oices were pitched as though they were just about to sing. This amiability made it difficult to tell them apart. But each face resumed its particular expression, and through February and March he was glad to stay in the kitchen, watching the wind ruffle the pool of rainwater that spread from under the woodhouse door, and eating the chips of dried cod that flew from under the mallet. Round and round went the days like a mill-wheel, and because it was Lent when penances are remembered, on Fridays his mother went barefooted to the cloisters to repeat the penitential psalms and be scourged by the prioress. No one much pitied her, neither did he; and hearing Mabel say that the bishop’s sentence had ordained that the scourgings should continue throughout the year and that only the prioress’s laziness restricted them to Lent he felt defrauded, as though his significance as a nun’s child were belittled.
Being a nun’s child distinguished him from the other children about the place, and even when they taunted him he knew he was more interesting than they, and that whatever future awaited him he would not, like them, live tethered to the sour soil of the manor. In spring, when all young animals play together, he played with them and was their ringleader, but when the days grew hot he left them and went to lie among the rushes, hidden, as he liked to lie. And so it would be full summer again, and he would be a year older, and this summer, surely, he would be old enough to go to Waxelby Fair.
But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster. Jackie was old enough to work now, and Jesse Figg the bailiff set him to weave hurdles or spread dung or keep the cows from straying into the young crops, and Mabel added that a cowherd has time on his hands, time enough to gather the tufts of wool that the sheep leave on brambles. Now, too, there was this new woman, this Pernelle. Sometimes she was a pleasure, for her clothes were coloured, and she could tell stories, and with a fine comb she would scratch the lice out of his head when they became troublesome. But at other times she was hateful, bustling after him and saying: ‘Jackie, do this! Jackie, do that! Jackie, Jackie! Where’s my little page?’ Then he would have to help her set up her loom or pound ginger or pick over feathers for pillows, or she would send him out to collect dew for a facewash; for being a townswoman she was full of such notions. And her stories, after all, were not worth much. Though they were of different places they were all about herself; and wherever she had gone she had always been the same Pernelle, cleverer and more meritorious than anyone else. If she spoke of anyone else, it was always her three nephews, who were such fine brisk boys, no bookworms. You would never see them with their eyes reddened by crying over grammar.
‘Grammar, grammar! Who’s the better for grammar? The Apostles had none.’
‘Saint Paul was a scholar,’ said Ursula.
‘So they say. But he was never Pope. That was for Saint Peter who was only a fisherman. Saint Paul’s grammar never hoisted him so far.’
She plunged her smooth hand into the belly of a goose.
‘If you had seen as much of the world as I have you wouldn’t care to have the priest stuffing your boy with grammar. All this hickorum-hackorum never filled a belly yet. Look at my brother-in-law the armourer. He can neither read nor write but he can afford to pay two clerks to keep his accounts for him, and in his house there are three beds, one of green serge, one of russet, and one of a most beautiful blue. The abbess of Shaftesbury hasn’t finer beds. But plenty of poor honest souls lie on rotten straw while these abbots and abbesses loll on goosedown, thinking over their Latin. Let them work, I say! Let them earn a living as other people do! Many’s the day my brother-in-law has worked twelve hours at a stretch, forging link after link till the eyes stood out of his head. Quite right, too! We are put into the world to labour. Le