick and they looked to lurch onto their backsides every moment. The Bessy was too bothered with her bosom to kick out as she should, but the Fool jumped high, and every time he approached me he clacked his sticks close. I could smell the skins he wore as they flapped and the thick cloud of his breath in the cold air hung before my face. He grew faster and the fiddle raced to keep up with him; the crowd clapped. The long line of his fox teeth grinned and his fox eyes glinted. And each time he turned to me, I curled my fingers on the coin till it hurt, for my heart raced and it felt I was falling into his quick, hot rhythm. The fiddle caught my breathing, fast and sharp, fast and sharp and there was a wild joy in it; the sticks flew around my head, nearer and nearer; I was alone in the white day, wrapped round by his dance. I squeezed the hard coin in my hand, and I felt giddy, giddy…
But then the door broke open behind me and there was my father, haggard with morning and shouting through the music till he shattered the spell.
‘Go on, begone, the lot of you. I’ll not be paying you. Pass on,’ he shouted, yanking me to him, for the Fool had stopped so close to me I felt the air lifting the bright red hairs of his pelt. He shook his bells in my father’s face and stepped lightly back. It seemed to me his yellow fox jaws were laughing. I glanced at my father and felt ashamed. Often enough folks had seen him a singing drunk; now he was a parson.
The boys with the plough surged forward. ‘Stand aside, Walter, skinflint, hardpenny, if you mock the plough you’ll be hungry in the harvest. Stand aside, you’d better grow corn in your doorway.’
My father tried to stop them, grabbed the plough itself and half wrestled it over, but they were six to his one, and the crowd laughing and jeering them on. It did not take long for them to push him into the mud. The Bessy came and plonked herself on his chest, waggling a finger at him as he lay there swearing and spluttering whilst they carved up the earth before our door. I leaned back and watched it all go, all the planting I’d put in over years. Rosemary and marjoram and thyme and bay. My little path, too, buckled and gone, all gone. How could he put his stupid pride before my garden? For a moment I saw my father as I suppose the others saw him: flailing like a beetle on its back, all its fine shell useless and misplaced. Then I looked back to the youths on the plough, laughing to each other as they dragged the blade and the clods flew. The Fool stood askance and watched me.
I found my voice then. ‘Shame on you. You do not have to ruin it all.’
They paused as if they had just noticed me.
‘Hark at you,’ one said. It was Davey Yapp. I knew him even through his blacking. ‘Not so proud now? Tramping the fields in the crook of the moon. And right after that the devil came and dug us a hole. Ain’t no coincidence, if you asks me. And what did you do to old Will Leigh? He’s scarce been out of his bed since you frighted him.’
‘That’s no fault of mine,’ I said, clutching at the plough to stop it. ‘I’ve no quarrel with Will, and you know it. There’s plenty have got comfort from those herbs you’re busy wrecking.’
I was going to go on. I had plenty of insults ready, but they closed around me in a circle, me and the plough together. The handles dug in my back, and my insults died in my throat. I could not see over their shoulders. I knew Davey and one or two of the others, but three of them I did not know. They were sneering at me, and each time I tried to step through they moved together and did not let me pass.
‘Let me go,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let me go?’ I could hear a silly panic rising in my voice. They heard it too, and smiled.
‘You’re a bit too high and mighty, aren’t you?’ Davey said, and pushed me, just a little, so I stumbled over the iron against his neighbour, who grabbed me by my arms and spun me round, then passed me on and another took me and hooted at the game. Yellow teeth and flecks of spittle on my face and I couldn’t wipe it off for they were shoving me, flinging me from one to the other around the plough, reaching out their big hands to grab at me and throw me on.
Perhaps it was only a minute – I don’t know – I heard my father in the crowd. Then the circle was breaking, the Fool was pushing through and as I turned to him the arm of the plough caught my skirts so that I fell headlong into the welling soil. There was a gasp. Next to me, a thumb’s width away from my head, sat the sharpened blades, sticky with mud and clay.
I closed my eyes to the day and shrugged off the hands that tried to pull me up. The same hands, no doubt, that had gripped my shoulders, my arms, my waist as they shoved me from one to the other, like a dog before the fight. I willed myself to think only of the wet earth and the rain. The rain was soft and cold; it fell so kindly.
By the time I had clambered to my knees, the flute and the fiddle had started up again. The plough and ploughmen were gone. Only the Fool lingered. He bent his fox head to glance down at me as he turned to go and in the angle of his head I knew him. I opened my palm and let the coin fall to the ground.
13
A Recognition
It was all over. The procession cheerfully progressed down the lane, leaving my father and me stuck with clay before our door, and the Widow and her sister enjoying the sight.
‘Go on now, there’s nothing to see,’ my father barked at them as he pulled me up. I took his outstretched hand. It was only a short time ago that he had talked so joyfully of rolling up our possessions and stepping out onto the road. All up until Christmas, and even after, his eyes were alight with planning. Why, he’d spoken to a man about taking lodgings and to another about work. In the spring, he’d said. But in the days since the year began the earth had eased itself into weeping once again; and the alehouse had seen far more of him than I. As he helped me to my feet I felt a terrible sense that he had shrunk. For a moment I had seen him as a stranger, pitted by years of drinking and rage. It was worse than being flung in the dirt myself. I felt that if we were alone, I was not sure that we were alone together any longer. I could not bear to look at him, though I knew he wanted me to.
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