Ingenious Pain Read online

  Until at last they do. It is a Friday, morning break, a week before the school is closed for the hay harvest. Kitty Gate, the blacksmith's girl, broad and ten, flings a stone at Peter Poundsett's

  leg as he crouches beside James, playing marbles by the priory wall. James hears the noise, hears Peter's gasp, looks at him, looks at Kitty. Keeping her eyes on James, she reachs slowly down to clutch a second stone. James looks away. It is his turn to roll. Peter whispers: 'Jem?' Then louder: Jem!' There is no answer. Kitty understands, enough if not all. She lets out a whoop, then throws, hard and true, striking her victim in the face and tearing his lower lip which instantly blooms into a rose of blood, velvety petals tumbling and splashing on to his shirt.

  Miss Lucket has witnessed the entire scene from the classroom window. Now she swings like a lame fury from the schoolhouse door, the strap trailing from her hand. She is afraid that they will scatter before she can reach them, but Kitty is transfixed by the sight of Peter Poundsett's face, and the first she knows of Miss Lucket's approach is the sear of the strap across her back, the shock of it knocking the girl off her feet. But Kitty is not Miss Lucket's true target. She hurries on, opening and shutting on the hinge of her good leg towards the wall where Peter Poundsett stands, and where his betrayer calmly watches her come. More than anything she wants to bring the strap down across his face, a thing she has never done nor even contemplated before. She draws up breathless before him, raises the strap, but as their eyes meet the rage goes out of her. Blue as the cornflower in the fields beyond them, his eyes contain no malice. It was not goodness she saw in him before; neither is this its reverse. They stare at each other for several seconds. Then she turns away from him, takes Peter Poundsett by the collar, and marches him into the schoolhouse, the boy, like something incompetently butchered, bleeding and howling beside her.

  Harvest. The village prepares itself like an army on the eve of campaign. Joshua Dyer takes on what help he can afford; ninepence a day plus vitals for a man, a penny for boys and women. Most years, local cottagers supply his needs, once they have brought in their share of what remains of the common meadow. Now and then the road delivers strangers: soldiers, sailors even, deserting, lame, or paid off after Dettingham, Fontenoy, Culloden.

  It is during the harvest of 1749 that Widow Dyer, carrying bread and cider out to the workers, suffers a paralytic seizure, and it is James, sent to find what has become of the refreshments, who discovers her, stretched out on the track like a mound of laundry. The sight is intriguing. He walks around her twice, observing her fat calves, her hair, tumbled out from beneath her linen cap, and the great congested moon of her face. A blue-bottle parades on her cheekbone.

  He waits to see if she will do anything, if, for example, she wiU die. Her mouth is working, mouthing silent pleas. He drinks from one of the dropped flagons, spilling some of the liquor over his chin. Then he goes to find his mother.

  It takes eight men, half winded and shuffling in their boots, to carry the widow back to the farmhouse. They set her on the trundle bed in the parlour then send for the parson, who sends for the curate, who comes sweating from the fields to read the prayer for the dying. The family stand around the bed awaiting the moment of her departure. Her breath is like a sack of coals dragged over a stone floor, but by

  the evening she lies more easily. Charlie is sent to Madderditch to bring Mr Viney.

  Viney arrives, his grey mare glow^ing Hke milk in the dark. He examines the Widow, Joshua holding a candle beside his mother's face. Viney bleeds her, then says: 'Let her bide where she is. If she lives out the night, send for me again. Prayer is the best physic for her now.' He drinks a glass of cider with Joshua, then mounts his horse and rides up the darkness of the lane.

  Joshua and Elizabeth sit up in the parlour. Elizabeth works with her needle. The house settles, groans; the widow wheezes and snores. Dawn reveals her living still. Charles is needed in the fields. James is sent to bring the apothecary.

  It is an hour's easy walking to Madderditch. Viney's house, dressed in ivy, stands on the outskirts of the village. The front door is answered by Viney's aunt, a gossip of the Widow's who reads the note - penned by Liza - explaining the boy's errand and leads him inside. She sends a servant to fetch the apothecary then stands eyeing the child with some interest. So this is EHzabeth Dyer's bastard, her shame. They say the child is dumb. She does not like his looks at all. A bastard should be the humblest creature on God's earth. This one contemplates her as if she were the cook. She says: 'Do you not know what you are? Do you not know what your mother is? Shall I tell you, child? Shall I?'

  Viney comes in; his face - shrewd, worried, kindly - is bright with heat. His aunt passes him the note and leaves the room. He reads it through a pair of folding spectacles, nods his head. He says: 'I think, then, we have some hope of saving her. Shall we make her well again, child, eh?'

  He gestures to the boy to foUow him. They come to a passageway, then to a door. The room inside is warm from the sun that cuts in through the half-open shutters. A spacious room but almost sunk beneath the clutter of the apothecary's trade. James

  sniffs the air. Here are scents unlike anything he has experienced before. Bitter and metallic, but also sweet, as if the apothecary had mixed together flowers and anvils, gunpowder and rotten eggs, to create a unique, stinking perfume.

  In the centre of the room is the work-bench, crowded with mortars, gallipots, smoke-blackened knives. There is a rolling-board for making pills, a small pile of crabs' claws, a human skull, and several books with crinkled yellow pages, as if they had once been under water. From the ceiling hang bundles of dried plants.

  Says Viney: 'Now, child, we shall find something to make the Widow mend. An infusion of borage perhaps.' He reaches up and takes a fist of blue, star-shaped flowers. 'And something to purge her. When evil is at work in a body we must expel it.' He takes senna leaves and ginger. 'My art - do not touch that! - is to mediate between man and nature. This art was given to our forefathers by God - Ay, pass me the pot - thus all healing is divine - set it upon the stove - It is the arrogance of modern doctors that is their undoing. We can neither heal - that is the lung of a fox -nor be healed without humility. There now, the water will draw the goodness from the plants. You are an able assistant, James. I shall mention as much to your father.'

  When they ride back to Blind Yeo, James sits in front of the apothecary, his fingers tangled in the mare's coarse mane. The country people say: 'Gad speed 'ee, Mr Viney', 'Good morrow to 'ee, sir!', 'Be that the Dyer boy ridin' up so mighty wiv 'ee?'

  The to-ing and fro-ing to Madderditch for medicine is James's particular duty. He spends longer and longer in the apothecary's den, watching and then helping in the preparation of mixtures and ointments and gargles. He learns to roll pills, to make an emulsion from the yolk of eggs, to prepare oils from lavender and cloves and ginger. Viney himself is more engrossed with his metals, his crucible and furnace, his pyramids of numbers. More

  than once they are forced to flee from clouds of noxious smoke, running out into the garden to gulp lungfuls of air while the aunt shakes her fan at them in exasperation.

  But the Widow rallies, though now she is as mute as the boy, her voice lost for ever above the summer fields. At Christmas she leaves her bed, her back pocked with sores, her face sunk on to the bones of her skull. There are no more visits to Madderditch. More than ever the boy keeps his own company, comes and softly goes. His silence, his dumb indifference, is taken for revolt, for insolence. Joshua beats him, flies out in real anger. Even Elizabeth treats him coldly, enraged that he should draw such attention to himself, and thus to her and to history. She watches him one morning, climbing up the side of the hill-fort like some grim diminutive tribesman, and thinks: Would that he does not stop. Would that he goes on, climbing and climbing. Would that this were farewell.

  Yet it cuts her heart to think it.

  It is the summer of 1750. The year of the London earthquakes. The hottest summer of th
e boy's life, hotter even than '48, when the locusts came. He is lying on his belly on the side of the hill, watching the wedding preparations in the orchard below. Small figures, just recognisable, are fetching and carrying from the house. He does not hear the stranger approach over the muffling grass until a hand catches him about the scruff of his neck and hoists him to his feet.

  The stranger eyes him; eases his grip, says: 'Now here's a pretty bird for the bag. Hiding, child, or spying? Are you a native of this place?'

  James wriggles free, rubs his neck, nods.

  'Then, Robin Goodfellow, you are hired. Which is the Dyer farm?'

  James points down the hill. The stranger squints, fans himself with his hat, spits at a bee. For a time he seems to consider it, the wisdom of descending. At length he says: 'Lead on, boy,' and they go, crabwise, towards a knot of sheep in the shade of an elm tree by the gate that leads to the road. As they walk, James steals glances at the man: the holy blue of his eyes, the pock-marked skin, the goat-hair wig dusting the shoulders of his coat with its powder. The stranger wears ribbons on his coat, yet it is difficult to imagine him as an acquaintance of Joshua's, still less of Jenny Scurl or Bob Ketch. Cetainly he is no farmer; nor does he seem a pedlar, for he has no pedlar's pack. Nor a gentleman. More than anything he reminds James of the actors who played at Moody's farm two summers past and who he watched through a knot-hole as they changed and danced and bellowed to each other among the rat-gloom of Moody's barn.

  Coming to the road, the stranger begins to talk more loudly, as if he distrusted his surroundings, yet did not wish to appear on his guard.

  '. . . A wedding, boy, why, 'tis one of the finest things imaginable, most prodigiously, of course, when one is not related to any of the parties involved. You have attended one before? Your parents' perhaps?'

  James shakes his head.

  'A funeral, however, is to be preferred. A fellow with a respectable suit of clothes may live comfortably on little else but the vanity of the dead for years together. I attended one one time at Bath. The burial of a notorious gambler who . . .'

  The stranger stops in the road by the lane to the farm. He leans down. Peers at the boy.

  Y'ou do not appear, child, to be made of mud and straw like

  the other inhabitants of this place. Indeed you put me in mind of someone. You have never been in Nev^gate? The Fleet? Bridew^ell? No . . . well, 'tis only my humour. Tell me, do you have money in your pocket? A penny perhaps?'

  James shakes his head. The stranger shrugs.

  'Then nothing is something, for w^e have it in common. You are schooled here?'

  A nod.

  *You can read?'

  A nod

  'God's teeth, child, I could have a better conversation with my hat. Do you never speak? . . . Ah, the creature shakes its head. And is the creature happy to be dumb? ... It does not know. And where does the creature live? . . . Behold! It points . . . Here? Here! Is Dyer your father?'

  Before James can move his head to answer, the stranger takes the boy's face between his hands, studies it like a portrait. His hands smell of tobacco juice. He laughs, more like a bark than laughter, then whispers, Til be . . . I'll be . . .'

  From along the road comes a burst of voices. It is the wedding cart, freshly daubed with yellow paint, turning out of Church Lane with Jenny Scurl and Bob Ketch and a half-dozen of the wedding party on board, singing and shouting and passing the bottle.

  The stranger looks a moment longer at the boy, then hurries off towards the orchard, the sole of one of his shoes flapping as he goes.

  James runs into the house. The women are sweating in the kitchen. He goes upstairs unnoticed. Sarah, Liza and Charles have long since changed. Their common clothes lie sprawled upon the beds. Now that they are older the room is divided by a curtain. James fingers the wool of his sisters' dresses, and the wooden combs where strands of Sarah's red-gold hair catch the light. She is the

  beautiful one. Half the village are enamoured of her, her name carved into the bark of a dozen trees, and though Joshua talks loudly of his blunderbuss, its cargo of rusty nails, they still come, men and boys, misty with lust.

  Liza also has admirers, but treats them so fiercely most go off in search of easier conquests and softer hearts. In truth, her affections are already spoken for, split like a divining-rod between her father and her youngest brother.

  James undresses, pulls on a pair of leather breeches and a linen shirt. He studies himself in the mirror. He is tall for his age, fineboned, his skin slightly burnished by the sun. Such an enigmatic look; such a silent, knowing face. There are moments when he thinks the face will speak to him and tell him secrets, remarkable secrets. He looks until he is dizzy.

  On the stairs he hears the patter and stamp of wooden soles, then Jenny Scurl and his mother, laughing and chiding each other. He goes on to the narrow landing. Jenny Scurl's face is round and pale as a sliced apple. She has already drunk a good deal, and the sight of the boy seems to mulch something in her heart. She bends down and kisses him fatly on the cheek. Elizabeth says: 'Go out now, Jem.'

  In the orchard, the noises of the wedding party are already unnaturally loud. The guests sit at a long, white-clothed table, feeding themselves upon Joshua Dyer's food and drink. Joshua, squeezed in the coat he wore at his own wedding, sits beside the Widow Scurl, a threadlike, nervous woman in a large, unsuccessful hat, the brim of which strikes the parson's nose each time she turns to talk with him. The parson barely notices. He is sweating and telling a story no one can be bothered to hsten to. An empty bottle of port glints in the grass behind him. Next to the parson sits Widow Dyer, a dense and disapproving cloud. Beside her is Bob Ketch, and his sister Amelda, the girl looking at something

  the stranger is showing her in the palm of his hand, and nodding her hot, pretty head as he talks. Beneath the table is a dog, black, thick-necked, scavenging from foot to foot.

  The harvest looks like being fair again. Joshua, revelling in his part as stand-in for Jenny s sea-deceased father, has seen to it that the table is v^ell spread with dishes. Seeing James, he calls him over and in an awkward movement drags him on to his lap. The bride totters to her seat, a large grin adrift in her face. Widow Scurl flashes her gums, tears a piece of white meat from the chicken and pushes it between the boy's lips. He keeps it there, on his tongue, until Joshua picks up the knife to carve. Then he slides from the farmer's lap, sidles beyond the nearest trees and spits the meat into the grass.

  He weaves between the avenues of fruit trees, comes by and by to an old cherry tree, the tallest tree in the orchard, and taking off his coat he circles the trunk until he finds a knot in the bark to serve as a foothold. He climbs, smudging his shirt-front with lichen as he stretches up for the lowest branch, then swinging his legs, rotating his body until he is topside of the branch like a drowsy cat. He sits up, finds another branch within easy reach and sees how he may go from one to another as if ascending a spiral staircase. Birds, thieving the cherries, go off like small explosions as he climbs towards them. Now and then he pauses in the hot shade to eat the fruit, letting the stones fall from his mouth to bounce off the branches below. Watching them fall, he sees a black shape moving at the base of the tree. The animal catches sight of him in the same moment, raises its snout and gazes up at him longingly. James resumes his climb, more carefully now as he feels the branches bow beneath him.. The foliage thins, and then, among a tangle of delicate wood, as though he has hatched from a jade egg, his head is in the sky and he is breathing the tangy breeze and narrowing his eyes against the sun.

  He eases himself round, takes his bearings. The hill-fort.

  Moody's farm, the church tower, the moor. Round and round until he comes to the white flash of the table where most of the guests are still eating, though a small group has gathered about Amelda Ketch, who has her neckerchief unpinned and is being fanned by Elizabeth. Joshua and the parson knock their mugs together, shout Tory toasts. Sarah and Charles are teasing the dog, running
in and out of the trees with the dog loping determinedly after them. A voice calls for dancing, and the old man, the same who played by the river in the great freeze, crooked as a root, pulls a long quavering note from his fiddle. The groom, the bride raucous in his arms, leads out the dancers. Soon, the others join; circling, ducking, hopping, spinning. Even the Widow Scurl, who moves over the grass like a small, mysteriously propelled sofa.

  The music ends and the dancers, breathless, are applauding themselves and preparing for the next dance, when Liza, shading her eyes, points and calls to Elizabeth who calls to Joshua who, after struggling to see, sees and shouts out: 'Down from there, James. Where's your sense, boy!'

  James, figuring himself to be immensely high, immensely distant, finds it hard to believe they are pointing at him, waving too, sharp downward movements of their hands as though droving the air. He steps higher, to the V of two fragile branches. Their waving is more insistent. Joshua shouts like a distant cannon. James leans from the tree. The shouting stops. Even their hands freeze in front of them. He feels as if, stepping out, he will have no difficulty in flying. He stretches out his arms, gazes into the far ends of the afternoon. His weight passes a line, fine as a human hair, and then he is flying, amazingly fast into the green sky, and then nothing, nothing but the memory of flight, faint and fading, and the iron taste of blood in his mouth.

  'How be 'ee, Jem?'

  The entire party has crowded into the Uttle room by the hall where Widow Dyer lay through her sickness. The room still smells of her and the medicines James carried over from Madderditch. Amos Gate, big as a cloud, leans over the injured boy, frowns at his leg. The foot hangs slack like a loose stocking; one could pull it off with bare hands. Amos turns, addresses the company: 'All you bodies wi'out business here best shog. Baint a dog fight.'