The Town House (29 page)

‘You belong to me. I never dreamed it could happen.’ There was a kind of exultation in his voice, but awe as well. I realized that he was as nervous as I was myself.

‘I belong to you and you belong to me,’ I said. ‘Are you happy?’

‘So happy that I am frightened.’

I thought that a strange thing to say, but very touching, too. I put up my hand and pressed it against the other side of his head, forcing our faces closer.

‘There is nothing to be frightened about. And if there were it is
I
who should be frightened,’ I said that rallyingly.

He said, almost in a whisper, ‘I would never do anything to hurt you. Never.’

Was it, I wonder, the fear of hurting me that made him fail? He loved me, I loved him, we were both sound and young.… But it was no good.

It was an odd circumstance that I, who at Minsham had been so clear-sighted, so contemptuous of all pretence, should change my nature with my name, and whole-heartedly begin to play a game of make-believe. I had not realized that I was so truly the daughter of my parents; here was I, pretending that all was well, pretending that I was a properly married woman, just as Mother always pretended that some day something would happen to restore our fortunes, and Father pretended he was a landed gentleman. I discovered another thing about myself too, I was hotly passionate. There were times when I felt that out of my own eagerness I could
make
it happen. This time! This time! I would think. Now! Now! Poor Richard, groaning and sweating, as puzzled as I was myself, would eventually fall asleep, and then I would cry, softly, secretly, and rather ashamed. I would accuse myself of being ungrateful, too; for apart from this one thing my new life was wonderful, better than I had ever imagined life could be.

The sheer comfort we enjoyed was a lasting joy and an amazement. People might laugh and sneer about merchants and their new money; they knew how to live, how to build and how to furnish. There was more warmth and softness at the Old Vine than in Abhurst, Beauclaire and Rivington rolled into one. As for Minsham Old Hall, I was soon wondering how I had endured the stone floor, the unglazed windows, the draughts that stirred your hair even as you sat by the hearth.

The Old Vine was really two houses, divided by a wide cobbled passage which was entered by a doorway, big enough and high enough, when it was fully open, to allow a pack pony loaded, to trot in. On the right of this passage was that part of the house which Master Reed had built first and lived in when he was starting his business. Richard took me over it and showed me how it had been. His father had had one room, his Uncle Tom the other, and there had been a kitchen for cooking and that was all. After some years, rooms had been built above all these apartments. One of them had been the room in which Richard had learned his lessons, he said.

Because I loved him, everything about him, back to when he was very young, was interesting to me, and when he pointed to the door and told me that, I was interested to see the room.

‘The servants sleep there now. You don’t want to look in there,’ he said.

‘I think you hated your lessons,’ I said, teasingly.

‘No. After a week I liked my lessons, but I hated my master. Sometimes even now, I dream –’

‘Oh, so do I. My Aunt Bowdegrave, teaching me to dance, and saying I had two left feet and would never find a husband…’ I cut that off sharply and said, ‘I was ten years old.’ Something that I could never find a name for had made me withhold from Richard all the story of my humiliating youth. I wanted him to desire me, so I must always seem to have been desired. ‘Little she knew!’ I said gaily.

‘In those days I used to sleep here,’ Richard said, moving to the other door. ‘When Father made the office downstairs, Uncle Tom moved up. He’s not my real uncle, but I still call him that. He was Father’s partner once. He’s bedridden now and a bit…’ He tapped his head and made a face. ‘But if you like to see him.’

‘I want to see everything.’

Richard opened the door and said,

‘Uncle Tom. I’ve brought you a visitor.’

The old man in the bed must once have been big and stout, he had shrunken and the flesh hung on his bones in heavy folds There was a musty, old-man smell in the room, and, added to it another, even less pleasant, which, as I moved towards the bed I knew came from a great, badly-cured bear skin which lay across the foot of the bed.

Uncle Tom’s eyes were bleary and his stare vague at first but when I was near enough, something quickened in them and he grinned. I’d seen his like before, hobbling old dotards until they catch you behind the screen or in a lonely passage.

‘A pretty one, too. Cure for sore eyes, you are, little mistress.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and smiled and for fun bobbed him a curtsey.

‘Aye, and better still, saucy.’

‘Anne is my wife,’ Richard said, a trifle stiffly I thought.

‘Your wife, eh?’ That seemed to take a little while to sink in. Then he said, ‘You’re lucky Dick; allust hev bin. Right from the first. Like your Dad. Well…’ he looked me up and down and I had a sudden, disconcerting certainty that he knew about us. This going over the house took place on my second or third day there and the thing was, naturally, still raw and tender, in the forefront of my mind. ‘See you do right by her,’ Uncle Tom said. ‘Make the most of your chance while you can. You shrivel and dry up afore you know where you are.’

Richard took hold of my elbow and said, ‘Come along.’

That was the old part of the house.

On the other side of the central passage the rooms were larger and higher. There was the solar, with the window which looked out into a garden, with a plot for herbs, and some fruit trees and roses. Behind the solar was a dining-hall, where, every day, at dinner and supper, we and several of the workmen and apprentices sat down together. Except that it lacked a dais it was like the hall of a great house. Richard, his father and I sat at a solid oak table which was never moved; the rest had trestles and boards which could be set up or taken down according to the number of places required. The food served here was good and plentiful and to me, delicious; but there were always other dishes, cakes, fruits and sweetmeats, in the livery cupboard of the solar.

Above the solar and dining-hall were the bedrooms of the family.

Across the yard were stables and lofts, the shed where wool was stored, the ‘floors’ where the fleeces were picked over. There was a smithy, a cow byre, a pigsty and a hen roost, a round house for pigeons and a pond. Thirty years ago, Richard said, when his father had started, there had been nothing at all, just a field full of old vine stumps. It seemed to me a lot to have built up and set working in thirty years, but that was not all; Master Reed had two ships on the sea, a warehouse in Amsterdam, and, of course, the sheep run at Minsham. He would have been justified in being very proud of his achievement, but I never saw him give any sign of being so. Except that he loved Richard, was kind to me, and apparently faithful to his old partner, he showed very few signs of any emotions; he was never angry, he never laughed, he never seemed to be in a hurry and he was never ill. Richard said that he was a strict, but just employer. It took me a little time to learn that his settled scowl, and silence and somber looks were not due to ill-humour, and to the end I was always disproportionately pleased if I could coax a smile from him. I often felt a little sorry for him; he worked so hard, every day, from dawn to dusk, just, it seemed, for the sake of working; rather like an old horse at a mill wheel or a well, which will go round and round, plodding at the same pace, whether it is being driven or not.

You might have imagined that a man who set such high store by work would have been a hard task-master to his son. Nothing was farther from the truth. Mother had said that Richard was under his father’s thumb, but it was a most gentle, kindly thumb. ‘Leave that to me, boy,’ or ‘I’ll see to it,’ were words constantly on his lips.

All through that first autumn of my married life Richard and I just frivoled the time away. We took long rides, went to Bywater – where I saw the sea for the first time, and to Walsingham, and Colchester, Lavenham, Melford, Sudbury and Clare. Summer died slowly that year and in the fine warm weather the roads were busy with pilgrims and merchants and the people who made their living by amusing them. These last, the minstrels and tumblers and jugglers had a fascination for Richard; he would watch them for hours, even make a special journey in the hope of catching up with some particularly pleasing performer again, and seemed actually to envy them. Once he said,

‘Not to be tied to any place … don’t you think that would be pleasant? I’ve often thought that I should like to take my lute and just set out.’

‘You play well enough. But it must be a hard life, especially in winter. And not being tied to any place means not belonging anywhere. I know. I spent my childhood moving from place to place. I hated it. I always had to leave something behind.’ I told him how, once, at Rivington, I had almost tamed a wild cat out of the woods; he was so pretty, striped tawny and grey, with tawny eyes. We must have stayed there for some time, because I had got him to the point where he would come when I called – if I waited long enough, and take meat from my hand though he never would let me stroke him. At another place I had made a little garden; I’d planted gilly-flower seeds and meant to make some gilly-flower water and scent myself all over. We moved on when the little green plants were two inches high.

‘Poor Anne,’ Richard said. ‘You’ve always wanted to settle. I’ve always wanted to get away.’

‘From what?’

‘Ah. That I can’t tell you. It’s something that comes over me. I sit at the table sometimes and think there we are and here we shall be next year and next and next and I feel as though I were stifling. Then I think – If only I could take my lute and go, gather a crowd and play and play.’

For a moment he looked unlike himself, wild, altered, as though the wind were blowing through him, as though he could hear the music he dreamed of making. I felt left out, left behind.

‘It’s silly. I should hate it really, sleeping in a ditch or under a haystack.’

‘And rough company. And not enough to eat.’

One place where we rode often, was of course, Minsham. Mother, on my first visit had contented herself with asking was all well with me and I told her everything was wonderfully well. The second and third time
she asked no questions, but on the fourth, I remember it well, it was in October, and Richard had gone out to join Father and Isabel in beating the walnut tree, Mother said,

‘You’ve not quickened yet?’

‘Two months… no three…Three months is not long.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No’; but her voice said the opposite. ‘But you should lose no time. You know what they say, and truly – For every year over sixteen there’s an hour’s labour with the first. You were sixteen last February. I bore my first a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday – they say women forget, but I remember it to this day, and I would not have you go through that and the extra hour. Get your first with all possible speed – the rest comes easy.’

‘It’s not a thing I can order.’

‘You shouldn’t ride so much. We are pleased to see you.… But unless compelled no married woman should set foot in stirrup for a year. It’s like junket – it will never set if you keep stirring.’

That evening, riding home, I was thoughtful. Once, on one of my visits I had been present at a birth. One of my Aunt Astallon’s attendants had had a clandestine love affair and had, up to the last minute, concealed her state, wearing a heavily pleated houpplard and joking about getting so fat. In the night, in the dormitory where six of us lay, her hour had come upon her, and nine hours later she was delivered. I could hear her screams still. And she was … how old? Getting on. Twenty-five perhaps. Yes, it worked out.

In the night, in the bed I said,

‘Are you afraid of hurting me? Is that it? Darling, pain now will spare me later. Hurt me. I want to be hurt.’

But we ended, as we always had, with me comforting him, pretending, pretending. Never mind. Next time. All will be well.

I still rode – though the days drew in; but I made excuses not to ride Minsham way, and I did not have to face Mother again until Christmas, when, at Master Reed’s invitation, she and Father and Isabel rode in to keep the Feast with us. They stayed four days, and we had a right merry time and I managed never to be alone with Mother long enough for her to ask me awkward questions. However, my father, who had remembered his first conversation with Richard – about hawks and hawking – had procured for him, as a Christmas gift, a young eyas tiercel which was to be trained, and eventually flown at Minsham.

‘A lot of riding for you,’ Father said. ‘Because if you want him to answer your whistle you must give him his beet as often as possible and whistle as you do it.’

Mother gave me what she no doubt thought was a subtle, sly look, a grimace that would have been noticeable a street’s width away. I nodded to show that I understood.

So the new year opened for me with a most embarrassing problem. Richard was riding out to Minsham twice a week, and always expected me, unless the weather was very foul, to go with him. And if I did Mother would accuse me of stirring the junket. Under the strain of making silly excuses, either to one or the other, I became bad tempered. His lute first, now his hawk I’d think to myself, he really never wanted a wife at all!

Once that thought had entered my head I never completely got rid of it again. Richard had told me how he had first seen me – at the time when his father brought the blue cloth; how he had fallen in love with me then and dreamed of me ever since. When I heard that story first I thought it was romantic, now, looking at it in the light of later knowledge I had a suspicion that perhaps he would have been content to let it
stay
a dream, just as he was content to dream about that other unlikely thing, being a wandering minstrel. He liked the idea of being in love, he liked my company, perhaps (may God forgive me the unkindness of this thought) the knowledge of my better birth and station added to the romantic idea; what he didn’t want, and had no need of was a real flesh and blood woman in his bed.