Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [586]
“Yet new men are coming in all the time. From the north.”
Mason grimaced.
“The fact is, most tenant farms are still a good proposition if you’re forward-looking. And the trouble is, most of our poorer sort aren’t. That’s why when the Scots discover the low cost of our labour, they come south as fast as they can.”
She had sometimes noticed strange accents in the market.
She had made other inquiries about the subject, which confirmed everything Mason had said and told her much more besides.
So now when she questioned Jethro Wilson, she had a shrewd idea of his predicament: too small to be economic, too poor to improve. And probably, certainly, too backward to take steps to save himself.
And yet, as he stood before her now, gazing at her with his surprisingly quiet, keen eyes, she wondered – might there be hope for him after all?
“Your children. Mr Mason says you’re prepared to put them in his care.”
“’Tis not the workhouse. I’d never allow that.”
“No.”
“He says a Methodist farmer will take them in if I pay for keep and they’ll get schooling until I’ve put the farm to rights.”
“I see.”
“Me with no wife. I think it’s for the best. For the time being.”
“So do I.”
He seemed thoughtful.
“I must reform myself, miss.” He said it not with shame, but with a quiet certainty that she found far more impressive.
“It would be as well.”
“Thank you, miss.”
Then she said it. Partly on impulse, partly out of curiosity to learn more about the subject.
“I think I shall come and see your farm, Mr Wilson.”
She went the next week.
There were many hedgerows on the high ground above the valleys-huge, untidy hedgerows, six, seven feet high or more, sometimes loaded with great tangles of ripe blackberries, bristling with nuts, elderberries, sloes – a storehouse which even the intense occupation of mice, red squirrels and visiting birds could never completely plunder. There were hedgerows enclosing fields around old Sarum and over the high ground far beyond.
She rode out over the plain, taking the old turnpike road.
The main roads were covered with tarmacadam now. But once off these, they were still often no more than dusty lanes or mere tracks and it was not long before she was passing along these more primitive, rutted ways. Then, leaving the world of close hedgerows she came out onto the bare, empty waste, and rode on, quite alone, for nearly an hour, until, coming over a ridge she saw in a dip below her the village she was looking for.
So this was Jethro Wilson’s Winterbourne. She had not been there before, but it was just as she had imagined it probably was. There were dozens of villages in Wessex with that evocative Saxon name. The stream that flows in winter, the winter bourne. Nearly always they collected an extra name, to distinguish them from their neighbours: but for Jane Shockley, this one of many such places was always to be just Winterbourne.
It lay on the very edge of the high ground, in a dip. On each side of its single little street, a line of cottages, with a mixture of brick, stone and plaster walls, and mostly thatched. There was a small stone church without a tower. Behind the houses, small fields with hedgerows extended a little way up the slope. There were two yew trees in the churchyard, a little windbreak of trees on the church’s northern side. And all around, the bareness of the chalk ridges, where the sheep were grazing.
The windswept ridges and their sheep: there were half a million sheep on Salisbury Plain.
She rode slowly down the slope and into the village street.
It was very quiet. It was as if the great harsh light of the open spaces above had been carried by the wind itself so that, in the dip where the village lay, it had been softened, filtered.
The children in the street were mostly barefoot; from their doorways, their mothers watched her curiously. It was possibly years, she realised, since this deserted hamlet on the edge of the empty plain had seen a lady riding side-saddle pass along their dusty street.
The thatched cottages, she noticed,