Chapter 7
When the wedding was over, the bride truly wed, they forewent their horses and walked to the hall hand in hand, arm in arm, through the mud and the pigs and the waving and cheers, and they dined. How they dined! From their lord and his lady right down to the children of churls. For they’d set up the trestles right down the length of the hall and supplied it with porkling, blood pudding, seethed goats in their fat. And venison, too! No one asked who had killed it, or where. It was best not to know, though they all looked at Ralph, who just grinned. (The royal hunting privilege of the Cranborne Chase was the width of the river away.)
There were wheat cakes for gentry, and dark bread preferred by the commoner sort, and with honey comb, too. Though the season was early the bee-ward had burned out two hollow-log skeps. They had ale by the tun you might drown in, and clover-fed mead by the jug that might turn a man’s head with but barely a cup—it was mead put the fight into Norsemen, they say, and why should Viviana’s gracious hall not be Valhalla, too? Tomorrow might ring in a lingering death, growling hunger, the pox or the cold, but by God and Our Saviour, they’d eat well today!
“When,” Bartholomew asked his bride some hours later, “shall we withdraw?” He was hard-pressed to restrain his enthusiasm.
Viviana favoured her lord with the sweetest of smiles, returning, “When one in three is asleep on the floor.”
He took her hand. “And I thought Okford and its lady so refined.”
“Well, the lady tries, from time to time, but Okford…”
“Shoeless on the river bank, just like old times?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “like old times.”
They had known each other from early childhood, these two, developing the sort of genderless relationship that siblings share. His family held land not far away. His branch of the Turbervilles and the de Eskellings grew and aged and changed as neighbours, in parallel. In the final analysis it was she who had sought out Bart to wed. But that we know.
There were toasts to the health of the bride, and the health of her man, and the health of the king, and the health of the least in this company, too. Then speeches, while speakers were sober enough they could stand; and then dancing, with pipes, tabor, viol, and a base viol as well. But how could they dance when they hardly could stand?
Quoth Mary to her master, “On yr feet, Old John!”
“Garn wi’ thee!”
“You do need to shift yr feet, avorn you d’ turn as solid as blood pudding!”
Old John allowed himself to be hauled off the bench, Mary pulling, Ralph pushing him behind.
“Wha’ be goin’ to do wi’ un?” called a ploughman.
“Ee be goin’ to dance wi’ I.”
The beating of the tabors took them, stomping round with others, Old John standing all but still, a straggly ancient Terra with his young wife Mary as his Sun revolving in her orbit all around.
“Mary’s trained bear!” some man among the crowd called out. Old John made a mental note to break a head. Round and round and round, till he were giddy as a broody hen, and when he knew at last that he must fall, Mary pushed the old man back against one of the roof posts, pushed herself against him, breathless. “That were nice, John,” she told him, propping him against the column, “Do ’ee bide here whilst I go fetch a pot of ale.”
Thus the afternoon passed to evening, and evening wore on till folk raised a great stir, standing and clapping, for now was the moment the bride and her husband chose to withdraw. Hoots, whistles and cheers rattled rafters, frighting even sparrows from the thatch. Viviana blew kisses to her people, Bartholemew Turberville waved, holding up her hand in his. Turning, they climbed three steps to the solar, closed the door behind them, and were gone.
But the tabors and the pipes never stopped, nay, the pipers redoubled their efforts by way of compensation, for the clamour of voices had died for a heartbeat or so while the more thoughtful among them contemplated the consequences of this change that shook their world.
The company sat down eventually, exulting in the ale and fire and food and fellowship again.
But there were two who sat more slowly than the rest, for both, separately, felt grievous loss. It was in that moment that they looked around the hall for reassurance, finding none of it. Their world was different now: how deep they felt the sting, the loss of affection, their lost oneness—no matter it could never be fully requited—with the bride now gone. Moreover, these two felt keenly their apparent loss of station in a small, closed world. It was then that their eyes met across the hall, each in that instant recognising intuitively the hurt the other felt.
Some heartbeats must have passed while dancers danced, a harper harped, and tabors thumped a greater heartbeat out, the rhythm of community, felt, loved, despaired; while clumping feet and ale-ripe voices stamped, and turned, and shouted, and the drinkers drank.
It was then that the woman of these two lowered her eyes, and sat, to wonder at the unfamiliar newness of a world she’d lived in all her years. The man stayed on his feet, studied her unobtrusively awhile, surveyed the crowd at board, absorbed the sights and sounds of music and the dance, rejecting it—but taking his shy courage in his throat he crossed the hall.
“Ellie,” he asked, bending to shout through the tumult and her wimple to her ear, “Would you like to dance?”
Staggered by his very approach, she stammered, “I shouldn’t rightly know how, Tom,” remaining fixed upon her bench, her eyes cast down upon the board, afraid of losing face, afraid of men.
“Ellie, love, do ’ee get off yr girt ass!” It was Cathrine speaking, shouting across the board, Cathrine the scullion, toothless and forty, but bold. “Bain’t a man among ’em like Long Tom.”
Ellie felt a blush that even in red firelight must light the hall, a blush to make the whitest wimple burn. But still she sat.
Cathrine again: “Take ’un to the cattle-byre. He do know where, right enough. He had the Mistress there oft-times enow!”
Hoots and whistles from the few of them as were close enough to hear through the din. At Tom’s expense. The man stood mortified, his great frame still bent double, stooped to the level of Ellie’s ear.
It was furious embarrassment that got her to her feet; escape from Cathrine’s lewdness that she sought. But whatever it took, Ellie offered Tom her hand and rose, graceful as a duchess, from her bench. And where he led her then, the both of them embarrassed into silence, was not into the barn, but to the space where trestles had been cleared and folk were dancing, stirring dust from ash and rushes, hand in hand, and round and round, tabors thumping, hearts a-racing, pipers squeaking like stuck pigs, their efforts lost to shouts of men and women squealing, bobbing up and down like heretics a-burning in a fire.
Tom and Ellie stood and faced each other, holding hands, their eyes aflame from firelight, the only static objects in this orbiting creation.
“Tom,” she managed, “I don’t know how.”
“Can’t rightly say as I d’know myself. But if Old John can hop around, reckon us can follow.”
So there they were, the ascetic bailiff and his nearly-nun, modesty amidst debauch, the pair of them but newly cut adrift and lonely in a crowded, noisy world; hopping awkwardly around like a goodwife’s tethered chickens, hardly daring find each other’s eyes for fear to feel the folly on it and the shame.
How many minutes, hours passed, with Bart and Viviana wrestling to a single flesh a-bed behind the world-excluding oaken door? And on this side, the stamping feet, the ceaseless pounding rhythm of the drums, of logs thrown in the fire and candles on their iron spikes and tallow-lamps set up on brackets guttering black smoke as flames fled human breath and movement. In the sweating heat the circle of the dancers grew much smaller, tighter, drunker, some folk dropping out to drink, to piss outdoor or vomit and return to clap and whistle, calling out encouragement to this strangely mismatched couple hoofing it around the room, their eyes for nothing but each other, and they might be dancing s
ilently by moonlight in a fairy-ring on Okford Hill for all they cared.
So the evening passed to night, and night to time without tomorrows, for what they found together here they couldn’t count, nor measure, not dispel. Nor wanted to.
At Viviana’s wedding.
Endnotes
ref_1 To ho over, as an angel hovers over one. Hence the modern to hover, vb.
ref_2 Source: the tenth century Exeter Book. Exeter Cathedral’s first bishop, Leofric, gave the book to the cathedral’s library.