The Wheelwright's Daughter

by Eleanor Porter

  The river was in flood. It was not so very far away if I found a cart to carry me. The current would take my skirts and whirl me under and then pound and pummel all the dirt away. Nothing left but a bubble rising to the surface of the water, breaking into air. I hauled myself up. My head was light; I saw everything with a terrible clarity. I think I would have gone then, but my moving had woken my father.

  His voice broke into my reverie. ‘So, Martha, how was he – how was Owen? How did old Richard Simons thank you for the finding of his son?’ His voice was gentle.

  It was with difficulty that I returned to the moment, and I looked down with pity at this father I had ruined. He would grieve for me but he would get well. It surprised me how easy and smooth the lies came. ‘Owen is poorly, but he’s mending, Father. He almost spoke, I think. And the whole family greeted me warmly.’

  ‘And so they should, girl. They’re an ignorant lot, every last one of them, but they won’t forget what you’ve done. Even if they talk of your father as broken and mad.’

  ‘No, Father, there’s goodwill towards you. Folks know the fit has gone now, that you were wild with worry. I’ve had no end of gifts left at our door.’

  He smiled with real contentment and patted my hand. ‘Bessie will be proud,’ he said.

  ‘Father,’ I said, leaning close, ‘when Miss Elizabeth visited you last week and told me how you saved her, you had begun to tell me another story.’

  But he had drifted off back to sleep. If he woke and told me, I thought, it would show me how to take my mother’s hand to join her. I did my work around the cottage. My ankle did not pain me for I glided above the earth.

  Death stood at my shoulder. He was a fine gentleman; Jacob was a rustic beside him. His breath smelled of water. Don’t be afraid, he said, she sent me. When evening fell he sank into the gurgle in my father’s chest and he was the river that called to me and sang that my mother was waiting in the moon, that she would set me free.

  32

  Pentaloe Well

  It seemed to me that I should lie down and sleep. In the thick of the night a song wove itself into my dreams. ‘Maiden in the moor lay,’ it sang, and sometimes the voice was mine and sometimes it was hers, my mother’s. ‘In the moor lay, seven nights full, seven nights full and a day.’ It was so very peaceful lying on the moor, where the soft grass brushed my face like a fall of hair and the moon looked down and sang to me.

  Good was her meat

  What was her meat?

  The primrose and the

  The primrose and the

  Good was her meat

  What was her meat?

  The primrose and the violet.

  When I woke the vision remained with me, more real than the wood of my cot or my father’s jagged gasping. I knew the place, too. It was the slope by Pentaloe Well, where the open land fell down to deep pools that never dried, even in years when the clay was baked to dust and the brooks sank into the earth. We used to find pretty pebbles and throw them in, presents for the fairy of the well. They would flick and spin through the air, but once in the water it was as though they had fallen into a dream and they drifted slowly down.

  I did not pause to reason, for I had none. My father’s forehead felt clammy to my lips, but I closed the door without a glance, because the water would make him well. I set off across the Goosefoot, and sometimes I rose above the grass and every step was a sloughing off of pain until my ankle tugged me down again. There was the moon, cold and shining. I heard my own voice singing high and quiet,

  Good was her meat

  What was her meat?

  The primrose and the violet.

  If my ankle did not pin me to the wet clay I knew I should rise and spin with the moon. They thought they could fasten me to the earth, but she knew another way. She was waiting for me in the water.

  ‘I am coming, Mother,’ I said, and even as I reached the track there was a cart. I stood before it and its old nag near reared in alarm. A man was sitting in front, idly whistling, all gathered up in a shawl.

  At the sight of me he yelped, ‘By the Lord Jesus, what are you, starting up out of the hedge like that? If there’s more of you, come forth. I’ll face the lot of you, devil or rogue. I’ve no money anyhow, I tell you.’

  The moonlight fell on his bony old face and picked out his eyes. He shrank back into his seat as though he could wish himself wood. Try as I might I could not speak. My mouth fell open in a grin, and I spread my arms wide. I drank the moonlight in. He suspected me of friendship with the moon, but he did not know my feet hovered above the earth. The thought made me giggle. I was more empty than the air. I threw my head back and laughed at emptiness and the moon, and the cart that would take me, and the foolish man who clutched at the reins and tried to urge the horse on. I had hold of the bridle and I put it in my teeth to bite back my wide, wide smile at the silly man. He kept repeating the Lord’s Prayer, over and over. I pushed my head into the horse’s flank to steady myself, then I clambered up beside him. He didn’t try to stop me.

  ‘I know what you are,’ he said. ‘I heard the talk, over at Little Marcle. You’re the girl who bought your life back with a boy’s soul. You leave me alone. I’ll have none of you, you hear?’

  What use had I with words? I pointed over the hill where the stars were dancing. Staring, terrified, he nodded.

  He didn’t let off his mumbling, nor take his eyes off me neither, unless it was to glance nervously behind us. More than once I thought I heard a pebble roll or the suck of a boot in mud, but the track was empty. As if any would trouble to follow us, or keep it a secret if they did. As if any could hinder the moon!

  It took so long through the Nighbrooks I panicked I had lost her. The woods covered over us completely. The track was barely a glimmer in the dark. I floated above the cart, watching this old man who flinched each time the girl at his side moved. He had a knife in his belt. His fingers crept to it now and again, and I wondered if he might suddenly stab her. It would not matter, only she had to find the moon in Pentaloe Well and it would not wait for ever. When the light silvered the trees and fell on the old man’s face, it was wet with tears. Again, he darted a quick glance back. Something was following. A dog, or a fox; a demon?

  There where the road curved round before it dropped, a crack of darkness opened in the trees. The moment I got down he whipped the old nag up into a trot. It would be dawn soon. The moon held on for me, but she was growing pale and sinking. As I toiled up the path I could not quite remember what I was doing here. All my giddy lightness was gone, but where had it gone? I remembered I was going to find my mother. The song came back to me.

  Well was her drink

  What was her drink?

  The cold water of the

  The cold water of the

  Well was her drink

  What was her drink?

  The cold water of the well spring.

  There was the well with its two pools, and there on the dark water, the moon. I sobbed to see her. After all, after so long, she was true to me; she was waiting! There was the willow we had used to swing from, jutting out to where the water was so deep it did not end. I leaned along the trunk and let myself fall into the moon.

  33

  The Red Rose and the Lily Flower

  The moon scattered and slid off, leaving black water. I lay and floated in darkness, till my gown grew heavy and pulled me down into the weeds, and they parted gently for me and softly noosed my arms and feet and drew me under. The water closed over my face, the chill, chill water in my eyes and mouth. It woke me.

  What was I doing here? How could I have left my father? If I died I would be damned. The cold licked me, told my skin it was alive. I did not want to die; I could hold my breath no longer; my chest was full, tight; I must breathe. I thrashed and kicked, but the weeds knotted me in. All the world was blackness and ropes. And shouting. I began to swallow, kicking into the bank. I reached my arms up. Something, someone, grasped my wrist.

 
; He had followed me from my door, he said, staying a little way behind. Each time the tinker had glanced back he’d thought himself seen, but the shadows had held him. Then when I turned to the pools he’d missed the path I’d taken and had come aslant, looking down from the slope to see a figure on the willow tree drop like a leaf into the water.

  ‘What were you doing, Martha? Are you gone mad like your father?’

  I wanted to answer him, but when the coughing stopped the world tilted strangely, and though I was lying still on the grass where he’d lain me down I was afraid I might slide off. I didn’t want to, so I fixed my eyes on the fading stars and on his face as he crouched above me, rubbing at my hands and feet.

  ‘You are too cold,’ he said. ‘Were you trialling if it’s true, what people are saying about you? A witch can’t drown, can she – was it that?’

  For a while his face kept dissolving and coming together again. I worked very hard to keep it there before me. ‘Jacob,’ I said, and lifted my hand to touch his beautiful face to see if it was real.

  ‘You are too cold,’ he said again. ‘Can you take your gown off? You can have my cloak.’ His words did not feel real. Only his face was real, his face and his hands. When I made no move, he began to unbutton me, but he turned away his eyes and I could not see them.

  A voice began singing, soft and clear.

  Well was her bower

  What was her bower

  The red rose and the

  The red rose and the

  Well her bower

  What was her bower

  The red rose and the lily flower.

  It was a fairy voice, I thought, and then I realised it was my own. As long as I sing, I thought, he will not go away. The moon had gone and I was on the earth and my skin glimmered.

  ‘You are too cold,’ he kept saying, and he took off his own shirt and lay down with his chest against mine and wrapped us both under the cloak while the light grew around him. All the time his hands stroked my bare arms and then my belly and then my breasts; it was as though he were pressing my soul back into my flesh. And I took his face between my hands and turned it to look at mine, and before he could speak I drew him to me and I kissed him, and he was warm, so warm. He hesitated for a second, only a second. I drew my hands across his back, his buttocks, the warm place between his thighs and then I drew him into me and it was like a knife, but oh, how sharp and good and real.

  The birds woke me. For a moment I lay conscious only of the pale sun, of lying safe between the earth and Jacob’s sleeping body. Then I heard voices somewhere down below us. He must have heard them too, for he sprang up and began dragging on his clothes. When he looked at me his face was full of shock and confusion. I sat up, but I could not think what to say. I knew what we had done. A soreness as I moved reminded me. There would be blood on his cloak. I had been pulled from one mortal sin into another, but I could not find it in me to be sorry. I had let go of the lonely moon for the rich soil beneath my fingernails. I had felt him and the stars within me and I knew that I belonged.

  ‘Jacob,’ I said, ‘it was not your fault. I made you do it, when I sang. You had no choice.’ I don’t know why I said this. Perhaps it was the shame in his face – I could not bear it – or perhaps it was true.

  In any case, his expression hardened. ‘You will have to put your wet things back on. We must not go back together. I’ll walk round by Woolhope. There should be a cart on the track. Your father will be needing you.’ He turned his back as I dressed and when I was done I stood there staring at his back, awkward.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For pulling me out of the water,’ I added, and I felt my cheeks turn red. The horizon reeled a little, but I knew it to be hunger, not lunacy. ‘Jacob, have you a little bread you could give me?’

  He turned then and rummaged through his bag for a piece of bread. Our fingers touched as he handed it to me; it was like the sting of a wasp. ‘Promise me that you will not try to harm yourself again, Martha. Whatever your trials may be, it is against all holy law,’ he said, not meeting my eyes, not taking his hand away either.

  ‘Do you trust me, Jacob?’ I asked. The bread and the touch made me bold.

  He looked at me then. ‘No. I don’t know – I cannot believe you have given yourself over to evil; you unsettle me. That’s the truth of it, Martha, you make me – I don’t know what it is – but when you are by I feel a wildness… Were you in earnest, that you made me make love to you? It was very like a dream. I don’t know. I cannot trust you. I barely trust myself any more.’

  I stepped up to him and kissed his lips until I felt his rough tongue on my own.

  ‘I made you,’ I said, and walked back down the path to the track.

  34

  Two Deaths

  I sat on the side of the lane and threaded flowers in my hair, wood anemones and stitchwort, until I saw a cart come rumbling up.

  ‘Decked out for the May already, are you, wench?’ the man said. ‘Off to see your sweetheart? Come on up then.’

  He didn’t notice my clothes, and happily for me soon fell to talking of himself. He was a barrel maker come to bring barrels to the Court at Little Marcle. Lived over at Sufton, he did, twenty years now and no better place on earth, got two fine sons coming up and the eldest could taper a stave better nor any man in the county, though he said it himself. No end of coopering work these last years, though the price of oak was shameful and Bishop John to blame. He was sorry to talk so of one of the cloth to a maid, but it had to be said. John Scory was a scoundrel and would sell the last oak in the diocese to increase his son’s portion. Hadn’t he sold off Bear’s Wood, which had always been for Sufton folk…?

  We were nearly at my door when a fine black horse came up with Father Paul upon it. He reined in at the sight of us and I bobbed him a curtsy as well as I could. The cooper hailed him, ‘How be, Father? Fine morning, thank the Lord.’

  Father Paul looked past him as though he were not there. I could feel his eyes locked on the flowers in my hair. One by one, I thought, they will wilt and die under that gaze.

  ‘I do not wonder you are too ashamed to face me, wanton, decked out like a strumpet, with your father dying in his own filth and the poor boy a dumb idiot. You can’t fool heaven with flowers, Martha. Sin smells rank as any midden.’

  I felt my eyes drawn up to his face.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘you cannot hide from your God. Confess. It may not be too late. God is merciful.’

  A great trembling took hold of me and the cooper glanced in puzzlement from one to the other and back again.

  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘she’s soaked through. Whatever have you been up to, child?’

  But I could no more have answered him than flown away. Was it written on my face what I had done last night? Was that what the Father’s eyes were searching out? What would happen if I laid it all before him? That against God’s law I had sought to destroy myself and then seduced my rescuer? It might have been a demon usurped my mother’s spirit to tempt me to self-slaughter, I could believe it. But after? Had the devil had a hand in that? I’d almost said as much to Jacob. But I did not believe it; it had not felt like devilry. When I kissed him, it had felt like coming home. Despair was the greater sin and I had vanquished it. It was a good thing to be alive. Tears of relief welled up.

  Father Paul was nodding, leaning from the saddle towards me. ‘Yes, weep. That is the Lord working. Open yourself to Him.’

  Yes, I thought, looking back at Father Paul, I have opened my soul. I have been restored. If my heart was truly black as he said, how was it that I felt so light? As if I were made of petals. I breathed in the scent of earth and flowers and it did not feel like shame. Last night I had been mad, but I was not mad now. I felt a vacancy where all my repentance ought to be. But then the cooper got down and came over to where I sat. Before I knew it he was bundling me off the wagon.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said, ‘but confessing will have to wait. This child is not we
ll. To think I’ve been pattering on for goodness knows how long and her not said a word, and I’d not noticed she was dripping. What would my Lucy say? This your cottage, is it? In you go, then. That’s right. No, don’t thank me. I’ve a soul needs saving as much as you.’

  ‘You’re an impudent fellow,’ I heard Father Paul saying behind me as I leaned against the door in the darkness of our cottage. ‘How dare you interfere? Still, it is of little matter, she can wait. Good day to you.’

  The room smelled of shit and of fever. I put on dry things, then cleaned my father up as best I could. I moistened his mouth, but he slept on, every now and then muttering or shaking his clammy head. Then I took the dirty things and hobbled out to try if the stream could scour them. If anyone meant me ill they could find me at home easy enough. I would not stay a prisoner.

  I scrubbed at the cloth in the water and thought how I had believed myself polluted and had longed to plunge into water and be drowned clean. I still felt strange, but the demon that had whispered of the moon was gone. Father Paul wished me to confess. But to confess what? I looked down at my hands through the clear water, I pounded the cloth and mud billowed around it, and I took a handful of grit and rubbed the foulness off. I let the shift spool out on the current then, like a shroud or a fresh kirtle; it was all one. And I thought about the way the clear water cleaved a way through the mud and grit, and the grit rubbed off the dirt it was a part of, and all things rolled into and away from earth and were never pure, but could be clear and fresh.