by Andy Brown
John Toucher and the village men went back into the fields, nursing their heads no doubt from the clobbering of drink they’d taken. It’s mysterious to me, that our Lord – forgive me for calling his ways in vain – should deign to start the ploughing season on that morning after wassailing. Maybe he means to provide a penitential hard day’s work in the fields, after a harder night’s drinking, to bring all drunken sinners down to earth. That night I had woven John Toucher his own hawthorn globe. He would soon be burning my last year’s gift to scatter its ashes in his straight and perfect furrows. Such ceremonies keep the wheels of the calendar turning, regular and true.
I’ve known John Toucher all my days. We were almost the same age and, while small children, often played together in the fields, our fathers and mothers busy elsewhere at their drudgery. The only boy in his family, he was, however, made to work the fields much sooner than I ever was and our childhood terms became gradually more distant. He then pleased himself to work and play with other boys, rather than keep my company. Growing up is also growing away.
He was always a large boy and carried this great size into adult years. Taller than most in our village by a head or a shank, whichever way you measured it, I could always pick him out above the crowd at market, or over a high hedge as he worked his fields. That head of his was thatched in a thick crop of hair that stood proud of his expansive brow. His chin too was all grown over, not rough like stubbly wheat, but with a downy fur, like wisps of meadow grass growing in the rides. His lips were also soft and, when he cared to give affection, planted careful kisses on my own, in secret moments. I never minded kissing John, for his teeth were clean and close together, quite unlike the foul brown stumps of other men whose mouths I’ve had misfortune to be near.
From his tongue, however, there sometimes came harsh words; he knew what he wanted and stuck to his purpose at all costs. Arguing was wasted time with John. Not that you’d have wanted arguments. For as long as I remember, he’d won the village wrestling bouts on fayre days and was never displaced from his throne. His challengers were few and always cautious.
January is mostly a lean time of year, when little food is growing, save winter cabbages and turnip heads and the food we’ve laid in stored is on the wane. Many tenants take on other work to earn themselves a coin for buying food – carting goods to market for others, or labouring in share-work, at a price. But in this way they run the risk of neglecting their own tillage. John Toucher’s surly neighbour, Reynolds, paid little heed to his own hedges and, many times, John found Reynolds’ hogs and cattle grazing on his land, as had no right to be there. Arguments and fights were often breaking out and, though my John was always soft with me, he wasn’t the man to cross. Reynolds would put up a fierce show at first, but knew he’d never win the case if, indeed, his animals had trampled down a hedge, or leapt a wall. Besides, Reynolds wouldn’t risk a beating. He was a sturdy little man, stocky on his reedy legs and bullish by nature, but John Toucher dwarfed him. John stood his ground determinedly, as if he were rooted in the very earth, an arable man at heart, who’d grown to adulthood upon that soil and to it returned his sweat and toil. His trade with Reynolds erred from bad to good and back again from fair to worse, but never into rancour. I think there was some mutual respect, which sealed them in a friendship, two-sided like a coin, albeit sometimes as unpredictable as when the coin is tossed.
John Toucher’s home was a frugal place at the Barton’s end of the village and it took me no longer to bring myself to his door than it takes to boil a crock of water. His home was built of wood and daub, with thatch on top like a hay stook. Although his home was mostly bare, it was always clean and receiving and I never minded passing the early hours there, cuddled on his palette bed, which he kindly piled with renewed straw whenever I was visiting, to banish horrid fleas and lice. Out on his field, he kept a barn of fragrant straw for his few livestock and made comfortable use of it himself. When I lay with him, he made me feel close, untroubled, in his arms. I gripped hold of his broad back for dear mercy and soothed myself against the down of his face, which tickled and put me in mind of kissing a gentle bear.
The twentieth of January is blessed St. Agnes’ day; a day of love for those who wish to make the preparations. And if ever there was need for some propitious divination and news of luck in matters of love, it was then, to lift our minds from the slog of work and the ongoing gloom of the season.
When the day was on us, I called Alford to the kitchen and told her what I planned to do. ‘Time to make the Dumb Cake, girl,’ I proposed to her.
‘Dumb cake?’ she asked me, surprised. ‘What’re they? I’ve never baked no dumb cakes, Morgan. Plum cakes, yes, many times. But dumb cakes? No. What speechless pies are these?’
‘Alford,’ I said. ‘Your mind’s been turned to silliness by memories of Twelfth Night dancing. There’s no plum cake will ever tell you your fate in love, but dumb cakes will…’
‘Dumb cakes will what, Morgan?’
‘Patience, girl! Can I get a word in edgewise and you yourself stay dumb for a minute or two? If you’ll listen, the dumb cake speaks your fancied boy’s intentions.’
‘You mean a cake… a cake!... will somehow tell me Dufflin’s name, or some proposal on his part?’
‘Indeed I do… and more.’
‘What d’you mean “more”?’
‘The dumb cake, if its magic serves, will bring Dufflin to your door tonight. A secret tryst.’
Her eyes illumined at the prospect.
‘John Toucher too?’ Her excitement had begun to bubble like a stew-pot.
‘Now why would you want John Toucher at your door?’
‘I didn’t mean that, Morgan,’ she blushed. ‘I meant John Toucher to your door?’
‘I know what you meant, Alford,’ I said. ‘Aye, it’ll bring John Toucher to me as well, I pray. But only if we make it right.’
‘And how d’you make them “right” then, Morgan?’
‘By keeping dumb, so your voice won’t spoil the spell the cake is going to work on your sweetheart! Now, hush your voice and get into the larder for the makings.’
With my instruction and a great deal of excitement, Alford ran around the back of the kitchen trestle and out into the larder where she fetched up all the makings we required: flour, eggs, the dried rinds of fruits, a cup of milk from the dairy pail to bind the parts together, as we wished soon to be bound with our men.
Then we sat together at the trestle, measuring out the cake’s parts in silence, for fear we’d spoil our recipe by mentioning our loved ones’ names.
Once we’d cracked their yolks into the bowl, the broken eggshells served us for our measuring spoons. I warmed to the mixing and kneading, strong repeated movements, plying stringy dough between the fingers and keeping mum as the task required. But Alford, she was constantly on the verge of speaking. She seemed so thrilled to think of the spell she’d cast upon Dufflin, that I made her put her pinafore’s hem in her mouth to keep her quiet.
‘The clue is in the name,’ I told her.
Dutifully, she bit down on it, so that her tongue could do no more waggling until everything was made. Yet still I could see impulsive words stirring up behind her eyes, like bubbles in a pennyworth of ale.
When all was done, I took a bodkin from the needle case and pricked the letters of our sweethearts’ names on top of the cakes.
‘D for Dufflin, T for Toucher,’ I muttered while I scored the letters. Alford watched me as I scribed, as though I practiced some arcane magic, for she hadn’t yet learned to write herself.
I finished the bar on my own man’s initial and, so help me, I was that distracted in thinking of his arrival, I almost made it into a cross itself.
Next we placed the cakes to one side of the fire to rise and waited before we cooked them in the cloam, all the while thinking forward to the night and whether our boys would make it to our door.
When the cakes were in the oven, only then did I let Alford slip the pinny from
out of her lips. A torrent of questions came pouring out, I was almost carried away by them, as by a flood.
‘When’ll he show here… what’ll he bring me… flowers… a gift… how’ll he come, by pony, on foot… what’ll he say… how shall he love me…?’ and so on. The only way I could make her quiet was teaching her a rhyme.
‘You’re under strict instructions,’ I told her, ‘to recite it only in quiet, to yourself and only in the privacy of your corner, while you’re thinking hard upon his name.’
‘I will, Morgan, I promise,’ she swore to me. When she had it, the prayer finally granted me the peace I needed for my own meditations. Fair St. Agnes, play thy part, Send to me my own sweetheart.
When it was out of the oven, Alford took her dumb cake and left the kitchen, breaking pieces off and eating them astride her palette bed beneath the dresser in the kitchen’s corner, with the words of the prayer repeating on her lips. I don’t know how long she kept herself awake with it that evening. Perhaps she simply bedded down in hope of Dufflin’s arrival, though he’d never dare to press himself upon her in the Barton. Who knows where they made their trysts.
At some point in the darker hours I looked to where she slept, though whether she had fallen asleep, or silently crept from her crib to find her boy I couldn’t clearly see.
I called her name discreetly, but there came no reply and I remained none the wiser.
I was bedded on my own cot beneath the table, with John Toucher’s name on my mind until the very fall of midnight. It was a miracle of sorts when a gentle knock came at the parlour door and who was standing there but John himself, as real as the nose on my face. We hurried to the barn in secrecy and, by the climbing of the sun, he left me with a warmth in my lips, so careful and so amorous was my man.
III
The first light of February doesn’t come up until eight hours of morning are past and darkness falls on the Barton by mid-afternoon. Those few hours in between are a dim and forbidding twilight, washed-out and grey. The only colour lives in willow catkins and witch-hazel flowers that shine through the frost; in the bright yellow clumps of gorse that side the lanes; in the purple straps of bramble through the hedges, the scattered patches of dried red sedge and the russet fronds of dead bracken. Buried underneath that thick cloak of last year’s leaves, which keeps the new shoots wrapped and warm against the harsh attacks of ice and snow, the young growth goes about its unfurling.
Pheasant cocks parade along the lanes, their white collars bright against their red necks, like jewels laid out on the dull linen of winter. Across the valley, you can see smoke rising straight up through the windless air. The sky is sheet white, as plain as the lime washed walls the Protestant bailiffs are painting now in all our country’s churches. The only sounds of movement are the slip and slop of water in the river’s fast-flowing ripples and the cries of hungry birds. When the sun at last decides to grace the fields, they become a sharp, acerbic green that stings the eyes, like soured wine steaming from a heated pot.
Great flocks of starlings gather in the fields, moving as a huge black cloud that shifts all of a sudden in one direction and then the other as if, like people, moved by one collective mind. Collared doves and hungry crows are the only other birds to be seen. Those that have escaped the gamekeeper’s gibbet, pick at scraps of carrion from the hedgerows. Plump dun doves peck around the woodland floor.
At dusk, moon-eyed owls wing along the hedges, hunting mice. The squirrels are all at their nutting, stripping the bark from branches for more food, where no more beechmast or filberts can be found. They dash across the road in frantic patterns, now and then jumping out in front of the cart’s wheels. They seem so confused at our journeying up and down the lane.
With few birds to catch, scavenging cats abound in the Barton’s yard in these lean weeks, loitering for scraps and stolen morsels of food. The largest was a creature I called Red-Jersey; a red-furred tom with four white feet that looked as though someone had pulled a rusty doublet over his head, leaving only his white toes showing. And that head of his was the size of a fox’s, his red eyes rimed, his fur clumped and torn away in patches where he’d made arguments with other ferals, wild boar and badgers.
This year he didn’t turn up.
Perhaps the world had finally got the better of old Red-Jersey.
Spring awoke on the second day of February with a service of Candlemas in our village church. The priest, our upright Peter Lock, preached the Mass with fervour, befitting the purification of our Blessed Virgin. I could listen to father Lock forever and never tire of his heavenly message. His words lifted me out of my body, off the ground and into exalted realms, joining me to the heavenly spheres, as though I’d left this base existence and was present at the foot of the rock, listening to the Lord’s sermon itself. Only the divine mysteries of our Church can open up these revelations. It’s only the Mass that connects with the soul and leaves the body on earth, silencing the senses and speaking to the spirit within.
As his words always were, father Lock’s Mass was salve to us on Candlemas. No one understood his people better. He’s always preached and administered the sacraments of baptism, marriage and burial, with honesty and openness. The rock of our village. A middle-aged man, of medium build, he took the middle path in all his ways; never extreme, always considered. His was an approachable face; an open, moon-browed air of wisdom. He presided over our church for longer than I remember. His hair and beard were both milk-white, the fuzz on his chin hanging low on his smock. It framed his face beneath his velvet cap which had, if truth be told, seen better days. His nose was fine and arch, sloping down from close-set eyes, lending him a look of constancy. For sure, I never feared him for his looks, nor did I have reason to fear him for his judgments. In the confession box he’d always listen well and his advice, or punishments were mete and exact. Children and women trusted him implicitly, some say the women too much, against his ministry’s forbidding, God shrivel their wicked souls for such indictments.
After his sermon that day, we sang like songbirds to hear of the cleansing light that shines upon us in this world. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, he intoned for our prayers and we all repeated the Latin words as best we could. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper. Our heads were bowed down low in pious concentration. Et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. His service preached light and renewal.
To fit the day, the songbirds began returning to our fields. The weeks of crows and doves, it seemed, were over. Blackbirds and robins, blue-tits and fieldfares, great tits and goldfinches picked at the seeds from last season’s teasel heads, each kind returned to us that morning, as if a gift from Heaven. All over the fields, tiny black specks of fowl pecked at the morning stubble after the long, cold night. In the trees beyond the orchard, a great woodpecker hammered out its territory, drumming its bill into the wood as hard as the woodsman’s hammer and chisel.
On the woodland floor, the badgers emerged from their setts by evening, to begin their growling and fighting. Below the earth, their mates were birthing their young. Spring was on its return. All the animals were pairing. In the trees, the squirrels chased each other in wild circles, flagging their tails and crying loud sounds. As I walked across the yard, I could smell fox scats along the hedges of the orchard and worried for my chickens. The reynards were now back about their business.
The year, it seemed, had turned.
Overnight the Mary’s Tapers and Lent Lilies had nudged their way up through the hard earth. Sometimes the Lilies all come up blind without a flower in sight, only a mass of greenery but, this morning, their firm green tips were pointing upwards to the sky, like the spears of a Holy army.
Before the good Priest’s sermon, sweet Alford and I had gathered flowers and herbs from the woodland floor. Dog’s mercury, violets, gorse and primroses. Winter aconite, alder, cyclamen and celandine. On top of our load, we carried in a bowl of pristine white petals from the Mary’s Tapers flowering beneath the oak trees beyo
nd the village common. With their procession to the altar, all malevolence and evil was banished from thereabouts for then and, God help us we prayed, evermore.
But with the ending of Peter Lock’s sermon and lessons, his own jubilation was tempered by caution and warning.
‘I hope you’ve revered this Candlemas,’ he said, ‘for this is the last time you’ll know it like this. No more candles… that’s if we get to honour it at all.’
Our congregation was silenced, broken then by the voice of one man, Woodbine, our carpenter.
‘What festival will Candlemas be, Father, without the burning of tallows?’
‘A poorer one for that,’ replied the priest.
‘Then we shan’t abide it,’ said Woodbine.
‘But abide it you must. The Council’s Law is Holy Law, whether they be right or wrong.’
‘But candles is for Candlemas, as Christ is for Christmas.’
We nodded our heads, as though we chanted nostrums.
And yet we were all fearful that father Lock was right. No one dared to speak against these strange and wicked changes. It was only Woodbine who showed his courage. A forester himself, he was built like an ancient oak, solid and firm-rooted. He was as reliable in both his work and his resolve, as oak timbers are for building. Upon the labours and faith of such men, the reputation of our shire’s been built. He stood from the crowd, as a model tree stands proud from a hedgerow, strong, unshakeable. Even his face, tanned from years of handling bark, was deep-grained with wrinkles and furrows. Yet his eyes shone out from the hollow of their sockets, like an owl’s great eyes from its moonlit nest. And there was as much common sense in those eyes as ever could be credited to an owl. Woodbine talked little but, when he did, it was always worth listening. His hands were also true. He could strike a full-swung axe blindfold through the thinnest of twigs, his aim was that accurate.
When the good priest’s sermon was over, we carried the greenery away from the church in our wooden trugs. We were blessed to sweep the congregation floor and strew perfumed violets on the ground, where before only rank, decayed rushes had lain, crushed flat beneath our peoples’ devout feet.