The Town House Read Free

me.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘clerks live longer. That is the rule. Measure your years not by mine but by your father’s. He lacks a year of his two score and he is an old man.’
    That was all too true. Oh hurry, I said in my mind; open that Kin Book, give me leave to marry Kate, for twenty years is all too short a time. And yet, if we cannot marry, twenty years without her will last for ever, they will last so long that I cannot live them out.
    He used his finger on the page of parchment which, with other pages, all of slightly different size and tied by thongs on to a stave of wood made up the book. Sweat broke out on my forehead and around my mouth. Weeks, months, years went by; and at last he lifted his head and said,
    ‘You are no kin to her.’
    I thanked him as though he, and he alone, had arranged it.
    It was too late, that evening, to disturb the steward; but early next morning, before he went out on his rounds, I went to him.
    ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘And about time too. By the Rood I don’t know what is happening to you young rascals. Too idle to breed! With labour so scarce, too.’ That reminded him of something else. ‘The wench must stay at her work,’ he said. ‘So she does that, nobody minds in which hut she sleeps. Except you, of course,’ he gave me a nudge and a leer. ‘You can tell shepherd that the bride fee will be two geese, rightly fattened. That being settled, I am sure you will have my lord’s permission to marry. It is a pity that you must wait until his harvest visit.’
    That day I whistled as I worked, and as soon as I could down tools, went, without waiting for my supper, over to the shepherd’s hut and said to that weak-minded man,
    ‘I have from priest and steward, permission to marry your daughter, Kate.’
    The woman looked pleased, but he grunted, and said something about talk coming cheap; he was a poor man with a wife and two children younger than Kate; where was the merchet coming from? He supposed I had never even thought of that; young men in their heat never remembered that every time a girl married the lord exacted his due.
    ‘But I have remembered. Steward said two fat geese, and them I will provide.’
    ‘Three’, he said, ‘can be fattened as easy as two. One for me, two for my lord and the bargain is made.’
    ‘It is made,’ I said, and struck hands on it. ‘And now,’ I said, stepping back and including the woman in my stare, ‘any blow on Kate’s body will be a blow on mine and I will repay it four-fold.’ As I spoke I knotted my great fist and the muscle on my forearm leaped up and quivered. Shepherd bleated, like his own bell-wether.
    ‘The children have run overlong unmothered. Their new mother did not more than mend their manners.’
    His other children were boys, aged about seven and nine, and hardy looking. They bore no marks of ill-usage that I could see, whereas my poor Kate was all swollen and marked from yesterday’s beating.
    ‘Any correction that Kate needs from this day forward I will tend to,’ I said, smiling at her, and feeling my heart go soft. ‘As for you boys, if the woman bears on you too hard, kick her back. You’re two against one, or, if you, shepherd, had the courage of a louse, three. What did she bring as her marriage portion? A gelding iron?’
    ‘Take your foot from my floor,’ the woman cried, furiously.
    ‘Gladly,’ I said, and taking Kate by the arm I drew her out and we went to a place where a bent hawthorn, just coming into flower, leaned over the stream. And there I held her close and we talked. I said,
    ‘My pretty one, you shall be safe with me.’
    Safe with me. Yes, I said that. I looked down the years and saw her in our hut, eating fatly of food I had provided, growing smooth and sleek. She was so small and I was so strong, I would never even let her carry a bucket of water from the well. Her work as sheep-girl I could not order, but I would put fear into the shepherd, so that the hard tasks did not fall to