Ashenden (20 page)

Jack didn’t have much time for Mr. Hastings, living out his last days rent-free, when others too old or too sick to labor for a wage finished up in the workhouse, their families broken, scattered, and ruined. His father had been fined in the magistrates’ court many years back for trespass and for helping himself to a couple of branches that weren’t strictly speaking dead wood, being attached to trees at the time, and that was all down to her uncle, who knew every hedge and hollow of the land, every oak, spruce, field maple, lime, chestnut, yew, and hawthorn like the back of his hand. Some had names. Old Bob was the yew in Easter Field, and Simon’s Seat was the two-hundred-year-old ash down by the gatehouses. Her uncle had been a scourge of boys, scrumpers, poachers, tenants behind in their rent, trespassers, never happier than when he caught someone out.

Work was hard to come by these days. There was next to none on the land. Jack went for a job on the railway and didn’t get it. He was big and strong, fit for anything, and stubborn with it. When he got an idea in his head, there was no dislodging it. Some
of those ideas had been put there by Arthur Young, who gave talks once a month on Sunday evenings in the upper room at the Ploughshare. Arthur Young was a man of the world. He came from Reading and had been to London, where he’d seen Hyde Park with all the railings down and the police clubbing heads in Trafalgar Square.

“They need a groundsman up at the house,” Dulcie had said, back in the summer, when she was walking with Jack by the river. “Someone to help with the coppicing. You could do it. I’ll put a word in, if you like.”

“You’ll do no such thing, Dulcie. I wasn’t born to cut down trees some rich man planted on the commons that was stolen from us in the first place.” The land belonged to the people, which was them, and didn’t belong to Mr. Henderson no matter how many walls and fences and hedges he put round it. “Property is theft.”

Property was theft. That was hard to get your head round when you were saving for your own place. Property invited theft, she could understand. The butler, Mr. Williams, was always at pains to point out that the house contained many valuables and they must be careful about answering the door to strangers. Up at the house, everything that could be locked was locked—doors, boxes, drawers, glass-fronted cupboards, cabinets, bookcases—and Mr. Williams jangled with keys to them all. There was a safe somewhere, but none of them had ever seen it, that’s how safe it was. “Lock a box and you tell a thief there’s something inside worth having,” her great-uncle said. He kept his watch in an old Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin printed with scenes from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

“It’s just a job. Can’t do any harm, can it?” She slipped her arm through his and laid her head on his shoulder. “I’m not saying it has to be forever.”

“I’m not doing it, Dulcie, and that’s that. I won’t slave for a filthy usurer like Henderson. Not while working men slice their feet to ribbons tramping from parish to parish in search of a crust.”

Usurer.
That was an Arthur Young word. “Then who will you work for?”

“Anyone who will give me honest employment.”

“What’s wrong with coppicing?”

Since Arthur Young had started giving his talks at the Ploughshare, what Jack understood by honest employment had narrowed somewhat. Any minute now he would get on to the millions of poor in London.

“There are millions of poor in London,” he said. “Millions and millions living in filth. Does Henderson care about them? Does he give them a moment’s thought when he’s sitting in his bank counting his money?”

“We need a roof over our heads. Nothing else has come up for months.”

“I’m not doing it. I will not work for that man.”

She withdrew her arm and moved away. “I don’t think you want to be married.”

“Think what you like.”

That had been the start of their first proper quarrel and it was a bitter one. Afterwards they had made it up more thoroughly than Dulcie had intended, although at which point what she had intended had given way to what she hadn’t intended was never clear to her. She hadn’t let it happen again, which you might say was a clear case of shutting the door after the horse had bolted.

The other day when she was lugging a coal scuttle up the corkscrewed back stairs, her arm wrenched out of its socket, a sour taste rising in her throat, she wondered what, after all, had been the point of her schooling. Once she thought learning might lead to something, and her teacher had encouraged her in that thought, giving her books and finding quiet places where she could read them. That was before her father’s accident and she had had to go into service. What she had discovered then was that no one paid you for knowing verses from the Bible, the kings and queens of England, or poetry by heart unless it was to teach them to somebody else. She had enough learning to know that she didn’t have enough learning to teach, and might never have it. When her duties took her into the library, the shelves of leather-bound books made her resentful.

Jack didn’t go for the job at the Park and it went to Billy Wells. Wee Willy they used to call him and he wasn’t much bigger now. Billy had cut down the tree that stood in the hall and filled the house with its sappy pine scent. It had been one of the spruces that grew along the railway line.

Her uncle’s hands were busy again. Up and down, up and down, putting things on a shelf or climbing a ladder.

“Look at him,” said Mrs. Jakes. “Perhaps he’s trying to tell us something.”

Dulcie reached across, laid the fluttering hands on the bedclothes and felt their sinew and bone, the slow beat of blood under the tissue of skin.

“You wouldn’t credit it now,” said Mrs. Jakes, tugging the yarn, “but Mr. Hastings asked me to marry him once. I was sixteen and he must have been forty if he was a day. There weren’t a female for miles around he didn’t ask, the plain ones and all. Never had no takers. No one so much as walked out with him so far as I know. We must follow our hearts, my love, however hard the road, that’s what I say.”

There was no money, Dulcie was sure of it. Nothing in the cottage said money. Bare floorboards, plaster threaded with horsehair crumbling away from the laths, greasy work shirts hanging from the peg rail, worn through at the elbows. It was a sorry place.

She slipped off the bed and lit the lantern with the candle.

“Where’re you going?”

“I won’t be a minute.”

Downstairs she heard mice scrabble into the corners. The lantern’s sway shouted up shadows on the pocked walls. Out back on the scullery shelf she found the Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin, rust creeping along its edges. The watch was inside, where it always was. It had stopped ticking years ago and the gilt plating was almost worn off. A cheap piece, her mother had said. “They think we don’t know quality.”

Dulcie fumbled in her skirts, drew out what she had wrapped in
a scrap of washrag, and pushed it down into the biscuit tin. It was a close fit. Then she closed the lid, her heart hammering, feeling giddy and sick.

*  *  *

The waits stomped their feet in the inn yard and breathed on their hands.

“Mills, Steadman, Brookes. And here comes Wells, with the drum. Who’s missing?” said the vicar, raising his lantern to their faces. He was a slight man with a light voice, well wrapped in a worsted muffler.

“Jack Pierce,” said Dick Steadman, the pigman.

“He’d be late for his own funeral,” said Billy Wells, joining them.

“That’s a good one,” said George Mills, smith, son of smith, and grandson of smith. All weathers his face was burned red and his hands were calloused and scarred, the black worked so far into them it wouldn’t come out. “He’d be late for his own funeral. I never heard that one before.”

“Horse kick you in the head lately, George? Or are these the wits you were born with?” Billy was a joker. You needed to be if you were short.

“We’ll start without him,” said the vicar. “What shall it be, boys?”

“ ‘Good King Wenceslas.’ ”

“ ‘While Shepherds Watched.’ ”

“ ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory,’ I think, boys,” said the vicar. “That’s a good beginning. We’ll sing the others later.”

They were used to the vicar asking for their opinion and not taking it.

“Are we ready?” said the vicar, blowing a note on his wind instrument. It was a shawm, a long wooden pipe that ended in a large flared bell.

They sang the first verse of the carol, fine and clear, to the door of the Feathers, and the rest of the verses inside, the reedy blast of the shawm and the drumbeat crowding the snug nicely.

“A small one for a small one,” Billy said to the landlord.

The landlord poured the ale. “For a small one you make some noise with that drum. My ears is ringing.”

“Billy’s always had plenty to say for himself. One way or another.” Jack Pierce had come in towards the middle of the last verse and brought the cold with him.

“Here you go, Jack,” said the landlord. “Get that down you. You’ll need it on a night like tonight.”

The vicar said they would do the public houses first, then the cottages strung out along the upper road, and finish at the big house. “Mr. Henderson has given us leave to sing up at the Park, which is most accommodating of him. I hear they’ve a beautiful tree.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Billy. “I cut it down.”

“Don’t we know it,” said Jack Pierce.

They went along to the East Arms, past the shuttered village shop and the tiny post office next door. The vicar was talking about the waits and how in the olden days every town of consequence had its players, paid for out of the public purse, a band of musicians who performed on civic occasions and wore their own livery. This history lesson they had every year, along with the pedigree of the shawm, a venerable instrument and a fine example of wood turning, which he had been fortunate to come across in an antiquarian shop in Oxford before he took orders. “Some say that singers at Christmastide should not properly be called waits, and perhaps they are right. However, I can see no harm in perpetuating the memory of such an ancient, worthy institution in our modern usage.” He had written a letter to
Punch,
explaining the difference between rowdy street musicians disturbing the peace in the small hours with menaces and gentle parishioners singing carols and collecting alms for the poor, but it hadn’t been printed, through a clerical oversight. “Wassailing, on the other hand,” said the vicar, “that is an entirely different matter and quite pagan in origin.”

“Cold night,” said George Mills.

“It wants to snow.”

“It doesn’t smell like snow,” said Jack Pierce.

The nails in their boots rang out like rifle shots. “Ground’s hard as iron.”

“You’d be the judge of that.” The old people thought that on nights like these the spirits came out of their graves and warmed their white, picked bones by the fires. “You seen any ghosts about the forge, George?”

“I seen my father once. Plain as day. ‘What you doing here?’ I says to him. ‘You’re dead. Get back in your box.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Ghosts don’t say nothing. They’re just firmaments of your imagination.” George rubbed his cheek. “Well, he might have said, ‘Keep the fire going,’ or something like that. But I can’t say I really harked at him.”

The East Arms was lively. They sang “Silent Night.”

“Ah,” said the vicar afterwards, “perhaps not the best choice. George, if you don’t know the words, would you not la-la-la quite so loudly? It puts the rest of us off our stroke, as it were. Onward!”

Where the East Arms was bright and cheery, the Ploughshare was sour, dour, and all but empty. The pubs faced each other across the road like a pair of brothers who had never got on and had stopped speaking to each other.

“What do you say, vicar? ‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen’?” said Billy.

The two drinkers at separate benches raised their heads. The landlord put down his clay pipe and frowned.

Afterwards Billy took round the hat. “A penny and two farthings. What you’d expect from the paste-pot brigade.”

“Mind how you go, Jack,” said the landlord, with a nod, as they went outside.

“At least we know he’s got a tongue in his head,” said Billy.

Six weeks ago the police had paid a visit to the Ploughshare and threatened the landlord with the loss of his license if he continued to allow his upstairs room to be used for the purposes of rabble-rousing. Jack Pierce had been one of those they’d hustled outside and roughed up a little. He’d had the printed bills down the back of his trousers at the time and would have been roughed up a little more if they had found them.

WORKERS!

UNITE TO ABOLISH PARLIAMENT!

FREEDOM FOR IRELAND!

NEITHER GOD NOR MASTER!

LAND FOR ALL!

March for Solidarity, Peace, and International Brotherhood
In Memory of Our Fallen Comrade Alfred Linnell
Sunday 24 November, 2 p.m. Assemble Forbury Gardens, Reading

A few hours after the police let him go off with his bruises, he pasted bills around the village. Nothing remained of them in the morning. The next night he pasted more up. Perseverance was what you needed, said Arthur Young. They knock you down and you get up again.

They’d knocked Alfred Linnell down at a march in London two years ago and a few days later he died from his injuries. The march had taken place a week after Bloody Sunday, when three people had been killed protesting against the government’s brutalities in Ireland.

Linnell’s blood, Arthur Young said, his eyes closed, swaying on his feet, was spilled for all of them. The three who had died on Bloody Sunday. The injured hundreds, women and children among them, who had been beaten by police fists and truncheons, crushed by the infantry, and trampled by the cavalry. The oppressed of all nations.

The waits went up the road in a long straggling line, the vicar, Wells, Mills, Pierce, Steadman, and Brookes, stopping at doorways, singing, and collecting alms. There was a smell of drying mortar as they passed the new school. The old school, round the side of the vicarage, had been one room, baking in summer and freezing in winter. Jack Pierce remembered Dulcie, a long plait to her waist, always shining with the answer whatever the question was. Their teacher, Miss Owen, could not keep order and they made it their business to torment her, as children will do when they smell weakness. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” his mother had said, when he told her. “You’re supposed to be learning, not fooling. Mrs.
Trimble, God rest her soul, would never have stood for it.” Now Dulcie’s hair was pinned under a starched cap, while she crept up the back stairs at the big house.