The Wheelwright's Daughter

by Eleanor Porter

  I hung my head a little. ‘Then I am grateful to you for speaking up against such talk. I know you will have been a good friend to me against such idle rumour.’ I would have gone on, but I noticed Jacob in the corner, his head thrown back a little and half a smile on his face. It would not do to go too far, I told myself; she would not take kindly to being laughed at.

  The Widow preened herself a little. ‘And so I have, Martha. She can be wayward, I’ve said, but there’s no harm in the girl, whatever her family. Think, I’ve said, of the damage false report can do, and her with no one to defend her.’

  ‘My father will defend me.’

  ‘Well, yes, child. And where is he tonight?’

  I bridled, but I let it go, congratulating myself on my restraint. She was watching me closely though, for she went on, ‘And don’t think Miss Elizabeth will step in for you. They’ve their own troubles at the Hall, and no one will defend a witch.’

  ‘There, you’ve said it,’ I said. ‘I am no witch.’

  The two women stared at me. ‘It’s time she knew,’ Goody Reynolds put in.

  ‘Knew what?’ I said.

  She went on as though I could not hear. ‘It’s time she knew about her mother.’ She turned to me. ‘How did she die, Martha?’

  ‘She had a fever,’ I said, ‘when I was two years old. It was in Gloucester, before we came here, just at this time of the year.’

  Goody Reynolds put out a finger and jabbed me in the chest.

  ‘No fever,’ she said. ‘Ask your father when he comes home, if he’s up to talking. Ask him tomorrow if he’s not.’

  And they threw one another a knowing glance. It was almost a smile. I felt tears prick at my eyes. I did not know what to say, but I felt I could not leave them holding the milk and their victory. I had a good mind to fling them out a curse, but fortunately Jacob came forward and asked his mother impatiently if he should have to wait all night for his meal.

  ‘Good evening to you,’ I said, turning for home and pulling the door shut behind me.

  ‘You’d better heat that milk through,’ I heard the Widow say as I lingered a moment on the step. ‘Get it good and hot. That will take any of the girl’s malice out of it.’

  If you listen hard enough you can hear the frost. There is a tautening of the air as it takes hold. I stood in the dark and listened. The ruts and the puddles had grown a skin of ice and the thatch glistened in the moonlight. An owl swooped by, but it did not hoot. The shutters were closed, but behind them the blest candles would be lit against the dragon in the hill. It was silent tonight. Perhaps the prayers had worked and the dragon had been banished, like Judas, back to hell.

  16

  The Creeping Frost

  I let the fire go out as the woodpile was low, but I could not sleep. It was often enough my father had gone to the tavern and not come home till dawn, but that was before we had resolved to leave. I could understand him drinking before, when his life was comprised only of tramping the lanes between the farms and the soaking dreams of the ale cup. Now it was different. Perhaps that was why I felt a foreboding as the minutes dragged into hours and he did not come.

  I had resolved to ask him Goody Reynolds’ question if he was not too bad, for he was looser tongued in drink than ever he was sober, though as likely to storm as to talk. I sat there thinking how to phrase it, anxious that he was not coming through the door, dreading the moment that he did, lest he told me when I asked. I had pictured so often the scene of my mother’s death. In it, he sat by her bedside, clasping her hands in his. Sometimes in the picture I sat on his knee, or happily next to my mother in the bed. Her head lay back on the pillows with her beautiful hair framing her face. The air was scented with herbs – rosemary, thyme and lavender. She opened her eyes and he bent forward to hear the words of comfort and love that she whispered, and then she closed her eyes and died. But I knew, as I stared into the ashes where the fire had been, that none of this was true and had never been true, and that there was another story with another picture I had hidden, which was waiting to be found.

  At last I could wait no longer. I gathered my cloak about me and went outside. The moon was high and the lane was deserted. The skin of ice had thickened and the mud bore my weight without shifting. If need be, I decided, I would walk to the alehouse at the Cockshoot, wake him from his stupor and drag him home. I did not meet a soul on the road, but when I reached the tavern, through the shutters I could see that a light still burned. I banged on the doors and set the dogs barking.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said a woman’s voice presently. ‘What kind of hour do you call this? We’re closed, can’t you see? Be off, you’ll get nothing here, be you a bishop or a prince. I’ll set the dogs on you, so I will.’

  ‘Meg,’ I said, ‘it’s Martha, Walter Dynely’s daughter. Is he there? I need him home.’

  She opened the door a crack and two of the dogs wriggled out. They would have gone for me if she’d not grabbed them and given them a blow on their snouts.

  ‘Whatever are you doing, girl, walking the lanes at this hour and at a time like this, with who knows what stirring? Your father is not here, and he’s not welcome back, neither, till he pays what he owes.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘he’s not come home. Who did he leave with?’

  ‘Left on his own, three hours since. Me and my Peter kicked him out. Proper addled, he was, and loud with it, lurching and swearing. We told him it was time to go, and he would not budge, but kept hollering on, blaspheming till old Nick would have blushed to hear it. A couple of the lads tried to talk some sense into him but he wouldn’t have it; even took a swing at poor Dick Loader. I’m not having none of that, I said. Not in my establishment. Out on his arse he went, and he’s lucky we didn’t get the constables.’

  ‘He’s not come home,’ I said, frightened now.

  ‘Well? I’m not his nursemaid. Maybe Jack Frost will talk some sense into him. You’d best get on home, girl. You’ve heard that hill – there’s bad spirits about. If I were you I’d lock the door against him, though he is your father, for like as not he’ll be in a beating mood.’

  ‘He doesn’t beat me.’ I said, but it was to myself, for she had already shut the door. I could hear the big bolts being dragged across.

  The cloud had thickened and rolled down till it hung like wool from the trees and pushed its way between houses, thick and silent as dread itself. I could barely see the ground at my feet, and all the time the air was freezing. Morning would not bring light for hours. From the Cockshoot to our cottage was not so far – a mile and a half at most – but he could be anywhere. I called out, quietly at first and then louder, setting the dogs barking and the pigs shuffling. More than once I thought I saw a man’s shape ahead on the lane and ran towards it, reaching out as though I could push the fog aside. But the figure drifted into nothing as I approached. All the phantoms of the world might have been with me in the fog and I should not have seen them, though I peered till my eyes hurt. I should not have cared, either; would have taken their hands and laughed, if they had led me to my living father.

  There were many different ways. It struck me that with the ground so hard he might have walked the fields: Goosefoot Meadow, Hungry Croft. I tried the lanes first, calling and calling, trying not to think of the ditches: that he could be lying there, with the ale freezing his blood. When it was light surely I should be able to see, even if only a few feet, but by then he might be dead. I needed others’ help. At the Fosbury the black wall of the Young’s farmhouse defied the drifts of cloud. Farmer Young was no friend of my father’s, not after last summer when he’d gone on a drunk leaving a cart half done, but other years he’d done good work for them; they’d four or five hands at least who could be roused to help me search. I steeled myself and knocked up the house. Edward Young came to the door with a cudgel, his wife at his shoulder. When I told them my father had been at the Cockshoot, they laughed in my face. Pleading made no difference, though I sank to my knees. I’d for
got how high they held themselves. Damn them, I thought, as I got back up and turned to the lane. I said it too out loud.

  ‘Damn you both, you turd-teethed, stink-breathed wretches.’

  ‘Fie on you, little Martha Dynely,’ they called back. ‘Your father can go to hell and join your mother. You won’t feel so strong for curses when you’re a walking mort and earning your bread on your back. Be off before we set the dogs on you.’

  I moved further off, shouting all the same, ‘May you waste like the dew against the sun, all of you. All of you.’ I would have given a piece of myself, then, for the power to make it happen.

  The air was so thick I near missed the gap into the Goosefoot, but as I climbed across Hungry Croft to Little Hill it grew thinner. Shreds of the fog drifted past me, white and aloof like the wraiths of horses. I stood still for some time with the mist about me, listening. The world felt very empty and quiet. If he should die, what would there be to keep me here? Or in all the world, come to that. But my body still would need to be fed and clothed; it would ache and be heavy. I envied the mist its weightless, silent drift, curling through wastes and villages, kissing the faces of the people if it wanted, or mingling with their breath. No one, not even the Queen herself, could lay a hold of it, or ask it to account.

  I shook myself. How could I stand still and dream so? He was not here. I descended back into the murk of the village. Still the lane was quiet. I resolved to rouse the houses – surely here people would not turn from me. I would put my foot in the door if need be. The Simons, at least, would aid us. I stumbled. It was one of the stones we had down put to warn of the hole. And there he was, headlong in the trench, his breeches and his jerkin stiff with frost.

  17

  Verses, Tales

  I must have screamed, for men enough blundered out of sleep to find out what was wrong, and together we shifted him into the house. He was not dead, as I had thought at first, slung out with all the trash, with all that the parish wanted to be rid of into that rent, to be covered over and forgotten like a murderer at the crossways; but he was not far from death.

  It seemed my reparation of the day before – how long ago that seemed – had indeed mended relations somewhat with my neighbours for the Widow and Goody Reynolds came by to help me warm him, both of them bloated with piety. They helped get the fire going and chafed his hands and feet. Perhaps I should have been more grateful, but I could not stand their sighs and tuts. It was rare, they said, that even the strongest recovered absolutely from a freezing like this. They wouldn’t be surprised if he was an invalid from now on. Do you remember, Judith, Goodwife Reynolds said, old Whittle, who’d lived next to them when they were girls in Woolhope? He’d been caught in the snow one winter, when he’d gone out after the sheep. Never the same again. Ice in his chest from then on, not good for a thing on the land, just sat wheezing by the fire. Ice in his chest and ice in his heart, her sister commented. It was like he was twisted, snapping at anyone who tried to help him, and him such a jolly soul before.

  At first I thought we should never get the warmth back into Father, and then he fell into a sleep from which we couldn’t wake him, his breath shallow and grating. For two days he lay with his eyelids flickering and I stood over his cot and watched. Then death threw him back.

  I thought he would recover, then, but it was like they said: the ice had found its way into his lungs and he could not cough it out. He sat up, but the strength had gone from his chest and he leaned his hands on his knees for support. I looked at him and felt our future shrink to the narrow rooms of the cottage. Why had I fooled myself? We could no more start afresh than the fire could burn without smoking or the walls be free of the soot. He spat long strings of phlegm into the fire and banged his stick for me to come to bring him broth or a rag or small beer and I came, and I rubbed his back too, and tucked the blanket around his shoulders, but often I could barely speak for rage and sorrow.

  Since he was out of danger I went back to my class and the boys were kinder to me than they had been, though I barely focused on the work and they made little progress.

  At the end of the second morning there was a knock on the door and Jacob stepped in. I recalled the last time he had entered the schoolroom and felt myself redden. He smiled at my confusion and walked up to me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ve learned enough of a lesson already in here. I know I don’t fit,’ and he nudged a bench with his foot and grinned at the boys.

  ‘I am sorry for it,’ I returned. ‘I had a text set aside for you to learn from. It concerns Pride mostly.’

  ‘Then it must be a passage that is very dear to you, Martha.’

  ‘Not at all. I have no need of it, as your mother so often reminds me.’

  ‘Still, you’d better keep it. I am sure it would be too difficult for me to follow.’

  The boys were watching us, turning from one to the other as we spoke, unsure if we were in anger or jest. ‘What have you come for, then?’ I said a little more sharply than I meant to.

  ‘Only this. Miss Elizabeth sends word to go to see her. She has work for you.’ Then he turned on his heel and left, and I felt that I had blundered with him once again, although I was not quite sure how.

  ‘Taken pity on you, Miss,’ Ned Stolley said, ‘on account of your father being so poorly.’

  ‘Is it true,’ Robbie put in, ‘that he was regular dead in the hole, and you had to rub the life back in him? Did you charm him back?’

  I could see where this was heading. ‘It was Widow Spicer and her sister that helped me revive him,’ I said quickly. ‘They were more skilled than I, but it’s true enough that he’s poorly.’

  ‘People say,’ Ben Ladding put in, ‘that deep down in the hole you can hear the screams of hell. May be that he heard them, Martha. It was a bad night with all that fog. There was ghosts abroad, my nan said. They could’ve pushed him in the hole.’

  I thought of the shapes that formed and dissolved before me when I was looking. I could believe there were wraiths in the whiteness, that the mist was thick with their longing and their loss. ‘Have you seen a ghost, Ben?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I en’t, but my nan’s seen plenty. She was coming back from Ledbury way once and there was a whole family on the road, walking towards Marcle. She hailed them and they looks right at her and then she fell on her knees for she could see straight through every one of them.’

  ‘All I know,’ Robbie, put in, ‘is there’s summat going on, and if it isn’t a dragon in the hill, then what is it?’

  Mistress Elizabeth herself came to the servants’ door to greet me. She took me by the hand and led me to a table in the library. I had not been in there before. What a contrast it was with the cold dusty schoolroom! All of the walls were of dark wood, and the fireplace was of the same dark wood, but carved and gleaming with the warm echoes of the fire in the grate. The air was rich with beeswax and leather.

  Miss Elizabeth swept her hand across the room as though to display it. ‘My father, alas, is no reader, but I have a modest collection of books, which I add to as much as I am able. I know you have a tolerable fair hand, Martha.’

  ‘I believe I do, ma’am, considering.’

  ‘Yes, considering. Of course, you are no scribe and have not been to school, dear, but I would like you to copy out some verses for me. If you do it well, I shall give you more to do. I have laid out what I want you to copy. There is ample paper. I shall come back and check on you later. And, Martha…’

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘Do not wander about the place. If you need anything, ring this bell.’

  For the second time that day I blushed to the roots of my hair, though there was no one to see, for she had left already.

  It was slow going, for I feared to make a mistake and was distracted by the verses, which were full of love and sighing. As careful as I tried to be, I blotted the paper more than once.

  I had not been there above half an hour when the door flew open and S
ir William strode in.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ he said, when he saw me sitting at his table.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ I said, bobbing low. ‘Miss Elizabeth asked me to copy some work for her.’

  He made a show of peering at me more closely. ‘Ah, yes, you’re Dynely’s girl, the one who can read and write. Sorry to hear about your father – bad business altogether – but he’s a good man, Dynely, all said and done. He’s been through worse than this. He’ll pull through. Don’t mind me, just looking for something. You get on with Lizzie’s dreadful verses.’

  An hour passed, and another and no one came. My hand ached; I was not used to writing like this. I stared at the bell on the table, but it felt too much like acting the lady to shake it and I feared how the sound would ring out all through the house. At last a servant appeared and told me brusquely that Miss Elizabeth had bade him give me something to eat. He led me to the big table near the kitchen, where the servants ate, and banged a plate of bread and cheese before me. Before long, half a dozen of the hands loped in, Jacob among them. They started a little to see me, but nodded quickly, sat down at the other end and forgot me entirely in the serious business of filling their plates.

  After a little they fell to talking and I kept quiet for I felt sure they would make me the butt of their jokes if I was noticed.

  ‘Did you see the messenger come this morning, from Bishop John?’ one said, poking his finger at Jacob.

  ‘Aye, I took his horse, remember.’

  ‘Well, the bishop has heard of all the goings-on around here.’

  ‘What goings-on?’

  ‘The signs, of course: the hole and the hill groaning like an old woman at her stool.’