Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “He really is like a cat,” she thought to herself good-humouredly. “They never refuse cream, but they never need you either.”

  Sometimes, as she rode back to Sarum after one of her visits, she would allow her mind to dwell upon those faces she thought she had seen at the window. What were they like, Jethro’s women, she wondered? Village girls, farmer’s wives perhaps? How much, even now, did she really know about the folk on the plain? She had no wish to be one of them; yet sometimes she daydreamed about what it would be like, if she lived in another world, to be loved by him. Then she would kick her horse into a canter, feel the wind on her face and laugh at herself.

  “That’s one thing, Miss Shockley, you will never know.”

  They had their quarrel in July. It was soon after the big sheep fair where they had had their first modest success. Looking over the accounts she had concluded that they should be in a healthy position by next March, when Jethro’s lease came up for renewal; but she had to admit to herself: “With only fifty acres, no matter what money we spend, we can never be more than marginally profitable. We need more land.” She said nothing to Jethro, but some careful enquiries with land agents soon told her what she wanted, and one day as they stood beside the chalk wall she said:

  “There’s another fifty acres coming up for lease next spring. It’s only half a mile off. I think we should take it on. That would give us a hundred acres and increase the profits.”

  She had expected him to be pleased. He was not.

  “Too much.”

  “But it would be more economical.”

  “I like what I have.”

  “But think of the extra space.”

  “Space!” He looked at her with contempt he did not try to hide. “Space, you call it.” He gestured to the hamlet behind them and the slowly opening valley beyond; then he pointed up to the high ground and its endless ridges. “I have space enough here.”

  She knew what he meant; she respected it, yet intellectually she was impatient.

  “If you just look at the accounts . . .” she began.

  “Accounts,” he spat the word out. “I know them.” Indeed, she knew that he understood the figures very well indeed. “Accounts, woman.” The expression conveyed a universe of contempt, not for her, but for the very underpinnings of her life, that she had never thought of before. “I live,” he said savagely, and turned on his heel and walked away.

  She rode home very thoughtfully that day.

  She saw him a week later in Salisbury. It was evening and he was drunk: not badly so, but enough. She came up with him just as the light was fading and he was climbing slowly into his cart. He saw her but took no notice.

  “How uncommonly rude the ordinary people are,” she thought furiously, as she stood in her crinoline and cloak and stared at him. “Why does one waste one’s time on them?”

  She saw him flick his whip and, as the little pony slowly started up, he took his old, broad-brimmed hat and crammed it on his head.

  “I see you are drunk.” She did not shout the words, but spoke them loud enough for him to hear. Two or three passers-by turned to stare.

  It was just before he reached the corner that he turned. Very slowly, just as he had the first time they met, he raised his hat in a salute, his ironic eyes gazing straight into hers as he rolled away.

  She waited two weeks before she went to the farm again. She was no longer angry: indeed, she could see his point of view. He had his own life – primitive no doubt, but one that gave him his own, strange freedom. It was foolish of her to try and tie him down, turn him into something he was not.

  “He’s just a wild animal,” she thought, as she rode across the open. And yet, she admitted to herself, there was a challenge, even an excitement in trying to reform and tame a wild animal. Perhaps one day she might even persuade him to add another fifty acres.

  Neither of them mentioned the other farm, or the incident in the town. They spoke quietly, almost distantly, as they always had before. But as she stood with him on top of the ridge that day, looking back at the little farm with its chalk wall and mulberry tree, she suddenly glanced into his eyes and it was as though, for an instant, there was a complicity between them: this was their farm, their wilderness, a place apart, whose ancient ways would never change.

  “Perhaps,” she suggested playfully as she mounted her horse to leave, “you’ll allow me to make some improvements to the house.”

  He came briefly to the Michaelmas Fair that year having made a number of sales a week before. As Lizzie the housemaid was leaving her, she had spent the first day of the fair, which was also a hiring fair for servants, touring the booths in the covered market and speaking to applicants. It was only on the second day of the fair that she sat down to do the accounts for Jethro’s farm, and examined the latest figures.

  They were surprisingly good. He had presold the corn at exceptional prices; he had obtained figures for their lambs and some of the cattle that could only have been achieved, she knew, with incredible cunning. If the December sales went as well – several times, as she looked over the figures, she laughed out so loud that it brought a message from her uncle Stephen in the drawing-room below to ask if she could be quieter.

  To have got so far, in their first year: she could hardly believe it. Her respect for Jethro increased further.

  It was early afternoon when she finished, and so great was her sense of triumph that she decided to go and tell him the good news at once, even though he would not have expected to see her for another week. Within an hour, she was riding out, past Old Sarum, on the familiar route.

  He was coming down the slope when she arrived. He had left the boy tending the sheep on the ridges above; the mid-afternoon sun was still warm.

  “Come inside,” she told him in triumph, “and see what you have done.”

  When she had taken him through the figures he seemed pleased.

  “’Tis better than I thought,” he confessed.

  “It’s wonderful. Indeed,” she said on impulse, “I think we should have a glass of beer. Could you procure such a thing?”

  It came in large pewter mugs, wonderful to handle. There was nothing she knew of more cool and refreshing than Wiltshire beer. They drank slowly.

  “There is enough to mend the thatch,” she ventured.

  He did not seem to mind this.

  “It should be done,” he agreed.

  “Does it leak?”

  “A little.”

  She sipped her beer reflectively. She was curious to see the rest of his house, but was not sure if she dared to ask. One was never taken out of the parlour of a farmer’s house. Then she thought of a solution.

  “The children: may I see where they sleep?”

  He stood quietly. “’Tis upstairs. You have to stoop.”

  He led her to the narrow wooden staircase that was set opposite the front door; she followed him up.

  The children’s room had two small windows, one each side of the house. It contained a wooden rocking-horse, a chest of drawers made of pine, and two low beds. She walked over and gently pulled the rocking-horse by its stiff mane.

  “I made that, for the first,” he said quietly. It was beautifully worked.

  “I didn’t know you were a carpenter.”

  “Have to, to farm.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She turned and went out onto the little landing. The room in which he slept lay opposite; the door was open.

  “My room,” he said half apologetically. “Not much furnished.”

  She stepped in.

  There was a huge oak chest at the far side, opposite it a mahogany chest of drawers. By the door, on a stand, hung a long, embroidered smock. The bed was covered by a white cotton counterpane with a pattern of blue flowers upon it: left, she imagined, from the days when his wife was alive. It was somewhat bare, but pleasant. She moved to the window and stared out at the little valley below.

  Then she turned.

  How
strange it was. They came from worlds between which the boundary was not just wide, but completely, irrevocably impassable. Neither would ever normally expect to penetrate beyond one room in the other’s house; he had come to her back door and, were she not such a regular caller, she would walk to his front.

  And now he was watching her, from the other side of the room. Yes, he was tall and handsome, she thought. He did not belong to any class when he was up on the high ground; yet what was he here, in this cottage? At that moment, she hardly cared.

  The late afternoon light was streaming in through the window; she felt it warm on her arm. There was a faint aroma of beer in the room. She found that pleasant. Her eyes travelled around it once more, noting with pleasure the clean white and blue counterpane.

  He was perfectly still. His eyes were watching her, saying nothing, giving nothing away, understanding, she sensed, everything that she might think.

  How warm it was. The beer seemed to take her half a pace towards the comfortable edge of sleep.

  She looked up at him again. He smiled, slightly, but did not speak.

  Silence. They shared the silence, as the sun shone into the little room. She noticed the grain in the glass making a little tracery pattern on the floor and on the edge of the counterpane. She felt her own heart-beat, slow and steady as the seconds passed and still, neither of them spoke. There seemed, that afternoon, to be a special magic in the place.

  And the silence. It was the silence of the bare ridges above, where the breeze hissed, that bred the numberless, tiny bright flowers and all that half-invisible wildlife, timelessly; it was the silence of the little valley, of the winter bourne waiting patiently for the November rains. It filled the village, the chalk-walled garden with its mulberry tree behind the house, the room where they were now, facing each other, to her own amazement, in the most perfect understanding.

  She watched him. She looked at him with wonder. Why was it that she felt so relaxed with him, as though she had known him all her life?

  Then, as she knew it must be, it was Jethro who moved.

  He did so very slowly, never letting his eyes leave her, like a cat, she smiled to herself. No, not like a cat though, for their eyes had met, and this room, and everything in it, was shared. Very softly, reaching out one long arm, he pushed the door of the room slowly shut.

  There was no need. There was no one else in the house. The wooden latch fell with a faint click.

  Her heart missed a beat. Now she was aware of it, beating faster.

  She stayed by the window. It was perfectly safe. He was not barring the door. He was standing, very quietly, where he had stood before and his expression was as calm as if they were meeting in the middle of Salisbury close. He would not stop her, she knew: she only had to leave. She stood in the sunlight by the window and did not move.

  Was, at last, the completely impossible to happen – so inconceivable that never once had she troubled, needed, allowed herself to think about an idea she would otherwise have had to strike down at its birth? Was it possible that at the age of thirty she could even think of such a thing, when in the close . . .?

  She stared at the blue and white counterpane and found herself half smiling, as though all her life, or rather perhaps in some former life, she had been here, known that counterpane before.

  She looked up at him once more, still standing by the warm window.

  He must move now. She could make no appeal.

  Very slowly, as gently as she herself might have approached to feed a bird, he moved towards her.

  As she turned, uncertain, looked up, and felt the warm sunlight on her back, it was as if all the rivers in the valleys had begun to run. She had not known such a thing before.

  He never spoke. That was as it should be. All that happened was in the great silence of the afternoon, broken only by faint sounds that to her seemed as faint and distant as the tiny cries of the birds on the ridges above.

  How was it he knew her so well?

  “You are somewhat late, my dear,” her Uncle Stephen complained. “Your rides are too long.”

  “Only this afternoon, uncle,” she replied.

  As she sat in the hip-bath that Lizzie had prepared for her, in the familiar surroundings of the house in the close, she knew one thing with absolute certainty.

  The impossible had happened. It could never happen again.

  She was sure she could trust Jethro: he understood as well as she. She did not believe the boy tending the sheep above had any idea; neither the old woman nor the farmhand had been there.

  For naturally, if any notion of what had taken place that afternoon reached Sarum close, then she would be finished for ever. Not a door in the place would be open to her. Her Uncle Stephen as head of the family would rightly ask her to leave the area. She could never marry and the name of Shockley would be permanently dishonoured.

  She wanted none of those things. They filled her with a sense of horror. It was as though she had stepped out, over a vast chasm, as in a dream, and managed to get back. But from now on, she vowed, she would be circumspect.

  For three weeks she did not go back to the farm.

  When she did, he seemed to understand. He was exactly his normal self, touched his hat in front of the farmhand and his boy, and he could discern nothing in their glances that suggested they had any inkling of what had passed.

  Alone with him for a moment she said simply: “It must be forgotten.” And he nodded calmly and said nothing more.

  But when later he took her foot as usual to lift her into the saddle, she found that she was trembling.

  The rest of that year went quietly by. She went to the farm only every two weeks now, and spent less time there. The thatch was not mended. But at the cattle sales in December, Jethro did well again, and with luck the lambing season would bring a goodly addition to the new Hampshires as well.

  During the month of January, when there were snows, she only visited the place once, and in February, another of Stephen Shockley’s solemn flirtations with death took place and kept her in the city throughout the month.

  Yet all that winter, alone in her room at night, she would lie awake and think of Jethro and admit to herself frankly: I ache for him. More than once she had decided on impulse to ride out to the farm and reached the door of the house – once she had even ridden to Old Sarum and the edge of the high ground – before deciding sadly to turn back.

  In the first week of March, Stephen Shockley, was, reluctantly, nearly well again, and since the lease on Jethro’s farm was due for renewal at the end of the month, she had decided to make a long visit there at the end of the second week.

  Before this, however, there were other things to think of. For that spring, an important and joyful event took place in England, which necessitated a considerable celebration in the town: this was the wedding of Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, which was to be celebrated with feasts and a grand parade on March 10.

  It was on the morning of that day that Jane went out for one of her customary walks around the cathedral and the cloisters. She was interested that day to find the door of the chapter house open and one of the canons ushering Bishop Hamilton himself and a group of men she did not know out of the place. After saluting the bishop as he passed, she paused, looking curiously into the chapter house.

  “Do you know who that was, Miss Shockley?” the canon asked.

  “No.”

  “The great Sir Gilbert Scott, who is undertaking the restoration in the cathedral. He was seeing what Clutton did in the chapter house. Do you want to come in?”

  It was some time since she had entered the fine octagonal building with its slender central column and huge windows. She admired it. Clutton had done his work so well: as she walked around and surveyed the wall carvings, she could not help smiling at the scenes so densely crammed with action between the severe arches: even their slightly foreshortened, clumsy figures had, she thought, an archaic grace, and gave her a hint of the for
mer, medieval Sarum that she thought was almost gone. The figure of Adam and Eve in particular caught her eye. Adam’s head had been beautifully restored, and his little body and Eve’s remained just as they had first been carved. She smiled, and thought of Jethro.

  She was walking from the north door of the cathedral towards the choristers’ green when she met Daniel Mason. He bustled up to her.

  “I have a commission to you, Miss Shockley,” he announced. “The money owed you by Jethro Wilson. With, I believe, some interest.” He smiled with satisfaction at this last proof of the drunkard’s reform. “I told him five per cent was acceptable.”

  She stared at him, bemused. What was he talking about?

  “Have you not heard? He is gone.”

  She felt the blood drain from her face.

  “Where?”

  “He has a cousin in the north, who died this last month and left him his farm.” He laughed. “Not only the meek, but reformed drinkers inherit the earth, it seems.”

  She was still staring at him. It seemed to her, suddenly, that all the houses in the close had begun to perform a strange and solemn dance.

  “But his farm?”

  “At Winterbourne? He has given it up: the lease was due, as you may know. He has returned your loan – with interest, as I say – collected his children from Barford and gone. I understand the farm is up on the edge of the cheese country– small but quite respectable.” He smiled. “He has the chance to do very well now.”

  She hardly heard him. Jethro had gone. With not a word to her.

  “Where is the farm?”

  “That I do not know.”

  “Thank you.” She began to stride towards the house.

  “Your money, Miss Shockley.”

  “Later.”

  She was leaving the close in fifteen minutes, having told the new maid not to expect her until evening. Dressed in her black riding habit, she strode quickly through the gate into the High Street.