Ulverton

HE APPEARED ON
the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked. I thought perhaps the warrior buried there had stood up again to haunt us. I thought this as I blew out the lanterns one by one around the pen. The sheep jostled and I was glad of their bells.

He came down towards me, stumbling down over the tussocks of the scarp’s slope that was cold and wet still with the night, and I could see he was a soldier from the red tunic that all the army now wore, it was said. He stopped at a distance. He had that wary look of one used to killing. His face was dark with dirt, and stubbled.

Deserters had been known to kill. I went on blowing.

He watched me all the time. Then as I turned towards him, he looked away and down into the valley where the village was beginning to smoke.

I saw him side on and I recognised him.

‘Gabby,’ I said.

He turned.

‘I wondered when,’ he murmured, so I could hardly hear. He was the tiredest man I have ever seen.

He sat. He draped his arms over his knees and buried his face in them. Then he looked up at me, smiling.

‘I’ve shook hands with him,’ he said.

‘With who?’

‘General Cromwell. I’ve shook hands with him.’

‘With the General?’

‘Aye.’ He said this with defiance, but I had no cause not to believe him. Whether a man has done a thing or no, I know when he believes he has, and that is all the same in the end.

‘That is a fine thing,’ I said. I sat down next to him and wondered if it was right to tell him. And he looked at me so
smiling
that I hadn’t the heart. Of course, I wish now I had, but it might not have saved anything. Sorrow is a water that flows however you try to dam it, that is my thought. It will find a way.

‘At Drogheda,’ he said. And do you know, I remember this man as a boy at my table, come in to tell me of some carriage he had seen along the main road, of the white glove that had waved to him, and cast him a penny. And other stories I forget now.

‘At Drogheda,’ he said again.

He wiped his lips that were sore, I noticed.

‘Drogheda?’

‘Across the water,’ he said, pointing at the clouds. He shivered, and I offered him my coat.

He took it. I hoped the sun would strike us soon. Down in the houses smoke broke through mist, piled higher and higher until it whitened with the sun. Up there the larks were warm.

He huddled in the coat. Some taut thing had gone. You could smell his tiredness.

‘At Drogheda,’ he said, ‘in Ireland. I shook his hand, like this.’

He clasped at air and moved his hand up and down. I could see it. I could see the General in this place and I could see Gabby be taken by the hand and have it shook.

The dogs pawed him, and I whistled them off. I reached into my basket and broke a piece of bread and a corner of cheese and handed it to him.

Did he scoff them!

I passed him the firkin and he tipped it back so that the ale runnelled either side of his mouth and down onto his leggings. He coughed and wiped his mouth and I confess I took back the ale double-quick for I had another twelve hours to thirst by. I lived the other side of Ulverton then.

‘Was he a big man?’ I said.

He sighed and licked his sore lips and picked at crumbs. He was thinking.

‘No,’ he said.

I was surprised at this, though Gabby was never a small man himself. Soldiering made him more crookbacked, not less. He looked no different to you nor I.

He turned surly then, and asked why should he be? And I kept out of it because Gabby seemed changed and I was alone, and my dogs then were soft. I fancied he might own a gun under his tunic.

So I said nothing either about the other matter, even when he asked.

‘Anne,’ he said, ‘my Anne.’

He was asking, in his own way. He’d been off so long and all of us thought him dead though I didn’t tell him.

‘You’d best go and see,’ I said.

I stood and fiddled with something – I think a lantern door or maybe a yoke or maybe both, one after the other – anyway, something to show I was busy and maybe I couldn’t talk. I also sent the dogs scurrying after a big ewe on the scarp who was doing no harm there. I am a cowardly man.

I could hear him rubbing his chin, like a saw on a horn.

‘She’s not dead then,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Not poorly then,’ he said.

I said no, and whistled, and said he’d best go and see. My heart was thumping. I’ll say, like I was a guilty man.

He stood up.

‘I know why you’re sore,’ he said. ‘I know why. I’ll thank you for the food and drink, and the talking, but I need no judgements, William.’

His voice was hoarse.

I shrugged. Then I spoke not looking at him.

‘Best go and see, that’s all I’ll say. I knowed you as a boy, Gabby. You used to sit out sometimes. We looked at the words in our heads and seed if they were God’s words or no, remember? Then you’ve gone out fighting for God’s word on earth and I don’t know if matters have changed, only that the King has lost his head and after Newberry old Joshua Swiffen’s field was smashed and sodden with blood and nothing’s altered as I can see. That’s all.’

I made this little speech much like the parson’s because my heart was thumping and I wished to divert his thoughts from Anne his wife. I think now whether it mightn’t have been better to tell him outright, but I was frighted.

‘You know the farm was broke. Soldiering was how I would set it right.’

‘In heaven or on earth?’ I said.

He smiled at that.

‘What I have sewn into my tunic will see us through,’ he said. ‘I fought for God and Anne so she might have a son that lives and no
parish
nor more working for Swiffen nor Hort nor Stiff nor any of them. I’ve come right back,’ he said.

He reached into his breeches and pulled out something I thought was gold but when he oped his hand it was a ball of old ribbons that had long ago been red.

‘She were allus dreaming of it,’ he said. ‘She were allus dreaming of her hair all up in silks. Hair black as a raven and all up in red silks, like a lady. And rings on her fingers! Aye. She were allus dreaming of it!’

Those ribbons looked so tattered and pale and torn it was sad, like he had pulled out his own heart. Even his fierceness was not that of love but, as I think it, of anguish.

I paused in my whittling of the yoke (for that’s what I was doing) and nodded my head neither knowingly nor as judgement. I could see the heads he had torn the ribbons from and all the fingers he had maybe cut for rings, if he were telling the truth, and prayed without moving my lips. He smiled and put the clump of ribbons back into his breeches carefully like it was a live thing and not to be hurt. The cocks were hollering from the thatch down there but else all you could hear were the cluckets ringing all over the coomb as the flock grazed. I thought. I thought how quiet we were compared to the noise of soldiering. The business at Newberry had set my sheep off in a canter, miles off.

He took my hand all of a sudden, that had a knife in it, so I dropped the yoke and threw the knife down and took his hand. Then we hugged, and kissed, as old friends, and I smelt the liquor on his skin that was a deep part of him and not just for jollity, and I wondered to myself how he reconciled this with God’s word.

He was crying.

He was a little boy again. There were stains on his tunic, that smelt of guns, and he took out a little leather belt with powder cases hanging from it, and threw it towards the scarp, so as it fell it twisted out, spilling bitterness into the wind.

‘Wexford and Drogheda,’ he said, choking a little on the last, ‘we did for all of them at Wexford and Drogheda. That was God’s word. Women and kiddies, William. God’s word. A flaming minister. A shining sword.’

‘Yes, yes. I heard of this,’ I said, then whistling back my dogs who had gone after the bandolier.

‘You had?’ he said, looking up.

I nodded, and turned away, and went down the slope a little. He followed.

I stopped at a bush and hooked out a small skull with my crook and showed it to him.

‘She was lambing. Dog. It’s in the nature of things, Gabby.’

The skull still smelt somewhat so I cast it back.

‘Until the Last Day when the Kingdom comes,’ I said.

‘Then I’m a dog, no better nor worse.’ He grinned, and I knew he thought I was a simple old man for my parables.

‘I thought you were needing forgiveness,’ I said.

‘That’s for me to decide,’ he said, ‘though we were blessed by the parson after. We were all black with the smoke. Now you have God’s kingdom. I don’t need no powder. All men will be equal in the common weal. Shepherds and kings.’

‘No kings,’ I said. I was a little angered, that’s true.

‘No. No kings.’

He grinned again and clapped me on the shoulder and then was off down the slope, where he tumbled and came up again laughing, down towards the thatch where the mist still clung and the cocks and dogs were hollering as if to warn him, for I wasn’t. I just stared, angered somewhat, and worrited more than a man can say by what he would do when he found his Anne with her husband, that wasn’t Gabby, for we had all thought him dead these five years.

I had my ewes folded for it was into February, and I spent that day thatching the hurdles. I remember it as a bright day, the warmest so far that year, save for a bitterness when the wind got up. I was struck into deep thought while the needle and twine did their work. Save for my page or a passing vagrant without his certificate cadging a day’s work (which I always refused) few were the times I had someone to talk with out on the sheep-walks. It were pure chance that Gabby had happened on that way back, I said to myself, over and over.

Or was it?

Maybe so, still, but now I’m thinking hard that Gabby knew I would be folding by the barrow, for that’s where we would sit when he was a boy, and his little arms pulling out the lambs in a slither.

It was for news of Anne he had passed this way. It was a
preparation
for sorrow, or gladness, from an old friend he might trust to tell him gently, and not stir the village. His farm was hid behind a hill on the other side and I saw him skirt the thatch and take the walk that goes up through the coppice. And the thing is, I had not told him. This preyed on my mind that much so I thought, well, I will go and see. For I half-expected Gabby to return running helter-skelter up the slope towards us, scattering the flock with his howls.

But he never did.

My good Ruth had rolled a dumpling of barley-flour that I cut into more from need than liking: it was another coat in warmth. I did so and sat the dogs and hollered the page over to bide with the ewes (though none had lambed yet) and took my lantern, it being dusk or thereabouts, and walked up through the coppice to the crest above Gabby Cobbold’s farm – for I still thought of it as his, a little mean thing shuffled round a yard with five great elms casting most of it into shade.

It was smoking. I could make that out even in the dark and it all looked peaceful. There was no reason why the fire shouldn’t have been lit excepting they were poor and it was late in the winter but maybe I thought his return would have put all out, like a cold gust my lantern if the door is not shut or the horn come away from the window.

It was a guilty man that wound his way down between the furze into business that was none of his. The Lord forgive me, I said, for it is my conscience that drives me to this. I knew where the dogs were and came up against the other side where a chalk wall had let in one window shuttered against the cold. There was an old cart-wheel all rotten and split leant up nearby and I rolled it to the window and stood up on the nave and set my eye against a crack in the shutter.

This was the parlour.

There were stools and a bed and ropes and tools but no Gabby nor anyone. The nave jiggled. There was frost in the air. I thought what a strange man to be pressed against a farmhouse wall like a fox-skin, white-haired and all.

Then I thought to see better I had best ope the shutter, maybe hear them in the next room. It was either rats in the thatch just above my head or voices, I couldn’t be sure. Or my own breathing, which in all my fifty years had never been so short and loud.

Over the night came the thump of the cows in the stable, and their decent smell. There was a calf, too, which Anne had prayed for but, so they told me, had gone sick, as everything went since Gabby’s father had been taken years before. The very earth had killed him.

I oped the shutter so slow its noise became a tree in the wind.

I could see them through the parlour door, which was latched back.

Gabby’s arm, its red cloth and buttons, his hand round a cup. Anne’s face with the hair like Mary Mother of God’s in the church before the soldiers came to burn her. Thomas Walters opposite, looking hard at the table, still with his hat on. Thomas Walters was the spit of his father, also Thomas, a shepherd from the next valley who I would meet at the fairs and did not like for his drinking.

They sat in silence. I wished to see Gabby’s face and tried to tell his thoughts from the hand tight round the cup. Thomas Walters was sullen. He had a clean jaw. His hat was twenty years old. He was thirty-four. Anne had the sad look of Mary in that old painting.

Well, no one had killed anyone, I thought. And there were Gabby’s old ribbons on the table, like they had always been there. Though no one had spread them out.

They would come to some arrangement. It was the property that was the issue as much as the sin of two husbands. Anne had been that keen to marry, the old parson had done something clever with the parchments. Gabby was dead or as good as, we all agreed. Anne had wanted kiddies like food and drink. The farm was no good to anyone. Thomas Walters had happened along and helped her out on both accounts, it seemed. Although she had lost each babby as it came.

I held the shutter hard against my cheek so it would not flap about and stir them. I was afraid of Thomas Walters. He was a big man with a big nose and drank. His bottom teeth closed over his top. His hat covered his forehead. He had five brothers. He laughed at the Execution when we heard of it. There’s still respect.