The Western Wind Read online

  ‘Well, excuse me then,’ I said, after a few moments of rigid standing, ‘while I go outside to see what’s what.’

  ‘It’s an upended milk cart, Reve. Did you take the vow of chastity to help villagers clean up milk?’

  ‘I took it to serve my parish.’

  ‘You took it to serve the Lord God, and the Lord God wants to know what happened to Newman. Now, tell me where to start.’

  ‘We know what happened to Newman – he drowned by poor, shoddy fate, like so many men do. Men, women, animals, children.’

  The dean held up his hand for me to stop. Then he pressed his skirts to his thighs and looked around the room at the business awaiting him, and exhaled.

  ‘I’ll start in here then,’ he said.

  ‘Start where you like – I have nothing.’ I looked again onto the road; a lot of dark motion, four or five bodies scurrying, crouching. ‘What happened out there?’ I asked the dean. ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘Too dark,’ he said. ‘The horse slipped on that patch of wet cobble, that’s all.’

  I sat in the chair. Even your horses are useless, he’d be thinking. Even your milk carts don’t stay upright.

  He offered his pale light to one corner, another corner, to the room’s centre, upwards, then said, ‘No wonder you weren’t worried about me stealing anything. Looks like somebody’s already taken it. Were you robbed in the night?’

  ‘I told you twice, I have nothing.’

  ‘All gone I suppose, when your sister left?’

  ‘You suppose right. The wagon came yesterday.’

  The emptiness had surprised even me, when the last thing was loaded and the wagon had creaked away. I’d thrown the words sanctus sanctus sanctus into the room, and they’d come back hollow and scolding.

  ‘Well, at least it won’t take long,’ the dean sighed.

  He ran his hands on and under the bed, between the blankets, under the piece of fustian I kept to warm my feet. He looked in the cooking pot, in my cupboard used for food and my chest used for clothes. One by one he nudged the five apples lined up on my table with a fingertip – the apples he had given me. They rocked without rolling, in an apple-ish way that seemed to satisfy and then disappoint him. He passed an unenthusiastic eye over the wash tub. The pile of wood barely interested him. He took the Man of Sorrows from the bedside stool and upended the stool, and gave it a little shake.

  I asked, ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve found it.’

  ‘How will you know you’ve found it, if you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘You’d make a sorry sheriff, Reve.’

  And you make a sorry dean, I thought; in fact, muttered within my chest. He glanced up, then away. He went into the other room, which had been my sister’s room until two days before and was now empty except for two things: a pair of shoes and a bottle of ambergris. Shoes might have been too glorified a term for those unravelling piles of leather, which she’d had as long as I could remember. Stitched and restitched, but now beyond the help of the needle; not shoes to take into a new life.

  I suspected the dean would come out of her room with one of these two things, so as to show his trip hadn’t been worthless. It was the ambergris he chose. He unstoppered the bottle and inhaled deeply as though it was a full-bloomed rose. His face went stale.

  ‘That was my sister’s,’ I said.

  ‘No wonder she left it behind. Smells like – ’

  ‘Something’s arse.’ I added, ‘So Robert Tunley once said.’ Poor quip, ill timing. He didn’t smile back.

  ‘It was for her headaches,’ I muttered, though unnecessarily. ‘She often got headaches.’

  ‘You speak of her as if she’s dead.’ Said, if not tenderly, then without accusation, and he passed me the bottle.

  I rolled it under my thumb, set it on the table, shrugged one shoulder and decided to venture a sentiment I thought he’d understand – he too being alone. ‘She’s the only person I had left to love. My only family.’

  He came a step closer. I thought he might even put a hand on my shoulder, and I prepared to place a hand over his; a clean gesture of alliance. But though he was now companionably close, he didn’t put a hand anywhere except stiff by his side, and I was reminded of the only time I’d played chess – I’d watched the other man advancing his piece towards me and marvelled how it could seem that someone was giving you something when in fact they were taking it away.

  I retreated one pace, away from the middle of the room, into which he’d stepped. ‘Is that all, then?’

  ‘That’s all. Nothing found. You’d better get over to your little dark box – I’ve been telling everyone about the pardon on offer if they confess, in the hope it might prompt in them the urgent desire to.’ He primly brushed his skirts. ‘Oh, and it’s a light breakfast for you this morning, I hear. Oakham’s little custom of weighing the priest.’ At which, inexplicably, he patted his own belly. ‘Go steady on those oats, hmm. Now, I ought to get on, sorry if I woke you.’

  If anyone ever doubted God’s facility for creation, they only needed to stand for a short time and watch a few lowly men and women at work. In the dawn dark they were freeing the fallen horse. They’d unhooked the cart on the upside, the easy side, and were working underneath the horse to free it on the other. They agreed: the mare had slipped, newly shod, on the rain-slimed cobbles. Jane Tunley was passing a soothing, shushing hand down the creature’s neck and coaxing it as upright as it could go, while Herry Carter and John Hadlo gave their hands to the straps and buckles of the harness in the cramped blindness under the horse’s bulk. ‘Breeching dee loosed!’ one would call. And the other: ‘Backband unbuckled! Trace free!’ Their fingers liberated the creature deftly. If God had made men and women in a cruder form, these ones would have either hacked the cart free of the horse with an axe, with breakage to the cart, or forced the horse and cart up by now, with probable breakage to both.

  But they were nimble, gentle and full of forethought, and when Hadlo declared that the cart was free, Jane Tunley called for somebody to go further up the road, knowing that when the horse came to its feet and realised its freedom, it would bolt. As it did. And there was Morris Hall and little Tom Hadlo to catch it and bring it to a standstill, and run their hands over its shoulders and flanks, down its legs, checking for injury. The cart meanwhile was brought onto its wheels by several men and women, and that too checked for injury – the axle was off and a wheel snapped, for a start. Its side gates were smashed. Despite that, it was fixable, they said. The spilt churns had already been lined up along the road, Townshend was already on his way down from the manor with a face that bore more concern than anger, and the cart and wheels were carried off to the barns for mending. Only the axle was left.

  While I watched – because they wouldn’t let me help (and didn’t need it, was the greater truth) – the whole scene was efficiently cleared and soon there was nothing left but the cart axle and a few interested dogs. Why they left the axle, I didn’t know; if it couldn’t be fixed, it’d make good firewood. The darkness was thin and blue by then and the sun soon up. The villagers had come and gone, and the cart carried off like a sick child. There was just the sound of cock crows, and the distantly whickering horse, and the dogs’ surprised tongues finding milk, thick, warm and sweet, between the cobbles.

  I emptied my bladder in the hazel scrub and went indoors. I ate oats with water and no milk. The dean was right, today was weighing day, that undignified annual ceremony in which I was put in a boat along with another man to see that I weighed less than him, for a priest’s substance is, it’s claimed, midway between man and angel. I didn’t feel altogether angelic, I must say. It occurred to me as I ate that the dean might delight in my failure if I weighed more, and the thought stopped me eating before the bowl was empty.

  A brother, I’d thought when he arrived the day before on his lonely little mare with his fearfully creased brow. I’d even felt relief when he d
ismounted in his vestments – which were a fair bit finer than mine – and squeezed my hands in his. I could see he was hoping to find something in Oakham to like, or something that would like him. I’d been prepared to be both, the liker and the liked. I’d show him the church full of donations – the chalices, the lights, the altar cloths, even the useless little acorn cups; we’d laugh.

  But he’d taken one look at the church and got on to other business – the business of Newman’s death, for which he’d come – and I hadn’t noticed anything about Oakham that had pleased him yet, least of all me. I sat too long in my chair. I unstoppered the bottle of ambergris; if I left it like that, would my sister escape completely and be gone? As a smell disperses and fades? You talk of her as if she’s dead, the dean said. Well, in a way she was, and also boldly alive. Here and gone. So recently, so long ago. I tried to remember anything from her twenty-three years on earth and nothing came, nothing at all except a memory of her on the eve of her wedding, which was only three days gone. Everything else preceding it – missing.

  She’d been in this room, frying bread basted in eggs in a skillet over the fire. It was good bread made with wheat. The room smelt of warm butter and ambergris. The table was set with a plate, knife and cup for each of us; I filled the cups with beer and we sat and ate. Annie ate hers like a wolf. As children we had egg-bread, though it was rye then and never tasted as good as this bread made with Oakham wheat. She sipped at her beer and made shapes with string wound around her fingers, and I noticed her fingernails were dirty, and said she should remember to clean them before she reached the altar.

  After breakfast I’d taken the last week’s ashes outside and added them to the heap, and cleaned the smoke off the window. Then I’d taken my razor and soap and shaved first my face, then the tonsure. I wore the tonsure small; England was no place for a bare head. ‘Soon you’ll be bald anyway,’ Annie said, ‘then you’ll be trying to stick it back on.’ She tied her own hair in a scarf; her hair, unlike mine, was the colour of late, ripe grain, and unlike mine it fell lazily down, where mine curled more urgently up. Mine was a wild ruff on my head, hers was a cloak more luxurious than she could afford to buy. I could never understand how it all went inside that scarf, nor how we two could have sprung from the same womb.

  ‘Thank the Lord for giving us another day of dog-hork,’ she said, meaning the rain and grey. We each bowed to and kissed the Man of Sorrows before we left; ‘Cheer up,’ she whispered to him, as she did every day, and she put on her coat and helped me fasten the topmost buttons of my cassock.

  There it was: a morning like any other, nothing special in it at all. Yet it eclipsed every morning, afternoon or evening that had gone before. A memory as trivial to the world as a stone to a shore – and yet was everything I had left of her before the great mill of time heaved itself up and over and spilt her out. Annie and I had watched two parents die, and long before that a brother, another brother and a sister before they could even walk. I’d bid farewell to my own flesh and blood, then farewell again and farewell again, until all that was left was Annie. When she had her twentieth birthday I’d begun to wonder if I’d be spared her loss, since a woman not married by then might have seemed (to callow men) to be jetsam washed up. But then John Endall appeared, tepid and pleasant as a lettuce, and there it was: time had dealt its curse – since all things are a matter of time.

  When I saw her next she wouldn’t be Annie, but a woman in the image of our mother. Fate sealed, fortunes set, belly swollen. Besieged. And our dank, carefree February morning of three days before would give way to the course of life, which shackles us. And me? Shackled too, by the heart, to God, my last presiding kin and remaining accomplice. Before Annie was pledged to be married, the warmth of her sisterly love had made me less craving for God’s. But there it was, he didn’t like to be uncraved, and so he’d designed from the very beginning my utmost dependence, and from that my utmost devotion. All things are a matter of time.

  Singing that day, my irrepressible Oakhamers. The village road busy with brooms while everyone swept their houses and yards for Lent. There was a rare ceasing of rain, and the brooms flew gusty. They made dust clouds that hung long in the damp air. The hens scattered circularly, the goats sneezed, the dogs ran ever hopeful at swinging broomsticks. Bring us in no capon’s flesh, for that is often dear; bring us in no duck’s flesh, for they wallow in the mere. A drinking song; they liked that one, whether they were drinking or not. They sang it in choruses up and down the road. That morning, the morning after it had been decided Thomas Newman was dead, they sang with defiant good spirits. Everybody was in trouble if Thomas Newman was dead; only in the wake of his death did the village realise fully that Oakham belonged to him, and that he was what protected them. So they sang, and the road plumed with dust like a stampede sent up at battle.

  Bring no bread,

  bring no pig,

  bring no cheese,

  bring no tripe,

  bring no eggs,

  bring no meat,

  bring us in good ale!

  For our blessed Lady’s sake,

  bring us in good ale!

  ‘Benedicite.’

  ‘Dominus.’

  ‘Confiteor.’

  A sob. Poor Carter. I might have known he’d be the very first to confess. A moment before, he’d been outside the Lewyses’ house sweeping their yard, and I’d seen him drop his broom and run to the church after me. I was only half on my stool when his ‘Benedicite’ burbled like water from a spout and his body dropped to the cushion.

  ‘He was as good as a father to you,’ I said.

  ‘He was.’ A strangled kind of sound.

  ‘You’ll see him in heaven.’

  We were whispering; it hadn’t been decided that way, but now that we were, it seemed we were committed to it. So we whispered on like thieves, and I bent forward to hear him.

  ‘Whatever’s to be done in the village, I’ll do,’ Carter said through tears. ‘I’ve swept Mary Grant’s house, and Fisker’s with his bad leg, and the Lewyses’ because of Joanna being so bloated with child, and Hikson’s. I said I’d help Hikson with his brewing, and there’s some slates on the church porch need replacing, and the dean said he’ll need help down at – down at – Tom Newman’s house, with the animals and that. Now that Tom’s – now that.’

  Carter went into a pain-racked silence. I couldn’t see why Hikson needed any help, able-bodied man that he was. Lazy as a cowpat, was Hikson. If a child offered to carry him to church on a Sunday, he’d let them.

  ‘Why do you have to help everyone?’

  ‘I have grief all through my body, Father, like I’m stung.’

  ‘And so you’re running in sore circles.’

  Carter said nothing.

  ‘Sometimes we have to sit with our sorrow, not run from it. Helping Hikson mash his grain won’t ease the sting.’

  ‘It might help atone for it.’

  This time I said nothing. The day before, Janet Grant had rung the death bell, and all of Oakham had come to the church as was our custom, and I’d invited them to pray, and told them the death was Newman’s, but there was no body to bless or bury. I’d seen Herry Carter’s face among the many, blank as a stone, and I hadn’t known until then that, far from the absence of feeling, blankness could be the overwhelment of feeling. I thought he too had died, standing there.

  Carter was sitting further back on the cushion than most did, and I was making no effort to turn myself from the grille. So I could see him, though the light was never good. He was so young in the face, and innocent, his nose button-ish and mildly upturned. His grey eyes were calm and fetching. His face was slack and melting with sorrow, the cheek I could see held the sheen of tears, his hair a nest, his fingers continually going up to it to scratch or ruffle.

  ‘Do you remember when Newman first came to the village?’ he said. ‘And we thought he was a criminal, or a merchant, or diseased, and we kept away from him.’

  I nodded int
o my lap, though Carter wasn’t to know.

  ‘He came wearing those gores over his shoes and we ribbed him,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ on a breath of laughter, because I did remember those gores, now he said it.

  ‘And then we heard he’d lost his wife and child. And come to make a new life. Why did he come to Oakham? Who would come to Oakham to make a new life?’

  This was less a question, more a matter of common perplexity that had passed around our village in the twelve years since Newman came, and it never expected an answer. Then as Newman made his fortune here – fortune relative to the rest of us, anyhow – the perplexity turned to marvel and the marvel to fact and the fact soon went as unremarked as any other.

  ‘One day I was helping one of his sows with her birthing,’ Carter said, then realised he wasn’t whispering any more, paused to decide what to do, and committed to speaking in passionate tones. ‘And when those little things were born, five of them laid along their mother blind and hungry, Tom was looking at them close to tears. Then rushed off all of a sudden and left me there. I sat in the stall at a loss. Then he came back and he was holding a small wool blanket. ‘This was my daughter’s,’ he said, and he said it all quiet and heavy like a sky full of rain. He held it out to me so I took it, but he didn’t say anything else. Nothing. Eventually I offered it back to him and he took it, and he held it and looked at the sow, and there was nothing to go by in his face, and then he started walking away. That was when I said in an urgent way, ‘I’m here, Tom, here I am,’ meaning, I’ll try and make up for what’s lost. He understood I meant that, I know he did. He looked me straight in the eye and nodded. Then he went and I was left with that sow and I felt – I don’t know. I don’t reckon he’d ever shown that blanket to another person, only to me. I felt – like a great sail full of the ocean’s wind.’

  Carter hadn’t known much of his parents; everyone in the village had had a hand in bringing him to adulthood, me too. Then Newman came, a wary, childless man, and there was Carter, a wary, parentless child of eight years, and Carter went in to live with him at the old wooden manse when it wasn’t much more than a leaky outhouse. Newman used the last of his money to rebuild it, and to feed Herry Carter and get him strong. Gave him love. A great sail full of the ocean’s wind.