Blood on the Wood (6 page)

‘When wasn't there a little problem? Have you been up to see Felicia yet?'

Daniel shook his head and turned to say hello to the baby, giving it his finger to grip. The woman holding it – mother, presumably – smiled but seemed a little nervous of our invasion, although she'd looked quite at ease with Carol Venn. She had a round face, a mass of red-brown hair, and wary grey eyes.

‘You should have, Daniel. She's waiting for you.'

‘She won't mind.'

Daniel pulled his finger gently away from the baby, took Carol by the arm and guided her towards the shadowy back of the room. ‘You'll excuse us for a minute, Miss Bray. Get Mr Sutton to show you the pole lathe. He's an artist.'

The big man went back to the treadle. Behind him the long pole that powered the lathe rose and dipped to the rhythm of his foot and the machine hummed. He was making a chair leg, pale shavings curling away from his chisel blade like apple peelings. The woman with the baby watched him, smiling. The air was full with the sweet smell of wood. Above the noise of the lathe I could hear the murmur of Daniel and Carol's conversation, but not what they said. Once she gave a sharp little laugh. Mr Sutton finished his chair leg, took it out of the lathe and fitted in another cylinder of wood. Daniel and Carol came back.

‘Carol's going to ask Adam about it,' Daniel said. ‘You're staying at the camp until tomorrow, aren't you? I'll let you know what he says.'

I think that was probably my signal to go. He'd mentioned that he had something else to discuss with Carol and I supposed it was family business. But she had other ideas, perhaps reluctant to give up the idea of me as a customer. If she'd seen my home or my bank balance she'd have known better.

‘Do look round while you're here, Miss Bray. We encourage people to come in and see things being made.'

She led me round the big room, talking lovingly about different kinds of wood, glowing red cherry wood, dark burr yew with its grain patterned like clouds in a stormy sky, coro-mandel, rosewood, ebony. I asked her if she designed the furniture herself.

‘I'm not trained as a designer. I have ideas and do sketches and Mr Sutton makes them work. He's a kind of genius. Would you believe that before we rescued him he was working in a factory at Swindon fitting out railway carriages? Isn't that terrible? Like making a thoroughbred pull a milk cart!' She put a hand lightly on my arm to stop me by a chest of drawers painted in a wild rose pattern. ‘That's mine. I do the painting, though wood's so beautiful it sometimes seems a crime to paint it at all.'

‘Do you and Mr Sutton do all this on your own?'

‘There's another craftsman and two apprentices from the village, but we give them Saturday afternoons off. In time, we hope to be employing a lot more people from round here – maybe encourage them to set up their own workshops all over the village. The point is to show what can be done by craftsmen working with love, not having to think of profits all the time.'

I noticed a small oval mirror in a carved stand on top of the chest of drawers, of an unusual design. The mirror was cradled by two beautifully worked female hands in some glowing golden wood.

‘Your hands?' I said.

I'd noticed that hers were particularly fine and slim. She laughed and blushed a little.

‘You're observant, aren't you? Yes, we can't run to professional models.'

But in spite of the casual tone I could see it pleased her. She stared into the mirror and the reflection of her face was clasped between her golden carved hands. The sound of the lathe faltered and when I turned Mr Sutton was watching her, a little smile on his face like a man trying to contain his pride. Not surprising because the mirror stand was a masterpiece. While we'd been walking round, Daniel had followed us, looking fidgety and trying to get Carol on her own again. We almost completed our circuit and came up to the big cabinet she'd been examining when we came in. It seemed out of place. The rest of the furniture in the workshop had a light and airy feel about it. This thing was massive, made in dark bog oak and corrugated with carvings.

‘This isn't one of ours. It's Jacobean. It belongs to a friend of mine who wants it restored. It's not the kind of work we normally do but it's an interesting piece.'

The front of the cabinet was divided into eight panels, four on each door, with what looked like scenes from a play or story carved on them. The top left hand one showed a man riding away on a horse and a lady waving him goodbye from a tower. Below that was a window in a house with what looked like some demon or hobgoblin creeping through it. The carving was rough but spirited, showing the creature with unnaturally long fingers and a grisly grin. The next panel had the hobgoblin standing full length with a girl who might be a serving wench, each on one side of a cradle. The hobgoblin figure was carrying a short sword and the wench a bowl. The bottom panel on that side and the top one on the other had been damaged so it was hard to make out what was happening but the next one showed the wench and the hobgoblin with a lady. He had his long fingers in her hair and her body was tilted backwards, mouth open in a little dark ‘O'. The last two panels showed the wench burning in a tire and the hobgoblin creature hanging from a gallows, eyes popping and tongue lolling all the way down to its splayed knees. I asked what the story was.

‘Janie and I were just trying to work it out when you came in. Janie doesn't like it one bit, do you?'

The young mother had moved aside, clasping the baby to her more tightly than before. Her hands were square and blunt-fingered. She shook her head but didn't say anything. Carol turned to Daniel.

‘You know about legends and ballads. See what you make of it.'

He came over, but more to please her than because he was interested. While he was looking at it, the workshop door crashed open and a man came in like a sudden gust of wind.

‘All right then, where's this workers' co-operative?'

I'd seen Harry Hawthorne at various meetings so recognised both him and his method of making an entrance: in a hurry and loudly. He was tall and broad in any case, but had a rough confidence and vitality that made him seem even larger. He carried more superfluous weight than in his days as a docker and prize fighter and his unkempt beard had acquired some grey hairs since I'd last seen him, but he was still straight-backed and quick on his feet. His hair, untidy and not recently washed, came down almost to his shoulders.

At the sight of him Janie clutched her baby even more closely. Daniel sounded pleased to see him.

‘Hello, Harry.'

‘Good afternoon, you bourgeois renegade. Where have you been?'

‘In Wiltshire on the Marlborough Downs, song collecting and so on.'

‘So where's this workers' co-operative you told me about?'

Carol gave Daniel a reproachful look. ‘We don't call ourselves a workers' co-operative,' she said. ‘We're a craftsmen's federation.'

He paused, sizing her up. On the one hand she was a good-looking woman and Harry was notoriously susceptible to that. On the other she looked and sounded like what she was – a member of the hated middle classes.

‘And you're one of the toiling masses, are you?'

‘My name's Carol Venn. I help design things.'

‘Oh, another Venn, is it? His sister?' He looked at Daniel.

‘My sister-in-law,' Daniel said. ‘Carol is married to Adam.'

At the mention of that name, Hawthorne's attitude visibly shifted towards hostility. ‘Making a good profit, I suppose,' he said.

‘Harry.' Warningly, from Daniel.

Carol said calmly, ‘At present, we don't make any kind of profit.'

‘I'm not surprised.' He looked at Mr Sutton, who was still carving away at his chair leg. ‘You won't till you get some proper machinery in.'

Harry would know that this was heresy to Carol and people like her in the Arts and Crafts movement. He probably didn't mean it and was only trying to annoy. She was cool enough not to rise to it. In fact, she seemed quite amused. Hawthorne moved towards a small round ashwood table.

‘So how much do you sell this for?'

‘Yours for six pounds.'

She smiled at him. Hawthorne threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Six pounds! A man's wage for a month and you charge that for a table. How's that supposed to help working people?'

‘By giving them a chance to make something beautiful.'

‘The middle classes all over,' Hawthorne said. ‘They want to rob you and feel virtuous about it.' He moved over to Mr Sutton and the lathe.

‘That doesn't look too difficult.'

Mr Sutton smiled, rather nervous.

‘Let him try, then,' Carol said.

Reluctantly Mr Sutton took out the chair leg he was working on and put in a new cylinder of wood. He explained the working of the lathe, while Hawthorne nodded impatiently as if he knew it already, then surrendered his place to him. But he wouldn't let Hawthorne use his chisel and fetched another from a row of tools on a table. The treadle started again, its rhythm less regular. Daniel turned his attention back to the chest. Uninterested at first, now he was absorbed in the thing, particularly the panel with the hobgoblin squeezing itself into the house.

‘It's Long Lankin.' He started singing. ‘“The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned, Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in”.'

‘But what is he?' Carol asked.

‘An outlaw, Old Nick, anybody's guess. It was probably a Scottish ballad originally but you get versions all over the place. I heard one in Berkshire and another one just now near Ogbourne. The story's much the same in all of them. Long Lankin gets into the house while the lord's away. He and the wicked nursemaid prick the baby with a pin to make it yell and when the mother comes down to see what's wrong, they kill her.'

Janie Sutton's expression had changed from nervous to horrified and the baby started grizzling. Not noticing, Daniel sang again:

‘Here's blood in the kitchen. Here's blood in the hall.

Here's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall.'

Unexpectedly, a second voice joined in, Hawthorne singing as he tried to operate the lathe, in a loud baritone, word-perfect. The lord comes riding back and hears what has happened to his wife:

‘Long Lankin was hung on a gibbet so high

And the false nurse was burnt in a fire close by.'

Janie was shaking, tears pouring down her cheeks. Her husband moved across and put his arm round her. She burrowed against his chest so that the baby was protected between them. The treadle stopped with a snap of wood. Hawthorne said, ‘Oh dammit.' Absorbed in singing, he'd gone on gouging with the chisel in the same place so that the chair leg was snapped right through. Carol went over to disentangle things.

‘You see, Mr Hawthorne. It's not so easy.' Then to Daniel, ‘I think you've solved it at any rate.' She caught Mr Sutton's worried look over his wife's bent head. ‘Don't cry, Janie. We'll have this carted up to the studio on Monday and Daniel can help me work out some sketches for the damaged panels.' She found an old sheet and draped it over the front of the cabinet. ‘There, you don't have to look at it.'

I said goodbye and thank you and left them there, Hawthorne looking crestfallen, Carol making arrangements with Mr Sutton to have the carter come on Monday, Daniel still looking like a man with a problem. Not my problem, at any rate, though whether I'd got any nearer to our picture was anybody's guess.

I strolled around the village for a while, taking my time about getting back to camp. I'd had enough political discussion for one day. By the time I got back a queue for supper had formed outside the kitchen of the old schoolhouse. Max Blume joined me while I was standing in it and was amused to hear about Harry Hawthorne's encounter with arts and crafts. We collected our portions of corned beef hash and pickled cabbage on tin plates and strolled across the field, avoiding cowpats, to find a clean patch of grass to sit and eat on.

At this late stage of summer the sun was already well down below the hedge at the western side of the field and the air had a crisp edge to it. People were gathering in groups round fires, most of them still debating as if a day of talk hadn't been enough. Somebody was squeezing a plaintive tune from a concertina. There was a general drift over to a group in the far corner of the field, first in twos and threes, then a steady stream. The attraction might be the bonfire, bigger and brighter than the rest, or the sound of a violin and a stamping of feet that vibrated through the hard ground.

‘Sounds like a party,' I said. ‘Shall we go over and have a look?'

We took our plates back to the kitchen and followed the general movement. By the time we got to the big bonfire most of the camp was standing round it with a space cleared between the audience and the flames. In the space two lines of silhouetted figures were dancing to the music of the violin, sticks in their hands, feet thudding in unison.

‘Yes, I was afraid they might be committing morris,' Max said.

The lines moved towards each other, clashed sticks three times as precisely and solemnly as duellists, danced away. The crowd watched mostly in silence until the music stopped in a gliding arpeggio from the violin and the two lines of dancers came to a halt. They were all women, the Londoners I'd noticed on the train. Some applause, some friendly insults flung between the dancers and friends in the crowd. One of them called, at a man who must have said something critical, ‘Well, you come and try it if you think it's so easy.' Laughter and mock struggles as the man was pushed forward by his friends, more horseplay as two apprentice morris sides were pulled into the space in front of the fire. The violin struck up again, with the concertina artist playing alongside, but less expertly.