Ulverton (3 page)

But I knelt and the stone was cold and I thought of Gabby with my coat on him, shivering, I don’t know why. And I told God of my thoughts and fears and that if I was going mad to spare me with a quick dying. And I asked God if He could whitewash all my thoughts like the soldiers had covered over the old paintings that I had known as a boy and a man. But thoughts were not on walls but ran like deer and the smell of whitewash mocked me.

The church whispered back my mumblings, and I was afraid lest someone might hear, and looked all about me. But it was deathly empty. I wished idolatrously for the statues and pictures still to be there, and the coloured glass they had broken through with poles and stones and their guns.

All in one day, with the parson and some of the village cheering in the graveyard. But my thoughts would not be smashed and covered so easy. They were deer running through the forest, and I prayed hard that God might save me.

For I never thought of Gabby as leaving that farm. In all my thoughts I could not see him crossing the yard and knocking the noses of the cattle and striding up the hill with his rings sewn into his pocket, jingling. To set hisself up. I could not see that, however hard I furrowed my brows and bit my lip and sat silent with the bells and the wind all round me out on the scarp. And even in the empty church with its whitewash smell like old rivers I could not see him leaving the farm.

And when I saw him there it was only through the parlour door with me shaky on a broken wheel and his arm shining with buttons in its red cloth. And the cloth would always run with blood as the arms did on that field after the business at Newberry when to walk across it was to lift clouds of flies from the arms.

And there was Anne and Thomas Walters in the shadows, and Anne’s crumbling teeth round my arm like a dog’s that is mad, that was really her hand.

So I shook my head and said that if there was blood that it should come out so as I could know my guilt in sending him down there into his judgement. And the church whispered back exactly my own words that I had said loud when there was a footstep behind me at the door and it was Anne, staring at me turned round to look at her.

I shook my head but she didn’t go. There was mud on her boots from the rains. She walked into the middle and I stood with my heart swallowing itself.

She was like the Virgin statue, with the hair all about her neck, and her hair crow-black and wet from the rains.

She stood as still.

‘I’ll be going,’ I said, as best I could.

‘Not on account of me,’ she said. ‘You called me, did you know that?’

She was a witch.

‘I was talking to God,’ I said, and made the sign of the cross.

‘Talk to me,’ she said, and she held my arm, but softly.

‘This is the house of God,’ I said, but didn’t take my arm away. I was afraid, and a little mad. She was panting and her coat was open.

‘William,’ she said.

She began to cry.

Frankly, she had a smell about her that was not healthy.

‘God will forgive thee,’ I said, ‘if you confess and you don’t need no parson to do it with the church an open house for sinner and saint alike.’ She hadn’t gone to the sermon last week for that was it, as I remembered.

‘He done nothing for me,’ she said.

‘That were no reason to kill him,’ I said, before I’d thought it.

She went as white as the statue then, before it was burnt.

She pushed her hair back into her shawl, for it had dropped right in front of her eyes.

She walked away and nodded me to follow. I was afraid. I had my knife in my belt and I asked forgiveness for thinking of it. We walked up behind the church onto the downland and up into Bailey’s Wood from where you could see my grazing, the other side of our river, rising up against the sky. The rains had stopped. My thoughts were shouting in my head and I held it but then she stopped in a little clearing where there had been a hut once. It was grass and stones.

‘William,’ she said.

I remembered her as a little chit and how sometimes she’d sell at the door and she had the same look then. At the end of the clearing a woodman’s shelter or it might have been part of the hut dripped from its thatch that sagged and was all looped about with bedwine as no one tended it now and she took my hand and we went in.

She looked at me first and then wiped my brow and I thought of the Virgin and Christ, and Mary Magdalen that tended Him and wiped His feet, and all my thoughts were whitewashed over, for the deer running through the forest had become a painting on a wall, that her hand brushed over and over. She took my arm and it stroked her legs with its hand where the skirt had been lifted so the white skin was open to the air.

I felt inside her like a ewe and she was the same warmth. I was pleased, somehow, that Ruth and the ewe and Anne were the same warmth. There were no more pictures. I went inside her as a man does and her skin was open to the air and was soft and full where I touched it. She was happy.

The rain began again and dripped on us through the thatch and I buried my loneliness inside her.

Then I went back up to the fold and saw the boy off with a penny. I had no more pictures nor whisperings. Only the voice in
my
ear that was a woman’s and was warm as my own fleece that I sat there in thinking of the next time she had said when I might return to the wood and only a penny for the page and his silence.

And the next time we lay on bluebells and it were sticky, and in the autumn the bedwine dropped his old man’s beard into her black hair and I said it was her crown of silver, but she said nothing. In the winter I brought a fleece with me and wrapped her in it so she wouldn’t shiver. For it snowed some of the times.

And this went on, oh, for years, until I couldn’t see the bedwine plumes in her hair no longer before I blew them off. Then she sickened and died one winter. Sometimes she would whisper the name of Gabby in my ear. And I an old man!

She was the last witch I ever knew.

I was a little mad, probably.

That’s the story.

[Reprinted by kind permission of
The Wessex Nave
.]

IT WAS NOT
snowing when we set out. The barest places can look heavenly under a bright moon and it was so then. If it had been in any way otherwise I can assure you we would not have set out.

The funeral of good Reverend Josiah Flaw had been fitting but full of sorrow. His assiduousness did cause his death: one stormy evening had him out to administer his flock, whereupon a chill came upon him and he forthwith sunk into the lap of our Lord.

Though his living was as mine and bore barely a roof yet he too was at every beck of those ’twas his ill fortune to mediate for betwixt the ire of the Lord and their gaming and fornication and drinking and covetousness and all the customary excesses, my children. O horrible oaths likewise do our ploughmen bellow, our sowers bark, our reapers bawl at every interposing stone. But when I have flung up my hands at their wantonness, Josiah Flaw was ever zealous for their betterment, that every peasant in his parish might praise the Lord as they delved and not scandalise the very corn.

His being the parish of Bursop.

It too does have its gaggle of ranters. It too does have its precious life-blood sucked, a cheating zeal that sups up as the east wind among the rabble, and leaves our churches hollow.

You shalt see how deep to the heart hath this poison entered, my children, when this true history is wound up.

’Twas not snowing nor in any ways foul when we set out. We thought to foot it back in no more than two hours, the said parish not being unknown to most of you as lying on the northerly edge of our chalkland yet, alas, without a convenient road between us on account of I know not what but those customary reasons that come betwixt convenience and human kind.

The snow already fallen the yesternight was soft no more than a thumb deep. Thereafter was iron.

Then we three left without foreboding. Our curate, our clerk, and thy minister.

Without foreboding did we set out illumined by a round moon which made the snow all abouts gleam and our hearts exult so virgin did the world seem and blameless.

And upon that vast blamelessness of snow the Lord espied us and craved to mantle us in His safekeeping for some have maintained He did abandon us or that He was full of ire for none other reason than mine own inadequacies.

I have heard the whisperings.

What presumption.

As if those small faults, those thinnest fissures from which we are none of us caulked lest stopped up by death, were worthy of God’s ire whilst all about be poxed and gaping.

My children.

The draught be about your legs. My voice cries out of the stone. List, list, we are empty and void. Our walls are smitten with breaches, and little clefts, and our roof is as the furrows of the field, and the stink of neglect doth come up unto our nostrils. Doth the Lord sift us in these days of famine, that is not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord, that good grain only doth fall upon the earth?

And the seed is rotten under our clods.

And the drunkard is with drink. And the ploughman is with his oxen. And the inhabitant of Ulverton doth loll fleshly abed. And thus saith the Lord, I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and of Ashdod, and of Tyrus, and of Edom, and of Rabbah. I shall smite you with blastings and mildew. For ye have turned judgement into gall, and the fruit of righteousness into hemlock.

Rejoicing in a thing of nought.

Woe.

That our piety is no longer snug with companions.

That we are spaced so, like scattered candles in the dark.

That we are cold.

Woe.

Woe.

For a zealous wind doth blow amongst us, withering the vine.

And the armies of the flashing mind devour the poor secretly.

Then beware, my children.

And that no conjecture further rot amongst you into malice, I shall relate the true history. Not a false whisper upon a filthy wind.

Beginning upon that track that runs higgledy-piggledy worn by shepherds and their more manageable flocks between Bursop and this habitation but rarely by folk making betwixt the two, for it runs along the crests and is not the crow’s way, and trusting in the fine light, and William Scablehorne having the way well, being once a shepherd’s boy, we soon took to the maiden downs, and were not troubled in any wise by having at our feet but immaculate snow.

For one happy hour we proceeded, my children, across that waste, fortified by our faith, by reflections on the good character of the late lamented and instances of this, and by my fine brandy which, though it was partook of eagerly by William Scablehorne, did barely wet the lips of Simon Kistle our late curate. And even merrily did we proceed, like true pilgrims, towards our holy harbour, for we could mount any drifted incline without sunken shins, and our swift pace hindered the cold from entering our bones. Even merrily, despite our mourning robes, did we proceed across that white waste.

So it was that Adam awoke in the garden that fateful morning teeming with light, unaware of the leadenness which was to befall that very noon.

There is a shame which bringeth sin, and there is a shame which bringeth glory and grace.

Cast a stone into snow and you shall hark no sound. Whip petty Vice and he shall howl but pettily.

Purge, purge, my children.

Purge those false whispers from the foul wind that have set your ears to tingle and your eyes to crowd with base lying images that rise like dust betwixt us. Rather feel inly that rawness of the very first morning of the very first day of Creation before the zephyrous balm had blown through the avenues of the universe and scatter the dust that lies upon your judgement like a filthy cloud and
freeze
the canker-worm that eats thee up unto the last hair and make white, my children. Make white and bruise not. Do not cast a stone to bruise the snow, do not welt the innocent back nor slaughter the lamb.

Do not presume to judge from a dung-hill of ignorance a ragged stinking deformed beggar, let alone thy minister!

Or is the hour come with toleration that the basest scum can judge the appointed, can lift on the heap of great waters of this modish freedom, and engulf all?

If so, woe.

O how virgin lay the snow, how darkly across those bald flanks that no ploughblade has yet delved and but the lips of sheep crop we three light hearts and easy minds of the sure in faith, forgetful of the inward rottenness, the hidden of the land, the blistering poison that thrives unseen, progressed. How uncomplainingly did we our bread that I had in my pocket from the funeral feast chew upon the empty scarp at Goosey Hill. With what heartiness did we slap William Scablehorne off of snow after he did tumble, and set his wide crown back upon his head, and slow descend from the high crest onto Furzecombe Down.

O how pure are the eyes of the unknowing, when iniquity lies all about them!

One fact let me make plain.

Our Adversary has many subtle devices at his disposal.

But that which was not expected but which so suddenly approached and overwhelmed us in that vale was in no wise owing to his actions.

God, but God, controls the seasons and the winds, my children.

The seemingly unreasonable changes therein.

He maketh his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Nay.

Stealthily, stealthily, doth our Adversary work.

Inly he thrives, breeding in our corruption the filthy spots that shall consume us, threshing from our sins the rotten stinking putrefying heap of our damnation, fattening upon the smallest waywardness that he might belch forth its sourness at our last breath and plunge us without stop unto the ovens of Hell.

Trust, then, in divine grace.

For may we remember the agonies of Mary Brinn late of our parish whose ague did cleanse her unclean stomach and did pour forth upon the pillow the sweat of her redemption that she did embrace with a fearful and devout mind unclouded of drink’s affections. And may we remember the sufferings of Thomas Walters late of our parish whose scall was endured as Job’s and whom I visited in his humble abode not a stone’s throw from this our holy house at his moment of release and whose ancient visage, ravaged though it was, bore upon it a smile sweeter than any I have ever beheld because he had had broken upon him the light of our Lord. O wicked are the ways of the flesh and the disease therein yet blessed is the state of the soul in bliss as I did witness only last week in this our habitation God rest their souls amen.

Yea, out of the whirlwind comes the still small voice.

Out of the howling wind.

Thou didst cleave the earth. Thou didst walk with burning coals before Thee, and the clouds were the dust of Thy feet. Thou didst break asunder and scatter the mountains and Thy wrath was terrible, O Lord.

O my children.

On Furzecombe Down I tasted of despair.

Yea, on Furzecombe Down the whirlwind came and filled my mouth and the snow stopped up mine ears and I chewed on ashes and was blind.

O my children.

In mine own parish. In mine own parish far from succour I did grow weak in faith. In that sudden tempest so small and feeble I did feel bowed down before the wrath of the Lord I called as Our Saviour Himself did upon the Cross, I lapsed into the greatest most horrible sin of all yea as if I had never once known Him or ever entered into the house of our Lord or as if my attire was but so much stage costume or rags as it did feel like in that ferocious cold and as my companions did appear to resemble whipped by the wind that made their cloaks blow before them and their hats to come off.

And Hell is but a single tiny thought away, my children.

You may well shift.

But you are looking agog at one who has felt the hot rasp and icy nip at once in his bowels and on his cheeks.

The fires and frosts of Hell’s perpetual kingdom.

Whatsoever be the talk of holy frauds. Whatsoever be the modish jabber of those inly lit up, as by some angelic taper. As by some luminous blossom.

Now this, my children, hear closely.

At the very moment of my despair and numbness in which the sudden inclement weather and its great gloominess all but obliterated my senses my Reason like our single shielded lanthorn swung by my hand endured and I reckoned that one amongst us was not feeling his suffering as he ought.

Nay, hear me out.

For it is in this point that the nub even the fruit of my sermon lies. For in these moments of extremity our greatest challenge comes and I do not speak of bodily challenge though that be severe. I speak of those challenges to our intellect and to our faith more subtle than the momentary clouding of that faith in despair which has doubtless chilled each one of you at some time in grief or in melancholy or in sickness and which is overcome when the light of Reason is restored or not at all. Indeed, I might add that those momentary nights of the soul are as limberings up that exercise and stiffen faith and our resolve. They imitate the night of our Lord. But our Adversary has subtler ways still.

Nay, let me proceed.

One amongst us namely Simon Kistle our late curate, God rest his soul, who came to us on very tender pinions out of his ordination and was barely fledged and had as you recall but a downy beard, was beckoning out of the foul wind that blew our cloaks about our heads for Mr Scablehorne and myself to shelter in the lee of a small hummock.

This hummock being but the sole swelling on a waste of snowy furze.

And Mr Scablehorne and myself did make for the hummock with our hoods held tight to our faces that we might not be blinded by the snow and did crouch there, it affording in the lee some shelter from the blasts.

Then think, my children, what degree of horror came upon your minister when poor Mr Scablehorne did lean across to me and did part my hood from mine ear and did whisper that our comforting protuberance was none other than that place where certain of the spiritually distracted in our grandparents’ time fell into unspeakable depravity and cavorted lustfully in nakedness upon its flanks and that is called thereby the Devil’s Knob.

Yea, and how often have I cried out for these heathen spots, like that great mound high upon our own southerly flank, called by some filthy name, that I shall not blister my lips with repeating, but that flaunts itself at this our humble house of God – how often have I cried out for these to be removed as a black wen from a face, that no canker might work unseen within, to pollute and foul the rabble? Yea, who was it but he whom ye now see stood before you that rooted up and broke upon a great fire the seven stones of Noon’s Hill?

Think what degree of horror coursed through my frozen joints. And I bid immediately Mr Scablehorne and Mr Kistle to pray aloud, that though our words might be obscured by the loudness of the blasts, we might scatter this wickedness. And I bid to cease from his sniggering poor William Scablehorne, whose wits were already turning in that exceeding discomfort.

My children.

William Scablehorne our clerk for forty years, whose rod was ever vigilant amongst thee for the smallest yawn, whose pitch-pipe did clothe the poverty of our singing with its asseveratory flourishes, whose hand remains in our register as a meticulous record of his attention I perceived was already slipping, my children.

Yet when I did turn to Mr Kistle who was clad in his customary hat and coat that you might recall as being as threadbare as the times, and out at one elbow, and wholly inadequate for the present great cold, I did perceive that in spite of his shuddering exceedingly every limb, he bore upon his face an expression I had never previously viewed upon his attenuated countenance, but which I swiftly ascertained was one of a comfortable elation.

List, my children.

I had indeed been amiss in not keeping a more eager watch on my curate. The dull chafe of our duties oft wears us to forgetfulness. Yea, my despair at the scandalous practices of this parish was all but consuming my will and my attention. Even on that very day not more than one month past when my curate returned from London with an excitable air I discovered, upon entering our vestry, a certain lackey of this village pissing upon the floor. And having with my heaviest candle-bearer cudgelled him out he did swear at me and declaim that it was the action of no Christian to strike a poor man who has Christ seeded inside him. That no fellow, however ragged and mean, might be contemned by those set up above him by riches. And that I was a dunce.