by Betty Burton
When Vinnie had asked if Jaen could learn her, Jaen had said she would, of course she would, except that she would have to think how to tell Vinnie, as she never knew how she had learned herself, except by going on Blackbrook market with her mother for eighteen years.
Vinnie reluctantly tucked the baby in beside Jaen.
'I shall have to get back. If you want anything, shout and I shall hear you in the dairy below. It a be nice and quiet for a bit. Get rested so your mother will see you nice and rosy when she gets here.'
'I doubt she will come yet — they'll be busy back home.'
Vinnie collected the bowls and made to leave the room, hesitated, then came and sat beside Jaen.
'What you said . . . about me being bright. I got to be honest. I don't always feel like that, it's just that you got to make the best of it, haven't you?'
Jaen nodded.
Vinnie went on, 'Only I thinks too much of you to have you think false of me. It's Pete that makes me bright.' She fiddled with the things she was carrying, obviously having something else to say.
'You and Peter are just right for each other,' Jaen said.
'I wasn't going to say nothing today — it being special for you and that . . . but I have to tell you. We are getting wed, soon as harvest is over.'
'Oh Vin, I am so glad about that. I expect that a mean a big feast — wedding and harvest in one.'
When Vinnie was back in the cool dairy she thought about how lucky she was. If she hadn't sent Dan off with a flea in his ear, she might have found herself married to him, instead of getting Peter who was worth a score of the others — a hundred of Dan. It was a shame that such a sweet thing like Jaen was should have to get Dan.
Vinnie would have liked everybody to be content, and not have bad things happen. When you think about all the hardship. The months of labour going into growing a crop then seeing it get the blight or mildew, or seeing a year's work go down in half an hour of hail. And the old men who can't stand straight, and the idiots who do things. They make people laugh, they'm always a bit of fun. That must be as bad as anything, Vinnie thought, to find your baby was an idiot.
She makes a short prayer that hers will not be like that, but if that was what God said you must have, then there wasn't nothing you could do. But it always do seem such a waste. Vinnie can never make God out. He is so wasteful. He makes oak trees grow, then blasts them down with lightning; he lets cabbages fill out then sends a plague of caterpillars — but then perhaps He thinks the caterpillars should be fed, or perhaps it is just teaching people a lesson about Him being Master.
Vinnie cannot see that people are all that sinful to keep on being punished.
God is hard to understand.
But he don't need to waste the children surely. All the waste of children there is, makes your heart bleed.
Sometimes Vinnie thinks how nice it'd be, to be able to wake up in the night and not to have the worry of things. Like Martha's secret crying over little Laurie. It was all very well anybody saying to her, 'You an't the only one who got a child in the graveyard,' a mother was bound to feel sad when it happens. It isn't so bad for men, they don't never take much notice of their children till they'm able to fend for theirselves a bit — but for a woman . . . once you hold a child to the breast you are bound to get fond, even though it looks like it won't live the year out . . . even if turns out to have summit wrong.
Vinnie hurts for Martha's misery.
12
Jaen had slumped into a fatigued sleep. She had spent a little time looking at the babe and trying to get some better sort of feeling towards it — like Vinnie had done. It hadn't even been her own child, yet she could see she was just natural and loving towards it.
She was wakened by a donkey whose braying she recognized, one of the animals from home, and the sound of her mother telling it to bide quiet. For a few seconds Jaen was nonplussed at finding herself in bed in the daytime. Then she heard some little mewing sounds from the baby. Jaen's heart lightened. Mother had come. At this busy time of harvest.
By the slant of the sun it was late afternoon, which meant that she had given up half a day to come to Newton Clare. Was Ju come too? She felt so free with the pressure on her ribs gone and her legs up and so elated at her mother's coming, that Jaen determined to show her what a good mother she herself would turn out to be. She picked up the baby and held it in the crook of her arm.
When Nance Hazelhurst opened the door, Jaen saw her mother, glowing, red; cheeks reddened by little broken veins and red showing on her brow and at the nape of her neck. Mother, robust and solid compared with her newt-like mother-in-law. Upright, wearing a fresh cap and neckerchief, she was handsome.
Jaen flushed with pleasure at the sight of the other red appearing from below — Ju's mop of wild red hair. Ju had come. Jaen swallowed a ball of tears, afraid of the bother it would cause if she let them fall in the presence of either of the older women. Her mother was no end of a Tartar and had no time for such weaknesses as tears.
'Here's your mother come to see you.' Nance stepped into the room and looked proprietorially at the baby, establishing who was who, and what was what. 'I'll leave you to it.'
'Well then!' said Bella Nugent. There was only the low nursing chair so she sat on the bed.
Jaen, seeing herself the picture of motherhood, and wanting to please her mother and show her that everything was just as it should be, held out the baby for them to hold and inspect.
It was an easy meeting after all. To look at Ju with the baby, nobody would ever imagine that five or six months ago there was such a rift between her and Jaen that Ju would not speak and only came to the wedding because their mother had insisted that she be there.
'You sprung it on everybody quick enough by all accounts. Is it true it was all over in a few hours? I can't hardly believe it.'
When Nance Hazelhurst had greeted Bella Nugent with the news that the baby was already birthen, it was a girl and it looked like the Nugents, Bella had wanted to know why it took the boy with the message so long to travel the few miles from Up Teg to Croud Cantle because she had wanted to be with her daughter in her labour. She found it hard to believe Nance's story of how Jaen had gone off walking early in the morning, showing no signs that her time had come until the child was nearly there. But now that Bella had heard the story from Jaen's own lips she had to believe it and, as they all had done earlier that day, shook her head in amazement at such a little bit of a thing like Jaen doing it as easy as that.
During the visit, Jaen did everything that was expected of a new mother. She spoke seriously and asked her mother's opinion and advice, she showed no doubts and disguised her anxieties with smiles. Jude was absorbed in the baby, talking to it as though it could understand.
There had been changes back home. Jude was now going to market regularly and there had been some arrangement with Mr Warren at the cornmarket to teach Jude to read.
'She got this notion in her head and . . . well, you knows Jude, she won't take "no" for an answer, so I thought she might as well . . . seeing she was so keen and that. She promised faithful that it wouldn't interfere with her labours, and I got to admit, so far it haven't . . . but new brooms sweep clean, we shall see whether she's just as eager come November when it comes to going over to Motte on a Sunday.'
Jaen could see that her home was slipping away from her, they were doing things that did not include her. Ju suddenly saying she wanted to learn to read like that; Ju seeming suddenly to have small breasts: Mother wearing a neckerchief Jaen had not seen before.
Ju, who had been so wretched and dejected that Jaen had not told her that she was pregnant, was now bright and cheerful, behaving as though nothing had ever been wrong between them. Suddenly she saw the reality . . . by turning into Dan Hazelhurst's wife, she no longer belonged to her mother and Ju. Dan Hazelhurst's wife was somebody to be visited from time to time. Between visits they would be doing things that had always included herself. Between visits Ju would be g
rowing up, growing away. She could not bear to think of it.
The time went too quickly and they had to start for home again. The light was going and there were some tricky bits of track between Newton Clare and Cantle. Jaen followed their journey in her mind, wanting to be making it with them, wanting to see what had been going on there.
Her mother had got the baby sucking properly and Jaen persevered with holding it to her, trying to ignore the contractions and the soreness by thinking about Ju and Mother, about living here these last sixteen weeks or so, and things changing back home. Behind her back almost, things had been going on in her own home.
They had made changes in the work routine.
Ju had already stepped into Jaen's role on market days. To fill Ju's place, they had taken little Johnny-twoey away from the bird-scaring and stone-picking.
Strange to think of that.
Little John Toose. She had scarcely ever given him a moment's thought. He did have parents, and there were many other Toose children, yet she had always thought of Johnny-twoey as a waif, living more like the stray dogs and cats who found enough at Croud Cantle to keep body and soul together. He had never done anything except earn a few pence like any five-year-old. He must have been growing up and she hadn't noticed. They used to leave Ju to see to the place on market days, when she was the same age.
Ju learning to read. Mr Warren had given her a magnifying glass and she had gone all round the Yard Room peering at things; she had even undone the baby's wrap to look close at its hands, and got a telling off for it. Poor Ju. And Ju was right when she had responded to the telling off by retorting that it wasn't so long ago that Jaen would have been just as interested. And that was true, but life at Up Teg didn't allow of such things. It was all so . . . tied down, so full of noise and people, men's voices from cock-crow to night.
Back home in the evenings, after Ju's chatter had ceased, there was at times only the click and whir of the spinning wheel and an occasional hiss and rustle of burning wood on the hearth.
She could not get out of her mind how Ju had filled out. Watching her today, Jaen saw that at twelve, Ju was almost a woman. It might not be long before she too might find herself like this; frightened and bleeding and hurting; pretending that she was like other girls, pretending that she loved the child she had so easily conceived and, almost as easily, expelled into the world. She watched her own pathetic attempt to make it feed and its own reluctance to turn to her as it had turned to Vinnie earlier. Unfathomable little creature. It had held itself still for more than a day, it had lulled her into believing that it was dead and that everything would be as it was before.
13
Vinnie and Peter were married at the end of September. There had been a better harvest than anyone had expected; there was an abundance of apples so that plenty of cider was being pressed; hogs had fattened well so that good joints of bacon were cured and pork pickled.
It had been decided that Dan's daughter was to be named Hanna and, although the child was not yet christened, Jaen had gone to church and got herself properly cleansed of Hanna's birth, so that she might go to Vinnie's wedding.
The re-thatching of the cottage at Ham Ford that Dan and Jaen were to have was not far off finished. There had been a bit of moving around in the Up Teg household so that Vinnie could move in with Peter until they could have the Yard Room.
Old Baxter gave the instructions as to what they would have. 'If there's one thing the Hazelhursts knows, it's how to have proper festivities.' And it was true.
They chose Saturday for the wedding and it seemed that half the parish would come to the feast. Early in the morning, the horns of the oxen were polished up and beribboned, and paper rosettes and streamers were attached to both the beasts and the wagon.
Vinnie loved every minute of the preparation. Although she still had a fair time to go, her stocky figure looked already overwhelmed, but that did not stop her working like a Trojan.
All the women had helped in the extra spinning and Nance had got some weaving out-work done so that Vinnie might be nicely turned out. Peter had gone down into Rathley without telling anyone and had got made for Vinnie a pair of fancy shoes and a cloak.
She laughed and cried simultaneously, and kissed him in front of them all, and told them, 'There an't a better man in the world than Peter.'
When she climbed into the wagon, dressed in a blue-dotted skirt with full gathering, bustled back and aproned front, she did not look nearly so overwhelmed and near her time as she did in her working clothes.
'I don't feel like me,' she said, patting a tucked neckerchief that Jaen had made and frilled cuffs from Annie.
'Well,' said Martha, 'you wants to try, because it's the last chance you'll have. By mid-day you'll be somebody else.'
Had Vinnie been a vixen, a hind, a doe, or a female of any species other than human, she would have been her own possession to give to her mate. But Vinnie Norris was a young woman, and by giving herself to Peter several months ago without the permission of a male member of the Norris family, had done a thing that had to be put right. There being no other male of the Norris family to be in ownership of Vinnie, she was to be given away by her young brother James.
Since they had taken him into Up Teg as a child, Jim had gone about the place almost unnoticed, doing as he was bid by the family. And that was how he liked it. Vinnie liked to be at the centre of things, but Jim kept to edges and quiet corners and spoke when he was spoken to. Jim was small, and seemed only ever half-well. The Boys joked about him in their friendly way — 'Careful when you step back else you'll squash Jim underfoot.' He took it all in good part because he was closely attached to Vinnie, and Vinnie wanted to be a Hazelhurst. Today Jim would give her to them.
St John's church, Newton Clare, had its foundations in Saxon mud and its walls built and rebuilt upon them several times since; those now standing were almost two hundred years old. The swaying oxen plodded largo, splendid and extravagant, drawing from villagers and cottagers the same comments as when the beasts were last got up fine for Dan's wedding at Cantle in the spring just gone. Everybody liked a show, and Baxter Hazelhurst was one to give it. The Boys wore their elaborately embroidered linen holiday-smocks, and the women looked well-fed and decently clad. The master of Up Teg sported a neat wig, high black hat and cut-away coat.
'Why look, 'tis the king hisself,' somebody called to him. Baxter, loving his own exhibition, doffed his hat with two hands and replaced it on his head as though a crown, and bid Nance wave.
'And I feel like a princess,' Vinnie told Peter. 'One day we shall sit up like Master Bax and Mrs Nance, and you shall wear a tall hat.'
Peter, liking Vinnie to be pleased, and glad himself that he had got himself a good, happy woman who thought he was superior to any other man, and who looked strong enough to give him a family equal to his father's, gave her plenty of squeezes and hearty kisses on her cheeks.
It took but a few minutes for the boy to give the woman to the man.
Luke's voice calling the new husband to 'Gid her a kiss then, Pete,' brought forth cheers and laughs enough to sound like a whole troop of soldiers.
'Mrs Peter Hazelhurst!' Vinnie announced herself to her new family.
'Come on, Peter, we shall walk back arm in arm.'
'No, Gel,' Baxter told her, 'you get on up in the wagon. I an't got the oxes all polished up to go back empty.'
'Thank you, Master Bax, but me and Peter a walk so as we can talk to everybody along the way. Me and Peter shall walk. I made up my mind to that.'
Baxter Hazelhurst was about to lay down the law, when Vinnie went up and gave him a loud kiss.
'You done me proud, Father Hazelhurst, and I thank you. Now you and Miz Nance lead us off in the wagon, and we shall follow and everybody shall walk behind us. That way we shall make a longer procession for everybody to see.'
Something came upon Vinnie Norris as soon as she announced herself as Peter's wife. It was like when butter comes; before that mom
ent all the elements are there, gathering, not yet anything except separate, tiny globules of fat suspended in solution, then one turn of the handle and there is butter.
Before that morning, every element that was to make the young wife was within Vinnie, and had been waiting to turn ever since she decided that she wanted to be married to Peter. He had given her a ring and his name, and the butter had come.
'Say "Mistress Hazelhurst". Go on, let me hear you say it.' As they walked she chattered and laughed excitedly. The sight of her lifted women momentarily.
'It's a shame her mother and father an't alive to see her happy.'
'It they was alive it probably wouldn't have happened, and Pete Hazelhurst would a put it in some other wench.'
And it was agreed that the ill-wind of being orphaned had blown Vinnie's way, the good of a share in the Hazelhurst fortunes.
Vinnie Hazelhurst was probably as happy as any woman in England on that September day in 1780, and Baxter Hazelhurst allowed himself to be won over and told what to do.
With Peter on one arm and Jim on the other, Vinnie, flushed and bright-eyed, ordered a procession behind them.
Last year, the Hazelhursts' near neighbour, Original Day, had put on a wedding for his last daughter which was still bright in the memory of the villagers of Newton Clare for its abundance and pleasure. There had been food, drink and music. It had rankled with Baxter that Ori Day should have outdone him. Ori and Baxter had been neighbourly rivals since they each became masters of farms at about the same time, and they had fared about equally, except that Baxter, by producing an abundance of sons, considered himself to have achieved the advantage over Original, who had produced only daughters. Except at weddings, when the Hazelhursts often must travel to the woman's parish.
Baxter had always put on good harvest and holy-day feasts, but this was the first time that there had been a wedding at Up Teg.
