Apples and Prayers (12 page)

During the dry spells, Alford and I collected baskets of ramsons to flavour my Lord and Lady's food. We dug them out of a rich carpet of anemones and violets on the woodland floor. In the garden, we weeded out unwanted plants and sowed new vegetables. 

When the sun shone, it was as midsummer, bright and warm until the evening; warmth on our crowns and light on our faces all day. When it was warm like this, we harvested St. George's mushrooms from underneath the birch trees in the old grassland. They sprouted up between the fortresses of moles, busy raising their young clutches underground. Doe hares were also raising their leverets, protecting them from stoats, buzzards and foxes. 

Beech and ash buds burst into crimson flames of leaves. The sweet smell of bluebells was perfume to the nose. 

In the darker, dappled glens of the wood, the crosiers of young ferns released their delicate fronds. I brushed my hands along their spikes and showered myself in their fern dust, imagining myself invisible. At once, I became a part of the woodland, flitting in between the shadows and the light. It gives you private sight of all that's unfolding on the land. Blackbirds and goldcrests, nuthatches, jays and woodpeckers, all became knowable to me, while I myself remained invisible to them. I spied the first badger cubs emerging from their setts at night, as I walked back from the evening Mass. Keeping downwind of them, they didn't notice me. I watched their tumbling, clumsy antics. These were the simple pleasures of spring.

My Lady called me into her chamber during that afternoon's rain. She was sore from bunions on her feet. Long months of wearing winter shoes had finally brought her toes to a fierce and inflamed condition. When I came to her, I brought a purging tonic, made from the boiled roots of Lent Lilies, which were then so plentiful in the lanes. I bathed and rubbed my Lady's feet in the yellow ointment and she talked to me of this and that, while I relieved her sores. She often told me small things of her affairs and, in such moments of intimacy between a Lady and her maid, would sometimes tell me things of greater import. Today was one of those.

‘You know full well, Morgan,' she said to me, ‘that my Lord Ponsford is a conscientious gentleman and devout to the faith of his forefathers above any other man?' 

I didn't know if my Lady was asking me a question, or telling me a point of fact. Whichever way it was, the only possible response was in accord.

‘Indeed he is, my Lady. There's no way one could find him to be anything but.'

Recalling the recent opinions that John Toucher had fervidly aired with me, concerning my Lord's care of the village beggars and the sudden increase in his rents, I wondered if we hadn't perhaps been spied upon and overheard. Report could easily have been made to my Lady of John's disgruntled words, but by whom? 

I immediately found myself suspicious of everyone. Sweet Alford included. Why would she do it? I thought. What could she possibly hope to gain from seeing me punished? 

But then I became angry with myself for thinking such uncharitable thoughts and felt my cheeks reddening. I tried to hide away my worry by dropping my gaze to the pewter bowl, in which my Lady's feet were steeping. It seemed, however, that my Lady didn't notice my discomfort and she went on with her business despite me. 

I rubbed the unguent into her aggravated toes.

‘My Lord came by his wealth through his own hard work, Morgan. And by his interests in cloth and commerce, both at home and abroad. It was
his father
–
and not he
– who made his wealth in purchasing monastic lands. All this wealth, in truth,' she said, gesturing around her chamber to its luxurious furnishings and features, ‘belongs to God. But my Lord took no direct part in its journey from church to private hands.'

‘Heaven forbid, no, my Lady!' I nodded. I couldn't think why she was pursuing this line of discourse with me, but felt sure now she'd make her accusation: John and I were recusants, weren't we? 

I waited meekly for her denunciation. 

‘When the Church overlords disappeared, it was
his
father who became more powerful, Morgan. I won't hear it said by anyone that my Lord's abused his position in the dissolution of the church. He couldn't be expected to do anything about the provenance of his own inheritance!' 

She seemed extremely agitated and I wondered further what gossip it was that had brought her to this unusual outburst. I wished I had my rosemary now, instead of foot rub, to lighten her mood.

‘Indeed not, my Lady,' I assuaged her. 

She seemed to waver a moment, deciding if she'd tell me what was troubling her, or not. Having revealed so much to me, she perhaps felt that she now had no choice but to continue. Should I wait for her to reproach me for what John Toucher had said, or should I come straight out with my apology? 

I searched myself for some resolve and opted to confess.

‘My Lady, I'm sorry… but I…'

Immediately, as if she hadn't heard me, she interrupted. 

‘Which is why I'm so gravely wounded, Morgan, by our own son's allegations.' She smoothed her hairpiece back with a sigh. 

I, too, breathed some inner sigh of relief, saved from confessing to something she clearly knew nothing of. 

But her forthright accusation against her son was confusing in its own way. She blushed to have spilled out so personal a matter to me and fiddled with her brocades. 

‘No word of this to anyone Morgan, I need not tell you.'

‘Of course, my Lady,' I obediently replied. ‘It goes without saying.' I was saved my own indignity, but the burden had been shifted somewhere else. Sir Robert.

Several days earlier, my Lady's youngest son had arrived back at the Barton on a visit from Exeter. He made his money there as a merchant in the cloth trade. As was customary, he'd left the household some years past when he'd come of age. By then, my Lord had already willed his land and money to the elder son, Walter. Although this was the traditional partition of a father's wealth, it fuelled the rivalry that existed between the two of them.

His rightful inheritance in place, my Lord's son Walter resided mostly at the Barton, but he'd been away in London for most of the year, on matters of business relating to my Lord's estate and government of the county. He would return home soon for the summer season. 

In the meantime, Robert had returned and was once again resident, arranging to meet with some north Devon merchants to strike a deal in wool and bring profit to his partnerships in Exeter. 

My Lord's estate was of no great measure itself by Royal standards, but means enough by any other. It could easily provide for the sustenance and livelihoods of all the commoners in our village. I surmised that my Lady's agitation stemmed from her youngest son's recent return; from some ongoing jealousy and old rivalries between the brothers, or between father and son. I ventured my nerve.

‘Master Robert has returned in
bold spirits
, my Lady?' I asked, immediately regretting my choice of words. She gave me a withering look that warned me not to step beyond the pale of my rightful place and pulled her foot away from me. 

Water dripped from her irritated toes onto my lap, as I knelt before her.

‘He's returned home in more than bold spirits, Morgan,' she chided me. ‘It seems he thinks he's become richer and more powerful than his father, coming back with boasts of his own hard-won earnings, yet accusing his father of profiting from the sale of Church lands. Of erring from his devout religious ways. It's unthinkable!'

‘Blessed Mother,' I said beneath my breath and crossed myself, almost spilling the bowl at her feet.

Many a man had grown into wealth and power on the back of the sale of Church lands, as John Toucher made it plainly known to me. Such changes were the root of common troubles and now seemed to divide the very ground on which we walked and farmed, even in my Lord and Lady's household it now seemed. Her confidence in me that day was sign of how greatly these matters had come to trouble us all.

When I'd finished drying her feet, I washed my Lady's soles with a perfume of cowslips. The fairies live among these flowers – most abundant at the time, carpeting the hedges in soft yellow pomades – and, where their tiny feet fall, they imbue the cowslip petals with a most effective medicine for removing spots and wrinkles. With this final rinse upon her feet, she bade me leave her to her sewing. I went to the kitchen and cooked her a syrup of pansies, a fail-safe guard against her sadness and hopefully for healing rifts in her domestic affairs too.

Around this time, work, relentless, necessary work, picks up around the Barton, in preparation for the summer's harvests. Everyone was ploughing in dung with teams of oxen, lest the rains wash it all away from the surface. To ease his labour, John Toucher contracted the help of the ploughman, Lucombes, to speed his work along. 

Lucombes could turn a field twice as fast as any other man and was fair in the price of his trade. His religious conscience too was like a straight furrow. All he asked for was the observance and upkeep of the old, traditional ways. Defence of his Catholic devotion. He and John Toucher worked well as a team and turned the manure into the season's later growth. But each time he came to see me after work, I pushed my John away from me, towards the water butt. He stank to high Heaven of muck from his day in the fields.

‘Morgan,' he pleaded, ‘you're mighty stern. Come and give me a cuddle, you smell as sweet as breadfruit!'

‘I wouldn't come near you John, even if I had a pig snout for a nose! Now, get yourself to the barrel and scrub that stink away, before you even so much as think of approaching me.'

‘A hog with as pretty a nose as yours would woo me any day,' he said, lunging for my arm. I slapped him back.

‘And a hog without a ring through his nose is a nuisance to all, as you are, John Toucher, digging up dirt where he shouldn't. Which is all well and good for the hog, but not so good for his keeper. Now get yourself to the pail!' 

Now when I think of it, this was the last time we played our foolish games. How befitting it should be when he was thoroughly be-shitten. But he scrubbed himself down and came up shining. 

Mind you, he could simply have stood in the rain and let the weather wash the smell from him, for it rained drearily throughout most of the month. Thankfully, it was also time to be indoors in the dairy, churning butter in the butterbox and setting milk for cheese. We'd sit industriously by the buttery door, watching the rain splash down onto the cobbles of the yard, shining them up so they looked like glass apples. We got soaked sometimes, however, going to the fields in the evenings to milk the cows, or to strew them some good hay to make their milk come thick and plenty.

Master Woodbine, the hewer and Coppin the carpenter were, perhaps, the busiest at the Barton at that time, managing the trees in my Lord's woodlands. If Woodbine himself was like an oak, then master Coppin was a tall and swaying birch. Long and thin in the leg, soft and ethereal in face and voice, it seemed to me he should have been unsuited to such vigorous work. But he showed himself industrious and strong and hefted an axe as well as the next. He was fine featured and silver haired, which looked out of place on a man as young as he was. Rumour said that he'd turned white overnight, after seeing ghosts parade on Hangy Down, the old moorland where criminals were once hanged. However it had altered, his hair now blended him into a summer copse of birch and aspens, disguising him as well as the fallow deer that hide in the sun-flecked glades of the woods.

Once they'd selected which trees should be cut and which left as standards, Woodbine and Coppin worked together to bring the trees down close to the ground. They cut the elm and sawed it into fine, straight planks, which found their way back to the Barton, to repair the broken floorboards. Many of the old boards are decayed with worm and worn out in patches through years of our walking upon them. The carpenters hewed and planed their timbers up there in the woods, squaring up oak beams for lintels and ceilings, peeling their bark to sell on to the tanner, Harvey, for his business of processing leather. 

Harvey was, on a good day, a shrewd but fair man and, in the past, he used to pay fair prices for his bark. If he ever got it cheap, he used to find some way of offering service to the vendor so the deal became more even. In recent times, however, he had become meaner with his coins and now was known for striking inflexible deals. Yet, if I thought John Toucher reeked of dung at that time of year, then Harvey stank the house down with his odour of sinews and guts, the rankest aromas that wafted off an animal's hide, or butchered corpse. 

Harvey was a man of two sides. While his hands and arms were stained deep brown from continual dipping in the tanning barrels, his chest and face were almost chalky white, perhaps from always being indoors, in the dark, where he cured his leather. He looked like a ghost, with the brownest of sleeves. The farmers about him were ruddy from sunshine and wind, but the tanner was pearly, with limbs as dark as a dog's. The semblance seemed to have sunk into his person too, for if he was an affable man the one day, the next you may as well find him in an angry rage, unpredictable, as riven as black and white. You never knew where you were with him. Some days you'd see him as mad as a hare from the drink, so he couldn't return to work for days of sickness. It didn't seem any way to run his trade, but then we'd always be in need of leather, wouldn't we and weren't going anywhere, so a day missed here or there was nothing to him. Maybe everyone is so divided. Even the purest of the pure conceal a darkness somewhere inside them. They'd rather it not be brought to light, but everyone reveals it sometime through a personal weakness, in Harvey's case, the drink.

When the carpenters had shaped their timbers and sold their bark, they were left with piles of crooked and curved branches that they sold at market to the visiting shipwrights, who oftentimes passed through this way on their way back from Exeter to Bideford, or north coasters heading across county, down to Plymouth. They bought such timbers for the ribs of their ships and they fetched in a great price, much to master Woodbine's increase. Ash wood he kept back for making handles and sundry farm implements. The tough wood of the crab apple went into making parts for carts and ploughs. The smaller oaken planks were sold to the cooper, Johnny Voun, for building hogsheads, a considerable number of which were given over to our orchard's cider. Voun was a grounded man, balanced like his barrels. He knew what he knew and no more.