The Western Wind Read online

  As I went through the lychgate, as I noticed that the boys who’d been around the oak tree were gone, I understood something only barely related, but connected by anxious associations – I understood what those boys at the old oak were doing. They weren’t trying to climb the tree but pretending to be Newman, trying to arrange themselves to appear the way his body had against the fallen tree that morning. They were aping his second death.

  Silence.

  ‘Please speak.’

  ‘You first, Father.’

  ‘Don’t you know what you want to confess?’

  ‘I know my Ten Commandments by heart, and the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy. Aren’t you going to ask me?’

  ‘If you know them, I needn’t ask.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be testing us, Father?’

  I tucked the amice clear of my left ear. I heard the pout of her lips and the tightening of her brow and the sulky twitch of a muscle in the roundness of her cheek. Townshend’s servant girl from the manor, Marjory Smith, Mippy they call her for some reason around the village; twelve or thirteen and will probably be married in another winter’s time.

  ‘Not testing you, no. But you can tell me which of the Seven Works of Mercy you’ve practised lately.’

  ‘None of them,’ she said.

  ‘That’s worse than I feared.’

  ‘So I need your forgiveness,’ she whispered through the grille, ‘since I could die on my next breath.’ She exhaled a faint laugh; I felt unnecessarily grateful – there was her next breath and she was safely past it. ‘He up there could snatch me away.’

  ‘He could – but only when the time is right.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said with a hoarse voice. Yet so young, her parents both dead of the sweating sickness when she was nothing more than a baby.

  ‘And that’s not my only sin, Father, I also stole. The cheese-makers were quarrelling in their chamber and there was a shoulder of ham on the block in the kitchen, so I helped myself.’

  ‘You should give them their proper names.’

  ‘Lord and Lady Cheese-maker,’ she said.

  ‘Townshend.’

  She made a sound. Hna, it went, or something like it. She was childish, impish, coarse, I think well loved – even by her cheese-makers, who’d taken her on reluctantly at Newman’s goading and were bound to her – I’d learnt – by contract. The lady didn’t like female house servants, for reasons I suppose she never needed to state; but still, they seemed to show love of sorts to this one. A child to replace their ambitious four, who’d long ago left Oakham.

  ‘How much ham did you steal?’

  ‘A mountain. But I took it from different places on the joint, so they might not notice.’

  ‘How much is a mountain?’

  ‘It filled my tunic.’

  ‘Why did you fill your tunic with ham?’

  ‘I hid it in my room for eating later, I ate it in bed in the dark and chewed like a lamb. Although I might as well have chomped it in the kitchen, they were arguing long and loud enough.’

  ‘Do you know what they were arguing about?’

  ‘Thick doors at their place.’

  ‘So you heard nothing?’

  ‘They were quarrelling like this,’ at which she began lisping in fast, spiked whispers, from which occasionally rose a distinguishable word or phrase. Well-horsed. Remnant. Sheep and cows. Monday. Venison again.

  ‘We can’t glean much from that,’ I said.

  ‘And if you wanted to, that would make you an eavesdropper, Father.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  She was a little wild thing, a rabbit, pelting about as she always did. But I’ve heard there are men queuing to marry her, orphan or no. Maybe it was that slight surprising plumpness and petulance, as if she were brought up with privilege and not the hard, parentless shoddiness that had been her childhood that far.

  ‘He ties his wife up – Mr Townshend. He ties her up to the bed and leaves her for hours. She calls to me for help.’ Again her mouth was to the grille, her lips a small gasping O, puffing words as a dandelion gives out its seeds.

  I lowered my head. ‘Do you – help?’

  ‘Would get a flogging if I did.’

  These sorry lives people live inside their own walls. Money makes them no better; but then nobody’s ever quite trusted Mr Townshend, with his strange cheese fascinations which transcend sense, and sometimes belief.

  I closed my eyes. I thought of her mouth at the grille, lips so full of blood and shapely sounds; and of Cecily Townshend, old now and tired from childbearing, but dignified and still beautiful around the eyes. Tied to a bed, like Mary Grant’s dog tied howling to a post. I’d thought better of her husband, who’d always seemed good enough, if erratic and a fool in business – and so I found I was asking this child, though I knew it was the wrong question, ‘Why does he do that? Tie her up, I mean. Do you know why?’

  ‘The man who’s an animal always tries to make an animal of his wife, Father.’

  That’s a deep wisdom for a shallow number of years, I didn’t say – and I didn’t say it because her years might not be many but they weren’t shallow. All that suffering, losing her parents. That can deepen you. I let go of a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding; I felt suddenly, unspeakably low. No words came.

  Her voice fell quieter and contrite for the first time. ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ she said. ‘It was ungrateful to those that feed and warm me. And I shouldn’t have stolen their ham.’

  I drew my head back because she’d made me remember, with shame, that she was the one confessing, she was the one to be forgiven, not Townshend, whose sins were his own. It was as if the dean had passed a seed of suspicion into my hand and the ripe hopefulness of her little voice had made me think of sowing it.

  ‘There are certain sins that we look on lightly and forgive easily,’ I said, ‘since they come from a wish to be well fed and healthy, which is what the Lord wants for us. But you must learn to take without stealing, and to take only what you need.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘I won’t ask you to go to your masters and admit to them what you did. Maybe they won’t be fair in their response.’ Cecily Townshend tied to the bed – Mr Townshend with his rope, frustrated by the failure of his cheese-making empire, a small man who never did well with the wealth he was given. ‘But the sin lives on you in smells and fat, which might have got under your skin. Scrub your hands with warm water three times a day to scour it off.’

  ‘I will, Father. Thank you.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘what’s the second of the Works of Mercy?’

  ‘Giving drink to the thirsty.’

  ‘And the fifth?’

  She said without a pause, ‘Caring for the sick.’

  ‘So, next time Mr Townshend is rough with his wife, will you go to her later, when she’s untied, and offer her a drink, and help her out?’

  ‘Do I get my forty days’ pardon, then,’ she asked. ‘For confessing, and for doing all that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good, because I want to get to heaven quickly. That’s where they are and I want to meet them.’

  ‘Who?’

  She stood and her hands were in front of the grille, in small fists.

  ‘Your father and mother?’

  Her fists eased. Those strong, small hands dropping open. And Thomas Newman? I wanted to ask. Do you miss him too? Thomas Newman who saved you as an orphan and brought you here, and made the Townshends take you on. Will you miss him? The back of my foot found the iron money box under the stool – Thomas Newman’s box, with the deeds to his lands and house scrolled and folded inside. It wasn’t yet time for the second rosary to come down, but I took it down anyway. I noticed, by the bittersweet smell of hops, that my cup of beer had been knocked over at some interval and had puddled on the floor, as if blown down. But I kept my gaze to the corner, where the stone had a dark, dirty, rough weft. The weft of wet wool and faded day.


  Burning

  NIGHT COMES EARLY to our church. The three windows at the west wall are small and narrow, since glaziers couldn’t be found to work at a price this parish could pay. The world has filled with windows, windows the height of four men, the colours of jewels, telling the news that Jesus is born, the magi have come, Lazarus is raised. England rises tall with wondrous cathedrals, as if it has grown at last into an adult, handsome and curious. A land of rich glaziers who, if they trouble themselves with work at all, don’t trouble themselves any more with the likes of Oakham.

  I’ve told Townshend, if you want to make money, the world needs glass. But he says glass needs sand and more wood than we have or could afford to buy – glass-makers have flattened the forests of Europe to heat their furnaces, wood is the price of silver. Whereas we have cows, and cows eat grass, which we also have, and breed by themselves and grow faster than trees. Better than sheep, who give all their strength to growing wool – cow’s milk is richer and fattier and thicker and more plentiful than any other, an abundant luxury. Cheese, he says. Cheese is what we’ll make.

  What about wheat, I’ve said. We can grow hundreds of acres of good wheat. But Townshend says we need our land for sustenance, not for profit. If we devote most of it to wheat and the crop fails, what’ll we live on? Sugar, then, I tried. If you want luxury, put your money into sugar – cargoes have started sailing straight into our westerly ports, no need to go to London any more, and if we had our bridge it would be easy to bring it from there to here in cartloads and sell it in portions, or make those little cakes of caffetin the rich like so much, and sweeter, stronger beer. A single pound of it is three times the cost of a whole pig. The rich have a taste for it – they think their tongues are made different from tongues of the poor, who can’t taste it. It sets them apart and above. For their tea, for their cakes, for their wine and preserves, they suck it while bathing, they sprinkle it on plums, it keeps their children from crying – sugar has come, sugar would buy us a large west window for the evening light.

  Cheese, he’s decided. It’s cheese will make our fortunes. But only the poor eat cheese, cow’s milk or no, and the poor will never make our fortunes. So each afternoon, when the sky is still offering a fair amount of day, the church falls prematurely dark and I or Janet Grant bring a rush-dip to the church lights til there are a hundred or more circles of grainy orange glow around which the darkness deepens. In February the light fades early, and this day I was late to light them. The silken stole of light that slings itself across the wall in the booth had been fading and narrowing to nothing, even as little Mippy had been kneeling there.

  Those left waiting in the nave were vague and grey, loose dirty wool, briefly glinting eyes, shifting feet. One man became another, one woman another. Their rosaries clinked; they whispered and laughed. They’d come in from revelry and were giving off a reek of beer. Two of them wore masks, that mush of leaves, mud, twigs, grass, whatever could be found, bound with sheep or goat or goose-fat into a paste and moulded into shapes often too crude to recognise, but always animals, real or supposed. These two were crude – one a dog’s head, the other not obvious. A bird? It seemed to have more a horn than a beak, but I could think of nothing horned that looked like that.

  I was tired but restless; Newman’s lute, once again, picked its way among the shadows. Or had it been there all the time? None of them in the line could hear it, they showed no sign as they stood and watched me wind my way around the walls making light. The sound followed me and was loudest wherever I was, a gentle but not timid plucking that quivered each new flame into a strong, still, upright petal.

  Singing, music, dancing, in the churchyard. The whole village gathering around us, pressing at us. Their torches sent light thrusting and jutting outside the windows as they danced past – all the boys from the barns, the children, the weary mothers, the spinners and ploughmen and yeomen and shepherds, the milkers and cheese girls, the butcher, the carpenter, the blacksmith, the baker – we have only one of each – Lewys’s wife with her pregnant load, Tunley perhaps, Janet Grant even, Herry and Cat Carter. They were carolling around the church, giving a repeated rendition of the same song, louder and louder with each round.

  Broad and beauty, do your duty

  Chupader, woah

  Time and reason, work for season

  Chupader, woah

  Young and old, work when you’re told

  Chupader, woah.

  Soon they’d form a ring around the church as they did every Shrove Tuesday before the curfew bell rang, before they were asked to go indoors and put out their fires and grit their teeth for forty days of Lent. They reached a fever in their masks, dressed in one another’s clothes. I took the last confessions with a candle by my feet, whose short well of light served only to make the darkness darker. Their tongues were loosened by drink and they came with more than one sin to hand over, some several. The sky darkened to perse, then to coal, and the noise outside the church lifted and toppled and lifted in waves that hit the church walls like the incoming sea.

  Father, I used all the torches (I was scared of the dark), I’m drunk, I poached a rabbit from Townshend’s warren, I gave Joan Morris’s bottom a playful pinch at the end of dancing ‘Hawthorn’, I laughed at Jesus in his shawl at New Cross we called him a baby baby-Jesus we fed him some milk, I’m drunk as a lion drunk as a monkey bowsy as a sow, I killed Thomas Newman, Father, I killed Thomas Newman.

  ‘With these hands,’ he said, and I said nothing. ‘Don’t you hear me?’

  His breath stale and insistent, and his fingers at the grille like the fingers of Lewys’s wife earlier in the day.

  ‘You did not kill anyone.’

  ‘I killed Newman.’

  ‘You did not.’

  ‘I need your forgiveness.’

  His fingers of both hands were tugging at the brittle criss-cross of hazel.‘Forgive me. Forgive me.’

  ‘Herry Carter,’ I said, ‘I can forgive anything you’ve done, but nothing you haven’t. Tell me: what have you done that torments you so much?’

  But Carter and I had been there before, and he wasn’t going to tell me anything other than that: I killed Newman, with my hands. He thought I wasn’t listening. He pressed the crown of his head against the hazel, pressed hard like he himself was the offered ram, and for the first time I felt something other than pity and concern; I felt fear. I didn’t know if it was fear of him, or for him.

  I took the light from the floor and held it near the grille. The cut in front of his right ear was worse than I’d perceived it to be that morning, deeper and angrier, and was beginning to ooze a sickly greenish-yellow. Was his false confession a form of raving? The pain of these sorts of cuts could drive a man to rave and rail; the pain was a fire that burnt and deranged him. Perhaps if his wife could get him some clean cold water?

  ‘Go home and ask your wife to bathe your head,’ I told him.

  ‘If you won’t forgive me, I’ll go to hell.’ His voice was steady and slow and part-buried under the chanting outside. Chupader, woah, chupader, woah, the chant beating rhythmically as a drum, and senseless. ‘As sure as anything, I’ll go to hell.’

  ‘I forgive your confusion and despair; these are forgiven. Go home, get Cat to bathe your wound.’

  In a pause from anger, a haze of sorts, he touched his fingers to that wound and, when he drew them away to look, his expression distant and dreamlike, their tips glistened with the wound’s yellowy weep. He stood and as he did, he snatched at a strand of hazel, which snapped. I pulled the candle away.

  ‘Benedicite,’ she said, and her rotting breath made me lean away.

  ‘Dominus.’

  ‘Confiteor,’ she whispered. ‘Confiteor, confiteor.’ This last word was hurled from her lips and I heard only teor, which ripped like a bat through the new break in the grille and landed in the cup of my joined hands. At which my palms turned downwards on my thighs to empty themselves.

  ‘He said he did it, I know he con
fessed, he said he was coming to confess, we spoke just now in the nave and he said it, he said he did it but he’s lying, he said it but I did it and he lies. Don’t you know about the way Carter lies?’

  This whispered rush of words, like trying to hear a voice in the wind, and I wouldn’t have been able to, if I hadn’t known her voice well and if I didn’t know already the kind of thing she’d say. In fact Carter’s never been a liar; her saying this made the fact of his honesty strike me. The most plain and honest of men, who’d chosen something so harmful to lie about. By now they outside were throwing small stones at the windows and walls, a few clipped at the door.

  ‘I did it,’ she said, and already I was weary of those particular words; weary of the dean’s suspicion, of death itself. ‘I killed Tom Newman and I want you to tell it and I want to be punished, I can pay with my life, I have what I must to pay, you see?’ She stretched her hands out for my attention, both as hooked and rigid as scythes. ‘You see?’ These hands clutched at her clothes and pulled them away from her skin, as if to show me the life she intended to pay with. ‘You see?’

  The flat, ridged chest, and then the first swelling that hinted at breast. I turned away. Would that she’d keep these milky places of herself private, for herself only. Poor child – or woman. Before the disease she was a child, round and whole and strong. Only a month before, she went away on a pilgrimage – she went round and whole and hopeful; she walked a hundred miles at least to a shrine in a far church to see a strand of St Katherine of Alexandria’s hair, and maybe St Katherine’s tooth. In a fortnight she came back – she’d seen the hair and the tooth (which surprised her by being half-rotted), but she didn’t seem better for it. She was tired. Then full of fever, then bouts of delirium. Then convulsions, then she wasted.