‘I stole it. But I have confessed the sin.’
‘You confessed it to Father Pomfret?’
‘He made me tell him where I had taken it from and why I could not return it. He gave me absolution.’
That is all she would say. Anne prefers asking to telling. She probed me about Peter. Did I think he would have made a good husband? I told her I did not know, only that he was the only man in the world for me.
‘There is a certain kind of man,’ said Anne, ‘whose wife is as his mother was to him when he was an infant. He looks to none but her. His home-place is her body, its nooks and crannies, its odours and flavours. It matters not at all what she comes to look like or smell like as she grows old. He could no more think of bedding another woman than of bedding a peacock.’
Might Peter have been like that, with me? But Anne had just got into her stride.
‘There is another kind of man who just needs a woman, often, and any woman. He will take his wife with a good heart because she is available, but he will not content himself with her however much he swears, at the beginning, that he loves only her. And he will mean it when he says it. But the passion for one woman does not last. Nor for that matter does the passion of any one woman for one man.’
‘How long does the passion last?’
‘Listen well, little Agnes. I have lived, and I have observed. Four years, at the most. A marriage is for a lifetime. It has its own serious purposes. Far better to farm out in other beds the itch of the flesh, without repining.’
‘Can one then ever be happy?’
‘You do not know when you are happy. You only know afterwards, looking back. You say to yourself, “I was happy, at that time.” Even then, you may be deceiving yourself.’
I was always intrigued by what she said. It remained with me. But at that time I was more interested in what she could tell me about Dorothy Clausey, who became my friend.
Dorothy initiated the friendship: ‘You are the first female I have met since I entered this place who has any intellect.’
‘What about Eleanor Wilmer?’
‘She is distorted.’
Dorothy told me she liked my voice and the way I spoke. She herself does not speak much. She holds back most of her opinions. She too is a reader, and we sit together in the Library in the afternoons. The heavy Library key is kept by us at the back of a niche in the cloister wall, behind the figure of St Catherine. Actually there are two keys on the one ring, the hinge of which is so rusted that the second, smaller one cannot be removed. This smaller one is the key to a wooden door across a hollowed-out cavity in the wall of the Library. That is where is kept the illuminated Psalter with a jewel-encrusted binding, the most precious object in all the Abbey’s collection. We are allowed by the Prioress to take the ring with the two keys when we want, so long as we lock up when we leave the Library and put the keys back in their hiding place.
I have been reading anything in English that I can lay my hands on – our Rule of St Benedict, chronologies, annals, spiritual exercises, chronicles, accounts of other Benedictine Houses, sacred poetry … There are little Books of Hours in Latin which I love for their coloured pictures.
I have come across some pleasing things, crushed behind heavy volumes at the back of shelves – recipes, sets of verses. The best is a delicious poem written on creased vellum about the first snowdrops of spring, which are likened to the drooping heads of novices. Dorothy calculates that it was written by a nun who lived in this House some two hundred years ago, because the English is not quite like our English and the script is not quite like ours either. It took me several afternoons to puzzle out and transcribe the poem. I wonder who the nun was, and what happened to her. Nothing and everything, I suppose. She grew old and died in the Abbey and went to Heaven.
Dorothy Clausey was taught Latin before she came to the Abbey, and has continued her study of it since. Father Robert Parker joins us and sits close beside her, helping her with difficult texts and correcting her own Latin writings. I envy them. If the truth were told, it is Dorothy whom I envy, both for knowing Latin and for having the attention of Robert. They are so absorbed and happy doing their Latin. When they raise their eyes from their books and smile at me, they are coming back from far away. Some of the Latin books and manuscripts are more interesting than what is available to in English. She has been studying a big illuminated manuscript about medicinal plants, and another about animals and fishes.
They do not always exclude me. One late autumn afternoon of slanting sunlight and disturbing fragrances, we three left the Library and crossed the roadway to the orchard. The grass, uncut since midsummer, was lush and soft. The apple trees cast shadows, making the green seem black. We lay down on our backs in the long grass in a patch of sunlight between the trees, in a row like salted herrings – Dorothy in the middle, Robert and I on either side of her. No touching. We must have looked comical to anyone who chanced to see us. No one did see us, or so I wrongly thought.
Robert picked up a windfall, and the sound of his teeth biting into the crispness of it made my mouth fill with water, as if I were tasting the sweet sharpness myself. Apple-juice saliva. We lay there a long time. Was this an occasion of sin? It was certainly an occasion of happiness. I knew that I was happy that day, my happiness welling up from the grass and down from the sun and from the nearness of Dorothy and Robert. Anne Cathcart was wrong about happiness.
‘I suppose you know who your great new friend Dorothy is?’ said Anne Cathcart. And then, in a lower tone, with her knowing look and air of giving me a special gift:
‘She is the Cardinal’s daughter.’
She paused for effect. All I could say was: ‘Oh?’
‘Of course, cardinals cannot marry, but … Dorothy arrived the same year as I did, in the old Abbess’s time. She was only fourteen then, a pupil boarder.’
When the old Abbess died, and Dame Elizabeth Zouche was elected, letters were sent her from London explaining who Dorothy was and asking Dame Elizabeth to keep her on in the community, as there was nowhere else suitable for her to go.
‘Then, the year after that, as you know, her father the Cardinal died. If he had not died naturally, his head would have been cut off within the week.’
Another tale told to scare children, it seemed to me. I felt stupid telling Anne that I had no idea who the Cardinal was, although I had heard him spoken of.
So Anne settled herself more comfortably on the bench. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was the son of a butcher (that endeared him to me) who rose to be what Master Thomas Cromwell now is – a wily government servant, ambitious, able, close to the King – also, as Master Cromwell is not, a Prince of the Church. He was the King’s chief advisor and confidant, his fixer. He supported the King in his desire to procure from the Pope an annulment of his marriage with Queen Catherine. When the Cardinal failed to bring this about he lost favour with the King and with the Lady Anne Boleyn who did everything she could to bring him down.
‘The King always liked the Cardinal and piled honours on him. The Cardinal got above himself. He grew gorgeous, extravagant. Gross. Wealthy beyond imagining. He built himself an outrageous palace on the Thames at Hampton.’
Then the Cardinal mismanaged some political business with France and the King, ‘egged on by Anne Boleyn’, turned against him and issued a warrant for his arrest.
‘The Cardinal died on his way back to London from the north to answer the charges. That is the end of the story of the Cardinal. The King grabbed for himself all his fine possessions and his palace too.’
‘And Dorothy? Who is her mother?’
For once Anne Cathcart was at a loss. She shrugged.
‘I do not know. Perhaps the Cardinal pleasured himself with a maidservant.’
3
TREGONWELL AND ARUNDELL
When my father goes out in the long summer evenings he will always say, ‘I have to see a man about a dog.’ What man? What dog? I wondered when I was a child. He could not answer me. He
does not have the words to explain that it is figurative or, as Hugh Backwell would say, a façon de parler. It is what men say when they intend to go off to do something and do not want to tell anyone where they are going. I expect my father wants solitude and just walks the roads for an hour or so. Or maybe he meets a woman? I do not think so, but what do I know.
We do have a real dog at home. He is called Ratter because ratting is his job. His domain is the yard and outhouses. He is not allowed into our living quarters and I have never been fond of him. When he is not gnawing a bone he is scratching himself or slobbering over his private parts.
There are dogs too here in the Abbey – guard dogs chained up outside the workshops and stores, to protect tools and materials from thieving townspeople at night. They growl and snarl when anyone comes within six feet of them. I steer clear of their yellow teeth, as do the Abbey cats. The Prioress has a comical white creature which she carries on the palm of her left hand, with its hind parts up her sleeve. It is a dog but it is more like a child’s plaything. We are not permitted to keep pet animals, but then much is done that is not permitted.
I never felt affection for any animal, let alone a dog, until Finbarr came.
She belonged to the two little boys. I remember one morning, the boys laughing and laughing, they could not stay upright, they threw himself from side to side until they fell on their backs on the ground waving their legs in the air, still laughing.
‘Finbarr has Sister’s shoe! Finbarr has Sister’s shoe!’
Finbarr ran round and round in circles, tossing Sister Catherine Hunt’s sandal in the air and catching it again, while Catherine lunged around trying to retrieve it. Catherine is plump and not a quick mover. Finbarr settled down with the sandal between his front paws to chew at the straps. When Catherine came near, he danced away with the sandal, out of reach.
One of the boys, suddenly exhausted, began to cough. He lay there coughing. The dog abandoned the wrecked sandal and came to lick his face.
That boy’s name is Weasel, or that’s what he told us. He and the black boy, whom he calls Dick, had been found huddled together outside the Abbey gatehouse one chilly night. Weasel and Dick seemed to be about eight years old although it was hard to tell. They were taken in and fed, and questioned by the Prioress, but could give no account of themselves, other than that they had crept in among the bundles on a cart on the quay at Bridport – Weasel knew that much – and fallen asleep. When they awoke it was dark and they did not know where they were. The oxen had been taken out and there was no one around.
The Prioress looked at Dick and at his black face.
‘Did you come off a ship?’
He could not say.
‘He does not know the words,’ said Weasel. ‘He has other words.’
Dick was a quick learner. Quite soon he knew a lot of our words. The boys stayed. No one said that they could, and no one said that they could not.
Dick and Weasel came and found me where I was reading about St Augustine in the slype. In their haste they almost tripped over the feet of Sister Eleanor Wilmer, kneeling in prayer with her elbows on the bench and her head for once buried in her hands.
‘Sister Agnes, something bad,’ whispered Dick.
‘Very, very bad,’ whispered Weasel. ‘You have to come.’
They pulled at my tunic. I followed them out, stepping over Eleanor’s feet, and up past the churches to the gatehouse. I had not asked permission to go to the town that afternoon. I had no sisterly companion with me, and so I hesitated.
‘You have to come,’ said Weasel.
They turned left on to Bimport and ran ahead of me. Past the backs of Abbey buildings there is a row of low dwellings with no windows and rotting thatch. Families from here come in through the side-gate and hang about the kitchen door for food. The boys stopped at one of these tenements, and Weasel took hold of the latch on the door.
‘It is horrible,’ he said, ‘but you mustn’t mind.’
Everything and everywhere and everyone smells of something, but I had never before smelled anything quite like that place. It was full of withy cages, and in the cages were animals lying in swamps of their own waste – cats, dogs, badgers, foxes, birds. Even with the door open it was hard to see, but all the creatures seemed dead, and some had been dead a long time and were coming apart. Flies crawled all over them and over each other. The flies all rose up in a filthy cloud when we came near and then settled back.
There was something – someone – on a mattress in the corner. The boys pulled me towards it.
‘She dead,’ said Dick.
He took my hand. I was glad of it. The woman’s body was covered in sacks, but her face was upturned and still haunts me at bad times. She was just recognisable. It was Mistress Winterbourne, one of the women who came regularly to the Abbey to beg.
The room darkened. Two young men stood there.
‘We didn’t know what to do for the best. Thought we had better just leave everything as it was. Our mother, and – and everything.’
That was the taller one. John Winterbourne. His brother is called John Winterbourne too. He never speaks, he has never spoken in all his life. The brothers make baskets, and hurdles, and fish-traps and skeps for bees, and sell them in the market.
I took a deep breath.
‘I will get help for you,’ I said, and made for the open door, but Weasel tugged at my hand.
‘The little dog,’ he said, ‘that one – ask them if we can have it.’
They dragged me over to a cage in which was an animal not dead. It crouched there in its mess and looked at us.
I could not stand another minute of being in that place. I am not over-delicate, everyone sees dead bodies, and I more than most. I accompanied my mother laying out corpses, I have seen vagrants frozen stiff against the Abbey wall in Bruton on January mornings, and children crushed and spilling out their little guts under the wheels of market wagons, and new-borns washed downstream from God knows where, caught in the rocks of the Brue where it runs shallow at the back of the Free School. I have seen boys from the school poke a little corpse with sticks to set it off downstream again. I am a butcher’s daughter and a dead person is no different from a dead animal. But the rats had been at Mistress Winterbourne’s face. I went out and vomited in the roadway.
At first the dog was too weak to walk, and Dick and Weasel trundled it all over the Abbey grounds in a handcart. We grew used to the particular clatter of its wheels on the cobbled parts and the cries of the boys, ‘Come out and see our little dog!’
She was starved and parched, she had lost most of her coat, she was covered in sores and would not have lasted another day had they not rescued her. The boys won the heart of the Cellaress, who allowed them to take stale bread and bones for the dog from the kitchen. They cuddled her between them at night. She was very young – less than a year old, we thought – and as she became well she became inquisitive and destructive, so the Prioress told the boys they must keep her on a leash. They made a slip-knot in a rope and put it round her neck. No one had the heart to tell them the dog must go. So she stayed.
This newcomer had a sweet nature, she never barked, and clung to Dick and Weasel like their shared shadow. She arrived full of mange but as she recovered she grew a glossy black coat. Her ears were silken flaps. She had comical habits. If we gave her something that she especially liked – a pig’s ear for example – she did not chew it up but carried it around in her mouth whimpering, suffering from an overwhelming desire to bury it. We had to stop her digging holes in the nun’s graveyard. Then she discovered she could wriggle under a weakened section of paling behind the Infirmary, and raced with her treasure down the slope and far into the Abbey Park, out of sight. The pig’s ear would not be seen again.
‘What is her name?’ I asked the boys.
They did not know that dogs have names. I told them that if they gave her a name, and she learned it, she would come when they called.
‘She comes anywa
y. We say “Little Dog! Little Dog!”’
Then that was her name, I told them.
‘Sister Little Dog,’ said Dick, and the two found that funny, and Sister Little Dog jumped all over them.
In their first weeks at the Abbey the boys slept in the hay in one of the barns. Then on one of their perambulations round the Abbey they came across the remains of a small structure – just two jutting sections of crumbling masonry, at right angles to the wall. The Abbey is littered with abandoned tenements and sheds and lean-tos. Nothing is wholly cleared away, though the best stones and timbers are carted off to be re-used. When King Alfred built the original Abbey, the timbers of the buildings would have been fresh cut, clean and pale, and the reed thatches crisp and dense, like the new bakery and the best guesthouse are now. But even the new bakery is built on the footings of something old. Nothing in any place where people have been settled for a long time is ever all new, or all old, at the same time. It’s just the same in Bruton.
The boys begged some old planking from the joiners’ workshop. They nailed the warped pieces together to make a roof over the broken stone walls, and found a hurdle to use as a door. It served to keep the dog in at night.
Dame Onion gave the dog her name. Dame Onion is old and from Ireland, and she has other words, like Dick, and sometimes it is hard to understand her even when she speaks our words. Her name is not Onion, it is something in Irish that sounds like Onion, and no one could pronounce her family name the way she said it either, except that it too began with the ‘O’ sound, so she is just Dame Onion. She said the kennel-house the boys built was like the cell of St Finbarr near where she was born.
‘Finbarr was a holy man and he lived with other holy men on an island on a lake.’
‘Finbarr,’ said Dick, and looked at Weasel.
‘Finbarr,’ said Weasel.
The dog became Finbarr.
But Finbarr in Irish means fair-haired, said Dame Onion, and besides that, Finbarr was a man, and this dog was female and as black as sin.
The Butcher's Daughter Page 6
