The next morning, another damp, mild day, I walked back over Legge’s Bridge and up the steep track to Joan Dempster’s hut. It is cosy and clean. I took off my muddy shoes at the door. She was ever a gossip, on account of her trade. What I now wanted to know from her, and with urgency, was what had happened to Peterkin, whether he still lived or did not, and whether his father Peter Mompesson thrived or did not. And also, about Jeanne Vile. I did not confront Joan with any of this straight away. I knew we must become comfortable together before she would speak as freely to me as I wished.
The Abbey Church, she told me, was now the parish church. She told me where in the churchyard I would find my father’s grave. We talked for a while about Maurice Berkeley’s plans for his great house, and the employment he was giving to tradesmen and labourers in the town. She showed me a copper bowl with an intricate design round its rim. She had picked it up in the Abbey precinct, half-buried in the mud, and carried it away under her cloak.
‘Something the greedy Commissioners must have missed,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘There is hardly a household in Bruton that does not have something rescued from the ruination of the Abbey. We were permitted to go in there with barrows to take away stones. Not that I have any use for stones. But the Abbey will live on for ever in our saved fragments.’
They had taken the lead from the chapel roof, she said, to melt it down. Lead is so valuable.
After an hour I could contain myself no longer and asked her what I needed to know. And she told me.
Peter Mompesson is well and farming still at Brewham, his father and sister both having died. He is bringing up Peterkin more or less on his own. Peterkin is a fine lad, and very like me in appearance, said Mistress Dempster. The same colour of hair, and slight and agile.
This made my heart leap and I felt my face flushing. To conceal my agitation I asked about Jeanne Vile.
Oh. This seemed problematic. Joan Dempster paused and lowered her gaze and scraped the copper bowl about on her trestle before she spoke.
‘Jeanne and Peter Mompesson were close after the sister died and Peter needed help with his son. Jeanne has a daughter, but I do not know if she is Peter’s. She married a farmer much older than herself soon after the birth, over on the Hardway, I just do not know. Whatever way it was, there is nothing between Peter and Jeanne now, They are friends.’
‘Does Peter have any another woman?’
‘How would I know? He is a man like any other. But there is no woman living with him and Peterkin up at the farm.’
She gave me a piece of sheep’s cheese in a cloth. ‘You will be looking after your mother from now on. You will need to melt the cheese, and soak her bread in milk or broth. That’s the only way she can eat it.’
Joan Dempster gave me much to think about. Too much, as my mother said about the food I gave her. I walked back down the town and past our house with her words ringing in my ears: ‘You will be looking after your mother from now on.’ Not much choice there. I made a silent Act of Contrition for my selfish thoughts.
I crossed the church bridge, and saw the grey Abbey Church standing as it always had and, winding away to the right, the path beside the Abbey wall with its tall buttresses. Some of the school buildings on the river side of the path were in bad repair, probably no longer in use. Venturing through the open Abbey gatehouse, I saw what I expected to see.
The destruction was almost total. The Abbey buildings were demolished, with masonry and stacks of roof timbers lying around. No walls stood to their former height except a range furthest from me, where I think the Abbot’s house had been. Perhaps Master Berkeley planned to incorporate it into his new mansion. But no cloister, no chapel, no dorter or infirmary or anything else. A wasteland. Grass and thistles and ash and alder were taking over the site – except where all was reduced to oozy mud by boots and wheels.
A dozen workmen with barrows were bringing stones from the random heaps and arranging them in piles according to size all along the boundary wall where the stables had been. Another set of workmen turned over the stones and hammered off the old mortar.
And then I saw him, in the name of God, of course it was he, Master Maurice Berkeley. A youngish gentleman – even then I knew a gentleman when I saw one. He was wearing long overboots to protect his no doubt dainty shoes and hose. Stomping at one side of him side was a bulky older man, a sheaf of papers in his hand, speaking urgently, prodding his papers with a finger, with the young gentleman nodding and throwing in his pennyworth.
I recognised that man. It was John White, Abbot Eley’s enemy. He had landed on his feet. Undeservedly. I expect it was he who informed my poor father in person that his lease was terminated. On Master Berkeley’s other side was a tall thin red-haired creature, fawning. I knew him too. It was Richard Halford, whom I had also heard speak against Abbot Eley, the night when my mother and I were laying out the elf-canon.
I could, maybe should, have approached Maurice Berkeley, and pleaded for my mother’s shelter and support, and explained to him our family connection through his FitzJames stepfather. I did not have the stomach for it nor the resilience, at that moment, to bear his cold stare and John White’s officious dismissal. If I still wore the emerald dolphin round my neck, I just might have had the confidence. I thought of my dolphin embedded in filth in a sewer and I cursed Eleanor Wilmer in my heart.
7
CHANCE AND CHOICE
I walked off and began to make my way through the fields and woods uphill towards Brewham. I had no plan.
There was no bright slanting sunlight as on the day when I ran to meet Peter in these woods at the same season so long ago. I walked that same way, and saw the long, low Mompesson farmhouse and its outhouses beyond the trees on the further side. The thatch looked to be in good repair. The half-door was swinging open at the top, so Peter could not be far away. There were a dozen or so sheep in a hurdle enclosure and fowls scratching on the track and in the yard.
I heard voices, not from the farmhouse but from behind me, and scrambled into the wet brambles to the side of the track to hide.
I watched them pass, talking and laughing. A thickset man, and a limping woman in a blue smock with wild hair escaping from her headcloth. She held the hand of a little girl, skipping along at her side, chirruping to herself as little girls do. Behind them trailed a skinny little boy with bright brown hair, hitting the stones of the track with a stick and sending them spinning, detaching himself from the family group as young lads do.
For they looked like a family. I struggled halfway out of the hedge and watched the four of them go into the farmhouse. I saw Jeanne looking out of the half-door. There was light behind her. They must have lit the rushlights, or a candle. She could not possibly have seen me. Dusk was falling, and the overgrown track would have been in darkness to her eyes. She stretched out an arm to find the catch on the half-door, and closed it with a bang.
So what did I do? I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Peter opened the door, a lantern in his hand, and held it up to my face.
‘Agnes! Is it really you! Come in, come in!’
I entered the firelit room, and Peterkin met my eyes. I opened my arms to him.
Peter drew me to a place by the fire and Peterkin followed, unable to stay away from my side. We gazed upon one. I smiled up at his father, Peter, and felt no whit of the old passion, only a loyalty to the past and an affinity. Jeanne was wrapping herself in her cloak. She came to embrace me.
‘My first and best friend! Come and see us soon. I must go now, we have to walk all the back to the Hardway and to my old man. He will be wondering what has become of us.’
We – the little family, the first and forever little family – were left together to tell our stories and make our peace and plan our future.
That is not what happened. No, not at all. That is just what I have imagined. So what really did happen?
What did I do? I knocked on the door of the farmhouse. Peter opened the door, a lant
ern in his hand, and held it up to my face.
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
He did not recognise me.
‘It is I, Agnes Peppin,’ I said.
He looked back over his shoulder.
‘You had better come in,’ he said.
I entered the room. Jeanne was bent over, attending to the food she was cooking over the fire. She jumped up and stared at me startled:
‘Agnes! Is it really you! What in God’s name are you doing here?’
I did not know how to answer her. Peterkin, my son, looked up briefly and then returned to what was occupying him. He was sitting on a stool in the corner, chipping away at a piece of wood with a knife. He was a boy who did not know me and whom I did not know. He was not interested. Peter said:
‘I am sorry about the death of your father. If there is anything I can do to help you and your mother …’
I saw in his eyes just a confusion – regret, shame, pity, fear. I do not know what he saw in mine.
‘Thank you, we do not need help. I came to see our son.’
I spoke softly. Peterkin, absorbed in what he was doing, could not have heard me. Peter glanced at the boy, his boy and mine. He rubbed his hand over his chin and sighed.
‘Perhaps it would be better not to disturb his peace of mind. He is a good boy. He will have the farm when I go. Is there any need for – this?’
‘He will become a man. I think a man should know who his mother was.’
‘Come outside.’
We went out into the yard, closing the door behind us. I was alone in the dusk with Peter as in the old days, but he was as a stranger to me.
‘Agnes, I promise you I will tell him when the time is right that his mother was a good woman. And that he can be proud of his heritage. I will tell him your name. Can you live with that?’
‘Perhaps when you tell him he will want to know me.’
‘Perhaps. I would put nothing in his way. But not now, not yet.’
We stood in silence.
‘Then I should go away now,’ I said.
‘Perhaps’ – and I heard the relief in his voice. ‘Will you find your way? The moon is up, look, the sky is clear.’
I turned away towards the track. I looked back and saw him standing at the door, and raised my hand. He raised his hand. I walked away into the dark.
That is not what happened either. No, not at all.
But those scenes, played out in my mind over and over when I am walking, and during the nightly void between first sleep and second sleep, remain as real to me as if they really had happened. Sometimes my mind fabricates variations.
The pain does recede though the stories in my head do not. Telling them to myself has become a habit. A weakness of the mind. Peterkin may come to find me one day or he may not. Sometimes I feel as if it is of no consequence one way or the other. There is but the thinnest of veils between what happens and what does not. Sometimes I can no longer distinguish between what was and is, and what was not and is not. I know myself to be a little mad at those times. A little like Eleanor perhaps.
What I actually did that night, after I saw Jeanne closing the half-door, was to turn around and stumble the three miles or so back through the woods and along the river into Bruton by the light of a paltry half-moon, and collapse beside my half-sleeping mumbling mother.
*
I had few conversations with my mother which meant anything to either of us. Joan Dempster was right. My mother, never securely attached to her life, had given up trying and was waiting for the end. She said as much, in her dry way, raising herself upon her bed.
‘The priest brings me the Host. They do not say priest here now, they say curate. A fellow put in by the new man. I have told him that I want to die, I am ready to meet my Maker. He said that unfortunately one has to wait for an invitation. The grave-digger, do you remember, is Mole. Master Mole. He will bury me in a mole-hole.’
I laughed at all that and she made to laugh too but the laugh became coughing and breathlessness.
‘I am trapped in an old body. It’s not mine. I want to fight my way out of it, kick and punch my way out.’
‘And then, when you get out?’
‘Then I will run away very fast and climb to the top of a tree.’
On what turned out to be her last day, though neither of us knew that, I sat upon the floor beside her and took her hand.
‘So how is it with you, daughter?’ she asked me.
I was moved, knowing the effort for her of any engagement, but did not know where to begin.
‘It is well with me,’ I said. ‘I have been in Sherborne, and I am going next back to Shaftesbury and then to London.’
I do not know why I said I would go to London. It had not been in my mind until it suddenly was.
She looked aghast. ‘But if you go away from here, your own place, you will not know where you are.’
‘I shall find out,’ I said. ‘I shall discover.’
‘But to live among strangers. No one will know you, or who your parents are. No one can live like that.’
It was for her completely unimaginable.
She died that night. I awoke in the small hours to hear her breathing change to a hoarse gurgling. The death rattle. I held her hand and thought, if she cannot get away by morning, I will help her to go. I will stifle her. Not for my sake, but for hers. No, for my sake too. I did not have to do it. Shortly before dawn the sound ceased. It was all over. I did nothing for a long while, to allow her spirit to fly free. I opened the back door as wide as it would go. I sat beside her. I prayed for her soul.
I washed her and laid her out as I had seen her lay out countless others. I sang to her the lullaby songs she used to sing. I whisper-sang to her, ‘Luly, lulay’ and ‘Balulalo, balulalo’, weeping from an empty heart, consuming my own substance. Had she ever, in all my childhood, filled my hungry heart with love, I would now be repaying that debt with joy and from an abundance. She extracted from me in her death what she had never invested in me.
I found in the chest a cleanish linen shift and a length of faded green wool. I also found a box of money, which I stowed in my bundle. Before her body stiffened I managed to put the shift on her and then wrapped her in the green wool. I went up the street to the carpenter’s shop. I knew him of old. He makes coffins. He always used four iron nails on each side to secure the coffin lid. Bang-bang-bang with his hammer, then a pause while he positioned the next nail, then bang-bang-bang again, and so on. He is a respectful man and does not speak much.
He dragged a ready-made coffin from the stack in his yard on to a handcart and followed me back to our house. It was still early, no one about. The coffin seemed to fill all the space in the room. Together we lifted my mother into it. I arranged the green wool around her. I turned away when he pulled the hammer and nails from his pouch.
Bang-bang-bang, then a pause while he positioned the next nail. Four each side, as always.
I walked over the bridge to the church. Inside, it was not much changed. The Holy Rood still hung over the screen. The paint on the stonework was chipped and fading, the gold on the cuff of the Hand of God was dulled, but the statues of saints and the tombs of long-ago priests had not been defaced and the old font stood in the nave.
I found the curate doing nothing much in the vestry. I looked at the closed door to the little chamber where Jeanne and I had learned to read and write. The curate’s name was William Wilton. I asked him if he knew what had become of John Harrold or Hugh Backwell, formerly canons in the Abbey.
‘Never heard of them,’ he said. ‘The only one still around is Richard Halford, poking his nose into everything.’
‘I have observed him,’ I said.
I made arrangements with Father Wilton for my mother’s burial next to my father.
We buried her in her mole-hole by lantern-light after dark. Just the curate, Master Mole, Joan Dempster and myself. We prayed for the departed souls of my mother and father.
With sorrow, and relief, I made my own departure – not, thanks be to God, from life, but from Bruton. I took nothing from our room except a grey headcloth of my mother’s, which carried the sharp scent of her, and a narrow-bladed knife in a worn leather sheath from my father’s box of tools. I have seen him use it a hundred times. The bone handle is polished by his hand. The knife has lasted longer than he did. It will last longer than me. Someone who knew neither of us will in the end throw it away. It will not rot down as mortal remains do, fallen leaves. The blade will rust but it will still be there, to be turned up by spade or plough God knows when.
I would guess that by now our tenement and those on each side will have been demolished and rebuilt by Master Berkeley’s men. If Father Wilton kept his promise to me and had their names cut on a headstone – I gave him most of the money from my mother’s box for this purpose – their names may be read. When all those who knew of them have long gone, someone will wonder:
‘And who may they have been, Thomas and Dorothy Peppin?’
When I went to say goodbye to the curate, he remembered that he had a letter addressed to me. It had been brought to him from London. Some time ago, he said. He had put it by. He would go and look for it. I was exasperated. People are always forgetting to give me my letters. I waited impatiently until he returned with a crumpled folded paper. I snatched it from him. Mice had been at it.
I read it by the light of the dying fire in my empty home. It was from Anne Cathcart. I did not make it all out that night. I was weary and the light dim, but I took in the gist, which was that she had established herself in a house close to the city of London and had an occupation that brought in money and provided her with much amusement. ‘Come and join me.’
There was a hint of danger and of naughtiness in what she wrote, but that was ever Anne’s manner. So yes, I would go to London. But first, back to Shaftesbury. It was on the way, more or less.
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