Apples and Prayers (3 page)

Once the playing was over the further talk of the commons was all about the Cornish men's advance; how they had marched from their lands in the west and were pressing now towards the capital. The gossip went on late into the afternoon, by which time some tempers were fraying. 

It wasn't long, therefore, before the Justices were summoned. They came only late in the evening and tried to keep what peace remained, but all their persuasion amounted to little and the white-livered Justices soon departed in confusion, hoping against hope that the day might end peaceably. 

We had been making merry all day, but such good feelings wouldn't stay forever. If we'd been wise, we would have seen the portents of the day's dissatisfactions. But we were mostly drunk as sots and inspired alike by our tipple, as by our faith and devotion. Like cows lying in the lea to keep their patch of meadow dry, we placidly awaited the storm-burst. When the deluge finally came, it seemed to wash away most nearly everything. All we knew of reason was taken off at once in an inevitable flood.

It was the franklyn, Hellyons, from the neighbouring parish, who came to quarrel markedly with those who'd gathered round the rustic stage – one man alone to take the commons on – to quell their rebellious tempers. They say he was, for the most part, an amiable man and a gentleman of respected position, but that day he was largely blunt and boorish. By railing against us he fused us in a common purpose. The crowd was in no mood to listen, but on and on he blindly forged with refutal on refutal.

‘The Commonwealth's a body,' he shouted from the platform where Underhill and Segar had so recently prevailed. ‘Feet and hands must work together for the mind to rule. That mind is our King, anointed by God, ruling by his Council, defending the realm with steady heart and constant word. We, the feet and hands.'

We loomed at him with suspicion. He seemed unmoved by our sea of pressing faces, our weighty silence and, so, went on.

‘What you've rallied here is plain rebellion, stirred up and guided by sedition. The penalties are harsh. Numerous. When English men rise against their sovereign Lord, we'll just as soon tumble into civil strife as if the gates of Hell had opened to receive us!'

‘Keep it to yourself, Hellyons!' shouted Segar. ‘We're not here to trade in your insults.'

‘The insult's in the sin you visit on your King,' Hellyons bellowed.

‘We no more rebel against the King than appeal to his minority. Let's halt this Prayer Book madness, Hellyons. Let better counsel prevail until he comes of age. This is a loyal throng.'

‘Loyal throng my arse, Segar! Here's nothing of loyalty! D'you so easily forget the Obediences read to you not two years past in this very church?'

‘This is a lawful protest with tradition and truth on its side!' Underhill replied. ‘Christ is offered day by day at altars across this land in Holy masses for the living and the dead. This new England, this Prayer Book and Holy sacrament, it's nothing to those who live by the true faith.'

‘Tradition? Truth? You must have lost your mind! This is pure rebellion. A blasphemy against your country. Against our God!'

‘Don't speak to us of blasphemy, Hellyons. Look to your own profanity!'

The exchanges then settled into low abuse.

‘The heresy's yours and yours alone, Underhill. Commotions like this can only spread like plague. The Devil's instruction. He makes quick work corrupting base and common minds. The rabble you've raised with you...' 

‘We'll give you a beating, by St. Agnes' tits, if you don't hold your tongue, man…'

‘Go ahead. Threaten me,' the franklyn said. ‘The beating will be yours and all the rakehells you muster with you. Rebellion
will
be punished…'

With this rebuke the crowd had heard enough. As if some silent signal had been given, they surged as one at Hellyons and fell on him in a fury. Someone seized him from the platform and, without warning, carried him aloft, shouting all the way to the Church House. 

‘You walk the path of anarchy,' he ranted. ‘How dare you bring the country to this state? What gives you the right?' 

His voice faded like birdsong in the rain. 

It was then that the blow was struck. 

I saw it happen as though the hours of the day had been suddenly slowed, as in unhurried daydreams. Each and every detail stood out to me, pressing itself in my memory to leave a lasting mark behind my eyes, like wooden kitchen tools pressed into loaves of dough. 

As I saw it, the billhook fell slowly. 

I looked about me, but had lost my friends. No Alford, no John Toucher, none I knew. I found myself quite suddenly amongst a crowd of strangers. Their twisted faces seemed to leer at Hellyons with prodigious malice. One rat-faced man pulled at the franklyn's hat with a gloved fist, placing the stolen cap on his own head, his mouth wide open in the semblance of a stinking culvert. His simpering companion's face was like a swollen swede. Behind them, a woman with grey whiskers on her chin, the length of a nanny goat's, seemed to dribble as if she was spitting frogs. She gawked at the spectacle, spellbound by the spinning gyre of bodies. Where earlier in the day there had been kindly-looking, well-presented folk, with skin scrubbed up and faces washed for mass, now there was nothing but a herd of dirty livestock: scuffed-up, ruddy countenances, screwed-up eyes and gurning mouths, their cheeks inflamed like furnaces with mean little eyes above. The tressed locks of women swung free like biting whips. The men's eyes rolled like children's marbles in circles of dust on the road. 

Not one of them seemed to understand what was actually happening. Some were screaming at Hellyons. Others simply laughed as though this were all some new outlandish game, some further entertainment.

When the billhook struck, it cut straight through Hellyon's neck and shoulder in a heavy slice. He never saw it coming, but I saw, within his frame, the gory meat of his body, just as I have seen the insides of pigs and sheep butchered in the yard on slaughter day. 

A great arc of blood jetted over the heads of those standing closest. They didn't seem to feel it as it streaked them, nor hear his pleas, his pitiful cries. I've seen pit dogs gathered round a bull calmer than that.

So it was that Hellyons was slain and, under father Harper's orders, buried with haste in the shaded corner of the churchyard, where the great yew overhangs the shaky wall, his mangled body lying north to south – an outcast from the church, a heretic's grave – and only there in sacred ground at all by way of some contrite apology.

The lucky die to lie in hallowed ground, attended to by friends who close their loved ones' eyes with coins and keen them to their graves; who shroud them in blankets and tributes of flowers. Not so for those with luck like Hellyons. These are times of cruel disposal.

 

Like any great tree that gives us fruit worth waiting for, the roots of my story go back much further, into the stony ground of last winter. 

I woke, the first of January, to find the country frozen and drawn in. White. Close. A gauze of fog floated across the sky before a muted, glowing sun, like a drape of muslin held in front of a slow burning candle. Each and every blade of grass stood crusted with a rime of frost, as delicate as a gentleman's lace ruff. Huge skating slabs had formed in the rutted gateways. Along the lane, the cart tracks from the season's drives were filled with heavy rods of ice. The air was biting and a freezing fog hung in the air all day until sundown. In the lee of each hedge, the frost remained until late afternoon, where the warmth of the low sun couldn't reach to melt it by day. 

Now that I remember it in meditation, my home is the most beautiful of places.

I rose by five that hoary morning and made my humble bed. My Lord and Lady wouldn't be rising til eight, giving me time to start my many household chores. What dreams I would have had given the chance, but once, to sleep upon a bed of down with feathered pillows, as my Lord and Lady slept at ease each night. My own bed has never been anything but a mattress stuffed with straw, laid on top of a wooden pallet beneath the great hall table. A sack of chaff has served me for a pillow. The dreams I've dreamed upon it have seldom been sweet and, when they have been heavenly or pleasurable, always too short. No sooner has my head gone down, than it always seems to be time to rise and work again, though why complain at this, the servant's lot?

After lifting myself from bed, I combed my hair, put on my shift and made the sign of the cross, readying my hands in morning prayer.

‘Lord, set a watch before my mouth, a guard at the door of my lips. Let my heart not incline to the evil of wicked deeds or thoughts...' I heard some creature, mouse or rat, stirring in the corners of the kitchen, going about his own wicked business and pushed my truckle bed beneath the bench to chase the vermin out with the bristles of my broom. No sign of him, save for some nibbled crusts behind the baskets.

My prayers complete as always, I set the first fire of the day in the grate and went outside to fetch in milk from the dairy. 

My breath plumed in the cold air like smoke from a demon's snout. My boots skated over the iced-up cobbles on my way to the cattle barn, past the leafless orchard. The loam crunched beneath my heavy winter boots as I crossed the garden plot, past the stock-still duck pond and the dovecote topped with its bonnet of ice. The pond was frozen solid; the dovecote empty. Winter has always been the time for its repair and a time that brings the natural end for many of the birds on my Lord's dining table, other meats being as scarce at this time of year as common acts of kindness. When new birds later take up their residence in the dovecote, their droppings make a rich and copious dung for the garden and provide for the household's vegetables. In this way, those generous birds serve us twice.

I reached the dairy shed and pushed the slatted door. My face received the warmth of drowsing cows, my back still cold in winter air as I crossed the dairy threshold. 

‘Good morning, girls,' I greeted the stock and watched them stir beneath their steaming straw, a hazy veil rising from their broad, dark backs, like vapour from the copper kettle. Thin shafts of light came through the slats and lit the milkers with dappled, scattered beams. You could hear the slurp and grind of chewing cud; scent the humid musk of belching kine.

At this time of year, the milk keeps for days on end in the churn, turning thick with binding icicles. When I had filled my jug with creamy, chilled milk, I went back to my kitchen at the back of the house and cleared the skin of ice from the scullery window. The window overlooks the vegetable garden and herb plot to the rear. I saw that Alford, my maid and intimate, was already risen and busy with the first of her own daily chores: emptying the privie pail behind the garden wall. 

The privie drain lies beneath a laurel bush, a great expanse of leaves which shade the conduit, ridden with humming pests all summer, you never want to wander near, but bearable in the cold months of the year, when all the putrid smells are damped and the crawlies have not yet appeared. 

My Lord and Lady used an ornate close stool, dressed with chamomile and rose leaves to keep it smelling sweet, while Alford and I both squatted in the jakes. Of all the chores, emptying the privie is the lowliest – a rank and odorous task – but one we have to face with good grace, to realise our work in proper fashion. Lowest as she was in our ranks, this onerous daily task had passed to Alford and I was glad to be rid of it. 

From time to time a gong farmer was called, when the cesspool was so overflowing we couldn't come near it. Then he and his boy would spend a nighttime digging out the gunge by lamplight, carting it away for crop manures.

From the scullery, I called to her to come and join me in the yard, waiting for her to come back with the bucket and return it to the close stool in the chamber. She washed some trace of ordure off her hands and was ready then to join me. Together, we went to draw the first water of the year from the well. 

‘You take the cream of the well, Morgan,' Alford said, as I broke the surface of the water with a rock. It was capped with a wheel of ice that sounded like a castle door being breached when I smote it.

I hoisted up a bucket from the source. 

‘It'll cure your ills,' she said to me. ‘D'you have any ills, Morgan?' this with one of her mischievous, knowing looks.

‘God's body, you're a lewd girl sometimes, Alford,' I said.

She laughed. ‘Well, ills or not, you'll have good luck all year, I'm sure.'

‘It's you who could do with good luck,' I told her. 

She'd had an unfortunate time of it this recent year, what with both her father and her mother being taken: he, from poisoned blood and apoplexy; she, in a fit of consumption, the chronic cough, her blood-tinged spit, her skinny frame and fevered sweats. Now that both of us had seen our parents snatched away before their time, we shared more in common than our serving positions at the Barton. These bonds had brought us close together and fixed us in our friendship.

‘No Morgan. I couldn't,' she said, as I offered it her. ‘You take it,' and she made me sup the first life-giving drink of the year. 

It was bracing, crystal clear, like honest devotion. 

Alford had no one in the world but me for friendship and still she let
me
take the cream of the well. Morgan Sweet I am by name, but it was Alford who was sweet by her very nature.

What with me drawing up the first water in the pail, there was nothing more for her to do than drop in a token, to buy herself good luck. She took out a small, polished stone that she'd been carrying for some time in the hem of her apron, kissed it for fortune and dropped it into the obscure depths. 

It sent tiny echoes ringing up into our ears from deep down below.

‘Did you make a wish?' I asked her when the stone had hit the bottom.