The Town House (2 page)

But I … I must needs fall in love!

There was, at first sight, no reason why my love for my sweet Kate should cause any upset. She belonged to our manor of Rede and her father was, like mine, a villein. He was a shepherd and lived on the sheep run, over by the river in a remote and lonely place; and since Ancaster church was nearer his hut than ours of Rede, he and his family went to Mass there; so I was twenty and Kate was seventeen before I noticed her, and then it was only by chance.

I was by this time a skilled smith and more active than my father, so when there was a job to be done at a distance I was the one to go; and on an April afternoon I was coming home from Ancaster, walking downhill towards the river where the stepping stones were, when I saw, on the Rede side of the stream, a child – as I thought – washing some linen in the stream. That was an ordinary sight enough on an April day when the body-clothes worn through the winter could be sloughed off and cleansed, and I took no notice until a woman came out of the shepherd’s hut, walked towards the child, berating her as she walked, and then, snatching up a broken branch that lay near-by, began to lay on heavily.

That again was no extraordinary sight and it was not for me to interfere between parent and child; only the priest, or perhaps the steward, had the right to do that. The little girl took the punishment without outcry and, for all I knew, deserved it. But after a moment, I, who all my life had seen women beating their children, was struck by the ferocity with which this woman went about the job. I splashed over the stones and on the other side slowed my pace and at last stood still. The woman seemed to be in a killing rage, and the prevention of murder is every man’s Christian duty. So I said.

‘Have a care, good wife. Such heavy stripes might kill the little wench.’

From what Kate told me later I have no doubt the woman would, sooner or later, have done that, but not out in the open under the eye of a witness. She gave me a savage look and laid on three more blows as though to prove her right, but they were lighter ones, and then she threw down the branch and went stamping and grumbling away back into the hut.

My fate then made me go to comfort the child, and as soon as I was within arm’s reach of her I saw that her smallness belied her years; inside the torn dress was the white curve and the pink bud of a girl’s breast. I looked on it and was lost.

I am not a poet or a singing man to tell of love. When I think of what made her dearer to me than any other I can only say that she was so small, so light and thin and small, like a little bird, a little rabbit. To the end of our days together I never grew used to the smallness of her, and my hands – sometimes against my will – always went gentle when they neared her. For the rest, her hair was the colour of new run honey and her eyes as blue as a speedwell.

I held her close to me for comfort, and dragging down the end of my sleeve I dipped it in the water and wiped away the blood where the skin was broken. She cried then. That was ever her way; to bear the blow, no matter how heavy, with fortitude, and then melt at a word or touch of kindness. When she was quiet again I asked for what reason her mother dealt so ill with her.

‘She is not my mother. She is my father’s new wife and she wishes me out of the house.’

‘To go would be better than to be treated thus roughly,’ I said.

‘I cannot. The steward orders me to stay. I help my father with the sheep.’

‘Then he must stand between you and the woman.’

‘Ah, but she lays about him with her tongue,’ Kate said. ‘I should think shame to tell you what she says of us if ever he even looks at me kindly.’

I held her in the crook of my arm and thought more rapidly than I had done for years, since I had done the last time the priest questioned me. Up to that moment the business of bedding and breeding had troubled me less than it does most men. One day, I had said to myself, I should marry and get a son to work in the forge when I, in my turn, began to shake and shudder, but it had never seemed an urgent or even a desirable business. There had never been a woman in our hut, and father and I had managed very well; we were peaceful and better fed than most. But now I knew.…

‘Be of good heart,’ I said, ‘and keep out of the woman’s way as far as you can. I shall be back tomorrow, to see how you fare.’ I dared not say more lest I should raise a hope which it would be cruel to cast down. Rede, though in many ways a manor far behind the times, was well run, and the priest kept the Kin Book in order to make sure that no marriage was within the forbidden degree. There were the laws of the Church to be minded and other, unwritten laws which ruled against the wedding of double cousins, that is, cousins related upon both sides. Experience had proved such unions to be bad alike for mind and body, hare-lips, fits, deafness, dumbness and blindness had been the penalties of such near-incest in the past. So, on all properly managed estates, even the lowest hind had his ‘Pedigree’ and it must be consulted before leave to marry was given.

When I left Kate I went straight to the priest’s house. I told him that I wished to marry Kate, daughter to the shepherd, and he said something which I always remembered.

‘I have watched you, Walter, my son, and it has vexed me lest all unwitting, I made a monk out of you when you were young yet failed to bestow the benefit of clergy upon you. I was not to blame.’

‘I know that, Father. You had no cause to be vexed for me.’

‘You are twenty years old. Half your life is sped.’

A cold thought for a man in love. I shuffled it off, looking at him; he had been in his middle years when he taught me.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘clerks live longer. That is the rule. Measure your years not by mine but by your father’s. He lacks a year of his two score and he is an old man.’

That was all too true. Oh hurry, I said in my mind; open that Kin Book, give me leave to marry Kate, for twenty years is all too short a time. And yet, if we cannot marry, twenty years without her will last for ever, they will last so long that I cannot live them out.

He used his finger on the page of parchment which, with other pages, all of slightly different size and tied by thongs on to a stave of wood made up the book. Sweat broke out on my forehead and around my mouth. Weeks, months, years went by; and at last he lifted his head and said,

‘You are no kin to her.’

I thanked him as though he, and he alone, had arranged it.

It was too late, that evening, to disturb the steward; but early next morning, before he went out on his rounds, I went to him.

‘Ha!’ he said. ‘And about time too. By the Rood I don’t know what is happening to you young rascals. Too idle to breed! With labour so scarce, too.’ That reminded him of something else. ‘The wench must stay at her work,’ he said. ‘So she does that, nobody minds in which hut she sleeps. Except you, of course,’ he gave me a nudge and a leer. ‘You can tell shepherd that the bride fee will be two geese, rightly fattened. That being settled, I am sure you will have my lord’s permission to marry. It is a pity that you must wait until his harvest visit.’

That day I whistled as I worked, and as soon as I could down tools, went, without waiting for my supper, over to the shepherd’s hut and said to that weak-minded man,

‘I have from priest and steward, permission to marry your daughter, Kate.’

The woman looked pleased, but he grunted, and said something about talk coming cheap; he was a poor man with a wife and two children younger than Kate; where was the merchet coming from? He supposed I had never even thought of that; young men in their heat never remembered that every time a girl married the lord exacted his due.

‘But I have remembered. Steward said two fat geese, and them I will provide.’

‘Three’, he said, ‘can be fattened as easy as two. One for me, two for my lord and the bargain is made.’

‘It is made,’ I said, and struck hands on it. ‘And now,’ I said, stepping back and including the woman in my stare, ‘any blow on Kate’s body will be a blow on mine and I will repay it four-fold.’ As I spoke I knotted my great fist and the muscle on my forearm leaped up and quivered. Shepherd bleated, like his own bell-wether.

‘The children have run overlong unmothered. Their new mother did not more than mend their manners.’

His other children were boys, aged about seven and nine, and hardy looking. They bore no marks of ill-usage that I could see, whereas my poor Kate was all swollen and marked from yesterday’s beating.

‘Any correction that Kate needs from this day forward
I
will tend to,’ I said, smiling at her, and feeling my heart go soft. ‘As for you boys, if the woman bears on you too hard, kick her back. You’re two against one, or, if you, shepherd, had the courage of a louse, three. What did she bring as her marriage portion? A gelding iron?’

‘Take your foot from my floor,’ the woman cried, furiously.

‘Gladly,’ I said, and taking Kate by the arm I drew her out and we went to a place where a bent hawthorn, just coming into flower, leaned over the stream. And there I held her close and we talked. I said,

‘My pretty one, you shall be safe with me.’

Safe with me. Yes, I said that. I looked down the years and saw her in our hut, eating fatly of food I had provided, growing smooth and sleek. She was so small and I was so strong, I would never even let her carry a bucket of water from the well. Her work as sheep-girl I could not order, but I would put fear into the shepherd, so that the hard tasks did not fall to her. She should be safe with me.

Now here is something which men born in free towns, or on the manors of more enlightened lords, may find hard to believe; or they will believe that it was true in times long past, not in my living memory. But I swear by all that I hold holy, it was true at Rede. It was a custom which our Norman masters brought with them. Having a little learning I can give it its proper name–
Jus primae noctis
–but we called it First Night’s and it meant simply that the lord of the manor had the right, if he so wished, to take any serf-born girl’s maidenhead. Whether he exercised the right depended upon many things, the man’s own lustfulness, age or disposition, the way the girl looked, the fashion in the district. On many manors it was regarded as out-moded, like the Twelve Days of the Lord of Misrule at the Christmas season: but in this, as in other matters, my Lord Bowdegrave was old-fashioned, and here and there about Rede manor, and about his others I have no doubt, the long straight Norman nose, the cleft chin, the bright hazel eyes which were the visible sign of the Bowdegrave breed, could be seen, incongruous in a peasant face, bearing witness that he had not only exercised his right, but done it potently. Of late years, however, age and an increasing heaviness – it took two stout men to heave him into his saddle by this time – had cooled
his ardours and for several seasons past he had contented himself with kissing the prospective bride if she were comely, or giving her a smack on the rump if she were otherwise.

Occasionally, during the weeks that followed my be-speaking of Kate, I thought upon this matter. It seemed to me impossible that any man, however old, however much he weighed, could look upon my Kate and not desire her. Yet, strange as it may sound to any not serf-born, I was not unduly disturbed. This matter of acceptance of circumstance cuts very deep. Think of those born hump-backed, deaf, blind. They accept their fate and bear it. I was born a serf. If my services were required even in the next village, Ancaster, to shoe a horse or mend a plough, I must ask the steward’s permission before I could step across the boundary between Rede and Ancaster. Think how irksome that rule would be on any free man. To me it was nothing. In the same way it was … well, almost nothing, that the unlikely might happen and my Lord Bowdegrave should claim his First Night’s right upon Kate. She would be mine for the rest of our lives. He could not be prevented. There lies the whole crux of the matter; what cannot be prevented must be borne, like unseasonal weather, mildew on wheat, murrain in cattle. Through May and June and the months that must drag until our lord’s harvest visit every time I thought upon the matter I told myself – There is nothing I can do; it is unlikely that he will claim his right, but if he does what is one night?

That was a year of most remarkable fine weather. With the new moon of June the heat set in and by mid-July the corn was ready for reaping. Without hitch or hindrance, without so much as a summer shower to halt it, the harvest went on and before the end of August, a full month early, the stubbles were cleared. My Lord Bowdegrave, informed of this, put forward his visit and my time of waiting was cut from October to September.

I had ruled myself well. To a degree the season had been in my favour; hay-time and harvest are busy times for smiths, and this year, since they followed so hard on one another’s heels, I was doubly busy. Also Kate’s father, resenting, perhaps, my words about the gelding iron, had sent Kate farther and farther afield as pasture became scarce. So I saw her but rarely. However, late in August, the grass having grown again on the low land by the river, the flock came home, and one night, under a lop-sided moon, she and I lay together.

It was sin; but she was guiltless. God and all the saints are witness to that. I did it deliberately, courting all blame. I had heard that day, somewhere in the yard, that my lord was on his way to Rede, and I thought, he is old and
clumsy, and he does not love her. She is very small. There may be hurt and it is better that I, who love her.… That was part of my thought, but not all. There was the reined-in desire of the last five months, and there was the wish to forestall, to be first, despite all custom.

Afterwards I took her face between my hands with their calloused palms and blackened nails and I said,

‘Now you belong to me.’

So then my Lord Bowdegrave came to Rede and there was much commotion, with the paying of the rents and the taking of tallies of all his stacks and beasts and flitches and honey-combs. Then, one fine morning, Kate and I were called into the hall, just as, long ago, my father and I had been called when it was to ask consent for me to go to the monks’ school. Walking over the fresh rushes, hand in hand with Kate, I was grateful that that consent had been refused.