Jaen

by Betty Burton

'You won't never be a mother if you lives to be a hundred!'

  About the middle of December, Bella Nugent had sent a message with the carrier to say that she and Jude would pay a visit to the new cottage on Christmas morning and, so that she would not find herself in any position of disadvantage, told the man to say '. . . that's if Master Dan and Jaen didn't have any other arrangements set up.'

  On his next call at the Croud Cantle farm, the carrier brought the message that Miz Jaen was pleased as a cat wi' two tails, and would have good hot vittles ready for them in the forenoon.

  When Nance had learned that Jaen's mother was paying a visit to the Ham Ford cottage she told Dan he must see to it that there wasn't nothing for Bella Nugent to turn up her nose at.

  'There's summit about Bella Nugent that makes her think she's a cut above the rest on us, so don't give her no chance.'

  So Dan bought two new low chairs with arms, a footstool, and a bright copper kettle; then a two-branched brass candle-holder for the table, and a pewter candlestick which he set in the window; he made a fancy fretted rack with hooks on which Jaen could hang her ladles and knives, and a shelf on which he made a pattern of dots with a red-hot poker for her jugs and bowls. Nance gave them some patchwork chair pallets, and four blue-patterned plates. Jaen had been working on a large knotted-rag hearth mat with a lot of bright colour mixed in, which although she had not finished stitching the backing, she put down before the hearth on Christmas morning.

  Jaen stood and looked about her, pleased and satisfied at the feeling of comfort and plenty. Again she recalled Dan's wedding-day phrase: 'We shall be all right when we gets going on our own.'

  If we'd had a bit of time to get to know each another; if he could have come riding over to Croud Cantle a time or two; if I hadn't a felt so out of my depth; if there hadn't a been all the haste in marrying. If.

  If it hadn't a been for the baby and now another, and probably more after that. Even if Hanna hadn't a been so peevish but nice and easy like Martha's and Elizabeth's was.

  If a few small things had a been different.

  There were times when she felt she didn't hardly know the man she found herself married to.

  If it could be more like this. Everything nice and orderly, Dan looking pleased, Hanna asleep and quiet. Comfort, warmth, the smell of apple-wood, roasting meats, the copper kettle and pewter candlestick reflecting flickering flames and glow from the hearth . . . if they could a had a few months like this, then she might have been as keen to have a baby as Vinnie.

  The day was bright and bitterly cold, drawing the fire to glowing brilliance behind two spitted fowls. Dan was in a good mood. He brought in a good pile of best apple-wood to burn, and a holly-bough for the mantel; he broached a jar of parsnip wine Luke had sent across and hung the hams from Jaen's summer pig where Mistress Nugent could see their quality.

  21

  CHRISTMAS AT HAM FORD COTTAGE

  Dan was the picture of a well-satisfied family man. Standing with his back to the fire, slapping his buttocks and drawing on a long-stemmed pipe, he said, 'I got more improvements in mind.'

  'You got it very nice.' A compliment indeed from Bella Nugent. 'I reckon you might like it if you got some red tiles down here. It'd save no end of dirt and that.'

  Jaen and Jude exchanged amused glances at the thought of the red tiles in the Croud Cantle kitchen, the daily washing, the rebukes for footmarks, the exclusion of hired labour from the red-tile area.

  'Dirt don't matter. But I was thinking as it might be warmer underfoot with some decent oak planking down.' And although he had not, until that moment, given any thought to whether underfoot in a farmworker's cottage there should be any kind of a floor other than the normal stamped earth, Dan reduced the use of red tiles to a notional list that might be headed 'Inferior'.

  But knowing that the Hazelhursts were a bigoted lot in their opinions on any subject, and that Jaen hadn't by no means got herself mixed up with the best in the herd of they great lot of oxes, Bella put his ignorance about red tiles down to where it come from.

  Hanna, being petted and nursed by her grandmother and young aunt, was told that she was the most pretty and good little creature in the world, and wasn't she just about as bright as buttons.

  'Her gums is all up from her teeth, but it don't seem to bother her,' Bella said, and did not miss the beginnings of a glance towards Dan that Jaen started, but withdrew quickly.

  Her face arranged in a bright smile, Jaen told her mother that the naughty little thing had them about all hours of the night. Above all else, Jaen wanted to show her mother that she was settled and competent — above all that she was competent. And she wanted Ju to understand that Hanna's aunts on the Hazelhurst side did not have the same claim to kinship as Ju herself. So when Jude asked if she could take the baby out in the fields, Jaen hugged her very tightly as she tucked Hanna inside Jude's shawl.

  Bella sat in one of the new chairs and missed nothing.

  Whilst basting the fowls, Jaen suddenly rushed from the room. She had not intended telling her mother about the expected new baby, but Bella had recognized the signs.

  'Ah well,' she said, 'I dare say you'm well looked after by this husband of yourn.'

  If the talk between Dan and Bella, about Nance's recommendation that Jaen consume near-raw livers for 'peakedness', was anything to go by, one would believe that Mistress Jaen was an extremely cosset-ted young woman. She smiled apologetically when she said how even the thought of it made her feel quite bad, but she did keep trying.

  Although Jaen felt strung-up and edgy, expecting that each small sound from Hanna would develop into the wail that made her want to run and run and never come back, the Christmas dinner was a success.

  Good food and plenty of mature country wines as potent as brandy worked the usual spell upon the two camps so that each came to admit that, well, when all's said and done p'rhaps there was summit to be said for th'other lot; they wan't all that bad after all, not once you got to know they a bit. Dan amused Jude and Bella by getting Hanna to respond to him by dipping his finger into the good gravy and letting her suck at it.

  'Well, will you just look at her!'

  'An' she a reg'lar little glutton.'

  'She a be a little porker if she haves much more a that.'

  Jaen prayed that the saltiness would not hurt Hanna's sore mouth and spoil the day. She had worked hard at making the Christmas visit memorable for Ju and Mother, holding it all up by her smiles, by the picture of cheerful domesticity she and Dan and Hanna presented, by responding to Dan's unexpected complicity in putting on the show.

  Then Hanna let out a cry. It was as much as Jaen could do not to hit out at the child, but it was over in a second, and she regained her composure without ever having lost her smile during the short battle with her emotions. When her mind again began working upon what her ears were taking in, she realized that Ju had asked if they might not take Hanna with them. They had come in the donkey and cart, she was old enough now, wasn't she, now she could take solids, and it would give Jaen a bit of a rest, and let Mother and herself have the fun of looking after her, and washing her and that.

  Ju, mature in some respects, still eagerly girlish in others, was stumbling on almost as though she had rehearsed her speech, trying to persuade Dan to agree. But it seemed that Dan did not need persuading.

  Jaen felt that they must know at once how joyful she was.

  That they must see that joy, and the guilt, written upon her face.

  'Oh, you wouldn't want all the bother of her now she's getting her teeth . . . she an't never dry hardly a minute . . . you got to be always mashing and mixing up bits and spooning her with goatmilk and that . . .'

  Bella blew away with mock indignation Jaen's weak protests.

  'And what makes you think I don't know nothing about a sixteen-munts-old baby girl?'

  And so it was settled.

  The visit was cut short so that they could get Hanna indoors at Croud Cantle before the ni
ght air came down, and soon after the meal was eaten the red-haired grandmother and red-haired aunt began their journey, stealing away like thieves with the red-haired baby, concealing their glee at their good fortune.

  The fourth red-head, properly, wifely capped, was overwhelmed with relief.

  The short, slight figure of Jaen stood beside the renowned Hazelhurst heighth and breadth of Dan as they waved and watched the donkey-cart carry away the reason for them being bound to one another until death.

  22

  ON BRACK DOWN

  The blizzard that laid down thick snow and ice like a carpet across the county, was said to be the worst in living memory and, although living memory picks and chooses the events to recall and relate with high drama, that winter was, for the thin-skinned county of Hampshire, indeed extremely severe.

  On Boxing Morning, Dan went up to the main farm but Jaen, briskly, housewifely, put on thick woollen stockings and shawl and said she must go and and get in as much furze and bavins as she could find in case they was snowed up for a long time.

  It was not much of an excuse to go walking out on such a morning, there being plenty of fuel of every kind at the main farm. It did not occur to him for a moment to suspect that she was off out for the sheer pleasure of walking abroad, alone, almost light-hearted. Normal people gathered to themselves every moment of rest and shelter, and Jaen could easily have found good reasons for working by the comfort of her own hearth. Had he known what pleasure was in her as she set off, he would have said that she was soft in her brain.

  'Just as long as you'm back in time to get my dinner on the table.'

  Jaen went in the direction of Brack Down because that way she could return across Cuckoo Bushes Common where she could quickly gather the fuel she was ostensibly out to collect. It was still early in the day. The wind had dropped and the air was still. The cloud-pack that had been driven furiously over the chalk downlands during the night had gone; in the north, another pack was assembling. But for now, as Jaen's boots made holes in the unhandseled snow-cover, her skirts smoothed over the holes behind her.

  The sky was blue as wild chicory, and appearing iridescent so clear and icy was the air.

  She played her old game of closing her mind to everything except what immediately fed her senses. For the present she had no worries, no problems to return to. Guilt did flicker an occasional threat to her relief at being free to walk, but she was beginning to learn how to deal with guilt — as she was beginning to learn how to deal with other anxieties. She put the stuns upon it with forged cheerfulness and buried it alive.

  Once or twice before, when out wooding on Cuckoo Bushes Common, she had walked briefly on the lower slopes of Brack Down, but this was the first time she had climbed it.

  As she breathed in on the summit, the air was so cold that it seemed to sear the back of her eyes and she constantly had to blink away the tears that formed. But she welcomed the sharp pain and felt that she was being cleansed by it.

  Brack was not as high as Beacon Hill, which was the highest down of the quartet of chalk-hills that surrounded and protected her home valley of Cantle, but there was a bleakness and bareness here that reminded her so much of Beacon. Although she and Ju had roamed all the other downlands around Cantle like two creatures who might well have had a dray or a burrow there, she had seldom taken Ju upon Beacon Hill.

  When she was quite young, before Ju was born, looking up at Beacon from the yard, a mystery was solved for her. In church the Reverend Archbold Tripp told of things that would make you jump with fright if they ever happened to you — turning people into lumps of salt, fingers writing on their own, magic bushes and voices; and of places that were so strange that you could not even make pictures of them inside your head. But one day looking up at the high mound, the five-year-old Jaen suddenly realized that Beacon must be the kind of place where Moses went when he got given the stones with the orders on.

  As she grew older the words which streamed forth from Mr Tripp became familiar, she could become totally absorbed into the sound of them; the phrases were spells; the intoning of psalms and creed raised her spirits in the same way as lark-song, but she never understood any of it. She learned how to cope with mystery — she reduced it to the mundane so that it was less fearsome. So she decided that when He would 'come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead', then He would probably come on Beacon. And when struggling to create a picture of a Kingdom having no end, then the shining line of sea that could be seen from Beacon in high summer put boundaries about infinity so that it was no longer lurking hysteria.

  When she was firmly on the valley floor, it was never clear to Jaen whether there was a difference between prayers and wishes. On the highest point of Beacon, it did not matter.

  Since leaving her home valley, she had been penned and hurdled by events and people. Sometimes she felt as though she was at the bottom of a well, and longed to stand where there was nothing above her except . . . except whatever, or whoever, was there.

  And now she had found Brack.

  Like Beacon, Brack is another place of isolation. Where something exists. Some Thing. Some other Thing than herself. And here on Brack the same sense of a presence. It, or another of its kind, exists. Beyond understanding, but not frightening. She is out of the well. She does not know whether she is thinking or whether she is speaking aloud.

  I will make a pact.

  There's something wrong between me and Hanna, and I can't take to her no more than she can take to me. I can't help it. I can't do nothing about it.

  But if you let it happen so that she can live with Ju and Mother, then I will be good to this baby and be a proper mother and wife.

  There is no Voice, nor do any of the stunted junipers burst into flame yet remain unconsumed by the fire. But she knows that the pact is made.

  When at last she moves her body aches with cold. Her hand clutching her shawl about her is mottled purple and stiff. Boots and feet are fused by the chill of compacted snow.

  Slowly she turns full circle.

  White, white everywhere.

  She feels as virginal and pure as the landscape.

  A fresh start.

  Jude and Bella have removed Jaen's mistake, her sin.

  Yes, a fresh start.

  Only hedges and trees show where tracks and lanes run. The turret and small spire of the church indicate the centre of Newton Clare village in the triangle formed by the Rathley, Tupnell and Winchester roads. On the far side of the valley two trails of smoke come from One Acre Cottage and Westcott, where Dick and Elizabeth, Luke and Martha live in enforced neighbourliness. Below on the side of the valley where she stands, Ham Ford and Keeper's Cottages, both tucked into the lee of the downs, one either side of the River Hammet. Central to all of The Boys' cottages is Up Teg, where she can see people moving about, and someone riding a horse away from the house, dogs chasing, the sound of their barking drifting up as though from another world.

  There are other farms, other fields, other clusters of cottages, the church and the inn. The whole is Newton Clare.

  It is to that place she now belongs.

  Where are you from then Mistress Hazelhurst?

  I comes from Newton Clare.

  Until now, she had thought of the village not as being Newton Clare, but as Up Teg. From Brack, Up Teg was put in its place, it was not so intimidating.

  She had a pact to be a good wife and mother; she would be. She would do her best to belong to them.

  Are you from around these parts Mistress Hazelhurst?

  Yes, Ham Cottage in 'Clare.

  A course I was born in Cantle, but now I'm from Newton Clare.

  Lower down from Brack's exposed summit, the creatures that live on its slopes are everywhere. Although touched by bright sunlight, the snow is becoming crisp and hard, it is no longer virgin but patterned by pads and claws. Clusters of coal-tits descend upon food, bending stems with their group weight, the scarlet of aggressive robins flashes brightly in
the sun as they give short shrift to any creature they can manage to stab at; foraging rabbits and squirrels warily ignore Jaen in their scrabble for food whilst there is still time.

  The bank of cloud, that had earlier looked like a grey and distant range of downs, is closer now, looming over the northern part of the county. Like all her kind, workers whose life is the land, and land is their life, she is in awe of extremes of weather. It is the enemy against which there is no defence, and from whom no retribution may be extracted. Her stomach clenches with apprehension. She has never seen such a cloud, such strange threatening light. Wild animals, hours ahead of humans, had sensed the approach of Arctic weather when it was still far off.

  Now the alarm touches Jaen and she hurries back down to the shelter of the valley.

  It is only when breathlessly she reaches the safety of Ham Cottage and her body begins to warm up, that she realizes that somewhere back there, perhaps on the Brack, or perhaps whilst pulling down snap-wood branches on the common, she has started to miscarry.

  By the time Dan comes in for his dinner, it is over.

  Cleansed and virginal.

  She is once more an empty vessel.

  23

  Hanna did not sleep under her parents' roof again until she was a serious and useful girl in her ninth year. Jaen kept her part of the pact. Not consciously, but without Hanna there as a constant admonishment and rebuke for her unnaturalness as a mother, Jaen settled into trying to be Dan Hazelhurst's good wife.

  The original intention was that Jude and Bella would return with Hanna to 'Clare after a few days, but the roads across the downs, and the raikes and paths out of the valley villages, were snow-blocked and frozen for weeks. One day Dicken Bordsell arrived at Ham Ford, extolling his virtues as an intrepid and dutiful servant of Master Bella, and giving the message that the little Miss was doing just fine with The Master and Young Jude afussing after her.