Apples and Prayers (6 page)

We jostled and stumbled our way across the cobbles towards the orchard's low stone wall.

‘Mind your step, my Lady,' I advised. ‘The ground's treacherous and slippery tonight.' Together, Alford and I carried the red train of her dress across the muddy ground.

‘Keep back there,' my Lord ordered. ‘Your Lady's passing through!'

‘Make a path!' slurred Dufflin, his voice already swimming in cider and ale.

‘Give more light,' called John Toucher.

‘A torch! A torch!' Woodbine the carpenter strode on ahead with a great wooden flambeau in each hand.

‘Wassail! Wassail!' the drunkards roared behind us. 

At the rear, Tan Harvey the skinner had joined with the tambours, banging a drum he had made from a costrel and sheepskin. The cottagers Barum, Brimley and Putt, made noises on crude whistles that passed for music. These three men were indissoluble as the Holy Trinity, working together by day and taking their drink together at night, a regular faction in the parish's ale houses. Although they weren't related, it seemed to everyone that they were as good as brothers, triplets from the mother womb, for they'd joined together in working their lands and sharing their profits. To their off-key tunes, we sang and hooted our way along the path to the orchard in a stumbling procession. 

When we came within the walls, my Lord called for silence.

‘Good people!' he cried. Still the singing went on. 

‘Some quiet, if you please!' he barked and a hush fell on us all. 

I looked around the faces of the gathered, there beneath the trees, their shadowed aspects glowing by the torches. When the jamboree was somberly silent, John Toucher began.

‘Hail Mary, Mother of Christ. Give us fertile trees this season and apples enough this autumn and we'll wassail many evenings more, until the good Lord takes us in his bosom…' and the wassail song was sung by all, with the harmony of angels, we could have raised the very roof of Heaven…
Hail to the old apple-tree! From every bough, Give us apples enow; Hatsful and capsful, Bushels and sacksful. Even a little heap under the stairs...
By the orchard hedge in the light of bright tapers and the shining moon, John Toucher lifted the Wassail Bowl and poured the very juice of life upon the great tree's roots. He then beat the trunk with his staff.

‘Woodland spirits… awake!' he shouted. 

There was so much singing and hollering, I could barely hear myself pray to the Virgin, as John then laid the cider-soaked cake in the mighty tree's cleft and emptied the last cup in offering. 

Then flagons were passed around for drinking and as much cider was spilled down their fronts as went in to their eager mouths. 

By evening's end, when they had drained the cider kegs into their swollen bellies, our boys John Toucher and Dufflin were flat on their backs in the orchard hedge. 

So help them, their only bed partner that night was the watery, sobering dew. 

Sweet Alford and I then made our solitary way back home, across the green and along the lane, ruing our lot with such drunken, listless lovers, but keeping our spirits high until we reached our doors with private songs:
Good Dame here at your door, Our wassail we begin; We are all maidens poor, We pray now let us in
. 

I hoped for our sakes, that my Lord and Lady weren't woken by our singing, but the following morning brought no reprimand from them and the only punishment I myself endured was the clattering in my own befuddled head.

The next day we returned to our distaffs of unspun wool and our wheels and looms high in the Barton's garret, to recommence the spinning where we'd left it off before the Holy season had begun.

John Toucher and the village men went back into the fields, nursing their heads no doubt from the clobbering of drink they'd taken. It's mysterious to me, that our Lord – forgive me for calling his ways in vain – should deign to start the ploughing season on that morning after wassailing. Maybe he means to provide a penitential hard day's work in the fields, after a harder night's drinking, to bring all drunken sinners down to earth. That night I had woven John Toucher his own hawthorn globe. He would soon be burning my last year's gift to scatter its ashes in his straight and perfect furrows. Such ceremonies keep the wheels of the calendar turning, regular and true. 

I've known John Toucher all my days. We were almost the same age and, while small children, often played together in the fields, our fathers and mothers busy elsewhere at their drudgery. The only boy in his family, he was, however, made to work the fields much sooner than I ever was and our childhood terms became gradually more distant. He then pleased himself to work and play with other boys, rather than keep my company. Growing up is also growing away. 

He was always a large boy and carried this great size into adult years. Taller than most in our village by a head or a shank, whichever way you measured it, I could always pick him out above the crowd at market, or over a high hedge as he worked his fields. That head of his was thatched in a thick crop of hair that stood proud of his expansive brow. His chin too was all grown over, not rough like stubbly wheat, but with a downy fur, like wisps of meadow grass growing in the rides. His lips were also soft and, when he cared to give affection, planted careful kisses on my own, in secret moments. I never minded kissing John, for his teeth were clean and close together, quite unlike the foul brown stumps of other men whose mouths I've had misfortune to be near. 

From his tongue, however, there sometimes came harsh words; he knew what he wanted and stuck to his purpose at all costs. Arguing was wasted time with John. Not that you'd have wanted arguments. For as long as I remember, he'd won the village wrestling bouts on fayre days and was never displaced from his throne. His challengers were few and always cautious.

January is mostly a lean time of year, when little food is growing, save winter cabbages and turnip heads and the food we've laid in stored is on the wane. Many tenants take on other work to earn themselves a coin for buying food – carting goods to market for others, or labouring in share-work, at a price. But in this way they run the risk of neglecting their own tillage. John Toucher's surly neighbour, Reynolds, paid little heed to his own hedges and, many times, John found Reynolds' hogs and cattle grazing on his land, as had no right to be there. Arguments and fights were often breaking out and, though my John was always soft with me, he wasn't the man to cross. Reynolds would put up a fierce show at first, but knew he'd never win the case if, indeed, his animals had trampled down a hedge, or leapt a wall. Besides, Reynolds wouldn't risk a beating. He was a sturdy little man, stocky on his reedy legs and bullish by nature, but John Toucher dwarfed him. John stood his ground determinedly, as if he were rooted in the very earth, an arable man at heart, who'd grown to adulthood upon that soil and to it returned his sweat and toil. His trade with Reynolds erred from bad to good and back again from fair to worse, but never into rancour. I think there was some mutual respect, which sealed them in a friendship, two-sided like a coin, albeit sometimes as unpredictable as when the coin is tossed.

John Toucher's home was a frugal place at the Barton's end of the village and it took me no longer to bring myself to his door than it takes to boil a crock of water. His home was built of wood and daub, with thatch on top like a hay stook. Although his home was mostly bare, it was always clean and receiving and I never minded passing the early hours there, cuddled on his palette bed, which he kindly piled with renewed straw whenever I was visiting, to banish horrid fleas and lice. Out on his field, he kept a barn of fragrant straw for his few livestock and made comfortable use of it himself. When I lay with him, he made me feel close, untroubled, in his arms. I gripped hold of his broad back for dear mercy and soothed myself against the down of his face, which tickled and put me in mind of kissing a gentle bear.

The twentieth of January is blessed St. Agnes' day; a day of love for those who wish to make the preparations. And if ever there was need for some propitious divination and news of luck in matters of love, it was then, to lift our minds from the slog of work and the ongoing gloom of the season.

When the day was on us, I called Alford to the kitchen and told her what I planned to do. ‘Time to make the Dumb Cake, girl,' I proposed to her.

‘Dumb cake?' she asked me, surprised. ‘What're they? I've never baked no dumb cakes, Morgan. Plum cakes, yes, many times. But dumb cakes? No. What speechless pies are these?'

‘Alford,' I said. ‘Your mind's been turned to silliness by memories of Twelfth Night dancing. There's no plum cake will ever tell you your fate in love, but dumb cakes will…'

‘Dumb cakes will
what
, Morgan?'

‘Patience, girl! Can I get a word in edgewise and you yourself stay dumb for a minute or two? If you'll listen, the dumb cake speaks your fancied boy's intentions.'

‘You mean a cake… a cake!... will somehow tell me Dufflin's name, or some proposal on his part?'

‘Indeed I do… and more.'

‘What d'you mean “more”?'

‘The dumb cake, if its magic serves, will bring Dufflin to your door tonight. A secret tryst.'

Her eyes illumined at the prospect.

‘John Toucher too?' Her excitement had begun to bubble like a stew-pot.

‘Now why would you want John Toucher at
your
door?'

‘I didn't mean that, Morgan,' she blushed. ‘I meant John Toucher to
your
door?'

‘I know what you meant, Alford,' I said. ‘Aye, it'll bring John Toucher to me as well, I pray. But only if we make it right.'

‘And how d'you make them “right” then, Morgan?'

‘By keeping dumb, so your voice won't spoil the spell the cake is going to work on your sweetheart! Now, hush your voice and get into the larder for the makings.' 

With my instruction and a great deal of excitement, Alford ran around the back of the kitchen trestle and out into the larder where she fetched up all the makings we required: flour, eggs, the dried rinds of fruits, a cup of milk from the dairy pail to bind the parts together, as we wished soon to be bound with our men.

Then we sat together at the trestle, measuring out the cake's parts in silence, for fear we'd spoil our recipe by mentioning our loved ones' names. 

Once we'd cracked their yolks into the bowl, the broken eggshells served us for our measuring spoons. I warmed to the mixing and kneading, strong repeated movements, plying stringy dough between the fingers and keeping mum as the task required. But Alford, she was constantly on the verge of speaking. She seemed so thrilled to think of the spell she'd cast upon Dufflin, that I made her put her pinafore's hem in her mouth to keep her quiet. 

‘The clue is in the name,' I told her. 

Dutifully, she bit down on it, so that her tongue could do no more waggling until everything was made. Yet still I could see impulsive words stirring up behind her eyes, like bubbles in a pennyworth of ale.

When all was done, I took a bodkin from the needle case and pricked the letters of our sweethearts' names on top of the cakes.

‘D for Dufflin, T for Toucher,' I muttered while I scored the letters. Alford watched me as I scribed, as though I practiced some arcane magic, for she hadn't yet learned to write herself.

I finished the bar on my own man's initial and, so help me, I was that distracted in thinking of his arrival, I almost made it into a cross itself. 

Next we placed the cakes to one side of the fire to rise and waited before we cooked them in the cloam, all the while thinking forward to the night and whether our boys would make it to our door. 

When the cakes were in the oven, only then did I let Alford slip the pinny from out of her lips. A torrent of questions came pouring out, I was almost carried away by them, as by a flood.

‘When'll he show here… what'll he bring me… flowers… a gift… how'll he come, by pony, on foot… what'll he say… how shall he love me…?' and so on. The only way I could make her quiet was teaching her a rhyme. 

‘You're under strict instructions,' I told her, ‘to recite it only in quiet, to yourself and only in the privacy of your corner, while you're thinking hard upon his name.'

‘I will, Morgan, I promise,' she swore to me. When she had it, the prayer finally granted me the peace I needed for my own meditations.
Fair St. Agnes, play thy part, Send to me my own sweetheart
.

When it was out of the oven, Alford took her dumb cake and left the kitchen, breaking pieces off and eating them astride her palette bed beneath the dresser in the kitchen's corner, with the words of the prayer repeating on her lips. I don't know how long she kept herself awake with it that evening. Perhaps she simply bedded down in hope of Dufflin's arrival, though he'd never dare to press himself upon her in the Barton. Who knows where they made their trysts. 

At some point in the darker hours I looked to where she slept, though whether she had fallen asleep, or silently crept from her crib to find her boy I couldn't clearly see. 

I called her name discreetly, but there came no reply and I remained none the wiser. 

I was bedded on my own cot beneath the table, with John Toucher's name on my mind until the very fall of midnight. It was a miracle of sorts when a gentle knock came at the parlour door and who was standing there but John himself, as real as the nose on my face. We hurried to the barn in secrecy and, by the climbing of the sun, he left me with a warmth in my lips, so careful and so amorous was my man.

 

The first light of February doesn't come up until eight hours of morning are past and darkness falls on the Barton by mid-afternoon. Those few hours in between are a dim and forbidding twilight, washed-out and grey. The only colour lives in willow catkins and witch-hazel flowers that shine through the frost; in the bright yellow clumps of gorse that side the lanes; in the purple straps of bramble through the hedges, the scattered patches of dried red sedge and the russet fronds of dead bracken. Buried underneath that thick cloak of last year's leaves, which keeps the new shoots wrapped and warm against the harsh attacks of ice and snow, the young growth goes about its unfurling.