Читать книгу To Calais, In Ordinary Time - James Meek - Страница 9

‘CUT ME THAT rose,’ demanded Berna of the gardeners. She pointed to the most finely formed flower, coloured the most brilliant crimson.

‘A prize surely intended for your marriage,’ said her cousin Pogge. ‘Weren’t it sufficient provocation to take your papa’s book without consent?’

Berna embraced the volume she carried. ‘Papa offered me the fulfilment of my desires in the garden, in lieu of my preference for a liberty general.’ She turned to the younger of the two gardeners. He had default of height, but was formed pleasantly, with puissant shoulders. His freshly razed face had an appearance of attentive tranquillity. ‘Will Quate, cut me the rose.’

IT WAS SUNDAY, St Thomas’s Day eve, and there wasn’t no garden work to be done nor no other work neither. Will Quate wasn’t no gardener. He came to help Rufy bear home a heap of rose sticks for his fire. But the lady Bernadine happened to come by and bade them give her the best bloom on the bush, and they mightn’t say no, so Will hewed the rose with his knife, plucked five thorns of the stem with his fingers and gave it her. She took it and led her kinswoman through the door in the garden wall to her father’s wood.

MY COMMISSION TO annotate the abbey’s property case is complete; I am obliged to transmit it to the advocates in Avignon. Nothing detains me in Malmesbury except the difficulty of leaving. It is not terror of events that obstructs my return to France, but the practicalities. It is impossible to be a solitary traveller in these times. I must find company for the journey, yet the roads to the southern ports, previously dense with viators, lie vacant.

I suspect the prior has more intelligence about the progress of the plague in Avignon than he divulges. I have received no communication from the city since Marc’s brief note in March, informing me that the pestilence was general there, and that on the advice of his doctor the Pope now defends himself against the pestilential miasma by habitation at the median of two enormous fires.

Written at Malmesbury Abbey, sixth July anno domini one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, of ordinary time the twenty-seventh, the Sunday preceding the festival of the translation of the relics of my name saint, Thomas martyr, by Thomas Pitkerro, proctor of Avignon.

BERNA AND POGGE passed a line of village children who foraged in the husks of last year’s beechmast. They followed a path to the foot of a tree, sat on a blanket and placed between them the book and the rose. From a pouch she carried, Berna took a bowl and a bloodletting knife and demanded that Pogge bare her arm.

‘I prefer not to,’ said Pogge.

‘It is simply to demonstrate the method, that you might at some future point apply it yourself.’

Pogge lifted her arm, rigidly enclosed in linen. ‘It’s sewn in,’ she said.

‘I advised you to permit your limbs liberty of movement.’

‘I desired to accustom myself to sewing in, in advance of your marriage ceremony.’

‘It is my opinion that you contrived this excuse. You doubt my ability to bleed.’

‘You know I admire your numerous virtues, but you are a knight’s daughter, not a surgeon.’

‘It is notorious in our family that I possess a plethora of blood.’ Berna rolled up her own left sleeve till it was above the elbow. ‘Regard,’ she said, demonstrating the faint marks of previous cuts in the crook of her arm, and one more fresh. ‘Are they not finely accomplished? I chanced to see my friend sanguinary, the barber, in Brimpsfield last week. He advised that should the advertisements of the clerks prove true my former comfort would be a form of defence. My chaperone left me unobserved for a moment and the barber supplied me with the knife.’

‘I would have held you too determined in your gentility to have acquaintance with barbers.’

‘I ne strain for gentility,’ said Berna, raising her voice a fraction. ‘It is courteous amiability towards such classes as barbers that distingues our relations with them from their relations with each other, determined, as they are, by money.’

The pique left her, though not the ardour with which she spoke, accompanied by a certain generality of address, as if Pogge were only one of a number of listeners. ‘While my mother lived she conducted me to the barber to be bled once a month. My humours were of so special a nature. She would lie on a couch, supported by a cushion, I would lie against her in the same position, and she would fold me in her arms while the barber opened my veins. The cut would be pursued by silence, apart from the respiration of my mother in my ear and the gutter of the blood in the bowl. I have never known such contentment.’

SIR GUY CAME and saw the rose was gone. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

‘Was my daughter here?’ he asked the men.

They ne said nothing.

Sir Guy beheld the heaps of rose sticks Will and Rufy had bound in bundles.

‘A heap of Sabbath-breakers,’ he said. ‘Would you have the murrain sent us sooner?’

Rufy said it wasn’t work, he and Will only gathered the sticks for his hearth, as his lord had behest him the boot of the rose tree when he shred it.

Sir Guy cut one of the bundles with his knife and took of it a thick, well-shaped length of rosewood, bent at one end in a handle, as it had grown. He held the handle, let the other end sit on the ground and leaned his weight on the wood.

‘A kind walking stick,’ he said.

Rufy said the tree would grow that way, and his mum was lame.

‘There’s sap in your old dam yet,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I saw her hop about the pole two month ago.’

Rufy said her bones were bad, and he ne thought it him no harm to take a good strong stick to help her walk about.

‘I’ll learn you otherwise,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I’ll have bad bones one day. Why would I lack a good stick of my own rose tree to help your shiftless mother? All hold me soft and reckon they might have what’s mine without no afterclap. I was robbed of a gown, and now you’d rob me of a walking stick.’

Will said they mightn’t say no to the lady Bernadine when she bade them give her the bloom. He took a handful of little brown spikelets of his belt-bag and, with bowed head, offered them to his lord.

‘Eh? What’s that?’ said Sir Guy.

Will said he hewed them from the rose branch. They were the thorns, he said, that must also rightly be Sir Guy’s.

A COMPANY OF archers pervenes to Malmesbury imminently, on its way to France. It is suggested I go with them.

When travelling towards the pestilence was a theoretical possibility, I had fortitude. Now I may actually go, I am terrified. My mind cannot accommodate my own mortality, yet is capable of engendering an infinite series of images of colleagues and remote acquaintances who have succumbed. I remember Brozzi, the Rota lawyer with the enormous jaw. I have been visited repeatedly by a vision of him recumbent in a pit in his court robes, his face corroded by marauding dogs, the bone of the jaw protruding nude and white, while my baker asperses soil over him with a flour scoop.

BERNA STROKED HER cousin’s cheek and told her how fortunate it was she’d come. She’d been about to take her own life.

‘How?’ demanded Pogge.

‘Thrown myself into the moat.’

Pogge shook her head. ‘Your moat’s not profound enough for drownage. You’d kill several frogs and break your arm.’

They disputed the best way a woman should contrive her death. Pogge favoured poison. Berna preferred a tumble from a high window. Pogge said she couldn’t have done it anywise, for suicide was the mortal sin that mightn’t never be absolved, and Berna were certain to go direct to hell, to burn till Judgement Day.

‘The King of Heaven will absolve me,’ said Berna. ‘He will perceive the purity of my soul and the sincerity of my ardour. He will see that by forcing me to marry an old man in place of my amour, my father left me no alternative method to preserve my honour. I shall be raised to heaven as a martyr to love.’

Before Pogge might reply she was arrested by a noise of approaching pigs. The place Berna had chosen was a hollow between two roots that rose higher than their heads, hiding them from most of the forest. They could hear the beasts grunt, step through last year’s dry leaves and dig in the ground with their muzzles. They heard the voice of Hab the pigboy. Pogge lifted her head and looked round.

‘Please ne regard these villainous animals while I explain the misery and joy that contest for possession of my heart,’ said Berna.

‘I have a despite of pigs. They are large and hairy and have a displeasant odour,’ said Pogge. ‘I beg your pardon. I am yours entirely. Let’s consider your state in a manner proper.’

‘How well-tempered you are,’ said Berna. ‘How many times at night I’ve wished you were in bed with me that I might wake you and be solaced of your reason.’

‘How old is your affianced?’

‘Fifty! Fifty years! As old as papa!’

‘Have you met him?’

‘He has hunted here. I call him Sir Hennery, because his face is like to it was pecked by chickens.’

‘But he isn’t otherwise disfigured.’

‘No.’

‘He’s of fair height, sound in body.’

‘It’s a husband, not a horse! He becomes my master, till the end of his days!’

‘Of estate substantial.’

Berna shrugged. ‘Three manors in Somerset-Somewhereset-Nowhereset.’

‘You’d be secure.’

‘He has hairs growing out of his nose.’

‘Encourage him to pluck them.’

‘He’s illiterate, hates music, and considers an evening well spent disputing the best hound to catch a hart in grease.’

‘England’s unloving husbands and wives may find relief of matrimony,’ said Pogge. ‘There’s a town in France where so many lay in the street they couldn’t neither bury them like Christians nor dig a pit to hold them all, and they burned them there, in front of the houses they were carried from.’

‘Who told you this?’

‘A Gascon who came to Bristol with merchandise for my father.’

‘I very much doubt the French have been burning people. In general we are too phlegmatic as creatures to burn well. Anyway, it ne troubles me. I’d rather the world perish than that I live without my amour.’

‘By “amour”, I suppose you refer to Laurence Haket?’

‘Ne speak his name,’ said Berna. ‘It’s discomfortable to me. Say “he” and “him”.’

‘Ah. Then I suppose you refer to he-and-him.’

The church bell rang in the village. ‘Oh, for a priest romantic,’ said Berna, ‘who might say, for example, “Death is sent by Love to make us sensible how few hours remain to he who is desirous of the Rose, once the Rose has flowered.”’ She placed the rose on her lap. ‘Pestilence or no pestilence.’

‘To imagine Laurence will rescue you from your future husband will make you suffer more. Laurence is departed and won’t return. You live in a manor in Gloucestershire, not in Paris among the poets.’

Berna laughed and touched the corners of the book. ‘How measurable you are, dear Pogge. Like the Lover in the book you pass too much time listening to Reason. Why not France? Calais is joined to England now, and Laurence is promised tenure of a grand manor outside the city. Why should he and I not voyage there together, and love and be secure?’

‘The pestilence.’

‘We’re all mortal.’

‘Your eyes are feverous, Berna. How might he come for you, if he’s in Calais, and you’re here?’

‘He’s not in Calais. He’s in Wiltshire for Saturday’s joust, and leaves for France next day.’

Pogge folded her arms. ‘Only account for this,’ she said. ‘Your father would marry you to his friend. Yet your Laurence is, by your description, an excellent young man of a good family, with prospects for advancement. If he loves you, why not ask your father if he may have you?’

‘He requested, and was refused. Laurence has no daughter marriageable, whereas Sir Hennery does. And my father judges himself, like Sir Hennery, a widower in need of a wife.’

‘Berna!’

‘I wouldn’t tell you, it’s so dishonourable. Their intention is that Sir Hennery arrive, we marry on Saturday, we journey to Somerset with my father, and there, after harvest, celebrate a second wedding, between my father and my new husband’s daughter.’

Pogge bared her teeth. ‘Outrageous,’ she said.

‘Is it not hideous? I and this other poor maid are our own dowries.’

‘Can the clerks allow such a bargain?’

‘You see why I speak of martyrdom. I’ve never prayed more than now, and if the archdeacon will hear my confession, let him make himself comfortable for a long duration.’ Berna opened the book and placed her finger on the page. ‘Listen how perfectly the Romance descrives him: “Il m’a au coeur cinq plaies faites.” Love has pierced him with five golden arrows: Simplicity, Courtesy, Company, Beau-Semblant and Beauty.’

‘Your beauty?’

‘Pogge, you ne understand allegory, just listen. In being pierced with these five arrows, love has crippled him.’

‘Certainly it is a great inconvenience to a man going about his affairs to have five arrows sticking out of him.’

‘Shhh! No more interruptions. He is crippled by love, he is love’s vassal. When he was here, in Outen Green, he told me even were his will otherwise, he couldn’t but love me par amour. He’s all that love demands: courteous, free of pride, elegant, light-hearted and generous. Yet he suffers terribly from the pain of those five wounds. How he suffers, most of all when we parted, try to conceal it as he might. Five wounds, Pogge!’ Berna touched in turn the palms of her hands, her feet, and one of her ribs. ‘Cinq plaies! Pogge, you ne know what it’s like to love and be loved. Believe me when I tell you that to see his face when he regarded me for the last time at the moment of his departure was like seeing the very face of Christ on the cross.’

Pogge wrinkled her nose. ‘I ne think it proper to know Christ’s love in a sense romantic.’

Berna leaned forward, took Pogge’s hands in hers and pressed them tightly. ‘Might you joy the sentiment of true love, as I have, you see it like to a sphere with many aspects.’

Pogge squealed, leapt to her feet and backed up against one fork of the tree roots. The glistening snout, pointed tusks, stiff bristles and small black eyes of an enormous boar depended of the top of the root opposite. Over his ears hung a garland of mallow-flowers and from his half-open mouth fell threads of silver slime.

Berna got up and scratched the boar on the cheek. ‘Enker,’ she said, ‘you frightened my cousin.’ The boar narrowed its eyes and snorted.

Hab the pigboy appeared beside Enker and bowed his head to Berna and Pogge. Berna commanded him to keep the swine at a greater distance, and Hab bowed again, and answered, and they spoke for a time.

He was a meagre brown youth in a patched tunic of undyed linen, barelegged, with shining black hair down to his shoulders, large black eyes and full red lips that gleamed as if he’d raised them from the surface of a spring. He spoke a word to Enker, the boar wheeled and they disappeared. There was a clatter as the herd moved off.

‘I lack your courage,’ said Pogge in a trembling voice.

‘I knew Enker as a piglet. They’re gentle beasts,’ said Berna, sitting down, ‘and cleaner than you suppose.’

‘The city pigs are nastier,’ said Pogge. She stayed on her feet and crossed her arms. ‘I can’t understand your villains. What did the pigboy say?’

‘It’s Cotswold,’ said Berna. ‘It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer. He said he hoped they’d catch the thief who stole my marriage gown.’

‘It’s marvellous that your villains have such familiarity with the privy troubles of their lord’s family.’

‘It’s not so very privy no more,’ said Berna. ‘After the gown was stolen my father looked to recover the expense of replacing it by raising their amercements. Well, one of them must have taken it, and they might easily have saved themselves the trouble by informing us as to the person of the thief. We must go. If anyone from the house sees us in the forest sans guardian we’ll be punished.’ But she ne moved to part, and ran her finger over the painture of the Lover in Le Roman de la Rose.

‘And punished again for taking your father’s book,’ said Pogge.

‘He knows I read it.’

Pogge knelt down close to her cousin. ‘The Lover is a man,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a book to guide men. If the Lover is a man, what are you?’

‘So you’ve read it,’ said Berna. ‘And you’ll know the response.’

‘I suppose you are Beauty and Simplicity and all the other arrows that have pierced him.’

‘It’s Love, not I, who shot those arrows.’

‘This was his sole desire,’ said Pogge. She took the rose and held it in her palm. ‘You refused it him, and he departed.’

Berna’s face turned crimson and she stood. She picked up the book and the blanket with impatient gestures, seized the rose from Pogge’s hand and threw it away. She began to walk towards the village, and Pogge hurried after her.

ON THE LEAVINGS of housewives’ stockpots the children laid owl pans and rotten crow, rib of vole and otter, a deal of brock rigbone, some small-fowl carrion and the shells of things that crawl in mould. All it ne gladdened us the pans of nightingales webbed with rat leg and snake rib in one mound of bone, Nack the hayward said a bonefire cleansed the air like no other, and held the saints their noses, their ears were open yet to beads, their gold eyes open to our candles’ light.

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE abbot and the prior having degenerated so severely (the abbot now completely separated from administrative matters), the prior has assumed responsibility for the emergency. He is content to have me here as a distraction, until he remembers I have no capacity for music, and is dissatisfied. He suspects horror of the plague, rather than, as I insist, practical obstacles, postpones my exit.

‘I RECOGNISE YOU from the book,’ said Berna. ‘You’re she who imprisons Warm Welcome and the Rose together in a high tower that the Lover ne approach.’

‘Jealousy?’ said Pogge. ‘I’m not Jealousy. If I’m in the book it’s as you say, as Reason.’

She looked over her shoulder at the pigboy Hab, who hadn’t moved away with the swine, but remained sufficiently close to the tree roots to hear what the cousins said. He caught her eye, laughed, winked, clapped his hands together, dropped his head back and let a squeal. The swine trotted to him.

‘Reason,’ said Berna, ‘is merely Jealousy in disguise.’

Pogge pleaded that she not be angry and took her by the hand.

They passed the foragers and Berna demanded of the children their purpose. The oldest girl, who carried a baby asleep on her back, said they gathered bones for the Thomas’s Day bonefire.

‘You made that stinking smoke once this year already, on John Baptist’s,’ said Berna. ‘There aren’t but small bones here.’

The girl said they’d burned their best bones the first time, and Nack the hayward told them they must have a second fire, for Death bode for a fair wind from France, and must be met with bone smoke. They gathered what they could find. She took from her apron a bird’s skull of an apricot’s bigness. It was small, she said, but they’d been bidden not to come home till they’d got bones to the weight of her baby brother.

The demoiselles continued on their way. ‘Concerning the stories of the clerks,’ said Pogge, ‘is there any doubt of the verity of what they say? In Bristol we’re sure. It’s inevitable. Everyone’s afraid.’

‘Here most people believe it’s a ruse to enrich priests,’ said Berna. ‘And deny such a malady could cross the sea to England. But it pleases Cotswold peasants to pretend obedience. And some do believe. Our hayward, for example, and he has power here. Hence the bonefire.’

THE OLD PIGSTER Dor farrowed Hab, and none knew the sire. Dor spent her death pennies on Hab’s christening, so when God called her forth she hadn’t aught left for the fare, and Hab was left alone in the world, without no gear nor silver. He kept our swine and we kept him. As we to the high and proud, so Hab to us. He was knave to any churl. In winter he bode in Enker’s cot, in summer a wattle shelter in the woods, and was deemed true enough that twice he’d driven swine to a buyer in Melksham, and come again with the silver. He danced naked in the bourne, dark as any eel, and sang and rolled in the mud with the grice.

QUERY: HAVE I been honest? Response: No. In perscribing this commentary I create a substitute for my faith in the continued existence of home.

Today I went to the feretory. Six pilgrims had risen from the pavement to press their noses to the crystal aperture protecting the nail with which the Romans fixed Christ to the cross. I imagine they who buried him cared more for his corpse than for the ferrous fragments perforating it, or for the spiny crown with which his executioners derided him, a part of which is also supposed to be in the abbey’s possession. These are false relics, I suppose; yet I do not doubt that Christ was crucified. So do I not doubt that my villa outside Avignon is securely insulated from plague, even as I create these textual ephemera. The pilgrims would connect with Christ de facto did they remain at home in a state of piety and virtue, in patient expectation of his resurrection and their transmission into paradise. Yet they doubt paradise is their destination, they suspect damnation, and so prefer to frequent sanctuaries, to touch with their hands the luxurious fallacies of the cult of sacred objects.

So it is with me. It is my creed that, as I perscribe this in Malmesbury, the chanting of the fraternity perpetually audible, Judith and Marc move around the villa in Avignon in the chanting of the cicadas, picking basil and lavender, lighting the lamps, setting out wine and a volume of Ovid for my return. This is the paradise I expect. But instead of proceeding there with maximum velocity I retard myself here, perscribing. In the mode of the pilgrims, my horror of damnation intervenes with false objects. My creed is the paradise of home, but the pestilence that has not yet infected England has afflicted Avignon, and my terror is to arrive there to an absolute post-mortal silence, pure nullity, except the accumulation of cadavers, the putrefaction of familiar faces. The terror is not of my own mortality, but the mortality of those I care for, that they might perish before me, and I would be in solitude, like Adam without Eve. Best is to be certain they have not perished. But to be uncertain is better than to be certain that they have.

THE COUSINS AMBLED towards the church. ‘There’ll be free and villain, no gentry, just us,’ said Berna. ‘A place is kept for us, although my father attends mass elsewhere. It’s a mean church, with an indigent curate.’

The church was so full it would have been difficult for the demoiselles to push through the entrance had the villagers not pressed themselves against the walls to let them pass. Some of the better-arrayed free women tried to meet their eyes; the rest acted as if they mightn’t see them, or oughtn’t, save that they stepped aside to open a way through to a bench close to the jube. There wasn’t enough incense lit to cover the scents of sweat and newly laundered cloth. All talked.

In front of the jube stood a group of young men with bowstaves against their shoulders. Among them was Will Quate, who sensed the demoiselles’ regard and turned his face towards them. On perceiving them he lowered his eyes and turned away.

‘His is the second face out of a painture I have seen among your common people,’ said Pogge, ‘although the pigboy’s reminds me of Lust among the sins, whereas Will Quate looks simple and honest. There is some assurance there that all men aren’t inevitably beasts, even among that sort.’

Berna regarded her cousin uncomprehendingly, and laughed. ‘You favour him? He’s no gentleman.’

‘My father says a family that ne breeds in a peasant every third generation grows away from its proper nature.’

‘Pogge, as you see, I converse with one as low as a pigboy, even cherish the boar he guards, but I wouldn’t marry it. Quate ploughs and weeds for a penny a day and lives with his mother. She’s villain-born, and the father free-born, so by his father’s blood he should be free. But his father went to be an archer and died at Sluys, so as far as my papa is concerned, the Quate boy is unfree again.’

‘And does Quate think he is free?’

‘He would be free. My father prefers him to be unsure. He tells him he’s at liberty, then offers him villain land to farm.’

‘Is that a bow he carries?’

‘After Crécy, they all practise archery after mass.’

‘He follows his father.’

‘Papa is supposed to send an archer for the Calais garrison, but Quate is to marry the village beauty, Ness. She lost a child in March, probably his, so he’s not such an angel. Anyway, Quate mayn’t go to France, so that beefy person next to Quate, the miller’s son, he’s going.’

Pogge whispered in Berna’s ear: ‘You should go. You desire to go to France so fiercely, and have already pierced the heart of a man with five arrows.’

‘Par amour, par amour,’ whispered Berna. ‘It was Love that shot those arrows; all I may do is make him apprehend the value of the pain.’

HAB CAME OF the wood at noon and made Enker, by his craft, bide at the lichgate. He came in the churchyard and went to the outer door of the church, which stood open, the inner door wedged wide by us that thrang there. Hab listened a handwhile to the priest through the open doors. The qualm would come to Gloucestershire, the priest said, to pine lewd folk for their sins.

Hab came away from the church door to where the Fishcombe women had left their gear ready to sell their wares after mass. He put the market boards on their trestles under a tree and sang

To whom should I, the wolf said,

Tell of my sins ere I am dead?

Here ne is nothing alive

That me could here now shrive.

The women came out of church with baskets of cheese and orchard stuff. Hab said he’d set their boards under the tree so they’d be in shade and they gave him a garlicle, a thick long stalk with fat red cloves below. He took it to the bowman’s field and sat on his haunches to bide till the bowmen came.

IT WAS THE first Sunday since the field was mown, the best time for bowmen, when the weather was good but they wouldn’t lose time looking for untrue arrows in the long grass. Four came from church to shoot, and chid each other as they went.

Those days, with Calais won for England, high folk lacked Lord Berkeley that he ne met his due of fresh bowmen to man the walls of the town so the French ne take it again. As the high folk stirred Berkeley, so he stirred his under-lords, and so Sir Guy stirred us for a bowman to join Hayne Attenoke’s Gloucestershire score when it went by Outen Green, Calais-bound.

Will Quate was our best with bow, but he was to wed Ness Muchbrook. Some gnof had got her with child, and she went to Santiago de Compostela with her mother, and came back a fortnight after, not great no more, with a likeness of St Margaret stamped on a littlewhat of tin. We ne knew how long it took to wend to Spain and back, but we believed it to be further. Maybe, the godsibs said, she ne fared to Spain. Maybe she went to see a woman in Bristol who knew how to make the unborn never-born.

Some of us reckoned Will Quate the sire of the get, as we’d seen them hop together at other folk’s weddings, but most of us reckoned it was Laurence Haket, Sir Guy’s kinsman, who was his guest when the get was gotten.

Anywise, Will and Ness were betrothed, and besides, the greater deal of us ne deemed Will a free man, so us thought Cockle, the miller’s son, was the man for Calais. He was free and full barst to go, to wear the iron cap and drink wine and know the French maids. When he told his father he was going, his father called him a dote and smote him on the ear. But now Cockle’d shifted his mood. He’d met a pedder of Bath who told him the qualm was right fell in France, and all the French were in hell anywise, without his help. So he wouldn’t go. And when he told his father, his father called him a canker and smote his other ear.

Sim, the master-bowman, who lost an eye to one of Despenser’s churls when we weren’t mostly born, said Cockle was a wantwit.

‘I’m a free man,’ said Cockle. ‘I’ll live as it likes me.’

‘It needs find a bowman by Michaelmas, and I’m too old,’ said Sim.

‘I’d go,’ said Whichday Wat, ‘only my wife’s got great, and the youngest is sick, and the ox is lame.’

They looked at Will.

‘He mayn’t go,’ said Cockle. ‘He’s not free. He’s bound to the manor.’

They heard a stir in the middle of town, over by the green. The priest flew out of the church in his mass-gear and ran toward the hooting, followed by his altar boys. The bowmen went to see, out-take Will, who bode in the field and shet an arrow at the mark.

THE MARK WAS a gin of straw and wattle meant to be in the likeness of a French knight, and the arrowhead blunt. But when the arrow struck the mark a keen cry of sore seemed to come of it, and a long, low moan. Will looked round and saw Hab on his haunches in the shade of the yew tree. Hab dropped his hand off his mouth and laughed. ‘Mind when I made Bob Woodyer think his cow could speak, and the cow told him she was the angel Gabriel, and God had hidden a golden crock in her arse?’ he said.

‘And Bob went about all week beshitten to the armpit,’ said Will.

Hab held the garlicle out, the stalk thick and right and the cloves red and full.

Will unstrung his bow, set it against the tree and sat by Hab. He took the garlicle, ran a thumbnail down the garlic sack and slote the rind. He bade Hab put out his hand and pushed the cloves into it. He told seven, white and clean. Hab did six in his bag and one in his mouth. He chewed and said: ‘I lack sweet meat to clean my breath.’

‘There’s none,’ said Will.

‘There is, would you give it me. A kiss.’

Will laughed and shook his head.

‘I showed you where the white owl nested,’ said Hab. ‘You helped me when they’d tie me to a post and throw sticks at me like to a Shrovetide cock.’

‘We aren’t little knaves no more,’ said Will. ‘Find a maid to kiss. She’ll share your bed and cook for you.’

‘If we’re all to die ere Martinmas, as the priest says, those as have sins to sin must sin them soon.’

‘The priest will say aught to sell candles.’

‘Am I not dear to you?’

‘You aren’t so dear to me as you’d like, not nearly.’

Hab narrowed his eyes. ‘I saw you kiss Whichday,’ he said.

‘I kissed him on the cheek when he’d been to Tewkesbury. I hadn’t seen him a week.’

‘So then you may.’

‘When I meet a friend I lack.’

‘My old friend!’ said Hab. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long. Kiss me!’ He dabbed at Will’s mouth with his. Will laughed, curled up like a hedgehog and trendled himself away.

Hab thrust out his underlip. ‘I wouldn’t that you leave our town, and I left alone,’ he said. ‘I’d swim with you again, and dry in the sun with you, my head on your chest.’

‘That’s gone.’

Hab mirthed again. ‘It needs do better than Ness,’ he said. ‘Her eyes aren’t in a right line, and her neb’s whirled like to the full moon. Would you not take me, take my sister.’

‘You haven’t no sister.’

‘I have a sister, and the sight of you gladdens her. Her name is Madlen, and she’d leave town with you and not come again, even to France.’

‘You haven’t no sister,’ said Will again. ‘You haven’t no kin. You bide alone with Enker in the wood.’

‘Madlen’s fair like May morning, and you’ll meet her, and she’ll prove your bowmanship.’

Will said he wouldn’t talk to Hab no more. He left him in the churchyard and went to the green.

THE STIR WAS made by two friars of Gloucester. One drove a cart and the other banged a drum. The priest came to fight them, for none but he had the right to shrive the folk of Outen Green, and he’d rather die than see Christ’s love sold cheap, or for a halfpenny less than he sold it, anywise.

But the friars, unwashed and deep yet bright of eye, came to sell other than forgiveness. Their cart was heaped with wood and tin likenesses of our Clean Mother. They showed us how to fill a likeness with holy water that the water seep from holes in her eyes, and she weep two days on our threshold till spent, and how, were a candle put in the hole in her womb, the tears would shine as jewels to shield us of night-death, and how it was our last hope to get a likeness, for the friars wouldn’t come again. They’d sworn to bide in a hermitry in the Malverns, eating not but dry bread while they prayed to God to forgive mankind. The fee was a bare sixpence, eleven pence for two, and any that took three likenesses, the friars said, might pay but a penny for the third.

Most folk, out-take Nack, reckoned the qualm was a tale the priests wrought up to wring out our silver. We ne thought us Christ so stern as to slay us by sickness when he took so many in the great hunger thirty winter before. But we wouldn’t that the priest weened we unworthed him, so we bought likenesses.

The friars said they had an errand from Hayne Attenoke in Gloucester. Hayne bade them tell town and manor his score of bowmen would fare by Outen Green early on Tuesday, the day after next, and they looked to meet their new man on the Miserden road that same afternoon.

THE MANOR SENT Anto the reeve to Will. Anto found him in the high half of the top meadow, shooting mark arrows at rags dropped by little knaves. When Will hit a rag at one hundred yard the knaves walloped out over the stubble, yall as them thought French knights would shout with an arrow in their gullet, and threw themselves on the ground, merrily slain.

Anto said their lord must send a bowman to Calais, and none might go but Will.

‘I’d go gladly,’ said Will, ‘but I mayn’t. I’m needed at harvest, I’m to wed Ness Muchbrook, and Sir Guy ne deems me a free man.’

‘They’ll crop the fields without you,’ said Anto. ‘You’ll wed Ness next summer, when you come again from France, laden with silver.’

‘I mayn’t go unfree,’ said Will.

‘Your lord deems you free,’ said Anto. ‘I heard it from his own mouth.’

‘Deemed he me free, he wouldn’t offer me no bound acres to farm.’

‘You ne know the stead you stand in,’ said Anto. ‘You’ve no thank for the blessings the Almighty and Sir Guy send. You’ve not but eighteen winter and you’ve two worthy brothers to keep your mother, you’re betrothed to the sweetest burd in Outen Green, and your lord, out of the kindness of his heart, bestows on you a cot and ten good acres to farm when you’re wed. And here you’re offered the speed of a fare to fight in France, such as any bold young man would yearn for, and it’s sikur Sir Guy deems you free. How else might he let you go?’

‘A bound man on his lord’s errand is bound yet, fares he to the brim of the world,’ said Will. ‘Go I to France, come home again and farm those acres, I were still bound to Sir Guy, for I still owed him two days’ work in six.’

Anto’s face lost hue and he no longer seemed to have himself in wield. He asked Will, in a steven like to he was choked, what then he’d have his lord do.

‘Let him give me an inch of hide with the words of my freedom written in ink and sealed with a gobbet of wax, for me to show all kind living clerks, that they believe my freedom true and not a tale I tell. Then I’ll go to France.’

‘You ne know your lowness in God’s read,’ said Anto. ‘You’d threaten all. The higher the ape climbs, the more he shows the filth of his arse.’

ONCE, THE EXCITING friction between the textual accumulation of old wisdom and the vivacious inquiry of a new generation was to be found in monasteries like this. That vigour has moved to the universities now.

‘You have a mind,’ said the prior. ‘Why remain a proctor, and not be a scholar or an advocate?’

‘When Oxford desired me for a doctorate,’ I explained, ‘I expected Paris, and when Paris offered to adscribe me, my finances were debilitated. When I had saved sufficient money, I submitted myself to the preliminary examination of Paris, and was rejected.’

The prior smiled. ‘You are bound for purgatory,’ he said. ‘You are excessively humid for infernal incineration, insufficiently lucid for celestial jubilation. On the margin of destroying humanity, the Deity created a homo novus, and you are the archetype. You are a non-decider. You neither reason nor instruct. You observe without participation. You do not reflect on the sacred mysteries. You comment on action as an alternative to action. You investigate pagan books in the library. You scribble on furtive parchment – and what do you scribble? Is it useful, or to the glorification of God?’

‘Ephemera,’ I said.

THE SERVANT ASSIGNED by Sir Guy to confine Berna to her chamber on her return from church admitted Pogge and closed the door behind her, permitting the cousins their privacy, if not their liberty. Pogge discovered Berna with her face pressed to the narrow ouverture that offered a view into the southern distances. She approached her and placed her hand on her shoulder but Berna ne turned, as if cloyed in the window’s stone surround.

‘Does your father’s emollience not surprise you?’ said Pogge.

‘Have they persuaded you to join their party, in contravention of our bonds of amity?’

‘I shall be loyal to you for eternity,’ said Pogge gently. She sat on the bed. ‘Your father promises to restore your usual liberties tomorrow. He permits you to retain the book in the chamber, for your consolation.’

Berna detached herself from the window. The sun had set and the chamber was sombre in the blue afterlight, Berna an indistinct form pacing to and fro, her hands in constant motion, now on her cheeks, now combing her hair, now on her hips.

‘He considers me a fine animal he has already vended, and desires to maintain in good condition till the purchaser arrive,’ said Berna.

‘You are extremely severe in your judgement of his motives.’

‘This Romance he so generously lends me,’ said Berna, seizing the volume of a table, ‘isn’t even finished.’

‘Berna, I doubt there is another demoiselle within three hours of here who is literate, and would have any non-ecclesiastical reading matter if she were.’

‘This Romance,’ repeated Berna, ‘is not the finished article. Our poor family possesses only the first part, the part by Guillaume de Lorris, which concludes with the imprisonment of the Rose in Jealousy’s castle. The greater part of the book, its completion by Jean de Meun, is absent.’

‘From what I hear,’ said Pogge, ‘de Meun’s so-called completion is a displeasant addition to another poet’s romance, excessively proud in its own ingeniousness, replete with irreligious mockery and the misprizement of women. I have never comprehended who gave him the authority to declare after another poet’s death that his rival’s verse was unfinished, and that he should complete it.’

‘So it is with people,’ said Berna. ‘Some girls consider themselves finished because they’re comfortable with whatever base rewards their parents offer. A Bristol merchant’s daughter may easily be satisfied with an allowance and a merchant’s son to marry when she lacks the imagination to realise how incomplete she is.’

The chamber was still for several moments, save the evening chants of the birds and Pogge weeping. Berna returned to her place at the window, blocking what little light remained.

‘I mayn’t attend my amour no longer,’ said Berna. ‘I shall journey to him.’

‘I know I haven’t your courage and imagination,’ sniffed Pogge. ‘I ne present myself as no example.’

Berna went to the door and demanded a candle of the servant. She took the light and went to sit with Pogge. ‘Pardon me my cruelty,’ she said. ‘My rigour towards you is a sign of my inquietude. Will you aid my escape?’

‘I would prefer to aid you in a change of heart,’ said Pogge. ‘Your severity to me bears a greater resemblance to your real nature than your acceptance of the role of the lover’s Rose. I’m not persuaded by your reliance on poet’s language to justify your strange intentions. To say Love’s arrows have crippled Laurence, to say he is Love’s vassal, has the odour of Guillaume de Lorris, not Bernadine. As I remember, Love possessed a sixth arrow, one he never used.’

‘The arrow named Frankness,’ said Berna.

‘That arrow is more characteristic of you, I would judge. The arrow that issues of a rose with a voice.’

‘I am best placed to judge my own sentiments.’

‘As my mother says, one is often the last to know one’s own roof is on fire.’

WILL SHET TILL the shadows were long. He unstrung his bow, put the arrows in his belt, plucked a cluster of loving-Andrew and went down the hill to town. He went by the fields to the back road and in through the Muchbrooks’ orchard gate. Ness’s deaf eldmother Gert, who when she was young had seen the king ride by at hunt like a giant, on a white horse, with gold stars on the harness, sat and span by the back door. The sun had set and the new moon shone. Ness came out bearing one of the friars’ likenesses, with a candle set in it. The Holy Mother of God wept. The light of the candle made a loop of hair between Ness’s forehead and her headcloth’s hem gleam gold. She set the likeness down next to Gert and came to Will. He gave her the blossoms.

‘Do you truly go to France on Tuesday?’ she asked.

‘Does Sir Guy give me a deed of freedom, yeah. To come again next summer with silver, a free man, and we’ll be wed.’

‘Your dad ne came again.’

‘I ne go to fight as he did. I go to hold a town already won.’

The blue leaves of the blossoms shook. ‘If you so yearn for freedom, why bind yourself to me?’

‘I need a wife, and you’re the best I know, and the fairest, and go I to France, to Italy, to Jerusalem, I won’t find better.’

‘Freedom’s dearer to you than I,’ said Ness. ‘You would I were your chattel, like the silver you hope to win in France.’

‘Why so wrathful?’ asked Will. ‘Aren’t you my sweetheart no more?’

Ness looked into his eyes and smiled unevenly. ‘My heart yearns for sweetness of you, and you ne give it. Last year you ne heeded me, so I went with Laurence Haket, to egg you on with a show of liking another. And Haket was weary of playing the lover to the lady Bernadine, so he hungered for it. But he japed me.’

‘I was ashamed to live so meanly,’ said Will. ‘I’d better my lot before I asked to wed you.’

‘Laurence Haket sang to me in French,’ said Ness. ‘He told me truelove things, and made me laugh, and I would kiss him; but to kiss him were wrong. And it was like to when I was a little girl. Mum made an apricot pie, and left me with it, and forbade me eat even one deal of it. But I ate one deal, because it needed me a sweet thing, and after I’d eaten one deal, I was already damned, and might as well eat the whole pie.’

‘I forgive you all that,’ said Will.

‘Am I to owe you everlastingly for forgiveness?’ said Ness. ‘Your forgiveness is but another name for the right my sin gives you to wed me without loving me, to have a wife and freedom at the same time.’

‘My brothers told me maids were unkind and dizzy, but I ne believed it before,’ said Will. ‘I won’t burden you no more.’ He went to the gate.

Gert, who maybe wasn’t as deaf as folk said, got to her feet, pulled the headcloth off Ness’s head that her gold hair glew in the candlelight, and said: ‘Would you leave such a hoard to go to France?’

‘I mayn’t take her with me,’ said Will, and went home.

His brothers were awake. They chid him that he vexed Sir Guy with his proud asks, when the lord had almost forgiven the town for the theft of his daughter’s gown, and was about to feast them all for her wedding. Went Will to Bristol, they said, he’d see the street thick with men of the land who’d gone seeking freedom and found it begging at a merchant’s door. Any dog, they said, was free to starve.

The stir woke their mother, who saw Will and buried her neb in her hands.

Will left them, clamb the hill and sat in the top meadow, looking down on the town under the moon. All had lit candles in the likenesses they’d bought, and filled them with holy water, and from one end to another the town sparkled with the bright falling tears of the Holy Mother.

Feet trod on the cropped grass behind him.

‘I know you, Hab,’ said Will, but he ne turned.

A mouth breathed on Will’s neck, a side crowded his back, and a hand reached inside his shirt, where it lay against his chest.

‘How may you know I’m Hab, and not Hab’s sister Madlen, or some other?’ came a whisper.

‘I know your walk, and your steven, and the feel of your hand.’

‘Hab and Madlen are brother and sister,’ came the whisper. ‘You mayn’t know which I am.’

‘It’s one of two?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You haven’t no sister.’

‘Likes you my hand on your skin?’

‘It ne baits me.’

‘My hand may hold your pintle.’

‘Ding you bloody if I feel it.’

‘Yeah, were I Hab. And were I Madlen?’

‘I’m betrothed.’

‘You wouldn’t ding me if I were a maid?’

‘It ne likes me to ding no maid.’

‘Let there be such a qualm as the priest says, and all die out-take you and I, and we be the only folk left in the world – would you take me then, as you say you would take Ness?’

‘Never, so long as you be Hab.’

‘And as her sister, the fair Madlen?’

‘Look!’ said Will, showing the sky and the town with his finger. ‘Like to the town be a great lake, and all the Holy Mother’s tears the folk have bought the likeness of the stars come again of the water. I would see the sea at night. Dad said the sea’s so great the light of all the stars come of it again.’

‘You speak as if the thing you yearned for more than any other were to leave this town. And yet you didder about with Ness and deeds of freedom like to you lack the strength to have your will.’

‘Ness said freedom was dearer to me than she.’

‘She’s right.’

‘I wouldn’t hurt her.’

‘Then stint at home. But if you would go and know the world and the sea, you must hurt her, and it were better you hurt her hard and quick than long and steady.’

‘I would not.’

‘It’s more kindly. Have her and walk away without a word, if you’re bold enough. Let her deem you a wretch, that she ne care so much you’re gone.’

MARC, EVEN IF this is not humanity’s final hour, it is improbable that you and I will survive the imminent calamity. If these texts have been transmitted to you, it signifies that I have expired; as I perscribe it, you may already be entombed. We here in Malmesbury – the clerics, if not the common people – accept that the pestilence has devastated Avignon, and Provence, and Italy, and must inevitably perflow to this insular location. In the event that I succumb and you survive, transfer these commentaries to the library at Senanque. All other post-mortem instructions are to be invented in my final testament, located in the signed scrine in partition vii of my analogium.

PS Examine my Latin for errors of syntax and vocabulary and make the necessary corrections. Reject the temptation to edit.

PPS Purge my debt to the fishmonger – iii sols, as I remember, or the equivalent in candles if he has perished – and apologise to him or his heirs for my intemperate assertions on the quality of his sardines.

My regards to your wife. I have a presagitation that Judith is secure.

Thomas

ON MONDAY, THE holiday, it seemed to us Will had lost everything, for we heard he’d fallen out with his betrothed and his kin, and no word had come from the manor about his proud ask. Folk said Sir Guy would withdraw his offer of land. It seemed Will’s pride would leave him worse off than before, without a bride, without acres, without the speed of a fare to France. He’d lost the freedom he’d always had, in his fellows’ eyes at least, by seeking to get a clerk to write it down.

All liked Will, but we were glad to see him lowed. We would not that he got his deed. Most of us that were free hadn’t no deed to say so; got he one, would that make us less free than he? And what of the bondmen? Got Will a deed, were it like to he deemed all bondmen worthless churls that they ne durst ask for one themselves?

Will ne looked ever so alone as in church, for Ness ne seemed to mind him, but kept her eyes to the ground and her fingers knit together with a string of beads. The Muchbrooks ne looked at the Quates, and the Quates ne looked at the Muchbrooks, out-take Will, who turned his head her way at the saecula saeculorum.

After mass the priest led us out of church and downhill. We bore the likenesses of St George, St Andrew and St Michael, and Rob the deacon bore the oaken rood with the likeness of our Maker nailed to it, and Whichday and Cockle and Tom the smith and Bob Woodyer bore the likeness of our Clean Mother in her blue kirtle with her fair white face shined with wax and lambswool and lips hued red. The knaves rattled sheep knuckles in boxwood cans and we sang

Domine Maria I have in mind

Whereso I wend

In well or in woe

Domine Maria will me defend

That I ne stand

For no manner foe

We came up to the bonefire and the priest bade us kneel and hold up our hands to heaven. The priest stretched his fingers over us and spoke in Latin and then a bead in English asking Christ to ward us of ferly death.

Then Nack came forward and un-knit the cloth around the horsepanthing and set it on the pole pitched in the middle of the heap of bones. No smith of Outen Green hadn’t made no horsepanthing since the ill crops of the old king’s day, and most of us hadn’t seen one. Tom put a little nail in the horsebone for each soul in Outen Green, edging the eye and nose pits with nail heads as to make it seem the horse were undergirt with iron when it was quick in our fields.

We tinded clouts soaked in pitch and cast them on the bonefire and it was fired and burned and black smoke ran off the bones. It stank all day and darkened the sky. Evening it dwined to ashes, and though we ne yet knew would Will outgo, the ploughmen set up a board for a bowman-ale in the churchyard, and some of our shepherds came.

It ne fetched but six shilling for Will’s shrift, and we ne knew would it be spent, for there wasn’t no word of Sir Guy, and none nad seen him. Whichday fetched his pipes and Buck the warrener his gittern and they played Guy Came Out of Warwick, The Maid of Cardiff, Three Strings and a Reed, The Mirthful Sparrow, Green Grow the Rushes, The Fiend and the Gleeman, My Love Yed to Fair Gloucester, The Oak Is Hoar and The Ram Would Have Good Wether. A few maids came by and we hopped with them.

When the moon was high, Whichday and Will ran and fetched Whichday’s ox and hitched it to a plough and they began to plough the duck pond, saying when they’d ploughed it they’d sow it with duck eggs, and in a fortnight crop baked duck.

‘POGGE. POGGE! ARE you asleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll take bread with me, and a veil for my face. And a blanket. It may be necessary to sleep in the forest.’

‘You won’t sleep in no forest, for you won’t go nowhere, and on Saturday you’ll be married.’

‘Pogge, I have no money. I mayn’t travel without money.’

‘All the more reason why I shouldn’t lend you none.’

‘One night’s lodging on route, and stabling for Jemsy.’

‘Your father’s horse?’

‘Two florins should cover it. I’ll repay you double when we’re safe in Calais.’

‘The larger part of femininity, if they may not marry him they love, will take the marriage, then try to return to their amour in secret once their social and financial position is secure.’

‘Pogge! How can you make such monstrous pronouncements? You evidently consider the larger part of femininity to be a branch of the sorority of prostitutes. A woman who permits a man she ne loves to possess her as a secret route to her real amour? Haven’t sufficient virgins been martyred rather than surrender to such advances?’

‘You summon the saints to justify your aversion to marriage, and the poets to justify your passion for the lover who provokes that aversion. You ne permitted me to finish. I spoke of the larger part of femininity. There is another part, whose members will joyfully allow themselves to be stolen from their families by a gallant lover before they may be married to a lubber of their parents’ preference.’

‘Yes! That’s I!’

‘No, Berna. Laurence hasn’t come to steal you. When he was here I’m sure he played the lover par amour very well. You ne know to whom he played before, nor to whom he plays now.’

‘You won’t make me cry, Pogge, although I know you wish it.’

‘He hasn’t come to steal you, so you’ve determined to steal yourself, and deliver yourself to him, wherever he is.’

‘Wiltshire,’ came Berna’s voice, small and rageous in the darkness.

‘I shan’t lend you no florins, but so long as you’re disposed to steal, you may have one of my gold nobles.’

‘Where are they?’

‘In my purse. Remember, I am measurable.’

Berna laughed and stretched, holding her arms straight back behind her head and clenching and unclenching her fingers and toes. It was hot and they lay on the bed without covers. ‘I shan’t never let no one measure me,’ she said.

TODAY I INQUIRED of the prior if he sensed the pestilence were the Deity’s final act with respect to his human creation. Would humanity be extinguished?

‘I predict,’ said the prior, ‘that you will perish. So Deuteronomy. And the music will cease, and the candles of the abbey will be extinguished, and its columns ruptured, and the Deity will abolish light, so that were a single member of humanity to survive, he would not possess the means to testify to its ruin.’

‘What of the last man?’ I said to the prior. ‘Who will receive his confession?’

‘We assume the final human to be male, but man’s was the prime nativity,’ said the prior. ‘Why should man be the last to die? Why should the final human not be female? Why should Adam not perish before Eve, and none remain except Eve for him to confess to? Eve’s was the primal vice, the rapture of the fruit. Were not it just for the last person left on earth, unconfessed, unabsolved, to be female?’

‘A terrible solitude for any human,’ I said, ‘to have no society except their conscience.’

‘Terrible and anticipated,’ said the prior. ‘Be cognisant that Canterbury determines the situation to demand an exceptional regulation, that in extremis the female may take confession from the male.’

NB Marc, the Dante by my bed belongs to one Konrad Schadland of Mainz. Do all in your power to return it, with a request that he absolve me.

IN THE MORNING Will asked his brothers if there’d been word from the manor, and they told him no, he must earn his bread with his back bent like any poor man, for it was a working day.

He took his weeding bill and stick, went by the back road to the demesne land, whet his bill and set to cropping golds and poppies in Sir Guy’s acres under corn. We saw him there hooded against the sun. He went inch by inch along the rows, set the fork and swung the bill and cropped the weeds one by one, right and steady. Behind him went a heap of small girls who gathered the blossoms that flew of his blade, and two thack-pot knaves to scare the crows. He ne saw nor heard Anto till the reeve was nigh behind him and spoke his name.

Anto asked him sharply why he was bent over the dirt in the sun when he must be on the highway to France that afternoon.

‘I mayn’t go till I hear from my lord,’ said Will.

‘Thinks you he comes out to the field in the sun to make his ends known to a hired man?’ Anto turned and went again to the manor house, fetching dust of the ground with his busy steps.

Will stood still and beheld him, tools hung from his hands.

Over his shoulder Anto called: ‘Would you be a free man and go to Calais, or sweat a scarecrow’s steading in the corn?’

Will ran after him to the manor house. The knaves followed and banged the pots, and the girls held up their barmcloths filled with blossom heads, but they stinted at the bridge across Sir Guy’s ditch, while Anto and Will went through the gate.

THEY WENT THROUGH Sir Guy’s hall, through laths of sunlight that came in through the narrow windows. The hall looked sluttish still after the masons of Coventry came the year before, took Sir Guy’s hearth off its old stead in the middle of the floor and set it under a brick pipe they called a chimney. A wonder gin it would’ve been had they fulfilled it, and two more chimneys at either end of the manor, but they went away when Sir Guy stinted the silver, to buy his daughter’s gown that was stolen.

Anto bade Will leave his tools outside and led him through the new door at the west end of the hall and into a room. It hadn’t no stead for bed nor dogs nor food-stuff, only a board and chair and chests and a cherrywood rood with a likeness of our Maker pined by his own weight. Sir Guy called it his privy chamber, chamber being room or cot or steading, and privy being that none of his household was to go in out-take him. When we’d asked Anto why Sir Guy would make a room to be alone in, if he ne slept there, Anto said he read the leaves of books, of which he had three or more, and wrote letters, and drank wine with the priest, and played dice with the high-born, and hid him from his daughtren.

Sir Guy sat on the chair at the board in hunting gear with one hand on his morning wine-crock and the other on the neck of the old alaunt, Canell. Nack the hayward stood on one side of him and Anto went to stand on the other. Will stood before them with his hands clasped, and bent and lifted his head. The three mole-hued greyhounds, Fortin, Pers and Starling, crope about like to one dog with three tails. Behind Sir Guy was a window scaled in glass and iron and at his left hand a brass box.

‘Ruth to lose a good ploughman ere harvest,’ said Sir Guy. ‘Worth it yet, do the French learn a Cotswold man can draw a bow as deep as any. The English archer’s the best on God’s mould, all be one in two a thief, and one in ten a murderer. You need to be quick, though, to be on the road by afternoon.’

Will said, always calling Sir Guy his lord, that he mightn’t go without a deed of freedom.

Fortin squatted and laid a turd in the nook and Sir Guy got up and went to him and pressed the dog’s nose to it. ‘Is that my thank for the rabbit liver you get of your master?’ he asked.

Anto said if Sir Guy would yield to Will’s ask, the fee mightn’t be less than five pound. The Muchbrooks nad paid the two pound owed by Ness, the lord’s bondwoman, for lying with Will when they weren’t wed; and to wed her Will must then pay his lord another pound for the loss of the bound children she wouldn’t never bear the manor.

Sir Guy straightened and pulled his lip. ‘The kind bonds that knit men together should rather be meted in love than ink and silver,’ he said. ‘The old wise me liked, when the lord feasted his men and shielded them with his sword arm, and they wrought the lord’s land for faithfulness alone, like the bond between father and son, when each was thankful to the other, and each gave the other worthship.’

Anto said Will was a thankless churl. The world was up-half down, and kind wit ne need look far to see what drove God to loose the pest.

‘Man ne owes to deem his maker,’ Sir Guy said.

He sat and opened the box. He took out a calfskin scrow, a feather and an inkpot and laid them on the table. He set the feather at Will.

‘Anto was wrong to say five pound was the fee for your freedom,’ he said. ‘You may hear me say you’re free for nothing. But ink and wax and calfskin is law, and law costs silver. Do you have five pound?’

Will said he hadn’t.

‘How then might you buy the deed?’

Will said he couldn’t buy it, and would go back to weeding Sir Guy’s field, and Hayne Attenoke would lack one bowman.

‘I hope you’re no stirrer,’ said Sir Guy. ‘That’s the shortest way to the gallows.’

Will said he ne stirred aught but the salt in his peas.

Sir Guy gave a kind of laugh, like to a pig found a fresh acorn. ‘I mayn’t give you the deed shot-free, but I’ll send it to my kinsman Laurence Haket, who’s been enfeoffed near Calais. Enfeoffed, understand? They gave him land. I’ll give you a letter for him, to bid him give you the deed once you’ve earned enough to buy it. You’ll find five pound and more in France. An English archer in France gets silver as lightly as a knave getting apples of a widow’s orchard.’

He held out his hand to Will and Anto bade Will kneel and kiss it and Will did as he was bidden.

Sir Guy said to rise, and lifted him, as if it were Will’s wish to bide on his knees. ‘Do me one errand on the way,’ he said.

He took a mouthful of wine and opened the box and dalve in it, but couldn’t find what he looked for. He went to the window and turned a key and the scales of glass set in iron swung out like a door. There was a garden beyond with green grass cropped short and a spring-well. Sir Guy’s younger daughtren played there with Bridget the housekeeper and the lord’s nift Pogge. Sir Guy called out to Bridget and in a handwhile a wench put through the window a stitch of cloth that gleamed where the sun caught it.

Sir Guy laid it on the board. On a white field were sewn scarlet roses and white lilies in silken thread. One hem was sewn in gold, and golden blazes ran through the field.

‘It was of such cloth my daughter’s gowns were made,’ he said. ‘The gown that was stolen and the second, that she’ll wear for her wedding. Keep your eyes and ears open, and get you tidings of the stolen gown, send word back to Outen Green, and we’ll muster men, fetch the thief and hang him.’

They sent Will out and in a stound Anto came to him with the letter, folded to the muchness of a hand and sealed with a grot of wax. Anto thacked him on the shoulder and said it was done, and he must be on the high road for France in three hour, and to gather his gear and ready his sins for church.

NACK STINTED US at the church door and let Will in and the priest’s knaves stripped him naked and washed him with holy water while the priest sang Latin and swung a crock of smoking reekles.

On the eve, Nack had gone to our women and told them we owed to see Will geared such that we not be shamed if he went forth, for whatever weird bode him in the south, in him wasn’t his worth alone, but ours. Now Nack came in with fresh clothes the women had sewn for Will, a shirt and breech with rood stitch on the hem, a grey kirtle, red hose and a red hood. We cleaned his shoon, that he’d bett with thick leather under-halves for a far fare, and we thrang into church.

Each of us was there. Even Sir Guy and his folk, that took their mass at Brimpsfield Priory, were in their stead by the south wall. We lacked only the lady Bernadine, who, us thought, would rather hight herself for her wedding, and Hab, who minded the pigs.

The priest came away from the altar and we kneeled for the confiteor. The priest called Will near and Will kneeled at his feet. The priest bade him clasp his hands together, bent to whisper in his ear and listened while Will whispered in his. We’d hear Will’s sins, but couldn’t, for he spoke too soft. He got shrift, and was shriven clean, and came away from the priest with his cheer clean and shining, and the women wept.

The priest came down from behind the rood-pale and led Will by the wrist to the likenesses on the north wall. On any other day we ne heeded the likenesses. We knew them too well. Yet now, tight together in the candle stink, it were as if we’d seen what they showed. When the priest spoke of Christ it were like to he told of a kinsman who’d gone out of Outen Green and fell in with uncouth churls that ne knew his worth, and scorned and slew him. It were like to we stood in the garden in Jerusalem, and smelled onion on false Judas’s breath when he kissed us in the murk, and felt the chill on our bare backs when the shirt was torn of it, the smart of flesh when the knotted rope struck, the uncouth spit wet on our faces, the weight of the rood like to a house-cruck, the hawthorns that pricked our brows and the nails that went between our hand-bones and foot-bones. It were like to we were pitched in the wind to hang like flesh on the butcher’s hook. And we saw him rise to heaven, like lightning shotten upward of the earth.

The priest went again to the altar. When the sacring bell rang we shoff up against the rood-pale and went on our knees and lifted our hands. Some of us saw our Maker in the priest’s hands and they at the back yall at the priest to lift our Lord higher. Buck and Whichday took Will by the arms and lifted him up out of the heap of folk, that he got good sight of Christ, for he that saw the Lord was shielded were he reft ferly of life. Then the priest ate Christ’s flesh, and drank of his blood.

After mass Will went from hand to hand, for each of us would wish him well, and give him some thing or useful word. His mother dight her hands on his cheeks and made a show of a smile, for she’d sworn to hold back her tears till he was gone.

Will walked away up the road with his pack on his back and his bowstaff in his right hand, the children after him. They stinted at the top field wall, and Will clamb over it, and ne looked again, and we couldn’t see him afterwards. That was how Will Quate left Outen Green.

When he’d gone we minded how mild he was with the old and children, how good a neighbour, how right he sowed and ploughed and sheared, how it comforted to see his cheer behind an ox-gang in the rain and hear his feet breaking ice in the puddles on the back road on a winter morning. We felt bare shame to let such strength and manship go, with his neb like an angel’s. And we felt bare glad the Green had such an offering to make. It lightened us to think us strong enough to send so handy a man away to where, the priest said, the Fiend had free hold. Let the world see, we kept no jewel back.

SOMEONE CRIED THE pigs were loose, and we ran to shield our orchards, and called for Hab, but he wasn’t there.

Whichday and Cockle bode at the church, and when the priest came out, Whichday went to him and said the night before he’d had a dream of Will walking through a cornfield ahead of him, but Will wouldn’t turn when he called, and did the priest know the meaning?

The priest was a ploughman’s son like us, who’d gotten Latin of the Gloucester monks. He said many men dreamed of their corn before harvest, and Whichday most likely feared hail.

Whichday said it wasn’t that. He lacked Will, and wished they hadn’t let him go. He’d know where he was, and what he did, and how he fared. Wasn’t there, he asked the priest, a way to ward dreams, to reach what you sought of them, not to be at the dream’s bidding?

The priest said man’s lot wasn’t to choose his dreams, nor win of them, and dreams fell upon us, like wild deer in darkness, while we slept. Yet there were some folk who warded their dreams, as shepherds warded sheep, and kept them as easy by day as by night, and won of them, as of their herd shepherds won wool. These folk, he said, were called writers, and they were close to the Fiend.

Yet, he said, there were holy among them. He told us he’d met a book in the getting of his priest-lore, a book by a man of Italy, about the life of Christ, and in this book was written of deeds by our Lord that weren’t in the gospel.

Like for one the gospel told how the Fiend tempted our Maker in the desert, and how Christ fasted, but the gospel ne told whence came the meat with which Christ’s fast was broken. So the man of Italy wrote a thing that seemed what our meek and simple son of God might do, that Christ bade angels fly to his mother’s house and fetch meat of her, and Christ, wrote the man of Italy, ate alone in the desert, with angels to serve him.

Whichday and Cockle were astoned. Cockle asked had Christ in truth sent home for meat to break his fast?

The priest said we mightn’t know, for the man of Italy ne wrote of what was true, nor what wasn’t true, but what might be true, by his conning of the lifelodes of men, and the things and deeds he minded, that he crafted with his mastery of dreaming into a likeness of truth.

Cockle said the man of Italy was a liar.

The priest pulled Cockle’s sleeve and asked was the seamstress who made it a liar, for making a thing out of flax in the likeness of another sleeve, and calling it a sleeve?

Cockle said he’d like to see a man ride to Brimpsfield on the likeness of a horse.

The priest bade Cockle beware to call those who made likenesses liars, for the gospel told us how our Lord made man in his own likeness. And Cockle shouldn’t rue the way he was, for God had made so many likenesses of himself, it wasn’t no wonder his fingers slipped once in a while.

All this time Whichday stood and stared about and played with the two hairs on his chin. He said he would ward his dreams that night. He would make a likeness of Will Quate.