Fair Weather Read online

  Vespasian looks after us all and we eat when we can. We steal for him and he is our lord and master. It’s not a bad life and we watch each other’s backs. He is a tall man, far taller than our little king, and I watch him from under my lashes, liking the way his muscles move in a slow dance beneath the thin moulded wool of his hose and the soft linen of his shirt. His hair and his eyes are quite black as if through some fault of his own the Good Lord had forbidden the passing of colour, and he is made up of night time. But when there is a candle flickering beside us, there are stars in his night time eyes and they flick suddenly aside, catching my gaze, so that I blush as if caught out in some sin. His lashes are as thick as Isabel’s and thicker than my own and his eyelids are heavy, like a lazy man’s might be. But this is misleading for Vespasian has the energy of a fox dashing from the brush, or a wolf in ambush with the leap ready at the points of his toes.

  He has never beaten me, nor any of us I think, though he has threatened to do so. We are all a little frightened of him but in fact it is his silences that we fear and the suspense of a man who is so unpredictable and seems capable of anything. Sometimes he leaves us and is gone weeks, off to court or castles or to some distant war which I do not either understand or wish to, Angevin and Normandy, against the wicked French king who puts his thumb into our English business and wants John’s nephew on the throne instead of our own chosen monarch. But when Vespasian returns and comes striding through the open door, flinging his mud stained cloak to the straw and his gloves to the coffer, he demands ale or wine if we have any, and laughs and tells us that war is for fools and fighting only for brutes and idiots. He empties his newly filled purse onto the table and puts his feet up on a stool and looks at us all from under half closed lids with a smile that just twitches at the corners of his mouth. He speaks so softly that it is a discipline of a sort, demanding total silence and attention, for otherwise we will not hear each precious word. Then he will tell us stories, of blood and valour, of comedy and chivalry, and of the absurd stupidity of man.

  When Vespasian is gone, we are lost souls, all of us. Gerald loses his dimples and his flaxen hair hangs limp like a swineherd who has mislaid his piglets. Richard and little Stephen, who is our baby at just eleven years, no longer tumble down the stairs each morning to throw open the doors and chase the chickens out to the sunny street. Hugh, who is the eldest, grumbles and tells us we are all useless, for he feels he should become our substitute leader and likes to seem superior, while Osbert and Walter do all the work in a tight lipped silence. Isabel flounces. She tosses those fair curls and doesn’t always bother to wash or comb them before pinning them up under her wimple. She likes to pinch my arm and tell me how Vespasian will come rampant into the bedroom on his return, and sweep her into his arms and then his bed. It is rather sad for Isabel that this does not ever actually happen, but it is the dream she carries with her, and I never bother to argue. After all, if I did she would just pinch me the harder and tell me I am jealous. I am of course, and she knows it. Vespasian may never have swept Isabel off her feet, but he climbs into bed with her and I watch from my pillow as his hand slides over her plump breast, and she gives a little smug sniff and lets me watch a minute before she pulls up the coverlet and turns her back.

  Gerald snorts at Isabel when she preens and pretends stories of romantic love. “With Vespasian?” his snort becomes a rumble. This is very hard to do, which I know because I have tried to copy it. Only Gerald can dismiss Isabel’s vanity with such contempt. “He would as soon practise chivalry with the blacksmith’s dog,” Gerald says. The poor creature had distemper and was likely to die within the month. “You are a quick and easy lay, Issy, let’s face facts.”

  I considered this harsh and often took Isabel’s part, but all the boys teased her and in the end, after she had burst into convenient tears once her powers of vocabulary had run dry, everyone would forgive everyone else and return to work, to busyness and to dreaming.

  The boys share their pallets of course, but I sleep alone and so there is no one to laugh when I put my thumb in my mouth and hug my knees. The heat of the evening’s fire comes up through the floor boards but I am in the furthest corner and the oiled parchment across the window lets in a draught which finds me first.

  Walter and Osbert sleep together and Walter snores a little louder than anyone else. He has trouble with his nose, which is snubbed like a penny and maybe can’t breathe in all the air he needs. Close to their heads wriggle the toes of the next pallet with Hugh who is the largest and Stephen, our baby. Gerald and faithful Richard have the bed next to Vespasian and Isabel. When Vespasian is away and Isabel has the whole pallet to herself, she keeps her clothes on as I do.

  The country’s harvest failed at the end of last year and we have gone hungry many times since then. We are not alone. All across the land there is a terrible starvation and we have heard tales of cannibalism. The babies are dying at their mother’s breasts and the old have such shrunken bodies that they shrivel and die in the gutters. Vespasian, with more initiative than many, keeps us fed most days but sometimes even he cannot steal enough for us all. It makes me cry sometimes, when my belly shrinks and I know there will be nothing for a day at least and probably three. When Hugh stole two candles from the nearby church, instead of lighting them we tried to eat them. Walter once went all across the city to the woods and collected chestnuts, acorns and herbs, but he brought back the roots of monkshood which Vespasian said was enough to kill us all, and laughed and threw them on the ashes of the fire. But ingenuity brings surprises and though one day we chew on nothing but our hopes or manage a watery gruel of stale cabbage leaves, suddenly Vespasian will supply a feast and laugh at our excitement.

  Now the East Cheap has a new stall with ready cooked pies, steaming hot crusts and fillings of stewed meat and gravy, so Vespasian stole us all a pastry wrapped in buttered linen, a purse with six bright pennies and a pair of white leather gloves for Isabel, which she tucked in her belt and twirled around the kitchen while everyone else did the work. Then Vespasian leaned back on his stool with his feet up on the trestle, with just a little twitch of amusement as he watched her, and didn’t even order her to stop dancing and help us, as she should.

  I was playing with the yardstick, re-knotting the feet, curling the rope around my hand. I had licked every one of my fingers, allowing not one dark drop of gravy to escape. Richer folk did not eat the hard pastry cases, but we wasted nothing. Then I looked up and saw Vespasian smiling at me. It is a smile I cherish and relive in my dreams since no doubt I will wait a long time before receiving another. All his smiles are precious to me for a smile from him is mighty rare. But sometimes I have a little fancy, which I cuddle to myself in the silence of the nights, imagining that tight within Vespasian’s dark frowns and relentless severity, is hidden a light hearted man of humour and sparkling laughter, and that one day the smiling man will escape and come to find me.

  Chapter Three

  Bertie’s cases clutter up the spare room. Actually they are my cases, but I lent them to him when I originally threw him out and I doubt if I’ll ever get them back now. I just wish he would take them elsewhere. God only knows why I ever fell in love with Bertie all those years ago. Once love is over, how little of it we ever understand. It is many long years since my dreams included him. Now they shift like shrouded mists, spilling over into my waking hours so that sometimes, and especially when I am writing, I cannot be sure what reality is all about. Like love, it is only a relative experience after all.

  I drift in apathy. My brain is all dust. I cannot be sure which world is worthy or where I belong. Bertie is at least an anchor but after two weeks of different women’s voices on the phone, some angry, some pleading, all wanting him, I have asked for another telephone line. One day it will arrive. Out here in picturesque village obscurity, we are not supposed to expect efficiency. It is part of being picturesque. A reminder, while finally smiling to myself, of Plantagenet London.

  I nod
at Bertie when he asks my advice but I am neither listening nor do I care. His affairs are irritating even though we are no longer married and I no longer want him. Ruby is the beloved, then Ruby flounces off and Evelyn takes her place. But Evelyn is short and plump and wears her hair in bubble curls and Bertie can stand it no longer and drifts off to Pam. Pam is prettier. Then Pam falls for our local butcher and Bertie stops eating meat for a week. Then there are twins. I was never sure which came first but Bertie dated both and both left him, possibly because of the other.

  I was aware when Bertie started becoming seriously devoted to just one new lover and began an inexperienced period of faltering fidelity, but I was still abstracted, for my mind continued to delve into hauntings and soft velvet fantasies. My other world is hypnotically encroaching.

  My girl is called Matilda, and usually Tilda. I have only to close my eyes and her face now absorbs my consciousness. As I slip more completely into a dream, night or day, so I become her. My secret place pulls me in. Its shadowed obscurity and intangible darkness then gradually clarify. Part of me lives there permanently. It is more than my dream state. It is the girl’s world and I am the girl.

  I have stopped writing. Now I sit and stare out the kitchen window over the black blank of the laptop screen, watching as the garden grass disappears under a spattering of white crystals. The sun dazzles across the frost and shoots its refracted rainbows along my stainless steel. It reminds me again that the magic of creation has nothing to do with solid reality, for reality is not solid and solidity is not real.

  When I was a child, freely accepting that truth was only what you wished to believe in, I knew that I inhabited two separate worlds. In both I felt unloved but in one I sometimes escaped the misery and constant threat of home. I pretended happiness as I went to school and skipped along sunny streets. But the other was my secret place which took me in when I was frightened and deepest sadness greyed my skies. It was secret because my parents dismissed me immediately if I talked of it. It was also secret because it smelled of secretiveness. It was dark and rustling, narrow, damp and confined. It neither attracted nor repelled me but I grew to dislike its hopeless grime. Matilda’s world contained threat, but the threat hurt less there than the threat I faced in my own modern home.

  Tilda is very young and desperately thin. After the failed harvest she cried for hunger but she is not unhappy. It is all she knows. Her thoughts now tug at me even during the day as I become gradually less myself. Bertie thinks I have become totally deranged. He is right. I am possessed. When I am Tilda and she is me, my consciousness of the bright and modern, the music and the comfort, the colour and all the fluff of gadgetry and bright entertainment, slips into a shuffling forgetfulness. I know these things exist. But I cannot shrug off the inertia which living between worlds brings, and I could not flick on the television, although I still see it here in my living room, for part of me says it is a fantasy and dangerous magic. Indeed, no such devilry has yet been invented. The electricity lightens my room in gaudy detail, but my eyes see only the spasmodic spluttering of lemon shadows from candle stubs. If Bertie lunges onto my horizons, hearty with noise and presence, I am spun into disorientation and feel nauseas as if rising too fast from diving the deep sea corals.

  They live, these long lost people, in a world of accepted discomforts and dreariness. They have a house furnished in draughts and when the wind is strong, it rattles and bends and the thatch becomes threadbare, with gaps in the straw. One of the boys is sent up to tie it tighter and stuff the holes with hay. He clings to the beams and shouts to frighten off the rats.

  Six boys and two girls live with the man who owns the house. Cradles of straw line the walls upstairs and the children curl warm amongst the fleas and cockroaches, clutching at each other when something disturbs them and night terrors, hunger and pain interrupt the rhythmic snoring.

  I love Tilda. I do not love the man. His smiles are rare unless he is a little drunk, when they tilt his lips but do not reach his eyes. He frightens me. I am not yet sure why, but his shadow swallows light and when I creep into his reality, his power over me seems menacing. Tall and very dark, hawk eyed and hard mouthed, he is Vespasian Fairweather. Through Tilda’s mind I know him. I would recognise him if I saw him, but I have not seen him yet. I see only his shadow, I hear his voice, I see the tip of his shoe or the back of his cloak. I am intrigued of course, and I want to see him properly, but I am sure I will not like him at all. I will despise his arrogance and the power he wields over these lost children.

  He must have been named for the ancient Roman emperor; delusions of grandeur perhaps from medieval peasants, though educated peasants since they knew such names to call their child at all. But I find it strange and am intrigued. His surname comes from no trade, guild or town as those early surnames usually did, but is Fairweather, originally a nickname I suppose, and must be inherited from a father more genial than the son.

  They are so alive to me. Yet it is eight hundred years since they are dead, buried and lost in decay.

  Tilda, having arrived in the city when ten years old and now being, I think, about sixteen, knows old London well. It is her place of work. She is both ridiculously innocent, and painfully street-wise. She enjoys the taverns which crowd the Thames’ damp banks between the wharves. The Bear’s Head is the biggest with a colourful sign swinging and a heavy thatch jutting over the eaves. A few dark eyed whores gather in the alley at the side, business conducted where the chickens peck among the refuse and their customers rut quick to escape the smell of the sewerage running through the central gutters. No point trying to cut a purse here, however drunk the patrons, for they are all thieves themselves and won’t be cheated by another.

  The Fletcher’s Arms is a small inn with a raised hearth and a warm fire in the winter with stables at the back and the landlord is said not to water his ale. But it is the Cock Tavern where Tilda makes her money most easily. The sacks of squirming cockerel ready for the fight hang along the outer wall and the courtyard is trampled hard and flat by a thousand feet. With the excitement of the wagers, no one notices a small girl with her hair in her eyes and a ready pen-knife. She can cut three purses and be gone before the cocks face off.

  Next best are the markets, the smaller weekly gatherings where the farmers come into town to sell and barter and the big monthly Cheaps when traders come even from aboard and the purses are the fattest in the city. I follow Tilda and feel her rising excitement, the quick flick of the knife through the soft leather pouch, and then the squeeze through the crowds and away from notice before skipping home to show off her expertise. I go with her. I know all her movements now and travel her life beside her.

  Sometimes I think her thoughts though I am also aware of my own. Then suddenly I am back with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, and I have no memory of how I even got here, let alone why I decided on housework when I’ve no interest anymore in dust or debris. I am disappointed when I find I am just myself again. So of course there was just one step further for me to go.

  I was up on the lower hills beyond my own comfortable house when it happened. I was in wellies and plastic hood, following the downward trail amongst the stones, when my afternoon walk turned into sudden regret. The storm rolled over the crests like the smoke of a forest on fire, clouds in billowing black and grimy yellow. There were still patches of snow on the hillsides, ice pockets, smears of white across the moss and fern. Then the slopes were mist ravaged and the clouds dipped down to touch the grass. Cotswold horizons are bleak during winter thunder.

  Tilda had been born during such a storm. I knew. I’d seen her father fall, struck by lightning, eyes wide open in surprise. I’d seen her born amongst the sodden wheat. Now I stood, braced against the wind and lashing rain, and saw both my own skies ravaged by the bold white electrical strikes, and Tilda’s lowering clouds split by the same intensity. I was trapped in two storms and had little hope of escaping either.

  I’d left my
car in the valley. I began to stumble back down the hillside, hood pulled low around my ears, rubber soles slipping in the mud. I fell twice, sheep droppings, thistles, up to my ankles in storm water. I tipped forward, twisting my wrist, my fingers squelching into a sluice of mud, knees on stones and jeans torn. I was still a long way up from the car. I fell a third time. I spun. As if I had fallen upwards instead of down, I was lifted. The sky cleared and the stars whirled their million blues in a cream spangled arc around me. I thought I had died.

  I was dizzy with light. I was part of light itself. The echo of my ears still thundered and the rain washed me cold and clean, but the fire of the stars dried me and flew me on. I passed through worlds. Time passed through me, and moved beyond.

  When I woke, I was curled small and warm amongst a thick prickle of straw with a thumb in my mouth and hunger in my belly.

  Chapter Four

  I share a body with Tilda and we are now, for the first time, totally and completely combined. For a little while, vaguely acknowledging me and glimpsing my thoughts and my influence over hers, she believed she was asleep and dreaming. I know that I am awake. I have never been more awake.

  It is not a body like my own, but it seems strangely familiar and I am at home within it. We are smooth skinned, still flat chested and small boned, more angles than curves. There are no mirrors here but I know my eyes are huge and beautiful and my hair is like a silk quilt which I can wrap around myself at night to help keep me warm. In fact, I am not cold for it is nearly spring. There is a fresh warmth to the air, a bright flutter of sunshine with a balmy touch. It is a much warmer world and a far quieter one. When I lived in the twenty first century I saw my secret place as dark and eternally shadowed, a place heavy with threat. Now that I am truly here, I love it. There are shadows but there is also dancing light. I am even getting used to the smells.