To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek
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IT WAS THE first Sunday since the field was mown, the best time for bowmen, when the weather was good but they wouldn’t lose time looking for untrue arrows in the long grass. Four came from church to shoot, and chid each other as they went.
Those days, with Calais won for England, high folk lacked Lord Berkeley that he ne met his due of fresh bowmen to man the walls of the town so the French ne take it again. As the high folk stirred Berkeley, so he stirred his under-lords, and so Sir Guy stirred us for a bowman to join Hayne Attenoke’s Gloucestershire score when it went by Outen Green, Calais-bound.
Will Quate was our best with bow, but he was to wed Ness Muchbrook. Some gnof had got her with child, and she went to Santiago de Compostela with her mother, and came back a fortnight after, not great no more, with a likeness of St Margaret stamped on a littlewhat of tin. We ne knew how long it took to wend to Spain and back, but we believed it to be further. Maybe, the godsibs said, she ne fared to Spain. Maybe she went to see a woman in Bristol who knew how to make the unborn never-born.
Some of us reckoned Will Quate the sire of the get, as we’d seen them hop together at other folk’s weddings, but most of us reckoned it was Laurence Haket, Sir Guy’s kinsman, who was his guest when the get was gotten.
Anywise, Will and Ness were betrothed, and besides, the greater deal of us ne deemed Will a free man, so us thought Cockle, the miller’s son, was the man for Calais. He was free and full barst to go, to wear the iron cap and drink wine and know the French maids. When he told his father he was going, his father called him a dote and smote him on the ear. But now Cockle’d shifted his mood. He’d met a pedder of Bath who told him the qualm was right fell in France, and all the French were in hell anywise, without his help. So he wouldn’t go. And when he told his father, his father called him a canker and smote his other ear.
Sim, the master-bowman, who lost an eye to one of Despenser’s churls when we weren’t mostly born, said Cockle was a wantwit.
‘I’m a free man,’ said Cockle. ‘I’ll live as it likes me.’
‘It needs find a bowman by Michaelmas, and I’m too old,’ said Sim.
‘I’d go,’ said Whichday Wat, ‘only my wife’s got great, and the youngest is sick, and the ox is lame.’
They looked at Will.
‘He mayn’t go,’ said Cockle. ‘He’s not free. He’s bound to the manor.’
They heard a stir in the middle of town, over by the green. The priest flew out of the church in his mass-gear and ran toward the hooting, followed by his altar boys. The bowmen went to see, out-take Will, who bode in the field and shet an arrow at the mark.
THE MARK WAS a gin of straw and wattle meant to be in the likeness of a French knight, and the arrowhead blunt. But when the arrow struck the mark a keen cry of sore seemed to come of it, and a long, low moan. Will looked round and saw Hab on his haunches in the shade of the yew tree. Hab dropped his hand off his mouth and laughed. ‘Mind when I made Bob Woodyer think his cow could speak, and the cow told him she was the angel Gabriel, and God had hidden a golden crock in her arse?’ he said.
‘And Bob went about all week beshitten to the armpit,’ said Will.
Hab held the garlicle out, the stalk thick and right and the cloves red and full.
Will unstrung his bow, set it against the tree and sat by Hab. He took the garlicle, ran a thumbnail down the garlic sack and slote the rind. He bade Hab put out his hand and pushed the cloves into it. He told seven, white and clean. Hab did six in his bag and one in his mouth. He chewed and said: ‘I lack sweet meat to clean my breath.’
‘There’s none,’ said Will.
‘There is, would you give it me. A kiss.’
Will laughed and shook his head.
‘I showed you where the white owl nested,’ said Hab. ‘You helped me when they’d tie me to a post and throw sticks at me like to a Shrovetide cock.’
‘We aren’t little knaves no more,’ said Will. ‘Find a maid to kiss. She’ll share your bed and cook for you.’
‘If we’re all to die ere Martinmas, as the priest says, those as have sins to sin must sin them soon.’
‘The priest will say aught to sell candles.’
‘Am I not dear to you?’
‘You aren’t so dear to me as you’d like, not nearly.’
Hab narrowed his eyes. ‘I saw you kiss Whichday,’ he said.
‘I kissed him on the cheek when he’d been to Tewkesbury. I hadn’t seen him a week.’
‘So then you may.’
‘When I meet a friend I lack.’
‘My old friend!’ said Hab. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long. Kiss me!’ He dabbed at Will’s mouth with his. Will laughed, curled up like a hedgehog and trendled himself away.
Hab thrust out his underlip. ‘I wouldn’t that you leave our town, and I left alone,’ he said. ‘I’d swim with you again, and dry in the sun with you, my head on your chest.’
‘That’s gone.’
Hab mirthed again. ‘It needs do better than Ness,’ he said. ‘Her eyes aren’t in a right line, and her neb’s whirled like to the full moon. Would you not take me, take my sister.’
‘You haven’t no sister.’
‘I have a sister, and the sight of you gladdens her. Her name is Madlen, and she’d leave town with you and not come again, even to France.’
‘You haven’t no sister,’ said Will again. ‘You haven’t no kin. You bide alone with Enker in the wood.’
‘Madlen’s fair like May morning, and you’ll meet her, and she’ll prove your bowmanship.’
Will said he wouldn’t talk to Hab no more. He left him in the churchyard and went to the green.
THE STIR WAS made by two friars of Gloucester. One drove a cart and the other banged a drum. The priest came to fight them, for none but he had the right to shrive the folk of Outen Green, and he’d rather die than see Christ’s love sold cheap, or for a halfpenny less than he sold it, anywise.
But the friars, unwashed and deep yet bright of eye, came to sell other than forgiveness. Their cart was heaped with wood and tin likenesses of our Clean Mother. They showed us how to fill a likeness with holy water that the water seep from holes in her eyes, and she weep two days on our threshold till spent, and how, were a candle put in the hole in her womb, the tears would shine as jewels to shield us of night-death, and how it was our last hope to get a likeness, for the friars wouldn’t come again. They’d sworn to bide in a hermitry in the Malverns, eating not but dry bread while they prayed to God to forgive mankind. The fee was a bare sixpence, eleven pence for two, and any that took three likenesses, the friars said, might pay but a penny for the third.
Most folk, out-take Nack, reckoned the qualm was a tale the priests wrought up to wring out our silver. We ne thought us Christ so stern as to slay us by sickness when he took so many in the great hunger thirty winter before. But we wouldn’t that the priest weened we unworthed him, so we bought likenesses.
The friars said they had an errand from Hayne Attenoke in Gloucester. Hayne bade them tell town and manor his score of bowmen would fare by Outen Green early on Tuesday, the day after next, and they looked to meet their new man on the Miserden road that same afternoon.
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