Apples and Prayers (15 page)

And yet, I was so terrified at his appearance, so distraught to think that here was a vision of his departed soul that I couldn't speak myself. In fact, I couldn't even open my mouth. It was all I could do to think of a reply in my head. But then with this thinking, it was as if John's apparition had already heard me, as though I'd uttered the words aloud.

‘I'm waiting for the souls of the year's dead to reveal themselves to me,' I thought. The wraith of John Toucher nodded, as though it already knew my purpose.

I should have pinched myself to prove that I was dreaming, but I was so transfixed to be there beyond midnight, in this strange dialogue with the dead, weighing up the meaning of living and dying and everything that lies beyond, that I couldn't move a single bone or muscle. I simply stared right through that vision of John Toucher, with terror flowing through my body like blood; with tears flowing down my cheeks like the Flood itself and a thousand Hail Mary's ringing round the inside of my head, like the church bells of a Sunday morning. 

Was this the messenger who'd come to announce the misfortune of John's impending death? 

Would I so soon be parted from him? 

My heart was stricken with grief and terror all at once.

‘
Credo et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
,' I said to myself, as the priest had taught me, praying for the Holy resurrection of the dead. 

I crossed my chest and kissed the crucifix hanging round my neck. 

I could almost feel my hair turning white with fear, as the carpenter Coppin's hair had turned on Hangy Down.

No sooner had I realised that John would live no longer than the coming year's end, than another figure stepped out from behind him. 

And then another. And another. All corpses in their winding sheets.

Before a minute had passed, it seemed that half the village was gathered there before me: my Lord Ponsford; his noble son Walter and the angry younger brother, Robert; Tan Harvey the tanner; Peter Lock the Priest; the cottagers Tom Putt, Brimley and Barum; Billy Down the shepherd; Billy White the miller; simple Sidney Strake; Don Coleman from the forge and the young Dufflin; the hewer Woodbine, his mate Coppin and so many more from the village that I could barely begin to count them. Nor could I bear to look on any longer. 

But look I did and there, at the back of that long and desperate line, I saw the figure of Alford herself – how could I believe it? – her skin as white as a winter peach. When I saw her spectre standing there before me, I raised myself with a Heaven-rending shriek and the whole of the night vision shattered in the air, like a bottle of farmer's glory dropped from a great height onto a slate floor.

What was spilled could never be put back in. 

I had seen the future and the future was nothing but death.

With my scream, Alford awoke suddenly and jumped up beside me. She gave a loud utterance into the night air, panicked that some vagrant had come to act a misdemeanour on our persons. When she saw me standing there, shaking like a sheet in the wind on wash-day, she rightfully wondered what had taken me over. 

With her fierce slap, I came back to myself, though I didn't dare to tell her what it was that had frightened me so. Wasting no time, she gathered our shawls around us and we removed ourselves from the churchyard in urgent haste. 

As it turned out, a little too urgent. As we made to leave that sanctified place, in her hurriedness, Alford stumbled over the edge of a gravestone and fell down with a cry.

‘Hell and damnation, the Devil's snared me, Morgan!' she shrieked.

‘God be in your mouth and in your speaking, Alford,' I rebuked her, but as I turned, I saw what had happened to make her curse so.

As immediately as she'd fallen down, she sprang back up again and the pair of us ran from the graveyard at a headlong pelt, down the lane and out of the village to the bridge. It was only there that we stopped, sorely out of breath and holding on to each other in the darkness between the hedges. Alford couldn't stop herself from jabbering that she'd felt the hand of death upon her, convinced that some corpse's hand had pulled her down towards the grave. I myself was gibbering and crying confused nothings, too afraid to reveal to her what it was that had so startled me in the first place.

But what capped my terror and left me sick with worry ever since, was the simple sound of two single notes ringing out across the night air; a
Coo
and its echo drifting down from the trees, along the river and boxing at my ears like the tormenting drums of the Underworld. 

Cuckoo. Cuckoo. 

To hear a cuckoo early one morning in spring, as I had heard these several weeks before, is one thing. Auspicious good luck. 

But to hear one call on St. Mark's Eve is terrible misfortune. 

I'd begun the month listening to the cuckoos in our garden and it had filled me with the greatest joy. Now that we could hear them singing on this dreadful night, the ghosts of our village yet barely faded from my memory, it seemed as though the month was closing with dreadful foreboding.

I was too scared to let myself fall asleep that night, but when I did nod off, I dreamed a dream that built on what I'd seen. To begin, I dreamed simply of my chickens and a mighty egg laid underneath the biggest hen in the coop. I took it to mean Alford's child. But the dream soon became disturbed by echoes of the cuckoo's haunting cry as we'd stood upon that bridge. With that ill omen, the egg in my dream cracked; some quarrel, or a dark betrayal. And yet the dream became much worse, as I dreamed myself back into the churchyard, with the whole village trooping there before me again, like the legions of the damned. 

Could it be that all these gentle souls would die this year? And where was I? Where was my spirit wandering that awful night? I didn't dare entertain the question. We die and, those who are still living, must wait til kingdom come to be so reunited, just as those who die must wait in Heaven for those they leave behind. The time of our dying then, in that great scheme, is of no lasting matter.

Our digger, Ben Red would – if his own wraith hadn't been parading there that night – be busy digging plots for the whole year. And Coppin, the coffin maker, building boxes from here on to eternity.

 

The warmth of late April was broken by heavy rains on the first of the following month. The air turned muggy and heavy like a laden sack. Then thunder rolled in from the distant coast and settled over our wet plain, bringing with it a deluge of fat raindrops that exploded on the earth with sweetness as much as wetness. 

The Barton stands above the flood plain. In dry weather, the land is passable in a waggon. During the rains, you have to make the journey by foot, my Lord and Lady riding on horseback. Then the river becomes high and swollen, with white crests on the rapids, where the droughts of midsummer leave only slow and shallow pools. With heavy rains, however, the fords often overflow and the river bursts its banks, flooding the fields. It washes down the lanes and over the fields in torrents, carrying clay off the land and filling the ditches with muck and leaves that later need clearing. We have to hire gangs of labourers to dig them out. 

At such times, there's a dampness in the air that works its way through clothes and into skin. Only the frogs take gladly to it. At night you can hear them calling in their pools, like drunken layabouts belching in the taverns. 

Yet, when the rains are high, we're fortunate that the tidemark seldom reaches us in the Barton. Last year we found countless fish stranded on the grass where the waters had receded and made our baskets full with them while scaring off the herons. Some fearful folks said this was the work of the Devil and swore that they'd seen fish flying over the tops of the trees in great shimmering shoals. This was a dangerous admission, for people less broad-minded than us would have taken their fanciful claims for witchcraft. And they would have paid dearly for that.

With all this warmth and water, the world was quickly greening. Where the apple trees' twigs had not so long ago been barren, now the earlies were blossoming… great pink pom-poms of flowers, like girls in May bonnets, sweet with sap and nectar, the promise of the coming autumn's fruit. Doilies of cow parsley thickened the hedges. Beyond the Barton's pale, the bluebell woods were carpeted in purple and, in the bunch grass of the fields, the purple heads of orchids stood tall, like the legion banners of angels. 

Throughout our woodlands, songbirds were raising their fledgling broods. Courting snipe flitted through the boggy fields. Those that weren't so clever as to outwit our snares, ended up on the Barton's dining table. At dusk, bats skimmed across the surface of the pond, before the black of night came down and the Maybugs flew against our windows, drawn towards the nightlights burning in our kitchen. 

After the rains, the warmed ground made moisture rise into the air as a balmy, afternoon haze. One evening, as I looked across the valley to the village church on top of its hill, it seemed to me more like the early morning than the day's end, with blankets of mist rising off the land into the cooler air.

On the second of the month, the village men lit bonfires on the hills and higher ground above the Barton. A warning to witches and other malevolent dabblers. The bales were lit as dusk fell. They kept them burning until the next day's early hours. It was only then, as the new day rolled in, that the men put an end to their stoking, drunk as they were, those rotten sops in wine, with skins full of dandelion beer and potent elderflower wine.

There was, in fact, a burning of a woman they called a witch, two years past in Killerton to the day. A serving girl called Jacobs, in the service of the Duke of Devonshire, was arrested by the Justices. Like me she was practiced in herb-lore and ministered concoctions to the commons to relieve their ailments. I heard she was the best at gout and arthritis, but also knew a salve for gonorrhea. Lord knows there was plenty of that in the district. She was also with child and, it was said by some jealous young serving man, that the Devil himself had lain with her, setting his seed in the core of her sex. 

At least, that was how Jacobs confessed in gaol, under torture of the law. They dunked her, but she didn't float, which men said proved the rumour true.

In fact, the stronger rumour was that the child belonged to the Duke himself. 

To make matters worse for Jacobs, she possessed, from birth, a line of red marks along her belly, like the rows of dugs on a bitch dog. After they dragged her out of the water, they saw them. The Justices proclaimed that Jacobs' strawberry marks were the Devil's teats themselves, for suckling her impish offspring. 

They shaved her hair and made the girl confess.

The child was soon born, under the duress of Jacobs' inquisition, although it died straight after. Some say that the child came into this world in the human form, but with a cat's head; others that it took the form of a child, but with bat's wings, for flying from coven to coven. 

Such lies put me in fear of these people's sanity, for they must have been more bewitched than Jacobs to believe in such stories. They also put me in fear of my own safety, with all my knowledge and practice in herbs.

No sooner was the child out, than Jacobs herself was burned at the stake in Killerton square for the crime of witchcraft. I wouldn't attend the spectacle. It seemed to me the poor girl had done nothing more wrong than satisfy the Duke's desires and probably no choice in that either. In doing so, the jealousies of his serving men had been roused. Whether she dabbled in the black arts I couldn't say, but it made me fear for any maid who might make preparations at the still.

Where witchcraft
does
exist, however, it's a dire threat to us all. Come May, the real witches are abroad in their covens, whittling broomsticks from ash and birch. There in their groves, they daub themselves with aconite, drink draughts of heliotrope, belladonna and henbane, to make a flying potion that lifts from the ground into the sky. 

In preparation against such evil, Alford and I made the Barton safe with hag stones, hung upon the threshold elder bush, to keep the witches and the warlocks at bay. But when the first light of morning had risen and no witches had come our way, we breathed in with relief and readied ourselves to go a-Maying, collecting plants from the hedgerows – birch, rowan and hawthorn blossom – singing all the while.

‘Here we go gathering knots of May,' sang Alford in her cheerful way, although there was something furtive about her, that I wasn't yet able to put my finger on. 

When I pressed her to tell me what she was hiding, she let me know. ‘It was my good luck yesterday, Morgan,' she said, ‘to be told by our Lady that I'd be this year's May Queen in procession.'

‘Well, good news again, Alford,' I replied, a little wary. ‘You're having a lucky time of it. First Queen Pea and, now, the Queen of May. Why, you'll be the queen herself at Court Royal before too long.' Her cheeks blushed full with colour.

‘It's good, Morgan,' she mumbled, ‘only in as far as I was flattered by my Lady's request.'

‘And in what way is it not so good, Alford?' I asked her, sensing some reluctance. ‘Why not excitement at the prospect?' I couldn't understand why she wasn't wholly pleased at the chance.

‘It's my condition, Morgan,' she said. ‘It works against me.' She whined to gain my sympathy. ‘I haven't found the courage… yet… to confess to my Lady…'

‘She doesn't know!' I said.

‘I don't think she can, Morgan.'

‘But you'll have to tell her soon, Alford. She'll notice as soon as next set eyes on you.'

‘I know, I know,' she simpered, ‘but I'm too cowardly to make the confession. Mightn't it cost me my place at the Barton?' 

I wondered why she worried so about telling, but fears for her employment clearly drove it.