He was crying.
He was a little boy again. There were stains on his tunic, that smelt of guns, and he took out a little leather belt with powder cases hanging from it, and threw it towards the scarp, so as it fell it twisted out, spilling bitterness into the wind.
‘Wexford and Drogheda,’ he said, choking a little on the last, ‘we did for all of them at Wexford and Drogheda. That was God’s word. Women and kiddies, William. God’s word. A flaming minister. A shining sword.’
‘Yes, yes. I heard of this,’ I said, then whistling back my dogs who had gone after the bandolier.
‘You had?’ he said, looking up.
I nodded, and turned away, and went down the slope a little. He followed.
I stopped at a bush and hooked out a small skull with my crook and showed it to him.
‘She was lambing. Dog. It’s in the nature of things, Gabby.’
The skull still smelt somewhat so I cast it back.
‘Until the Last Day when the Kingdom comes,’ I said.
‘Then I’m a dog, no better nor worse.’ He grinned, and I knew he thought I was a simple old man for my parables.
‘I thought you were needing forgiveness,’ I said.
‘That’s for me to decide,’ he said, ‘though we were blessed by the parson after. We were all black with the smoke. Now you have God’s kingdom. I don’t need no powder. All men will be equal in the common weal. Shepherds and kings.’
‘No kings,’ I said. I was a little angered, that’s true.
‘No. No kings.’
He grinned again and clapped me on the shoulder and then was off down the slope, where he tumbled and came up again laughing, down towards the thatch where the mist still clung and the cocks and dogs were hollering as if to warn him, for I wasn’t. I just stared, angered somewhat, and worrited more than a man can say by what he would do when he found his Anne with her husband, that wasn’t Gabby, for we had all thought him dead these five years.
I had my ewes folded for it was into February, and I spent that day thatching the hurdles. I remember it as a bright day, the warmest so far that year, save for a bitterness when the wind got up. I was struck into deep thought while the needle and twine did their work. Save for my page or a passing vagrant without his certificate cadging a day’s work (which I always refused) few were the times I had someone to talk with out on the sheep-walks. It were pure chance that Gabby had happened on that way back, I said to myself, over and over.
Or was it?
Maybe so, still, but now I’m thinking hard that Gabby knew I would be folding by the barrow, for that’s where we would sit when he was a boy, and his little arms pulling out the lambs in a slither.
It was for news of Anne he had passed this way. It was a preparation for sorrow, or gladness, from an old friend he might trust to tell him gently, and not stir the village. His farm was hid behind a hill on the other side and I saw him skirt the thatch and take the walk that goes up through the coppice. And the thing is, I had not told him. This preyed on my mind that much so I thought, well, I will go and see. For I half-expected Gabby to return running helter-skelter up the slope towards us, scattering the flock with his howls.
But he never did.
My good Ruth had rolled a dumpling of barley-flour that I cut into more from need than liking: it was another coat in warmth. I did so and sat the dogs and hollered the page over to bide with the ewes (though none had lambed yet) and took my lantern, it being dusk or thereabouts, and walked up through the coppice to the crest above Gabby Cobbold’s farm — for I still thought of it as his, a little mean thing shuffled round a yard with five great elms casting most of it into shade.
It was smoking. I could make that out even in the dark and it all looked peaceful. There was no reason why the fire shouldn’t have been lit excepting they were poor and it was late in the winter but maybe I thought his return would have put all out, like a cold gust my lantern if the door is not shut or the horn come away from the window.
It was a guilty man that wound his way down between the furze into business that was none of his. The Lord forgive me, I said, for it is my conscience that drives me to this. I knew where the dogs were and came up against the other side where a chalk wall had let in one window shuttered against the cold. There was an old cart-wheel all rotten and split leant up nearby and I rolled it to the window and stood up on the nave and set my eye against a crack in the shutter.
This was the parlour.
There were stools and a bed and ropes and tools but no Gabby nor anyone. The nave jiggled. There was frost in the air. I thought what a strange man to be pressed against a farmhouse wall like a fox-skin, white-haired and all.
Then I thought to see better I had best ope the shutter, maybe hear them in the next room. It was either rats in the thatch just above my head or voices, I couldn’t be sure. Or my own breathing, which in all my fifty years had never been so short and loud.
Over the night came the thump of the cows in the stable, and their decent smell. There was a calf, too, which Anne had prayed for but, so they told me, had gone sick, as everything went since Gabby’s father had been taken years before. The very earth had killed him.
I oped the shutter so slow its noise became a tree in the wind.
I could see them through the parlour door, which was latched back.
Gabby’s arm, its red cloth and buttons, his hand round a cup. Anne’s face with the hair like Mary Mother of God’s in the church before the soldiers came to burn her. Thomas Walters opposite, looking hard at the table, still with his hat on. Thomas Walters was the spit of his father, also Thomas, a shepherd from the next valley who I would meet at the fairs and did not like for his drinking.
They sat in silence. I wished to see Gabby’s face and tried to tell his thoughts from the hand tight round the cup. Thomas Walters was sullen. He had a clean jaw. His hat was twenty years old. He was thirty-four. Anne had the sad look of Mary in that old painting.
Well, no one had killed anyone, I thought. And there were Gabby’s old ribbons on the table, like they had always been there. Though no one had spread them out.
They would come to some arrangement. It was the property that was the issue as much as the sin of two husbands. Anne had been that keen to marry, the old parson had done something clever with the parchments. Gabby was dead or as good as, we all agreed. Anne had wanted kiddies like food and drink. The farm was no good to anyone. Thomas Walters had happened along and helped her out on both accounts, it seemed. Although she had lost each babby as it came.
I held the shutter hard against my cheek so it would not flap about and stir them. I was afraid of Thomas Walters. He was a big man with a big nose and drank. His bottom teeth closed over his top. His hat covered his forehead. He had five brothers. He laughed at the Execution when we heard of it. There’s still respect.
But no one spoke, that was true. It was like they were listening for the right way, like in church over the rustle of skirts and a child’s coughing and the babbies. Listening for the Word that would tell them the right way. As I was listening with the wood of the shutter dark with soot against my cheek. And I think now that over the cold and the wind came the voice that told them, but it was not God’s voice, and Gabby never heard it.
My page was on nightwatch but Ruth was asleep when I came back. We slept apart. She had it in her head that it was a sin to sleep together after child-bearing was over. Even in winter. I am a pious man and nodded when she told me. That night I cried. That was twenty years before I spied on the day Gabby came back.