The Tide Mill Page 7

  Next, such a baron would be assessed on the profits made by his mill. A tithe, one tenth, would be payable to the diocese in which his manor lay. The assessment would apply to the value of the milling to his own manor, and to any profits he made by working for others. He would further be bound by the Molarius to adhere to the standard scale of charges, so that mills in ecclesiastical manors were not undercut. While negligible compared with its other tithes, milling provided a source of revenue for every diocese. The laws dealing with it were extremely detailed and enforced with the maximum zeal.

  Few barons could afford a molendinium sacrum. Most sacred mills were sited in ecclesiastical manors where, besides grinding corn, they were used for wood-turning and sawing or driving the bellows and hammers in iron-working.

  Windmills on the coast were at particular risk of storm damage, and were otherwise problematical, but Gervase de Maepe had in the past toyed with the idea of a watermill. His river had sufficient flow. Upstream, outside the manor, there was as yet no other wheel: if his were the first, its licence would be cheaper, and would reduce in price if subsequent mills were built. He had gone so far as to have his clerk reckon it all out. Even if the cost of building and manning were taken into account, the advantages of owning a watermill were real enough. What Stephen could not forecast, however, were the caprices of the Bishop. From what Gervase had heard, the cost of the Cathedral was proving so ruinous that even William of Briouze was feeling the strain. Unless he had a long-term guarantee of the liabilities, Gervase could not risk the capital needed to erect a mill. The project had remained as nothing more than a sheaf of optimistic calculations, buried somewhere among all the other optimistic manuscripts in this room.

  This year’s harvest was already looking lean. That might hold the price up a little, provided the harvest were equally bad elsewhere. That in turn would reduce his milling costs.

  “We need more serfs,” Walter said.

  “You know my feelings on that,” said Gervase. There were exceptions, but most of his people were idle and fractious. He upheld his compact with them: he gave them housing, protection, and certainty. In return he received insolence, indolence, sullen intransigence.

  This morning, the letter from the Molarius was not Gervase’s only worry. The contract with the reed-merchant had not yet been signed. The fellow was still muttering about terms, and Walter had reported that the church dike might need repairs this winter, which would divert labour from the reed-harvest. Early next month Gervase had to travel to Westminster and spend time at court. And, to cap everything, he had received new tidings of the extravagance of his eldest and self-named son, Gervase.

  Of all his children, he supposed that only Godric gave him no trouble. Gervase and Henry, in the army, between them spent more on horses and drink than the manor itself. Adela’s marriage had cost him so dear that he did not even want to think about it. The next wedding, of Eloise, was his new preoccupation. He and Margaret had begun to scatter groundbait; among others now assembling, the satisfactory shape of a certain duke’s son could be seen through the ripples.

  Eloise was a worry in herself. For all her outward obedience, he never could tell what she was thinking. Who knew what was going on beneath that demure exterior, or how she would react to her chosen husband? In every way, he feared, she was quite the opposite of Adela.

  But Godric was different. Gervase was reminded of himself at that age, except that Godric was more thoughtful. He asked for nothing, was acceptably studious – as Stephen, who was schooling him, would attest – and, in short, caused no difficulty at all. He found it hard to make friends, at least among noblemen’s sons, a trait which would soon disappear once he had started at the Abbey. A favourable portent might be his recent friendship with that rather impressive Grigg boy. If Godric were to get on in the world, and especially in the Church, he would have to learn how to cultivate goodwill and turn it to his advantage.

  Goodwill, suitors, the King: all had to be cultivated, like the soil of this manor, manured if necessary with flattery, money, or obsequiousness, with hints and half-promises of favour and allegiance, and with compliance when unavoidable.

  Gervase always recognized the unavoidable. It frequently took the form of the Church.

  He gave Walter a wry smile. The milling charge had been most cunningly set. A fraction more and the Diocese would have lost revenue; a fraction less and the greed of Bishop William would not, for now, have been satisfied.

  “We have no choice,” he said. “We’ll have to pay.”

  * * *

  On the walk out to the beach, Ralf told Godric about the trick Eaton Rendell had played. Godric, listening intently, made little comment, but when Ralf said that he was going to ignore Eaton and Cebert in future, Godric said, “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not worthy of you.”

  “I hate them.”

  “They’re serfs, Ralf.”

  “So is my grandfather.”

  “You must allow for them.”

  “They know not what they do. Is that it?”

  Godric said nothing.

  It had just slipped out. Ralf had not meant to cheapen the gospel. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was walking behind, on the narrow path along the top of the church dike. The bare part was hidden by vegetation: the yarrow and sea-aster, the lyme-grass and docks, were now as thick as they would ever be.

  Godric said, “Can you imagine what it’s like to be born in servitude? To know you’ll never be free?”

  “No.”

  “Neither can I. My father taught me that. He’s always complaining about the serfs, but he tries to understand them. He loves them. All of them. Including Eaton Rendell.”

  Ralf looked at Godric’s back in surprise. He said, “What should I do, then?”

  “Read the Sermon on the Mount.”

  “I don’t have a Bible.”

  “There’s a New Testament in the church. Ask Father Pickard.”

  “It’s in Latin.”

  “‘Do good to those who hate you’,” Godric said, over his shoulder. “That should keep you going for now.”

  Ralf was assailed by contrary feelings. He had never suspected that Godric’s belief ran quite so deep, or that it governed his daily life. He still hated Eaton and Cebert. He still hated them for what they had done, yesterday evening, to his mother. But, for Godric’s sake, he would try not to ignore them.

  During the night the wind had increased and changed to a fresher direction, north-east. Great waves of motion rippled across the reeds. Ralf breathed clean morning air and looked up at a flawless sky. Godric was right. This was freedom. A mile away, hidden behind the eastern dike, the harvesters were still submerged in their suffering, still toiling their way through dust and sweat across the two-hundred-acre field.

  The path ended at the beach. They climbed the rise of shingle to its crest: and stood facing the sea.

  “Rough today!” Godric yelled.

  And blue. “Eiders!” Ralf cried, pointing at a small, heaving raft of sea-ducks two hundred yards offshore.

  “I meant to ask you, how do you know all the birds?”

  “My mother taught me.” Most of them, anyway. She could identify any dead ones he brought home; and on their walks together, when he and Imogen had been younger, she had always named the birds, their songs and calls.

  Godric grinned for no discernible reason and ran, slithering and crunching, down the slope towards the surf. Ralf followed.

  Low water would come this afternoon. The ebb, three hours old, was uncovering an irregular strip of sand halfway down the beach. This strip, smooth, firm, still gleaming, and sparsely studded with pebbles and the occasional shell, formed an almost unbroken pavement three miles long, all the way out to the end of the Point. Ralf had often seen it from the boat; he had walked part of it, both to east and west.

  From the Hall Godric had brought a game-bag and an earthenware bottle of small-beer. He had insisted on unpa
cking Ralf’s bag and sharing the weight.

  Ralf removed his shoes, brushed away the sand as best he could, thrust them into his bag, and rolled his leggings up his calves. Godric did the same.

  Turning their faces to the east, with waves crashing on their right and the wall of shingle concealing the saltings, the village, and even the downs, they set forth on that unprinted highway left by the sea.

  7

  Mape’s river rises from chalk springs in the downs. By the time it reaches the coast it has gathered water from three tributaries. Twelve thousand years of forest silt have been discharged into its estuary.

  The coastal current trends eastwards, churning, grinding and grading the chalk and flint which make the sea-bed. Trapped between the sea and the estuary, deposited shingle and sand have extended the beach into a spit. Its long body remains more or less constant from year to year, but the broad, ragged point, curving inward, is always changing. The limit to growth is set by the river. As the estuary widens, its flow can no longer compete with the waves.

  A titanic struggle is waged here between land and sea, between fresh water and salt. Mape Point is a battleground, a desert of dunes and spindrift, hardly visited except for birds’-eggs. A single storm can wash out a third of its area. Rebuilding instantly resumes and might last unchecked for years.

  To seaward, low tide reveals spacious sandflats, and on the furthest edge of these is the place where the seals haul out to bask and digest.

  “How many, do you think?” Ralf said, shading his eyes.

  “Two hundred. At least.”

  He and Godric, sitting on the shingle near the top of the beach, had completed much of the outward walk: the sand stretched below them and away to the left.

  The seals were so far off that it was not easy to count them, and so far off that they had as yet shown no reaction to the intruders. At their leisure, as soon as they felt threatened, they would hitch themselves across the few yards to the sea, slip into the water, and disappear. Though Ralf himself had never participated, his grandfather’s boat was one of those which converged to kill seals each autumn: for their skins and fat, but mostly for the quantity of fish they ate and the pots they ruined.

  The hides fetched a good price in the city. They were used to make rainproof hats and clothes, and things that had to be soft as well as durable, like gaskets, washers, glaziers’ mats, and the kneepads worn aloft by masons. The kneepads worn also, Ralf now remembered, by thatchers.

  “Godric,” he said, after a moment. “I’ve got something to ask you.” And he began to recount the story of his grandfather’s roof: what happened every time it rained, the eternal dampness of the bedding, Imogen’s chesty cough which, last winter, had so worried their mother.

  Almost as soon as he had started, Ralf regretted raising the subject. He faltered.

  “Has your grandfather spoken to the Steward?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want you to —”

  “What did he say?”

  “This was two years ago.”

  “Did he say he’d mend the roof?”

  “Yes. Several times.”

  “I’ll speak to my father.”

  “Godric, I didn’t mean —”

  “You were right to mention it. It’s not a favour. You’re entitled to be dry. After all, we’re not short of reeds.”

  The Rendells’ roof, and the Whitlocks’, while not so bad, also needed thatching. Ralf suddenly saw how it would look if only Jacob’s were renewed. He wished more than ever that he had held his peace.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Ours isn’t the only one.”

  Godric smiled, the sun above him and to the right, and in that instant Ralf felt more than ever that he had known him before, at some other time, long before Mape. “Don’t worry, Ralf. My father isn’t a fool.” To put an end to the conversation, and Ralf’s discomfort, he raised a hand to his brow and squinted again at the seals.

  The highest parts of the sandflats had already dried out. Just above the surface swirling patterns of blown grains were being driven before the wind, like mist. Elsewhere pools of seawater remained trapped. On the far side, to the right of the seals, a loose flock of gulls faced into the breeze; and to the right of them, much further right, at the water’s edge, stood four gull-like birds, smaller, but heavier-looking, and very dark.

  “What are those?” Godric said, pointing, at the moment of Ralf’s seeing them.

  “I don’t know.”

  First one and then the other three dark gulls launched. With powerful beats they flew low towards the seals, on wings long and narrow. There was something languid as well as purposeful, almost sinister, about their flight, and as they approached it the entire white flock of gulls swirled and scattered in terror. The four continued south-eastwards, gaining altitude, and were lost to the glare.

  “Demons,” Godric said: and with that word fixed the amorphous feelings rising in Ralf’s breast. The unknown birds belonged to the vastness of the creation, or its underside. They belonged to the sea.

  “Come on,” Godric said, “let’s go.”

  A few small clouds, very white, had appeared. The wind had grown stronger and, despite the sun, felt cold.

  The shingle gave way entirely to sand. From the summit of a dune the whole harbour was visible. Along the base of the eastern dike the mud and marsh-plants lay exposed. Along its top, broken here and there, the billowing foliage of the windbreak trees stretched towards the lagoons. Under one of those oaks, this time yesterday, Ralf had sat by his grandfather and yearned to be here.

  It was hot in the dunes, out of the wind. They returned to the shore. A few minutes later, near the furthest reach of the Point, they came across a bleached and eroded framework of timbers about four yards long, half buried in the sand. At first they could not make it out.

  “It’s a ship,” Ralf said. “Part of a ship. On its side.”

  “A wreck,” Godric said. “Do you think anyone was killed?”

  “Bound to have been.”

  “I expect it broke up. In a huge storm.”

  To judge from the shallow curve of the main bearer, the vessel must have been at least sixty feet long. The beams had been halved, drilled and treenailed, just as Ralf had seen his father do. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The way it’s made. The way it’s weathering.”

  “How long has it been here?”

  “Ages.”

  “How big do you think it was?”

  “A sixty footer. Perhaps more.”

  “A navy ship, then.”

  “Or a transport.”

  “I wouldn’t be a sailor for anything,” Godric said.

  Ralf was not so sure. Walking round these timbers, he had already wondered what it would be like to put to sea. Not just for the day, not just to collect crabs or to fish for flounders, but really to set sail. Beyond the horizon, on the open ocean, you would depend utterly on the men who had built your ship. But even their care and science, and even the bravest crew, could be overwhelmed by the fury of the sea.

  He thought of his father in the boatyard at Rushton. They built crabbers, mainly, but also bigger vessels, like smacks, and even coasters.

  Ralf had never seen it before, but there was heroism in the shipwright’s craft. Better to build something real, something for a purpose, than a saintly statue or the arches of a cathedral. A church was supposed to glorify God: but what glorified him more? Could a church spare anyone from labour or hardship? Could it carry wool across the Channel or goods along the coast?

  At thirteen, Ralf knew such thoughts to be heretical and wrong. He had never breathed a word of them to anyone, even his own mother. At Sunday service when the congregation prayed, when, with everyone else, Ralf shut tight his eyes and tried to speak to God, he encountered only silence. While Father Pickard spoke of Moses or the Virgin, Ralf tried to listen, to maintain an interest, but soon was thinking of other things. Boredom:
that was what he found in church. He feared the presence in himself of grievous sin. He constantly resolved to do better, though he never could.

  That was why he had been so struck by Godric’s certainty. As they walked away from the wreck, Ralf wanted to ask him more but was unable to find the right words; and then the moment, and with it the impulse, had passed.

  To get out of the wind, they sat in the dunes to eat. High in the marram-grass, overlooking the sea, they tore the bread apart and swigged their beer. No sails were visible. Fishing had been all but suspended during harvest, and the sight of larger vessels was rare. In any case, they steered well clear of the Point and the shoals beyond.

  With Jacob and Edwin, Ralf had seen most of the ships that passed. Eastbound for Dover or London, westbound for Portsmouth, Southampton, Bristol, and perhaps even more exotic places, the most usual were heavy merchant barks, square-rigged and two-masted, or smaller, single-masted cogs and barges plying the local ports. None, now, ever came up to the staith: the channel was too choked. Occasionally the castles and full sails of a navy ship could be seen.

  But today nothing whatever interrupted the horizon. Ralf felt as though he and Godric were masters of some undiscovered island. The stretch of barren shingle between the dunes and the church dike might have been a gulf a hundred miles across; and indeed, thinking of how far they had already walked, he did not know how he was to get home. His lack of sleep was catching up with him.

  Their conversation about the roof was still on his mind. It seemed unresolved, but was not. Ordinarily he would have felt the need to explain further, to seek reassurance that Jacob Farlow’s would not be rethatched alone; yet the matter was settled. “My father’s not a fool,” Godric had said. Neither was his son. A few words were all it took for him to understand. “Demons,” he had called them, those dark birds, not just reading Ralf’s thoughts but leaping ahead. Almost from the first moment of their meeting, and certainly during their leave-taking under the churchyard yew, Ralf had been aware of this unaccountable familiarity, a sympathy of outlook which should have come only after long acquaintance. He had liked Godric immediately. Now he was learning to respect him too.