The Ballad of John Clare (16 page)

“Have you seen them? There is such a display! Come!”

Mary steered John through the Fair.

“They have been brought, all chained and manacled, from Norman Cross, poor things. But John, they have made such carvings from wood and bone as you would not believe.”

They pushed through the milling crowd to a corner of the Fair he had not seen.

A great display had been made of the three French prisoners. They had shackles to their ankles that were joined to iron chains that were bolted to heavy iron balls. These in turn rested upon a tattered French flag that lay, mud-besmirched at the prisoners’ feet. They were sitting at a table with the Union Jack flapping on its pole over their cropped heads. To either side a soldier stood guard, dressed in the full regalia of the Northampton militia, with musket and sword at the ready.

The prisoners were dressed in old canvas shirts and trousers, with wooden clogs to their feet. The scene would have struck fear into the heart of any Boney-loving traitor, were it not for the friendly ease with which victors and vanquished shared their tobacco, and filled the air with sweet smoke.

The people of Peterborough were not so kindly disposed, and the babble of talk around the stall was thick with shouted insult, for there’s many have not come home from the French Wars. And Boneparte still struts his bold tyranny as cock-sure as ever you please.

But the prisoners took no notice of the crowd, they eyed the girls, whistled, waved, made faces and held up their wares to any that lingered. John and Mary pushed to the front of the crowd.

“Look John!”

The table was covered in wonders. There were woven flowers of straw and coloured wood. There were tiny ships of bone, fully rigged with cotton sails. There were carved eagles. There was a likeness of Peterborough Cathedral fashioned from different shaded woods. There were children’s toys: spinning tops, painted soldiers and chickens that pecked the ground when they were tilted forwards. There was a tiny guillotine with a blade that fell and chopped off a man’s head so that it rolled into a basket.

One of the soldiers waved his pipe in the direction of the table and shouted at the crowd:

“All the work of Frenchie prisoners. Roll up and see. Every item for sale.”

Mary pointed to a man and woman made of bone who stood facing each other on a little wooden platform. One of the prisoners picked it up by its handle. He looked at Mary and smiled:

“L’amour!”

Underneath the ground the figures stood upon, a wooden ball hung on two threads. As the prisoner swung it from side to side the little bone man bent forwards at the waist and kissed the woman, then, as the man straightened, the woman bent forward and kissed the man. Backwards and forwards they kissed and kissed again: click clack, click clack.

Mary laughed out loud with delight:

“Oh John, look!”

John took it and tried it himself. Again and again the little marionettes met lip to lip: click clack.

“How much?”

These were words the Frenchman understood.

“Deux …two …two sheeeling.”

“Two shillings,” said a soldier. “But it’s yours, today, for the knock-down price of one silver florin.”

It was more than John could spare, but he had the last of his harvest fee in his pocket, along with all that was left of his advance. He pulled the coins from his pocket and counted them out onto his palm.

“Here you are.”

He handed four sixpences across the table.

“Merci.”

The prisoner looked up at John and Mary and his eyes misted for a moment with tenderness. Then he winked.

“Un moment.”

He picked up a sharp little knife and started scratching words onto the wooden ground at the feet of the little woman in beautiful, curling, tilted script. He lifted the wood to his lips and, as though he was kissing it, blew away the dust.

“Bon.”

The other two prisoners peered across at it.

John took it from him and showed it to Mary. She read aloud:

“AMOR VINCIT OMNIA. I have enough of Merrishaw’s Latin to understand that.”

She looked at the Frenchman and smiled such a sweet smile that for a moment he glimpsed a memory of sunlight through the endless cloud of English imprisonment. Then she whispered shyly:

“Love conquers all.”

The prisoner jumped to his feet and bowed setting the iron shackles rattling and clanking beneath the table. The other prisoners laughed, but he turned to them and raised both his hands:

“C’est vrai …c’est vrai!”

He took the carving from her, wrapped it up with a great display of tenderness and tied it with string. He gave it back to Mary.

John and Mary turned from the stall and walked away arm in arm. They bought a bag of apples, found a quiet place and sat down on the grass. Mary rested her cheek on John’s shoulder and munched an apple as he untied the string and unfolded the coloured cloth that wrapped the carving. He pulled his new knife from his pocket and with the point of it scratched into the ground beneath the feet of the little bone man, in letters more crude of manner than the Frenchman’s flourishes: JCMARY
1811

“There.”

He passed it to her.

“’Tis for thee, Mary.”

She wrapped it up and put it carefully into the little bag that hung from her shoulder.

“I shall keep it always.”

She kissed his cheek.

“And now I must find my father.”

“And I must find mine.”

She kissed him and turned, he caught her hand, pulled her towards himself and they kissed again. She laughed:

“Click clack.”

She ran into the crowd and quickly disappeared.

John walked towards the bridge. He was thinking to himself that from that vantage he would be able to look down on the mass of people and maybe catch a glimpse of Parker, Ann and Sophie. He climbed the slope of the bridge, leaned on the stone parapet and looked back at the jostling crowd with its myriad shifting colours. He listened to the strains of fiddles and pipes, the shouts and the deep murmur of babbling talk, the whinnying of horses and the lowing of prize bulls, the shrieks of children and the flapping of canvas. All the sounds mingled in John’s ears and became a strange music that he both longed to be a part of, and at the same time longed to be far away from – deep in his own sweet solitudes. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the tugging contradiction of his secret heart, basking also in the thought that somewhere in the swirl of sound was Mary’s voice.

Suddenly his reverie was broken by his own name:

“John Clare!”

He turned and saw Betsy Jackson tripping up the bridge behind him. She was dressed for the Fair with her fitted jacket drawn tight about the waist so that her breasts – under their striped neckerchief – swelled above it, and her hips – under their white petticoats – swelled ripe and rounded below. Her curls spilled out from under a lace cap. She was a little unsteady on her feet. She drew closer to John than good manners would allow on any other day of the year. Her voice was loud:

“I’ve been celebrating with the girls John, for John Close has took us all on for another year and has added five shillings to my wage.”

John could smell the gin on her breath. She reached out and steadied herself on the parapet of the bridge with her strong, working hand.

“Was that your little sister I saw you with just now?”

John shook his head, innocent of her design.

“No, that was Mary Joyce.”

Then he added with a certain note of pride for he had never spoke it aloud before:

“She is my sweetheart.”

“Oh, but she seemed such a little shrimp of a thing John. And now she is run back to her Papa.”

Betsy reached forward and stroked John’s coat with the back of her hand.

“And you are left here all alone John …as am I.”

John shrugged.

“And it don’t do, John, to be on your own at Bridge Fair … it don’t do at all.”

John’s heart was so full of Mary he still did not read her. She leaned forward and whispered:

“Walk me home John, walk me home to Helpston.”

“We shall all be walking home in a while Betsy …me and my family …and you are welcome to walk along with us on the road.”

She looked at him, her head tilted on one side, as a parent might look a little disappointed at a child, but there was such a lack of guile on John’s face, and his heart shone out of his eyes so clear that she suddenly laughed out loud:

“Ay, you go with them John Clare. I shall no doubt find company …”

She turned on her heel and walked back down the bridge towards the Fair.

*******

It was late afternoon when the Clares walked home. The red of the sinking sun drew the redness out of the stubble fields, the soil, the ricks, the bricks, the turning leaves …so that half the world seemed to glow as though it was made of flesh and blood. And across the fields the piled heaps of dung that waited on the plough steamed quietly in the autumn air.

They had been walking silently for a while when Parker turned to John:

“Give us a page of your new book John, something to shorten the road.”

“Oh, go on John!” Said Sophie.

John pulled the battered volume from his pocket.

“Ay, all right then …though it might not be altogether to your liking.”

“Spit it out boy, ‘twill pass the time one way or t’other.”

John opened it and read aloud:

“Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flow’r,
Glist’ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful ev’ning mild, then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heav’n, her starry train …”

John paused, as if for a moment a sharp draught of some strong liquor had warmed his blood. Then he said:

“’Tis Eden see …I heard something of it from Merrishaw.”

“Ay,” said Parker. “’Tis fine enough writ, though a little gentlemanly for my taste. I doubt he’s ever blistered his fingers with a spade.”

There is a big bowl that Ann Clare has been keeping beside the fire since September, covered in a muslin cloth that is stained with dark red splashes. Beneath the muslin there has been such a bubbling and frothing as has filled the cottage with a yeasty savour. Her elderberry wine is her pride and the toast of the neighbourhood. Last week she strained it and poured it into earthenware jars where it will stand until Christmas when, with ginger and cloves and mulling irons, its moment will come.

There has been a fermentation too in the mind of John Clare, a fever almost, a frenzy of scribbling. Since first he learned his ABCs he has scratched with his nib at whatever scrap of paper he could lay his hands upon. Most have been scrunched in his fist and thrown into the fire. Some he has folded most careful into the pages of his few precious books. But since Bridge Fair he has writ as one possessed. Whether it was that tattered volume that woke in him something that had long been slumbering. Or whether it is to sharpen and sweeten his tongue for Mary. Or whether it is merely to take his mind off poor Wisdom, who languishes still in the Bishop's gaol waiting on the convict ship that'll take him to New Holland. Whatever his reason, when he's not labouring he is either dipping his pen into ink or hunched over one of his volumes muttering the words aloud to himself as though it was a book of devotions. If he was an earthenware pot he would have long since popped his cork.

Each morning, along with the bread and cheese in his dinner bag, he must carry his paper and pencil stub. When the other men rest from their fencing or hedge-setting or stone-breaking and settle down for their baggin he sits apart and sets down the rhymes he has whispered to himself as he laboured. There are those that mock, and those that shrug, and those that say ‘Good luck to ye', but John is indifferent to them all. He is in an amaze of words that will not let him be, they come spilling and rhyming from his tongue and he delights in the pictures they summon. And then, when a poem is done, he will doubt it also. And there's many a verse as has served no higher purpose than to wipe his arse behind a hedge.

And now October is gone and November gathers her dark skirts and the bracken on the heath flattens beneath her feet.

Five days ago John and Parker came home soaked to the skin by the cold rain. Ann had been sweating since before first light in John Close's kitchen. She'd brought home a cut of salt bacon and she'd boiled some potatoes, which they all ate with relish. When food was done Parker threw some twists of whin onto the fire so that it blazed. John took one of his books from its cubby hole and leaned over it, devouring the words. Ann was spinning thread with her rockie, from the pile of combed wool on her knee. Parker dozed. Sophie, wrapped in a blanket at her mother's feet, talked idly of this and that, snatches of gossip she had garnered from the dairy. Suddenly Parker woke with a start and turned to John:

“All the world has been watching thee John, worrying pen to paper as though you'd ease an itch …but no one's heard a word of it. Read us something, one of your poems, if poems they be, for I've always had a taste for such.”