The Mereward Stone

The Packman's Bolt

The curlew was crying over Greywether when Nell Storr came down off the moor with her apron full of rue, and afterward she would think that the bird had been trying, in the only speech it had, to tell her to turn back.

She did not turn back. She had no reason to. The evening was the soft grey-gold of early June, the rain not yet come though the west had been thickening all afternoon, and the moor lay open under it the way it always lay, careless of her, careless of everything, beautiful in the offhand way of a thing that does not know it is being looked at. The heather was not out yet; that was July's work. But the cotton-grass nodded its white heads down in the flushes, and the bog-myrtle was sharp and clean where her skirts had crushed it, and away east the long whaleback of Greywether went up into the murk with the curlew turning above it, bubbling its long falling call that broke at the end into that single wild note no other bird in England could make. Her mother said the curlew cried for rain. Her father said it cried because it was a curlew and could do nothing else. Nell thought, that evening, climbing down the rake with the wet herb cool against her arm, that it was only crying, and that the moor would have gone on exactly the same had there been no one on it to hear.

The rake she came down was one of the old grooves, the seamed scar of a lead-working that the long-dead miners had cut and the dead grass had half-healed, so that to walk it was to walk a wound a hundred years closed over. The whole moor was stitched with them. You could not go a quarter-mile in any direction out of Stannerdale without your foot finding the rake of someone who had dug there in your great-grandfather's time and was bones now under Whindale or under the church. The dale was poorer than it had been when the lead ran rich; there was still a deal of getting at the grooves and a deal of sheep on the tops, and between the two the parish kept itself alive and not much more. Nell had never been further from it than Gildersedge market, a day's walk south, the one time her father took her to choose buttons. She had been eleven. She had thought Gildersedge the largest place in the world.

Below her, in its fold under Howe Crag, the village laid itself out in the dusk, and the sight of it stopped her a moment on the rake the way it sometimes did, for no reason she could name. The single straggling street. The low thatched cottages crouched along the Cawdell Beck with their backs to the weather. The smoke of peat going up blue and straight from a dozen chimneys, for the wind had dropped, and the smell of it reached her even up here, that sweet earth-smell that was the smell of being home. She could pick out every roof and name who slept beneath it. The smithy at the near end, where Ned Tunnicliffe's fire still glowed and the ring of his hammer came up thin and far. The Sickle, Cicely Heald's alehouse, with the lamp already lit in the window and the low murmur of men in it after their day. The squat grey church on its knoll, older than anyone, its tower no higher than a good barn, holding the dead of the dale about its skirts. And there, halfway down, the long low front of her father's shop, where the only good window-glass in Stannerdale caught the last of the light, for a tailor must see to set his stitches.

She stood between them all, the way she always had. Her mother's craft was on her arm — the rue, and the betony and the wood-sage she had been after up the moor, the green physic of the dale, which Margaret Storr brewed and pounded and laid on and was sent for, day and night, when a child took croup or a ewe could not lamb or an old man's chest filled up in the back end of the year. And her father's craft was in her hands, for she was a seamstress, the best young needle in the parish her mother said, though her mother would, and she sat in the shop the long days and cut and pinned and stitched the homespun and the russet and the good broadcloth that Joseph Storr made into breeches and bodices and Sunday coats for folk who had one Sunday coat to last them their lives. Herb and thread. Her mother's hands and her father's. She had never thought it anything but luck, to have two trades to stand between.

She came down the last of the rake and through the gap in the wall, and there was Adam Crowther at the churchyard, finishing his course of stone.

He had his back to her, kneeling at the broken-down stretch of the churchyard wall where the frost had brought it down two winters since and the churchwardens had at last found the money to have it set up again. She watched him a moment before he knew she was there. He worked the way he always worked, without hurry and without a wasted motion, his big hands turning each stone over and over, weighing it, learning it, finding the one face of it that wanted to lie outward and the one edge that would lock against its neighbour, and then setting it down so true that it might have grown there. A drystone waller used no mortar; the wall stood by its own weight and its own cunning, every stone holding every other, and Adam said a wall built right would outlast a wall built with lime, for the lime cracked and the dry wall only settled. He had built half the new walls in the dale and mended the other half, and he could read a heap of fallen stone the way Nell could read a page, which was a thing not three other souls in Stannerdale could do.

"Tha'll have me wall down, standing over me like that," he said, without turning.

"I never said a word."

"Tha breathes loud." He set the stone, tapped it once with the flat of his hand, and looked round at her then, and his face did the thing it did when it found her in it, the slow ease of it, like a fist opening. He was three-and-twenty, broad in the shoulder from the lifting, brown from the weather, with a quiet to him that the loud lads of the dale took for slowness and Nell knew for the opposite. "Up the moor for thy mother?"

"Rue," she said, and showed him the apron. "And she'll want more of it before the month's out. There's the Marbury order coming, and half the dale wanting new gear for the wedding, and she says folk fall ill at a wedding worse than a funeral, for the drink."

"Aye, well." He turned back to the wall and laid the next stone, and she came and sat on the coping a little way along, where he had finished, and watched his hands. They had been going on like this since the spring before — not courting, not so anyone had said the word, but there was an understanding in it as plain as the wall, built stone on stone without any lime of promises, and standing all the firmer for it. He had spoken to her father in the back-end of last year. Her father had said wait, and see, and Adam had waited, and Nell had waited, and the thing between them had settled the way a good wall settles, into truth.

"Here," he said. "I set thee summat. In the wall."

"Set me what?"

He nodded down at the course below the one he was working, and she leaned and looked, and there in the grey gritstone, low, where you would never see it unless you knew, he had cut into the flat face of a single stone a curlew with its wings up and beneath it, small, two letters tangled together that she made out after a moment to be an N and an A. The marks were fresh, the pale insides of the cuts not yet weathered grey.

"So it's in the wall," he said, not looking at her, going on with his work as if it were nothing, which was how she knew it was not. "Long after we're both on the wrong side of yon church door. There's walls in this dale our great-grandfathers set, and the stones don't care whose name's on 'em, but they keep it all the same. I thought I'd give the moor summat to keep besides sheep."

Nell put her finger into the cut of the curlew's wing, and the stone was cold, and the evening was very quiet, and down the dale the curlew that had been crying over Greywether had stopped, or gone too far to hear.

"Adam Crowther," she said, and could not for a moment say anything else.

"Don't tell thy father. He'll have me mending it out."

"I'll tell him nowt." She took her finger out of the cut. "It's the best thing any soul ever gave me, and it cost thee nobbut a stone."

"The best things mostly do," said Adam, and set the next stone, and that was as near as either of them came, that June evening, to saying the thing aloud.

It was full dusk and the first fine rain just beginning to drift when the packman came up the road.

They heard him before they saw him — the dull clop of the lead horse, the small mournful clank of the bells on the strings behind, the man's voice low and weary, cursing and coaxing his beasts up the last of the rake into the village. Then he came out of the murk by the Sickle, a tall lean figure in a sodden riding-coat at the head of a string of six packhorses, their panniers humped and roped, their heads down against the wet, the whole train smelling of leather and horse and the road. A dog trotted at the man's heel and then was off, slipping under the churchyard wall and away across the dark pasture toward the moor on some errand of its own, where no gate let it through and no gate kept it out. Folk came to their doors at the sound. A packman was news, and news came seldom enough to Stannerdale; he carried the dale's wool out to the market towns and brought back the things the dale could not make, the salt and the iron and the sugar-loaf for a wedding, and once or twice a year a thing rich and strange ordered down from a city none of them would ever see.

"Storr," the man called, peering at the lit window of the shop. "Where's Joseph Storr's? I've gear for Storr, come up from London, and I'd be quit of it and under a roof, for I've ridden through worse weather today than I care to ride through again this side of Michaelmas."

"There," said Adam, and pointed with a wet stone, and went with him, and Nell went too, for the cloth was the shop's and the shop was half hers.

Her father came out into the road bareheaded, wiping his hands, and there was the small business of the unloading, the man easing down the long oilcloth-wrapped bundle from the lead horse's pannier as careful as if it were a coffin, for it had come a great way and cost a great deal. They carried it in between them out of the rain. And while Joseph found the candle and the packman stamped and dripped and warmed his hands at the shop fire, the talk went the way a traveller's talk goes, of the road and the weather and the prices, and then, lower, of the city the cloth had come from.

"You'll have heard," the packman said, "how it is, down London way."

"We hear nowt up here," said Joseph. "What's amiss with London?"

"The sickness." He said it the way a man says a thing he has said too many times and stopped quite believing, a wonder worn smooth. "The plague, master. It's in London worse than living memory. They die in thousands of a week — thousands, I tell you, more than there's souls in all this dale and ten dales beside. The carts go round of a night and the men cry bring out your dead, and the grass grows in the Exchange, they say, and the grand folk are all fled to the country and the poor left to it." He shook his head and held his red hands closer to the peat. "I had the cloth off a factor at Gildersedge that had it up from a London house — your fine stuff, master, your wedding stuff, none finer comes north — and glad he was to be shut of it and the money in his hand, for there's no trade like there was, with the city shut up so. But it's a long way off, London. A power of a long way. Nowt to do with the likes of us, up here at the back of the world." He looked round the warm low room, the candle, the cloth, the country faces. "You're well out of it, friends, and that's God's truth. You're well sealed away."

They gave him bread and a sup and a corner of the byre to sleep in, and thought no more of it. London was a word, like Rome, like the sea. None of them had seen it and none of them would. The sickness there was a thing that happened to other people in a place that was hardly a place at all, told by a wet man at a fire of a June evening, and gone with him up the road in the morning.

They ate late, all of them together, the way the Storrs ate of an evening when the day's work was folded away. Margaret had kept the pot warm — a thin mutton broth thick with barley and the last of the winter kale — and she ladled it round and was last to sit, as she always was. Joseph at the head, quiet and content with his great order safe under his roof. Bess, who was fifteen and thought herself older, with her colour up and her eyes going sidelong down the board to where Kit Fenton sat. Kit, the journeyman come up from the south at Lady Day, three-and-twenty days a-finding his feet in a dale that talked too broad for him to follow, sweet-faced and willing and laughing now at something Bess had said too low for the rest to catch. And little Sam, seven and full of the day, kneeling up on the bench to reach the bread until his mother put him down on it with one hand, telling them all how the smith had let him hold the bellows and how a packman's dog had crossed the beck without wetting its feet, which no one believed and Sam swore to. The candle burned. The rain found the thatch and settled to a steady soft drumming overhead. They were six about the board and whole, every one of them, and not a soul among them knew it for the last ordinary night their house would ever hold.

Afterward, while the rest went up, Nell and her father lingered a while in the shop over the new cloth, the way they did over any fine thing that came to them, which was seldom enough. The bolt lay on the long cutting-table under the candle. He had set his name to the packman's greasy ledger earlier by this same light, slow and careful, for he wrote a fair hand for a tailor and was proud of it; and the wax seal that had closed the wrapping lay broken on the boards, a fat blob of dark red stamped with the mark of a city merchant's house, a crest and letters that meant nothing to either of them, the print of a hand a four-day ride away. He turned back the oilcloth at one end to be sure of his goods, and the rain had got at it, for the wrapping was dark and damp the length of it on the underside, and a little water stood in the folds of the cloth where it lay against the table.

Nell looked at the cloth. It was the finest she had ever seen, even folded, even wet — a broadcloth of so deep and even a colour, a kind of rich brown going on red, that it drank the candlelight and gave back almost none, and the nap of it, when she set two fingers to the cut end, was as soft as the inside of a lamb's ear. It would make the Marbury bridegroom the proudest coat in three parishes. It would take cutting careful as cutting glass. And it had come up wet, which would not do, for damp cloth folded close took the spot and the mildew and lost its even colour, and a stain in such stuff would be a thing you could never put right and never pay for.

She laid her palm flat on the bolt the way you'd lay it on a fevered brow, and felt only that it was cold and wet through. "It'll spot, Father, if it's not dried," she said — the most ordinary sentence of her whole life — and went up to bed while the rain came on harder over the thatch.

Dry It by the Fire

By daylight the bolt was only cloth again, the finest Nell had ever touched, and she shook it out so the firelight ran along it like water. "Hang it open, Kit," she said. "By the fire. It'll dry sweet by morning and never show the rain."

Kit Fenton had it across both arms like a man carrying a sleeping child. He was new enough to the north to find the morning cold even in June, and he stood close to the hearth where her father had built the fire up high against the damp, and he turned the cloth to the light the way she'd shown him, so the nap lay all one way and shone. A grey, it was, the colour of a wood-pigeon's breast, with a hidden green in it where the light slid; broadcloth, milled close and shorn smooth, come up by packhorse the long road from the south. The best that had ever crossed the Storrs' threshold. She had not slept for thinking of it.

"It's a queer thing to fear rain," Kit said, "and hang it by the fire to mend it." But he hung it, on the long pole her father used for airing, two trestles drawn near the hearth and the cloth spread open between them with its selvedge down and the firelight running through. He smoothed it with the flat of his hand. He had good hands, Kit, for a tailor — long and clever and gentle, and they did not pluck or snatch at a seam the way some did. "There. Will that please her ladyship?"

"It's not for her ladyship. It's for Sir Roger's own back, the steward said, a suit of grey for the harvest sessions, and if it's well made there'll be more. Father says—" She stopped, because it sounded like boasting, and Margaret Storr had no patience with a boasting tongue. But it was true. Her father had said, with his thumbs in his belt and that small careful pride of his, that a good name made at Marbury Hall would feed them through ten winters. So she had wanted it perfect. That was all. She had wanted the cloth dry and the suit fine and the great folk pleased, and she had wanted it more than she had wanted her breakfast, and she said to the journeyman, dry it by the fire, the way her mother might say bruise the leaf to free the scent — a thing any sensible body would have said.

It would be a long while before she could think the words and not put her own hand over her mouth.

But there was no telling that morning. The fire drew the wet up out of the wool in a faint warm smell, lanolin and rain and the road, and the cloth steamed a little and then did not, and dried, and was beautiful.

—

They cut it three days after, when it was sweet and dry and folded soft as a cat. Her father did the cutting himself, with the long shears that had been his own father's, and he chalked the cloth and stood over it a long time before ever he set the blade, because broadcloth like that you got one cutting and no second, and a wrong line was a month's bread thrown in the beck. Nell held the cloth taut where he wanted it taut. Kit pinned. Bess threaded needles she had no leave to use yet and watched Kit's hands and laughed at everything he said, whether it was meant for laughing or no.

"Hold still, you," Joseph said, not unkindly, to none of them and all of them.

It was good work and they were good at it, and the shop was warm with the work. Out the open door the dale lay green and over-green, the moor above it purpling toward the heather's time, the becks loud with the wet spring behind them. Sheep on Greywether. The lead-grooves scarring the far slope like old wounds healed crooked. Somewhere up the street Ned Tunnicliffe's hammer went all morning, a heartbeat under everything, and the smell of his forge came down on the warm air with the smell of the midden and the may-blossom gone brown on the hedge. A good summer. Everyone said so. The hay would be heavy. There was a wedding set for the month's turn — Margery Hollins to the Whindale man, the banns called out twice already from the rector's new mouth — and half the dale meant to walk over for it, and Cicely Heald at the Sickle was brewing strong against the day. The whole valley leaned toward midsummer the way a field leans toward the light.

Nell sewed. She was the best hand in the shop and knew it without vanity, the way you know your own height; the seams went out from her needle straight and small and even as a hymn, and she could fell a hem in the half-dark by feel. Her stitches were her own small kingdom and she was happy in it. She let herself think, once or twice, of how it would be when it was her own wedding-clothes she cut — for she would marry Adam Crowther come another year, though nothing was said yet to anyone, and the saying of it sat warm and secret under her breastbone all that bright fortnight. She thought of Adam's hands too, that were not clever like Kit's but were sure, that could set a stone so true you could not find the join with a wet finger. She thought of him more than she sewed, if the truth were told, and pricked herself for it twice, and laughed.

Sam was always underfoot. Seven years old and full of the devil and forever wanting the bright pins, the off-cuts, the chalk to draw soldiers on the flags, and Kit would slip him a thread-spool to roll across the floor and Margaret would shoo him out to the garden and he'd be back inside a quarter-hour. The Storrs were not a rich house but they were a full one, and that fullness was a kind of wealth: the father's careful trade, the mother's garden and her physic that brought a little coin and a great deal of trust, the two girls grown and the boy coming up, the journeyman lodged under the roof and near enough a son already, sweet on the younger daughter and not hiding it well. It was a small close economy of love, that house, every soul of it spending and earning, and Nell moved through the middle of it that June like one warm in deep water and not yet knowing the water for a gift.

Margaret was in her garden most of the daylight, the long border behind the shop where she grew her healing. Nell carried her out a noggin of small-ale at noon and stood among it a while — the feverfew and the betony, the horehound, the comfrey her mother called knitbone, the dark spires of the angelica, and the rue along the path's edge with its bitter blue-green leaf that her mother trusted above all the rest. Herb of grace, Margaret called it, and grew it thick. Nell rubbed a leaf and the smell of it stayed on her fingers, sharp and clean and a little sorrowful, all the rest of the day.

"It's a good cloth, then," her mother said, not looking up from the weeding.

"The best ever come here."

"Aye. Well." Margaret pressed the soil round a root with her thumbs. "Tell your father not to let it turn his head. Fine folk are slow to pay and quick to blame." She straightened, a hand to the small of her back, and looked off up the moor a moment the way she did — Margaret was forever looking at weather no one else could see yet — and then she looked at her daughter, and something crossed her face and was put away. "You've a good colour on you," was all she said. "Mind you keep it."

—

It was Kit who lost his colour first, and so slow that no one marked the losing.

By the evening of the fifth or sixth day — Nell could never afterward fix which, and tried, God knew she tried, lying awake counting it backward through the dark — he had taken to scratching at his neck. Just below the ear, on the left side. A small worrying motion, the back of his nails against the skin, the way a man does at a midge-bite without thinking. He made a joke of it. He always made a joke. "Your smith's bred a plague of midges down at that forge," he said, "they've supped on me till I'm half drained," and Bess laughed too loud and said he was too sweet for them, and Kit said sweet was it, and the two of them went on like that, daft as ducks, while Joseph sighed over his account-book and Sam banged a spoon.

But Kit ate little that night. Nell saw it and did not name what she saw. He pushed the mutton about his trencher and gave half to Sam under the board and drank his ale and went early to the truckle bed by the shop fire where he lodged, and that was unlike him, for Kit loved a long evening and a fire and a song, and he had not sung.

In the morning he was up before her, as a journeyman should be, the shutters down and the fire mended, but his face had a sheen on it that was not the heat of the hearth, and a brightness in the eye, and when he bent to the cutting-board his breath came short. He had wound a kerchief round his throat. To keep the draught off, he said, and grinned, and the grin was good but it was a grin worn over something, the way you'd hang cloth over a stain. Once, reaching for the shears, he flinched and put his hand to his side under his arm, quick, and took it away quick, and looked to see had she seen.

She had seen. She did not understand it. How could she? There was no plague in the dale and never had been; the word belonged to London, to the broadsheets that came up sometimes from Gildersedge full of the dreadful far-off numbers, the bills of mortality, the dead-carts and the crosses on doors — a thing that happened in the foul hot south among the wicked crowded folk, the way storms at sea happened, a judgement on places that were not Stannerdale. Here a man got a summer ague and sweated it out and was right in three days. Here a swelling under the ear was a swelling under the ear. She thought, if she thought anything, that Kit had taken a chill from going about with his shirt open in the evening damp, and that her mother would brew him something and chide him, and that he would be teasing Bess again by Sunday.

The cloth lay folded on the shelf above the cutting-board where Joseph kept the cut pieces wrapped clean in an old sheet, the grey suit pinned and basted and waiting on the fine work. Innocent as bread. She passed it twenty times that day and never gave it a thought, except once to be glad it had dried so sweet and showed no spot of the rain at all.

—

By night the fever had him in earnest.

They did not call it fever. That was the way of it — they had a hundred soft words and used them all. A summer chill. The heat of the season. He's overdone, he's a southron and not bred to our air, he's pined for that lass and lost his appetite, look how she frets over him. Margaret came and laid the back of her hand to his brow and was a moment longer about it than the gesture asked, and her face when she drew the hand away told Nell nothing, because Margaret's face when she chose told no one anything. She said he was to keep his bed and sweat it kindly and she would see to him. She said it easy. But she set Bess to making up the truckle with the clean blanket and sent Sam up to his own bed early and did not let the boy near, and these were small things, and Nell laid them by in herself without knowing she had laid them by, the way you put a stone in your pocket on the moor and find it there days after and cannot think why you kept it.

Nell made him the posset her mother had taught her — milk set to scald and turned with a little ale and sweetened, a few grains of her mother's powders stirred under — and she carried it to him in the dark shop with a rushlight, and held it while he drank, for his hands shook now and would have spilled it. He drank a little. His skin gave off a heat she could feel before ever she touched him, like a wall that has stood in the sun. The kerchief was off and she saw, in the small moving light, the place below his ear: a swelling risen up hard and red as a damson, the size of a pullet's egg, the skin over it stretched and shining. He saw her see it and turned his head away on the bolster.

"It's nobbut a knot," he said. "I get them. It'll burst and be done."

"Aye," she said. "I'll tell Mother to draw it with a poultice in the morning." Her voice was steady. She was proud, after, of how steady it had been, and ashamed of the pride. "Sleep now, Kit. You'll be better for the sweating."

"Tell Bess—" he began, and then seemed to think better of it, or to lose the thread of it in the heat. "Tell her I'm right enough. She frets."

"She'll fret worse if she hears you've a fever. I'll tell her you're sleeping it off."

He smiled at that, the old quick smile gone slow. "You're a good lass, Nell Storr," he said. "The best in this whole cold country." And he turned his cheek to the bolster like a child and shut his eyes, and she set the cup by him and the small-ale within his reach and banked the fire, and she stood a moment over him in the red dark of the embers with the rushlight guttering, watching his breath, and then she went up.

The house was easy still. She could hear her father's slow breathing through the wall, and Bess murmuring something in her sleep, and below it the small ordinary settling of timber and thatch, the dale's hush, an owl off on the moor. Nothing was wrong that a body could name. The cloth was dry on the shelf and the order half-made and the wedding a fortnight off and the hay coming heavy and her own heart full of Adam Crowther and the whole green summer spread out ahead of them all like a cloth shaken into the light.

In the dark she heard him turn and turn on the truckle bed, and the small dry sound of his nails against his own throat, and she told herself it was the heat of the night, the way you tell yourself a thing because the other thing cannot be borne.