‘But she’s a lady, Ruth.’
‘There’s folks as grand as her have found themselves swinging. No, there’s nothing steady these days.’
Some time later I was lying on my stomach in the cot my father had lain in. I pressed my nose into the tick and tried to catch the scent of him, but Ruth was a good housewife and had aired it well; all I smelled was straw and lavender. My back stung, but this was a tight kind of pain, more bearable than the raw agony I had felt at first. Ruth stood above me, finishing her pasting.
‘I don’t say I’ve your gifts, Martha, but there’s no end of injuries I’ve healed over the years. You’re young and hale, and the wounds aren’t deep: you’ll do. Not but they’ve made a fine mess of your back. Written all over, it is; looks like the scribes have been at it. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I’d have sworn they’d used knives, not nails. May they never scrub the guilt from their fingers.’
The door banged and Ben Tranter came in heavily and stood beside his wife. ‘He’ll come as soon as he can harness her,’ he said to his wife, throwing a hand up now and then to his sore mouth. ‘No, don’t worry,’ he said, as I made some feeble attempt to cover myself. ‘I’ve seen a girl before. We nursed your father and we’ll stand by you. You should have come to us, child. Right, well, you’re in no fit state to be moved, but moved you’ll have to be. Bert will be over here within the hour. He’ll take you where Tom can pick you up in the morning.’
I began to thank him, but he cut me off. ‘I don’t want thanking. Or not yet, any road. Thank me when you’re safe.’
Ruth helped me to dress and then made up a parcel of food for me. Outside a cuckoo sang. ‘Always a cuckoo we have out the back door in April. Wouldn’t be spring without it,’ she said, smiling, and taking my hand. I felt such love – had I ever known such love for people? Not knotted up like my love for Father, or full of thorns as my feelings for Jacob were, but simple, nourishing as porridge laced with honey. Ruth stroked my face and smiled, and Ben came up and patted my hand and called me ‘child’, and they neither of them had a doubt or a shred of fear of me. The dread that clutched at my heart and my belly finally gave up its hold. I am no witch, I suddenly thought, and I believed it to be true. I must have said it aloud, for Ruth nodded.
‘Of course you’re not, dearie,’ she said. ‘I would know one a mile off.’
Ben stood with his pitchfork by the door, keeping lookout up and down the lane. Now and again he turned to me and smiled too broadly, his old hands kneading anxiously.
‘Not long now, child,’ he said, again. ‘Bert will see you right.’
I perched on the cot and did my best to smile back.
Then all at once the door burst open. Ben was thrown forward. Ruth and I seized hold of one another in alarm. A man near fell in, but sprang up in an instant and grabbed old Ben by the smock.
‘What has happened? Is she dead? Has my mother killed her? Where have you taken her?’ Jacob. It was Jacob.
Ruth had stepped forward to hide me, but I rose. Everyone knew I was here. It could only be a short while before the constables came, and if it was Jacob at their head I wanted to know it.
‘I am here,’ I said.
He turned as I spoke the words. All the fences had gone from his gaze. He was before me, reaching to take my hands. He turned them over and kissed my palms and cupped them about his face and leaned his head against my own and I would have stepped into fire for him then.
‘Come, come,’ Ben said, ‘a bit more temperate, lad. If you’re so fond of the girl where were you when they came at her and half tore the skin off her back?’
Jacob coloured a little, and stepped away, but he kept hold of my hands. After the funeral, he told us, he had had to take a load of rabbit skins to be sold in town. There were things he’d needed to consider, and here I could not meet his eyes. He’d not thought me in danger, with the earth fresh on my father’s grave, and though he had little faith in Sir William or Miss Elizabeth he had reckoned their protection would stay folk from any direct show of violence. Saturday night had been so fair he had slept out by Sleaves Oak and counted stars. He paused, embarrassed. It was not only that, he said, meeting my eyes, his mother had wrought him so he half believed I had ensnared his soul somehow, and indeed my own words had seemed to say so.
‘Why, Martha?’ he said now. ‘Why did you say that?’
I flushed. What could I say? I didn’t hardly know myself. Except, I was afraid of his disgust and had thought somehow I could ambush it. ‘You looked so shamed,’ I said. ‘I thought my willing it must have worked upon you, or it could not be true. I was afraid there must be magic in it. And you, why have you returned to me?’
‘I could not be freed, whether I wished it or no. And I realised I did not. I do not wish to be free, Martha. It was strange. I lay on the warm earth and dreamed you were there too, sleeping, and there was nothing in the world but the breast of the hill and the stars and we two. And I woke and knew you were dearer to me than the pulse of my own blood. I cursed myself for leaving you alone. The second I entered the stables the hands told me how you had been turned away. And, oh, Martha, I thought you might be dead!’
‘It could have come to that,’ said Ruth, ‘and your own mother and aunt set it on,’ and she turned me round and uncovered my back a little.
‘Oh,’ he said, his voice long and drawn and low so that I was afraid at what he saw. ‘Oh God, oh God, I was the cause of this.’
‘No cause,’ I said, turning back to him, ‘no cause.’ And I took his face and kissed his eyes and his forehead and his mouth.
‘Well,’ Ben interrupted us, ‘enough billing and cooing. If you mean what you say and are not here to work a foul trick on the girl you had best say your goodbyes. She has to be off. Bert should have been here already. It’ll be too late if we leave it an hour more.’
Ruth bound me again and helped me with my cloak.
Jacob straightened himself. ‘I’ll not leave her,’ he said. ‘I’ll not leave you, Martha, not any more. I shall marry you.’ He turned to the Tranters. ‘We must marry, now. You must be our witnesses, in the sight of God.’
‘Oh dear Christ,’ Ruth said, ‘save the young from themselves. Steady on, this is too fast.’
‘No,’ Jacob said, ‘it is much too slow. I have known it must be so since the hole appeared, only I doubted my own heart.’
Ruth raised her brows at her husband, who was shaking his head. ‘If anything were to take the sting out of Judith Spicer it is their being wed. And I do not wish to pry, but it is clear things have gone so far that you had better be knit.’
Ben frowned and shrugged at her. ‘A handfast. I suppose it is legal,’ he said. ‘They are old enough.’
Jacob sank to his knees and I kneeled too, and he took both my hands in his. ‘Martha Dynely, in the sight of our Redeemer and these good people, I marry you.’ He smiled and poked me, for I kneeled stupid and silent beside him. ‘You have to say it too.’
‘Jacob,’ I said, hardly believing my own voice. ‘Jacob Spicer, I marry you, here, now, for my whole life long in the sight of God.’ And I reached into my gown and found where I had sewn the ring my father gave me and I pulled it out and put it on his finger.
‘Goodness,’ Ruth said, ‘who’d have thought you’d have a ring ready. Well, that was quickly done, but better so, perhaps. Listen, that’s the cart now. Bert has sacks to hide you. Tend to her back, Jacob, that the wounds stay clean. Send us word when you are safe.’
39
The Blackbird
Bert’s face was as hard to read as a sheep’s is as it chews over the grass. He stowed us between sacks and hogsheads, saying nothing, but taking care my back was clear of aught that might jolt on it.
‘I don’t say as it’s decent, you two laid up together, married or not. In my book a priest should have a hand in that, though the law’s the law,’ he said to Jacob. ‘I’ll take you up Pixley way and you can wait for Tom by the Roman road. And I’ll tend yo
ur poor father’s grave, girl, till such time as you can come back and fetch flowers for yourself. Lay still, the pair of you, and don’t say a word.’
The hours that followed were the softest and the harshest I had ever known. He took us right through the village. We knew just where we were by the greetings people threw at him. Even the ruts were familiar. As we went past our own cottages we put our hands over one another’s mouth.
‘Good day to you, Bert.’ It was the Widow. I felt Jacob’s jaw tense beneath my palm. She sounded nervous. ‘What news at the Hall? Have the constables taken her yet? You might have passed them. It was an hour ago, at least, they set off and Father Paul with them.’
‘Aye, missus, I passed them. Father Paul looked very well pleased. Heard you had a bit of justice of your own. Wet your whistles a little, before the law and the vicar could take a good long drink.’
‘We only did what was right, Bert, to protect our own. There’s a boy lying near death yonder, remember that. Have you seen my Jacob, by any chance? You tell him to come home, if you see him.’
‘Oh, I doubt he’ll stray now you’ve seen to her, Judith Spicer. He’ll know where his heart lies. Wait a moment… Take this toothpick to clean out your nails.’
We lay pressed together between the hogsheads, under the burlap sacking, and the joy of lying so was greater than the pain in my back. He smelled of wet grass and the stables. Softly, quietly, so that a mouse would scarce have seen a movement, I took my hand from his mouth and we kissed, long and slow, as though we were drinking one another’s souls.
We were past the village and long past the house before I thought of Owen. Had he been waiting for me all day in that dark room, with the sour smell of his cot and his bitter family about him? Or perhaps he had heard I was to be taken. Perhaps his father was crouching over him, waiting to see if the scratching had released him. Agnes I did not want to think about. She had betrayed me. Worse, I had betrayed her too.
Bert set us down in the woods south of Pixley, at a long-abandoned cottage. A rowan tree grew out of a broken wall and a blackbird alighted as we approached and did not take fright. I took that as a good sign. We dared not make a fire, but Bert left us sacking that we placed over a drift of last year’s fallen leaves.
As evening came the pain grew worse, each slight shift of my limbs ached and I began to fear the wounds grew infected, but Ruth had bound them up tight and I thought it better to leave the dressing in place. Jacob peeled back my gown to check for swelling and whistled low as if he were seeing it for the first time. Then he stood and swore.
‘What do I do?’ he said at last. ‘Do I hate my own mother, my silly old aunt? They did this.’
‘Not only them.’
‘Chiefly them.’
‘It was for love of you.’
‘Love of me be damned. It was for love of position.’
You have forgot, I thought, that you, too, lately questioned what I was; that I myself sought out the green well in despair, to try if I was guilty. But I said nothing and presently he came and kneeled before me where I sat, and kissed my shoulders and my bare arms and my sides, and he went on kissing till I felt no pain, only swooning, and then he laid himself down on his back and drew me to him. We did not speak, but softly, gently, we moved together and the blackbird trilled in me and through me and for me, and all was singing.
40
Taken
In the dawn the road and trees were dewed and mantled by the mist. I do not think we spoke at all; our voices would have broken something of the stillness and the peace. Jacob went down to the road and waited. It did not seem a good sign that the horizon was veiled from us. At length I heard his whistle. There was Tom, with his laden cart and my father’s beautiful chair atop of it all. How had he managed that?
He grinned when he saw me. ‘Thought I might not find you standing after what you’ve been through, but you’re a tough one, Martha. Can’t keep yourself from saving her, can you, Jacob? First the earth and now the noose, is that it? I hope you’ve not done ought you shouldn’t.’
‘We are married, Tom. The Tranters witnessed it.’
‘The Tranters, eh?’ and I could not but help noticing a cloud cross his brow, though he blinked it off. ‘Well, that’s as may be; I don’t doubt you love one another and you’ll make a fine couple, but if you don’t want to find yourself a widower before you’ve brought your bride under a lintel you’d best get back, Jacob.’
‘I’ve made my choice, Tom. I’m coming with her to Worcester.’
‘And what’ll you do there, pray?’
‘I’ll find work. I know horses, and every inn has a stables.’
‘Every short-breeched boy knows horses, or says he does. All the work you know is here. Wait here, save your money and when the land is settled fetch her home, or near home. Or if you must, join her when you’ve got a place set up and money in your purse. Come now and afore long you’ll find yourselves in a stinking room with a puking baby in your arms and you’ll have no comfort for it, or each other. My sister will see Martha right, find her a place and send word by me.’
It was all good sense. I glanced at Jacob and the set of his jaw. There was a whisper of the Widow in the line of it, though I scuttled the thought away.
‘Thank you, Tom,’ he said, ‘but I’ll take my chances.’
Tom opened his mouth to reply, but just then a horseman emerged from the mist and trotted by. Jacob and Tom touched their caps and I dropped my head. As they set to again I ventured a glance back and to my consternation saw the horse had stalled and the man was craning back to look right at me. The others had not noticed and when I looked again he had gone.
‘Tom,’ I said, butting in, ‘I am anxious to get going.’ We agreed that Jacob should walk alongside at least as far as Stony Brook, where Tom had a friend with whom we could break our fast.
‘I think you should go back,’ I said to Jacob as he helped me up.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Ha,’ I said, ‘I wondered how long before we fell back into argument.’
He threw his head back in the way that used to puzzle me so, and then he grinned. ‘It was falling into difference that felled me. I am fallen, I am at your feet.’
‘Nothing like a bit of chafing to warm a body up,’ said Tom.
The sun came up and the mist began curling up into the branches. I was leaving all the world I had ever known, but the sun was shining and as we neared Pixley church the pear blossom was beginning in the orchards. The road did not wind and meander like the lanes I knew, it sliced through the country with a purpose. Far in the west the ripples of the land rose into waves. I thought of the Roman soldiers in the ancient days when it was built; who knew how many miles they had walked? Had they dreamed of settling here, or of returning to their own country?
I felt the tilt of possibilities in the rise of the road as we drew towards the horizon. And after all, what was I leaving, but a ruined name and the bitterness of neighbours I had never loved? Although that too was not true, or not all of that was true. I remembered sitting up on the ridge with Owen, before the Wonder finally ripped the world apart, with the redwings in the rowans and our talk of Hereford, and I thought of my grandmother’s and my father’s graves and I knew the lines of the land were written into me as deeply as my veins. No scratch could score them out.
A fair number of folk passed us, on their way to the orchards and the fields. At first I cowered, but after the first one or two I saw we were nothing to them, just faces on the road that they wished good day to and passed by. So I did not take much notice of the sound of hoofs that came up from behind till I looked up and saw riders either side of us. One was the horseman who had passed us earlier and looked back.
‘You had better stop, sirrah,’ he said to Tom.
‘Happen I will,’ said Tom, ‘and then happen I won’t. It all depends how I am asked.’ He reined in the horse nonetheless.
The gentleman ignored him and pointed at me. ‘What is your
name?’ he said.
I tried to look calm. ‘Susan,’ I said, ‘Susan Birch.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t. I note you perjure yourself without compunction. It fits. You had better come along with me. Make no fuss and I shall let your companions carry on their business, or at least I’ll let the miller go. This one,’ he pointed at Jacob, ‘I’m told is needed.’
‘On whose authority?’ asked Tom, turning to him, red faced.
The rider laughed. ‘Saucy fellow, are you? On the authority of my sword. But since you ask, there is a warrant out for her. The bishop has come to terms with Sir William and her neck is part of the bargain. That, and a deal of trees. There’s a whiff of Rome about Sir William and a deal of washing to be done. It’ll be no small service to him and the bishop, too, to deliver the girl.’
Tom glanced round. The flanking riders looked hastily mounted and carried only staves, but there were four of them. I saw where his thoughts were headed. ‘No,’ I said, ‘please, Tom, you are more use to everyone free and hale.’
I got down as quickly as my back and my ankle would let me. Jacob stepped in front of me, one hand on the knife at his side. I leaned up towards his ear. ‘If you let yourself be killed I’ll fashion the noose myself,’ I said, ‘and it’ll be you who will have killed me.’
‘That’s right,’ said the gentleman, dismounting, ‘no cock of the walk prancing, young man. See –’ with a fling of his arm he drew his sword, and pointed it at Jacob’s belly – ‘I could run you through. You are chaff. I doubt even the miller would bother to pick up your body. Still, you may come in handy.’ He nodded to the fellow next to Jacob. ‘Tie his arms – it’s best.’ Then he turned to me. ‘I am glad you have a head on your shoulders. None of your cursing, mind, or it’ll go hard on you, and harder on the old woman.’
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