John Saturnall's Feast

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Clutching sacks, spades and hoes, they formed forage parties and ventured up into the chestnut groves, fanning out through the glades to grub and root for skirrets and navets, rampions and wild barley. Across the river, in Home Farm's abandoned fields, Adam, Jed and Alf organised teams who hitched themselves to the plough-traces and hauled the heavy share through the loam. Each evening, they tramped home exhausted in mud-caked boots. In the kitchen, Hesekey and Simeon boiled up root-pottage thickened with barley. When the week ended all were footsore and weary. In the bare chapel, Alf led the prayers. Ranked around him, the men and women of the Household repeated the words then sang a psalm. Standing at the back, John watched Lucretia, her face hidden beneath a bonnet.

  His hasty words echoed in his head. Their nights in the bedchamber seemed a distant memory now. He felt her absence from his side at night like a cold wind against him, at one with the bleak skies above. But the yard still bore the imprint of the block. The oak rose high over the Heron Boy's grave. The sight of Philip's sling sapped his resolve. He had forfeited her, he thought. He deserved no better. He stole glances at Philip as they ate together until at last he eased the stump from its sling.

  ‘You can look if you like.’

  John coloured. ‘No, I . . .’

  ‘It was Marpot's act, John,’ Philip said. ‘He'll answer for it. Not you.’

  The work grew harder. John rose before sunrise to beat the cauldron and wake the household. In the woods, those foraging had to venture deeper and deeper to fill their sacks. In the fields the sun beat down, burning the tops of the wheat. By midsummer the green stalks were no more than knee-high.

  They formed a human chain, hauling up water from the river in leather buckets and wooden tubs and pouring it down the crooked furrows. The corn began to grow again but by late summer great swathes of the fields were bare. They scythed, winnowed and threshed. They milled the grain in querns. They gathered fruit and picked berries, netted rabbits and plucked pigeons. Falling gratefully onto his cot each night, John had only to close his eyes to sleep.

  Still their cheeks grew hollow and their eyes sank deeper into their heads. The roads remained blocked by Marpot's Militia and the yards were empty. That autumn came news of the King's trial. John remembered the sad-eyed man who had beckoned him up, seating him at his side. At Christmas, the Household gathered again in the Great Hall and ate rabbit stew with slabs of coarse cheat bread. As Mrs Gardiner fell asleep and began to snore gently, John glanced down the table to Lucretia.

  They had scarcely exchanged a word all year. Her nose had set slightly crooked. It had softened her face, he thought. But at the sight of him she turned away.

  The winter deepened. The cold seemed to suck the strength from their limbs. Every morning the Household was slower to muster. When two of Quiller's men fell sick, Meg and Ginny took their places. The pale-faced troop trudged out at dawn and back after dusk, heads drooping, feet dragging, stomachs rumbling with hunger. But there was always more firewood to be dragged down and chopped, more water to be hauled upstairs, more furrows to be dug.

  ‘Half the cabbage is rusted,’ Philip told John at Martinmas. ‘The kale's worse. The turnips we won't know till we dig them out.’ His arm was out of its sling now. ‘Some of the men are talking of leaving again. The worst is the meal. Without bread . . .’

  John felt the deep weariness in them. Their clothes were ragged and their shoulders slumped. Each morning he faced the same downtrodden faces. New Year came and went. A week later an argument broke out between Jed Scantlebury and Jim Gingell. In a moment they were rolling in the snow under the chestnut trees and landing clumsy blows on each other. The rest gathered around, shouting and yelling. Adam and Peter pulled the combatants apart.

  ‘Go if you want!’ Jed shouted. ‘You'll get a good welcome from Marpot.’

  ‘It's better than starving,’ retorted Jim.

  ‘No one will starve,’ said John.

  ‘Won't we?’ asked Barney Curle. ‘The stores are empty. There ain't much left up here neither.’

  ‘What'll we eat?’ asked Peter Pears.

  Their pinched red faces turned to him. A few stamped their feet against the cold. John felt their fatigue steal over him.

  ‘He don't know,’ declared Jim Gingell. Some began to mutter. One or two turned away.

  ‘Wait,’ John said.

  They watched him, some curious, others only puzzled as he struggled to order his thoughts.

  ‘This was a garden once,’ John said at last. ‘Every green thing grew here.’

  The snow seemed to swallow up the words. The bare trees stood silent.

  ‘That was Paradise,’ Tam Yallop said. ‘This ain't Paradise.’

  ‘It was once,’ John said.

  ‘He's mocking us,’ said Jim Gingell. He turned to those around him. ‘Ain't he?’

  ‘Where's it now then?’ demanded another voice.

  ‘That garden was ruined,’ John said. ‘The men and women were left with nothing. Like us. But they survived.’

  ‘How?’ asked Jim's brother Jem. ‘What they eat? Tree bark?’

  John scraped aside the snow at his feet then bent and felt in the mud. He held up a dark brown nut. ‘They made bread,’ he said. ‘They ground up chestnuts and made loaves from the meal.’

  He stood before them with Philip beside him. But a discontented murmur spread among the shivering men.

  ‘Is that your Paradise?’ asked one of Quiller's men.

  ‘That's pig food,’ declared another.

  ‘What'll you and Lady Lucy be eating? Up there on your High Table?’ challenged Jim Gingell.

  John's face hardened. ‘The same as you.’

  But the men were shaking their heads. A wave of fatigue rolled over John. He racked his brains for the right words but none came. Perhaps they were right, he wondered. There was no garden. There was no Feast. They were lost long ago. Then a woman's voice sounded.

  ‘Eden had no High Table.’

  Hooded and robed in a coarse wool cloak, a figure holding a sack pushed her way through the men then stood before them. She pushed back the hood.

  ‘The first men and women ate together as equals,’ declared Lucretia. ‘So will we. They were alike in their riches. So are we in our poverty.’

  She stood before them, her hands on her hips. John saw their faces soften, curious now.

  ‘We will make this Paradise bread,’ she ordered. ‘Just as Master Saturnall says.’

  ‘And eat it too, will you?’ demanded a sullen voice.

  ‘We shall, Master Gingell,’ Lucretia said, picking him out at the back. ‘All of us. We shall make it. And we shall eat it.’

  With that, she bent and dug her fingers into the snow, picked up a chestnut and dropped it into her sack. Another followed. Then another. The Household stood in disbelieving silence at the sight of Lady Lucretia working. Then John jolted himself from his reverie and bent to join her. A moment later, Philip did too. Next Alf stepped forward.

  ‘Never thought Paradise'd look like this,’ he said, bending to pick up the nuts. Adam followed. Shrugging and shaking their heads, the others advanced over the snow, kicking aside the white covering to uncover the wood's harvest.

  John shuffled forward, his fingers digging in the snow. But out of the corner of his eye he watched Lucretia. Soon her white hands turned red in the cold. Her cheeks grew flushed. At last she glanced across at him.

  ‘Does it give you pleasure to watch Sir William's daughter labour?’

  ‘Forgive me, your ladyship,’ John answered.

  ‘I am not your chaplain, Master Saturnall,’ she answered crisply. ‘I cannot absolve you.’

  ‘Yet I seek absolution.’

  ‘A strange sentiment from one who shunned his absolver so publicly.’ Lucretia scraped a nut from the muddy soil, wiped it on her skirts and tossed it in the sack.

  ‘He shunned all sense,’ John said, raking his boot through the snow. ‘He shunned the one he held most dear.’
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br />   ‘Did he?’

  John felt as if he were venturing out over one of the Heron Boy's icy ponds. One false step and he would fall through. ‘He lacked the courage to own his error,’ he continued in a whisper. ‘He denied his own true feelings . . .’

  ‘Enough.’

  He closed his mouth quickly. She bent down again, her reddened hands brushing away the snow. As her fingers dug into the freezing earth, she spoke quietly.

  ‘If you wish to beg for absolution, Master Saturnall, you might have the good grace to do so elsewhere than before the whole Household.’

  ‘Elsewhere, your ladyship?’

  But Lucretia had moved away.

  ‘This was our garden! Those were your words!’ Her angry face glowed red in the firelight. ‘Here we would serve one another as the first men and women did! Here we would “exchange our affections”, as you called it. So we did. Until John Saturnall's conscience bade him otherwise.’

  ‘I . . .’John began.

  ‘Be silent.’

  The denunciation had begun as John entered the room. It showed no sign of abating.

  ‘How dare you turn from me,’ Lucretia continued, jabbing a finger at his chest. ‘Scurrying back into your kitchen. No doubt you amused yourself with Ginny down there. I've seen how you look at her.’

  ‘Ginny?’ John was baffled.

  ‘Oh!’ Her eyebrows flew up in mock-surprise. ‘Was it another? What name were you moaning while I bathed your head? Cassie, was it?’

  So it was Lucretia who had tended him. Before Marpot had called her up to the tower. As she berated him, John saw that her nails were broken and her fingers chapped. Reaching out, he captured her hands between his palms.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. He felt her fingers clench within his own.

  ‘How could you, John?’ she said quietly, and this time her reproach was worse than any anger. ‘How could you turn from me?’

  ‘Never again,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  He traced her ribs through her pale skin. Her hips jutted sharply from her sides. He ran his finger over the slight bump in her nose. They lay together in the bed and shivered.

  ‘All I could think of was Marpot,’ he said as she fitted herself to him. He felt her cheek on his shoulder. Her palm rested fiat on his chest. ‘What he did to Philip in my place. I could not think of you without his injury. And yet Marpot handled you too. Alf told me he dragged you into the chapel. Before he fled . . .’

  ‘Enough.’ She placed a finger over his lips. ‘Marpot has gone. We will plant a new garden. You and I.’

  They scraped chestnuts out of the snow, roasted them, peeled them and ground them to meal which they mixed with water and set to rise. Tam Yallop and Simeon baked the crumbling fiat loaves in the ovens. In the Great Hall, serving men, maids and cooks sat together at the long tables.

  ‘If this is Paradise bread,’ declared Philip, biting off a dry crumbling corner, ‘then send me to Hell.’

  ‘Philip!’ hissed a scandalised Gemma across the table. Adam Lockyer grinned.

  ‘I heard from Bunce there's some dried apple rings left.’

  ‘And dried broom buds,’ added Peter Pears.

  They chewed.

  Spring arrived with a downpour and the news of the King's execution. At the Manor, the Household held a day of silence, remembering the sad-eyed man butchered by Cromwell and his Parliament. As John listened to the rain descend, a drenched Hesekey walked in.

  ‘There's a man in the yard, Master Saturnall,’ he whispered. ‘He's asking for you.’

  A familiar figure stood in the icy rain, a snow-white mule beside him. Josh's hair was almost as white, John noticed.

  ‘I know about Henry,’ the driver said before John could speak. ‘I knew the moment he marched out of here.’

  ‘I'm sorry, Josh,’ John offered. Then he looked up the drive. ‘How did you get through?’

  ‘Your Colonel Marpot's been ordered back to Zoyland. They don't like him up in Soughton. The new Lieutenant's secretary's an old friend of yours.’

  ‘Who?’ asked John.

  ‘Sir Philemon Armesley.’

  John shook his head. ‘You're mistaken, Josh. Sir Philemon served the King at Court.’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Now he holds old Ned's pen. Sits on their Committee too. But that ain't why I'm here.’ He gestured back to the string of horses, laden with crates and sacks. ‘Got a letter in there. Took it from a fellow who was around by Banbury. He had it from a driver out of Oxford. From Sir William.’

  ‘He will return?’ John asked, wondering at Lucretia's reaction. But Josh shook his head.

  ‘Sir William's dead.’

  My Daughter, may this Letter reach you in better Health than its Writer who suffers more under the demands of ‘Peace than ever he did on the Battlefield. The Masters of our new Commonwealth are miraculous Men who see deeper into our Consciences than we do ourselves. For they discover loyal Men to be Traitors and those who fought for their Sovereign to be Outlaws. And though they are Thieves they call themselves Judges for whatever escaped their Cannons they would seize now with their Pens.

  Some these Commissioners unhouse and drive from their Estates. Upon others they visit barbarous Violence as they threaten against our King, Such is our new Babylonian Captivity.

  It pains me as grievously as the Saw that gnawed its Way through my Knee that you must .face these Creatures in my place. That they know if those close Conferences which were held here at Buckland is certain for one among our Company serves now upon their Committee. Philemon Armesley presents as many Faces as there are Gentlemen to look upon them. He tells me that he presses our Cause from Within.

  All these Woes I bequeath you, and .Another. This Day the Surgeons tell me there is a Poison in my Blood. The .Apothecaries opine the same. But I have known it long before. Our Legacy has ever been a Poison that creeps about our Veins, mingled with the bright Blood that nourishes us.

  Now the Hour is late and you and Buckland are distant. Yet I rest secure, trusting in the Promise that you made to me and knowing now your true Character. For Lady .Anne did not give her Life for Naught. In your Hands I know that the Vale will be kept safe. You are my Providence, Lucretia, and hers . . .

  John waited for her in the Solar Gallery, composing speeches in his head. But when she came in the early hours, red-eyed with grief, he found himself tongue-tied. She clung to him wordlessly, her body shaking with silent sobs.

  In the Great Hall, the black velvet hangings were brought out. The Household conducted its business in silence. Lucretia wore a dark dress and veil. Sitting with John in the bedchamber, she gazed at the doorway.

  ‘He caught me playing here once,’ she said. She glanced back at the cradle with its silver bells, the dusty combs and little bottles. ‘Gemma and I used to play at Queens and Maids.’

  ‘You must play a different part,’ said John. ‘You must be Mistress of Buckland.’

  Sir Philemon arrived flanked by riders as before, his saddle-bags bulging with commissions. Sitting behind the great walnut table, Lucretia heard out his protestations of loyalty while John, Ben Martin and Mister Fanshawe stood behind her. He would plead their case before the Committee, he promised. He would save the Estate from its worst depredations. But alas, he could not return empty-handed. John watched the man's scar stretch as he offered an apologetic smile, laying out his papers. A composition would have to be paid, he feared . . .

  With Marpot banished, the pack-men and carters began to return. Ben Martin and Mister Fanshawe examined the accounts in the steward's rooms, drawing up lists of rents and fees, tallying the arrears and making rounds to collect them. Soon, in the crowded yards, Philip presided over a jostling throng, waving his one good hand at the unruly men. Motte began replanting the kitchen garden. Once again the Buckland Kitchen took its meals downstairs.

  Word of the Manor's resurgence spread. Men arrived in search of work. Across the river, a gang of hired hands spread muck under Adam Lockyer's directio
n. All around the gardens, men and boys dug, cut back, repaired and planted. Only the ponds remained untouched. Beneath the water's dark surface, the fish swam lazily among the weeds.

  In the house, the windows in the Great Hall were reglazed and the passages grew crowded. No longer could John and Lucretia exchange glances across the table, nor let their hands brush beneath, let alone embrace in quiet corridors. If John intercepted Lucretia, he hardly had time to take her arm before footsteps approached and she was forced to shake herself free.

  ‘I could not get away!’ she hissed after he had again waited in vain for her in the Solar Gallery.

  Their encounters grew rarer. A week or two might pass before they kept their assignation. Then they came together in a flurry of desire. The next day, wielding his ladle at the hearth or discussing the next week's dishes with Philip, John wondered if he had dreamed the night's encounter, so abruptly did it wrench him from his life in the kitchen.

  But at the end of that year on Old Saint Andrew's Day he laid the table in their chamber and awaited her, holding before him a tray loaded with dishes. She took her seat and, as he bent over her, spoon in hand, she looked up again with a smile.

  ‘If it pleases you, Master Saturnall, perhaps you might sit with me?’

  Her hip-bones no longer jutted. He could not count her ribs through her skin. Only Marpot's blow marked her. As they lay together in bed, John ran his finger over the bump.

  ‘Your broke-nosed bride,’ she murmured.

  ‘Would that you were.’

  That winter, the stores and larders were full. On the Twelfth Night feast John was summoned from the depths by a smiling Mister Fanshawe who led the way up the stairs and past the old buttery, through the passage and into the Great Hall.

  Once again the red-liveried cooks, pot-boys, scullions and turnspits emerged from behind the screen and were beckoned onto the benches. The Household and Estate men shifted up to make room until the Great Hall was a motley of red, green and purple. Philip Elsterstreet contrived a place next to Gemma. Adam Lockyer and Alf leaned over to exchange words with Ginny and Meg. Further down, John saw Mister Bunce and Mister Stone yawn over their cups while Simeon Parfitt hushed three bellowing kitchen boys with an angry wave of his hand. It seemed another life in which Simeon had peered into a blackened pan, his eyes prickling with tears, or Scovell had pressed the ladle into his hand.