The Butcher's Daughter Read online

  Father always asks, as soon as she comes home, what old Mistress Mary or young Master Thomas or whoever it might be had died from. She just shrugs.

  ‘People do die.’

  Sometimes there is something she can tell him. A lump, she will say, indicating on her own body where the lump was. Or a fever. A chill. Fits. Apoplexy. A witch’s spell. Bleeding after childbirth, and the child stillborn. A poisoned wound. Hunger, and the bloody flux. But mostly they just die. Who knows?

  My father wants to know because his Granny Peppin, who lived to a great age, terrified him when he was a little boy with stories of the Plague which had been told to her long ago when she herself was young. Granny Peppin had remembered too much and all of it horrible. Yet if no one told the old stories, there would only be now, and everything would be happening as if for the first time. Not that it would make much difference, as it is always the first time, when you are young and it happens to you.

  ‘No,’ my mother always said to him, ‘it is not the Plague. Do not distress yourself.’

  That evening when I told them what had happened with Peter I sat on the ground and cried. I had never pleased my mother and now I was a disgrace. She hit me about the arms and legs with the broomstick. She sometimes does that. It is no good trying to run from the beatings, because where would I go?

  When she had satisfied herself my father moved the rushlight so that he would not knock it over and opened his hairy arms to me. I scrambled on to his lap, breathing in his reek, and he rocked me in an absent-minded way. He gave me a piece of bread, unrolled my mattress, laid me upon it and put the blanket over me. Still in my soiled shift, my bruises paining me, I fell asleep.

  I saw Peter Mompesson only once more, in November. He sent a message through my friend Jeanne that he would meet me the day after Martinmas, an hour before sunset. I was to follow the river upstream past Batt’s Farm, and he would be waiting in the woods on the other side. I already knew that I was carrying a child. I had not bled since I was with him. My mother said it was not yet certain and that it any case many first pregnancies came to nothing. But blue veins were standing out in my breasts and there were other signs. I was fearful.

  I decided to say nothing about this to Peter. My heart beat and my gut flickered at the thought of seeing him again. It was a fine evening. I put on my cloak and my green hood and slipped out without telling my mother or father. Because of slaughtering and hanging the Martinmas beef, everyone in our row was busy.

  Dogs barked as I passed the farm, and then I saw him far off through the trees. He could not see me because the low sun was shining straight into his eyes. I ran towards him and he saw me and began running too, and we met in a flurry of outstretched arms, swinging round together, and slipping and falling.

  We talked and loved until the sun had gone down and it was dark in the wood. It was the happiest hour – a little more than an hour – of all my life. I will not put our promises to one another into new words. We said what we said, and we meant it, and for ever. It was a marriage even if the only witnesses were the birds in the trees.

  Mother looked at me with her mouth tight. ‘You need to take pennyroyal. And tansy and rue.’

  No such herbs grow in our yard. She obtained what she wanted from the old dame on the backway behind our premises. Mother stewed the leaves up into a black liquid to make me bleed away what was growing inside me. I loathe the smell of rue, it is like cat’s piss. I had to drink a cup of this stuff every day for a week. Nothing happened except that I vomited each time. Perhaps that was why the herbs did not work. After that my mother kept me in. She made me stay around the house and sheds during the daytime.

  My mother laid off our little maidservant and put me to work. I brought in water, I kept the fire alive. I peeled reeds and rendered down mutton fat for rushlights. I shovelled up shit. I salted and soaked and packed chunks of beef and pork until my hands were raw. I scrubbed my father’s leather aprons. I boiled up pig’s blood for the black puddings. and set it by the fire to solidify. My father prided himself on his black puddings. On market days, he sold as many as he made. Thomas Peppin’s famous black puddings – delicious. Only my mother did not think so, and tightened her headcloth round her mouth and nose. The cluster-flies on the carcasses and on the walls and rafters of our two rooms were terrible that autumn. When I took down the shutters in the mornings, my fingers met gross new hatchings seething round the edges.

  I was forbidden to get in touch with Peter and did not risk it. I did not want another beating from my mother. I did not want to be struck down by the Hand of God either. There is a painting on the wall in St Mary’s of the Hand coming out of a cloud, with the thumb and two fingers pointing straight downwards, and the middle two curled up. You can see part of God’s sleeve, banded with gold.

  I walked out for air when it was getting dark and there was no one much about. When I was younger, before I learned butchery, I used to help out at the clothmaker’s yard off Quaperlake Street, stretching the pieces tightly on the tenters to get rid of the creases. Jeanne Vile worked there too. She, my true friend from that former time, would come and sit with me now in the dusk on the steps of the new market cross. Jeanne is clever and she has beautiful rippling hair but one of her feet is turned inwards and she cannot walk fast.

  The masons finished the canopy, with balustrades on top, and jars called urns on the corners. Inside, there were stone benches all round. One evening I sat in there alone. Jeanne did not come. I watched a stranger picking his way down Coombe Hill, carrying a satchel on his back. There were always pilgrims coming through on their way to Glastonbury, and travellers, and many strangers were visiting Bruton too at that time, to see the Abbot. This man walked on past me, down Patwell Street and over the bridge to St Mary’s Church and the Abbey gatehouse – and then ten minutes later was back, with a book like a ledger in his hand. He sat down near me and began to scribble in his book. He was lean and weather-beaten with a big nose under a bulky cap. Not unhandsome.

  He looked at me and began to talk. He told me he was John Leland, and he was a travelling scholar and a poet. He had walked that day through the woods and down the hill from Evercreech.

  ‘Your Bruton lies in a bowl,’ he said. ‘The Great Forest all around you. But the Great Forest could not keep you safe from the Danes in times gone by. They arrived by sea.’

  ‘I do not know about that. We say, the Forest keeps us warm from the east wind. There are tracks through it going into Wiltshire, it is easy to lose your way. The tracks split. There are wild families living in the Forest, and ogres and bad spirits in Pensel Wood. We do not like going that way.’

  ‘There will be many ghosts in Pensel Wood. If you are quiet, you may overhear from the long-ago the clashing of steel and the cries of the slain. It has been a place of battles, even before your people tried to fight off King Cnut. That was a terrible time of fighting.’

  ‘I do not know about that King.’

  ‘You should. He was a Norseman and King of England for nearly twenty years and died not far from here, in Shaftesbury. More than five hundred years ago, no one will remember. The wood certainly makes it difficult to find you. I am making a record of all the places through which I pass. Your fine stone bridge, now – three spans, that is wide for a small stream.’

  I told him about what I did know – about Bow Bridge only a few steps downriver, joining the Abbey to the town, just wide enough for a string of packhorses, and Legge’s Bridge at the other end of town. I told him how Bruton was crisscrossed with streams and leets and culverts, and fords and ponds and footbridges, and how the Brue river rose when the rain was heavy and flooded the town.

  It was perhaps not wise, then, he said, to have built those little tenements on the bridge. They would be washed away.

  ‘But you are fortunate to have in plenty the two commodities that made life possible – water, and wood for firing and building.’

  Master Leland was interested in the Abbot. He was going to call up
on him, and inspect the Abbey Library. He showed me lists in his ledger of what he said were the titles of books, with descriptions.

  ‘My work is to examine the libraries of the religious houses of England, and to note down everything rare or valuable. I have a personal commission from the King.’

  ‘Why does the King want to know that?’

  ‘His Majesty is a cultivated man. He takes an interest in these things, as I do. But I rather fear …’

  He did not finish the sentence. He said, ‘Knowledge of the whereabouts of antiquities and valuables is a boon for scholars. The use to which such knowledge may be put in the times that are coming is another matter altogether.’

  This was the first time that I glimpsed the significance of lists – and of inventories and inspections and valuations – and sensed that there was something to be feared from them.

  He asked me what was the general opinion of the Abbot, in the town. I told him the Abbot was well-liked.

  ‘And the monks too?’

  ‘They are called canons.’

  ‘Any misbehaviour among the canons?’

  Not at all, I told him, the canons are gentle, scholarly men.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘About seventeen, maybe.’

  ‘A small community then. It may not last long.’

  Two of the younger canons taught me and Jeanne Vile to read and write, in a dark little room off the vestry of St Mary’s. Their names are John Harrold and Hugh Backwell, and they are scholars of Oxford. My mother did not oppose the idea, and father was in favour. He himself can calculate numbers, and mark the figures down, but he cannot write words, or read words.

  Our teachers also taught Jeanne and me how to speak our words so that they might be understood by people who are not from hereabouts. I was trying to put that into practice with Master Leland, but he sometimes had to ask me to repeat. He said he was born and raised in London, and that London people would not understand me, nor I them.

  ‘I have studied at Cambridge where, in order to understand one another, men find a middle way, or speak to one another in Latin.’

  ‘I know what Latin sounds and looks like, but I do not know many of the words, or the grammar. But I can write and I can read.’

  Master Leland looked at me sharply. He was astonished, I think.

  I directed him up the High Street to the tavern, and had no further talk with him. A few days later I spotted him in the distance loping off out of the town in the rain, back the way he had come.

  I asked my father what he knew about King Cnut.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ he said.

  ‘He came here. He was a Norseman, from over the sea. I think they use different words.’

  I had not told Master Leland everything about the Abbey. It is true that Abbot Eley is generally well-liked. He has not been here long. Father says John Eley is a new broom. Soon after he arrived, when I was about thirteen, he acquired a licence for us to have a great three-day fair on the feast of St George, in April.

  Bruton goes crazy on those days. People appear like eels slithering into down the steep paths through the woods from the villages and farms, the men with hooks to swipe at the brambles growing across the narrow ways. There is music and singing and stalls selling foods and garments and cloths and trinkets and tools and pots and poultry, you can hardly walk up the High Street for the stalls and wagons and carts and packhorses and oxen. The inns are crammed, the drains overflow all over the roadways, the din is unbelievable, and after dark torches are lit and young men full of ale pull down their hose and their breeks and show what they have and chase the girls. Some like to be caught. Not me. The old folk complain, but St George’s Fair does bring a lot of trade into the town. For that everyone is grateful to Abbot Eley.

  There is one man in Bruton who hates the Abbot. John White worked at the Abbey in Abbot Gilbert’s time, and the old Abbot paid him £10 a year, I’ve no idea for what. Then Abbot Gilbert died, and Abbot Eley was elected, and he did not see why he should go on paying £10 a year to John White. There was a bad quarrel. John White has not given up.

  Another trouble is the Abbot’s injustice to Tom Legat. Tom killed a man, a halfwit from Batcombe who appeared on a wet afternoon all hung about with rabbits which he had trapped on Creech Hill. He hoped to sell them but no one wanted them. Bruton and Batcombe never do get on at the best of times. Tom Legat was finishing off the market cross. The Batcombe fellow sat down and they exchanged jokes. Then Tom remarked that blood from the coneys and mud from the man’s person were spoiling the new-cut stone, and bade the man remove himself. The man from Batcombe, taking this amiss, slashed at Tom’s face with his knife, the same that he had used to gut the rabbits. Tom swung his great mallet and brought it down on the Batcombe man’s head, smashing his skull.

  The dogs licked up the brains spattered on the road. The dead body was sent back to Batcombe on a cart. Tom Legat was arrested. He was tried at the Court House and cleared of the charge of murder since he acted in self-defence. In any case the Batcombe man was a known idiot. There it might have ended. Abbot Eley would not let it lie. He always has his own views on any matter and he let it be known that Tom Legat was in the wrong and should be punished. This defiance of the Court’s ruling, like the business of Master White’s annuity, was reported to London by our landed gentlemen. They were turning against the Abbot.

  Abbot Eley is a difficult, principled man and he does make enemies. Everyone knows that. John White swears he will get his money and his revenge. He is large man of around forty years old who struts around the town with a band of lesser fellows. You would want to keep out of their way, especially at night. I am surprised to see that our canon Hugh Backwell sometimes keeps company with him. I think it is political, to do with dissensions within the Abbey, and between the Abbey and London.

  Nor did I tell Master Leland that my friends John Harrold and Hugh Backwell are as close as brothers, yet not like brothers. When they walk out at dusk by the river they hold hands. The Abbey wall on the town side has buttresses built against it to support the stables on the other side. It is always dark on the narrow roadway there, because of the high wall and the gatehouse of the Free School opposite. It is common knowledge that John and Hugh lean together for many minutes in an angle between wall and buttress. As if two people become one. Anyone who passes by keeps their heads bowed. It is unlawful for canons to lie together, but everyone speculates that they do. It was because our two canons never pester the girls of the town that my parents were unworried about the lessons in the room off the vestry.

  Once I learned to read, I read everything in English that I could lay my hands on. Hugh brought me books out of the Abbey Library. I wrote down the words which I did not understand and learned their meanings. I learned to recognise from their forms which words were really Latin and which were really French, even though I know no French or Latin. Hugh said I did, but that I did not know I did, because the French and the Latin were all mixed up with our words. He can speak French, the French of France as he says, not the garble used in this country.

  John showed us a printed book, the first we had ever seen, called a Book of Hours, and we learned to read the words in that black lettering. Another day he brought out from where he had hidden it under his scapular a printed book which was the Bible in English, not in Latin.

  ‘This is a secret. It was brought to me by a brother who had been in …’ – ah, he named some foreign town, I no longer remember. ‘We have had parts of the Gospels in English before, but nothing like this.’

  John was flushed and excited. Hugh was nervous. He took the key from the other side of the door into the room where we worked, and locked it from the inside.

  ‘That is stupid, Brother Hugh, my dear,’ said John. ‘They will think, if we are discovered, that we are molesting the girls.’

  Hugh sat with his head sunk on to his chest while John read to us from the Bible in English the story of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. We al
ready knew the story, because there is a picture of it painted on the wall of St Mary’s. Jesus is seated, and Mary is at his feet, looking up into his face. Martha is away to the side, looking towards them with an angry face, with a pile of pots and bowls beside her.

  I am drawn to this story, and copied it out when I was in Shaftesbury Abbey. We had an English Bible there. In our last year, it was ordered that every church in the kingdom must have an English Bible – even though the translator had his head cut off, and even though a great man in London, Sir Thomas More, said it was heretical, and he had his head cut off too – either for that or for something else. Perhaps it was because he would not agree that the King, not the Pope, was the head of the church in England.

  ‘Keep up, Agnes!’

  As Hugh would say.

  It was hard to keep up. I thought then that the confusing rule-changes were a boring matter of nit-picking and pedantry, were it not for the beheadings and burnings alive. And I did like the Bible in English and the story of Martha and Mary. It begins like this:

  ‘It fortuned as they went that he entered into a certain town. And a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And this woman had a sister called Mary which sat at Jesus’ feet and heard his preachings. And Martha was cumbered about much serving and stood and said: “Master dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to minister alone? Bid her therefore that she helps me.”’