John Saturnall's Feast (19 page)

But the faster they laboured the faster the porridge-slimed bowls arrived. For all their scraping, sweating and shoving, the pile only rose higher. Soon it teetered above them, a looming overhang of smeared pewter and tin which seemed to swell and rise no matter how fast they worked. At last only a narrow ledge remained where both boys snatched, scraped and toppled the bowls into the grey scum-flecked water. Every moment, the teetering heap threatened to crash down on top of them. So long as they toiled, John told himself, they could keep the porridge-slimed pewter at bay . . . Then the first pots arrived.

They had given up, John conceded afterwards. He and Philip still scraped but the battle was lost. The pots had overwhelmed them. Then Mister Stone had joined the fray.

‘Falling behind,’ he had muttered disapprovingly, taking John's spatula from his hand. ‘You straighten up that pile.’

Mister Stone went to work. His large stiff body swivelled from pile to trough. He scraped and flicked in a steady fashion. He did not seem to move quickly. But the pile began to descend. At last, when only a token stack of plates remained along with a ten-gallon saucepot with a light ring of grime, Mister Stone stood aside. Philip and John finished up then staggered out into Firsts to eat their own breakfasts.

‘We've got to get out,’ Philip said, spooning cold porridge into his mouth.

‘It'll get better,’ said John.

It got worse.

Supper was a steamy chaos in which the piles of plates, dishes and bowls mounted ever higher. This time Mister Stone did not step in. The other scullions washed and scrubbed in silence, saying nothing to the boys. ‘They know we won't be here long,’ Philip explained hopefully as they tramped back into the kitchen that night.

‘That's right. You'll be in the Carrboro Poorhouse.’

Coake stood with Barlow and Stubbs. The boy sneered as John and Philip trudged past the trio but they were too weary to answer. They pulled their pallet out from under a table. But it seemed their heads had barely touched the coarse calico before Scovell's ladle rang out again.

The days passed in flurries of crashing plates, gouts of water and scraping. Philip reorganised the pair. ‘We're spending half our time dodging around each other. You scrape here, I'll shift the plates around like this . . .’

To John's surprise, the arrangement worked. They still bolted down their food in Firsts then collapsed on the floor of the scullery but they waited for the next onslaught in simple exhaustion rather than dread. Nothing happened in the scullery but dirty water and scrubbing. No words were spoken but the cry of ‘Washing out!’ and, when the pipe dried up, a loud shout from Mister Stone of ‘Motte!’ Then with the pots and plates piling up in the troughs, the Head Scullion strode out in pursuit of the gardener. Through the window, John and Philip saw his boots stamp over the gravel and grass of the Rose Garden. Words were exchanged and the flow resumed.

At midday, the tolling of the chapel bell called the boys to dinner. Another in the late afternoon heralded supper. John drank small beer from the butt, swilling down the thin, bitter liquor. He tore his bread into pieces and crammed them into his mouth, chewing furiously. Looking up he saw the other boys stare.

‘It's how you eat,’ Philip told him later.

‘How's that?’

‘Like a starving wolf.’

He chewed more slowly. The work grew no easier but when Philip complained of the filthy water that soaked them or the bowls and plates that threatened to engulf them, John remembered how the cold in Buccla's Wood had pinched his bones in its fingers, how his belly had ached and his scalp crawled with lice. How his mother's voice had pursued him through the dark trees.

We keep the Feast. We keep it for all of them .
. .

By day, the clatter of bowls drowned out her words but every night, after he settled himself on the pallet with Philip, he returned to the silent trees. There his mother awaited him.

She had sent him to the Manor, he told himself. Why did she draw him back nightly to Buccla's Wood? Still he heard her voice calling after him. What more had she meant to tell him that night? Waking, the question goaded him, turning his thoughts to Scovell. How the man's gaze had slid away when he had told of her death.

But Scovell was another enigma. He had not addressed a word to John since his first day in the kitchen. Sometimes the Master Cook seemed to fill the room with his presence. At others he drifted through like a ghost. His chambers stretched under the whole house, the other boys said. He cooked strange-smelling dishes down there. He spoke languages that no one understood.

‘Like Roos then,’ offered Phineas Campin one night.

‘That's Flemish,’ said Adam Lockyer dismissively. ‘Scovell's not Flemish . . .’

‘What is he then?’ asked John.

But none of the kitchen boys knew quite what the Master Cook was.

‘I saw him watching you,’ Phineas confided later to John. ‘The first day you came here. When you told Vanian what was in that broth. I came in from Firsts and he was watching you. Just hanging back in the shadows.’

John's hair grew, black and curly as before. His ribs gained flesh. The bruises from his encounter with Coake faded. He no longer shivered his way through the nights or woke to the old gnawing hunger. He no longer gulped his food like a wolf. The work in the scullery settled into a routine.

Sunday afforded a longer respite when breakfasts and suppers were taken on trenchers, the rounds of hard bread disappearing either into hungry mouths or the dole-box. Then the boys were drawn up in lines, caps were jammed on their heads and they were led out of the kitchens. Philip and John walked with the others in single file through the passage and out into the bright sunlight.

‘That's Roderick Tichborn,’ Philip pointed out. ‘He's in with Henry Palewick. And that's Morris Appleton. Same. Those two with the white hair, they're Jim and Jem Gingell. Don't do nothing but moan. The little'un with them, that's Wendell Turpin. He's out in the dovecote with Diggory Wing. Gervase next to him, he works in the dairy. Those two over there, they're Philpot and Dymion. Adam Lockyer and Alf you know. And Peter Pears and Phineas Cam pin. Look, that's Meg and Ginny up ahead. Ginny's waving at you . . . ,

John nodded. The other boys were his family now, he told himself. But lost among the welter of names and faces, he looked back past the drive and the flanking lawns. Beyond the neat grass, rough pasture led down to a wicket gate and the meadows beyond where sunlight glittered off a series of ponds set about a massive oak. There an odd figure stood.

A tall boy with hair like a hayrick and dressed in rags was picking his way around the largest pond, raising and lowering his feet with odd pauses between steps. As John watched, he stopped altogether and spread his arms, extending two long poles hung with sacks which he flapped like a pair of enormous tattered wings. An approaching pigeon veered away.

‘Who's that?’

‘The Heron Boy,’ Philip said behind him. ‘He doesn't talk.’ The figure lowered his wings again, John thought of his own silence as he was carried down the Vale. He stared at the ragged figure but at that moment the line of kitchen boys moved off. The Heron Boy resumed his circuit around the pond.

They walked past the steps to the Great Hall, beneath the portico with its carved stone torches then up the path. Beside the wall of the East Garden, John glanced up at the high windows of the Solar Gallery, glinting in the morning sunlight. The image of Lucretia hovered in his memory, then the raucous rumble of her belly . . .

‘What's funny?, Philip asked.

‘Funny?’

‘You're grinning.’

John shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

The shallow slope carried them up towards the edge of the chestnut woods where the chapel emerged like a ship from fog, its nave a hull of weathered grey stone and the tall tower a swollen mast built of ancient granite. At the top John glimpsed openings like high arched windows and remembered his first distant glimpse from high on the slope. He smelt the chestnut sap from the trees behind then a sweeter scent, drifting in the air. Fruit blossom, he realised. The same as in Buccla's Wood . . . How could that be? But before he could wonder more, the path grew crowded. Men in purple livery blocked the way. A voice from the chapel shouted, ‘All stand! All stand! Eyes down for Sir William!’

Around John, men and boys were pulling off headgear. The boys in front spilled back onto those behind. Within a few seconds, the orderly lines had become serums. John found himself pushed aside by the milling men and boys.

‘Out the way! Clear the way for his lordship! Eyes down!’

A flustered-looking Mister Fanshawe strode out of the chapel. Two household grooms followed. Suddenly the jostling bodies ceased jostling. Silence fell. Out of the door stepped Sir William.

John glimpsed a tall, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and a hawkish face. Dressed in black from head to toe, he was accompanied by a smaller man who wore a chain about his neck. Sir William appeared unaware of the silent throng. As the mass of men began to bow, the two men proceeded down a corridor that opened before them. John bent his head like the others, barely glimpsing two women, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, both clutching small black books. Then he stared. Behind them walked a slighter figure. Lady Lucretia.

She wore an elaborate silk bonnet and the same dark green dress as before. John craned his neck to look at her face. The same sharp nose and dark eyes. But a moment later a hard hand rapped the side of John's head. Vanian's face loomed before his own.

‘Eyes down!’ the man hissed. A bony hand pushed John's head forward. The little party passed. The men and boys filed in. John and Philip knelt with the other kitchen boys beneath a row of faded banners at the back. A stained-glass window showed a knight kneeling before a fire. The flames glowed brightly among the darkened wood and stone.

‘Here's Father Yapp,’ whispered Philip.

A pink-cheeked young man wearing a white surplice climbed the stairs of the pulpit. Light from the window bathed his head in purple. John settled himself, ready for the inevitable sermon. But the priest had barely gabbled the Lord's Prayer and a homily before Philip was pulling John to his feet.

‘The liveries have to take it in turns,’ the boy told him as they turned to leave. ‘Not room for everyone.’

‘What about up there?’ John asked, pointing to a gallery with a heavy door set in its back wall.

Philip shook his head. ‘That was Lady Anne's place. That door behind goes to the tower. No one's allowed up there now. Except Sir William.’

A long line of men wearing green livery filed in. The Kitchen exchanged glares with the Household. Among the Household men, John spotted a familiar face.

‘Ben!’

Ben Martin looked almost pleased.

‘They took me on doing tallies,’ he told John. ‘Can't hardly count, most of this lot. You?’

‘In the scullery.’

The boys behind were pushing to get out. The clerks were pressing to get in. Ben stepped out of the line and leaned closer.

‘There was a fellow here from Buckland. Said the whole place went to the Devil.’

‘Who?’

‘Didn't catch his name. He was in the old orchards. Grafting fruit trees.’ Ben nodded towards the chestnut woods.

‘Orchards?’ queried John. ‘In there?’

‘Right ragged lot,’ Ben said. ‘All fruiting the wrong time of year. They don't give apples much bigger'n cherries. Root ‘em out, I said. Sir William won't have it. Been here as long as the Manor, the orchardman told me . . . ‘

Philip was quiet as they walked back to the kitchen. Entering the scullery, he turned to John.

‘That Ben Martin fellow said Buckland.’

‘So?’

‘I thought you said you were from Flitwick?’

‘Buckland's near enough Flitwick,’ John replied. He upended a pot resting on the bench and inspected it for grime.

‘What did he mean it went to the Devil?’ persisted Philip.

‘It just did,’ John answered.

Philip considered this. ‘You weren't riding with Josh Palewick, were you?’

John looked up. ‘What?’ Why should Philip care how he got here?

But the boy's normally cheerful face now wore a dark frown.

‘You lied to me,’ Philip said.

‘Lied?’

‘Who showed you the kitchens?’ Philip demanded.

‘I never asked you to show me,’ John retorted.

‘They might be taking me on. That's what you said. John Saturnall with his famous nose. That wasn't true either, was it?’

John felt his temper rise.

‘They chased us out, all right?’ he retorted. ‘They called my mother a witch. They burned our home. The priest paid Josh to take me. Satisfied?’

John felt his face flush. But Philip shook his head.

‘What's that? Another story?’

‘Believe what you like,’ John shot back. ‘I don't care.’

‘Of course you don't.’ Philip glared. ‘You don't need Philip Elsterstreet now, do you? You don't need anyone.’

John clenched his fists. Suddenly he no longer cared what Philip thought of him.

‘That's right,’ he threw back. ‘I don't.’

They scraped platters and scrubbed pots. They hauled porridge bowls from the trays into the trough and out again. They ate at the same table and washed from the same bucket in the servants’ yard. They slept on the pallet among the other kitchen boys. But they did all this in a silence as heavy as the leather curtain hanging above the door to the kitchen. Since the afternoon of their quarrel, the two boys had not exchanged a word.

John swapped greetings with Alf and Adam Lockyer. He made pleasantries with Phineas Campin and Jed Scantlebury. He grunted morning greetings to the Gingell twins and Peter Pears. Coake and his minions sneered as they passed. But Philip remained as silent as the Heron Boy and when, on Sunday afternoons, they were confined together in the quiet scullery the seconds passed like clods of porridge dropping off Phelps's ladle. Philip sat on the floor. John leaned against the sink, tapping his fingers against the side and studying the ceiling. Through the window, he smelt the different scents from the Rose Garden. An obdurate and uncomfortable silence was broken only by the distant shouts of the other boys running in the fields below. But on the third dull Sabbath, the clip-clop of footsteps sounded on the paving- stones. Looking up through the window, John saw a pair of brown ladies’ boots. Above them appeared a brown skirt. A moment later the brown boots were joined by a pair of shinier black ones. A dark green skirt with a red embroidered hem topped the dainty footwear.