Читать книгу Rivers Parting - Shirley Barker - Страница 3

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John Scarlock felt great things astir that night, but whether they came and went in the flow of his own blood up the dark creeks of the brain, or outside him, a trouble, too, for other farm lads looking out at the star-pricked sky and the windless hazels, he could not tell. He put his head out of the low doorway in the farmhouse kitchen, and looked up at the sickle moon, down at the plowland curved with the curve of the Trent valley. No comets flashed above him, and no earthquakes rocked the ground and its waters under; outside lay only an autumn night, like a thousand others he could remember. In the room behind him, a log snapped and settled on the hearth. He turned then, glanced at old Rob and Bet nodding in their chairs, and stepped outward, shutting the door.

White rime spun a delicate mist over the grass, and looking back once as he walked up Gamwell Chase, he could see his footprints marching square and black and stubborn on the whiteness. It was a night to walk between the great crabbed trees here on the lower edge of Sherwood; a fit night to meet Old Will, if ever you were to meet him. John had walked often so, hearing the thorn twigs crackle under his bootsoles, shoving his way through the hornbeam thickets, half of him hoping to meet the family ghost, half of him not believing there was such a thing. Maybe that story was true, his father was so fond of, that the Scarlocks of Old Thorny had come down from the merry man, Will Scarlet, and that it was given to them to meet him sometimes in the high wood, slipped from his grave by Blidworth Church, alive as ever in his forest green. But more than forty years back was the last time it had happened—to Cousin Rob, the night before he went off to fight the Armada, a warm night, smoking with fog, in the late spring. Had there been a strangeness on that night the way there was on this one? John wondered uneasily. Did it mean he would be going off tomorrow to fight for something he’d never quite find out all the reasons for, just as Rob had? His muscles tensed like those of a hound asleep by the fire when something unseen and trackless walks around the house, something that may be the wind for all a man can tell. Impatient at the treachery of his own nerves, he caught suddenly at a birch bough dipping toward him and snapped it off.

“The devil with it!” he said aloud. “I’ll go see Joan.”

Striding along the windmill ridge, with Trent flowing silver below him on the left, he kept his eyes straight ahead toward Nottingham, all roofs and chimneys and lighted panes slanting up a hillside at the sky. Out of the shadow of the forest now, his forebodings left him and he began to whistle. There were more ghosts in the wood than Will Scarlet’s, and ’twas one of those old, dark things that dwelt there, passing just beyond his sight, that had been the trouble, likely; nothing to do with him. The landscape round him now looked just the way it always had; here a quickset hedge, there a barley rick, on the right, before you came to the first row of houses, a hooded malt kiln smoking. The known, familiar look of it all reassured him. Men could die and roofs fall in, but the land under them did not change. You could trust the land—even now in these declining times, in the fifth year of Charles the First, King by the Grace of God. It would feed you if you sowed it, and take you into itself when the time came for that, just as it had for your father and would for your sons after you—for his sons, he thought, his sons and Joan’s.

He quickened his steps when he thought about Joan, the barmaid at the Bull’s Head, brown and slim, born just sixteen years ago this fall in St. Nicholas’ workhouse. But that wasn’t so bad a thing. He’d rather take home a workhouse girl, pretty and warm and loving, than a cold, giggling stick like Squire’s daughter, and it was time he took Joan home now. He’d loved her in every hedge this side of Sherwood, and at first he thought loving her in the hedges would be enough, but it wasn’t. He wanted to marry her with a ring and take her to Old Thorny. Maybe Christmas or Boxing Day—after the winter wheat was sown and a man could rest from the fields for a bit. He could see how she’d look with holly all about her, her brown eyes shining through the glossy leaves, and the berries not so deep a red as her soft mouth. He’d kiss her mouth in a few minutes, he thought; kiss her, and then sit in and drink with the men until Jack Gambrell cried closing time, and then—his flesh quivered in his rough woolen clothes to think what would happen then—how he would be all alone under the sickle moon with the sweetness of Joan.

Just as he reached the edge of town the strangeness of the night began to trouble him again—the feel of something about to happen—something that he was to have a part in, that might be good or evil, but would be, in any course, a great thing. He had felt a little like that five years ago, he remembered, the time the woods got afire from a charcoal cart and blacked over the noon sky way to Newark. Looked as if all Sherwood might come down and half the shire be burnt over. But why trouble his blood tonight about fires and going off fighting? He’d got no use for either, and if they came again, he hoped it wouldn’t be in his time. He wanted to live peaceably on Old Thorny and marry Joan. He put up his head and sniffed the night air in the way all animals test their world for approaching trouble: for the salt wind that wandered inland sometimes before a storm fell, the brimstone of mortars pounding in battle, even the faint tease of spicy airs that meant the unknown. But he smelled only plowed ground and dying leaves, the sweetness of unpicked apples rotting on some forgotten tree in the darkened fields behind him, then the reek of the tanyard and the fulsomeness of brewery malt as his feet struck the cobblestones of Nottingham.

Past the Swine Green he went, taking the short way through St. Peter’s churchyard with its broken gravestones, and down into the dirty fog that rose off the sluggish waters of the Leen Ditch. Unsightly, even on a foggy night, the houses of Brew House Yard sprouted out of the hillside, like toadstools from a fallen tree. All the street doors opened into alehouses, and no one asked or needed to ask what went on behind the crazy gables. Under the floors and pavement, round caves tunneled through the red sandstone, but no man living had pried into them very far. Master Tibbalds used to tell the boys at the Free School, when John was a boy there, that the Gray Friars had made the caves to bed down men fallen sick of the plague in the old time, that the sickness still might live on there in the porous stone, for all he knew.

John had never gone into them to find out, but he’d been often enough in the well-like cellar to the north, for Jack Gambrell stored casks there, and trusted his servant Joan with the key of it. Kissing in the copses could be cold work on a frosty night, but no winds raked the malt cellar, and there was clean, kind sand on the floor. In his pocket now, as he went up the tilted cobbles toward the Bull’s Head, he felt a clever little copy of Joan’s key that he’d got Ned Trigg to make for him. Humpbacked and finical, Ned was no good at the forge he tried to work, but he could cut an eye in a needle, or mend their London earrings for the aldermen’s wives. Some said he was a rare lad for the girls before he got the fall that crippled him—close kin to Joan Sweetapple, John had heard more than once, but her mother had died in the dirty straw under St. Nicholas’ with her mouth shut, not naming any names.

John stopped by the wide bow window of the tavern and looked inside. For a moment he forgot about Joan, seeing the men over their ale mugs in the firelight, and thinking of one man who had often sat there until last winter’s great snow took him off. His father he thought of, and how he used to thump on the table with his earthen mug, telling bits of the family story that the whole shire knew as well as he did.

“Never said we was great folk,” he’d argue, tossing his shaggy head and mumbling a little for want of teeth. “Robin Hood now, some say he were a lord’s son as run away, though I’ve my doubts about that even. But we’re not his kin, whichever way it were. We be yeomen folk from Gamwell Chase, and we come down from his man, Will Scarlet, the one who always got the deer, and warned Robin against that she-devil prioress who killed him later—likewise the one the queen out of Spain took a fancy to.”

And at that he would look slyly at Joan and she would slide a full mug in front of the old man and wipe up the froth he’d spilled from the last one. How eagerly then he would lift it to his dry old mouth. Dry, dry ... and so the dust is dry. “Dust thou art,” Parson had read, the words blown away from him on the icy wind that raked the December graveyard. John’s throat ached suddenly and his eyes filled.

A mirror glass hung on the opposite wall of the tavern, and John caught the look of his own face in it, a little distorted by the curved panes between. He saw a thin face, more long than wide, with gray eyes, and dark, straight brows, and wisps of brown hair tossed above it by the night wind. You wouldn’t look twice at him, he thought, because there were lads all over England looked like that; good to fight the King’s wars, and plow the fields, and get sons who would do the same thing over. No one to look to if you wanted someone rare and strange, a great man for a beacon on the night.

A trim brown head moved between him and the man in the mirror. It was Joan. She stepped carefully, a brimming tankard in either hand, but she could not keep her eyes from turning toward the leaded windowpanes. John raised his arm and brought it down quickly, a long sweep of green where the candlelight shone into the street. He had other coats at home, hodden gray, and plowman’s russet, but it pleased his fancy to wear the forest color and Joan knew it. She had been watching for the flash of green. Her face lighted up now, and she spilled ale on her customer’s sleeve as she hastily served him. There was no cold pretense about Joan. She saw her lover, and the sight made her happy, and she would go to him now as fast as she could. Almost running, she crossed the crowded room and slipped through the inner door that John knew would take her to the malt cellar. How slim her waist was, set between the full homespun skirt and the curving bodice; her shoulders were straight and slim, too, and something about the way she moved made him think of a Michaelmas daisy swaying on its stem. That was the way a girl should look, not thick like Moll at the Trip to Jerusalem, the only other girl he had ever lain in the hedges with. “Town o’ Nottingham keeps Moll Doubleday for the lads to learn on,” his father used to tell him. Well, Moll could teach him nothing more. He knew her ill-smelling fair hair and the grease stains on her bodice, her panting love, and the sick revulsion after. He had Joan now, and that was something the King of England didn’t have. Plunging into the lightless alley that ran along the tavern wall, he came up against the stone door to the cellar and unlocked it, stepped down into the malty dark and the ring of Joan’s laughter from the stairs below.

“Guess, Johnny, where I am. How many steps?”

“Don’t have to guess. I know. Thirteen.”

“How could you tell?”

He groped down the mossy treads toward her.

“Because you’re a daft maid with no honest fear in her. Just the kind that’s like to try the unluckiest number.”

He counted, stopped on the right ledge and drew her to him, lost in the soft warmth of her arms and bosom, finding her mouth.

“Johnny!” She writhed a little. “What’s in your jacket? It hurts me!”

“Only the book. I forgot ’twas there.”

“Forgot! Likely! It’s always by you. You’re worse than Parson with Prayer Book.”

“I am not. Prayer Book’s high and mystical, and full of things they don’t teach you at the Free School. Let Parson make what he can of it, and I’ll listen to him on Sunday, but I’d not carry it around with me. This is a man’s book of common sense, written down by a farming man, Thomas Tusser. I used to sit out at Old Thorny and read it every night before I knew you, and the crop’s been bettered a third for going by it. Has all the learning I’ll ever need.”

“But it’s a book! It’s only paper rotting inside of leather that might ha’ soled a pair of shoes.”

The book still nudged its corners into her breast and hurt her, but something about the way her words had struck him lay sharper between them than the worn calfskin. He stirred restlessly against her.

“Only a book! Yes, I know. But there’s a queerness on books. They’ve not tongues, but they can speak to every man that reads them, and they’ll talk to him of things the writer never meant, things no man knows of but he.”

Joan shivered. “What things? I thought it told all about when to stick hogs and drain sedge.”

“No, there’s other matter. It’s older’n we, this book. Way before Rob went off to fight the dons, it was written. Man who wrote it’s dead, Old Tibbalds says. But there’s words in it that’s we—that’s ours—that’s you and I!”

“What words?”

“ ‘Such glory I had in loving!’ Joan!” He said it over slowly, not quite clear, his mouth brushing her hair. “ ‘Such glory I had in loving.’ Doesn’t that make you remember the rye hills and the saffron meadow?”

“Aye. And the oak knoll by Ann’s Well.”

“And the stone nest under the sycamore atop Chapel Gate.”

“Oh that night! We were mad that night! All Nottingham could see us cuddling up there.”

“Well, cuddling’s nothing new in Nottingham. But how did Old Tusser know way back then to put in a book the thing that we ... ?”

“Think he never walked out with a girl, Johnny?”

“Think it would be ... the same?”

“No ... no ... I guess not ... ever.”

But a moment later she drew away from him. “Not now, Johnny. There’s a spider crawling on my neck, and you saw the place was full upstairs. Jack’ll box my ears if I’m out much longer. And a stranger’s there, talking about—oh, you jumped! Was it the spider?”

“No. Not that. All night I’ve felt that there was something uncommon queer afoot and I was part of it. When you spoke of the stranger I felt it again. Come. We’ll go.”

They had no need to slip into the tavern by separate ways. They could enter boldly together by the street door, for all Brew House Yard knew that they had enjoyed each other’s love, and Brew House Yard believed in love’s enjoyment and a pox on banns. All the sin and vice and poverty of the teeming shire town seemed to draw cosily into this tilted close, but sin and vice and poverty were not really reckoned so very bad in Nottingham, with its proud memory of one merry thief who had loved the poor. And if stale, sour odors and a curse or two drifted upward on the river wind to the great houses of the merchants and aldermen, why let it be remembered there that this is, after all, a world of sin, and he who would breathe of untainted airs must look to Paradise for them. In due time the merchants of Nottingham might turn to Paradise, preferably just before the bell started to go for their last leavetakings, but now they were too busy making money. The tanners, and the brewers, and the weavers, whose craft had come down almost unchanged from their Flemish ancestors, would be early every Saturday at the Market Cross in time to welcome the farmers trundling in from Belvoir Vale with apples, wool and tallow, hides and slaughter cattle, or what’s-in-season. The chapman’s vans from London would be there, too, to carry away the country’s richness in return for silks and silver and Eastern seasonings that would spice your porridge up so your wife herself couldn’t tell what it was she’d set out to cook. City goods, too, that men would buy because they glittered, but couldn’t always find a name or a use for afterward. John o’ London wanted a flitch of bacon in the rind, and Jack o’ Leenside Farm wanted a city waistcoat, and Nottingham would take its shilling toll from John and Jack. So long as wheels turned, ewes grew fleece, and crops ripened, all went well in market and Nottingham throve, so what did it matter if a wench below the wall liked varied company in bed, if dwellers in the foul mews stole from each other and rooked unwary strangers at shovelboard? Of course the Yard stank, but so it had in their fathers’ time, and their fathers had not minded it, so why should they?

As John and Joan stepped inside the Bull’s Head, a dozen voices called out in greeting, but Jack Gambrell’s could be heard over all the others.

“So ye’re back!” he roared in loud good humor, coming out of the buttery, a ladle slung at his belt and slapping against his round stomach with the food-splashed apron drawn tight across it. “Little cool nesting in the hay, were it?”

“Ye’ll not pick any hay out of my hair, Jack Gambrell,” laughed Joan, gathering up the unwashed mugs and elbowing his ribs as she passed him.

“Ho, Joan!” called a rough lad half down the room. “We’re right dry waiting for you to be done your loving!”

“Aw, drink up, and leave the wench alone!” called another. “Over here, Johnny.”

The men made a place for him at the long table down the middle, not too near the fire. There was hardly a face there that Joan hadn’t slapped in keeping herself till he came, the way she had. But they all understood that—part of a maid’s ways, for which there be no accounting—and John was the lucky man, and they were all friends now.

“Come on, Jack, you robber!” called John to his host. “Mine’s Northdown ale, and bring the boys the same again.”

They were farmers like himself who sat around him, men with sun-bleached hair and thorn scratches on their hands, good wool coats and eyes looking straight at you. There were paler, swarthier men, too, a little furtive, smelling of the dark warrens around the Yard, quick to come forward and claim knowledge of everything, slow to pay their share of the reckoning. Joan beamed upon them all and brought ale for everybody, coming last to John. He took his drink, smiled into her eyes, and lifted the tankard to his mouth.

He saw the stranger, alone, sitting in the bow of the window.

He was a dark man, lean, not over tall, dressed in gentleman’s velvet, and as he waited at the small oak table he ran his fingers along his sword caressingly, as if it were the dimpled arm of a woman. His eyes caught the unsteady light of the burning tallow in the sconces facing him, and gleamed like phosphorus in the swamp pools where the Leen flows out of Sherwood; not the kind of fire that comes when you strike flint, but a colder, less cheering thing.

Jack, always proud of his own cookery, waddled in and set down a tray on the oak table.

“Got an eel pasty for ye, sir. Deer’s not so easy to come by now in Sherwood, for King says they’re all his, and our best poachers are not the men their fathers were, not by cock’s bones. As I growed older and fathered lads of my own, I seen it more and more, how little men be what their fathers were in their time. What’ll ye drink?”

“Wine, in Bordeaux,” smiled the stranger, “and mead where the beehives are. But here in Nottingham—the nut-brown ale!”

“Now here’s a man knows what’s good,” roared Jack. “I never held, man or boy, with swill out of French casks. Sells it, I do, but drinks it, I don’t, for it befoggles one.”

“Which ale does not,” murmured the stranger, plunging his knife under the crust of the pasty and flipping a coil of white meat into his mouth.

Ned Trigg drew close to John’s elbow and spoke quietly to him, under the drone of voices now filling the room with a comfortable sound.

“The key work, Johnny?”

“You made it, Ned. That’s answer, isn’t it?”

He looked down at the twisted gnome who might be his sweetheart’s father and wished he could get drunk enough to ask Ned if there were truth in the story. It wasn’t a thing you could ask a man sober.

“If ye’d not been out dallying with Joannie, ye’d have heard the stranger over there giving his fine talk.”

“What’d he say?” asked John, slopping his ale on the table, feeling that sick uneasiness again.

“Talked about his master. Said he was a trading man o’ wealth somewhere in the south—Hampshire, of course, it were—named John Mason. Seems he thinks to build himself a manor.”

“Well, men have done that since the time of God. There’s no fine story there.”

“But this one’s going over the western sea to do his building. Right square into the middle of a wood that’s never had the axe put to it. Red savages, an’ lions, an’ tygers, an’ what-all be there.”

“He better build in Hampshire.”

“Give you back your own words, Johnny. Since the time of God there’s men built manors in Hampshire. This one’ll take new country.”

John stared silently into his ale, and Ned went on.

“Oh, he—Captain Neal, that is, over there—made a rare tale of it. Seems they’re signing papers down in London now for King to let ’em go.”

They watched the dark man bending to the eel pasty.

“They think to call the place ‘New Hampshire,’ and they’re going out there in a ship, come spring. He’s looking for a pack of likely lads to take with him, and he says once Mason’s land’s cleared and his hall put up, there’s no reason every man can’t go past it into the woods and take as much for himself. I’d sure go, if I was a whole man again, and twenty-one like you be. You ought to go along, Johnny.”

“Me? Why? I got Old Thorny, and I wouldn’t trade that for any land this side of hell. You’re drunk, man.”

“No.” Ned shook his head. “Your farm’s a tidy bit, lad, but it’s not a manor. New Hampshire’ll have manor lands for all that go there, and from some of the things he said, I’m not so sure which side hell it’s on.”

Captain Neal finished the pasty as they watched him, cleaned his knife on a gobbet of bread, and rose leisurely. He came toward the long table, his glance running like a flash of light over the men gathered there. Then he kicked up a stool just across from John, sat down on it and spoke to him.

“You’ve not been here all evening?”

“No,” said John, his hand cupped around his tankard, staring into it.

“Then you didn’t hear my story. But you look like the man I told it for. Where do you live and what do you do there?”

“I farm my own land by Gamwell Chase.”

“Your own land?”

“Aye. Forty shilling freehold, down in Subsidy Book.”

“You’re better off than many.”

“Aye.”

John nursed his ale. The captain tried again.

“Close to the Forest, is it?”

John laughed then, too high and loud.

“Close to where it was. My fields run up to the Chase on the north side, and there’s a good growth there, but the high wood beyond’s been thinned out by too much cutting ship timber. More bilberries than oaks now.”

Why should he think Captain Neal would want to hear about Sherwood when he had all those unending forests oversea to look to? But he had to go on talking because he was afraid to hear what the man was going to say next.

“You mean Sherwood’s pretty well down? I’m from the home shires myself, and wouldn’t know.”

“It thickens up to the west. There’s hornbeams by Worksop Priory grew out of seeds that our men brought back from Agincourt—first way that tree ever came into England.”

“Agincourt ...” mused the captain, his hand playing with his sword again. “I’ve often wished I could have been there....” Then, waking from his moment’s dream, he spoke sharply. “What’s Agincourt to you?”

“To me? I don’t know. Something I’ve always heard of. Mostly old men talking. Nottingham’s bowmen’s country, and that was supposed to be a great day for bowmen. Just another time we beat the French, I guess. It’s happened often enough.”

“About Sherwood, now?”

“Oh ... Sherwood. You should see Bilhaugh where the oaks are so great and old, and gray lichens grow so thick that it’s never clear day, only twilight. Or the hawthorns up by Birdley. Men say there’s fifty thousand trees there. Could be. I never counted them. It’s a lie to say Sherwood’s down. It’s thinning some.”

“And I suppose that goes for Dean and Epping and the west,” pondered Neal. “London shipyards, Sussex iron forges ... it takes wood to run the world, to keep England England.”

“Woods, and mostly oaks,” said John, sipping at the ale Joan had brought him without being told to. “Holly’s tougher, and fir’s more limber, but if you was to take off all the trees and leave me only one, why leave me oak. I’ve seen oaks men had cut their names on, and when I read the date cut under, it were a hundred and twenty year back.”

“Same name as yours?”

“What? Oh, aye. ‘John’ like mine. Maybe ‘Rob’ or ‘Will.’ ”

“And the last name?”

“Mine? Oh. John Scarlock. ‘Scarlet,’ it’ll be sometimes written.”

“The word for red?”

“Na, na,” interrupted Ned Trigg, cross with drink. “Nothing to do with red. ‘Scar lock’! Means his folk been cracking pates round the shire since trees been growing there.”

“I could use,” said the captain slowly, “a cracker of pates from Sherwood Forest.”

I knew. I knew he was coming to that, thought John. Why did he have to come to that? I don’t want to go with him. His ale went down his throat like liquid dust. Neal was still talking.

“You know the way of seeds in the ground, John? And how to hold an axe?”

“Yes. I know that. It isn’t much.”

“Nobody ever called him ‘Johnny Fool.’ He’s a Free School lad,” piped Ned, his face sliding down into a pool of spilled ale on the table.

John flushed. He watched Joan in the alcove washing mugs. Getting married to her under the holly berries had seemed so near a little while ago. Now he couldn’t see how he had ever thought he would be doing such a thing. And still there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t. More men stood in to drink at every moment, for the tang of the fall night seemed to put a man in mind of ale the way an empty stomach would send him groping to the buttery.

“John,” said Captain Neal, “is there any man around here who knows the things you know, who’d be glad to leave his old acres and go look for some better ones?”

“Can’t say.”

“You know my business here.”

“It’s naught to do with me.”

“Will you wager that?” asked the captain, his eyes catching the light again.

John felt the green wool of his jerkin scraping his neck, and ran a gnarling finger down the skin. He was as nervous as a mare running first time in the Goose Fair race. Why was he, for God’s sake? He tried to answer, but choked on his ale.

Neal leaned easily on one elbow and talked on. “Cracking pates around Sherwood since trees been growing there! Well, that’s a fine past, but a man needs more than what’s behind him. Comes time now when the trees are so much gone that you feel the need to boast about what’s left Isn’t it time a man should go, too? Did you ever think there might be something better in the world than Gamwell Chase ... ?”

“You’ve never seen the Chase like it is tonight. Half moon, half dark, all old time waiting there.”

“Devil take old time!” rapped Captain Neal. “A man’s alive today and dead tomorrow. Today’s damn short, and tomorrow’s forever. You’re a young man with blood and muscle. Yes, I know, you had them both from the old pate-crackers, but manhood’s not an heirloom to keep like a silver porringer in a locked chest. Didn’t any of your kin ever leave Sherwood?”

“Rob fought the Armada.”

“So? To Rob, then!”

He took the longest swallow of ale John had known a man could hold his breath for. “There must be adventure in the stock. You’re not all clay like Trent bottom.”

Anger stirred in John unreasoningly. “Trent bottom’s ledge, not clay, as all fools know. And as for adventure, I come down from a man whose trade it were. What’s yours, I wonder?”

Captain Neal stroked the brass mountings of his scabbard.

“This is my trade. It serves me well enough.”

No one seemed to have any more to say. The ale dripped down the tankard sides. The autumn moon rode high over Brew House Yard and the fog had shrunken back into Leen. Inside the taproom the tallow dips burned down, the fire dwindled, and Jack no longer replenished it. The men were leaving unsteadily by twos and threes.

“John,” said Walter Neal after a long silence, “when you came in here tonight, I knew you were a man I wanted. You have the strength I want, and somehow the look on your face that I like a man to have—the look that means England, whether you meet it fighting on the Rhine, or coasting North Virginia, or home here, drinking in a tavern. You know timber and seeds, and no man has yet signed with me who knows them. Coopers I have, with pegs and hammers; masons; merchants’ sons to build the fur trade, and bully boys who want to kill redskins; fishermen; men to tend the salt pans. But it worries me to think whoever in God’s name’s to see to feeding them all. Corn out of England, Captain Mason says, but corn boats out of England have a way of going to sea bottom or New Amsterdam after Dutch prices, and the taste of game gets rank in a man’s mouth before the winter’s end. I say we should have fields by Piscataqua—the river there—and men to lay them out and see to tilling them. What kind of manor would it be without? And then, another thing. Cod’s there, and beaver, and it would please all men to find gold, but with our forests here falling off the way they are, I’m not so sure the best thing we get for ourselves won’t be the ship timber. Why, Sherwood in its best days was nothing but a field coppice beside the woods I’m going to. And I want a man with me who knows trees. Yes, point for point, you’re the man I’m after. And you have your mystery, too, as every man should have, and yours I wonder at. Here we’ve sat at the board all evening, and you’ve put down two ales for every one of mine. Your friend’s in a sore plight”—for Ned snored in the ale puddle—“and I—I, a rare lad in taverns all over the world—I, sir, am mellow. But you sit there dry and sober as Paul’s. How d’ye do it?”

John did not doubt that Captain Neal was a rare lad, in taverns or wherever he might be, even under Great Paul’s in London. He felt awkward and oafish, took his leather cap out of his pocket and twisted it.

“ ’Tis a curse put on us in grandsir’s time by an old begging woman. He moved the bottle away from her because he said she’d had enough already, and she said, ‘Ye’ll get no good from the grain or the grape, nor your heirs afterward.’ Nor do we ever.”

“You mean it’s always so with you? The more you drink the soberer you grow?”

“Aye,” answered John morosely.

Captain Neal shook his sleek head and a dark lock of hair hung into his eyes. “Then you’d hardly do for us. I have not seen New Hampshire, but from what I hear of it there will be times there when a man must get drunk or go mad. Sir, I’ll not take you.”

“So I’ve been telling you.”

“I won’t? Damme, I will. Some day when my fine colonists are lying drunk on a rock beach, caught between the salt tide and the squalling Indians, it will be well to have one sober man among us to fend off trouble.”

His lean, muscled hands in their black velvet cuffs lay before him, flung outward on the table. Not drunk, but drunk enough to speak the truth, he looked at John and spoke it.

“John, I have work to do, and I was hired just as you’d hire a man to stick a hog at Martinmas or pitch hay in midsummer. If I make an ending to the business that pleases John Mason and those who adventure money, they won’t enquire how I brought it about, and I’m not a man to carp and query inside myself as to whether my works are good or no. I’ve gone up and down England for the men I wanted, talked sly to the stoutest youths, and promised each of them the thing I thought he most lusted after—gold guineas, mostly, to buy them wenches whiter than Helen, and raise them up past what they were born to. Some lads like a fight, and God knows I could promise them that with honor. I have even promised ease and luxury, God help me. I have made New Hampshire sound so fair my men would go past heaven to get to it. I’ve promised them land, and enough wideness around every man so he could lift his voice and shout a prayer or a curse without his nearest neighbor knowing which it was. But to you, I shall make no promises.

“There’s a safe harbor with a rocky shore. My friend, John Smith, who’s been there told me that. Some of the headlands, he says, mind him a little of Devonshire. And that’s just about all I know of it. The savages, they say, will tear a man’s flesh like ripping rotten cloth, cut off his scalp like taking the crust off a pasty. There’s wolves and worse animals, I hear; great snows, and mountains with bald, whitish tops. I’ve told some lads there’d be rich mines in those mountains—but I do not tell you so. I don’t know what the hell is in them. There’s beaver along the rivers, and cod enough to feed Pope’s people till the next coming of Christ. Great trees begin at the sea’s edge. I don’t know where they end or what kind of soil is under them. And if you come, I don’t know what you’ll get out of it. Likely, a hard death before your time. Here you’re a free man on your own acres, rooted in Sherwood Forest like a beech tree. You’ve got no trouble to run away from, and you’re not all awry with the love of God, like the men who are getting a charter south of us in Massachusetts. But I’d rather have you beside me in a fight than any man I know.”

Captain Neal did not put the question. Instead he waited. John looked into his empty tankard. All his life he would remember the little whorls at the bottom of it. He knew he was meant to go with Walter Neal, but he did not want to go. No man alive remembers being born, he thought, but it must be like this, a force thrusting you into life, whether you would or no, and something within yourself urging you the same way, too. Only if you can resist your birth can you resist your destiny.

The two men looked each other in the face, done with words.

And then John felt a light touch on his sleeve.

“We’re closing, Johnny. I’ll walk out with you a little way.”

Joan pulled at him, turning her face toward Walter Neal. “Jack says for you to take the candle, sir, and go upstairs. The room’s straight ahead, made with clean linen and a fire laid if you want it. Himself, he’s quite befoggled.”

Turning away with Joan, he did not bid the other man goodnight, but he knew that the dark eyes followed him, even after the timbered door had closed between them. Joan nestled close under his arm as they threaded the crooked, cobbled streets. In the Goose Gate he asked her if she should not go back, but she only laughed at him as they stepped out together into the moonlit fields. And a little later they were lying in the bracken under a gray beech, her cloak keeping the frost from both of them. Holding her, looking into her eager face that changed with the changing flow of the light and shadowy air, he thought how wonderful, how beautiful she was. Too wonderful to be any man’s love! And she was his! And suddenly all the evening’s burden of strangeness and confusion slid away from him like a wool sack lowered from the shoulder. Neal was a sly man with a courtier’s tongue that fooled nobody, and John Mason could put up his manor wherever he wanted to, but he would have to do without any help from John Scarlock. He was staying here—to plow Old Thorny and to marry Joan. In loving her he did not love only a woman, a warm mouth and soft flesh moving sweetly beneath him in answer to the movement of his. He loved the ground, every lift and curve of it, and every tree in the wood, and every thorn by Gamwell Chase; and as he pressed closer to Joan, he pressed closer to the very heart of England, loving that, too. And oh, and oh, he loved being alive, being a man. Manhood was not to hoard like a silver porringer. It was to carry about you—like a good sword—

“Oh Joan! Such glory I had in loving ... !”

She stirred against him with a little sigh. “Johnny—that book! It’s hurting me again.”

He wrenched all Thomas Tusser’s printed wisdom out of his jacket and hurled it into a drift of dead leaves. Then he put his mouth back on hers and sank his fingers into the thick turf beneath her head. Nothing could keep him from glory now, no trouble gathering in the dark air and windless hazel trees, no destiny calling him off the farms of Nottingham. He held Joan, and he held England, and for one moment heaven touched earth as love came home to love.