The Corn

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  The great freight trains past me like tornadoes when I dared travel south, following the rails. I could have jumped aboard. Their steam and smoke cascaded from their chimneys, with a stench like fire and smut. Their low thundering horns blew constantly, threatening immediate death if anyone crossed the rails when they were near. On, and on, that repeated deep rumble and the blast of the horn, they seemed more like devils than saviours. Their front fifty or sixty carriages were simply metal crates on wheels, without suspension, big roofed box-like affairs without any form of comfort, and all for freight, imports from the great southern ships, or soldiers transported from one part of Eden to another. Then, trailing and rattling, came the three or four comfortable carriages for customers who paid to travel, giving them benches and even a row of cubicles with seated holes in the metal floor. Finally, open metal trays, three or four clattering and clanking slabs on wheels, just roofless trailers where anyone might, in desperation, jump on and ride for free. Jumping off could be more dangerous than jumping on, but you have to wait for a corner rail where the train always slowed. Better still – find a station. But whoever managed to clamber or leap aboard, since it was quite legal to travel free, had little enough to hold onto and no comfort of any kind. The trains rumbled and whistled, smoked and puffed, and crossed Eden every day. They crossed the Corn on the rail bridge, dripping its filth on those below. Don’t build your island under a bridge, was the saying. We should have more sense, the saying meant, to ensure our own misfortune.

  With Eden such a grand and massive country, one train would take four days to travel from north to south, and six days to travel from east to west. But we had a new train every second day, and there were shorter lines which might take only hours. Crashes had happened on the short lines, but not often. No one bothered too much. Most of us hated the trains anyway. That deep resounding horn was a nightmare, echoing from over great distances.

  So I walked. I’d never travelled on a train before, had hardly ever seen one, and wasn’t going to start strange habits now.

  It was several months before I arrived at Eden City. When I got there, I wondered why I’d bothered. It was surrounded by the great and ancient wall smashed in parts, marked with fire, stone, explosions and mould. There were gates which could be locked at night and unlocked in the morning. But there were also great gaping holes which you could just walk through, just kicking the occasional pebble from your path.

  I knew I was angry. I had been furious for months. The stupid brutes of my hometown had murdered my mother with cruelty and blind ignorance. And then, immediately afterwards, Jak had deserted me. When bitter, I blamed Jak. He had chosen to run, rather than marry me. But for most of the time, I had sufficient sanity to know it had never happened that way. Jak had been too ill. His father had carried him off and made sure I wouldn’t find him. At least I had money and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it if I could discover the best way to make it all come true.

  I slept in the sheltering shade of what I supposed were the palace grounds.

  Every day on that endless walk I had spoken to Jak, and to my mother. Sometimes I thought they answered me, but then realised I was simply remembering what they had said to me long ago.

  “Look, Jak, white birds all along the great river. I never asked you if you’d seen the Corn and its birdlife. They screech and shriek like demons.”

  “Birds are pink and gold.”

  “What about the black swans and the white skybirds and the glorious blue parrots?

  “All pink, with gold around their heads and the tips of their wings. Tell me I’m crazed, my love. Oh yes, I see the colour of their feathers and the beauty of their crests. But I also see the inner colour, which tells me of reality, thought and magic power.”

  As I walked my thoughts danced alongside, sometimes sweet, sometimes harsh and stabbing: my mother’s words, and her caresses when I was younger, Jak’s laughter and the golden glint in his deep dark green eyes. But now my mother was gone forever, and there wasn’t any Jak, so the colours had bleached from the world.

  Then, “You and Jak will live long together. He will introduce you to kings. He will bring you happiness few other souls could understand.”

  At least I was sure that Jak still lived. Kings, then?

  I stared up at the trees peering over the top of the high railings. They enclosed the gardens into privacy, but above railings, treetops and all, I could see the spires of a mighty castle. So I curled below the shadow of a tree which stretched its boughs way beyond the confines of the palace boundary, and since I was exhausted, as I now was every day, I slept without dreams.

  I was surprised, the next morning, to discover the tall double gateway wide open, seemingly open to anyone, with a wide paved road leading in. There were guards at the gate, but they seemed entirely disinterested in anyone absurd enough to visit the place. So I walked in. I expected pikes to my ribs and sword points to my neck. Yet I received not even a yawn. I continued to walk, and was soon halfway up the path, staring at the enormous painted castle before me. Every tower was a different colour, every doorway another, windows patterned, and brickwork painted white. The roof and turrets were striped in bright colours, and I stood in wonder.

  Perhaps, I thought, this was how Jak saw the world with all his vivid colours merging across the sky’s gloomy grey.

  Passing a round hillock of sanded paving, I saw the long line of nooses dangling from the wooden gallows, and the ladders used for hanging men until death. There were eight nooses, thick rope and all heavily stained, but also all empty. The same, but far smaller, two nooses only, had stood in the central square of Lydiard, but once the invasion was over, before I was born, the last of all the enemy were hanged there, and I never saw one. Thieves and abusive husbands, wicked men and brutal women were locked in the stocks for several days or imprisoned in Lydiard. They were not hung. I was delighted to see that no one was hanging here. I hurried past the gallows and didn’t look back.

  The grounds stretched in all directions, and people walked everywhere, on grass, on paths, between bushes, and even across courtyards and into the main building. I wasn’t going to risk doing that. I slipped around, keeping to shade, and skirted the palace to arrive at the back where I expected the kitchens, stables and laundries. They were all there. I could smell them.

  Including the gardens, this was as large as a village. Not a bad sized house for one man and his wife. But they employed hundreds for the grounds were alive with gardeners, and servants, wearing similar clothes of red and green, were rushing to and from this to that.

  I walked across the cobbled paving beside the stables. Two hundred horses at least, and many of them kicking at their half open doors, neighing or snorting. The grooms were running so fast I was sure they were all in a panic. Then I saw a skinny boy trying to adjust the lacings of his britches beneath his livery, looked up, saw me watching him, and blushed furiously. Now, the grooms having reached their impatient mounts, the horses were being led out to exercise, and I quickly found myself caught between swinging tabards, a great clatter on the cobbles, the eager snorting of the animals and the cursing of the men. Very much in the way, and being creased and stained from the road, it was clear I was certainly no lady.

  “Get over here,” shouted the boy. “You’ll be kicked or trampled.”

  Nervously I hurried aside. “I was aiming for the kitchens,” I said, and even in my own ears, it sounded forlorn, as if I was some beggar child, starving for the lord’s discarded scraps.

  With a scornful nod, the stable boy led me there. Scurrying after the child’s narrow dwindling shoulders, I asked him about recent guests to the castle. “I’m looking for – people I know. Lord Lydiard and his son. Would you know if anyone recently passed through here, or if grand lords have come to stay?”

  “Of course I’d know,” said the boy. “It’s the stables have first knowledge of all the guests. Well, we would, wouldn’t we? You think they take the horses to the kitchens for break
fast?”

  Best stay polite. “I don’t know anything about castles. But in the kitchens I might find work.”

  “Well, there’s been no grand guests in an age, and they don’t employ no beggars in the kitchens,” sniffed the stable boy. “Go ask. I don’t care. But reckon they’ll throw you out.”

  Finally arriving at the kitchens, I was told the same. There had been no important visitors, no cavalcades, no notables of any kind. It seemed no kitchen boy had ever heard of Lord and Lady Lydiard from the north And I knew, as I spoke, that I was a fool. Travellers accompanied by a young man recently half dead of the pestilence, would not be welcomed by any tavern or an inn, not by relatives, nor other lords, and certainly not by the nobility, including the mighty king himself. Any such attempt would probably be counted as high treason.

  But I had arrived at the end with nowhere else to go and begged for work. I said I was much practised at everything, including medicines, healing and nursing.

  “No beggar child will be trusted to help a doctor,” the assistant steward said, staring at me with distinct distrust. “And we prefer to employ experienced cooks in the kitchens, and boys to scrub.”

  “Something else then?” I asked, feeling shamefully pathetic. “I’m awfully – hungry.”

  “Oh, very well,” the man said, brushing down his livery as though I had blown my own beggarly dust all over him. “You can work in the laundries. They’re short-handed. Over there. Third doorway beyond the pantry. Tell the woman in charge that Slacks sent you.”

  So I followed orders and was given one the nastiest jobs I could imagine. Women, of course, did not wear undergarments, but men did. And what they wore beneath their britches was often stained with brown matter, and I naturally knew exactly what that was. “Scrape it off with the blunt knife-edge,” Mistress Tucker told me, “Then wash the knife in the deeper sink bowl before throwing the garment in the tub for boiling with all the rest.”

  The whites were boiled together in vast wooden tubs over individual fires. One tub was for sheets and other white cotton bedding. Another tub was for the gentlemen’s under-britch-wear and the female’s petticoats. A third tub was used to wash aprons, tablecloths, drying cloths and place-mats. The final tub was for anything else white, even if it was now grey or scummy sepia.

  Within a ten-day I regretted ever having come. I had never learned how to take orders from strangers, and although I was only recently turned fifteen, I found it was now too late to learn. If the castle was colourfully gorgeous outside, and up within its main quarters, the servants’ quarters and winding stone stairs, pantries, spicery, wine and ale storage freezing, were damp and draughty, while the buttery and brewery were even worse, dripping with three hundred years of collected condensation turned to ice. Yet close by, the bakery and laundries were steaming with an enormous clog of steam from the ovens and the tubs, and sweat of the servants working there. One girl fainted. The heat was vile and sucked out all the air. I thought the steam worse than the screeching billows from the trains. The heat where I worked was worse than the bakery, and at least they had pleasant smells, whereas we had a stench which made me sick. Yet everyone had colds. Lug the youngest scullion, who was nine, wore green fustian livery but the ends of his sleeves were black from a lifetime of sneezes and a small nose needing to be wiped of its drips. I wondered if I might soon look the same.

  The water bubbled and spat, incessant and turgid. Each bucket was trudged through from the well within the kitchen courtyard, then added to each tub until it was half full. Then the bundled linens were rinsed through, scrubbed of their stains, and finally forced down below the water level to boil. Skinned fingers, scorched hands, wrists scalded, and knuckles rubbed raw, shoulders bent from the weight of the buckets, nose pink and cheeks either chapped from the freezing draughts or flushed from the heat of the fires and the water, while my elbows screamed from the scrubbing, my feet were blistered, and my head permanently ached. Once boiled and scrubbed, the more important linens were bleached by adding urine, collected by the scullions from the night’s chamber pots. Sometimes lime was added when stains were persistent. Everything sweltered, everything stank.

  I never asked questions about the work I did. I didn’t want information. I wanted out. I presumed that the lord’s underwear was cleaned somewhere separately, but we certainly handled a great deal, surely that of all the servants of all types, and what they received back, some still faintly stained from previous soiling, could have belonged to anyone before. No item carried the name of its owner.

  I was well used to cleaning out my mother’s cauldrons. Since having been used for many diverse purposes, they always needed washing most thoroughly. A mixture of henbane and hemlock still slicking the edges of a pot would not mix well with the evening’s pottage. But these huge laundry tubs and coppers were so much larger, and these also needed scrubbing out before attending to everything necessary for a royal family and a staff of two hundred or more.

  My small hands grew hard like corrugated grease, ridged with calluses, knuckles swollen and red, and fingertips peeling their skin like tatters of leaf waving in the wind. My fingernails oozed like softened fungi. My eyes stung from soap, urine and lime, and were desperate to close under lids as heavy as the looming stone walls.

  By the time I decided I had to leave, I had still not mastered the inner ramblings of the dark castle stairs and passages or the icy corridors which led from one level to another. Most parts of the castle were forbidden to me, each a different strata of unlit gloom reserved for those more important. But I certainly knew where my own duties took me for this was limited strictly within the laundry and the courtyard beyond. I knew how to collect water, call the scullions to keep the fire going, scrub away unspeakable remnants, and how to keep my eyes meekly lowered with my chin to my chest when addressed by my betters. When finally each working day finished, I rubbed my own salves on to my blistered hands, and then crawled below the laundry bench to sleep. My designated space curled between the younger girl Manka and Brilla, our sharp-eyed senior, was warm, clean straw and as close to the fire slab as the slabs would allow. I accepted humility. Freia come lately must be last in the shifting scale of status more important among the lowly, than among those accustomed to their rights. But I was lucky too, for Brilla demanded the place due to her in time earned and experience learned, and, though acid tongued, she grew fond of me and demanded I snuggle warm at her side.

  Although carried in huge chafing dishes, the food was almost cold before it reached the guests in the grand dining hall and if his majesty chose to eat alone in his own bedchamber, why then everyone else’s supper had turned to congealing sludge before they ever lifted a spoon. Their lordships accepted such inconveniences, whereas my dinner, one daily meal served in the lower kitchen, was meagre but sometimes hotter, since finally, after everyone else had almost finished, I was served straight from the trivet. No more palatable, however, for our cook was no artist and his assistants were no more than pot boys with claims above their station. If any grand nobleman dared come to stay, then best he brings his own cook with him. Yet I believed that every grand house suffered, for the pestilence had combed its stinking path through the whole country, and there were almost as many dead as those who had managed to escape and survive.

  Chapter Nine

  I had lived all my life watching the seasons as the different herbs and flowers sprigged the slopes around my home. The grass was my cradle, birdsong my lullaby and the trees my shade. Now I barely saw the sky, only a patch of cloud up beyond the soaring stone battlements. I tramped the cold, wet cobbles four times each day just to fill the buckets, and for the rest I was bent over the endless steam, fire, cauldron, boiling water and slowly dissolving filth. My horizon had once been bright sunshine, followed by the tawny magic of twilight. Now it was the condensation dripping from the walls.

  A man’s braes, I soon learned, were not simply a matter of masculine modesty, keeping the wool of his britches from rubbing agains
t his tender parts. They absorbed whatever visits to the privy left behind. I began to understand more of a man’s habits than I wished to. I knew that the young wards changed their braes every three days, for I recognised the modern style, size and quality. The steward wore the latest fashion too; tight to the leg, brief across the arse and tied either side. His were as clean before washing as they were afterwards. Most of the rest were the old fashioned sort; baggy, shapeless and vile to touch.

  I had worked at the Royal Castle for only a ten-day when the first seeming disaster turned out to be a blessing, and the other seeming good luck turned out to be a horrible misfortune.

  Through every part of the servant’s domain, the buzz started in whispers and grew to mutters, then gossip. The king had caught the Plague.

  Some laughed. “That young shame-carrier deserves an early death.”

  “He deserves punishment for his sins.”

  “But he’s the king. The sovereign. Our monarch. He is above such things.”

  “He’s a man. Or at least, half a man. Men catch all diseases, and God inflicts the worst on the wicked.”

  “So our sweet-natured king prefers boys to girls? That’s simply common sense. Being wicked is altogether nasty to boys and girls both.”

  “No babies. No heir.”

  I was too tired to care much and knew nothing of our king. With Jak gone and my mother dead, I had cried enough and felt I had no more tears to give, not even for myself. My eyes were scorched dry and I felt numb. I didn’t even bother listening when those around me gossiped.

  “His majesty hasn’t recovered. Even with the most senior doctor in the land.”

  “They say one of the pages carried the disease in his hair and infected the king one day when he delivered a glass of wine.”

  I interrupted. “You can’t infect people through the hair,” I said.