Cover
About the Author
Also by Adam Thorpe
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
1: Return 1650
2: Friends 1689
3: Improvements 1712
4: Leeward 1743
5: Dissection 1775
6: Rise 1803
7: Deposition 1830
8: Shutter 1859
9: Stitches 1887
10: Treasure 1914
11: Wing 1953
12: Here 1988
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. Ulverton, written in 1992, was his first novel and he has since written nine others – most recently Flight – two collections of stories, six books of poetry and a translation of Madame Bovary.
BY ADAM THORPE
Fiction
Ulverton
Still
Pieces of Light
Shifts
Nineteen Twenty-One
Poetry
Mornings in the Baltic
Meeting Montaigne
From the Neanderthal
‘A superb and moving meditation on history, fate and the nature of time, Ulverton is at once a traditional fiction and a wholly successful testing of the limits of literary art’
John Banville
‘A writer of such prodigious gifts … Thorpe is a giant in the making’
Max Davidson, Sunday Telegraph
‘Beneath the variety of Ulverton’s episodes is the current that links them, and that makes this one of the great British fictional works of our time. Each voice gives us a richly accomplished story; as one voice follows another, we are given the waxing and waning of history, of the land, and of the ways in which society regards itself and the world it disposes of’
LA Times
‘Spanning three centuries and encompassing a startling variety of lives, this debut novel from British poet Adam Thorpe is nothing less than a bravura performance … With Ulverton, Thorpe has woven his own enticing “secret web”. This is no mere promising fist novel, but a major work, heralding a brilliant new voice in British fiction’
Washington Post
‘… merely by focusing exclusively on one small unassuming town in the Southwest of England from 1650 to the present, Thorpe has somehow managed to create as encompassing a portrait of what it means to be British as I have ever read’
The Seattle Times
‘Ulverton is more than just a novel; it is an experience, a participatory effort that you share along with the writer, and it provides the opportunity to discover a talent demanding without relief your willingness to accept its brilliance simply because it is there’
St Louis Post Dispatch
‘[Stitches] is one of the most subtle and moving and terrible stories I’ve ever read in my life – it’s brilliant … An extremely serious, extremely important book’
Harriet Gilbert, Kaleidoscope, Radio 4
‘A masterpiece … moving, detailed, convincing, complicated and original … a linguistic tour de force’
Angela Lambert, Country Life
‘This is a book in which we tread again and again the same physical ground – meander along well-worn paths, past hedgerows unchanged for centuries, pause at a gate, perhaps, to reflect on the bewitching, timeless familiarity of the landscape – and enter brand new territories of the imagination’
Mary Scott, Literary Review
‘Exceptional resonance and scope … These stories are meaty, dramatic, suspenseful’
Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books
‘Ulverton is a glorious success, both an intellectually powerful and an extremely moving novel and one which exhilaratingly passes fiction’s key test by illuminating what is usually invisible’
James Walton, The Tablet
‘Beautifully researched … an extraordinarily rich read … a remarkable piece of work, bold in imagination and execution, original in description and wise in perception’
James Runcie, Daily Telegraph
‘Brilliant’
She
‘An exceptional first novel’
Judy Cooke, Country Living
For Jo
HE APPEARED ON the hill at first light. The scarp was dark against a greening sky and there was the bump of the barrow and then the figure, and it shocked. I thought perhaps the warrior buried there had stood up again to haunt us. I thought this as I blew out the lanterns one by one around the pen. The sheep jostled and I was glad of their bells.
He came down towards me, stumbling down over the tussocks of the scarp’s slope that was cold and wet still with the night, and I could see he was a soldier from the red tunic that all the army now wore, it was said. He stopped at a distance. He had that wary look of one used to killing. His face was dark with dirt, and stubbled.
Deserters had been known to kill. I went on blowing.
He watched me all the time. Then as I turned towards him, he looked away and down into the valley where the village was beginning to smoke.
I saw him side on and I recognised him.
‘Gabby,’ I said.
He turned.
‘I wondered when,’ he murmured, so I could hardly hear. He was the tiredest man I have ever seen.
He sat. He draped his arms over his knees and buried his face in them. Then he looked up at me, smiling.
‘I’ve shook hands with him,’ he said.
‘With who?’
‘General Cromwell. I’ve shook hands with him.’
‘With the General?’
‘Aye.’ He said this with defiance, but I had no cause not to believe him. Whether a man has done a thing or no, I know when he believes he has, and that is all the same in the end.
‘That is a fine thing,’ I said. I sat down next to him and wondered if it was right to tell him. And he looked at me so smiling that I hadn’t the heart. Of course, I wish now I had, but it might not have saved anything. Sorrow is a water that flows however you try to dam it, that is my thought. It will find a way.
‘At Drogheda,’ he said. And do you know, I remember this man as a boy at my table, come in to tell me of some carriage he had seen along the main road, of the white glove that had waved to him, and cast him a penny. And other stories I forget now.
‘At Drogheda,’ he said again.
He wiped his lips that were sore, I noticed.
‘Drogheda?’
‘Across the water,’ he said, pointing at the clouds. He shivered, and I offered him my coat.
He took it. I hoped the sun would strike us soon. Down in the houses smoke broke through mist, piled higher and higher until it whitened with the sun. Up there the larks were warm.
He huddled in the coat. Some taut thing had gone. You could smell his tiredness.
‘At Drogheda,’ he said, ‘in Ireland. I shook his hand, like this.’
He clasped at air and moved his hand up and down. I could see it. I could see the General in this place and I could see Gabby be taken by the hand and have it shook.
The dogs pawed him, and I whistled them off. I reached into my basket and broke a piece of bread and a corner of cheese and handed it to him.
Did he scoff them!
I passed him the firkin and he tipped it back so that the ale runnelled either side of his mouth and down onto his leggings. He coughed and wiped his mouth and I confess I took back the ale double-quick for I had another twelve hours to thirst by. I lived the other side of Ulverton then.
‘Was he a big man?’ I said.
He sighed and licked his sore lips and picked at crumbs. He was thinking.
‘No,’ he said.
I was surprised at this, though Gabby was never a small man himself. Soldiering made him more crookbacked, not less. He looked no different to you nor I.
He turned surly then, and asked why should he be? And I kept out of it because Gabby seemed changed and I was alone, and my dogs then were soft. I fancied he might own a gun under his tunic.
So I said nothing either about the other matter, even when he asked.
‘Anne,’ he said, ‘my Anne.’
He was asking, in his own way. He’d been off so long and all of us thought him dead though I didn’t tell him.
‘You’d best go and see,’ I said.
I stood and fiddled with something – I think a lantern door or maybe a yoke or maybe both, one after the other – anyway, something to show I was busy and maybe I couldn’t talk. I also sent the dogs scurrying after a big ewe on the scarp who was doing no harm there. I am a cowardly man.
I could hear him rubbing his chin, like a saw on a horn.
‘She’s not dead then,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Not poorly then,’ he said.
I said no, and whistled, and said he’d best go and see. My heart was thumping. I’ll say, like I was a guilty man.
He stood up.
‘I know why you’re sore,’ he said. ‘I know why. I’ll thank you for the food and drink, and the talking, but I need no judgements, William.’
His voice was hoarse.
I shrugged. Then I spoke not looking at him.
‘Best go and see, that’s all I’ll say. I knowed you as a boy, Gabby. You used to sit out sometimes. We looked at the words in our heads and seed if they were God’s words or no, remember? Then you’ve gone out fighting for God’s word on earth and I don’t know if matters have changed, only that the King has lost his head and after Newberry old Joshua Swiffen’s field was smashed and sodden with blood and nothing’s altered as I can see. That’s all.’
I made this little speech much like the parson’s because my heart was thumping and I wished to divert his thoughts from Anne his wife. I think now whether it mightn’t have been better to tell him outright, but I was frighted.
‘You know the farm was broke. Soldiering was how I would set it right.’
‘In heaven or on earth?’ I said.
He smiled at that.
‘What I have sewn into my tunic will see us through,’ he said. ‘I fought for God and Anne so she might have a son that lives and no parish nor more working for Swiffen nor Hort nor Stiff nor any of them. I’ve come right back,’ he said.
He reached into his breeches and pulled out something I thought was gold but when he oped his hand it was a ball of old ribbons that had long ago been red.
‘She were allus dreaming of it,’ he said. ‘She were allus dreaming of her hair all up in silks. Hair black as a raven and all up in red silks, like a lady. And rings on her fingers! Aye. She were allus dreaming of it!’
Those ribbons looked so tattered and pale and torn it was sad, like he had pulled out his own heart. Even his fierceness was not that of love but, as I think it, of anguish.
I paused in my whittling of the yoke (for that’s what I was doing) and nodded my head neither knowingly nor as judgement. I could see the heads he had torn the ribbons from and all the fingers he had maybe cut for rings, if he were telling the truth, and prayed without moving my lips. He smiled and put the clump of ribbons back into his breeches carefully like it was a live thing and not to be hurt. The cocks were hollering from the thatch down there but else all you could hear were the cluckets ringing all over the coomb as the flock grazed. I thought. I thought how quiet we were compared to the noise of soldiering. The business at Newberry had set my sheep off in a canter, miles off.
He took my hand all of a sudden, that had a knife in it, so I dropped the yoke and threw the knife down and took his hand. Then we hugged, and kissed, as old friends, and I smelt the liquor on his skin that was a deep part of him and not just for jollity, and I wondered to myself how he reconciled this with God’s word.
He was crying.
He was a little boy again. There were stains on his tunic, that smelt of guns, and he took out a little leather belt with powder cases hanging from it, and threw it towards the scarp, so as it fell it twisted out, spilling bitterness into the wind.
‘Wexford and Drogheda,’ he said, choking a little on the last, ‘we did for all of them at Wexford and Drogheda. That was God’s word. Women and kiddies, William. God’s word. A flaming minister. A shining sword.’
‘Yes, yes. I heard of this,’ I said, then whistling back my dogs who had gone after the bandolier.
‘You had?’ he said, looking up.
I nodded, and turned away, and went down the slope a little. He followed.
I stopped at a bush and hooked out a small skull with my crook and showed it to him.
‘She was lambing. Dog. It’s in the nature of things, Gabby.’
The skull still smelt somewhat so I cast it back.
‘Until the Last Day when the Kingdom comes,’ I said.
‘Then I’m a dog, no better nor worse.’ He grinned, and I knew he thought I was a simple old man for my parables.
‘I thought you were needing forgiveness,’ I said.
‘That’s for me to decide,’ he said, ‘though we were blessed by the parson after. We were all black with the smoke. Now you have God’s kingdom. I don’t need no powder. All men will be equal in the common weal. Shepherds and kings.’
‘No kings,’ I said. I was a little angered, that’s true.
‘No. No kings.’
He grinned again and clapped me on the shoulder and then was off down the slope, where he tumbled and came up again laughing, down towards the thatch where the mist still clung and the cocks and dogs were hollering as if to warn him, for I wasn’t. I just stared, angered somewhat, and worrited more than a man can say by what he would do when he found his Anne with her husband, that wasn’t Gabby, for we had all thought him dead these five years.
I had my ewes folded for it was into February, and I spent that day thatching the hurdles. I remember it as a bright day, the warmest so far that year, save for a bitterness when the wind got up. I was struck into deep thought while the needle and twine did their work. Save for my page or a passing vagrant without his certificate cadging a day’s work (which I always refused) few were the times I had someone to talk with out on the sheep-walks. It were pure chance that Gabby had happened on that way back, I said to myself, over and over.
Or was it?
Maybe so, still, but now I’m thinking hard that Gabby knew I would be folding by the barrow, for that’s where we would sit when he was a boy, and his little arms pulling out the lambs in a slither.
It was for news of Anne he had passed this way. It was a preparation for sorrow, or gladness, from an old friend he might trust to tell him gently, and not stir the village. His farm was hid behind a hill on the other side and I saw him skirt the thatch and take the walk that goes up through the coppice. And the thing is, I had not told him. This preyed on my mind that much so I thought, well, I will go and see. For I half-expected Gabby to return running helter-skelter up the slope towards us, scattering the flock with his howls.
But he never did.
My good Ruth had rolled a dumpling of barley-flour that I cut into more from need than liking: it was another coat in warmth. I did so and sat the dogs and hollered the page over to bide with the ewes (though none had lambed yet) and took my lantern, it being dusk or thereabouts, and walked up through the coppice to the crest above Gabby Cobbold’s farm – for I still thought of it as his, a little mean thing shuffled round a yard with five great elms casting most of it into shade.
It was smoking. I could make that out even in the dark and it all looked peaceful. There was no reason why the fire shouldn’t have been lit excepting they were poor and it was late in the winter but maybe I thought his return would have put all out, like a cold gust my lantern if the door is not shut or the horn come away from the window.
It was a guilty man that wound his way down between the furze into business that was none of his. The Lord forgive me, I said, for it is my conscience that drives me to this. I knew where the dogs were and came up against the other side where a chalk wall had let in one window shuttered against the cold. There was an old cart-wheel all rotten and split leant up nearby and I rolled it to the window and stood up on the nave and set my eye against a crack in the shutter.
This was the parlour.
There were stools and a bed and ropes and tools but no Gabby nor anyone. The nave jiggled. There was frost in the air. I thought what a strange man to be pressed against a farmhouse wall like a fox-skin, white-haired and all.
Then I thought to see better I had best ope the shutter, maybe hear them in the next room. It was either rats in the thatch just above my head or voices, I couldn’t be sure. Or my own breathing, which in all my fifty years had never been so short and loud.
Over the night came the thump of the cows in the stable, and their decent smell. There was a calf, too, which Anne had prayed for but, so they told me, had gone sick, as everything went since Gabby’s father had been taken years before. The very earth had killed him.
I oped the shutter so slow its noise became a tree in the wind.
I could see them through the parlour door, which was latched back.
Gabby’s arm, its red cloth and buttons, his hand round a cup. Anne’s face with the hair like Mary Mother of God’s in the church before the soldiers came to burn her. Thomas Walters opposite, looking hard at the table, still with his hat on. Thomas Walters was the spit of his father, also Thomas, a shepherd from the next valley who I would meet at the fairs and did not like for his drinking.
They sat in silence. I wished to see Gabby’s face and tried to tell his thoughts from the hand tight round the cup. Thomas Walters was sullen. He had a clean jaw. His hat was twenty years old. He was thirty-four. Anne had the sad look of Mary in that old painting.
Well, no one had killed anyone, I thought. And there were Gabby’s old ribbons on the table, like they had always been there. Though no one had spread them out.
They would come to some arrangement. It was the property that was the issue as much as the sin of two husbands. Anne had been that keen to marry, the old parson had done something clever with the parchments. Gabby was dead or as good as, we all agreed. Anne had wanted kiddies like food and drink. The farm was no good to anyone. Thomas Walters had happened along and helped her out on both accounts, it seemed. Although she had lost each babby as it came.
I held the shutter hard against my cheek so it would not flap about and stir them. I was afraid of Thomas Walters. He was a big man with a big nose and drank. His bottom teeth closed over his top. His hat covered his forehead. He had five brothers. He laughed at the Execution when we heard of it. There’s still respect.
But no one spoke, that was true. It was like they were listening for the right way, like in church over the rustle of skirts and a child’s coughing and the babbies. Listening for the Word that would tell them the right way. As I was listening with the wood of the shutter dark with soot against my cheek. And I think now that over the cold and the wind came the voice that told them, but it was not God’s voice, and Gabby never heard it.
My page was on nightwatch but Ruth was asleep when I came back. We slept apart. She had it in her head that it was a sin to sleep together after child-bearing was over. Even in winter. I am a pious man and nodded when she told me. That night I cried. That was twenty years before I spied on the day Gabby came back.
Why I say this is that my thoughts then were running on marriage, and how it is only for child-bearing in the eyes of God, but in my mind it is working out a love that is caught like a ram in brambles and must be cut free only by the hand of Death. Or it will tear something from you.
And while I lay rustling around in my wakefulness staring at the thatch or my dreams (to close my eyes is always to see the same as when they are open on the downland) I thought how Gabby was paying for his tearing away into soldiering, despite the fact of its love for God, and fighting for the kingdom of God on earth.
But I was lonely as Gabby. I cried that night, too. Ruth breathed through her nose in her sleep and I thought she didn’t care for me save to bring the master’s coins and have a roof over our heads. I thought of all the times we tried to make children together and I could remember each time, and how it was good.
She was afeared of bearing. I delivered our girl when old Win Oadam called out to me and it came out legs first like a lamb but not with the head between the legs so I was worrited but the babby was a good one. Ruth on all fours like a ewe and my hand warm inside her. Our girl lived three years.
I was not like some men and agreed to touch her no more and turned my thoughts stronger to God and to the flock and lambing and so on. The fashion began about then to breed new types and my master made me observe the fashion. His sheep, I might say, are some of the strongest in the county.
I remembered how warm she was in the nakedness of Eve. Would Gabby be thinking now of Anne in the same way and her under the same roof with Thomas Walters next to her flesh? Would she be praying for forgiveness? Would Gabby claim the farm for his own? Would Thomas Walters leave as he ought in the eyes of God, that always watch from the clouds or the stars?
No wonder I never slept that night!
Now it happened that a shepherd belonging to the Hall had an accident and was laid up all that week and a boy ran up to ask if I could go over and see to a ewe who had slinked and was in trouble, the first lamb of that year and dead. I left my page to watch the flock with one of the dogs and took the upper road to the fold that was a little past Gabby’s farm (as I thought of it). The road across Frum took me in sight of the place I had spied into two days back. No one had seen Gabby, though everyone in the village knew he had returned. Gabby’s farm was far enough out that no one dared have a look lest bad things were afoot and they would be party to it. Some said Anne had taken both men into her bed because after the third bearing she would not be churched until the magistrates fined her into it, and then she entered in her farm boots that stank the place out. Others said that all this proved she was sickly in her mind after the babby died.
I pulled the lamb out but the ewe was torn and I used a knife on her windpipe and they gave me a side of pork for my trouble. On the way back I stopped on the crest where the upper road runs between the sarsens and gives a good view of the farm. It was bitter up there, and the ewe’s blood was still under my nails. The smoke from the farm swung across the coomb over the five elms that seemed to be hiding the thatch like a secret. Then I thought, why not go in and call on Gabby.
Why I thought this was because I would not be out that way for a long time and I could say in honesty I was passing. I could even share a slice of pork as I knew for a fact that two mouths to feed were two too many on that farm and three were famine, as Thomas Walters had lost his ploughing at Stiff’s.
My heart beat bad as I walked down and the tussocks were hard with frost. The snowdrops were half-closed, I remember, so it was well after noon, but not yet dark.
The dogs fretted at their chains. They were thin as empty sacks and slavered terrible. The yard was hard as rock. Anne was at the door looking out with a face in a storm. I tapped my hat with my crook at some distance and said how I was passing on the way back from lambing for the Hall. She said nothing but tightened her shawl and nodded me inside.
It was hardly warmer in there as I remember. The wood was damp I suppose and it was all smoke. At first I saw nothing but the window with the sacking over it but then I made out the trestle and behind the trestle Thomas Walters, chewing bread.
He was always a lazy man.
I swung the pork onto a stool and stood in front of the fire, such as it was. I could see then the parlour window and wondered if I had moved the wheel and prayed for forgiveness in my thoughts.
‘Pork?’ said Thomas Walters.
Anne was patting butter so the cows feed well, I thought. She patted and put her hair back as it swung down from under her shawl. She was a handsome woman, even then.
‘Been up at the Hall. Ewe were slinking. I thought as you would like some.’
No sign of Gabby.
‘Spirit of the Commonwealth, shepherd?’ said Thomas Walters, chewing his bread like a cud. You could hear his top teeth hitting the back of his bottom teeth, like fire-irons.
‘Don’t know as it’s that,’ I said, smiling all the way.
Thomas Walters grunted, and mopped his bowl.
Anne spoke.
‘We have enough,’ she said. ‘Thank’ee.’
As more of the room lightened with accustoming it felt as if Gabby had never been there. No red tunic, no laugh, no smell of powder. No bag.
‘I thought as you had more now to feed, perhaps,’ I said, as best I could.
Anne looked up smartly. Thomas Walters stopped his bread at his mouth and it stayed there.
The fire went on coughing like a sick child.
‘How do you mean?’ Anne said.
‘He met me coming down. When was it … two days, first light. Hadn’t seen a fighting man since they cleared our church of idolatry last spring. Don’t seem a year ago do it? You can smoke that pork like they did the Virgin. Didn’t see no wrong in her.’
The teeth began clacking again, but slowly.
‘Seems you be talking about deserters,’ said Thomas Walters.
Pat, pat went the butter, but faster.
‘Wars are over,’ I said. ‘The kingdom of God on earth is at hand. Though it can’t save an early lamb or its mother. Bitter, bitter.’
‘William,’ she said, ‘you are taking the heat.’
I shifted myself to the side and sat on a log, which was indeed damp, with all the cold of the woods still in it.
Thomas Walters looked at the log as if it were the very throne of Charles.
‘Look sharpish, Thomas, and get the man a cup,’ Anne said.
Thomas Walters was not happy.
‘He’s here on prying business,’ he said.
I sniffed hard, and rubbed my hands with the blood still under the nails, and the gloves frayed at the big knuckles, that now hang from a nail by my hearth as a remembrance of those times and my work. I can see them now, about the cup in that cold mean place, after Thomas Walters had tipped the pot of ale and handed one to me.
It was well nigh water, in fact. But warm.
‘He’s gone,’ she said.
Thomas Walters’s hand shook so as the pot rattled on the hook as he put it back over the smoke.
I wiped my mouth and thought a bit.
‘That’s as I thought,’ I said. Though it wasn’t.
‘Indeed?’ said Thomas Walters.
He stood in front of the fire picking his teeth.
‘Poor lad,’ I said, and drank.
‘Well, he’s gone, and that’s an end on it,’ said Anne. I thought the butter might be patted to nothing, she went at it so quick.
‘We were friends once,’ I said.
‘Indeed?’ said Thomas Walters. ‘Then you might have knocked the sense out of him p’raps. You shepherds.’
‘I knew your father,’ said I.
‘I know.’
‘Droving the flock with that great stick of his. Great hazel stick he’d near poke your eye out with.’
Thomas Walters smiled, without his eyes. He was the spit of his father. But his father had decent eyes, saving the drink swilling around in them. Neglect, as I reckon, made the son Thomas Walters was. The man that stood there, smiling.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you won’t be needing so much pork then.’
‘I know what you’re about, shepherd. You’ll go get chilblains sitting where you oughtn’t. He had no right to assume.’
Anne looked at him as one claps up a dog that’s growling out on the steal.
The question is, was I the deer or the keeper?
I chuckled to myself at the thought, and both looked fit to hang me.
Well, I wasn’t staying. Gabby had gone and that was a fact. He might never have returned. I stood up and wiped my mouth and lifted the pork onto my shoulder.
‘Thank’ee for the ale,’ I said. ‘These are mean times. Maybe we’ll have a bit more sharing out of things now the church is whitewashed and the King in his coffin. Though I’ll miss the dancing myself. Keeps a man warm.’
Thomas Walters nodded the smallest nod I have ever seen. Anne bit her lip fit to bleed. Some said she was growing to be a witch. Well, since Maud had gone head first into the chalk by the north yew they had to have someone to blame all on.
At the door I said:
‘With them rings from Ireland he’ll set hisself up alright, and that’s a fact.’
‘Rings?’ said Thomas Walters, sharpish.
I knew that would hook him. I turned to look at the yard. The thatch was touching the cows’ backs off the shelter, it was that sagged.
‘That’s what he counted his love with. Pillaging. He shook the General’s hand. We all took him for dead. And all the time he were thinking of us waiting, and how he’d afford new thatch for the shelter, and the barn. But he’ll set hisself up alright, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I left then as one leaves a night on the downs full of its silence, that is pushing something terrible at your back which you don’t turn round to for fear of seeing it.
I heard steps behind me and I was halfway across the yard.
It was Anne. She was panting. The cows followed her, nudging. She held herself tight and looked up at me, fierce but frighted.
‘What rings?’ she said.
Thomas Walters was in the door, in the shadows.
I shrugged as a man does when he is at the fair and offered a low price.
‘What rings?’ she said, real fierce.
The poor cows were nudging her but she was stone, like.
‘I’d say he brought them back for you and the farm. He’ll be a sad man but it’s no one’s doing. He was a boy. He fought for the kingdom of God on earth, and shook General Cromwell’s hand. He’ll set hisself up.’
‘He had nothing,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Nothing. And he never did. He was never good for anything but what he went and done. He left me,’ she said, and she was shivering.
‘He did,’ I said. I made to move but she held my arm like a jaw round a bone.
‘Nothing,’ she said, between her teeth, that were half of them gone already, and she only thirty or so.
She was nevertheless a handsome woman.
I thought of telling Ruth but I didn’t. She would only grumble that it was none of my business and there would be trouble. So I watched her go to sleep that night after prayers without talking, as we sometimes did, both staring at the thatch above our beds and wondering in between the words how we would fare when the other went under and there was only the rats rustling, not a body you had touched. We never talked that night and I didn’t tell her.
Then the lambing started and I were sleeping out, but I thought of Gabby all through the lambing. He had left a silence where I heard my own whispering, that was many things going round and round in my head. I took up a Bible and heard the parson’s words as I read because I couldn’t read the letters, but always the whispering came on the wind and the taste of bitterness like the smoke that would blow sometimes out of the coomb across my scarp. And I shook my head but the whispering grew louder. I thought I might be going mad like half the old shepherds went up there all on their own.
I thought of how he had shook hands with General Cromwell in all the smoke and all the women and children of Drogheda spilled like empty sacks that Gabby had helped empty. And I saw Ruth among them, I don’t know why. She had her legs wide open like the times we made a babby or like a ewe ready for a ram. And there was General Cromwell shaking hands with Gabby and both smiling while Thomas Walters clacked his teeth together next to them and turned round and saw me looking on my damp log, and shot me.
These were dreams but I was awake. I shook my head free of them and took to making dolls out of straw but always they had their legs wide open and they smiled like General Cromwell or Thomas Walters. And sometimes as I was lifting out a lamb I thought of Anne with my hand inside her which was really Ruth and the ewe kicking out its legs as the lamb came out in a slither, all new.
It was on account of guilt, I reckoned, and one day in April I went to the church and left the boy with the flock and the church was empty. It still smelt of whitewash where all the old paintings had been covered over by the soldiers and the parson looking on nodding all the time, though he cried that night as I remember. I must say that I could remember all the paintings and when I looked at the white walls they were there anyway, particularly Noah and the funny old sheep that were clambering up in a pair to the only ship I had ever seen, rocking on those little blue waves that was the beginnings of the Flood, I suppose.
I stood in the middle of the church and looked round slowly at the walls and saw all the paintings from Creation to Judgement Day, and in my mind heard the parson’s words, and the rim on my hat was fair crumpled up I was that nervous of talking with God in His house.
But I knelt and the stone was cold and I thought of Gabby with my coat on him, shivering, I don’t know why. And I told God of my thoughts and fears and that if I was going mad to spare me with a quick dying. And I asked God if He could whitewash all my thoughts like the soldiers had covered over the old paintings that I had known as a boy and a man. But thoughts were not on walls but ran like deer and the smell of whitewash mocked me.
The church whispered back my mumblings, and I was afraid lest someone might hear, and looked all about me. But it was deathly empty. I wished idolatrously for the statues and pictures still to be there, and the coloured glass they had broken through with poles and stones and their guns.
All in one day, with the parson and some of the village cheering in the graveyard. But my thoughts would not be smashed and covered so easy. They were deer running through the forest, and I prayed hard that God might save me.
For I never thought of Gabby as leaving that farm. In all my thoughts I could not see him crossing the yard and knocking the noses of the cattle and striding up the hill with his rings sewn into his pocket, jingling. To set hisself up. I could not see that, however hard I furrowed my brows and bit my lip and sat silent with the bells and the wind all round me out on the scarp. And even in the empty church with its whitewash smell like old rivers I could not see him leaving the farm.
And when I saw him there it was only through the parlour door with me shaky on a broken wheel and his arm shining with buttons in its red cloth. And the cloth would always run with blood as the arms did on that field after the business at Newberry when to walk across it was to lift clouds of flies from the arms.
And there was Anne and Thomas Walters in the shadows, and Anne’s crumbling teeth round my arm like a dog’s that is mad, that was really her hand.
So I shook my head and said that if there was blood that it should come out so as I could know my guilt in sending him down there into his judgement. And the church whispered back exactly my own words that I had said loud when there was a footstep behind me at the door and it was Anne, staring at me turned round to look at her.
I shook my head but she didn’t go. There was mud on her boots from the rains. She walked into the middle and I stood with my heart swallowing itself.
She was like the Virgin statue, with the hair all about her neck, and her hair crow-black and wet from the rains.
She stood as still.
‘I’ll be going,’ I said, as best I could.
‘Not on account of me,’ she said. ‘You called me, did you know that?’
She was a witch.
‘I was talking to God,’ I said, and made the sign of the cross.
‘Talk to me,’ she said, and she held my arm, but softly.
‘This is the house of God,’ I said, but didn’t take my arm away. I was afraid, and a little mad. She was panting and her coat was open.
‘William,’ she said.
She began to cry.
Frankly, she had a smell about her that was not healthy.
‘God will forgive thee,’ I said, ‘if you confess and you don’t need no parson to do it with the church an open house for sinner and saint alike.’ She hadn’t gone to the sermon last week for that was it, as I remembered.
‘He done nothing for me,’ she said.
‘That were no reason to kill him,’ I said, before I’d thought it.
She went as white as the statue then, before it was burnt.
She pushed her hair back into her shawl, for it had dropped right in front of her eyes.
She walked away and nodded me to follow. I was afraid. I had my knife in my belt and I asked forgiveness for thinking of it. We walked up behind the church onto the downland and up into Bailey’s Wood from where you could see my grazing, the other side of our river, rising up against the sky. The rains had stopped. My thoughts were shouting in my head and I held it but then she stopped in a little clearing where there had been a hut once. It was grass and stones.
‘William,’ she said.
I remembered her as a little chit and how sometimes she’d sell at the door and she had the same look then. At the end of the clearing a woodman’s shelter or it might have been part of the hut dripped from its thatch that sagged and was all looped about with bedwine as no one tended it now and she took my hand and we went in.
She looked at me first and then wiped my brow and I thought of the Virgin and Christ, and Mary Magdalen that tended Him and wiped His feet, and all my thoughts were whitewashed over, for the deer running through the forest had become a painting on a wall, that her hand brushed over and over. She took my arm and it stroked her legs with its hand where the skirt had been lifted so the white skin was open to the air.
I felt inside her like a ewe and she was the same warmth. I was pleased, somehow, that Ruth and the ewe and Anne were the same warmth. There were no more pictures. I went inside her as a man does and her skin was open to the air and was soft and full where I touched it. She was happy.
The rain began again and dripped on us through the thatch and I buried my loneliness inside her.
Then I went back up to the fold and saw the boy off with a penny. I had no more pictures nor whisperings. Only the voice in my ear that was a woman’s and was warm as my own fleece that I sat there in thinking of the next time she had said when I might return to the wood and only a penny for the page and his silence.
And the next time we lay on bluebells and it were sticky, and in the autumn the bedwine dropped his old man’s beard into her black hair and I said it was her crown of silver, but she said nothing. In the winter I brought a fleece with me and wrapped her in it so she wouldn’t shiver. For it snowed some of the times.
And this went on, oh, for years, until I couldn’t see the bedwine plumes in her hair no longer before I blew them off. Then she sickened and died one winter. Sometimes she would whisper the name of Gabby in my ear. And I an old man!
She was the last witch I ever knew.
I was a little mad, probably.
That’s the story.
[Reprinted by kind permission of The Wessex Nave.]