The Western Wind Page 20

  So one morning in mid-September I borrowed a horse and went to Southampton where there were markets selling jewellery, and I bought her a good silver bracelet from Germany with all the money I had and some I’d stolen from my father. I rode back and waited for her. Why not my wife? I wasn’t realistic: there was every reason why not, not least that she had a husband. Well then, my wife in nature if not in name, our bodies wedded. I could share her, if there was no other choice. I could share her two ways – with her husband and with her children, and she could share me with God, since God was offering no objection. So I waited that night and she didn’t come, then I waited the next daybreak and she didn’t come, and I waited night-day-night-day with the bracelet in a burse around my neck and she didn’t come.

  On the last day of September she came, finally, but not to me, only to the village – not at dawn or night, but in the middle of the afternoon, and when I saw her (because my ears were sharp as knives to her call of Dulse! Eelgrass! that chimed like Vespers bells from a voice unexpectedly sweet), she saw me too and looked away. She came to our village once or twice a week as usual after that, but never deigned to know me.

  I went back to the piece of ground in the woods where we’d encountered each other, to see if God, even yet, had something to say to me. I expected punishment and none came. I wanted encouragement and none came. I asked him: Is her change of heart a sign from you? Nothing came to say it was or wasn’t. I forgot about the woman, in case that was his will, which it surely was. I asked: Shall I give myself to you? He didn’t seem to hear. I went back to the market and sold the bracelet for half what I’d paid, and with the money I bought the carving of the Man of Sorrows, and a chalky painting of the Pietà. Later, when I was offered my first stole and chasuble and my hands were anointed, I wondered if he’d strike me down. He didn’t. He let me become a priest. I asked for a church newly enlarged and improved, its roof vaulted and its buttressed walls pierced daringly high with windows. He gave me a parish between river and ridge, and a church that was like any other. Though I knew he wouldn’t reply, I said, Let me serve you well.

  We hang between the devil and the deep blue sea. Priests are the light of the world, they say when they anoint us. The light of this world, of this heavy earth. The Ghostly Fathers, the golden hook. And I feel burn in me at times a cool unearthly fire, and my skin unpicks and is halfway to light and air. Yet we’re also men, men among others and like others, men of the parish with muscles that ache and eyes that blur with sleep, and stomachs that nag and needs that nag too, then beg.

  We have faces that flush with heat, ears that burn with desire, teeth that get infected and drop out, skin that rips; we sweat, we itch, we squat like a dog to evacuate what’s inside. We’re so like men, they have to weigh us against another man in a boat to make sure there’s no mistake. They weigh me like a pig at market! We’re not men, but so like men it’s hard to tell. So like men that suddenly the Ghostly Father is on his knees at his own confession stool, his face pressed anguished into his hands – imagining the hard floor he kneels on is a copse and his knees are in loam and he’s as much an animal as any man could ever be, as if time had given way and he was with that woman still, with her salt-and-sea-stench on his stomach. With her, and looking up from her legs towards the mule, and trying to argue his holiness to a God that he doubts, for a moment, is interested, or listening, or even there.

  Goose, cooked

  ‘WELL, FATHER, I’M neatly shafted.’

  I folded my hands and turned my face up to give it some air. At the sound of someone scuffling the curtain I’d sat properly on the stool again, straightened myself, put my hand to my neck to cool it.

  ‘Perfectly shafted,’ he said, ‘as if God arranged the shafting himself.’ A lively pause. ‘Felicitations, by the way; your end of the boat stood up nice and proud.’

  Was he joking? With Townshend it was hard to tell. He might look like someone’s kind uncle at first glance – stout and small-handed and with well-spaced eyes – but he was as dry as a twig and sometimes sharp. He’d stood watching the scene at the millpond without much humour, his tabard a bit tight around his middle and his face purplish-grey. Now we sat on either side of the screen with the thunder rolling like rocks loose on a mountain.

  ‘You know it as well as I do, Reve – with Newman dead, we’re fish on a hook.’

  I didn’t say anything; it was always better to let Townshend speak in his own way.

  ‘Not even fish on a hook, minnows in a net. We’ve been in that net for a while, and now it’s about to be dragged up.’

  Minnows can swim out of most nets, was my thought, and I didn’t know if it was pedantic or significant.

  ‘You’re talking about the monks coming?’ I’d only heard about the monks the day before, from the dean, but I wagered that Townshend already knew. He was the one with messengers, fingers in pies.

  ‘Yes, the monks,’ he said. ‘And everything else that’s coming for us, but mostly the monks.’

  ‘What else is coming for us?’

  ‘The world, Reve. Taking little bites out of our flanks like a horsefly.’

  ‘Minnows, horseflies. The Lord wants to hear things plain and straight.’

  ‘He wants it straight? Here’s a straight tale then – they wrote to me, the Bruton monks, back in January. They asked if my land was available. They didn’t ask if it was for sale, they just asked if it was available – procurable, they said. Would it be that your hectares of wheat-growing land are procurable? No, I said, it wouldn’t be. Was that plain and straight enough?’

  Oliver Townshend had a voice of velvet, skin of satin, eyes of summer dusk. It didn’t matter how hard times were for him, or how grey his face went with worry, or how well or badly he ate, or how much milk his cows produced; money and good breeding were deep in him. I envied that. He was a nobler man than most, with more weaknesses. I could imagine him penning that short and righteous sentence to the Bruton monks: No, it wouldn’t be procurable. Yours in faith, OT. With a vehement full stop. Then standing and pushing his shoulders back and pulling his tabard in.

  ‘I had a pact with Newman – neither of us would cede any land to anyone outside this parish. We’d keep a tight grip on it, we’d keep Oakham’s land to Oakham, we’d rely on no one and give nothing away for free. If we sold land, it was to each other.’

  Your land to him, I thought. Never the reverse.

  ‘Well, now he’s dead and his land is nobody’s and I have only two hands, how do I keep a grip on it all? It’s as ripe for the plucking as – ’

  He stopped as if reeling back from another metaphor, lest the Lord take umbrage. He swallowed loudly. God only knew what he’d do or say if he knew of the money his wife had given me that very day, now stuffed in Annie’s shoes, or if he knew of the deeds Newman had drawn up that left everything to him and his housemaid.

  ‘And if we all bought Newman’s land, between us?’ I said. ‘That would be a hundred pairs of gripping hands.’

  He gave a short laugh. ‘Little hands, worth nothing. As good as a gaggle of children clutching at straw dolls.’

  Which I knew to be right. It wasn’t about the land being owned, it was about who owned it, whether those who owned it would be able to put up much of a fight to keep it. In one man’s hands – Newman’s – that land was safer; one man with a lot of land had power, because he had money, had proven himself either by right of birth or by wit and cunning sense. In many poor, weak hands it was for the taking, as if offered. It needed to pass to Townshend, but that would be to reveal the deeds, which would be to rouse the dean’s suspicions and have him fling about predictions of murder. Which would be to the peril of us all. So silence, for now, was my only refuge.

  ‘I think my wife was in love with Thomas Newman,’ Townshend said, and the swerve of the conversation set off a tic in my neck; I half-expected the thunder to rip through its constraints and split the night. ‘Not that it matters, because nothing can be done.’

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nbsp; ‘Is that your confession?’ I said, I hoped not too hurriedly.

  ‘Is what my confession?’

  ‘Your suspicion of your wife.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Then ask the Lord forgiveness for it, because it’s no good a man having no trust of his wife, especially when there are other worries. It isn’t what marriage asks of him.’

  ‘And if he’s right not to trust her?’

  ‘Then her deceit is her own sin, to be forgiven separately.’

  Though I let that sin go, I thought. I let Cecily Townshend go without settling her score.

  ‘Well, he’s dead, so even if my wife goes on loving him, he can’t love her back. She’ll tire of that, my wife. She tires when there’s no attention.’

  I thought of Cecily Townshend’s skirt in my beer and her silks near my cheek; perhaps her husband could smell the traces of her lavender and hair pomade here in the booth. I thought of her sharp, stricken face; I doubted she’d tire of a dead Newman. What happens to unreturned love? It becomes powerful, rampant – I’d already seen that in her darting eyes.

  ‘It doesn’t make me glad he’s dead,’ Townshend said. ‘Before you ask me to confess to envy and gratitude at another’s misfortune. I wish with a passion he weren’t dead.’

  His voice had become a mutter, a thought aloud.

  ‘Reve, listen, I want to give money for rebuilding the bridge. I’ve done the calculations – ’

  ‘You mean to build it in the same place,’ I said, ‘just so it can fall down again?’

  ‘Further downstream or further up would do, where it’s slower and wider. Come on, Reve.’

  ‘Where it would need five arches. Who in Oakham has the skill for that?’

  We’d tried to find bridge masons before, they wanted too much money. We sent four Oakham men away to Exeter to learn the skills for themselves, and three never came back. The last, labourer James Monk, spent his time away suffering the French pox and returned with the strength of an old man and no bridge-building knowledge whatsoever.

  ‘Listen to me, Reve,’ Townshend said, and I sank back on my stool, for it hadn’t been so long ago that Newman had put to me the very arguments I was now putting to Townshend, and I’d been the one saying Listen to me, knowing that what I had to say wasn’t entirely worth listening to, and wanted to be said all the more doggedly for that.

  ‘Listen,’ Townshend was saying. ‘With the herd I have, I can produce around six hundred gallons of milk a week, that’s six pence a gallon, which is fifteen pounds, but if I increase the herds three- or fourfold – let’s say fourfold, which is modest – that’s two thousand four hundred gallons and sixty pounds per week. Granted, only in the summer when the grass is good and there’s lots of grain. If we have a bridge we can get the milk to the nearest towns within a day, which means we can trade it fresh. The rest we can use to make cheese, which can become our speciality, Oakham cheese, like Venice glass, like Portugal malmsey, like Dutch flax. Within half a year we could be doing ten times that much, think of it. I’ll borrow the money to buy back some of Newman’s land, I have cousins – I’ll write to them. We’ll be a place to be reckoned with. Oakham cheese. Sounds wholesome, doesn’t it? Sound and homely. Think of it.’

  I did think of it, there and then. A bridge handsomely built further downstream where Newman had said, five miraculously vaulting arches, conveying cart after cart of milk and cheese; the cheese bridge. We could rename ourselves just as the dean had said: Cheesechurn. A proud sign on the far bank.

  It was all very well making two thousand gallons of milk a week – the milk would be on the turn before it reached the other side of the bridge. Cheesechurn, also known as Milkturn. And where were the mouths that wanted to swallow it? Anybody could get a cow and anybody could milk it and anybody could churn its milk and make that grainy, pallid mulch Townshend called his finest. You could swab your face with a slab of Townshend’s cheese, so wet and giving it was.

  ‘We’ll find the skilled men to do it,’ he said. ‘We have to make a go of ourselves. We have to be a place that can stand up for itself.’

  I hesitated; I leant sideways to rest my weight against the wall. Suppose we could find skilled men; suppose Townshend could pay them, as he suggested he could. A bridge is a bridge. If we had a bridge, and if that bridge carried milk and cheese, it could one day carry sugar, and if we could make confections with that sugar and trade it outwards, then we might begin to stand up for ourselves. If the bridge carried in traders and pilgrims on their way elsewhere, if those traders and pilgrims paid tolls, spent money for a bed or some food, spread the word about our parish, our sugar, our wheat, then we might begin to stand up for ourselves.

  ‘If you’d donate money for the bridge, Oakham would gladly accept it,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll speak to my cousins.’

  ‘Are they rich, your cousins?’

  ‘Richer than us.’

  ‘There are goats richer than us.’

  A lord elsewhere in the country had left his worldly goods to his herd of goats, or so it was said. Meanwhile Annie’s old shoes were packed with Townshend’s wife’s money, which was neither fortune nor pittance, but a help, a great help. If only I could tell him of this dubious good fortune, but there wasn’t a delicate way of explaining its provenance.

  And what of the other dubious good fortune? ‘Townshend,’ I said. The words were ready in my mouth – Newman has left you almost everything he owned. But once those words met his ears, they’d steal his ignorance, and his ignorance went some way to protecting him, since a man who didn’t know he’d benefit from another’s death is less likely to have brought the other’s death about. Once he knew, he knew, and he couldn’t prove when and where that knowing started.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  One day soon I’d have to tell him; when the dean was gone. When it had all blown over and Oakham was once again forgotten to anybody who mattered. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You know something about my wife you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’m only sorry. Nothing’s as it was.’

  He let out air through his nose. Circled, so it seemed, his wrists, which cracked once with each rotation.

  ‘You’re not far wrong,’ he said. Then, ‘Reve, a last thing. If there’s any suspicion over Thomas Newman’s death, if that dean – God’s own snoop – decides it was more than an accident, eyes will turn to me. We weren’t friends, I’ll admit we didn’t like each other much. I was the man who was losing everything at Newman’s hands. But we had a shared cause and an understanding which kept us both safe, and all of us safe. His death could break me. It could break Oakham, as we’ve discussed. I’m asking you to defend me if ever it came to that.’

  Genteel, purring Townshend, a cat among dogs. He gave off a delicate smell of camomile and cloves. His dark outline through the grille was tense and proud – I knew a life of small, cruel selfish worries collected in the furrow between his eyes, while the heavier selfless worries bore his shoulders down to a worn kindness. He was always shuffling them back, adjusting his tunic or coat. Making himself taller. I could hear him do it now.

  ‘I would, of course,’ I said. ‘If it came to it, of course.’

  ‘I see woods and no easy way out of them.’

  ‘There’s always a way out.’

  ‘But not an easy one.’

  I wondered if this was the time for my observation about minnows and nets, but I couldn’t remember its point. If we, the minnows, swam out of the monks’ net, what did that even mean? Swim to where?

  ‘Is anything in this whole world easy?’ I asked.

  ‘Parting with your money is easy. And dying, apparently.’

  ‘Dying is the hardest part.’

  ‘Well then, I’d thank you to stop it happening to me any time soon, Father.’

  He blew out some air; his belly rumbled. Then he came to his feet with the assi
stance of the grille. His hand clutched it and he hoisted himself upright.

  ‘Do you know why I came here, Reve?’ he said.

  ‘To confess, I suppose.’

  ‘Confess, my arse. Confess to what? I came because you’re the last friend I have in this place. I just wanted to come and see a friend.’

  When he’d gone, I drank my beer down. His smell of cloves left warmth and comfort, as did the beer, though my tongue was as dry and rough as a board.

  It was with worryingly little trouble that I envisaged this pack of monks Townshend forecast – or at least their brief-bearers or door-keepers or carriers or gardeners – coming from over the hill that marked Oakham’s boundary with Bruton, through our East Woods and onto the land bought up by Newman. I saw them look with approval at our furlongs parcelled into well-marked strips that were newly ploughed to what would be a good till, once it dried out, a till capable of wheat. I saw them look at the leys where a few wilful horses and goats and sheep grazed. I saw them appraise and project, count and calculate – you could get fifteen, sixteen, seventeen bushels of wheat or barley per acre out here; that’s how many? There’s some two hundred acres that the eye can see, that’s some three thousand two hundred bushels of wheat, more than any abbey of monks can eat – and wheat is like gold, no trouble selling it. That’s not to mention the rest of the land as you near the village, and all those meadows by the river. And the mill, and the manor, and the church. All those would be useful.

  I envisaged the army of monks and I thought: now Newman’s gone, what stops them coming? As soon as they get wind of his death, they’ll come. His land is for the taking. Oakham slips down another notch or two in their estimations because the respectable Thomas Newman, man of wit and business, is no longer in it, and died a death that shames us. If a murder, then it shows our savagery; if a suicide, then it shows how we wore him down to despair; and if an accident, then it shows that twelve years with us makes even the most able man clumsy and hapless. When there’s nothing left of Oakham for them to respect, they can take our land without even having to ask for forgiveness. They can take it as if granting a favour.