“Goin’ as far as Enfield,” the farmer says over his shoulder as the wagon lurches forward. “You’re welcome to come along.”
♦ ♦ ♦
A lord in London — some distant, congenitally privileged, bewigged and besilked Member of the House, Knight of the Garter and hanger-on at White’s Gaming Club — is responsible for the meticulously arranged gardens, stands of naked black trees and cultivated fields that engulf Nahum Fribble’s one-room cottage. Nahum is merely a tenant. He owns two goats, a pig, a dozen hens and an ox. His wife is dead. She got into bed one night muttering something about a fat man sitting on her chest. In the morning there was blood on the pillow. Nahum buried her out back but the overseer made him dig her up and buy a plot for her in the parish cemetery. Ever since, Nahum has raised the boys on his own.
“Must be hard,” says Ned over a cup of mulled wine. The windows are black. Boyles is snoring in front of the fireplace, a dog on either side of him. The boys are in bed.
“Hard? That’s what Jesus must have thought when he was nailed to the cross and they stuck that spear in his side.” Nahum is standing over a tub of water, his big hands scraping at the wooden supper plates. The firelight washes his features clean, lines and furrows softened, his face as smooth and timeless as a portrait in a darkened gallery.
“I mean raising the kids with no woman around.”
The farmer turns to look Ned in the eye. “There’s a father in Heaven that looks after Nahum Pribble, and Nahum Pribble is humbly thankful that he’s been blessed to be a father on earth to look after them two boys there.”
Ned glances over at the frame bed, the two forms in the shadows, the slow pacific rise and fall of the coverlet.
“That’s the whole of my life,” the farmer says, his voice so soft Ned can barely hear it over the hiss of the flames.
♦ ♦ ♦
The next morning they’re back on the road, provisioned with bread and cheese, a handful of dried apples and a jug of beer. Despite lowering skies, a stiff wind and temperatures in the teens, Ned is feeling optimistic. The farmer’s hospitality has touched him, made him feel for the first time in years that the universe is not uniformly and actively malignant, that the milk of human kindness hasn’t necessarily soured, that hope is in the cards though the deck may be stacked against you. He actually finds himself whistling — an air for the clarinet Barrenboyne had taught him years ago — as he ambles up the rutted road like a landowner out for a stroll.
Though Hertford is less than ten miles off, Boyles is so worked up about the beer he convinces Ned to stop and have a nip before they’ve passed the first milestone. Ned manages to get a fire going in the lee of a stone wall, and they have a chilly picnic of it, toasting the bread and cheese, burning the apples and washing the whole thing down with thirsty gulps of beer. The remainder of the journey is comfortless, a grim silent plodding against the wind, the road deserted, neither cottage nor inn in sight. By late afternoon they reach the outskirts of Hertford, and are summarily turned away from the first three cottages they approach. So much for the milk of human kindness.
“What’ll we do now, Neddy?” Boyles stutters, hunched and trembling, blue in the face. The wind rattles the trees with a sound of bone on bone.
Ned is blowing into his fist, hugging himself, dancing. “Hit the next place,” he puffs, “beg them to let us stand by the fire a minute and then point us the way to the Brunches’.”
The next place is set back from the road in a grove of maple and yew.
Numbed, they fight their way through thorns and nettles, over fallen trees and through the slush of a fetid stream, the thin coil of chimney smoke guiding their way, the first glimmerings of desperation pricking at fingers and toes. But when they come upon the house itself, they’re stopped cold.
The place is nothing more than a hovel, linked by means of a crumbling umbilical passage to an even smaller hovel in back. It looks like a Druid burial mound, or a reconverted sheepcote dating from the reign of William the Conqueror. There are no windows, stones have dropped from the walls and left gaps like missing teeth, the thatch of the roof is overgrown with weed, moss, brambles, saplings four or five feet high. “No use in wastin’ your breath,” Boyles sighs. “Nobody’s lived here in a hunnert years.”
But there it is, incontrovertible, the thin steady stream of smoke spinning from the chimney.
Ned goes down on his knees in the frozen muck and taps at the door, a tale of want and woe and sore distress on his lips, the story of how he and Boyles, on their way to their father’s funeral in Cambridge — a wealthy man, their father, porcelain merchant, worth nearly two hundred thousand pounds at his death — were set upon by highwaymen, stripped of everything they owned and forced at gunpoint to change clothes with the heartless blackguards, and how they’d been wandering ever since, penniless, near dead with the cold and hunger, determinedly making their way to that distant seat of learning where a fat dazzling fortune awaits them. .
As it turns out, there’s no need for pretty speeches. The door wrenches back at the first tap, and before he can utter a word a wild shriek cauterizes the air and a wizened old crone is ushering them in the door. “Eeeeeeeeeee! Travelers, is it? Cold and ‘ungry? Robbed on the road, no doubt? Well come on in and warm yerselfs round Mother’s fire, come on now, don’t be shy.”
She is hunched low to the ground with some progressive deformity of the spine, this old woman, her squamate hands twisted into claws, the eyes keen as talons in a face as ravaged as the dimmest memories of the past. Boyles nearly knocks her flat in his rush to get at the fire, but Ned hangs back, alarmed, until she reaches out a withered claw and pulls him through the doorway.
Inside, it’s a cave. Stone walls, earthen floor, a darkness meliorated only by the primeval Light of the fire. Ned nearly trips over a shadow stretched across the floor, his heart racing like a quick little animal in a cage, something wrong, something dead wrong, all his senses strung to a pitch and that burned-once, twice-cautious voice gibbering in his head, look out, look out. He jerks back and the shadow snorts, rises from the dirt and materializes into a drooping, flap-eared sow.
“ ‘Ere!” shrieks the old woman, her voice as cracked and mad as a tortured violin, “come and warm yer bones. Eeeeeeeeeee!” Suddenly she wheels around on Boyles. “You, flattop—’ow ‘bout a snootful o’ nippitatum, eh? Eh?”
She doesn’t have to ask twice. Boyles has the jug to his mouth before she can lift it from the shelf, smacking his lips and gasping, running on with some nonsense about elixir of the gods, his lank legs thrust into the fire, his face red as an innkeeper’s.
“And you, peachfuzz?”
Ned is backed up against the hearth, tense as a cat, half expecting to blink twice and discover a string of murdered children hanging from the ceiling or some nasty stinging thing coiled in the shadows. The sow shakes its ears and gives him a long slow look of utter disdain before collapsing in the corner, the scent of it hot in his nostrils, a fetor of decay and excrement about the place, a stink of life lived at the root and mired in every odious little event of the body. “No,” he says, rubbing his hands. “No, we’ve really got to be going. . just stopped to ask the way to Squire Trelawney’s place—”
“Ah,” the old woman breathes, “friends o’ the Squire’s, are ye?”
Ned makes the mistake of nodding yes.
“Eeeeeeeeeee!” she caterwauls. “Well that’s a good one, the divil and ‘is dam it is. I took ye to be no-account, disreputable, vagabond, derelict bums, I did. . but friends o’ the Squire’s, now that’s a different story, yes,” she cackles, “another story altogether.” And then she cups her hands to her mouth and shouts down the passageway in a voice as raw and poisonous as a dish of toadstools: “Boy! Hallo, boy! Get yer lazy arse out ‘ere and meet the fine gennelmens wot’s come a-callin’.”