The Town House (32 page)

My last sensible thought was of my story and how, if needs be I must stick to it. Then my agony began; and presently I didn’t care if the child
were born with one eye or four, if only it would be born. I saw Mother and screamed to her, ‘Help me!’ and with tears on her face she said, ‘You must be brave. You must help yourself. None other can.’

I tried to be brave. I told myself that I was the daughter of one of the boldest knights that ever rode in tourney, and of a woman who had set out to ride from Rivington to Beauclaire, risking being brought to bed in a ditch. But it went on too long. In the end I was screaming like a trapped hare and I went on screaming until I had no voice left and could only make harsh, weak cries. The pain abated and I floated away, and was walking towards St. Petronella’s shrine, but the solid green hedges were all covered with open-hearted roses, drenching the air with scent. Just before the shrine Richard waited for me, but as I went near he turned into Denys, holding a dark cloak with which he smothered me. I fought against the weight of it and struggled up into the air and light again. The priest was in the room.

I thought – I am dying. I wanted to say – I have a great sin to confess; I have committed adultery. Had we been alone I might have said it, but beyond the circle of the candlelight I saw other people – Mother, another woman, several … Richard will hear about it, I thought, and be hurt, and not revere my memory. No, sooner I would die unshriven and go to Hell.

Hell was the Long Gallery at Abhurst, brightly lighted so that there was no shadow into which one could retire. I stood alone and watched four or five young men crowd about Catherine Montsorrel. My Aunt Bowdegrave came and stood by me, showing her yellow teeth and saying that with my sharp tongue and prim manner I should never find a husband.

From there I slipped into a bottomless pit of darkness and lay there until someone above reached down with a grappling iron and hooked it into my body and hauled me up, screaming and struggling, and with each struggle the iron bit deeper into me, I was being cut in two. When I was severed what remained fell down upon the bed and the pain was over. I could hear a bustling and a soft clucking of tongues. Then I opened my eyes, and there was Mother, holding a baby, and the midwife with another.

‘Twins,’ Mother said. ‘Boy and girl.’

Twins were freaks; nobody expected them to be quite ordinary; if one, or both, lacked an eye, or even a limb, it would be no wonder. Holy Mother of God, you have dealt with me more gently than I deserve.

‘Are they whole?’ I whispered.

‘Whole? They are beautiful.’

Twins, Mother and the midwife agreed, are ordinarily smaller than other babies, but Walter and Maude were each as large as any single child; from this, and the abundance of hair on each of their heads Mother deduced that I had carried them over-long and muddled my dates.

‘Young women are so careless,’ she grumbled. ‘You told me March, and if they’d been born when they should, I might not have got to you in time.’

They were not a bit like one another once the red, crumpled new-born look had worn off. They were both born with black flair, but they shed it in the first weeks, and Walter’s grew black again, Maude’s reddish gold.

‘The wrong way about,’ Mother said. ‘The boy should favour you, and the girl her father. As often happens.’

‘To our cost. My Blanchefleur nose! I would sooner have had yours.’

Such trivial, cosy little conversations seemed to underline my sense of safety; as though I had forded a dangerous stream, been almost swept away, but struggled to safety and now could afford to talk about currents, deep waters, lost footholds. I was safe. I was lucky. I now had everything.

In a month I was up and about, fully restored to health, and miracle of miracles, my waist was its normal size. I knew that by my dresses; my nose, now that the flesh was back on my face, took its proper place again, and I knew that I was prettier than ever.

There being two babies to feed we were forced to engage a wet nurse – a thing not common in households of our degree however rich, and when I proved to be a poor milch cow, while she had enough for four, she took on all that duty, and I was free to enjoy the summer and go riding with Richard again.

It was he who suggested that we should ride to St. Petronella’s shrine and take a further present to show our gratitude. Something, and to this day I do not know exactly what it was, made me demur.

‘I don’t think that is customary. Women only go there to ask.’

‘Then it’s time somebody had manners enough to go and say “Thank you”,’ he said, smiling.

I smiled too.

‘I believe you have never been to St. Edmundsbury.’

‘That is so. We’ll go, shall we?’

‘You have to ride through the rowdiest kind of Fair.’

‘I shall be with you. And this time you can look down your nose at all the spell-binders. I warrant none of them bore two, weighing a full stone between them.’

To settle an argument between Mother and the midwife Master Reed had carried the babies out and weighed them in the wool scales.

Having no argument, no reason for not riding that way, except a vague and mysterious feeling that it would be wiser not to, I gave way, and we set off on a fine warm morning.

Richard enjoyed himself enormously, especially when we reached the stalls. I was newly puzzled how anyone so gentle and fastidious and dignified should seem so much at ease in such surroundings. He bought gingerbread babies and charms of every kind, and a long string of blue beads which he slipped over my head, tangling it in my veil. Even the shaggy old harridan who so brazenly shouted ‘in pod’ – only now she had changed her cry to ‘in pod by Lammas’ – did not disgust him. He gave her fourpence and laughed when she promised us four lusty sons.

‘Old fraud,’ he said as we moved on, ‘none of that gaggle of brats is hers, I’ll warrant.’

‘Then why encourage her?’

‘She must live. There’s something about people who try to wring a living out of the world, with nothing but a slick tongue or a penny whistle, that appeals to me.’

‘I know. You might have been born at a Fair, you seem so much at home.’

‘Then I could have played my lute.’

‘And dreamed of being the only son of a prosperous wool merchant, no doubt.’

‘No doubt at all.’

We rode on and entered the enclosure. Richard slipped a gold piece into my hand and I gave it to the monk by the inner gate. I set off briskly down the path, feeling the delight of moving freely and lightly again, and thinking that I had only to kneel and offer a few words of thanksgiving. But as I rounded one curve and then the next I found myself walking more and more slowly, while the distaste I felt for this apparently simple errand grew until it was terror. The day seemed to darken, and when I looked up at the sky I saw that a great purple cloud had reared up from the west and engulfed the sun.

I stood still and thought – I don’t
have
to go any farther, no one will know. Stand here and count up to a hundred, twice, slowly. But that would be cowardly, and later I should despise myself. All my life I had
heard a high price set on courage, and cowardice spoken of as rather worse than sin, and when I was a child, with my full share of childish fears I had always schooled myself to overcome them. Now to be frightened of nothing, that was ridiculous. So I set myself in motion; walked on and reached the shrine which was in all respects just as before.

I went down on my knees and suddenly could think of nothing except the words Master Reed had said to me just before my first visit here. ‘Miracles … they work in a queer twisted way, and I can’t for the life of me see how what you’re wanting could be other than straightforward.’ But I could see, with sudden, clear sight, how my miracle had come about, in, as he said, a queer, twisted way. Doubly twisted. First my madness, and then the fact that neither child bore any mark of its paternity. For let Mother say what she would about weight and crops of hair and muddled dates, I
knew
.

No doubt St. Petronella has been passionately thanked, even if the grateful petitioners did not make a journey to her shrine to do it, but she surely never was thanked, so passionately, so much from the heart as I thanked her in that moment when I understood the extent of her miracle.

I went back to Richard and suggested that we should wait for a little, since that cloud threatened rain. We sat under the chestnut trees and ate and drank, and still the rain held off, and at last he said, ‘In summer it often clouds over without a drop falling.’ So we set off. When we were on the open road, far from any house, there was a fearful clap of thunder, and the heavens opened and down came the rain, mingled with hailstones, as large as the blue beads I was wearing. I suggested sheltering under some trees near by, but Richard said they were elms dangerous at any time and doubly so in a storm, so we rode, on soon drenched and then shivering, for the day had turned cold as the hail fell.

Next day Richard was feverish and stayed in bed, hot and cold by turns, and coughing now and then. I made linseed poultices for his chest and rubbed him well with neats’-foot oil and beat honey and vinegar together for him to swallow, but the cough grew worse, and after the third night, when he had kept all our side of the house, save the babies, awake with it, Master Reed sent for the doctor. He had several remedies to try – one, the nature of which I concealed from Richard – was the liquor in which snails had been boiled, but nothing did any service until one morning he came along with a little horn full of a greenish-grey powder. One pinch of it, as much as one could take between finger and thumb was to be
dropped on top of a cup of warm milk or wine; just the one pinch and the dose was not to be repeated in less than twelve hours.

‘It is’, the doctor said, ‘a sovereign remedy, but it is also a powerful poison; taken in quantity, or too often, it could be fatal.’

‘I alone will administer it, and I will be very careful.’

That night he slept, and sleep is itself a healer. In the morning his fever was lessened, his skin moist and cool to the touch. During the day the cough returned, but less violently and so, day by day he made progress. In most ways he was an easy patient, grateful and cheerful, but being held to the one room irked him; his only complaint was that the walls seemed to be closing in. We pushed the bed close to the window and propped him up so that he could look out and see the sky. And as soon as he was well enough – about three weeks after our unfortunate journey – he came down, leaning on his father’s arm, into the solar.

That was a happy day and as soon as he was settled in the window seat, overlooking the garden, I got out my sewing which I had neglected lately. I was making Mother a winter cloak, of our own Baildon cloth, the cloth which was to become so famous that men would speak of ‘my Baildon breeches’, and women say, ‘I will wear my Baildon’. The cloth itself was dove grey, there was an interlining of shredded-out lambs’ wool, and a lining of red silk, the two last quilted together. It had a hood which could be pulled over the head or thrown back. It was, in fact, such a garment as Mother had never owned. Master Reed, immediately after our marriage, had done a generous thing, hired, for some absurdly high price, several of the acres which went with the house, to add to his sheep run, but none of the extra money found its way into Mothers wardrobe. Isabel went out into the world better equipped, and Mag, the old horse, had been replaced.

I was stitching away, when Richard said,

‘That is for your mother’s birthday, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. The day after tomorrow and I still have this much of the lining to fix, and then the hood to stitch on.’ I held it out and showed him.

‘It’ll be ready. And I shall be ready to ride out and take it.’

‘I should no more dream of letting you ride out to Minsham die day after tomorrow than I should dream of … well … of throwing myself into the river.’

‘But I’m better.’

‘You’re downstairs today for the first time. A fortnight hence will be time enough to talk about mounting a horse.’

‘I want to see Jason’; that was his hawk.

‘Then you must want,’ I said, stitching away.

‘Uncle Tom once warned me that all high-nosed women were masterful and domineering!’

‘How strange. Somebody once warned me that all black-haired men were obstinate and unreasonable.’

He laughed and coughed.

‘You sound like riding abroad the day after tomorrow.’

‘I shall.’

‘Then you’ll go alone. I will not lend my countenance to such a thing.’

Just then Master Reed entered the solar and Richard appealed to him to decide.

‘You would be more than foolish. Just to visit a hawk.’

‘But Anne will want to see her mother.’

‘So she shall. Clement can ride with her and take out the tar and spend his day helping the shepherd.’

Mother’s birthday dawned clear and bright, and Richard woke feeling so much better that I had to repeat my threat that if he rode I would stay at home. His improvement, and the fair morning sent my spirits soaring.

When I was ready to leave Master Reed came into the yard with me, carrying a small cask of wine.

‘For your mother, with good wishes,’ he said, and muttered something about it being a balance for the tar barrel.

There in the yard stood a big brown horse, and my palfrey, and standing between them Denys.

I know my step faltered, for Master Reed said,

‘Forgotten something?’

I shook my head, and went forward wondering whether I could, at this last moment say that I felt ill. A coward’s trick, and disappointing for Mother. And perhaps, after all, Denys was only holding the horses; it was Clement – who understood sheep – who was supposed to spend the day at Minsham with the shepherd. I stood, all confused and uncertain, sweat breaking out on my forehead and upper lip and the palms of my hands while the two men slung the wine cask.

There was still time to droop and dwindle and pretend a sudden pain. But I said to myself – Courage, courage.

Master Reed turned to me and said,