Authors: Norah Lofts
That night I hardly slept at all. It was easy enough to say – Come to the wool loft … two excuses … church and the dressmaker. I had never been one of those pious women, for ever running to church at odd hours. Because of Master Reed’s hatred of Baildon and all its folk, and because, living outside the town boundary we were free to choose, we went to Mass at the tiny church of Flaxham St. Giles, and usually went, the three of us together, to make our Confessions on Saturday, before supper in winter, after it in summer. Richard would think it very strange if I proposed going to church alone on Saturday afternoon. As for my dressmaker – who was a little hunchback – she always came to the house when I needed her; I wasn’t even certain of where she lived. She was a relative of one of the pack-whackers and when I had sewing to be done I simply asked him to ask his Aunt Margit to come.
To people who live more grandly, or more poorly it may sound incredible that a grown woman should find it so difficult to absent herself, without rousing questions, for an hour on a Saturday afternoon. But always, when I wasn’t with the children, I was in the solar, or the kitchen or the garden, and with Richard just on the move again the whole thing was doubly difficult. If I said I would go and look in on the children he would say he hadn’t seen them lately and would come too; if I said I would see how my palfrey did, ten to one he would say that a stroll in the sun would do him good.
All this I had to worry out in the night, and to think that it wasn’t just this Saturday … this kind of thing could go on and on.
In the end I pleaded the routine female excuse; I had a headache, I said, due to sleeping badly. That I had slept badly Richard knew was true. I said that after dinner I would go and lie down. Master Reed went into the garden, where some plums on two trees on the south wall should be ready for plucking, and Richard said,
‘I shall go and do an hour’s work in the office. Father hasn’t complained, but the work must be mounting up.’
That was better than I had hoped for; he might have offered to come and sit beside me and dabble my head with a vinegar cloth. I went into the children’s room, brooded over them for a little while and then stole out.
The yard was empty and quiet. No work was done at the Old Vine on Saturday afternoons; the young men went to practise their archery at the Butts on the west of the town; those whose age or some infirmity
excused them, sought their town amusements. From the huts which we called Squatters Row, at the back of the stables, I could hear voices and the sound of a fiddle.
I felt extremely large and conspicuous as I made my way to the wool-shed, hugging the walls of each building I passed. I told myself that I had a perfect right to go out and see how my palfrey did. When I was level with the pasture fence I did step out of the buildings’ shadow and stand, for a moment, staring. Then I cut back, through the two wool-picking sheds, where the sun cut in in golden, dust-filled rays, and then, at the end, up the ladder and into the wool store.
Denys was waiting for me. He took hold of me and kissed and pawed me for a minute or two like a madman. I pushed him away and said, ‘Wait. Wait. You want it to be good …. You said, after childbed women were … And it is true. I think that is what ails me and I think a little wine would help.’ I held out the little leather wine bottle that I had brought.
‘You don’t need that,’ he said.
‘Oh, I do, I do. Just give me time.’ I loosed the stopper and tilted the bottle to my lips. I said,‘You know what is wrong with me, don’t you. I was in labour two days and three nights. … A woman has to be pot valiant to risk that again.’
‘You’re over the worst. The next lot’ll be as easy as shelling peas.’
‘I’m pot valiant,’ I said, wishing to God I were. For, when neither flesh nor spirit is desirous this is a sorry, sad business. He didn’t think so; and anxious to pleasure him, I made as good a pretence of sharing his joy as I could.
When he was spent he lolled back against the soft, greasy fleeces and sighed and smiled. After a minute he said – forestalling me by a count of ten–
‘Is any left in that bottle?’
I reached out and lifted and shook it.
‘Very little – but you’re welcome to what there is. It heartened me.’
‘Rubbish. I heartened you. I told you everything would be all right. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?’
‘Yes. And you were right.’
He set the bottle to his lips and drank.
‘I must go now,’ I said. ‘And I must take the bottle. It might be missed.’
‘Next Saturday. Here.’
‘Next Saturday. Here,’ I repeated. He tilted the bottle and then gave it back into my hand. ‘I had to force you. You see, I knew what was best for you. You’re my beauty, my darling and I don’t know how I shall wait the
week out. But I will.’ He burrowed his head into my breast and clutched at me with his hands. In one moment it would all begin again.
‘I
must
go … or there’ll be no next Saturday.’ He sighed and set me free.
I climbed down the ladder of the wool loft with the words ‘no next Saturday’ still sounding inside my head. By the pasture fence I picked up a young apple that I had left there – how long before, half an hour, an hour? How long had the whole thing taken? I called my palfrey and it came, took the apple and slobbered over my hand and sleeve.
I went back into the solar where Master Reed was laying plums on a dish.
‘I couldn’t sleep, so I went out to see how my horse fared. I gave it an apple,’ I said, ‘and look what a mess it has made of me. I must go and wash.’
No next Saturday, I thought. There will be no next Saturday.
The next day being Sunday Denys was not looked for and when he was found on Monday nobody could tell which day he had died, until one of the weavers said that he remembered seeing him come into the yard late on Saturday, very drunk. This – though it is unpleasant to think that in cases of felony some of the evidence given may be equally false – most admirably served my purpose, since it prevented the possibility, remote indeed, but lively in my mind at least, of anyone connecting Denys’s death with my wandering around on the Saturday afternoon.
‘He was probably not as sound as he looked,’ Master Reed said, and passed on to the matter of replacing him. Until that was done I knew I must be prepared to face hearing Denys’s name now and again. I must keep my face smooth and secret, and show enough, but not too much interest. Actually even that was spared me, though I would rather have been tested than excused the way I was. What happened was that within half an hour of the discovery of Denys’s body, a hind, bumping and bouncing on Father’s best horse, came to tell me that Mother was in bed.
‘Very sick,’ he said she was, and anxious to see me.
Richard, who now had great faith in the doctor who had relieved his cough by night if not by day, insisted upon sending for him to ride out with me, but I was too anxious to be off. So he was to follow.
Mother was in bed and as I set foot on the gallery I could hear the gasping rattle of her breath. Her brow and nose and chin were bone white, her
cheeks dark purple with fever. Her eyes, dim with pain, were open, but she did not know me, even when I took her hot dry hand and spoke her name. Father was in the room, looking almost as ill and half crazed.
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘Yesterday, no, the day before, no, yesterday, she complained of pain in her side. I looked and it was bruised, very black and swollen. I made a poultice, a linseed poultice, and she said it eased her. Then she sickened and cried for you, but she was sensible then. It is only this morning …’
Suddenly the deep criss-cross wrinkles below his eyes were wet. I envied him being able to cry. My need to cry scorched me. It was my fault that she had her fall, and if she died, I’d have killed her as surely as I had killed …
‘The doctor is riding close behind,’ I said. ‘He’s … very clever. He’ll do something.’
‘I hope to God …’ Father said.
Mother went on fighting for breath. Every now and then a gobbet of thick yellow stuff, streaked with blood, bubbled from her mouth and I wiped it away. Once, just after I had thus cleared her lips, she spoke, in a surprisingly bright, vigorous, young voice.
‘I can hold together as long as I have to,’ she said, and then went back to that broken-winded breathing.
Father gave a sort of groan. ‘She said that to me … once before. The bravest …’ he said,‘braver than …’
And brought this low by her own daughter, a coward.
I thought of her courage, her unquenchable hopefulness which I had so much despised; I thought of her kindness to me every time I came back to Minsham rejected and in what was tantamount to disgrace. It seemed to me at that moment that the only person on earth whom I truly loved was my mother.
I did not stand idle. All this time I was busy with what might be helpful. Remembering Richard and his cough I propped her higher, to ease the breathing; I tried to make her drink something hot to wash the thick stuff from her throat; I wiped her face and hands with a cool cloth. Once, when I was doing that, she eyed me and said,
‘I’ll thank you, my lady, to take back this glove. Blanchefleur has no use for it!’
‘Holy Mother of God,’ Father cried and dropped his head against the wall. ‘That that should trouble her now!’ He banged his grizzled head against the wall several times and then went to the other side of the bed and cried,
‘Maude. You know. You must know, there was never any other. Any good tourney man, it was the fashion to pursue him. Whose glove did I carry?’
But Mother had gone back to her fight for breath and minded neither of us.
Then the doctor arrived.
He looked at the bruise, just below her left breast and said gravely,‘Most unfortunate, the heart has been bruised; and the heart governs the melancholy humour. And the melancholy humour, left to run its course can lead to death. However.’ He opened his bag and gave me some small objects, the seed cases of some plant, rounded at one end, pointed at the other.
‘Make an infusion,’ he said. ‘Fox-glove is a sovereign remedy for the heart.’
But it was difficult to make her drink – as I had already discovered; the battle to breathe was too urgent, too closely pressed; most of the infusion was wasted.
She died just before sunset. The doctor, sadly disappointed by the result of his infusion, had gone; he had other patients waiting, he said and he had done all he could. He had, at last given an opiate, so that Mother seemed to sleep, though the battle for breath went on.
Just before sunset she woke, and returned to her senses. In a very weak fluffy voice she said my name.
‘Anne.’
‘Here I am,’ I said. And my heart lifted. She knew me, she wasn’t going to die. Some of the infusion, that sovereign heart remedy had gone down and done its work; or the drugged sleep had helped to mend.
‘Take good care of Blanchefleur,’ she whispered. Then her eyelids fluttered, the death rattle sounded in her throat, her mouth fell open and she was dead.
I would gladly, and this is true, have lain down there on the floor by her bed and died too. On Saturday afternoon I had deliberately killed a man and been no more troubled than if I had crushed a fly which pestered me. But this was different. Remorse, perhaps the most terrible of all feelings, now had me in its mangling jaws. By accident, by a side blow, I had killed somebody who loved me and whom I loved. There is, and of this I am certain, no more terrible knowledge in the whole world. I should carry it with me until I died, and that seemed too much to face. I flung myself down on the floor beside the bed, and sobbed, in that dry, tearless way which brings no healing, and wished that I could die, just to be rid of the burden of guilt.
People don’t – unless they are old and nearly ready for death anyway – die from the wishing. Presently I was aware of Father, sobbing and groaning away on his side of the bed. ‘Take good care of Blanchefleur,’ they had been her last words to me; and taking care surely meant comforting him now. I got up and went round to him and sat on the bed’s edge and lifted his head so that it lay in my lap. I tried to speak comforting words about Mother soon being with the Saints in Heaven, about the great reunion of all families which would one day take place there.
But Father was also deep in this business of self-accusation; and unlike me he could accuse himself aloud. He blamed himself for a multitude of faults, ranging from never have made a proper home or clothing her suitably, to having given her cause for jealousy in the old days. On that score, at least, I could comfort him with what I knew was truth. I told him of the talk we had had before my marriage and of the pride and triumph in her voice as she spoke of his wearing her glove and rejecting the great lady’s. As I spoke I remembered that during my time of madness I had looked at Denys’s flat archer’s shoulders and imagined myself sharing Mother’s pride. So even that was spoiled and sullied, and my words which made Father feel better, made me feel worse.
I turned at last, for relief, to material things. I had not eaten since breakfast, and most likely Father had not even broken his fast. I slipped downstairs in the dusk – seeing as I did so, Mother’s fatal stumble and fall – and looked into the buttery. There was precious little to eat, some bread and three pigeons, ready plucked but uncooked. Another pain stabbed me at the thought that had she felt well yesterday Mother would have cooked those birds. I turned away from them and took up the bread. And then I saw the little cask of wine which Master Reed had sent on Thursday for her birthday. Her birthday!
The wine, I thought, would help down the dry bread; so I drew a joyful, found two cups, cut the bread into slices and set it all on the table in the hall. Then I lighted three candles, one for the table and one for the head and the foot of the bed, and carrying them went up to the room where Father was waiting.
‘I will do what is to be done here, after,’ I said. ‘You come now and make shift to eat a little.’
Moving like a very old man he dragged out on to the gallery and at the stairhead looked down and said,