The Knot. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ litter for Frances, with Henry riding alongside, as even with allowances made for the sluggish nature of progress by carriage, the journey had taken a day longer than it should as a wheel was lost and they had to put up overnight at the inn in Stockbridge whilst the axle was repaired at the wright’s. But now here they are. This feels momentous, her arrival here; perhaps more so than the marriage itself. There is baggage due to follow when her mother comes next month.

      Four o’clock in the afternoon, and the fire has been lit with all speed to honour her entrance and take the chill off the hall. Someone has swept out the leaves and dirt that sift into the porch on windy days and has left the besom propped in the passage. All of the household is gathered here to glimpse the new mistress; John Parsons his bailiff; Old Hannah, Lisbet and other servants; the dairymaid; Richard Oxendon the horseman; various farmhands, and several tenants’ children clustered at the door. Frances removes her chaperon and cloak, goes straight to the hearth and stands shivering against the yellow fire. Her black hair is in rats’ tails from being blown about. She says nothing at all. Old Hannah mutters something to someone Henry cannot see. Henry tries to be jolly, stands beside her feeling stiff and damp and out of sorts and makes an awkward joke about the countryside, whilst all the time trying to recall how she’d looked when he saw her last. She seems very different here. Her skin is unnaturally white and smooth. He has a strong impulse to touch her cheek to see if there is any warmth to be had from it. She is like a doll, a figurine. He had wanted, expected her to look about and take in her new surroundings eagerly. She had been so pleased to see him, so chatty for much of the journey, pointing out distant spires of churches and asking questions. She must be feeling the very great difference of what she is now, he thinks, and is occupied with that. She is anxious, perhaps, or very tired. Yes of course, she needs hot food to eat and then her bed should be warmed. It must be that she is white with exhaustion, quite blanched through with it, indeed he can see now that she is almost swaying on her feet. Henry Lyte feels guilty that he hadn’t thought of that more promptly. She looks ready to faint.

      ‘Lisbet!’ he claps the servant over to take his wife to her chamber. A boy is dispatched to the carriage to bring in her first of many bags and cases.

      ‘Send up a caudle,’ he tells the cook. ‘Or a dish of eggs. Something hot and quick. My wife is tired.’ He is annoyed with himself for not having sent word on ahead to have a spread of food prepared ready for her arrival. Clearly he is out of the habit of being married to someone younger. The crowded hall filters away to usual duties, until it is very quiet in here, just the spit and crackle of the freshly lit fire.

      His girls, all stood beside it in a row, are watching him like little owls. Edith, at twelve years old the eldest, opens her mouth to speak but then closes it again. He looks at her, and then at Jane, who is nine, with baby Florence on her hip. At Mary, six, then back to Jane again – and is baffled.

      ‘What?’ he says.

      His new wife is asleep in the very middle of their bed by the time he goes up to see how she is, a plate of half-eaten tart and an empty mug on the floorboards at the end of the bed. He parts the curtains and holds up the candle but she does not stir in the pool of light. Her face is fine-boned and angular. Her breathing is deep and even, she lies with the cover pulled up over her chemise and one narrow wrist flung out. It seems bad-mannered to climb in and push her across, so he takes a blanket from the wicker coffer and retires for the night to the dressing room, where he does not sleep because the owls are so loud on the roof above him.

      In the morning he goes to his study to give his wife time to get ready in their chamber before coming down. He is not going to be a stranger in his own house ordinarily, but this is, after all, the first day: the first day of his new life. He stands at the window that gives onto the garden and watches a fine rain coming down and the green Sorcerer out on the grass, up-loping toward the ants. He sees Tom Coin coming back from the fishponds with a large carp flapping so much he can hardly keep it in the basket. Henry opens the window and leans out, and the noise of chopping up in the coppice tells him that the woodman is not idle, despite the weather. There is nothing seemingly wrong at all, and he should be glad for it. Why then does he feel so angry? It makes no sense. The Sorcerer puts his thick head up and seems to laugh at him as it flies away towards the wood.

      ‘I had no choice but to marry, I have four surviving daughters to consider. Four, dammit! They cannot run free in the mud like dottrill or little urchins. They need a woman’s hand to oversee their maturation, to bring them up in a civilized way until they are of age and can enter the world as wives and then mothers. They need to know French, totting-up, how to stitch, how to make sweet malt, bind a man’s wound, how to be in charge of the kitchen. Not everything can be taught by a nurserymaid.’ He indicates out of the window at the rainy scene. The grass is sodden and deserted, though to the far left a cow is being driven into the yard from Inner Close for milking.

      ‘Look at it out there,’ he demands, to the empty room, ‘what civilizing influences will be had by them if I do not seek it?’

      He regrets that there has been no time for grieving – practical matters to attend to when a family member dies seemed on this occasion to take all his vigour for months afterwards, he has felt blank and sucked dry of any melancholy or other emotion. He does not mean he didn’t suffer pain but that he felt it like a physical blow to the body, so that he sat by the hearth alone at night aching as though he’d been in a fight. Yes, it was just that he’d been in a fist-fight with death on behalf of his wife and had lost. It is all perfectly normal. Doesn’t everyone suffer deaths within their close family circle?

      In the year that his own mother Edith died, coffins went up the road to the church almost every week. There had been fair warning that death was to be afoot that year – in March around Lady Day there had come a great comet, reddish like Mars, half the size of the moon in diameter, with a flaming, agitated tail that stretched itself across the night sky and scorched a rightful terror into the hearts of those who looked upon it. There were many who said it was a clear token from God that the end of Catholic rule was near, and that Queen Mary’s tumour may have begun with its manifestation. A comet is a sure sign of change, or death. He hopes never to see another body like it in the sky. His mother had died in exceptional pain, drenched in sweat and gasping for air in what had been the hottest summer for eleven years, as she clung to his hand for those last dreadful days. Sometimes across his knuckles he feels the grip of her bones still, has to flex all his fingers to free himself of it. And sometimes when his eye catches at the horizon just after sunset, the first bright sight of Venus makes his blood pound momentarily, mistakenly. It is surely unthinkable that another comet of that stature could appear twice in a man’s lifetime.

      His father, remarried himself after Edith’s passing within two years, has no right to listen to any bad claims against his character. It’s just the usual way of things, to marry again.

      ‘Everybody does it,’ Henry goes on aloud to no-one. ‘Hadn’t I waited a decent length of time since Anys was taken from us by the will of God? By God’s will alone. It had been nearly a year.’ With this last thought, a draught blows under the door, and for a second he almost thinks he can catch the scent of her brushing against him like a substance.

      Anys smelt of leather polish and warm skin and oats. She smelt of hard work and prayerbooks and children and bread. He is sure he has remembered that right. He is sure she knew how well she was esteemed by him. He swallows. The whole business is unavoidable. He leaves the study hastily, goes to the last of his new wife’s boxes stacked in the hall, and carries them up.

      He had lost two servants soon after the funeral, but they’d each had good reasons, as they explained, for their change of situation. Lisbet is the new maidservant, she replaced Sarah who was a diligent worker. He had let her go with regret, Anys had thought so well of her. Lisbet is tolerably good, but he did wish he couldn’t hear her feet slopping down the corridor all the time when he is trying to concentrate. Why does she never pick them up when she walks? It occurs briefly СКАЧАТЬ