Page 7 of Linenfold (The Alice Chronicles #4)

O ld Angus from the woodshed is a Job’s comforter if ever there was, foreseeing the rain would continue well into December.

They all scoffed. Listen to him, there can’t be any rain left to fall.

But Alice, mistress of High Stoke and its acres, has learned in the months she has known him that, unwelcome as his predictions can be, Angus is very sharp as to the weather.

Sure enough, within minutes of her arrival back at High Stoke, it starts again.

Bidding hasty thanks to Jack as he pulls his cloak close and turns for home, Alice glances up at the looming grey.

As yet it is but a prelude, mere spits on a mischievous breeze.

What none of them has foreseen is the strength of the coming frenzy after midday meal, rapidly filling to an angry downpour thrown by vengeful gusts against tile and pane, spraying time and again across the kitchen court, sparing none.

Under a sagging sky, Joe struggles from barn to stable, wisps of straw torn at the wind’s will from the armfuls he carries for the horses’ bedding.

Betsy, head down, laden with limp linen, sloshes through spreading puddles.

In her raised pattens she seems to walk on water as she stumps from wash house to kitchen to drape shirts and shifts over benches before the hearth.

Skipping through the deluge to collect charcoal for cooking, Mollie’s flying hair wilts to flapping rat’s tails.

Beyond the dairy, the kine spared from the autumn slaughter refuse to be cowed, turn their backs and prepare to sit it out.

For the rest of the day and throughout that night, the tempest progressively spares neither man, woman, beast nor tree.

God’s gardener, it weeds out a sullen pine skulking amongst the autumn-gold trees circling the house.

It topples the withered branch of a nearby oak and two scrawny saplings that dared sprout in its shadow.

Yards from the herb garden an aged beech, no match for the battering wind, crashes earthwards with a splitting screech.

The great tree scatters the sheep, scythes lesser trees in its wide-armed fall, and sets a swathe of lumber bouncing and rolling across the sward.

Knee-deep holes gouge the grass, the shallow root-dish ripped from the earth rears up higher than the garden wall.

The clearing before the house becomes a splattered tide of leaves, sulphurous yellow and rustling brown, gathering in drifts, skittering and subsiding into sodden heaps under the dripping eaves.

The trees they graced turn within hours to shuddering skeletons.

Dawn brings respite from the rain, but a lesser wind persists from breakfast to supper, its invading flurries chilling without and within.

As the dregs of light die out of the second day, the black-humoured storm resumes, guttering rushlights and throwing shadows along the walls when the household retreat to their beds.

Even as the last flicker is snuffed out, still the wind tirelessly bays and the tempest stamps its fury across the earth …

On stirring to a pale morning light, a sense of the unfamiliar draws Alice to puzzled wakefulness.

She lies for a minute wondering, listening.

It is not yesterday’s gusty rattle of casement, not the patter and slash of rain on glass, nor yet the eaves dribbling on puddled ground.

The wind has fallen away. It is the absence of sound that has stirred her, a thick, weighty silence.

She pushes back the coverlet and rises, rubs her eyes, seeing out of the window only invisibility, a vaporous memory of what was.

A wintry chill has brought breaths of fog rolling past, mirrored by the breath from her mouth.

It has made off with the trees, sheeted the grass, swallowed the sheep.

Just one or two close by the house, their fleeces raggedly dirty through the thick mist, direct a baleful eye up at her sheltered behind the window.

She gazes at the disappeared landscape until a shiver prompts her to get dressed.

Downstairs, through the kitchen window she watches the morning’s to and fro out in the yard taking place in muted forms of huddled figures.

Angus hurrying from the woodshed in hopes of something to eat before breakfast, Allan from the same place but heading for the dairy court.

He will be helping his sweetheart, the dairymaid Grace, take feed to the overwintering kine.

Betsy’s wide patten-prints puncture the churned mud from kitchen to wash house where she has just taken a bundle of linen.

Little Mollie trips to and fro between kitchen and stables to fetch faggots for the bread oven, logs for the fires.

Joe sheltering at the stable door chews on a crust he has filched behind the cook’s back.

And Rose, the newest maidservant at High Stoke, is here and there and everywhere because Rose likes to know what is going on, and to discuss it with anyone showing an inclination to gossip.

The kitchen hearth radiates welcome light and warmth from its new-lit fire, a foil to the chill grey outdoors.

Maureen, arms folded, stands over the proving bowls ranged around it.

Patience on a monument. Ever since Alice has taken an active part in preparing the household’s food, Maureen has been like this, resolutely long-suffering, simmeringly resentful.

Isabel the steward used to let Maureen cook as she wished, but Isabel is gone.

For six months there have been mutterings of finding another position, but thus far Maureen has done nothing about it.

The bland pottages and overcooked meat she is wont to produce have a lowering effect on the whole household.

Involved with the direction of both household and wider demesne, Alice cannot always take as full a hand in the kitchen as is needed.

The cooking and baking Maureen regards as her personal territory, and she counters Alice’s efforts to teach by a dogged refusal to learn, by reverting to her old methods when she thinks Alice is not looking.

The bowls of dough around the hearth await knocking back before their second proving. ‘We need to get the loaves shaped, Maureen,’ Alice says, picking up bowls and punching a fist into each cushion of dough. ‘Then I’ll light the oven. It’ll be warm enough by the time they’re ready to go in.’

‘How many loaves do you want cooked?’ Maureen asks, not moving.

‘All of them, please, Maureen.’ Does she still think they are going to leave half the risen dough to sag flat?

Maureen’s tightened lips say yes, that is exactly what Maureen thinks. ‘I usually do half of them now and the rest later in the week,’ she says.

‘The rest go dense when you do that.’

‘They’re fresher, my way,’ Maureen persists. ‘More recently baked.’

‘Maureen, we’ll use an oven-full in a couple of days. We’ll be starting another batch tomorrow evening.’ How many times have we been through this?

‘When I do it my way, they don’t eat so much, it’s more economical.’

Alice wants to snap that it’s hardly surprising they don’t eat it.

The result of cooking dough that has lost its yeasty vigour is an indigestible stodge.

She takes a deep breath. ‘We’ll cook the whole batch now, Maureen, as soon as they are risen.

’ She proceeds to divide and shape the dough into loaves.

Maureen saunters over to the proving bowls on the hearth stones.

Arms folded, she contemplates one, contemplates another.

Alice heaves a quiet sigh and thrusts a bowl into her hands. ‘Start with this one, Maureen.’

As ever, Alice does the larger share, while Maureen labours over the exact size of each loaf.

Alice reins in the rebuke on the tip of her tongue.

She is in no condition to threaten dismissal while she becomes progressively less able to do her normal workload.

It’s an effort bending down to light a handful of twigs from the brands in the hearth.

Widow she is, but Henry Jerrard lives on within her.

His offspring due next month lets her know of the offence she gives in squashing her unborn child this late in its term.

At the bread oven she holds the flaring twigs to the bundle, blows gently and yellow flame catches, wavers, leaps up.

Smoke spirals out and up to hover in a grey fog amongst the rafters.

Gradually the flames turn orange, Alice pushes in another faggot and takes a step back from the warmth.

By the time the oven reaches heat the loaves will be ready to go in.

She straightens and puts a hand to her back, easing the ache.

In a few weeks she will have to accept help.

Betsy her laundress, though Alice counts her as much her friend, advised her, ‘You should expect a lying-in period before you give birth, you know?’ But so far Alice has resisted the idea.

What on earth would I do trapped in bed with all that time to myself?

Eat Maureen’s leaden bread? ‘We don’t need to think about lying-in yet,’ she countered.

‘When I am brought to bed will be soon enough. As long as you are my gossip, Betsy, all will be well.’ With a long experience in attending childbirth, Betsy’s skills when the time comes are what Alice relies on.

But until then she is determined to maintain as much of her daily routine as possible.