Apples and Prayers (10 page)

Whatever prudent savings I could make in the larder, as I'd been taught by Polly, I would. Lenten loaves and nettle tops would serve our servants' bellies. Our stocks were low and poor quality, what with winter drudging on to the plaintive cries of the evening curlew on the commons. The saving grace of stormy Lenten months is, at least, that days will shortly lengthen, bringing in spring's greenery.

But, for now, it was still a lean time for us all, including my Lord's hounds. Our table scraps were limited and so the dogs were rarely treated, making do with the rats that they killed in the barns. But hunger drove some of them to thieving and mischief in the yard; the undoing of one of my Lord's hounds. 

The creature was the one that my Lord called Listener, for his ability to hear the tiniest of sounds; a rabbit stirring under piles of leaves at a hundred paces or more; a rat in a barrel or haystack. But Listener, it seemed, had gone more than hungry this Lent and, by the time my Lord had found him with lamb's blood around his jaws and the carcass of the unfortunate lamb bleeding behind the dog shed, it was clear he'd made his final transgression.

‘There are only two ways out for a sheep killer, Morgan,' my Lord said at the discovery. ‘Shut him away in a barn with a couple of rams and they'll give him such a kicking and butting that he'll never dare go near their kind again.'

‘It sounds grievously damaging to the creature, my Lord,' I offered humbly.

‘Indeed it is, Morgan, indeed it is. But not so damaging as the havoc a savage dog inflicts on a flock of newborn lambs.' 

I nodded in agreement. 

‘However,' he went on. ‘I'm not altogether sure of the advisedness of such action. Not only for the dog's sake – I've had to destroy several such creatures afterwards, because of their wounds from the rams – but because a dog with a taste for blood won't ever forget it. It's fairer all ways round to opt for the second course.'

‘Which is my Lord?'

‘Destroy him, Morgan. String him up.'

‘Hanging a dog, Sire?' I questioned. It seemed like a very strange course of action to me.

‘I'll not waste good lead on a sheep killer, Morgan! He has to go. That's the fairest way. Let's not be sentimental about it. He's a killer.' 

With that, the rope was thrown around a long stem of the nearest tree and Listener, who'd been collared and leashed after his bloody misdemeanour, was hung upon it like a common criminal. Death bides his time and comes for all, even the dogs of this world. Listener yelped a little when my Lord pulled him up, but he ushered me underneath the animal's struggling legs and told me to pull on them sharply. I hated grabbing at the poor dog's legs, it made me queasy to my stomach. His claws scratched at my forearms and drew some thin lines of blood as he kicked and struggled there at the rope's end. 

But I did it as best as I could, not wanting to dissatisfy my master, nor let the dog suffer. I pitied him in his moment of need. God see to it that there might be some presiding angel there at all our ends.

With a whine and a strange snap I can never forget, the bones of his neck broke in an instant and he hung there limply until my Lord slacked the rope and let him down and we went back inside. Two animals now were dead. The lamb. The dog. The first had fed the latter. The dead dog would now feed his pack.

The flowers are flush in the hedgerows by early March: those first prim roses of the year, so delicate and delicious to eat; violets, anemones, periwinkle, columbine and blessed Pilewort, which served me very well. I'd been instructed by my Lady to make a soothing preparation, to treat my Lord's behind. He'd been sitting for too long on the Barton's cold stone seats and frozen his arse good and proper. The blooms of that useful plant open themselves in the morning and close themselves at night, like dutiful children obeying their father's rule, quietly and without the show and fuss of other blossoms.

John Toucher grazed his own few livestock in a small meadow, blooming at times with such flowers. ‘Grazing'll be over by St Gregory's,' he said. ‘Then I'll let the marshland grow for hay and you can pick whatever flowers you want.' 

I liked John best when he thought of me and what I might have needed.

It's also the time for sowing barley. Barley for malting, for animal feed. Barley for coarse oven bread. It grows better on the lighter land, so John could only grow it if he sowed his seed much earlier than others. 

‘She's temperamental, barley seed,' he said, I hoped without suggestion to myself. ‘She doesn't like the wet and cold, nor agree with early sowing. The weeds'll choke her and slow her growth. Giver her a fine tilth, Morgan. My soil's as lumpy as year-old soup from your kitchen. What with scavenging birds… why'd I bother with it at all?'

‘You leave my cooking out of this, John Toucher,' I cautioned. He caught my eye and made to recant on his claim.

‘I say
lumpy
only to point out the perfection of your
new-made
soup,' he said, ‘which is manna itself, just as the tilth must be for sowing barley.' He was sometimes passable with his charm.

Once his seeds were in the ground, their next trial was the pesty birds. John would try and drive them off with the scarecrow, or walked around the hedgerows finding nests, to break the eggs. 

For most it was an easy job. 

For Sidney Strake, the simple village boy, it had proved his undoing. 

Many years before, the heedless lad had climbed the highest tree round here, to break into a rookery. He fell from the branch, just half way up, but nonetheless landed on his head, receiving a blow that had rendered him entirely senseless ever since. Strake had grown into a gentle enough man in his way, but he reached manhood with nothing more than the mind that he'd possessed as a child and found himself the butt of mockery from the village's less kindly children. 

His appearance didn't help. His legs were very long, but his body very short, on top of which his head seemed almost doubled in size and far too big for his frame. His hair was a patchy mass of orange curls and nestled in between his big flat ears, like a bird's nest between two great branches. And within that face, his eyes were small and almost colourless, like the eggs in the nests he'd been climbing to try and destroy. For his own sake, he was too dumb to understand the jibes of the villagers and passed his days in ignorant happiness. Mostly though he quietly worked in the fields for his keep, weeding thistles and wild oats from the tenants' plots, though this was more to keep him out of mischief and busily employed. Wild oats are impossible to be rid of.

The days of Holy Ascension were stormy. Before the auspicious morning came, I cleaned the fire and turned the ashes into lye, for doing the household's washing. I hoped that the thunderous winds would hold their rain and work their whitening magic on my Lady's drying linen. I hung a chain of Day's Eye flowers above the hearth, to deflect the lightning bolts away from the Barton. The hearth itself would need sweeping and the fire dogs scouring with flour and salt, what little we had left in our dwindling larder. 

One morning that week, while Alford and I were polishing the grate, my Lady's voice came sounding through the house like thunder itself. 

‘Morgan! Alford! We suddenly heard her holler. ‘To my chamber straight away. Both of you!'

Wondering what misfortune had befallen her, we stopped our work and dropped our cloths and brushes.

‘God's blood, what's happened, Alford?' I said as we hurried to her private chamber. 

‘Perhaps she's fallen, Morgan, or stuck herself with a needle?' It wouldn't have been uncommon. My Lady was a keen, but not the most exact, seamstress.

Breathlessly, we bustled through the hall and gallery and came quickly to her door. 

She was sitting on her chair with her back to the entrance, holding her mirror up to her neck. I could see she was rubbing the nape. 

It wasn't, at least, a bodkin in her finger.

‘My Lady?' I said as I went in, curtseying. Alford waited quietly in the doorway.

‘I don't hold you here in my employ, Morgan,' she began straight away, ‘to neglect your duties in this, my own most private and cherished room.'

‘No indeed, my Lady,' I replied, guessing where the dressing down was heading. ‘Of course not. Is there something special I can do here to fulfill that service this morning, my Lady?' I still couldn't see what had made her shout so loud and suddenly.

‘It's not so much what you may do, Morgan, as what you have not done.' She was devilishly annoyed and I could see that her anger wouldn't be easily assuaged.

‘Forgive me my Lady. Pray tell me what I've neglected and I'll right it straight away.'

‘Can't you see what your neglect has done, Morgan?' she asked me, thrusting her neck up for my closer inspection.

I looked to her neck, where she'd pulled her locks to one side. Raised there on the skin at her nape, I saw a rash of small red bumps. Bites. From fleas. I nodded my assent.

‘Indeed, I see, my Lady,' I said, though how the bites were my doing I couldn't understand. My Lady would normally have abided such stings as a common enough occurrence but, for some reason on that day, she made much more of them than usual. Other worries and grievances were yet still on her mind and these bites were but the pique that had set her off.

‘Haven't you smoked the house out yet, Morgan?' she tutted. 

The task was on my list of things to do, buried there beneath the polishing, lye and washday and a hundred other tasks that needed doing.

‘I haven't yet, my Lady,' I apologized. ‘I don't know how it could have slipped my mind.' I tried to keep my voice both calm and measured, to allay her displeasure.

‘Well… do it now, Morgan,' she said. ‘Smoke out the chamber immediately and all my linens. After you've finished, do the same around the whole house. Understood?'

‘Yes my Lady. I'll see to it right away. But beforehand,' I suggested sensitively, ‘would my Lady allow me to rub a little ointment on the bites? Then your mind shall be at rest. I can see how they must chafe.' She calmed herself and, once Alford had fetched up the liniment, my rubbing it in soon had the episode at an end. 

An unpleasant and sulphurous task then lay ahead of us. 

Alford and I fumigated the house with burning brimstone, bandages around our mouths and noses, to drive the cursed pests abroad. 

Afterwards, we went down to the coppice, to collect and peel new willow wands for basket making; alder shoots for dyeing. At least there, in that bosquey corner, we found fresh air to drive those flea-destroying fumes from our nostrils.

Further to the treatment of my Lady's bites, I was called to ease my Lord's hacking chest which was, it seemed, racked with wheezes and rattles in all the dampness of spring, the noise of which could have woken the dearly departed. That evening I treated him with egg-yolk, milk, and water of sweet roses. He was put under instruction to refrain from
aqua vit
, although how well he fared in this I couldn't say, as he was partial to an evening's feasting and drinking, even in those frugal weeks of Lent. With this medicine administered and abstinence from alcohol, the pain and swelling in his chest would soon subside. Then he'd be able to freshen his spirits with the wine he so loved. I left his room that afternoon on a delicate note, secreting a pat of the Pilewort ointment I'd recently prepared, wrapped up in a muslin cloth, upon his dresser table.

‘For your… troubles… my Lord,' I coughed. 

Puzzled, he looked up at me and pouted as if to ask me ‘What?' 

Discreet in such a delicate matter, I patted my own rear and left the room. A few moments passed before his laughter echoed after me down the chilly hall. 

Lent was over, four weeks gone. Yet hardly had we ceased our abstinence, than the angelic Annunciation was upon us. Time to celebrate the angel's news to Mary. 

It was as we were walking home from Mass in our mother church, that Alford chose her moment to reveal to me the news of which I'd been suspicious for several weeks. For the preceding months I'd been concocting preventative philters for the pair of us to drink, a sup of lovers' Vervain and Solomon's Seal, to steel our blood and keep our womanhoods free from the work of our men's seed. You couldn't be too careful in moments of congress, with a belly to protect from conception and an honour to protect from idle gossipers, who thrived on news of illegitimate births.

‘Protect us well, seal of the Virgin,' I'd prayed. ‘Do your work. Don't make me have to brew a Heartsease tonic, to mend our broken hearts if you should fail.' 

But it appeared that my philter hadn't assuaged the vigour of Dufflin's seed. 

That day, just as we had heard in church of the Virgin's Annunciation, so too Alford told me that she was with child.

For my own part, I knew that the potion had worked its trick on me, as I was with women's blood and its accompanying aches and discomforts. Alford herself was already several months gone – she told me she'd not bled for at least two moons and, throughout this time, she'd been puking in the mornings. That, she'd managed to conceal. But her stomach was now beginning to distend, something that she strove to hide from all, especially Dufflin. She'd managed, until now, well enough on me.

‘Holy Mother,' I prayed, ‘protect the girl through the rigours of this. She's naive and inexperienced.'

Alford would no doubt soon be subjected to lewd comments from the young men of the village about the father of her child. It fell upon me to protect her in a motherly way from the rudeness of such suggestions. It would only be a matter of days before Dufflin himself discovered Alford's condition. In fact, now that she'd told me, it struck me as glaringly obvious and I wondered what ignorance had blinded me to the truth.