The Tide Mill Page 3

  To port lay more saltmarsh, lined by seablite, and the rise of the long shingle beach which, at its shifting, scattered, incurved point, marked the entry to the harbour.

  Ralf glanced again at the channel marker. “About,” he said.

  Jacob and Edwin slightly raised their hands, to show that they had heard, and, like Ralf himself, now ducked under the boom as he put the tiller over and changed tack.

  Theirs was the sixth boat to arrive. More came in as they waited for the Reeve to assess their baskets. The Meg was not dragged ashore, but left at anchor: Jacob and Edwin, and Edwin’s son, would be sailing again this evening, going far out, with lanterns, for mackerel.

  The sun broke through the clouds; the horse-drawn dray of the usual Alincester fishmonger emerged from the trees, blocking the trackway from the village; but the crabs had yet to be weighed, the ledger marked, or the damaged pots, floats and buoy duly noted.

  “Run along, Ralf,” Jacob said.

  “What about the pots? Don’t you want me to carry one?”

  “We can manage. I’ll see you at home.”

  No more than two hundred yards from the staith, sitting on a stile, Ralf came upon Godric de Maepe.

  Godric got down. “I hoped I might see you,” he said. “I didn’t thank you properly.”

  “No need for that. Please.”

  “I wasn’t myself.” He gave an awkward smile. “Are you walking home?”

  “Yes.”

  They set off. Ralf felt uneasy. Today he was far more conscious of his place, and they walked for a time in silence. The river, its banks much overgrown, was spanned here by a wooden bridge with rough-hewn rails.

  “Did you get into trouble?” Godric said, as they crossed it.

  “No. I think I can mend the bag.”

  After a moment, Godric said, “They asked a lot of questions about Letty. I let them think I gave up as soon as I lost my boots. My father sent someone to look for her body. He didn’t find it.”

  “She’ll be on the Point by now,” Ralf said.

  “Really?”

  “I expect so. That’s how the current runs.”

  Godric wordlessly yielded to Ralf’s knowledge of the tides. “Then I’ve got to get my clothes rinsed in fresh water without anyone knowing.”

  Ralf said, “Can’t you do it yourself?”

  “No. They’d find out. Besides, I’ve no way to hang them up to dry.”

  Ralf had never had cause to set foot inside the Hall, but at second hand was quite familiar with its offices as they pertained to regulating the manor. Perhaps even before the church, the Hall was the most important building in Mape, and most of the villagers thought nothing of going there to see the Steward, to settle questions of pannage or strip-boundaries, or even to petition the Baron for a ruling in some more thorny dispute.

  Just as he had never considered the Baron to be a father like his own, so Ralf had never before thought of the Hall as a family dwelling, with private chambers the lowlier vassals never saw.

  It struck him as quaint that Godric, with so much at his command, could not even arrange the private drying of a suit of clothes. He was tempted to offer to do it himself, but then saw that he, too, would be subjected to unwelcome questions at home.

  “I’ve got a tercel,” Godric said. “Have you ever seen him?”

  “I think so,” said Ralf. He had often noticed the Baron and his retainers, with or without one or more of his sons, setting forth on horseback, bent on hawking or hunting. “A little one, isn’t he?”

  “A hobby. He doesn’t catch much. A few martins. Mostly he gets dragonflies.”

  “Not much good for the table, then.”

  “No. Unless you like dragonflies.”

  “I’ve never had them.”

  “Nor me.” Godric gave another smile, broader this time, and without any trace of awkwardness.

  They walked a few steps more. Ralf felt his sense of inferiority diminishing. It seemed that Godric had, at Ralf’s request, laid his gratitude aside.

  “I’m flying him this evening,” Godric said. “Would you like to come?”

  “I don’t know,” Ralf said. The invitation had taken him by surprise; and he was not sure whether he could be spared. There would be chores at home, and the crab-pots needed mending. “I’ll have to ask.”

  Godric assented with a motion of his head in which Ralf detected disappointment. He realized that he was being offered what he most lacked, what he had not known since the cathedral school: the companionship of one his own age. Last night, and again today, he had recalled their easy, pleasant conversation on the walk along the dike. Now it seemed that Godric might have recalled it too.

  “Where were you thinking of going?” Ralf said.

  “Out to the Severals.”

  These reed-fringed lagoons, near the end of the eastern dike, comprised one of the wildest places in the manor and one of the best for birds. The ground there, falling away towards the harbour mouth, was so low that the whole area sometimes flooded, even if the dike did not give way, which, in winter, it occasionally did.

  “I may have to work,” Ralf said, “but I’ll do my best.”

  Almost imperceptibly, Godric brightened at this, though, much like Ralf himself, he was trying to appear indifferent.

  So was it arranged that, when the evening bell sounded, Godric would come to the north door of the Hall and wait there for a few minutes in case Ralf was able, after all, to be spared.

  * * *

  For Anna Grigg, having once been convinced that she was escaping the drudgery of this damp and confining cottage, her husband’s fall had been particularly hard. Not that she disliked her father, or wished to be parted from him; not that she disliked Mape itself or its lenient baron, or even its backwardness and isolation; but for Linsell to have bought her freedom, to have established her as the mistress of a household inside the high flint walls of the finest city in the south, and then for her, her husband, and their two beautiful children, to return, penniless, to the place of her birth: this had not been easy.

  None of the girls she had grown up with, who were now women like her, of middle age, with children of their own, had found a freeman willing to pay their price. They had envied her at the time, envied her good-looking bridegroom, her lavish wedding at the village church. They had envied her at a distance, and during her infrequent visits they had envied her still more. It was not surprising that, behind their hands, some of them had expressed satisfaction at her plight.

  Their station was now better than hers. They had the protection of the manor, and would never starve. Their menfolk would never be at a loss for work, or a house, however mean, in which to live. Because they had never left the place, they and their children had been drawn ever more tightly into the village. They knew what the future held.

  The catastrophe had begun with deceptive auguries of smoothness and ease. Linsell had won his biggest contract yet, to build a dozen almshouses for the city beadle.

  Linsell’s usual merchant had been unable to supply at short notice the quantity of seasoned oak needed, so he went to another, named Acklin. Six weeks into the contract, Acklin was charged with stealing trees from royal land and all his stocks – seasoned as well as green – were seized, including twenty prime standards for which Linsell had already signed. All timber at the site, some of which Linsell had supplied from his own yard, was also seized.

  His assumption that the Bishop would make good the loss was soon dispelled by the Beadle’s masters on the Diocesan Panel. Since Linsell’s tender had so notably undercut the other contractors’, there was also a possibility that he would be accused of conspiring with Acklin.

  Linsell could not afford to sue the Bishop, whose advocates were the best in the land. He could no longer raise credit, even to buy more timber. He necessarily defaulted on the contract, losing the value of the work already done, and was prosecuted by the Panel in the county court. The fine and costs amounted to over a hundred and twenty m
arks. Meanwhile Acklin’s trial, to be held at Westminster since the Crown was the plaintiff, was postponed and postponed yet again.

  Orders at the yard had ceased. The men were dismissed and the workshop closed. Anna’s husband was no longer invited to the houses of other guildsmen and merchants. Some even ignored him, and her, in the street.

  The conspiracy charge was not made; Acklin was found guilty and hanged, but not before his clerk had deposed that Linsell had acted throughout in good faith. Linsell’s petition to the Diocese for the value of his own timber was granted. He eventually recovered most of his losses from Acklin’s estate. At the end of the three years the whole affair had consumed, he was left twenty-seven marks in debt.

  This sum represented over a year’s wage for a master in charge of carpentry at a major project such as Alincester Cathedral. Linsell was a master: but until his debt was repaid his guild, bound by its ancient ordinances, would withhold his master’s licence.

  He had at least been allowed to keep his tools. As a skilled journeyman at the boatyard, he was receiving six marks a year. Even by living rent-free and practising every economy possible, it could take him another seven years before his licence was restored.

  Anna cared little for herself, but she could not forgive the effect all this had had on her innocent husband, daughter, and son; and on her children unborn who now, through poverty, would never be. Her only Ralf, whose promise had shone through from his earliest age, had been denied his schooling, his future; without a miracle, in the form of a free apprenticeship, what would he amount to? And what now of poor, sweet Imogen?

  Anna blamed the Bishop. Linsell refused to listen, but she blamed the Bishop nonetheless. This old man, rich beyond imagining, richer even than the King, could have ended their troubles with one slight pressure of his seal in warm wax. He lived in remote splendour, so far above the cares of the people that he might have been the Pope himself. The Cathedral, still unfinished, had been forty years in construction; that, and his palace, were devouring the Diocese.

  As a child, Anna had listened with credulity to the priest’s words about the downtrodden. According to the Saviour, they would be exalted. The gospel said other things too, just as subversive, about the rich: had he had not in righteous rage overturned the tables in the temple?

  Linsell was never moved to rage, righteous or otherwise. She was impatient with him for his acceptance, but could not in earnest be sorry for it. His mildness was one of the qualities that had most attracted her when first they had met, sixteen years ago, here in Mape. He had been sent by Master Hampden among a party of cathedral-men choosing wind-formed oak, the best of which grew near the sea.

  He was not only mild, but exasperatingly impartial. Sometimes Anna could not help herself. In the extremity of her frustration, disappointment and weariness, sometimes – but never in the hearing of the children – she found herself reproving him, or even trying to quarrel. That injustice, too, he bore without complaint.

  This afternoon she was so tired that she had again been unable to suppress unreasoning resentment of his absence. In Rushton, when his working day was over, Linsell had nothing more to do. His lodgings, at the house of another workman, never needed cleaning by him; he never had to fetch water or to launder these threadbare clothes; he never had to cook, to grind corn, to eke meals out of nothing, to nurse any who might be ill, to sew, to mend, endlessly to mend. Her family never had anything new, unless, received as alms, it inflicted yet more injury on her pride. All this had to be endured under a roof that was not their own.

  Like most of those in Mape, her father’s cottage was cramped and gloomy, with ceilings so low that one could barely stand up. Linsell had done what he could, but the doors and shutters, warped and in places even rotten, no longer fitted. Only the tiny, smoke-filled kitchen had a pavement; the other floors downstairs were of beaten earth. Damp came from below, from the walls, and from the thatch, which was so old and black, so sodden and leaky, that it should have been stripped ten years ago. The manor had promised repairs, but they never came.

  “I’m sorry, dearest, I can’t do much more with this,” Anna told Imogen, as she tied off the thread on her second shift: the split seam had already been mended two or three times. Imogen, cleaning a bowl of parsnips in her lap, thanked her and said she did not mind.

  For a tender moment Anna gazed at her daughter’s profile. They were sitting outside the front door, making the most of this unexpected late-afternoon sun.

  “Mother,” she said, “why aren’t … Mary says we aren’t supposed to be here.”

  Mary Ibbott was one of the little girls with whom Imogen played.

  “She says Father isn’t a serf, so we shouldn’t be living here.”

  Anna kept back the reply she wanted to make. “The Seigneur decides who may occupy his houses.”

  “The Baron?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is he a good man?”

  “Yes. He is.” Except, perhaps, for his steward’s promise about the roof.

  “He won’t make us leave?”

  “You mustn’t listen to Mary,” Anna said, gently. “His Lordship has always been kind to us. Even when your grandmother was alive. Especially then.”

  The Baron need not have permitted Anna’s purchase; nor need he have set the price so low. He could even, on the wedding-night, have insisted that she attend him instead of her groom. He had been generous to Jacob, allowing him to continue alone in a cottage which might have housed a whole family, or even two.

  The manor encompassed part of another village besides Mape, and, at some remove along the coast, land which was rented by a neighbouring, ecclesiastical, manor. The Baron farmed about a third of the total, his demesne, for himself. He had five other tenants, and the rest was villein land. Each family of glebe-serfs, bound to the soil, had its own strips in the communal fields, widely separated and interspersed with demesne strips, usually handed on from father to son. The Baron controlled all buildings except the church, and could move his serfs around at will.

  Imogen was about to frame another question, but her attention was drawn away, as Anna now saw for herself, by Ralf’s appearance in the gap in the hedge which served as the gateway between the long, narrow front garden and the village green.

  * * *

  The evening meal, rabbit stew, was ready soon after Grandfather got home. Ralf sat down to eat without having broached the subject of Godric or the Severals.

  Even as grace was being said, Ralf, eyes closed and hands clasped, was still wondering what to do. Last night, the main reason he had omitted mention of Godric was a fear of questioning that might have exposed what had happened in the saltings.

  Ralf was innately truthful and disliked even prevarication. He preferred to avoid, if he could, venturing into any territory where he might wish to tell a lie. Besides, he was so little accomplished at deception that he usually got found out, especially by his mother, whose powers of penetration were so much greater than those of his father.

  But Ralf had also failed to mention Godric for another reason. The Baron’s family was so far above his own that he could not predict the reaction of his mother and grandfather, whether they would disapprove, or even feel slighted.

  “Amen,” he murmured, opened his eyes, and, while waiting for his turn with the parsnips and attending to Imogen’s questions about his day, could not help listening out for the evening bell.

  There was only one big bell in Mape, in the church, rung on Sundays to mark the seven canonical hours, and as a tocsin when a boat was in trouble or a house had caught fire. During each weekday the Doorward’s boy came over from the Hall six times, at three-hourly intervals, to ring the sequent which regulated work in the fields and in the village. Ralf had heard the afternoon sequent, faintly across the water, as he had helped Edwin to haul in the last of the pots.

  It could not be much longer before the evening sequent sounded and he was due to meet Godric. If he did not bring the subject
into the open well beforehand, it would by then be too late to speak. For Ralf had now admitted to himself that he wanted very much to visit the Severals this evening, not just for the sake of his new acquaintance, but also to see the hobby.

  Everyone was served. Ralf swallowed his first spoonful.

  “May I go out after supper?” he said to his mother, and then, before anyone could speak, he turned to his grandfather with: “I haven’t forgotten the broken pots, but I’ve a chance to see a hobby.”

  “A hobby?” Jacob said.

  “It’s a hawk,” Anna said.

  No: a falcon, or, to be really strict, a tercel, but Ralf, waiting for the next question, forbore.

  “Whose is it?” Anna said.

  “Godric de Maepe’s. He was on the staith-track just now. He asked if I could come.”

  Anna looked at her father with a significance Ralf did not understand. “I didn’t know you knew him,” she said.

  “We met yesterday.”

  “Beachcombing?”

  “He lost his dog in the marsh.”

  “I heard something about that.”

  Jacob said, “Are you quite sure he asked you?”

  “Yes. He’ll be at the Hall when the evening bell sounds. He’s going out to the Severals.”

  “Them old pots can wait,” Jacob said, readdressing himself to his stew. “I see no harm in it.”

  “Nor me,” said Anna.

  “I can go, then?”

  “If you’re back well before dark.”

  Imogen now piped up, taking Ralf by surprise. “Can I come?” When informed by her mother that she could not, she rejoined with a drawn-out “Please” that made even Ralf smile.

  “It’s not fair,” Imogen said.

  “Mr Godric only asked your brother,” Anna told her. “Anyway, even if he’d asked you as well, I wouldn’t let you go. You’re too little.”

  “That’s what I mean about it not being fair.”

  Ralf saw that his mother was studying him. “Is anyone else going?” she said. “His brothers?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.”