The Town House (17 page)

‘You come and lay down,’ she insisted. ‘You can lay under my rag.’

He said ‘No,’ and flung himself down by the black ruin, the grave of all his love. The old woman sat down beside him, took his head in her skinny dirty claws and eased it into her lap. Her kindness, or the ale – it was a long time since he had drunk anything but water – loosened something in him. Tears came, and with them words, such a flow of words as he was never to loose again. Everything he said was self-reproachful, all concerned with the ruin he had made of Kate’s life, how he had promised that she should be safe with him and then robbed her of the only safety possible in this unjust world. Old Agnes hardly listened. She stroked his head and at intervals muttered a soothing word or two. ‘You couldn’t help that, lad. ‘Aye, I know, I’ve been through it myself, long ago.’ ‘Ah, that’s the way it is when you’re poor.’ And once she said, ‘Dying young’s no real hardship. Plucked off the bough, clean and sound. If you hang on you rot. I’ve seen ’em, Martin, riddled with rot, stinking like corpses, but still alive. Kate and your little ones are safe from that, they’re safe from everything now. We’re the ones anything could happen to. We’re in worse case.’

Pert Tom had been born into an age and a community as devoutly mystical, as thoroughly religious as any in the history of mankind. As a baby he had been baptized, as a child put through his Catechism. As an apprentice the only holidays he had known, the only landmarks in the year’s toil had been the festivals of the Church and the Saints’ days. As a soldier even his oaths had been religious, since without belief there can be no blasphemy; and as a bear leader he had never spent a whole day without passing through a town where a new church was building, or mingling with a group of pilgrims on their way to or from some shrine, or hearing a Friar preach, some convent bell ringing.

Of it all he had absorbed and retained only one thing, as primitive and as personal as a savage’s devotion to his household idol. Pert Tom believed in St. Ursula. That same fellow soldier who had given him the information about the painlessness of death by burning had told him that St. Ursula was the patron saint of bears and bear leaders – an excusable piece of misinformation based upon the likeness of the Saint’s name to the generic Ursus, meaning bear. When a dead man’s ring provided Tom with the price of Owd Muscovy, he had thanked St. Ursula and adopted her as his personal Deity. The Holy Trinity and the rest of the Saints seemed, like most respectable people, to be against him and his fellow vagrants, but St. Ursula, whom he visualized as a stout, comfortable, vulgar, tolerant old woman, was firmly on his side. When a cunning idea slid into his head, it came direct from her; any trick he played had her nudging connivance; any luck that came his way was her work. She did not, like the rest of them, set a poor man any impossible standard of virtue. She made no demands. She entirely understood that he had meant Kate no harm and that it had been necessary to lie about the burns on his hands and face. Proof of her understanding and partnership was there, concrete, indisputable. Look how he had been rewarded!

By April of the next year Pert Tom had some vague conception of just how full and rich his reward was to be, and it occurred to him for the first time, that he should make a gesture of recognition towards this Saint who had been so overwhelmingly generous to him. So when, with the spring, the fresh tide of pilgrims and tumblers and minstrels and vagrants came pouring into Baildon, he began to look out for an image seller, and before long found one.

The image seller was of grave, almost priestly mien. He carried a tray of meticulously fashioned, beautifully coloured little images and a box of
holy relics. He wore a hat with cockle-shells which indicated – in his case falsely – that he had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and his box contained, amongst other things a sliver of wood, purporting to be a piece of the true Cross, two thorns from Christ’s crown of mockery, and a two-inch square of St. Veronica’s handkerchief. Most of the figures on the tray were of the Virgin, the rest were of female Saints after whom girl children were named. What parent, having named a daughter Agnes could resist buying for her an image of the Saint, with the lamb at her feet?

All the figures were made and fired and coloured at a pottery in Wattisfield, where clay had been dug and worked in Roman times, and they were all made by one old man, who, though he worked quickly enough to keep four salesmen on the road from April to September as well as supplying two settled dealers, one in Norwich and one in Walsingham, never turned out anything shoddy or slapdash. True, the colours of the Saints’ garments were a little gaudy, customers liked them that way, but the tiny faces were virginal and saintly, pearly-pale and wearing one of two expressions, gently smiling or gently sorrowful.

On this bright April morning, Pert Tom, now a gentleman of leisure, with money in his pocket, halted and looked over the image-seller’s stock. He would know his Saint when he saw her, buxom, red-faced, her interest identified by a bear, or perhaps a goad, spiked collar or muzzle. There was no St. Ursula; the old man at Wattisfield knew his business; little girls in that district were named Catherine, Ethelred, Winifred, Edith, Agnes, Elizabeth.

‘You ain’t got what I want,’ Tom said reproachfully.

‘And who was you wanting?’

‘St. Ursula.’

‘Here y’are.’ He proffered a St. Ethelreda with her daisy emblem.

‘That ain’t my St. Ursula. She’d hev a bear.’

‘A what?’

‘A bear. Growler. Got a bit of flesh on her bones too.’

‘Oh! That one! Sold the last a day or two back. Great demand. Bring you good health, good luck. Tell you what, I’ll bring one on my next round. I’ll be back here for the Lammas Fair. You live here?’

He must ask that, for an unpopular outlandish Saint, with a
bear,
would be quite unsaleable, and Pert Tom, though he had now been settled for five months and looked like being settled for the rest of his life, still had a vagrant look, something of the roadster about him.

‘I live here. All right. I’ll look out for you Lammas time.’

There must be some special interest, something extra behind such choosiness, and it might be open to exploitation.

‘Of course, if you
liked
and was prepared to pay for it, I could hev her made with a bit of genuine relic to it – strand of her own real hair or something. Only that’d cost you, naturally.’

‘How much?’

‘Two shillings,’ said the image seller tentatively, ready to abate the price should this odd customer flinch.

‘I could manage that. But I want her
proper,
bear and all. Not one of them poor peaked looking things.’

‘You should mind your tongue, remembering who these are. And if you want the hair then you’ll have to pay half down.’

Tom paid, calling upon St. Ursula as he did so, to witness how heart-felt was his gratitude that he should take such a risk.

Weeks after, on the morning of the Lammas Fair, he took delivery of his order with loud complaints.

The old man in Wattisfield, who was a dedicated artist, had disliked being given definite orders; he had protested that though he knew more about the Saints than any bishop alive he had never heard of a St. Ursula who had dealings with bears. There was only one St. Ursula, a virgin, who with eleven hundred other virgins, had been martyred at a place called Cologne by some people called Huns. A virgin saint. And virgin saints were all slender, pearly pale, yellow haired, gently smiling or gently grave. He’d been making them for years and he
knew.
‘Flesh on her bones,’ the very thought was a heresy.

‘But master, I told him two shillings and he paid one down. I promised him real hair.’

Even the artist agreed that such a customer merited some consideration. But when it came to the point he could not bring himself to sacrifice his artistic integrity to the extent of making a Saint as buxom as a washerwoman. He made a solid looking brown bear to crouch at the hem of the blue robe and the inclusion of a flaxen curl cut from the head of his youngest grand-daughter cost him no twinge of conscience at all. If people were such fools as to believe that their silver could buy hair from the head of a woman dead and buried for hundreds of years they deserved to be cheated. What could not be cheated or ever would be, was his own standard of workmanship.

‘Poor starved-looking thing! But for the bear I shouldn’t’ve known her,’ said Tom, handing over his money grudgingly.

Still, there it was, he had bought the best that money could buy and St. Ursula, who had understood so much, would understand that the false representation was not his fault.

He carried the little image home and set it on a shelf in the room that was his, the first room that he had ever been able to call his own.

‘Set you there,’ he said, ‘and enjoy all you was so kind as to give me.’

He thought of how, in the next dark winter, when the snow fell and the mud lay thick in the roads, the flames would leap on the hearthstone and the howling wind would drop back baffled by the thick walls and the stout shutters, by the heavy door and deep thatch of the house that was already known as the Old Vine.

No member of any Guild had laid a finger on the house. Martin had planned it and done much of the work, the rest had been done by unemployables like Peg-Leg and Dummy. The monks’ Old Vineyard lay outside the town walls where the Guild rules did not hold.

It was a small house, two tiny rooms and a kitchen, but there was as much sound timber in it as in many three times the size. The walls were made of oaken posts, planted at eighteen-inch intervals. Smaller beams were set aslant, joining the bottom of the one post to the top of the next, and the triangles thus formed were divided again, horizontally. The spaces were filled in with laths and the whole plastered over, once on the inside and twice on the outside. A brick chimney in the centre carried the smoke from both rooms and from the kitchen hearth.

‘We’ll have our own fire,’ Martin had said, already aware that although he had bonded himself for life to the bear leader his enforced constant company would be intolerable. All that he had, all that he intended to have in the future, he was prepared to share with Tom, who had tried to save Kate, and with Old Agnes, who had tried to ease his hour of misery, but his fire and his bed he must have to himself.

The little house stood at the lowest edge of the vineyard, close to the road, and adjoining it, sharing a wall with Martin’s own room, was the new smithy, into which, during the next summer season much of Armstrong’s and Smithson’s trade was to be diverted. Once the house and smithy were up Martin’s gang of cripples and misfits who would work for any pittance and the certainty of one good meal a day, set to work upon a stable block, built of clod and wattle.

Pert Tom could see the reason for the house and for the forge where Martin was going to earn a living for them both, but the stables puzzled him.

‘What do’you want them for?’

‘I shall offer stabling, like smith work, at a price those in town can’t match. To begin with that is. Later I shall have horses of my own.’

‘And what d’you aim to do with them?’

‘You’ll see.’

It was not a satisfactory answer, but one with which Tom must be content. To press a question was useless, although on that November morning when Martin had talked in stony-faced calm with Tom, one of his reasons for offering to take him into partnership was that he needed his company.

‘There’s not a man in this town that I can ever bring myself to talk to, except in the way of business, and that the least I can; and living that fashion a man could be struck with the dumb madness.’

The other reason he had given was that he needed Tom’s partnership as a screen for his own sudden possession of money.

‘I’ve got it and I didn’t steal it. More than that I can’t tell you. Nobody could know what you’ve earned, or saved over the years, It’d look natural enough for you to settle down, build a house and a smithy for me to work in, so that your old age would be taken care of. You could have come into Baildon with some such scheme in mind.’

His real, his secret reason, the wish to share with Tom all that he should have shared with Kate, he never mentioned to anyone. Nor did he ever put into words his grudge against the town. When, at the beginning of the second summer season a deputation of the Smiths’ Guild waited upon him and offered him full membership, even some seniority, admission at once as a master man, if he would cease under-cutting prices, he gave no sign of the bitter, ironic amusement the proposal roused.

‘I cannot see how that would work to my advantage,’ he said.

And this time, though the damage he was doing them was far more serious than that he had done by shoeing Master Webster’s pack ponies, they hesitated about taking revenge by violence. For this there were two reasons, he had his gang of riff-raff, the poor without a craft, the disabled, reinforced by tougher elements, an old soldier or two, one of Peg-Leg’s ship-mates, a half-crazy priest who had been unfrocked. They owned an almost feudal allegiance to Martin, who allowed them to build another, more solid Squatters Row at the back of his stables, who paid them when there was work to be done and fed them between times. And there was also a strong feeling throughout the town that Pert Tom and Martin, in becoming – as it seemed – tenants of a piece of Abbey land,
had moved into the shadow of the protection of that august authority. It was an authority with which, at the moment, the townspeople had no wish to try another throw. After their failure in the previous November the Abbey seemed to delight in grinding their faces; even the rule concerning the eel-fishing had now been revived and was strictly enforced. The town as a whole had been laid under an obligation to pay a large part of the cost of the new gate and was groaning under the imposition. Not until many years had passed, and a King set an example, would the people of Baildon defy their Abbot again.

The suspicion that the Abbey looked with favour upon Pert Tom and Martin who had taken a piece of unprofitable land off its hands was confirmed by the story of an amazingly out-of-character behaviour upon the part of the new Cellarer. It concerned a horse, a young, strong horse, newly broken, and brought to Martin’s forge to be shod for the first time. Its owner, an oldish peasant, was sitting on a bench waiting, when he clapped his hand to his chest, gave a loud groan and collapsed. He was dead when he was picked up. It was evening when his eldest son came to remove the body, and before he left he said to Martin, slyly,