North Side of the Tree

by Maggie Prince

  “No!” I shout. “No, I won’t stay here!” My voice cracks humiliatingly.

  My mother turns round, the big iron key in her hand. “I’ll return shortly, Beatrice. First, I want to have a word with Parson Becker.” She closes the door and the key grates in the lock. Their raised voices retreat down the stairwell, growing angrier with every step.

  Chapter 5

  Occasionally in life there comes a moment when you just have to lie down and say, for now I can do nothing; for now I give up. I do so then. I lie down on my bed with my face to the wall. Then I get up, close the bed-curtains and lie down again in darkness. I feel betrayed. How could they? Worst of all, my mother has colluded in my imprisonment. How could she who defies convention herself? I thought I knew her. I have never felt more let down.

  “Beatrice, it’s for your own good,” she says when she returns an hour later and whips the bed-curtains open. “People heard what you said. Stupid, stupid girl! Do you want to be hanged for murder? I don’t believe for a moment that you did it. You’re obviously just trying to protect James. Do you think that great lummox can’t look after himself? We’ve told everyone you have a brain fever, brought on by the fall, and didn’t know what you were saying. Now we have to let it die down, so please be good and stay here in your room for a week or so, while people forget about it.”

  “And James, Mother?” I enquire. “Is he in the meantime to be hunted down and hanged?”

  “Well, presumably not, if you tell us who really committed this murder. It wasn’t James, was it? Are you going to tell me what really happened? It may not go so badly for the murderer, if he was indeed saving you from the men. Who was it, Beatrice? You do know, don’t you?”

  I turn my face away. “No. I don’t know.”

  “Was it James?”

  “No.”

  “Then you do know. Come along, child, who was it?”

  “I don’t know!” I shout.

  My mother turns away. “Then I’m afraid your father is set on incriminating James.” She crosses to the door. I jump off the bed and follow her.

  “Mother, you can’t allow it! It’s obvious that Father only wants him out of the way because of Verity.”

  “I can’t stop him, Beatrice. I have tried.”

  “Then I shall tell everyone – the magistrate, everyone – that I did it.”

  My mother walks out and slams the door behind her, calling through it, “Not from here you won’t, Beatrice.” It is ridiculous – ridiculous and humiliating. I cannot quite understand how I managed to get myself into this situation, from which there appears no way out. I have heard of girls being locked away before, but never dreamt it could happen to me.

  They manage my imprisonment very well. I almost feel as if they have been waiting to do this, as if there were some unspoken agreement between everyone that I have been getting above myself. By the end of the first week I am beginning to think I truly do have brain fever, the boredom and sense of being trapped are so great. By night I lie awake listening to the shrieks of owls, and by day to the screams of pigs, as autumn slaughter gets under way along the valley. It is necessary work, so that we may all eat through the winter, and make soap and black puddings and leather gloves. Usually on our farm I decide on the pig, and the day it shall be dispatched. This year my mother tells me they are managing the autumn work quite well without me – the barns are well filled and she will be asking Leo to kill one of the pigs in a fortnight. There will be no more Scots this year, so now we can settle down to preparing for winter.

  One day I hear sounds of fighting from further down the valley, and I learn later from Germaine that a pitched battle has been fought at Low Back Farm. Verity has, it seems, moved there from the parsonage, and my father and his henchmen have been attempting to retrieve her, and to capture James Sorrell. However, James now has henchmen of his own, and my father’s forces were driven off.

  I have a few visitors, always with the door locked behind them and a henchman on duty outside. It is mortifying. They come as if to an invalid, all keeping up the ghastly pretence that I am ill with brain fever and must be enclosed for my own good. Mother, to whom I cannot bring myself to speak, looks concerned and tired. Kate brings hot possets and titbits from the kitchen, and the news that John has called every day but has not been allowed in. Germaine comes with her sewing, and books of poetry to read to me. One day I wake from an afternoon doze to find Gerald here with her. From where I lie in the dark recesses of my bed they are framed by a gap in my bed-curtains, clutching each other in a wild embrace. I watch the soft triangle of Germaine’s underjaw as they kiss frantically, and am filled with sadness. I think of Robert, and the moment I chose not to go to Scotland with him, and for the first time I believe I made the wrong decision.

  The weather turns cold and windy. Kate lights the fire in the chimney hole in my room, and the draught under the door fills the chamber with smoke and half suffocates me. I sit with tears pouring down my cheeks, only partly because of the smoke. Kate jerks her chin at the door which Michael, the sly new henchman, has locked behind her. “I don’t hold with this,” she says, “shutting you in here when there’s work to be done. Farm’s going to rack and ruin. Brain fever my arse. You’re no dafter than you ever were. Your father gets nobbut gristle from me till he lets you out.” She hammers on the door for it to be opened.

  “Kate,” I whisper, “Kate, please let me out. Please, I beg you.”

  From outside comes the sound of Michael unlocking the door. Kate turns her short-sighted gaze on me. “Oh lass, we’d all fain let you out if we could, but what would your father do? Our lives wouldn’t be worth the living, if we still had them to live.”

  Michael stands in the doorway, listening. “Best be careful, Goody Kate,” he says with a grin.

  I could have warned him, had I been so inclined, that it is deeply unwise to antagonise Kate, but I do not, since it will be a pleasure to ponder the frightful things which she will now do to his food.

  “I thank you for your advice, lad,” she says to him as he pulls the door to. “For certain it will guide my actions.” Michael gives a self-satisfied laugh.

  Sunday comes, and I am not even allowed to go to church. John comes over again afterwards. I hear his horse, which has a distinctive, petulant whinny, and I catch a glimpse of him arriving as I peer out of the awkward angle of my window. My father, whom I can hear coughing and wheezing upstairs, does not go down, and no one opens the door to the visitor. After a while John gives up hammering on it and instead stands shouting up at the battlements. Eventually he comes round the tower looking for my window. I rap on the glass and finally he sees me. He stands up in his saddle, then ducks, as a stone flies off the battlements at him. I can hear my father shouting above, “Give that bow to me, lad, if you’re too lily-livered to use it! What, you’ve never shot a parson? What have you been doing all your life? Call yourself a henchman?” An arrow hisses past my window, and another, and I recoil in horror, then realise as they land quivering in the grass that they are not intended to hit John – my father’s aim is better than that – but merely to cause him to go away. He does not go away, however. He sits there for a long time, arms folded, whilst arrows fly past him, then he turns his horse and moves away to the edge of the woods, a one-man siege.

  By Monday I have had enough. I have looked at all ways of escaping. It might well be possible to break my window with the warmingstone from my bed. My bedsheets tied together could possibly reach near enough the ground for me to jump. The problem is that the tower is too well guarded for me to get away. There is always a watchman on the battlements, and they fear my father too much to turn a blind eye. I have considered bribery, and ponder what it would take to bribe somebody to leave the door unlocked. What can you offer someone, to risk their life? Do I indeed ever want anyone to risk their life for me again? In the end, when it happens, it is in an unplanned way. Kate brings my supper on Monday evening, and tells me that my father and his men are to attack
Low Back Farm again tonight, under cover of darkness. They believe that today’s rough weather, which is rapidly turning into a wild night, will enable them to creep right up to the farmhouse undetected.

  “If everyone’s going down to Low Back Farm, who’ll

  be on watch?” I ask her.

  “Leo, that slitgut, him as should be off tending t’cows.” Before she has finished speaking, I have made up my mind.

  As night falls, I can hear them preparing for the attack. Swords scrape and tinderboxes click. The smell of hot tar rises up the tower walls as arrows are wrapped and dipped. I offer up a prayer for Verity and James, then rip the sheets off my bed, drag the clothes press against the door, retrieve the warmingstone and wait for it to become silent outside.

  It takes a long time. My stomach churns with nervousness as I wait, straining my ears. Raindrops beat against my window, driven by the wind. I can see nothing beyond the wet glass but a great darkness full of moving shadows.

  The gale battering the tower becomes too loud for me to know whether or not all the men have gone. I can only hope it is also loud enough to cover the sounds of my escape. Kate will be asleep in her room behind the kitchen hearth. Germaine, I do not know. I just hope she is off on one of her unexplained absences.

  For a moment I cannot do it. I hold the green granite warmingstone, and can think of nothing but how expensive this fragile glass was, and how cold my room used to be before the window was glazed. I listen. Will Leo really be on the battlements in this weather, with no Scots likely and no one to check his vigilance? What will he do if he sees me? It is, after all, for his sake that I am imprisoned here. I swing the stone high above my head, and bring it crashing against the window.

  In a second it is gone, precious glass smashing and tinkling away into the night. I am almost knocked back against the bedpost by the wind roaring in. Now I must hurry. I stuff the knotted bedsheet out of the window, but it blows back over and over again. When it is finally out, it will not hang down. I think of Robert climbing the wall on his swaying rope ladder, his face at the window, my hands pushing him and the terrible injuries he sustained when he fell. The height and the precariousness of these walls seem suddenly fearsome and impossible.

  There is a lull in the gale. Is this the moment to go? No one appears to have heard me so far. The bedsheet whips round and catches on some shards of glass. I free it, prise the fragments out, check that the other end of the sheet is still firmly knotted round the leg of the bed. There is a sound from above. I must just go, never mind the sheer drop and the frightening fragility of the knotted sheets. I drag my cloak round me and climb backwards on to the deep windowsill. The wind rips at my skirts and I feel as if I am being sucked through the narrow aperture before I am ready. I kneel there, holding on to the sheet and the window-ledge, staring back into the room, and as I do so, the clothes press which was jammed against the door starts to move. It judders along the floor towards me. I stare at it, paralysed. Someone is coming in, and I hadn’t even heard the key.

  With the opening door, the gale rushes right through the room. Hangings rattle and ash swirls. “What’s the matter with this door?” enquires a voice. “I knocked, mistress; is everything all right?” With a final push, Leo enters. “Sweet Jesu!” He rushes across the room and grabs my arms as I frantically try to lower myself out.

  “No!” I hit out at him. “No! Let me go, Leo! Let me go at once!”

  Almost effortlessly he drags me back in and sets me on my feet in the chamber.

  “Leo, how dare…”

  “Shh.” He goes to the window, pushes the knotted bedsheet out again and watches it spiral around the window space as the wind catches it. Then he crosses to the door, holds it open for me and bows. “An easier way, mistress. I heard nothing, with this terrible wind blowing.”

  We look at one another. All manner of things are in that look, acknowledgements of deeds done and faith kept. Leo looks away first, as he unhooks a piece of hessian twine from his belt. “Come on, lady, out with you.” I step on to the tiny landing that leads to the spiral staircase, and watch as Leo loops the twine round a leg of the clothes press, then hooks it under the door. “Anything more you wish to take?” he asks. I look back, and shake my head. I have all I intend to take bundled into a large pocket attached at my waist. I watch as Leo closes the door and locks it, then pulls both ends of the twine so that the clothes press scrapes back into position, barricading the door on the inside.

  “Thank you.” My voice is hoarse. I have to clear my throat. “Thank you, Leo.”

  “Come lady, we’d best get you moving. I’ll saddle a horse. You’ll be going to the parsonage?” I nod. Down in the blowy barmkin, whilst Leo puts my sidesaddle on Germaine’s little mare, Mattie, I stand and watch my bedsheet high on the tower wall, flailing about in the rising gale.

  Chapter 6

  If I had not gone to stay at John’s, everything would have been different.

  For my first few days at the parsonage, I am filled with melancholy. I miss my home, my room, the rhythms of life on the farm. I have to remind myself that I was a prisoner there, and that the past week was intolerable. On the many occasions in those first few days when my father comes beating at the parsonage door, only to be turned away, I feel almost glad to hear him, simply for the familiarity of his rage. From a small, high window I watch him walk back to where his horse is tethered at the trough on the green, and I see that he has a severe limp, presumably from his latest encounter with James and the men of Low Back Farm.

  My mother does not visit me, but instead sends such of my clothes as I might need for a short stay, and a note berating me for supposedly risking breaking my neck by climbing out of the window, and commanding me to mind my tongue and under no circumstances to speak about the deaths of the two strangers.

  The day after my arrival John and I sit in the kitchen where Mother Bain is baking bread. Smoke rolls through the late afternoon sunlight as she lifts out trays of flat, black loaves from the bread oven, and tips them on to the wooden rack. The bitter scents of smoke and rye fill the kitchen.

  “I’ll mull some ale.” John looks tired. He has been up half the night with one of his parishioners who is dying of consumption. “Will you have some ale?” he asks Mother Bain.

  “Nay lad. The bread’s done and I’m off to lie down. I daresay the pair of you are safe to be left?”

  This has become a joke between the three of us. John watches her go to her room behind the hearth, which she took over when James left, since stairs have now become too much for her.

  “We should get a chaperone for you,” John says when she has gone. “It’s well enough to joke, but your being here is a very different matter from Verity’s being here. I don’t think it can be entirely unknown to people that you and I have some fondness for each other.” He pushes the poker into the fire to heat. “I want you to stay. I want you to stay as long as you’re willing to, and I want there to be no whisper of scandal to spoil it.”

  I do not distress him by telling him that there is already considerably more than a whisper of scandal surrounding my presence here, amid speculation about my imprisonment and escape. I have seen groups of villagers on the green casting curious glances at the parsonage, and we have had a stream of visitors here these first few days, bringing pies and puddings. They say it is to welcome me to Wraithwaite, but I know it is in fact to see the state I am in, since my father’s notorious temper appears to have driven yet another daughter to seek refuge here. On the occasions when my father comes galloping up to the parsonage door, a surprising number of people appear to have business requiring their attendance on the village green. John goes out and talks calmly to him each time, locking the door behind him, and in the presence of so many witnesses there is little my father can do but eventually leave.

  “Surely Mother Bain is adequate as a chaperone,” I reply. “Unless your designs on me are more drastic and immediate than I anticipated.”

  John smiles.
“The problem is that Mother Bain has failing eyesight and hearing, and is also seen as somewhat unorthodox, with all her soothsaying and predictions. I think we need a woman of narrow views and a reputation for utmost propriety. The widow of one of the strangers who was killed in the woods has journeyed to Wraithwaite, looking for work. She is destitute now that her husband is dead. I spoke to her. She seems exactly the sort of person we need. Her name is Widow Brissenden.”

  I stare at him. “You spoke to her without consulting me, John? I have heard of this woman. They say she is truly dreadful. They say she is carping and narrow-minded and criticises everyone in her path.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, you know what people here are like, particularly about strangers. They’ll get used to her. She has relatives in Hagditch who speak very highly of her. She’s staying with them but does not wish to be dependent on them, which is admirable. One of her nephews rode over here to recommend her to me. It seems only sensible to take her on, since she needs a position and we have one to offer. Also, I almost feel we owe it to her, since her husband was murdered whilst here at the command of your father.”

  I pace round the kitchen, feeling angry, yet not in a position to vent my anger. I am John’s guest, and also I feel partly responsible for this woman having become a widow. The thought of having her as a constant reminder of the attack appals me though. I stop in front of John. “Please do not employ her, John. I shall not be here for long. It does not generally bother you to flout convention.”