As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann
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were wise to leave off your shoes. I fear mine are ruined,’ I said.
‘Dear brother, that is scarce a catastrophe here,’ Izzy replied. He found a basket of clean shirts and tossed one in my direction. ‘That’ll keep you decent until we can get back to our own chamber.’
‘Godfrey could have bidden Caro bring clothes down for us,’ said Zeb. ‘What are stewards for, if not to make others work?’
‘I would not have Caro see this,’ I said.
‘What, the three of us in our shirts?’ asked Zeb.
‘You tempt God by jesting,’ said Izzy. He limped over to the boy and stood a while looking at him. ‘Suppose it had been Patience? I would not be you in that case.’
Zeb started. ‘The Mistress doesn’t know, does she?’
‘No, but it is the first thing thought on if a lass be found drowned,’ Izzy replied.
Zeb considered. ‘But there were no signs – if I remarked nothing – if any man had the chance, that man was I—’ He broke off, his cheeks colouring.
Izzy crossed the room and took him by the shoulders. ‘They can cut them open and look inside.’
‘Are we in a madhouse? Cut what? Look at what?’ I cried.
The two of them turned exasperated faces upon me.
‘Ever the last to know,’ said Zeb. ‘So Caro has told you nothing?’
‘Our brother has been hard at work, Jacob,’ said Izzy. ‘Patience is with child.’
So that was the key to their mysterious talk: Patience with child by Zeb. The great secret, taken at its worth, was hardly astonishing – I had been watching Zeb and Patience dance the old dance for some time – yet I was riled at not having been told.
‘Two days and not in the pond. She is run away for sure,’ said Zeb. ‘But why, why now?’
‘Shame?’ I ventured – though to be sure, shame and Patience White were words scarce ever heard together, except when folk shook their heads and said she had none.
‘She would not have been shamed. Zeb agreed to marry her,’ said Izzy.
‘What!’ I cried. ‘Zeb, you’re the biggest fool living.’
‘I like her, Jacob,’ protested my brother.
‘Oh? And would you like her for a sister?’
Zeb was silenced. What he liked, I thought, was the place between her legs, for what else was there? We would be all of us better off without Patience. It was impossible any should miss her braying laugh; for myself, I had always found her an affliction. She was Caro’s fellow maidservant and a mare long since broken in, most likely by Peter, who worked alongside us and was roughly of an age with Zeb. Patience and Peter, now there was a match: loud, foolish, neither of them able to read, neither caring to do so. I had a strong dislike to Peter’s countenance, which was both freckled and pimply and seemed to me unclean, yet I was obliged to admit that in many ways he showed himself not a bad-hearted lad, for he worked hard and was ready to lend and to share. I much preferred him to Patience, whose constant aim was to draw men in.
She had tried it once with me, when I was not yet twenty. Coming through the wicket gate with a basket of windfalls from the orchard, I found her in my way.
‘That’s a heavy load you’ve got,’ she said.
‘Move then,’ I told her. ‘Let me lay it down,’ for my shoulders were aching.
‘An excellent notion,’ Patience said, ‘to lay a thing down on the grass.’
She had never before fastened on me, and though I knew her even then for a whore I was slow to take her meaning. My coat was off for the heat, and Patience put her fingers on my arm.
‘You could give a lass a good squeeze, eh?’ She pressed my shoulder so that I felt her warm palm through my shirt. ‘I’m one that squeezes back. I wager you’ll like it.’
‘I wager I won’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve no call for the pox. Now let me through or you’ll feel my arm another way.’
For some time after that we did not speak, but servants must rub along somehow – they have enough to do coddling the whims of their masters – and besides, I think Izzy said something to soften her. Since then we had behaved together civilly, as our work required. Peter was come next, I was pretty sure, and had consoled her for Jacob; but she could never have engaged Zeb’s interest had there been a comelier woman in the house. There was Caro, of course; but Caro was mine.
Caro. Against Patience’s slovenly dress and coarse speech, my darling girl shone like virgin snow. Naturally, there were huffs and quarrels between the two.
‘She’s lewd as a midwife,’ Caro complained to me once. ‘Forever snuffling after us: does he do this, does he do that.’
But I was no Zeb. I treated Caro always with the respect which is due from a lover and never assumed the privileges of a husband. Thus I again thwarted Patience by my self-command.
Self-command was the unknown word to my brother, and could have put no brake on his doings. Foolish indulgence had ruined Zebedee. He was only four when Father died, and missed a guiding hand all the more in that his beauty tempted our mother to spoil him.
‘Zeb must go on with his lute,’ she announced, when it was clear we had scarce a hat between us. To be just, he played well, and looked well even when he played out of tune. We Cullen men are all like Sir Thomas Fairfax, dark-skinned to a fault, but the fault shows comely in Zeb because of his graceful make and his very brilliant eyes. I have seen women, even women of quality, look at him as if they lacked only the bread to make a meal of him there and then – and Zeb, not one whit abashed, return the look.
I lack his charm. Though I am like him in skin and hair, my face is altogether rougher and my eyes are grey. I am, however, the tallest man I know, and the strongest – stronger than Isaiah and Zeb put together. Not that Izzy has much strength to add to Zeb’s, for my elder brother came into the world twisted and never grew right afterwards. ‘Izzy gave me such a long, hard bringing to bed,’ my mother said more than once, ‘you may thank God that you were let to be born at all.’
Now Zeb was to go to Champains, as being the best rider and also the most personable of the menservants. I did not begrudge him the job, for I rode very ill and was generally sore all the next day. My own task was humbler, but not without its interest: to clean the boy’s body for his master to see it, and for the surgeon. This cleaning should rather he a woman’s work, but I was glad to do it for otherwise, Patience being gone, it would fall entirely upon Caro. In the chamber we dressed according to our allotted duty, Zeb taking a well-brushed cassock and some thick new breeches for riding, myself pulling on an old pair over a worn shirt.
‘Just wait, we will be suspected for this,’ Zeb said to me, combing out his hair. ‘You especially.’
‘Me?’
‘You quarrelled with him that night.’
‘I wouldn’t call it a quarrel,’ I protested. ‘We disagreed over his pamphlets, what of that?’
‘Jacob is right,’ said Izzy. ‘Hardly a drowning matter.’
Zeb ignored him. ‘It will put off your betrothal, Jacob.’
Izzy turned to me. ‘Take no notice. He wants only to tease, when he should be examining his accounts before God.’
‘What!’ Zeb was stung in his turn. ‘Patience isn’t dead, nor did I send her away. I heard her news kindly, sour though it was.’
‘So why would she leave?’ I pressed him.
He shrugged. ‘Another sweetheart?’
Izzy