The Black and the White

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Is that why you’re on pilgrimage? To give thanks?’

  ‘In part.’

  He waits for more.

  ‘A miracle, then?’

  I cluck to the mare. ‘Who’s to say? I know I was all but dead and now I’m as well as you.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid it’ll strike a second time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  I keep my eyes away from the cart and give him no reply.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dusk falls and we stop for the night. As Hob goes for firewood and I start a fire with the few sticks left in the cart, I feel that I might have lived half a lifetime since Edgar’s attack in the woods. So quickly have I become accustomed to Hob’s presence that the loneliness I have felt since leaving the Dene has already begun to fade.

  Had I not already known it, my enforced solitude would have shown me that I am not built for a life removed from other folk. Not like my father.

  It always seemed to me that, practical considerations aside, my father would have been just as happy in the forest without my mother and me. For, if our company gave him pleasure, he never showed it.

  My poor mother. She must have found the hut in the Dene a sorry substitute for our good village house with its two big rooms and well-ordered garden plot. Though she sang at her work like a woman wholly content with her lot, it was not fair of my father to bring her to the forest and deprive her of the company of other women. Men and women speak differently to each other and my father, though not a harsh husband, was a silent one.

  And now he is enfolded with his silence; alone, in the forest.

  ‘Martin?’

  I jump, startled.

  ‘Easy, man! You’re twitchy as a blackbird.’

  I breathe out.

  ‘Where’s the hobble? I’ll see to the mare.’

  I watch Hob out of the corner of my eye. He is bigger than me, probably a year or two older — maybe eighteen summers. Wide in the shoulder and narrow in the hip, he is the kind of youth the girls in our village always gave the glad eye to, the kind never short of a willing mate at maying. His thick, light-coloured hair matches his beard and I know I must present a contrast to anybody who sees us. My mother was fond of telling me how much I look like my father and, even when not covered in charcoal dust, he was dark-featured and black-haired, with the melancholy temper that often goes with those looks. My mother was dark, too, but not so much as him; her hair was the deep brown of a blackbird’s wing, her eyes a bright hazel.

  The mare hobbled and watered, Hob sits opposite me at the fire.

  ‘How have you been living, Hob?’ I ask. Winter is a poor time to forage and his frame bears none of the marks of hunger.

  ‘How have I been living?’ He stretches his hands towards the flames. ‘Badly, compared to you, my friend. I wasn’t half so well-equipped.’ He glances at me, mocking. ‘You’re like a snail, Martin. You’re slow but sure and you carry your house with you — everything, even your fire!’

  I do not like the comparison but I let it go. ‘Packing embers in a basket is a collyer’s trick,’ I tell him. ‘When you leave your house, you take the embers from the fire packed in moss and turf and you light your cooking fire at the hearth when you get there.’

  Hob takes a stick from the pile and pokes at the fire with it. ‘Well, unlike you, I didn’t have a horse so I couldn’t bring much with me. I bundled everything I could and made the most of it.’ He pauses. ‘I’m a handy bowman. I didn’t have to eat pease pottage every day.’ He grunts at some memory. ‘I don’t mind drawing and roasting a rabbit or a pigeon but stirring pottage is women’s work and they’re welcome to it for I haven’t the knack.’ Our eyes meet over the fire and I know what he is thinking. He thinks I do have the knack.

  With the trestle-board keeping me off the damp ground, I lie between the fire and the cart, protected and tolerably warm, but, unlike last night when both of us were half-asleep over our supper, I am unable shake off wakefulness.

  Hob is on first watch against the likes of Edgar and I study him through my eyelashes as I feign sleep.

  Eyes on the fire, elbows on his thighs, he’s all russet and darkly gold in the firelight. If he feels my gaze on him, he never looks at me.

  After a while, he takes his knife from his belt and begins polishing the blade with breath and thumb. I have seen that knife at close quarters, moist with Edgar’s failing breath. The blade is long and slim with neither pitting nor rust-marks and looks as sharp as the devil. The handle — made of some pale, grainless wood — is separated from the blade by a metal cross-piece, something I have only seen before on the long daggers the Dene’s archers carried home from the war. It was whispered that they went about the battlefields with them, finishing injured Frenchmen and looting their corpses.

  When he leaves off polishing it, Hob takes to balancing the knife on the flat of one finger and flipping it into the air to catch it as it falls. It is clearly a favourite game — his finger finds the balancing point every time and his catch is always clean.

  I wake to find him slumped on the stool, dozing, and the full moon high in the sky. The clouds have cleared and the whole dark vault of heaven is lit with stars. Hob looks up as I stir, rubs drool from the corner of his mouth and tips his head back in a huge yawn.

  ‘If you’re awake, can we change places?’ He stands and rubs his arse. ‘I can barely hold my eyes open, even squatting on this damned stool.’ He reaches down for the blanket which has slipped from his shoulders and makes his way around the fire.

  ‘Aren’t you going to see...?’ I incline my head towards the back of the cart.

  ‘If he’s dead, he’s dead. If he’s alive, he’s alive. Nothing we can do till morning.’

  He takes my place on the board beside the fire and wraps himself in his cloak and blanket. I look down at him. He trusts me to keep him safe; with his arms bound tight to his body, he could not hope to free himself and find his feet quickly enough to fend off an attack.

  I make up the fire and settle myself on my one-legged collyer’s stool, blanket about my shoulders. Sitting there, watching the night while another man sleeps, my mind slips back on itself and, after a little while, I find myself rising to my feet, ready to take a turn about the charcoal pit. As soon as I am on my feet, I come to myself and shake my head at my own forgetfulness, but, loath just to sit down again, I tread softly around to the back of the cart and stand, staring at the canvas. Lying beneath it must be like lying in your own coffin — how will he feel, Edgar, if he wakes to that dense, hard weave above him? As if he has been shroud-wrapped for the grave.

  But I do not think he will wake. The blows Hob landed on him — the swing that stopped his murderous stab, the crack to the head that knocked him senseless and that second skull-crunching blow — they were enough to have killed a man outright. I do not believe he can live much longer.

  I lift the canvas aside, its folds stiff and cold. He lies still, utterly silent beneath the blankets I have heaped on him. On one side of his face, the skin above his beard is bone-white in the moonlight. On the other, it is dark with crusted blood from his head wound. Leaning on the side of the cart, I reach out to his unblemished side. The flesh is cold, colder than the hazel-weave of the cart’s side beneath my other hand.

  I unsheathe my knife and hold it beneath his nose. The moonlight is too dim to see clouding but, if he is breathing, I will feel wetness on the blade. I count a dozen heartbeats, then pull the knife away and draw my forefinger along the blade. Dry and cold. I reach over to feel one of his hands. Cold, stiff — I cannot easily move the fingers.

  Hob looked under the canvas after we had eaten our supper and said that all was well, yet I have seen enough folk die in this last month to know when death-stiffness begins; Edgar must already have been dead when Hob put that last knife beneath his nose. Why did he lie to me? Was it because he thought I would insist on digging a grave there and then?

  I begin to pra
y. Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificatur nomen tuum. Our Father who is in heaven, holy be your name.

  Master William taught me the meaning of our prayers even before he taught me to read the words. He taught me that there is no magic in Latin and that a priest must be able to explain to supplicant souls what he is saying on their behalf. I made him go over and over the prayers until my mind knew their meaning as well as my tongue knew their rhythm.

  Remit us our debts just as we remit those debts owed to us.

  Do not lead us into temptation but free us from evil. Amen.

  Temptation. I cannot deny that I am as guilty of that as Edgar. Though I called it vocation when I pleaded with my father to release me from the collyer’s life, I know in my heart that what Master William’s teaching woke in me was ambition. And what is ambition but a temptation to put our own desires before God’s will?

  But my father saw neither vocation nor ambition. To him, my desire to be a priest was simply disobedience. Defiance of him. You shall be a collyer with me, and there’s an end to it.

  But it had not been the end. Not by a long way.

  I open my eyes to make the sign of the cross over Edgar and, as I lean over, the light of the moon shows up a mark on his nose. I cock my head and peer more closely. Yes, there is a shadow on his nostril. More than a shadow — a stain. A small amount of blood crusts the opening of his nostril.

  Did he come to his senses before he died — did he flail about and injure himself? Or have Hob’s blows to his head somehow caused this blood to leak from his nose?

  I bend my head towards his in the moonlight. Is it moonshadow or is his nose a little bent to one side? I move around to see him more clearly. Yes, his nose is definitely skewed to one side at the tip.

  I cast my mind back to the fight. I know that I landed no blows on Edgar’s face but, perhaps, when Hob’s cudgel felled him, he fell on his nose. Could I have failed to notice an injury until now? I have gazed at his face enough, willingly or unwillingly, as I have moved him, dripped water into his mouth, tested for breath.

  No. I would have noticed it. Edgar must have woken, been overtaken with terror as he supposed himself to have been shrouded and dashed himself unknowingly against the press.

  I pull the blanket over his face and begin the words of the Placebo.

  When Hob finds me in the morning, the sun has risen into a watery sky and I am already a yard down.

  He juts his chin at the half-dug grave. ‘Deep enough, don’t you think?’

  ‘No.’ I thrust the spade into the pick-loosened soil. ‘If we bury him as shallow as this, the vermin’ll dig him up and scatter his bones.’ I haul myself out and hand him the spade. ‘You dig for a while. I’ve got something else to do.’

  I use two decent firewood staves, binding them together with a yard of rope cut from the skein in the cart. The makeshift cross’s resemblance to the one I placed at the head of my father’s grave makes me uncomfortable but there is only so much that can be done with roundwood. I did, at least, strip the bark from the one that marks my father’s resting place and cut clefts in both upright and crosspiece so that they were properly jointed.

  I lie the cross on the ground next to the pile of earth and stones. Hob stops and rests his weight on the pick’s handle. ‘Why’re you wasting good firewood on him?’

  I survey the deepening grave and avoid his eye. Edgar might have wished me dead but I would not have him damned for all eternity. If I do not mark his grave, how will the angel find him at the Last Judgment?

  The mare hitched, I turn to Hob. Though his company has lightened my load these last two days, I will not have him think I have come to depend on him.

  ‘With Edgar gone, we are not bound together anymore. If you want to go back to shunning folk and waiting out the pestilence, I’ll take the letter to Sir John at Slievesdon.’

  He looks at me, eyes narrowed. He thinks I am trying to get one over on him.

  ‘You can keep the ten shillings,’ I tell him. ‘I’d have taken the letter anyway.’

  He grins. ‘You would, wouldn’t you? Master’s boy!’ He swings his cloak around his shoulders. ‘No, you’re all right, Martin. Let’s keep company together for a while and see if we suit. As long as you’re not making for any towns.’

  ‘Only as markers along the road,’ I tell him, relief settling in me like a warmth, ‘not as places to stop.’

  ‘Right then. We’re agreed.’

  I nod, a grin taking control of my face. I am to be one of a pair again, as I have always been accustomed to. Stranger as Hob is to me, it feels as if life has found its balance once more.

  ‘Well then, are we off, or what?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ My fingers suddenly trembling, I untie the front of the canvas and lift out the blanket-wrapped bundle. In the corner of my eye, Hob folds his arms. Then, as he catches sight of the saint, he whistles. ‘And you were shitting your braies about me taking church goods!’

  I stand the little figure at the front of the cart.

  ‘I didn’t steal her —’

  ‘No, no! No need to play the innocent with me, I’d’ve done the same.’ He moves to get a better look. ‘She’s a beauty. But who’ll you sell her to? Who’ll buy church property?’

  ‘I didn’t steal her. And I’m not selling her. She’s mine.’

  ‘Course she’s yours. If you found her in a village where everybody was dead, who’s to say she’s not?’

  ‘I didn’t find her! She’s mine.’

  He stares at me like a man forced, by courtesy, to nod at the tall tale of a traveller. ‘You must be richer than you look, then. I’ve never seen such a beautiful statue of the Virgin.’

  ‘It’s not Our Lady.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘When did you ever see Our Lady in white, Hob? When did you ever see her with calfskin boots and a yellow braid on her kirtle?’

  Hob shrugs. ‘Who is she then?’

  I draw in a breath. ‘Saint Cynryth. The White Maiden of the Well. She’s our family’s patron saint.’

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  Neither had I, until one day in the Dene. ‘I’ll tell you the story while we walk.’

  ‘We were in the forest, collyering —’ I begin.

  ‘What forest?’

  ‘The King’s Dene Forest, to the west of the Severn.’

  ‘Were you there in the winter slack, or is that your trade?’

  Hob does not understand my sudden bark of laughter, and why should he? Nobody but me knows how deep that question cuts; how it lies at the root of all the strife between my father and me.

  ‘We started out like most — just coaling three or four pits in the winter to bring in a bit extra but my father took to the craft more than he ever did to husbandry.’

  In truth, my father found in himself an affinity for the making of coal. In his ability to judge a cord of wood, to screen just so against the wind and burn an even pit, to bank down different ways for green wood and seasoned, he had no equal and his pits yielded more and better coal than those of any other collyer we knew. By the time I was ten years old he had given up our acres to Young Adam, my eldest brother, and spent the months from October to June back and forth to the forest. Where other landholding collyers bought licences for a week here, a fortnight there in the slack winter months, by the time my father passed the tenancy to my brother, the licences he bought were for forty weeks. By and by, folk in Lysington stopped thinking of him as Adam Hillfield and gave that name to my brother. My father became Adam Collyer and my future was decided.

  During the months before the pestilence shrank the future to tomorrow’s survival, as I grew to match my father in height, if not yet in strength, he had begun to speak of the two of us working as collyers for the king. My mind brings our argument to life once more as my mouth continues to describe our life to Hob.

  Wouldn’ have to go down Flaxley, then, to sell the coal, he said. King’s men’d come up here, to us.

  T
he need to take our coal to market always irked my father. Every time we made the day’s round trip to Flaxley with a cart full of coal, it would be the same; as the forest thinned and we neared the valley of the Westbury brook where people came with their carts and barrows to mill and trade, my father would fall silent and I would find my tongue.

  Greeting the smiths who bought our charcoal, watching them haggle with my father over the price as they hefted the sacks, listening to the different speechways of merchants passing through to buy iron from the forest — everything was exciting to me.

  I looked forward to the trips to Flaxley as much as my father hated them. I craved the greetings, the gossip, the everyday talk of neighbours and regular visitors. I longed to be amongst people, to live cheek-by-jowl with them; my father’s notion of becoming a king’s collyer, of cutting our ties with the village and living like wild men in the forest, caused my soul to shrink like skin in a cold wind. For, once we put ourselves at the king’s command and worked to keep his forges stoked, I knew there would be no letting me go back to Lysington for holy days and festivals. My father had set his face against my ambitions.

  Church is rotten and corrupt. No son of mine shall have a part in it.

  The more my father had planned and looked forward to a life away from Lysington, the more I hated him. I could not help it; in the innermost, most sinful chambers of my heart, I had wished him and his ambitions to be a king’s collyer dead.

  And now, dead he was. Dead and lying in red forest earth.

  ‘So there you were in your forest,’ Hob is tired of hearing about my father. ‘Then what?’

  ‘A peddler wandered on to our hearth.’

  Did he wander, half-lost in the hills and valleys of the Dene, or was he guided to us by the saint? She has been so much part of our family lore ever since that it is hard not to think that she had a hand in her own arrival that day.

  ‘I don’t know what brought him to us,’ I tell Hob, ‘but he soon had my father by the ears with his stories and the one that took his fancy most was of Saint Cynryth. The peddler had a little carving of her in his pack —’