The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (33 page)

'There's a side to it that is not ridiculous, my lady,' Hadstock said. 'It's a free country...nobody minds what they do except in so far as it involves...It's you I mind for, my lady.'

'Well, of course,' she said, making an effort to be reasonable,

'I am not much involved. Richard would never ...' She broke off as she realised she had referred in this informal way to Richard. 'And we have no proof, have we?' she went on hastily.

'And if we had there's very little we could do.' Hadstock's voice was suddenly heavy. 'At least, you, my lady...Would it not be possible for you to make a prolonged visit somewhere until this has blown over, whatever it is?'

He looked so troubled that she said, more brightly: 'Why, yes, of course, I could always do that. But I think I have been making a fuss about nothing. It's strange how bothersome, puzzling things grow less when one talks them over, isn't it? I am so glad I can talk to you.'

'Well, I'm there to be talked to, or called upon, if ever there is anything I can do. In fact I'm entirely at your service, my lady.' He brought out the last sentence with a mocking imitation of a fine gentleman's formal utterance of the phrase.

'I know. And I'm very grateful,' Linda said.

Once again Matt Ashpole had been foresighted. So far all his plans and schemes had gone wrong, but it was difficult to see what could go wrong with this one. He'd obtained several old pine trees and a two-handed saw; and having worked at it with his wife and those of his children still at home just long enough to demonstrate the management of the tool, he had set them to saw five-foot lengths and then split them into fencing stakes. There'd been a slight difficulty with Mrs Ashpole, who protested that it was not woman's work.

'Don't be a dunderhead,' Matt said. 'Stand to reason, don't it, I can't stand here a-sawing--that is unless you'd care to take owd Gyp and knock up a living for us. We gotta eat till them stakes are ready and sold.' Mrs Ashpole, who was as fond of her food as any woman, saw the force of that argument and later used it herself. As soon as Matt had gone off in the cart she abandoned her end of the saw, saying, 'Now you boys get on. Stand to reason I can't stand here a-sawing--that is unless one of you'd care to make a stew. We gotta eat!' She did more cooking in the next few weeks than she had done in the previous two years. She also kept the boys at work by the simple expedient of setting so much work to be done before food was served. The pile of stakes grew steadily. There would soon be a brisk demand for them. The commissioners had borne in mind the European situation. England and France were at war, the island kingdom must feed itself or go hungry; not even the enclosure of Clevely must be allowed to reduce, by one grain, the year's harvest. A greater yield next year must be arranged for in every possible way. So they had ruled that the Waste should be fenced by the end of May-- which would give its new owners a chance to plough it if they intended to try cultivation, or to gather a hay crop; and Old Tom and Layer were to be fenced by the end of November. Any land remaining unfenced by that date was forfeited. As Mr Sawston truly said, 'Any man who can't afford to fence after harvest must be a very inefficient farmer and should not have land at all.'

By the end of May the fences were up, and on some claims the ploughs were out. The desperate situation which Matt had foreseen, when the Waste Cottages lay landless between the fence and the highroad, had come about. There were other Waste-dwellers, more blindly optimistic, or too stupidly incredulous to be taken by surprise.

Mrs Palfrey was one of these. Spitty, her husband, was no good; he was frail in body and feeble in mind, the last to get a job when seasonal labour was in demand, the first to lose it. Mrs Palfrey had kept food in the many mouths of her large family by growing potatoes, rearing a pig on the potato peelings, and keeping a few geese and hens. Nine pregnancies and several miscarriages had not interfered with her simple yearly routine. She had always begun to plant her potatoes on Good Friday; and on that date, in 1797, she planted them as usual, despite the warnings of more far-sighted persons who told her she would never gather the crop. All through her married life she had done her best, and that included planting potatoes; her dim mind could not visualise a future which did not include a potato crop.

Three weeks later she stood by the brand-new fence which stood within an arm's length of her hovel door and watched the ploughshare turn out the potatoes--'All sprouted beautiful,' as she said. She shed no tears, for she had learned the futility of them in the first four years of her life; she stood and watched with an expression of dumb-animal hopelessness on her face and then went in and shut the door. She had four geese and six hens in the precarious shelter of Matt Juby's half-acre; she had enough potatoes to last until late July. 'There'll be no taters this year; we can't live athout taters,' she said to herself, over and over again. Two more of the children must get work: Emmeline, aged nine, who, like Spitty, was not quite bright; and Tommy, seven. And she herself must leave the younger ones to Spitty's care and go Out to work. In June she made hay at Wood Farm and earned eight shillings; in July she picked stones from a section of the newly ploughed Waste--twopence a bushel they paid her and she earned fifteen shillings. The one hundred and seventy bushels of stones, did, as she said, 'drag you down a bit'; but by August she knew that the down-dragging was not all due to the stones. She was pregnant again. Soon she would be unemployable, since lithe active women were ten a penny. In the old days she could go out and dig a few potatoes and catch her breath and lean on the spade, her own woman, on her own plot; now there'd be nothing for it but to starve or go on the parish I Nobody looking at her, gaunt, despairing, ragged, dirty creature as she was, would have credited her with any pride; yet she had been proud--proud of the fact that, though they had been hungry, and cold, and barefooted, they'd never yet been on the parish...

Matt Juby had enclosed his half-acre as soon as he had paid the one shilling and sixpence which was his share of the commissioners' expenses. He hacked into the thinnest possible slivers a wooden bedstead, the back door of his hovel, a ladder whose staves had rotted, and the body of an old wheelless wagon which Matt Ashpole bought for a shilling, dragged home and sold for half a crown. Each stake was linked to its neighbour by a piece of string, a length of knotted rag or some twisted reeds and rushes. 'That don't look a mucher; but there 'tis, thass fenced and nobody can say it ain't,' Matt Juby said. Few were in a position to criticise the fencing, for most people were begging Juby to house some bit of livestock or other, 'just till we know where we are.' Bert Sadler, the other fortunate legal possessor of a half-acre, had put it all down to potatoes immediately, foreseeing a time when potatoes would be in demand among his neighbours. Matt Juby 'took lodgers'. The rickety fence established his claim and satisfied--apparently--the letter of the law, but it did not act as a retaining wall, so anybody who struck a bargain with Juby and gained a lodging for his beast must do a bit of fencing on his own account. Mrs Palfrey's four geese and six hens were penned in a corner surrounded by a fence made of the stouter sticks of a faggot gathered by Emmeline and Tommy from the edge of Layer Wood; the thinner sticks were woven in and out and formed a kind of. basketwork. But geese eat a great deal of grass and very soon the patch was bare, and then, in the struggle for the possession of the boiled potato peelings and 'gleanings' which Mrs Palfrey brought for the hens, the geese always won; so the hens starved and laid no eggs and it was only reasonable to kill them off one by one while there was still flesh on their bones. Matt Juby had bargained for one goose as rent for the corner, so the Palfreys ate three geese and six scrawny hens in nine weeks and then settled down to an unvaried diet of potatoes again.

For a while Shad's donkey also lodged with Matt Juby, not fenced in, but attached to a stake which allowed him only a limited amount of grazing for which Shad paid sixpence a week. The donkey did not realise how privileged he was; he could only remember that when he was free on the Waste he stayed as near as possible to a certain back door which would open and a woman would come out and give him a crust or an apple core. Five times in four weeks he managed to grub up his stake, trot to the flimsy fence, lean against it and get to the door where three times he received a titbit and twice--complaints having been made--a clout on the rump. At the end of the month Juby said to Shad, 'Sixpence a week or no sixpence a week, I can't afford to house that donkey. Might hev my fence down one time when they come to inspect, and then where would I be?'

So then Shad's donkey went to join Matt Ashpole's horse, which was staked out on the narrow grass verge of the road which ran through Nettleton to Baildon. Juby-- on the whole ungratefully, considering that Matt had got him the wagon cheap--had refused to house the horse, so Matt had taken to the roadside, where the animal, eating steadily, was moving every day farther and farther from his owner's house. 'He'll end in Baildon, so any tune I want to drive in there I'll hetta walk there first to fetch him,' Matt said.

Amos had also been faced with the fencing problem. His twenty acres, that unaccountable gift from Heaven, did not lie near his house at all. About five acres of it consisted of the tip of the common pasture where it ran up to the Stone Bridge; the other fifteen acres were on the Waste just across the river. It was, all moist, soggy ground, the grass freely interspersed with clumps of reeds, and though it afforded pasture of a kind it was useless for cultivation. As an allotment made to someone who was not a proprietor and had no rights it did not carry with it the demand for a share of the expenses, but it must be fenced by the end of May and Amos had no money.

'S'pose I fence her for you, Amos,' Matt Ashpole said, grasping out to catch another slippery opportunity. 'S'pose I fence her real good and proper and for payment take pasture for my owd Hoss for--well, less say five year. End of that time do I still hev a Hoss I'll start to pay you sixpence a week--regular. Thass a fair offer, Amos.'

'A fair offer,' Amos repeated. 'But I dunno...that stick in my mind that God didn't bring all this about just to give your old horse a home. There's purpose behind all this and I've gotta puzzle it out.'

'What d'you mean, a purpose?'

'A purpose. The will of God. There I am, my chapel burnt down and twenty acres of land I can't afford to fence. That don't make sense to me; but there must be some purpose there, part of the eternal plan. Seems to me if I could sell the land, then I could build a chapel----'

'And who the hell'd buy that mucky marshy bit?' Matt demanded.

'There's Martha Bowyer, she can't afford to fence what her own man left; either he didn't hev no cash money or he hid it where she can't find it. Hers is good land and that ain't snapped up yet. Fact is, Amos, all about here, just this time, them thass got cash got land as well and folks like me that is land hungry is money hungry too. Nobody'd bid for your bit; you'd do best to let me fence it like I said.'

'Well, I 'on't refuse right away, Matt, but I gotta give God a chance. Heving all enternity, He move a bit slow; but I reckon everything'll work out afore the end of May...'

Apart from mentioning here and there that he had a bit of land for sale, Amos did not exert himself. He was busy; with haytime and harvest approaching there was a good deal of harness to repair, and the light evenings brought a spate of out-door meetings in villages which had no chapels. Amos attended as many of these as he could and preached at several, and when he thought about the land which must be fenced or forfeited before the end of May he reminded himself that the Lord would provide.

He was coming home from an outdoor meeting--a very well-attended and successful one--on a Saturday evening when May had only ten more days to run, when he overtook Danny Fuller, walking rather wearily towards Clevely.

The Fullers had left the village in March, that much Amos knew, so he was surprised to see Danny, so late, in the dusk, going that way. 'Hullo, Danny,' he said as he drew level. 'Oh, hullo, Amos,' Danny said. There was a slight constraint. It was, Danny remembered, almost a year ago this very day he'd set off with Damask to take the way through Layer Wood to Muchanger--it seemed hundreds of years, so much had happened--and he'd never really come face to face with Amos since. And Amos was remembering that Danny was a backslider--which was, in a way, worse than being a heathen. Heathen didn't know what they missed, backsliders did and scorned it. Still...raking in his mind, Amos turned out the fact that Danny had done the right thing by Sally Ashpole...and then Julie had said...and there was Damask...His mind shot away from the thought of Damask...all wrong--all wrong somehow; he'd argued and rebuked everytime he saw her...It was no use dwelling on your failures----

'How're you faring, Danny? I misremember for the moment where you went and set up.'

'We went to Baildon, in the Friargate. Handy for me. I got a job with Mr Thurlow Lamb, the auctioneer.'

'Did you so? And your mother? Well, I hope?'

'She's all right--in health, I mean. Still pining. Houses seem to mean a lot to women. She never got over being uprooted.'

That was the explanation that he and Sally gave one another for Mrs Fuller's decline in energy and efficiency. Danny could remember the time when, at every turn, his mother would mention, either as a threat or a promise, what she could do with a little shop in Baildon. Now she had the little shop and took no interest in it. Her cooking had deteriorated and every time the bell rang she'd say 'Oh, bother that bell' or 'You go, Sally.' And she was always harking back. 'Just about now that apple-tree is in full blow.'

'I reckon them lilacs smell sweet this morning.'

Danny thrust the uncomfortable thought away and said more briskly: 'You live on the Waste, Amos. Can you tell me--did Fred Clopton plough his piece or leave it for grass?'