“Bad news, Miss Shockley. I fear Jethro Wilson must have fallen to drinking again.”
“Why so?”
“The payments for his children have ceased. They were due a week ago and there has been no word from him.”
“Perhaps he is sick.”
“Perhaps. I am trying to get word to him today.”
“There is no need, Mr Mason,” she assured him. “I know his farm and I shall ride over there this afternoon.”
She was glad to get out of the town and clear her head after the month tending Uncle Stephen. It was a bright harsh day, and as she came down into Winterbourne at last, she walked her horse carefully on the slippery street where water had flooded the edge of the little bourne and then frozen.
The farmhouse was not deserted. A thin column of smoke rose from the chimney, but she had to hammer several times upon the door before it was finally answered, not as she had expected by the old woman, but by Jethro himself.
He had not been drinking much: she was sure of that, although she thought she could smell a little gin on his lips. But he had several days’ growth of beard now and his whole appearance was unkempt. His face seemed thinner, and a little wasted. The nurse in her told her that he had not eaten.
“May I come in?”
He motioned her silently towards the parlour.
The fire in its huge brick hearth was low. He had pulled a small wooden chair close to it for greater warmth. The place was not much furnished. On the table in the middle of the room, there was the remains of a loaf baked several days before. There was a single easy chair, covered with a coarse cloth, which he offered her.
“Well, Mr Wilson? Mr Mason sent me about your children.”
He nodded slowly.
“My money’s run out. They’ll have to come back here.”
“With no money?”
He stared at the fire.
“I have a cow to sell. Best price’ll be at the next market. I’ll pay what I owe them and take the children back.” He grimaced. “Not much of a Christmas to offer them.”
“Do you want to sell the cow?”
He looked discouraged. “It’s a loss, miss.”
“Then how will you manage?”
“We get by.”
He turned to face her. It was sad to see the strong figure of a month ago so strained and almost stooped now.
“I shall have to give up the farm, move elsewhere.”
“What can you do?”
“What is there to do?”
She tried to think. The cloth trade had improved a little, but it was still poor. There was the carpet factory at Wilton, which now employed over two hundred people; she had heard that the tanning works in Salisbury was starting to look for extra men. There were paper mills down the Avon at Downton; and of course there was the railway. She could not see the man at her side in any of these occupations.
“I was at a meeting once when they read out a letter from a man named Godfrey in Australia,” he said. “You’d hardly believe the good life the farmers have out there. And the food! Half the men there were for taking the boat out at once.”
“Many do. Would you?”
He sighed. “I don’t want to, miss. There is a possibility,” he went on. He could give up the farm, leave Sarum, and go to the other side of the plain. “To the one cousin who speaks to me!” he grinned. He had a family farm up in the cheese country, and he needed help. “I could go there, but I’d be working for him then,” he explained. “And,” he paused before concluding quietly: “I’d not like that.”
She could imagine.
“This farm could still be made to work,” she urged him.
He gave her a gentle look, as though she were a child.
“Not by me.”
It irked her to see the man dragged down like this, through ignorance and lack of capital as much as by his own fault. And suddenly, on an impulse she cried:
“Would you accept help – financial help – to improve?”
“Where from?”
She smiled at him hopefully.
“From me.”
The investment of Jane Shockley in Jethro Wilson’s farm was not a huge outlay.
“Besides, when we do the accounts, I shall take a return on my investment,” she told him.
But it was by far the most exciting project she had ever undertaken.
He went about the business quietly. He was neither assertive nor submissive because of their financial arrangement, and as far as the farm was concerned, he seemed to accept the improvements as necessary evils. The first thing she did was to introduce new stock: “Hampshires,” she insisted. “You could grow root crops on the lower part of your land as well,” she told him. She took advice from farmers and landowners she knew, who were so surprised and then amused at her enthusiastic and sometimes pointed inquisitiveness, that they often gave her their best and most expert advice.
“It may be cheaper to import manure for the two west fields,” she announced one day. “I’ll see about it.” And though he looked surprised, he did not oppose her.
She was wise, however. With the single farm labourer, and his gawky son, and the old woman who came each day to keep house, she had nothing to do at all, maintaining her distance as if she had been a complete stranger. Indeed, with Jethro himself she claimed: “All I do is make a few suggestions and keep accounts.”
But not a week passed without her riding over to Winterbourne to watch his progress.
The children remained with the Methodist farmer and his family.
“You have no wife,” she reminded Jethro, “and they are receiving proper schooling there.”
But if the changes came at the initiative of Jane Shockley, she soon realised that she herself was receiving a greater, and far more subtle education than any she was giving. Few people knew where she rode to across the plain; they would have been more surprised still to see her walking with the tall farmer along the edge of the high ground, listening and nodding as he pointed out every detail of the tiny, delicate life forms in those huge waste spaces.
He looked well; his colour and strength had long since returned, and each time she visited the farm, she noticed how his lean, powerful form seemed to belong in those windswept regions. “He is like an animal,” she sometimes thought. On a warm day, as he moved lazily along the edge of the ridge, or sat on a stone outcrop watching the sheep, she could picture him as a lizard. On a windy day, as the clouds raced over the land and his thin narrow face with its deepset eyes faced into the weather, he seemed more like a hawk. And when he carefully, softly approached some little animal he meant to trap, she would think: “Ah, but most of all, he is like a cat.”
He never went to church and she did not try to make him. “He can be reformed,” she believed, but never in Mason’s manner.
He still drank, but only a little. The binges in Salisbury seemed to be a thing of the past. His hair now was always sleek, his black eyes clear.
As she looked at him, she could not believe he did not have women, but she never saw them, and never asked.
How she relished her time in his presence. In a place where she saw only a lonely furze bush, in a bare landscape that in certain lights, could almost have been the tundra, he would find tiny bright flowers; a quarter of a mile away, he would somehow discern a hare or a rabbit; with a pointing finger, he would seem to bring to life from the motionless landscape a pipit, a wheatear or another of the tiny birds that inhabited the plain and would burst with sudden life over the rim of the valley. He would see, where she peered and made out nothing, a cranefly or even the elusive hoverfly. Once, when they were walking by a field, a huge cloud of light blue butterflies rose directly in front of them, without warning and in their hundreds, so that the air was suddenly full of a flickering blue haze. She was so taken by surprise, that without thinking what she was doing, she grasped his strong arm and burst out laughing at the wild pleasure of the place.
She spoke of these experiences to no one. They were her secret escape, and often she would pass most of the day with him, insisting on the same food that he and the men ate – a piece of bread, if they were lucky, a piece of cheese for lunch and then, in the farmhouse, some potatoes and a little bacon at teatime, prepared by the old woman who continued to gaze at her in surly silence.
She enjoyed these days. An instinct told her it would be better not to discuss the matter with anyone, beyond telling Daniel Mason that she had made a loan to Jethro Wilson in the hope of keeping the farm going, and providing for the children. Once a month Jethro would now come into Sarum, see Mason, and then visit his children. “Who I really believe, in time, will become members of our church,” Mason delightedly and optimistically assured her. But she had no doubts about the wisdom of what she was doing herself.
Once, it was true – the only time she had spoken to her – the old woman had suddenly turned to her when the men were out of the kitchen and said:
“You’re a proper fool. He’s no good – not where women is concerned.”
But she had put this cryptic sentence out of her mind as merely spiteful.
No, she thought, he belongs to the subtle, silent life along the edges of Salisbury Plain.
The spring, so-called Lady Day market was held in April. It was a modest affair, given over mainly to selling cloth, and now falling into disuse, but Jane insisted that he buy some blankets for the farm there and even gave him a small present of money to do so. She had been careful not to interfere in his house, though she longed secretly to do so, but she felt some basic improvements could be made.
It was in the afternoon during this fair, while her Uncle Stephen was at tea in the house of one of the canons nearby, that, on her instructions, Jethro Wilson presented himself at the back door of the house and was ushered into the library.
He looked about him with mild curiosity, as she sat at the bureau where she had been working. Though she had never seen him trouble to write anything down, she knew he could read, and discovered, when it came to doing business, that he had a shrewd head for figures.
“I have prepared accounts,” she told him, “and I want you to see them.” She showed him what they had spent on livestock, and other improvements, and the anticipated returns. “We shall have sheep to sell in July, and lambs. The cattle I think we should hold until December. There’s the corn too.”
He picked up the sheet of paper and walked over to the window, leaning against the panelling by the window frame to study it. As the light caught his long face in repose she smiled to herself. How strange it was: Mr Porters, the man of education, had looked so awkward and uncomfortable in the library; yet Jethro Wilson the poor farmer, no longer shabby, had exactly the careless ease of a gentleman who has owned a library all his life.
He returned the paper to her with a smile. As he did so, she noticed for some reason the sound of his frock coat brushing against the leather of the chair. Why did that please her?
“I must go to Barford now, to see the children.”
“Of course.”
It was only minutes after he had left that she stepped outside into the close; and she had hardly gone ten yards before she met Mr Porters. His face was troubled. She had not seen him so agitated since he first proposed to her.
“Ah, Miss Shockley. You have had, ah, a visitor.”
She gave him a pleasant smile.
“Yes indeed. How did you know, Mr Porters.”
He blushed.
“I . . . could not help observing. I happened to be passing.”
“And you are still here.”
She gazed into his embarrassed, anxious eyes.
“I was . . .” his voice trailed off. “Miss Shockley, the man who visited your house is Jethro Wilson, I believe.”
“Yes indeed.” She saw no reason to explain any further.
“If you will permit me . . . please do not think me impertinent . . . I am aware from Mr Mason that you have been most kind, most generous concerning him and his unfortunate children.”
“Mr Mason and I believe he is somewhat reformed.”
“Somewhat?”
“I think myself, Mr Porters,” she considered, without disapproval she realised, of Jethro’s free and heathen spirit, “that with a man like Jethro Wilson, complete reform is out of the question.”
“Ah. Quite so.” He looked relieved. “His visit to your house was unusual,” he ventured.
“Most.”
“Quite so,” he repeated. “You would not be aware, of course,” he was struggling to find his way into his normal, more comfortable advisory role, “that this Wilson has . . . something of a reputation.”
“Really?”
“Yes indeed.” He paused. “The two children, for instance, may not be his only ones.”
“Ah yes.” It would not surprise her in the least. She thought of his eyes, sometimes mocking.
“One must be careful in one’s dealings, I think, with such a man.” And he made her a little bow, as if he were a schoolmaster giving advice to a favourite but erring pupil.