Everyone said the word for it was
clumsy.
Her hair was dead straight and hung to her waist like mine. It was what they called strawberry blonde (Strawberry? Blonde? Never did work that one out) and going prematurely gray underneath her starched linen bonnet.
When Pa was out, we’d be sitting around embroidering a tablecloth for market and Mam’d tell us how one summer’ s evening after a day’s harvesting when she was marching impatiently toward womanhood, Lord Perceval Montague (she always used his full name) came up behind her on Lower Lane. The meadows were “bathed in summer’ golden glow” and as he drew aside she felt him rest a palm in the scoop of her back and his steamy breath whispered onto her neck that she’d become “a winsome lass” and had “a natural grace.”
Mam said she felt “the butterflies” for the first and last time in her life, that her “spine tingled,” that she could have stayed and swum in his “come-hither eyes” forever, except that her grumpy, widowed father, Bob Woulbarowe, tugging their cow up ahead and cursing it, suddenly turned around and called her to heel, even though it could have got him into serious trouble with His Lordship.
Granpa Woulbarowe kept her hidden inside their peat hovel in the wind-blown wilds for three months solid after that, then forced her to wear shapeless black woolens like an old maid thereafter. That’ when she began to have “the turns,” her “humors went out of balance” and she “got a hunch” her days were “numbered.” Within the year she was wed off to Pa, although she’d only met him the once before marriage.
Mam held up a needle, squinted, pursed her thin lips to a slit and threaded it carefully, all the while saying that in this life there were “fairy-tale castles” and “peasant shit-houses,” and wasn’t it a pity not to have a choice.
That night in bed we girls debated the pros and cons of being Percy’s kids.
Lady Madge. Lady Sharon. Lady Doris. Lady Alice.
We thought there might be possibilities.
Mam was always showing us what to do because she “wouldn’t be around forever.” She kept a tiny skull pendant in a box to remind her and said she was surprised she’d “been given such a long run by the good Lord above but it won’t last long, I expect.”
“When I die,” she’d whisper when Pa wasn’t around, because he’d soon tell her to hush her nonsense, “make sure my ashes are scattered on the seven seas.”
“What ashes? What seas?” we’d reply, blinking back tears, thinking of our mam going up in flames.
“Oh, you know, the seven seas,” she’d add, knowingly. “And I want that hymn ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ sung so it’s a joyous occasion, do you hear? Not a wet eye in the house.”
A day didn’t go by without her raising the issue of her death. It made me want to curl up in a ball on the floor and sob my heart out, but if you did that after the age of four, Mam would give you a good kick in the bum and tell you to put a stocking in it.
When I got older I’d retort, “Mam, will you make sure you die after you’ve baked the rhubarb crumble?”
We were to be wives and mothers-so we were taught how to cook: cabbage soup, cabbage pie, fried cabbage, pickled cabbage, skillet cabbage, scalloped cabbage, cabbage and turnip bake, cabbage and potato casserole, cabbage and spinach cake. How to separate milk to make butter and cheese. How to bake horse bread from dried peas when the household budget wasn’ t balancing, and when it was-scones, muffins, gingerbread. How to make milk pudding with barley, and jam from gooseberries and strawberries. How to candy fruit. Occasionally we ate salted stockfish, which could last four years but had to be beaten with a wooden hammer for a full hour and then soaked in warm water for four more hours before it was ready. The priest said we had to eat fish twice a week, but who could afford that?
Mam taught us how to sew our dresses and blouses from material bought in bulk from the spinners and weavers at the market, which made us girls all look alike, which we hated; how to crochet blankets, knit woollies and scarves, darn socks; how to clean the house, the laundry, the yard; how to store vegetables in the outhouse, potatoes in the soil for the winter; how to distill rosewater, how to smear bread with glue and put a lighted candle in the middle to attract and kill fleas and how to use rags for our menses when the time came, egg whites for our hair, soda, lime and potash to make soap.
Thank God we had the freshwater stream running down from Haven Banks less than a hundred yards from our cottage. Most folk drank watered-down ale.
Pa built our furniture: chairs, tables, cabinets, beds-all of which were lopsided, not that he noticed.
We teased him about it.
“You know full well I can’t afford a carpenter,” he’d shout, before storming out of the house.
Entering our cottage used to make me feel a bit wonky.
Mam said to imagine we were on a ship, but I protested I’d never been on one.
Some evenings one of my sisters would get at Mam’ s back with the backscratcher Pa made specially for her, a wooden hand on a stick—only it had four fingers because he’d forgotten the fifth. Two of us massaged a hand each and I’d massage her bony feet, if I could get there first. She’d sit there issuing instructions :
“To the right, Madge! Don’t forget my fingers, Alice!”
We’d be a flurry of skinny elbows stuck up at right angles, white moths fluttering around her as we each tried to make her love us more than she did the others.
The most important outing of our week was to Duddingley with Mam on a Monday morning to sell our handiwork of table-cloths and bonnets. The journey took ages, and only one of us got to go along on the back of the cart as there was so much work to do at home. I cherished that time on the road, pretending I was Mam’ s only child, cuddling up to her as the cart jolted along lanes and dirt tracks strewn with fallen rocks and dangerous potholes, which could delay a journey by several hours if the wheels got trapped.
In the market Mam indulged in gossip because rumor was the lifeblood of conversation. Gossip was our theater and our fiction.
I’d be hanging on to her arm watching her eyes flash, her face flush and her mouth excitedly emitting Never’s and Who’d have thought it’s.
As farming folk we generally targeted one person above all others, the only one who wouldn’t hear: Percy.
Short, pot-bellied and with a penchant for brocaded doublets and wide-brimmed hats with feathers sticking up, Percy was a huntin’ -an’ -fishin’ man like his deceased father, Lord Peregrine, and like his father he was always entertaining important guests en route to the Border Lands. There were many grand dinners and parties up at Montague Manor. We heard he had a preference for fine white bread, boar’s skin filled with jellied meat, baked chewetts, spiced custard pies and syllabub, and that his cellar contained hundreds of barrels of sweet wines.
Then there was the wife, Priscilla, who looked suspiciously foreign, went mad (likely connected) and was locked up in the attic.
The son and heir, Harold, who everyone suspected was really the result of the gardener’ s dalliance with Priscilla, only no one dared tell Percy.
The illegitimate son, Tom, who was the offspring of Percy’ s dalliance with the scullery maid Lizzie.
The legitimate daughter, Phoebe, who died in mysterious circumstances on a boat on Larksong Lake with her lady’ companion, Elinor, who was really her secret sister (raised by an elderly aunt of Percv’ s) because she was the daughter of Percy’ s dalliance with the governess, Miss Felliplace, who ended up dying of asphyxiation caused by her scarf getting caught in the wheels of Percy’s carriage, and who was suspiciously buried in Mad Bess Woods the very next day.
The Montagues gave our lives drama by association, glamour by proximity, status through acquaintance. Without them we would have been your wretched run-of-the-mill peasant family eking out a living on the land. Instead, we were part of an estate. We were of the
Montagues.
One icy morning Percy trotted by on his mare as we were walking through Coppice Forest. He doffed his cap and almost smiled.
Well, Pa jumped up and punched the air silently as if he’d just won himself a chest full of doubloons.
Another stormy morning Pa acted like a spurned lover when Percy nearly ran into us, shouting, “Get out of my way!” when we were sloshing down the donkey track in waterlogged clogs after mass at St. Michael’s.
Once out of earshot Pa spat out that “One day the working man will be Percy’s comeuppance.”
For all the talk of the “common man having his day,” no one seriously wanted Percy gone. He represented stability, he was the devil we knew, and in any case, if there really was an attempted “revolution” by Pa and the lads, Percy and his ilk would have all the perpetrators hung, drawn and quartered to a man.
It was at the market that we heard that slave raiders had entered our country from the faraway sea, although none had been sighted in our neighbourhood, as yet. The story went that the Border Landers were involved and so were men called Aphrikans, who were colored blak.
The slave raiders, it seemed, were in cahoots with aristocrats like Percy and the middlemen who supplied them with slaves for shipment overseas. Criminals and prisoners of war were hot favorites, but when they weren’ t available it was any one who could be captured, so long as they weren’t too old or, in Percy’ s case, his own serfs. Children were taken too.
Some said that the guns the greedy aristocrats received in exchange for slaves encouraged them to start more wars just to meet the demand of the slave traders who wanted a yearly increase in exports.
The Aphrikans built heavily fortified castles to hold their cargo until ships arrived to collect them. It was rumored that there was one on the coast that could accommodate a thousand slaves at a time.
But all that was happening somewhere far away. None of us knew what happened when the prisoners got on those boats, but it was rumored to be a bit crowded belowdecks, and sea-sickness was rife.
To be honest, it felt so distant from us that we didn’t give it much thought. Our world was made up of our immediate neighbors and foreign meant the people of the midlands or fenlands.
We were just simple country folk, who tried our best to live with ourselves and understand one another.
O
U
R NIGHTS WERE SPENT
singing songs. What else was there to do after work was done and food eaten and we were exhausted but not quite ready for bed? Pa’ s snoring provided a sonorous bass. We’d be inside in front of the fire in winter with the tallow rushlights flickering, woolen blankets wrapped around us for extra warmth. Or outside in summer, sitting on stools under a sky bigger than our brains could ever imagine (we could just about manage acres, not planets), surrounded by the silence of the countryside, which was really quite noisy what with crickets and owls, small scurrying beasts in the undergrowth, the close buzzing of mosquitoes, the pig snortling, the fowl doing their nighttime chicken-pen shuffle, and the stream running nearby.
We’d stamp our feet, bang clay pots, rub sticks up and down a washboard, click wooden cutlery, clap our hands and slip into familiar harmonies. We’d raise a cheer after a song if it was rendered perfectly, or point the finger when someone’ harmony didn’ t slide smoothly into place.
When my mind does a back flip into my BS days, at some point it goes on past what I remember myself and into what I’d been told. There it goes, legs, hands, the supple spine of a child, flicking back the years to when my mother was in labor and Old Sarah, the local midwife, saved my life.
Mam went into the throes with me early one evening a month before I was due to arrive while Pa, as luck would have it, was at work. She lay in a puddle of broken waters and just knew I was going to come out all twisted. I was her seventh child—four had already died. She kept rattling some stones in the cup of her hand, which was supposed to prevent a miscarriage.
Mam had to send little Madge off to Old Sarah, who lived all the way over at Sheepwash. Somehow she made it and Old Sarah came rushing in through our door, sending Madge to heat up some water while I was safely disentangled.
Then I was swaddled from head to toe in linen bands so that I didn’t grow up deformed, and she made a caudle of spiced wine for Mam, to keep her health and spirits up.
Old Sarah lived alone, had never married, had no kids, owned a cat, Tibbles, and was over fiftv-all of which should have been enough to see her tied up in a sack and drowned in the river for witchcraft. She also practiced the herbs and was known for her healing powers, which could have got her burned alive at the stake outside the church at Duddingley. She was lucky not to have been stripped naked in search of extra teats (from which her imps suckled), inspected for a telltale mole (a sign she was “consorting” with a demon), pricked by a witchpricker to see if she could bleed, had her shack searched for a pile of stolen, moving penises that fed on oats or corn (as they do); failing all of that, a few days of good old-fashioned torture would have seen her confessing to flying on poles, changing into an animal, taking part in witches’ Sabbaths and having sexual intercourse with the Devil.
But so many of us owed our lives to Old Sarah that when malice-laced gossip began the rounds-that she was the reason for the Copplestones’ mysteriously diseased cow, or the latest Durridge child’s freakish sixth toe, or the surprise storm that struck young Jennet Briggs down stone dead in the middle of summer-there were many to defend her.
She died in her sleep long before I could get to thank her.
They searched her body after her death, but no unusual markings or extra breasts were found, to the disappointment of some.
When Pa came home after my birth, he gathered me up and took me outside, and, as was the Scagglethorpe family tradition, held his latest swaddled bundle up to the heavens with outstretched arms.
It was dark but there was a full moon, which shone directly onto me, providing a luminous, otherworldly glow, apparently.
“I name you, my dearest, treasured new daughter, Doris Scagglethorpe,” he said, his voice throaty with emotion.