The Town House (4 page)

I did not know then, though I know it now, that the great forest stretched, with but few large clearings, from the Wash to the Thames river, but I knew it was large and I hoped that Kate and I could stay in its shelter for a long time, and then, perhaps emerge at Colchester, which was the only town besides Norwich which I knew by name. I knew it because of its oyster beds; every year, when my lord made his after-harvest visit, great creels of them were hurried up on horseback to lay upon his table. Where this town lay I did not know except that it was southward and my hope of reaching it was only a hope. For the woods, while offering shelter from the hue-and-cry along the roads, had dangers of their own. In the densest thickets there were wolves, and the even more dangerous
wild boars and everywhere there were the game wardens. Merely by entering the forest Kate and I were committing a felony and making ourselves liable to savage punishment, if caught.

All this we knew, yet, having found one another, we walked along in good spirits. On this first day of our journey the wood was mainly of beech trees, which do not encourage undergrowth. The great grey tree trunks rose straight and smooth as the pillars of a church, and under our feet was a carpet of leaves dropped in the autumns of by-gone years. We travelled until a grey dusk was thick amongst the trees. Then I remembered stories of men who had been lost in fogs, or in forests, or in great open spaces like sheep-runs and gone round and round, re-treading the same path. Lest we do the same and find ourselves, in the morning, back at Rede, I called a halt. We threw ourselves down under a tree so old that its roots in places grew clear of the soil, making little low caves. We crouched in one, ate bread and mutton and apples, the first food we had ever taken together. I thought of that, blasphemously perhaps, thinking that it was a kind of communion; and as I did so Kate put up her hand and touched the twisted arch of root under which we sat.

‘This is our very first house,’ she said.

Something began in my belly and swelled and swelled until it reached my head; I forgot all my fears, forgot our present plight and the future’s uncertainties. I felt brave and powerful, tireless, undefeatable.

‘You shall have better, sweetheart. I will build it myself, a snug, trig house, as sound as this tree.’ I reached out my longer arm and laid a finger on the tree trunk.

Kate laughed and said, ‘I’m glad you were touching wood!’

I laughed too. Rede seemed far away, here in the wood’s quiet, with night gathering about us we might have been alone in the world, another Adam, another Eve in a new Garden of Eden. We finished our meal and afterwards slept in each other’s arms.

The next four or five days – that is so long as the food lasted – were the happiest in my whole life. I can look back and see them, set apart, glowing with something more than sunshine. Since then I have never pitied idiots; for during that time Kate and I were touched by idiocy, not set free from the dangers and cares of ordinary living but somehow
not properly concerned. It was as though we had ceased to be Kate, daughter of the shepherd, Walter, son of the smith, and become people in some minstrel’s song, walking through the greenwood, loving one another. ‘All for love.’

The nature of the woods changed; the clear-floored beech trees ended and we came to the thick forest, with undergrowth of hazels, brambles and bracken, all closely woven. Sometimes we could turn aside to seek easier passage, sometimes I had to go ahead, hacking a way through with my knife. Still we moved on, careful to keep the sun upon our left hand until it was high, walking into its eye for an hour and then keeping it upon our right until it sank. We were sparing of our poor provisions, eking them out with blackberries and unripe hazel nuts, with sloes and crab-apples that soured our mouths, but even so we came to an end and were face to face with the eternal problem of the poor, brought back to earth by the question which is for all but the rich the first and the last question – How shall we eat today? We learned, soon enough, that love is a business for those with full bellies. No, maybe there I wrong Kate and through her, all women; I think they care more for love and less for their bellies than men do. She stayed cheerful long after I had begun to fret; she spoke gently and lovingly while my words grew few and sharp from hunger.

We say, lightly enough, the words ‘starve to death’. Put like that it sounds easy and brief enough, a man ceases to eat and he dies. The truth is that he does not immediately die. Death by starvation has many unpleasant stages. There is the belly pain, as though, within you, some strange animal hungered and lacking other sustenance, gnawed at your vitals with sharp fangs. There is, following the pain, a constant desire to vomit, as though you would turn your empty belly inside out, like a beggar proving his pocket to be coinless. There is a shakiness in the bones, your hands fumble and grow clumsy, your knees give way. There is a ringing in your ears, as though bees hived there.

As our need to get out of the forest grew greater we made less progress. We were weaker and we were forced to hunt. From the cord I made a rabbit snare and we wasted hours sitting somewhere near, but out of sight, fretting over the loss of time and yet glad enough to have reason for inaction. I caught nothing.

Kate bore up bravely until we ate the hawthorn berries. They were plump and red and ripe and looked to us, in our hunger, as good as cherries. ‘Birds eat them,’ we told one another; and we ate them, in
quantities. They did me no harm at all, but they turned Kate’s bowels to water. Soon she was stumbling along, doubled over with pain and looking so wan that I was frightened. Up to that point we had been careful to make as little of ourselves as possible, but now I began calling as we went forward, cupping my hands to my mouth and uttering loud cries. Wood-cutters, charcoal-burners and gamewardens lived in the forest and now that we were starving the hope of falling in with some man with a heart of Christian charity loomed larger than our fear. Nothing answered me but my own voice, bouncing back from the trees. In all that time we saw nothing but one red deer which flickered away like something seen in a dream.

We found no more hawthorn berries, but Kate’s infirmity persisted; the time came when she could no longer walk at all, so I carried her; and I did not go straight forward, I took the easiest way. She never weighed much, but now she was variable. I’d pick her up and it was like lifting a kitten, so light she was; but as I went on she grew heavy and heavier. Sweat broke out all over my body, my heart hammered, my sight clouded. In the end I would set her down and fall prone, and she would creep away a little distance, behind the nearest tree or bush and then emerge, more deathly pale than ever. Through the ringing and buzzing in my ears a stern voice would say clearly, ‘Kate is going to die and you are to blame.’ Presently I would brace myself and try again. Again. Again. Making no progress, and the forest going on and on, and nobody in it but us.

From hunger sleep is no refuge; the starving do not sleep; they slip from one kind of misery to another; the gnawing pain goes on and so does the worry. I would lie down and think, imagine, dream, that a fine fat rabbit was kicking in my snare, then I would struggle up, shouting, to find that the piece of cord was still twisted about my wrist because I had lain where I had fallen and never set the snare at all.

It was a nightmare time.

Once I lifted Kate, turned dizzy, and only just set her down before I dropped her. She said, in a weak voice, gasping,

‘You can’t… carry me… any more. Leave me. No need… for both… to die.’

If I had had a known destination or any real hope of finding help I might have been more tempted. But mere walking was not going to save me. Only a miracle could do that. I told her so.

‘Only a miracle can save us now. And a miracle could happen here as well as at any other place.’ So I lay beside her for a little, gathering my strength, and then staggered a little distance and set my silly snare. That
was the miracle I expected, a rabbit in my snare. As I set it I prayed, not in the manner I had been taught but as though God were the steward and I were begging some small favour of him. ‘God send a rabbit, please God. A rabbit, God, please.’ The light was just beginning to fail; it was a time when rabbits were abroad.

When I got back to Kate she said,

‘I can smell… herrings roasting.’

I almost wept then. I knew that delusion. It had been my companion for hours, days. As I walked I had smelt more food cooking than had ever been set on my lord’s table; fat pork boiling with peas; roasting fowl; dried herring; new bread; seethed beef; dredged hare; onions.

‘Poor Kate,’ I said. ‘My poor, poor Kate. Your hungry nose deceives you.’

‘But I can … can’t you?’

I sniffed. I could smell it. A mouth-watering smell at any time. After the harvest of the earth came the harvest of the sea and the dried herring would come in barrels to Rede. When the day’s work was done father and I would toast them, on long sticks, by the fire. We could have been doing it now, while Kate ate venison and syllabub at Abhurst.

Call me heartless knave if you will. But first go hungry for uncounted days; then make your own choice, love or a roasted herring. Lie, weak with hunger on the ground and stare death by starvation in the face, and choose. If you say, Love, then I will call you saint and you may call me what you will. I am honest with myself. I wished myself back at Rede with a herring spluttering at the end of a stick, and Kate safe and full fed in Abhurst.

I lay, wishing that, and the good smell continued. Presently I realized that never before in my delusions had the one kind of smell continued. Moreover it grew more powerful. This, I thought, was because I was growing weaker, slipping farther and farther from reality. Perhaps, I thought, before we died we should taste food as well as smell it, God’s final mercy. And from that I turned to thinking about dying, as Kate and I must do, unshriven, with all our sins upon us. Even the joys of our few happy days had been stolen. Unconfessed and unabsolved they would weigh heavy in the scales. I was beginning, desperately, to try to recall the proper prayers for those on the point of departure when Kate nudged me.

‘Go and … look. It can’t … be … far away.’

Even in that extremity my good strong body served me; lying prone, even in despair, had restored me. Standing up, without having to lift Kate, I found myself steadier than I could have hoped. Turning my head from side to side like a hound, and drooling water at the mouth, I set off in the
direction from which the scent seemed strongest. A few paces brought me to a place where, in some time past, the forest trees had been felled. Where they had stood a coppice of bushes, elder and wild rose and hawthorn had grown up. Close pressed and fighting with one another, they had woven themselves into a living wall. The strong scent of herrings roasting came from its farther side. I walked along the thicket, seeking an entrance, but there was none, and the scent grew fainter. I turned back and walked the other way. The fence continued and the smell again faded. I was vastly puzzled. No house could be completely enclosed.

I staggered to the spot where the smell was strongest and threw myself at the bushes, thrusting my way into them bodily, hacking at them with my knife in a frenzy. The last line of them gave way before my onslaught and I found myself standing at the top of a little bank, looking down upon a sight as astonishing as it was welcome. To left and right, as far as eye could see in either direction, ran a straight flat road, bordered on each side by thicket like that through which I had just forced my way. The road was thickly grassed and at the point immediately below me stood a jenny ass with her foal. Near by was a fire and over it, slung on a cross bar, the herrings. Standing guard over the whole was a little old woman with a donkey stick in her hand and an expression on her face that was at once terrified and defiant.

‘Keep your distance!’ she said. ‘I’ve nowt worth stealing, and if you come near I shall fetch you a clout.’

I must have been a fearsome sight, bursting through the bushes knife in hand, the bruises of my beating turning greenish yellow, the broken places now well-scabbed, all in addition to my desperate, hungry look.

My wits were still with me, however. I did not move, but dropped the knife so that it fell down the bank almost at her feet.

‘Good mother,’ I said, ‘I am no robber. We have gone astray in the forest and are like to die of hunger. Of your charity, let us eat.’ Then I remembered that I had money. ‘I am no beggar, either.’ I took out a penny and threw it after the knife.

‘We,’ she repeated on a questioning note. ‘How many are you?’

‘Myself and my wife, she is in worse case.’

‘All right then.’ She Stooped and picked up my knife and the penny. ‘No tricks, though. I’m old, but I’m lively.’

I turned and pushed my way back through the gap, widening it as best I could, and walked to where I had left Kate.

‘Was… it true?’

For answer I bent and lifted her. Hope had given me strength and I was able to carry her to the gap and pull her through it. The old woman was still on guard, but at the sight of Kate her manner changed.

‘Poor creature,’ she said, and coming forward helped me to bring Kate down the little bank and place her by the fire. Then she quickly slid the herrings from the stick, cut great slabs from a round brown loaf and said,

‘Lay to. And God send Grace on the food.’

I ate as I had never eaten before, but Kate, after a bite or two, sickened again.

‘Poor mawther. She has clemmed over-long. Her belly is shrunk. If only…’ In her face, brown and wrinkled as a walnut, her faded eyes snapped and sparkled. ‘God be thanked,’ she said. ‘We have it!’

She routed about amongst her belongings and found a little wooden bowl.

‘You must hold the donkey steady,’ she said to me. ‘She’s not been milked this way afore.’

If ever there should come a time when dancing bears are so common that they no longer draw a crowd, an old woman, a young man and a jenny ass in milk should go the rounds. I was too anxious about Kate to be other than vexed by the performance and the time it took, but even then I could see its comical side, especially when the little foal, shrewd enough to see that it was being robbed, came butting in. However, at last we had a cupful of milk in the bowl. Kate drank it and it stayed down. The old woman slipped some more herrings on the stick.