The Town House (5 page)

‘Maybe St. Christopher knew what he was about when he let my basket break,’ she said. I then looked at the two osier baskets which stood by the fire and saw that the bottom of one of them had given way.

‘I’d have been a mile or two farther along the road if that hadn’t happened,’ the old woman said. ‘Couldn’t go scattering the good fish, so I thought I’d stop and mend it up while I could see; then I felt hungry and reckoned I’d eat first.’

‘And we smelt your supper and were saved,’ I said, looking at Kate, who was holding the bowl in both hands and sipping slowly, but steadily.

‘Slip a bit of bread down with it, afore your belly shuts again,’ the old woman said, handing her a slice. Kate ate, obediently, and when that stayed with her too I knew the worst was over.

When I was full to bursting, I licked my fingers and offered to try my hand at mending the basket. I used a piece of the cord and some young hazel wands. Kate curled up under cover of her cloak and slept; the old
woman and I sat by the fire. She had lost all fear of me by that time, and when I needed my knife for the work, handed it back with a grin.

‘I was flummoxed to see you,’ she confessed. ‘Mostly I’m on the look-out for trouble, but on this bit of road I never seen another living soul, not in all the years I’ve travelled it. None else know of it, and I ain’t likely to tell them.’

It was a strange road, like none I ever saw before or since. Under the grass, which was shallow-rooted, were large flat slabs of stone, set edge to edge. I scraped away the grass to have, a better look at it.

‘It’s a wonderful good road for a loaded donkey,’ said the old woman. ‘Pity there ain’t more like it. I blundered on it by accident.’

She told me how, years before, with another donkey, she had camped for the night on a common and waked to find that, despite his hobble, the donkey had strayed. She thought she could hear him moving behind some breast-high bracken, and looking for him, had found the road.

‘That was the end, all grown over and known to none. But it looked to me to run the same way as the other, so I reckoned I’d try it. And I’m glad I did. It’s ten miles of easy going for the beast, and nice for a lone woman to have a spell with her mind at rest without fearing to be set upon. The ghosts I don’t mind. They don’t heed me, nor me them.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘Aye. The like of no mortal men they are. Marching men, with short skirts, like a woman’s but up to the knee, and shining helmets with brushes atop. There’s great silver eagles on poles going ahead of them. I’ve seen them many’s the time. The first time I was too scared to breathe, but I crossed myself and they went by without so much as a glance.’

‘You have a stout heart,’ I said.

‘For some things. I’m feared of robbers. And of the time when I cannot get around to sell my herrings.’ She watched me work for a while. ‘By your hands,’ she said, ‘you’re a smith. I’ve an idea that you broke your time and ran off to get married.’

An apprentice who left his master before his time was up was in fault, but he was not the marked, hunted man that a serf was who had run from his manor, so I nodded.

‘Ah well, there’s good masters and bad. Was yours a beater?’

I nodded again, thinking to myself that in the morning I must warn Kate to tell the same tale.

‘There’s a smith in Baildon who
might
take you – if you was well-spoke of by somebody he knew, like me.’

‘Would you so speak?’

‘I might. You seem to me a decent sort of chap. And it’d cost me nowt.’

‘I should be grateful to you all my life,’ I said. ‘Is Baildon where you go to sell your herrings?’

‘One of the places. It’s a fine large town with the best market in these parts. And it’s a long way from Norfolk,’ she added slyly.

‘How do you know that I am from Norfolk?’

‘By your tongue. Hereabouts we talk different. We sing our words. Silly Suffolk, some call us, but in the old days it was Singing Suffolk. Still, don’t worry about that, we’ll fash up a tale to explain. There, you’ve done a good job on that basket; good as new.’

We were on the move early in the grey and rosy dawn, for the old woman was anxious to get on. She and I breakfasted on herrings, from which Kate still turned sickened away, but she ate heartily of the bread.

‘The little mawther can ride the ass for a bit, you and I’ll hump the baskets. We’ll go faster that way.’

Old and shrunken as she was she set a fast pace, one which I, carrying one basket, could only just manage, and to which the donkey held unwillingly, urged on by a light blow now and again. The foal frisked along, light as a leaf, unaware that his unburdened days were numbered.

Three miles along the road we came to a wide open space, which had also been cleared in some past time and was now all grass and self-sown bushes. Above the tangle some white columns rose, one complete, twice my height and beautifully carved at the top. Others were broken.

‘There’s a good well here,’ the old woman said briskly. ‘This is where I aim to spend the night when I’m this way.’

There was a well in Rede manor yard, but nothing like this one, all buried in bushes and weeds. This was a basin of that same white stone as made the pillars and shaped something like a church font, but one side was higher than the others and had a horse’s head carved upon it, the water ran in a clear steady trickle out of the horse’s mouth, into the basin. We all drank from it.

‘Now we’ll load the donkey and go in proper fashion,’ our guide said. That done she took the animal’s bridle and dragged it forward, through some bushes and a belt of trees and in a few minutes we stood on a piece of common ground, beyond which was a sight which to me was new and most marvellous. When I say new, I mean to my
eyes
. Inside my head a picture something like it had formed when I had heard anything about Jerusalem. But my imagination had been small and mean compared with
this reality. This town was walled, though in places the wall had been neglected and allowed to crumble; inside the walls were the crowded roofs of a multitude of houses, and rising above them were some great towers, taller than the highest tree I had ever seen. One in particular seemed to soar into the sky, with buttresses and pinnacles of extreme grace and beauty.

‘That is Baildon Abbey,’ said the old woman, seeing me staring. ‘Don’t stand goggling now. If Armstrong takes you you’ll have plenty of chance to look at it.’ She urged on the donkey and we left the common for the high road which was crowded with market goers. There were men driving cattle and sheep and pigs, women carrying fowls and eggs and baskets of fruit and vegetables, other laden donkeys, people on horse-back, even a litter or two.

‘I didn’t know’, said Kate in an awed voice, ‘that there were so many people in the world.’

‘Any others with herrings; thass what I want to know,’ said the old woman. She looked sharply about her. ‘Not that I worry much,’ she went on, contradictorily, ‘bringing fish this far is more of a trudge than most folks’d face. We go this way.’

Directly ahead of us was one of the town’s gateways; some people entered it, others swerved aside and followed a track worn close to the wall.

‘A new order last year. Market dues used to be collected on the market place, but the poor fellows wore themselves out, walking round. So now us with stuff to sell walk round to the North gate and pay as we go in. They chose that gate because it’s nearest the Abbey – not so far to carry the bag!’

A monk – the first of his kind that I had ever seen – stood in the archway, accompanied by two ordinary men. As each market-goer drew level with the monk he looked over the produce he carried and without a moment’s hesitation decided whether the dues should be paid in cash or kind. He touched nothing: if cash were demanded one of the laymen received it. If the dues were in kind the other took it. It was all done swiftly and in order and in a singular silence. There was no haggling; the dues were paid in sullen silence and no-one said much until out of ear-shot of the monk. At a safe distance grumbling began. I later learned that there was a kind of justice about the dues, ruled by the law of supply and demand. The monk might take, for example, a fowl from one woman and a pound of apples from another, unfair on the face of it; but inside the market that day fowls were plentiful and cheap, apples scarce and dear. From the basket that I had mended he demanded a score of herrings. Once out of earshot, our friend said sourly,

‘There’s robbers in all shapes, but them in cowls is the worst. They say that some of their takings come back again as alms and such, but I never took charity yet and never want to.’

The market place was a great open square immediately in front of the Abbey’s main gateway. Here on the cobbles some people took up a stand and began to cry their wares as a means of drawing attention; others moved to and fro amongst the townswomen who had come out to do their marketing. I saw several females of a kind new to me, well dressed, with rings on their fingers and elegant head-gear, followed by maid- or men-servants, carrying baskets. In my simple way I took them for great ladies, never having seen one, for if my Lord Bowdegrave had a wife he never brought her to Rede. It was a surprise to me to learn that all this grandeur appertained to the wives of burghers who had been successful in their various businesses, and an even greater surprise to know that these grave-faced, sedate women were, in many cases, breaking the law by dressing themselves so fine. In the towns ordinary folk had become so rich that they could afford to ape the nobility, and laws were passed saying at what rank one might wear velvet, satin or the better kinds of fur. The laws were not heeded. In fact that was one of the first things I noticed about life in the town, the ordinary people were far less humble and conscious of their state than even the freemen on the country manors.

There was no other herring seller in Baildon that morning so Old Betsy – as I heard her called – soon emptied her baskets. One man even made an offer for the donkey foal, to which she replied shortly that she’d think about selling it when the creature was weaned. Then she said to me,

‘Come along, and I’ll take you to Armstrong, and be on my way.’

Leaving the Abbey behind us we climbed a short steep street called Cooks Lane, in which almost every shop was a food shop, out of which came odours that set my mouth watering anew, and from there we turned left into a narrower lane that smelt of hot iron and scorched hoof-horn. The smithy was set back from the street and its wide thatch stuck out, supported by roughly trimmed tree trunks, so that the animals awaiting attention and the men with them, were sheltered from the rain or sun. The space was crowded and the smith and three apprentices were working at full pelt. Old Betsy pushed her way in, leaving Kate to hold the donkey and beckoning to me to follow. When the smith, between jobs, straightened himself, he saw her and said,

‘Thass no good, dame. You must wait your turn today. I’m too busy to draw breath.’

‘Then I’m doing you a favour. I’ve brought you my young kinsman, a good smith, in his sixth year. His master died, poor man, and his forge was took over by a man with four sons, so he wouldn’t take over the ‘prentices.’

‘You want I should take him, eh?’ asked Armstrong, looking me over with a calculating eye.

‘You’d be doing yourself a good turn.’

‘In his sixth year. I don’t like other men’s ‘prentices, they ain’t trained to my ways. Besides, though I got work, I’m short of room. These three lay all in one bed as it is.’

‘He’d find his own bed. He’s married.’

‘What! In his sixth year! Scandalous.’

‘Thass different in Norfolk where he come from. They ain’t so hard-hearted; they make allowances for human nature.’

‘Let’s see your work,’ Armstrong said, speaking to me for the first time. ‘Clap a shoe on this nag.’

My hands were less steady, my movements less sure than usual, because so much depended upon how I showed, but I did the best job I could.

‘Passable,’ Armstrong said, without enthusiasm, when I had done.

‘Well, do you take him, or don’t you?’ Old Betsy asked shrilly. ‘We can’t stand about all day, waiting on you.’

‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ the smith said, narrowing his eyes. ‘I’ll take him, but not as a six year man. He go back to five; that’ll give me a chance to undo the bad ways he’ve learned in Norfolk where everything is so different. He find his own bed, I give him his dinner and his dole at Christmas and Whitsun. Are you agreed?’

‘Thass for him to say,’ Betsy said. She looked at me and managed to convey, without a word, that in her opinion I should be wise to accept the offer since one in my position was not likely to get a better.

‘I agree,’ I said, ‘and I thank you.’

‘Well you may,’ Armstrong said. ‘And all here will witness the agreement.’

All the men within hearing nodded and said, ‘Aye, aye.’

‘Start right in, then. How’re you called?’

Mindful that I might even yet, even at this distance, be hunted, I renamed myself there and then.

‘Martin, sir,’ I said.

I know now that amongst sailors there is a superstition that it is unlucky to change the name of a ship. Perhaps it does a man no good either.

So I was established and had a footing, however humble, in the town, and could not be driven out as a vagrant, and Kate found work the next day in a bake-house in Cooks Lane. The work was hard and heavy, the wages very small, but – and this meant much to us – she was allowed to bring away, at the end of her day’s toil, a good quantity of unsaleable stale bread.

We started off our life in Baildon, in a lodging about which one of my fellow-apprentices told me, saying it was a cheap place. It was in a loft over a stable and contained six straw-stuffed pallets laid close together on the floor and a cooking stone under a hole in the roof. There was a trough in the yard below. The beds, at that time of the year, when people were on the move, were always occupied by travellers of the poorer sort, tinkers, drovers, tumblers and bear leaders, and by the humble pilgrims to St. Egbert’s shrine in the Abbey. The loft had a stench of its own, a mingling of the stable smell from below, of years of careless cooking on the greasy hearth, of sweat and foul breath and human excrement; Kate and I found this irksome, for though neither of us had been bred to be fastidious, we were used to fresh country air, and to stinks so accustomed as to be unnoticed. In this lodging place the stink changed from night to night and always, it seemed, for the worse. Still, it was a shelter, the cheapest one available and had I been earning only a little, we should have stayed there. As it was, what Kate earned just sufficed to feed us, and week by week I had to pay the rent out of my small store of money. I was ignorant of town life and had imagined that I might earn a coin or two by doing odd smith jobs for people, as Father and I had done in and around Rede: two things defeated that hope. For one thing Armstrong was a hard master and we apprentices often worked far into the night; after the horses had all been shod and taken home we worked, by fire and candle-light on plough-shares and harrows, and chains, and spits and iron sconces. The other thing was that in towns all labour was organized into Guilds, which were communities of craftsmen, governed by strict laws, all of them aimed at upholding a monopoly. An apprentice to the smith’s craft, for instance, was forbidden to work for hire outside the place where he was apprenticed. If he did so he would be punished, and worse yet, it would count against him when, his apprenticeship completed, he applied for journeyman status and admission to the Guild. The person who employed him would also be in trouble, since every Guildman in the district would be
against him, refuse perhaps to do the most urgent job for him for a period varying from a month to six, and, if the man himself were a Guildsman of another craft, his own members would regard him as a traitor. There were some forms of work which I would have been allowed to do, I might, for instance have helped to drive cattle to market, or dig somebody’s garden, but such jobs must be done in daylight, and I never had a daylight hour to spare. The smithy closed early on Saturdays, and then another rule came into force; every apprentice was bound to go and practise shooting at the butts on Saturday afternoon; so I had only Sunday, when nobody wanted cattle driven or gardens dug: