The Town House (18 page)

‘Now they’ll come round to pick the heriot, and they allust take the best beast. The horse is the best my father had. Would you let it bide – just till the dues are paid.’

Martin looked the young man in the face.

‘Ask me to stable your horse and I agree. I make part of my living by stabling horses.’

He had no intention of involving himself, though he would have agreed that the heriot was a peculiarly heartless exaction, for it meant that when a villein’s family lost its bread-winner it also lost – to its manorial lord – the most valuable of its possessions.

‘Then will you stable my horse until I fetch it and pay what I owe. They’ll take the cow for heriot – and she’s dry in two teats.’

Nine or ten days later the Cellarer rode up on his mule and beckoned Martin from the forge.

‘We understand,’ he said, ‘that you have in your stable a horse which is, by heriot right, Abbey property.’

So the peasant was an Abbey tenant and had under-estimated the thoroughness of the system.

‘There are several horses in the stable,’ Martin said.

‘This one is young, freshly broken. Its owner died here, suddenly.’

‘I know the one. I’ll fetch it.’

‘No.’ The Cellarer held up a plump hand. ‘In this case, because there was some dispute about the heriot – they offered a cow, fit only for beef – the Abbot himself took an interest. He said that if the horse was with you it should remain. He has asked from time to time about the Old Vineyard and was interested to hear that you had laid the rest of the field down to barley. He thought the animal would be useful to you.’

Every word of this singular conversation was audible to the men waiting on the bench outside the forge and was duly reported in the town. What, men asked themselves, was so virtuous about growing barley? And why had such a valuable present been made to Martin, with no mention of Pert Tom who was understood to be the tenant of the land? When all the questions had been asked, and all the speculations made, and the gossip finished one thing remained in the memory – the Abbot took an interest in the Old Vineyard. Martin in his upward spiral towards success met, therefore, much less opposition than he might have done.

PART TWO

I never knew my age by yearly reckoning, but a woman’s life has milestones of its own, and by their measure I was an old woman, and had been for years, when Martin took me to live with him in the house at Old Vine and made me free with all that he had.

Before that, for more years than I can number, I’d lived in Squatters Row, amongst – save for a very few – the scum of the earth. For that I had only myself to blame, in the main. I’d had one knock as a young woman and never pulled myself up again. My family were decent country people, and my mother taught me her midwife’s trade. When I married I got a good steady man, one of Sir Stephen Fennel’s game wardens out at Ockley where we had a tidy snug house on the edge of Layer Wood. We’d been married two years, and I’d just started a baby, when he died of a fever and the house was wanted for the man that took over his job.

What with the grief and the baby coming and all, I didn’t act sensible; I went running round like a hen with its head off trying to find – not a job, as I should have done – but some little place to put my bits and pieces. That took some doing, and before I’d managed it, along came the bailiff and two men and put my furniture out. I never forgot that day; it was October and pouring wet, and there was my goose-feather bed that my mother had made, the chest my granny had left me, the chair my own father had sat down to die in, and all my other things, set out in the rain and the wind. I was like somebody crazy and stood there crying and howling.

After a bit one of the men came back and said he’d give a shilling for the lot. I took his shilling, got a ride in a wagon to Baildon and went straight to an ale-house and got drunk. Whether it was that or the jolting in the wagon. I lost the baby the next day; and after that there didn’t seem anything to bother for, except to earn enough to keep me in ale. I never tried for a steady job, or to try to get myself a house again. Whenever I even thought about houses I thought of the one I’d had, and how I’d kept it clean and aired the bed in the sun and polished the chest and the chairs with beeswax. And yet I was a home-keeping body. All those years I never heard of a pig-killing without my fingers itching to do the salting and make the brawn and the sausages; I never smelt bread baking without wishing I’d had a hand in it. I hated the way I lived and the riff-raff all round me; but all I ever did was get drunk and forget it. When Martin took his knock, which was so much like mine, the first thing I did was to offer him some ale and a chance to forget.

One knock didn’t down him though, and the day came when he looked for me and said Pert Tom the bear man and he were setting up in business together and had a house nearly built, and they wanted me to go and look after it for them.

I said, ‘I don’t know. I reckon it’s too late by many a year. I’ve lost all my housekeeping skills. And you’ve lived alongside me long enough to know my weakness for ale.’

‘I don’t ask for skill. All we want is food on the table and a stitch put in now and again. And you’re welcome to all the ale you can drink, and to anything else you want.’

‘You want somebody younger.’

‘I want you,’ he said. So I said I’d try.

I hardly knew myself. I found there wasn’t a thing I’d forgotten. After all those years, living hand to mouth, I could still do things just as I’d seen my mother do them, and been taught by her to do them. Even her wonderful lardy cake I could make as though I’d been doing it all my days. I made a little garden and grew herbs and peas and beans and bushes of lavender and rosemary. As for the ale, now that I was happy I could take a pot and be content with that, just like anybody else.

It was like being born again, and it was all due to Martin who’d taken me out of the gutter. I’d always liked him; he’d been very generous over the Trimble; and now, what with the liking, and feeling sorry for him and admiring the way he worked and schemed, I came to love him. He seemed like my own, the son I never had.

I had three happy, busy years. Then one morning I noticed that my ankles were swelling. That was how Death first put his finger on my mother. Later would come the blue lips, the shortness of breath. Then I’d be useless. And what would happen to Martin?

There were, I knew, dozens of women who would come and keep house for him and Tom; but there is a difference between keeping house and looking after. I kept house for Tom, I looked after Martin.

If Pert Tom came home soaking wet – as rarely happened for he could pick his time for going abroad – I’d say to him, ‘Look at the mess you’ve brought in!’ and let him sit down wet or dry as he chose. If Martin came in wet and would have gone to his room to get busy with his tally sticks or some such I would say, ‘Oh no you don’t. You put off your wet things and on with these dry ones, and drink this hot broth before you so much as sit down.’

Once – the winter he started his wool-buying, and should have gone to Kersey and had a heavy cold – I took away every stitch of clothing he had, so he had to stay in bed.

I looked ahead and I could even see the new woman making more fuss of Pert Tom than of Martin. For one thing Pert Tom was supposed to be the one with the money, and he was cheerful and joking, while Martin was glum, on the sour side, all wrapped up in whatever he was doing, no matter what it was. Martin worked as some men drink or gamble.

To me and to Tom he was civil enough, so long as we didn’t take liberties; even Tom held him in some awe. To speak to him on such a private business was taking a liberty, perhaps, still I did it.

I asked him, ‘Did you ever give a thought to marrying again?’

He gave me one of those black looks of his. They’d come over him since Kate’s death. Before that I’d seen him look miserable, or hungry, dog-tired orangry, but this was something different; there was a sort of power to that look, so that it was as bad as having another man curse you.

‘It’d put some purpose to all this work and getting gear together,’ I went on. ‘You’ll end a rich man, with no one to take after you.’

‘I’ll leave a fund to pay nosy old women to mind their own business.’

‘I know I’m old, and maybe I’m nosy, but I would like to see you settled. The past is over and done with. A new wife in your bed and a new boy in a cradle and …’

He gave me another, even blacker look, one that cut clean through me, turned on his heel and went out. I never mustered the courage to speak of it again.

Still, there are more ways of catching a coney than running after it shouting. I put my wits to work.

I didn’t know any respectable young women, and none ever came to the house. There had been a time, when Martin first looked like being successful when the townsfolk would have been friendly – they even invited him to join a Guild, after all; but he would have none of that. He never went into anybody’s house, and no one visited us. So where to start my matchmaking?

There was Peg-Leg. He was the black sheep of a very respectable family and had a niece, out at Clevely, married to a yeoman farmer that owned his fifty acres; she must have been a very decent sort of woman too, for riff-raff as Peg-Leg had become she never cut him off. I talked to him frankly, telling him what I was looking out for.

He laughed at first.

‘Do the man want a wife he’d find one hisself. He get about, don’t he, he must see dozens. He’ve lived alone three year now, and I reckon he must like it.’

‘He’s never given the matter a thought, being too busy, first with the Forge and the stabling and now with all this wool. There’s a difference between going out to find yourself a wife and seeing a neat pretty girl doing the jobs about the house, waiting on you and listening when you talk. If we could find the right girl it’d come over him bit by bit, without any thinking.

‘Well, maybe. I’ll hev a talk with Winnie about it next time I go over.’

But I hadn’t got endless time; I couldn’t wait.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Peg-Leg; I’ll give you the money to buy yourself a ride, and to take your niece a present.’

‘Where’d you get it from?’

‘The housekeeping. I handle all.’ I was proud of that.

‘All right then. Only don’t set your heart on it too much. You know the saying about the horse and water.’

A day or two later he set off for Clevely and he must have been on his very best behaviour, for he stayed ten days, and when he came back he was as pleased as if he’d thought of the whole idea himself.

His niece’s husband had a sister named Jennie, eighteen years old and, said Peg-Leg, as pretty as a hedge rose as well as being’ skilled in the house. Peg-Leg had explained the situation and the girl and her family were willing. So I said to Martin that the work was getting a bit much for me and that Peg-Leg had a niece who would come and help me.

‘Where’d she sleep?’

‘With me. There’s room.’ My bed was in a kind of alcove in the kitchen, the chimney stuck out and there was just room for a bed between it and the wall.

‘Not much room. If that was shored up stronger,’ he said, pointing up to a kind of wide shelf that ran across one end of the kitchen, and was used to store cheese and bacon and onions – all of which we used a lot of, feeding so many men their dinners.

‘All right. Maybe that would be best. Thank you,’ I said.

So presently Jennie came; and she was as pretty as a hedge rose, and almost as quiet. Asked a flat question she’d say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as the case might be; and passed the salt she’d say ‘Thank you’. For a sensible young man with the itch in his blood that would have been enough; but being so quiet and shy made her seem younger than she was, while Martin was years older than his age. Across the gap he only gave her the kind of attention he’d have given a child.

There was a Fair while she was with us and I made an effort and went into town and bought her a head-dress, the prettiest I ever saw, made of stuff so thin it was like cobwebs on a frosty morning, all draped over two pointed horns. I’d make her look older, I thought, and it couldn’t help but be noticed. It would have made any girl prink and toss her head and flutter her eyelashes and
be
noticed; but Jennie wore it as though it were a woollen hood to keep out the cold.