Apples and Prayers (8 page)

His flock too had grown to twice its size in the same number of years and, with his rich earnings, he'd brought some sizeable copses beyond the Barton's woodlands, in the district of Limberland. Here he grazed his sheep, before herding them through the woolbrook and on up through the village to the site of his barns. It was at this herding time that his sheep were prone to wander and many times he'd stirred the bailiff's wrath, as well as the ire of the village, by letting his sheep stray across the green. For such neglect and for his unreasonable profits in these matters, he'd become unpopular in Buckland. I had, by now, heard of the intended tax upon such flocks as large as these and offered this to John, to ease his fears.

‘Profits or not, John, Billy Down'll soon be paying taxes, more and more upon his massing sheep. That'll surely keep him within his means.'

‘Not before some honest arable man's been turned off his land for Billy Down's profit! Where do those men go, Morgan, those who've been drummed off?' He was becoming terse and I was upset at his manner.

‘I don't know, John. Though you yourself most obviously seem to. Why bother asking?' 

I knew his convictions on such matters, but seldom had seen him so troubled, or heard him turn his talk upon one man in particular. Now he seemed to be turning it on me as well.

‘I'll tell you where,' he said.

‘I'm sure you will,' I replied.

‘Given over to beggary!' he said, swinging his arms wide round about him, as if he was casting seed. ‘Those beggars knocking at the Barton's gate each month don't arise from nowhere, you know. They're men like me. Ploughmen put out of work by enclosure. Rampant shepherding. And it's the King's law that protects them, Morgan, making outlaws of them. See how many men have moved away from these parts in recent months? Seeking to make their living elsewhere, where they might. Why, Morgan, even your own departed brothers…'

‘You leave my brothers out of your quarrels, John Toucher,' I warned him. ‘They went abroad from their own choice, as well you know. And that was many years ago. I don't know why you make such a thing of it all. These changes can't happen here. My Lord won't let it happen.'

‘Your Lord
is
letting it happen, Morgan! He should mind his obligations to us, his loyal tenants.' 

By now I had to stop him. 

‘Be ashamed of yourself for suggesting it, John Toucher. It's you who should be mindful of your tongue and obligations,' I shouted. ‘My Lord's never shown anything but kindness to me, to you. And to those beggars attendant on his gates.'

‘And why is that, Morgan?'

I turned my eyes away, as his words began to make tears form in their gentle wells.

‘From guilt!' he went on, shouting at me in misdirected fury. 

Behind him, two crows krekked in the treetops and lifted into the air, like ashes on the heat of a fire. I wished then for this heated talk to end and for the morning to return itself to rights. He, however, was going to finish his piece. 

‘Your Lord feels guilt for those men he's displaced. Nothing more, Morgan. Open your eyes to the truth. There's more profit in sheep than there's ever been in arable, we all know that. It won't be long before we too are pushed aside for the landlord's further gain.'

With this he had me at a loss. I wouldn't hear slanderous talk of my Lord. And yet it was true that many men in local parishes had lost their land and even that some village commons had been enclosed to make way for grazing. Our own church green was being abused, against the laws designed to so prevent it. My Lord must have turned a blind eye to such trespass, or wouldn't he surely in some way have stopped it? 

And so, although I smarted at the way he abused my intentions that morning, it struck me there were grains of truth in what John Toucher said. 

Then again, this was the first time ever that I'd argued with him so openly and it hurt me that he thought so little of upsetting me. All I'd wished for was a few quiet moments together, but he'd firmly rebuffed that. 

I ran away from him that morning, crying myself back to the Barton. I didn't turn back to see what he was doing, but then neither did he call after me, nor follow.

When I returned, I tried to take my mind off our argument by sowing the season's peas. Besides my usual chores around the hearth, at table and in my Lady's chamber, my own work for February was mostly in the garden, composting the plot with kitchen waste and digging over twice. Preparing the ground like this always reaps great benefits and sets a precedent of vigour for the whole year. I sowed peas and beans for our pottage. These would also serve for feeding animals, added to their grazing. 

The moon is always an excellent measure for timing your sowing. I cast my peas and beans when she's on the wane, for then they'll surely grow into fuller pods under her influence. Those who sow upon the waxing moon can only look forward to small pea plants, leafy and rope-like in stem and tendril, puny in the pod. 

That morning, although I sowed the seeds at the right time, I watered them in with my own regretful tears, for John had so wounded my feelings. Between my duty to my Lord and Lady and my devotion to my own man, I felt myself bruised, my allegiances pulled hither and thither.

February's the time for weeding the fields. Lines of crouched serfs and labourers scour the land, with weed-hooks in one hand and tongs in the other, plucking the weeds from the soil. It's one of the times when fieldsmen offer their services to each other and work as a team. John Toucher and his argumentative neighbour, Reynolds; the odd-jobber, Rawlings; Lucombes the ploughman; the cottagers Barum, Brimley and Putt. These last three men were joined to the communal stalk of friendship like the trefoil of a clover. 

Tom Putt was their principal dealer, quick minded and clever with his tongue. He was tall, high cheeked, with the guise of natural intelligence, rather than schooled, for he had been put to work in the fields from the cradle. The joker of the three, he'd speak for all of them against the bailiff's steep demands for rent, or increase in tithes, winning adversaries over with a tale and an amicable smile. It bought them time, though the bailiff would soon enough be back. 

Brimley was the mover of their group, who organised and oversaw their common work. A small, squat man with wide-set eyes and a nose like a great pebble, he was straight talking. Practical. Barum was their muscle, when muscle was called for; a simple, quiet man, who called a hoe a hoe and did as he was bidden. The arrangement suited each man according to his means and constitution. And where these three men were, perhaps, less dutiful in their observances at church, they held intensely to their landed rights and would protect a fellow's independence, whatever his beliefs.

Behind the lines of weeding men come others; children hired to clear the fields of stones. They gather the cobbles together and sell them to the bailiff for repairing lanes and highways, which suffer greatly in the spring rains. Weeding is backbreaking and tedious work and I obliged John Toucher with small attentions at the end of his day. All that kneeling and bending made him stiff and crotchety, as I had lately found.

The month is also time for planting hedges and mending the old and damaged ones around the edges of the fields. Hazel and blackthorn stand side-by-side, silver-skinned and dark barked alike, shooting straight lines up against the whiteness, like supplicants with arms raised to Heaven. Ash straplings spring from their pollarded boles, their branches tipped with hard, black buds. On the thin tips of hazel twigs, the catkins hang, waiting to open and shed their seeds in the first awakenings after winter. Their soft yellow pom-poms hang bright against the grey-brown understorey of sapling willows. Last season's beech leaves still cling to their branches in bright patches, emblazoning the hedgerows. A year's woody growth stands ready to be hacked and twisted into a thick new hedge. Willow's dug in for new fence posts and shoots to shade the livestock in the summer. Quick sets of hawthorn and blackthorn are rooted into the ground to portion out copses and fields, to stop stray livestock wandering. 

By mid-month, the hedgerows are full of farming men cutting through the growth at the base with a hand-axe or hatchet, bending the straplings down to the ground, to weave them through the border's living fabric. Woodbine was the fastest in his craft, but other men vied for his title and there was competition for the speed and neatness of their finished hedges. None is neater than those around my Lord's woodlands.

Both deer and coney are plentiful in those woods and they gave excellent sport. In winter, my Lord left the rabbits to their own devices, so they might increase their number in their natural way, for greater sport come spring. The red deer themselves are pests, always eating crops, or the tender new shoots of the coppice, which grows there for valuable fuel. To stop the deer, Woodbine cut the trees into pollarded clumps and each winter I'd make fences from the poles of wood he'd trimmed. It's here that my Lord also gave chase to the reynards, those red thieves who pestered my chickens and ducks. Along the edges of these woods, he also made sport with his falcon, his crossbow and bolts. Many times I was charged with cooking up his catch for warming suppers.

One time this last February, a roguish man named Stubbard, from the neighbouring homestead of Halstow, was arrested for snaring rabbits in his woods. After they caught him, he spent a day and night in the stocks for his pains, which was so fearfully cold he'd almost frozen solid by morning. Happily, my Lord showed him mercy and didn't have the poacher's hand removed, as was common. Justice has always been hard in these parts. There were villains hereabouts with only five fingers to labour. From time to time we saw other rogues abroad, with noses split, an ear removed, or jabbering through the stump of a tongue. These men were mostly vagabonds, who terrified the children and found themselves hounded away by the bailiff.

On Valentine's Eve, Alford and I amused ourselves. We set the candles on their sconces on the dim kitchen walls and sat ourselves at the scullery trestle, preparing things for a game I had in mind.

‘Take the parchment, Alford,' I told her, ‘and lay it flat before you.' 

We'd borrowed some scraps from my Lady's chamber, after she'd finished her practice at calligraphy and illumination.

‘What'll we do with it, Morgan?' she asked me. 

I enjoyed these moments with Alford. They gave me the chance to pass on to her some matters of lore, which she always engaged in with interest.

‘Take the charcoal… scribe your boy's name,' I told her.

She looked at me, puzzled, fumbling with the stick of charcoal I'd saved from the fire for writing. Then she looked away and her mouth went into a quiver. I remembered then that she didn't know how.

‘Let me show you,' I said quickly and held her hand to help her form the shape of his initial. ‘There, it's done. The letter D for Dufflin.'

She was so pleased with herself that she set to copying the shape over and over. Her piece of paper was soon covered both sides with the bow of his initial. It was as if she hoped to conjure him there and then by writing it out so many times.

‘Look, Morgan,' she cried. ‘I can write! I'll be sending him letters soon to win my husband.' Her eyes were alive by the candles. 

While she delighted herself in her task, I wrote John Toucher's initials carefully on my own scrap of paper and set it to one side.

‘Next, we'll make ourselves some holders for these tokens.' I went to the window ledge and fetched down what I needed: a small clod of clay that I'd dug up from the edge of the pond that afternoon.

‘What's that?' she asked. 

I showed her the clay and she pouted her lips in anticipation. 

‘For making a ball,' I told her, showing her how to prise away a piece and roll it into a ball. She did the same and set it on the table.

‘Now, make a hollow core in it, to tuck the letters inside.'

All along she had no inkling of what we'd do with these trinkets once moulded. It was a pleasure to see her so engaged in the task, unquestioning for once and ready to please, like a child still, really. 

When we'd both hollowed out our balls of clay, we tucked the parchment in and sealed the hole with a further plug of mud.

‘Now for floating them,' I told her.

‘Floating?' she said. ‘Clay doesn't float, Morgan. It sinks to the bottom of the pond. Even I know that.'

‘Yes, but that clay doesn't have a hole in its middle, does it, nor a heart of parchment as light as air, inscribed with the names of lovers, Alford? Our clay has both. It'll rise to the surface, as sticks float on a moving stream.' 

I knew she'd understand, for we often stood on Keswick's Bridge – a clapper bridge not a mile down river – and raced sticks underneath its stony arches.

‘Of course,' she said. We fetched the brimming bowl and set it there before us.

When we were both ready, on the count we dropped our pieces in and passed some impatient moments as we waited to see which of the two would rise to the surface first. When one bobbed to the top before the other, she cried out excitedly and fished the thing out, like a heron catching frogs.

‘Open it,' I told her. ‘Quick, quick. Whose cypher's inside? Whoever it is will prove to be the truer lover…'

‘Is it so, Morgan?' she said. ‘Let me see.' She dug her fingers into the ball and pulled it apart like a ripe fruit.

‘It's mine!' she exclaimed. 

Right enough, there was her own piece of parchment, a little damp, but clearly decorated with Dufflin's initial. While she was hopping about with excitement, John Toucher's vessel rose to the surface and I hooked it out too. She was almost in a swooning fit, but we'd see in truth which of our men would prove the greater constancy by morning.