What if today, this very moment, he should come upon me hatless in the meadow with my hair up in a simple net – chewing the sweetness from a juicy grass-stalk, sunlight playing on my neck? How would it be if I looked up to scent the new-made hay, and found him standing here. Right here before me. Staring at me in my pale blue fustian and white chemise – he’d have to think me pretty wouldn’t he?
The hay’s very late this year. The fair weather held for sheep-washing and shearing, and for the shearing supper in the village. But then three days of rain put mowing back another two, and July was on us before Steward Kempe came up to see me in my chamber.
‘The laid-off meadowlands are fit, Mistress. An’ Hayward knows because I’ve told ’im, that you’ll want the domain hay cut first before they think of lookin’ to their own.’
As if it was Kempe’s place to take control instead of mine! I let him ride to pay the interest loan last month without my help, and now see where it’s got me! What’s more he had a note of confidence in his deep voice, a look of certainty in his long monkish face, which made me almost bound to contradict him.
‘That as it happens is the contrary of what I have decided,’ I said loftily. ‘You should have asked me first.’ And then of course I had to find the reason – and told him that the village hay was thinner, would make quicker than our own.
‘We’ll wait until the weather is more settled,’ I declared, ‘before we think to mow the manor fields.’
‘Now then an’ with respect, Mistress…’ (Why is it when they say that, that people always show so little of it?) ‘With the greatest of respect we always cut the Lord’s hay first soonasever it is fit. We never change the rule.’
And perhaps if he’d smiled a little, shown some deference or made it clear that it was not for him to have the final say – well then I might, just might, have changed my mind. But old Sobersides Kempe’s never troubled to hide his disapproval of me, hardly ever cracks a smile. He simply stood there like a block of wood to add, ‘’Tis ready now, My Lady, surely.’
So naturally I took it as a challenge to change the silly rule. Which you could say put me in the wrong when, after all the peasants’ hay was made and carried to the rick yard – when after they’d cut no more than half the manor share, it rained again. And not just rain, but a tremendous summer storm, with great peals of thunder and savage hail that tore the petals of the briars and turned the cart ruts into streams.
‘A little wet does no real harm before the hay is turned,’ I told Master Know-it-All Nick Noddy Kempe, when he came back with the kind of ‘told-you-so’ look on his face that made me want to kick him!
‘The sun’s out now,’ I pointed out. ‘It’ll dry through in next to no time.’
That’s why Hoddie and I are out afield this afternoon. To save the hay and prove that I was right.
‘Ye’re never going out like that into the spiteful sun?’
Hod was scandalised. ‘Nice thing that ’ud be, my lambkin!’ (the name she uses when she wants to get around me) ‘Good sakes, I’ve told ye times unnumbered ’aven’t I? My Lady Blanche ’ud have me fleed if I should let you burn.’
Then, having failed three times to cram a rush hat on my head, she settled for a pair of kerchiefs for my hair and shoulders. (They’re off already – who is there to see or care if I end up as freckled as a quail’s egg? I’m bored to tears with looking like some pallid thing that’s crawled out from a stone!)
We walked, it wasn’t far. The frightful Bruno – Garon’s verminous excuse for a dog, the one with feathers like a moulting hen’s – perforce has come along. He always does when I walk out or ride abroad, trotting jauntily ahead. I think the silly cur believes I need him to protect me.
The sun has dried the surface of the grass that’s mown. So that’s good, anyway. The cattle fence is down and the huge meadow’s like a painted image – molehill shapes of haycocks, moving figures, men and women, gleeful children, dogs for mine to bark at – with swallows overhead and warm soil underfoot and everywhere the malty smell of making hay. All the greens have quietened now the summer is so well advanced. The long grass tickles my bare feet and pollen rises from the seed-heads as the swathes fall to the mowers.
I’ve often thought our bondmen boorish fellows – Adam Hayward, Jordan Smith, old Hobbe – not one I would describe as handsome. Yet there’s a kind of grace in the smooth swatching of their scythes – blades flashing in the sun, mowing as they’ve mowed since history began for aught I know, in Rome or Babylon. I like the way they move, the line of hairy arms and thighs. Strong legs, when you can see so much of them, are rather the best bits of men. Even short ones aren’t unpleasant. Father Gerard’s… But they’ve seen us, stop with one accord to turn their heads and stare like moggie-owls, the women with the rakes as well. As if I had no perfect right to visit my own fields!
‘Bon Joy, m’lady.’
The hayward’s changed his scythe for his peeled ashwood staff of office – lumbers over with a sailor’s rolling gait, red-faced and smelling like a badger! He’s doffed his frayed straw hat to show a straight brim-line across his brow, and hair like mouldy thatch with ears that stick out through it like the handles of a pot. But now he’s drawling something else in Engleis, looking to the steward to translate.
‘He says you’ve lost some seed, but there’s a tidy bit of bottom grass come up to make the crop.’ (And you’d think from the expression in Kempe’s face he’d just as soon it hadn’t!)
‘Hayward says they’ll finish this bout presently and then start carryin’ what’s dry. He thinks the sun’ll come again tomorrow.’
‘Then tell him that my maid and I are here to help take up what’s made.’
I’d really only thought to watch. But why should they have all the fun? And ’though I shouldn’t laugh, the way the hayward gawked at that, you’d think that Kempe had told him we would do it naked with our hind-parts painted purple!
‘She says a fork’s a pretty thing in use, but using it wants method more’n muscle if ye get her meaning? She says there’s no sense stooping down to pick up nothing. She says ye’ll need to put in less an’ git more out – or otherwhiles, she says, ye’ll be fair frazzled afore ye’ve hardly started.’
While Kempe translated everything she said, the haywards’s goodwife, Martha (who seems less of a grout-head than her husband) showed me the way to turn the wet side of the hay with my long ashwood fork, ready for the others to rake into windrows and then pile into haycocks when it’s dry.
‘There’s no sense in going at it end on,’ is what she’s saying now according to the steward.
‘She holds there’s but two ways to do it, right and wrong – as she told Hayward at the harvest feast, when he got hopeless drunk and ate a tallow candle wick an’ all.’
I said I shouldn’t laugh, am doing all I can to avoid the twinkle in the woman’s eye whilst imitating what she’s doing. The movement of her brawny arms. The way she balances the fork. The lightest flick – she makes it look so effortless despite her thickened shape, a trick you have to learn.
I’m stronger than I look. But my left hand and the other elbow are aching horridly and perspiration’s dripping off my chin. The meadow is so big besides, with so much to do.
Brisk as a bumbledore herself, Hod won’t be told or shown the way to rake the hay up lightly in a series of short jerks. She hefts her rake instead as if it were an axe, and brings it down so hard and far away from her bare toes that five times out of six she has to stoop to free it from the soil.
‘Plaguey thing won’t go where ’tis instructered,’ she mutters in disgust while dragging grass that’s plainly green into a flattened heap that looks more like a magpie’s nest than any kind of haycock. (I’ve never really thought of it before. But it’s only when she is attending me that Hoddie’s ever gentle or exact. In all else I’d say she was as awkward as a sowpig in skirts!)
The little clouds have somehow managed to meet up and scum over half the sky. But it isn’t going to rain. It won’t, I’m sure of it – and here’s the wagon come to carry what’s already made, with six red oxen yoked in pairs to draw it to the manor barn.
I’d like to see if Hod fares better, now that she’s changed her hay rake for a fork – marching off to show the peasants how to pitch (as if they didn’t know!). No one on earth looks quite like Hoddie from behind, I’d know her back-end in a crowd of fifty-thousand – the way she stalks, neck-forward, arms akimbo, white legs stretching her loose kirtle (goose-turd green, a colour I would never wear). Feet like dinner plates – thin rump stuck out and slapped at every second pace by one or other of the wiry tassels at the end of her grey plaits.
The other pitchers all are men. But the old besom’s undeterred, and ’though I dare say I have always known, I’ve never quite admitted until now how very like a man my Hoddie is – how little like a woman in the way she strides about, so very independent and immodest. It’s what she’s always been (the reason I suppose why Maman was forever telling me to be more feminine in every little thing).
Hod’s watching keenly as each pitcher forks up his hay onto the moving wain. Her first attempt draws every eye as she intends it should. The men stand back while she steps forth with careless ease and hurls her fork-load high into the sky – to clear the piled hay in the wagon by at least ten feet, and land on the astonished head of Martin Reeve beyond.
Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Or so the scriptures tell us. Hod runs the back of a large hand across her gleaming brow and glances back uneasily to see if I am watching.
‘If any of ye smart lads ’ave a fault to find, p’raps you’d ’ave the nicety to say it to me ’ead?’ she says indignantly in French – just as the living haystack that’s poor Martin Reeve gives an almighty sneeze!
There is no help for it – no really, I can’t think I’ve laughed so hard since the time I gave myself the hiccoughs! The time the Reigate butler lost his footing on the castle stair and fell tip over tail into the dungheap!
The clouds have pulled apart again into long wisps like carded wool. The sun is westering, no longer visible except as fiery splinters shimmering between the branches of the trees – rooks cawing, flapping to their roosts – colour seeping from the land into a sky that looks set fair… I said it would be fine tomorrow and was right!
The hay we’re perched on’s like a shaggy golden raft, creaking through the shadows, swaying up the track to shed a litter of untidy stalks on either side. When Hayward set the ladder for us to climb up, Hod likened us to currants on a dumpling, riding home in pride of place atop the load with lines of plodding peasants for our escort. We’ve cleared all the hay now that was cut before the rain. The mowers each have carried off what they can balance on their scythes, as is their right and due, and still we have two wagons stacked to overspilling. Kempe says the quality is poor. But that’s sour grapes. It’s bound to be, because I know I made the right decision – even if it nearly killed me!
I can’t remember ever being quite so weary – or so grimy, with dirt caked in my hair and lashes, tickling my nose. Gritty in my mouth. My arms are burned and covered in small scratches. But I feel wonderful I really do! I haven’t felt as good since… well not for months at any rate. I’ve had a perfect day and so has Hod.
I glanced up from my windrows every now and then – to see her working grimly to perfect her skill, spurred on by the men’s loud cheers each time a fork-load landed more or less where she intended. Excepting Father Gerard in his hitched-up cassock, the haymakers all are bonded, owe me labour. And yet each time I stood to rest my back and look along the rows, it felt more like a favour on their part than mine to be allowed to work amongst them.
And now we’re loaded ready for the barn. There was moment when Hod missed her footing on the ladder, when there flashed across my mind an image of her falling backwards, yelling, with her white legs in the air. But ‘Stupid blessed ladder, danged rungs are set too close together,’ was all she had to say as she regained her balance and climbed up beside me on the hay. (Is it callous to feel disappointed?)
From our high perch we’re looking down on elder trees, red backs of oxen, Bruno keeping pace. The women with small children have gone home. Others’ hats push up like faded cockles in a field of rakes – voices, laughter, comfortable and friendly – a man’s voice singing, joined by others for the chorus in the high warbling Sussex style. Someone’s brought a tabor to beat out the rhythms…
‘What is it? What’s the song, Hod? Can you hear the words?’
‘They’re caterwaulin’ something of the plough an’ scythe and mowing in a line. And every Jack of ’em plain out of tune!’ She says it gruffly with a mild expression of approval on her battered face, as the last words of the ragged chorus float across the breeze.
Silence now, but for the creaking of the wagon and the oxen’s rasping breath. The hand-beat of the tabor – and now another voice and others taking up the theme.
‘What is it this time, Hoddie? Tell me as they sing it.’
‘“Ah love’s a pretty thing, a pretty thing is love! The love of the earth for the leafy green that fills her valleys fair. There’s love, m’lads, there’s love!
“Ah love’s a pretty thing, a pretty thing is love!” (An’ that’s the chorus, see?) “The love of a maiden for the spronky lad who fills ’er belly for ’er.” (They sing it ruder, lamb, ye may b’lieve!) “There’s love, m’lads, there’s love! Ah love’s a…” (Same chorus, just said over.)
“The love of a mother for the little babe who fills ’er cradle nicely. (An’ same again.) There’s love, m’lads, there’s love…