by Ann Swinfen
I did not undertake the ride back to the farm alone. Gideon had borrowed a horse from Will, while Nehemiah half walked, half trotted alongside us. I had tucked up my skirts and rode astride, as I always did, for we did not possess a side saddle, and I doubt whether I could have managed to stay mounted on that barbarous invention. The lane was pock marked in some places with new holes, hollowed out by the flood, and ridged with frozen mud in others, so we had need to go carefully. Despite Blaze’s eagerness to reach home, I was forced to hold him on a tight rein and pick our way with caution.
At last the farmhouse came into sight. I must confess I had almost dreaded that it might have been washed away, but it stood there sturdily on its slight rise, with the barn and dairy and hen-hus and well-hus beyond, though I could see that the roof of the hen-hus was damaged. One wall of the barn was sagging, which we had been hastily propping up before we had abandoned the farm.
‘You will need to ask the help of the Dutchmen,’ Gideon said, his eyes on the barn as we rode through the gateway into the yard. The gate itself had been partially torn from its hinges and lay askew against the supporting post. ‘That wall needs urgent repair, before the whole side of the barn collapses.’
I nodded. The repair to the barn was urgent and looked difficult. However, the roof of the hen-hus would be easy enough to replace, once we had gathered reeds for thatching, but I could not return the hens there until it was done, for fear of foxes. I wondered whether the local foxes had been drowned in the floods. Probably not. Wild animals have an instinct at such times. They would have fled for the higher ground further inland, though one or two had been seen about the glebe land.
Dismounted, I tethered Blaze to the ring in the house wall and shook down my skirts.
‘The house first,’ I said.
Best to confront the worst before all else. Then I jumped in alarm as something pushed against the back of my legs.
‘Jacob!’ Our dog must have followed us up the lane from the church. Like Blaze, he was anxious to return home.
Gideon laughed and rubbed Jacob behind his ears. ‘You’ll not find your usual warm place beside the fire, lad.’
‘I hope we can make a fire.’ I frowned. ‘The whole of our wood store beside the barn will have been saturated. Nehemiah, have we any peat left?’
‘We had some in the barn loft, Mistress Mercy. I’ll climb up and see.’
Nehemiah crossed the yard to the barn, while Gideon and I struggled to open the house door, which, like others in the village, had warped in the wet. We stepped over the threshold.
I had steeled myself to expect the worst, after what I had seen in the village houses. My own home was no worse than some, and a good deal better than many. Like the Coxes’ house, Turbary Holm stood a little higher than the surrounding ground. That was why it had been built here and why it was so named, for ‘holm’ is an old word for ‘island’, so I had once been told – a word brought to these parts by the Danes – while ‘turbary’ referred to the rich peat bogs nearby. It had not been island enough in the flood, but was raised sufficiently that the flood had reached not much above waist height, judging by the dirty marks on the walls.
As elsewhere there was a layer of mud on the floor about a foot deep, but the stench was not as bad as it had been in the Coxes’ house. Somehow the movement of the flood waters had spared us the midden. But there was the same destruction of small household goods, although the heavy furniture had survived. In the corner my mother’s loom was a pile of shattered sticks, tangled up in a half finished blanket Kitty had been weaving. The door to the small chamber which had once been Kitty’s stood open. Since his amputation, it had been Tom’s, for he had not yet found a way to manage stairs. The bedclothes had been torn off the bed and lay in the mud.
‘There is a ham left,’ Gideon said, pointing to where it hung above the fireplace.
‘And there will be cheeses and other stores in the hayloft over the barn,’ I said. ‘We hid them there when the court officers seized our goods as security for Father’s fine. We never moved them.’
‘Some good has come of that bad time, then.’
Nehemiah came in, carrying two shovels. ‘Aye, there’s a small store of peat left in the barn, but let it stay until we have cleared this mud, eh, Reverend?’
‘You’d best not call me that, Nehemiah. Not until I may return to my church, if ever I may.’
He nodded. ‘Aye. Master Clarke it shall be, then. Shall us set to and clear this clag?’
He had brought a wheelbarrow to the door, and as they began to shovel the filth from the floor into it, I picked my way to the barn. Jacob kept close at my heels. It seemed he was worried by the state in which he had found his familiar home. The beaten earth of the yard had been softened and churned by the flood, then frozen into uneven hillocks, so there was every likelihood of turning an ankle. It would be better not to bring the cows back until there was safer footing for them.
The large lidded crock which held the hens’ food still stood safely on a shelf in the barn, away from rats. The rest of the barn was in much the same state as the house, though there was little here that could be damaged. Everything of value was stored in the hay loft or hung from pegs high on the walls. Normally I took a single scoop to feed the hens, but I feared they might be starving, so I made a bag of my apron and filled it with as much of the feed as it would hold.
Back in the house I could hear Gideon and Nehemiah working away in the back parlour, seldom used by the family. They had not begun yet on the kitchen, where we mostly lived. Holding my apron tightly with one hand, I felt my way cautiously up the stairs to the first floor. The first few steps were slippery, but after that they seemed sound enough. As in the Coxes’ house, I decided to shed my muddy boots. The attics were reached by a ladder, which was still in place. This was even more difficult to climb with my burden of hen food. Unable to follow me, Jacob watched anxiously from the foot of the ladder, whining softly. As I pushed up the trap with my free hand I was engulfed in a stink of hen droppings and something worse, so that I closed my eyes and prayed that I should not find them all dead.
Two had perished. Their emaciated bodies showed clearly enough that they had starved to death. Hens have a fierce pecking order and the strongest will always prevail over the weakest, pushing and clawing them away from the food. These were two of the young pullets, and I was glad that I had not brought Kitty with me, for she had reared the brood herself and was mighty proud of them. The remaining hens crouched here and there, with lacklustre eyes and ragged feathers. Clearly they had been pecking each other in their distress. All the food, naturally, was gone.
I scattered several handfuls of grain in a wide sweep over the floor, so that all the hens could reach it without being bullied. They staggered or scrambled to their feet, some certainly in a worse case than the others, but animated by the prospect of food. I was relieved that Hannah’s pet hen, Polly, was still alive, although she looked very weak. She had been taken in by us, along with her mistress and the cat Tobit, when the drainers burned down Hannah’s cottage. After Hannah’s death at the hands of the witchfinders, I had felt a particular care for her two pets.
Once the hens were all feeding, I searched the attics to see how much damage they had done. Kitty now slept up here, in the room she had once shared with Hannah. Fortunately she had closed the door before we left the farm, but the rest of the attics, those used for storage and the one where the billeted soldiers had slept, were now covered in hen droppings. Every inch would need to be scoured. That would have to wait until the hens could be returned to the repaired hen-hus. It must be one of the first tasks, for the smell permeated all the floor below, where our bed chambers were.
I scattered the rest of the grain, then carried the dead hens down the ladder and out to the midden. They were not fit for eating, having been dead some time and already crawling with maggots. As I came back round the corner of the barn away from the midden, I stopped suddenly at the sight of the two
bee skeps, overturned and lying broken in the mud. The bees! Hannah’s bees. I had quite forgotten them when we were herding the stock to the glebe lands. If I had remembered, we could have moved the skeps to a safer place, the hay loft, or a high shelf in the dairy where the big cheeses were sometimes kept. The bees would have been deep in their winter sleep when the floods came. No chance of escape. They must have drowned, every one.
Somehow the loss of the bees seemed to hit me like a blow in the stomach. Until then I had thought that everything about the farm could be cleaned and repaired, soon all would be well again, but those were Hannah’s bees, which had followed her here from her cottage, and everyone knows the importance of bees to any household, especially a farm. They are part of the luck of the family. Suddenly I found myself weeping, unable to stop.
At the sound of the trundling wheelbarrow, I rubbed my face with the edge of my apron. It smelled of the hens’ grain. Why should I weep for the bees? There had been so much lost, so many families bereft. What were two skeps of bees, compared to that? Yet I could have saved them, had I not forgotten them, hidden round here in the shelter at the side of the barn, where the bees had a clear flight path to our small orchard.
‘Why, what ails thee, Mercy lass?’
Nehemiah had dropped the handles of the barrow, and at the same time lapsed into the way he had always spoken to me as a child. I pointed to the tattered skeps, which Kitty had helped Hannah make, back in the spring.
‘We have lost the bees,’ I said. ‘I should have remembered.’
‘Nay, lass,’ he said gently, ‘what you did was grand. You got all the stock to the glebe land, and all the folk too, even those foreigners. And if you hadn’t seen to breaking down the old sluice gate to run off some of the water from the Lode, the flood would have been deeper still. We’ll make new skeps, and happen we’ll find us a new swarm, come the spring.’ He patted my shoulder clumsily. ‘How have the hens fared?’
‘Two of Kitty’s pullets are dead, and the rest thin and in a bad state, but I think they will live. I wish we could move them back into the hen-hus. There’s a fair stink in the attic.’
‘I’ll thatch it again tomorrow, but there’s a bit canvas in the barn we could tie down over the roof tonight, if you like.’
‘Aye, let us do that,’ I said. ‘When you and Gideon have finished shovelling the clag from the house.’
‘Nearly done,’ he said, and set off again with his barrow for the midden.
‘Bring the peat back with you,’ I called. ‘I will light a fire upstairs to air the bed chambers.’ I walked slowly back to the house, with Jacob still clinging to my heels. I felt suddenly tired and defeated, but I was determined that I would keep such weakness hidden.
For the next few hours we all worked hard. I lit a fire in my chamber, leaving all the doors open so that the heat would reach the other chambers – my mother’s, the one which used to be Tom’s, and the little room at the back where Nehemiah slept. As we had found in the village houses, the bed clothes were damp, and even the clothing stored in the coffers. By the time I had spread everything out to air, I came down to find Gideon on his hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. He had lit a small fire on the kitchen hearth and brought in stacks of the damp logs to dry out in the warmth.
Something twisted in my chest as I looked down at Gideon crouched like a poor scullion, his hands red and sore.
‘That is no task for an Oxford trained clergyman,’ I said, trying to make a jest of it, though my voice trembled a little.
He looked up at me sideways, a lock of his hair fallen across his face, and grinned.
‘We must forget the Oxford trained clergyman until better times return, my love. I am a farm labourer now, like Nehemiah.’
‘You do not sound like Nehemiah,’ I said. ‘And where is he, leaving you to scrub the floor?’
‘Fixing a canvas on the hen-hus roof, so you may move your poultry back where they belong.’
‘You found some dry logs?’
‘Aye, the top of the stack was above the level of the flood, so there is a dry layer. The ones just below are only a little damp. They should dry out soon.’
I started to sort out the crockery, separating the broken from the undamaged, and I put the muddy bedding from the small chamber off the kitchen to soak. Soon after, Nehemiah came in, rubbing his hands together against the cold.
‘More snow coming, I’m afeared,’ he said. ‘But the hen-hus is snug enough. I’ve put a layer of peat over the canvas for warmth. Shall us move them?’
‘Aye,’ I said, ‘then I think we have done enough for today. Tomorrow I will scrub out the attics.’
It took the three of us two trips to restore the hens to their home and settle them with a good supply of water and feed, then we laid damp peats over the fires in the house to make them safe, before setting off to ride back to the village, Nehemiah and Jacob trotting behind the horses, perhaps not quite as briskly as earlier in the day.
Dusk was drawing over us as we came to the village. It was heartening to see candlelight in the windows of the houses that had been restored, and smoke rising from their chimneys. I began to think that some sort of normal life was returning. I wondered how Tom was faring, far away in London.
The following day Alice, Kitty, and Griet walked with me to the farm, and with the four of us working together, the unpleasant task of scouring the attics was quickly done. I had carried a load of small logs on my back, to make up better fires and hasten the drying out of the house, while Alice brought a basket of small loaves and cheese and ale, so that we were able to sit down to a midday meal around the kitchen table, almost as if the farm had been restored.
‘My attic is quite as good as ever,’ Kitty said cheerfully, biting into a large slab of bread and cheese. ‘I could sleep here tonight.’
‘You shall not sleep here alone,’ I said sternly. ‘Not until we all move home.’
‘And when will that be?’
I looked around. We had tidied the kitchen before we sat down to eat and apart from a few broken dishes and the loss of the loom, it did not seem too severely damaged. The walls throughout the ground floor would need to be lime-washed, but Gideon and Jack had promised to do that the next day. They had followed us to the farm with Nehemiah and four of the Dutchmen and were busy repairing the wall of the barn, where the flood waters had undermined the foundations. Back from taking them food, Kitty had reported that they had nearly finished and would then set about levelling the yard, so that it would be safe for the cows, while Nehemiah thatched the hen-hus.
‘Perhaps in two or three days we can come home,’ I said. ‘I want it to be as comfortable as possible for my mother.’
‘Her chamber is quite warm and dry now,’ Alice said. ‘Griet and I have made up the bed and folded her clothes away. Once the painting is done, I think you should come back. It will be less confusing for her.’
I nodded. ‘Aye. But she will be sad at the loss of the loom.’
‘Nehemiah thinks he can repair it,’ Kitty said. ‘I asked him just now. He must carve some new pieces, but he says it is not past mending.’
‘And the spinning wheel is fine,’ Alice said, ‘now that we have cleaned it, and thrown away the spoiled wool.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Once she has the spinning wheel under her hand, she will be more content. We will keep the broken loom out of sight until Nehemiah can see to it. You can move the pieces into the dairy, Kitty, when we have eaten. I am sorry that your blanket is destroyed.’
‘I can weave another,’ she said stoutly. ‘I am only sad that the wool is lost.’
Despite our best efforts, the half-woven blanket could not be saved, but scraps of it would serve as bedding for sick lambs in the spring, or to rub down Blaze after a hard day’s work.
Alice and I cleared away the food while Kitty and Griet cleaned the parlour. When we had finished and I was reaching for my cloak to see how the work on the yard was faring, Alice laid her hand on my arm
to stay me.
‘Mercy, have you thought what is to become of Gideon when we have all moved out of the church? He cannot stay at the rectory, once there is the risk of a new rector being sent to us, or the Reverend Edgemont riding over from Crowthorne.’
I looked at her in surprise. ‘He will come here, of course. He will help me run the farm.’
‘He knows very little of farming, Mercy. He always hired Joseph Waters and his nephews to manage the little farming he did on the glebe lands. Besides–’
‘What is worrying you, Alice?’
‘It cannot be right for him to be living here before you are married, now that Tom is gone.’
I laughed. ‘I shall not be alone with him. My mother and Kitty and Nehemiah all live here.’
Still she shook her head. ‘I fear there may be talk.’
I was astonished. In truth, I had hardly thought ahead as far as this, we had been so preoccupied with trying to survive and repair the damage of the flood. Yet now that Alice had put the idea into my head, I supposed there might be talk. Gideon had lived here before, when he was recovering from the terrible injuries inflicted on him during the attack on the church, but Alice was right. Tom had still been in sound health and living here, as had Hannah. My mother had not grown feeble in her wits. Indeed, there might now be talk. I could defy it for myself, but a clergyman must take care that no whisper of scandal comes near him. Some day Gideon might be able to take up his vocation again and I must not allow anything to endanger that.
‘We would take him into the Coxes’ house,’ Alice said, ‘but already it is so full of the homeless that Rafe and I and Huw are going to board with Jack and his mother, living in their attic. Will has two settler families at the smithy.’ She gave me a shy smile. ‘It would be best if you could be married at once.’
Married at once! I hardly dared think of it. Who would marry us? We could not ask the rector of Crowthorne, a rigid Puritan, who knew that Gideon had been expelled from his parish. We must keep his return here hidden from the Reverend Edgemont. Gideon could hardly perform the service himself. I thought of Alice’s marriage last year, all our joyous preparations, the whole village joining in the celebrations. It had been during the dancing on the green afterwards that I had the first inkling that Gideon might love me.
