Ulverton Read Online Free Page B

where there had been a hut once. It was grass and stones.
    ‘William,’ she said.
    I remembered her as a little chit and how sometimes she’d sell at the door and she had the same look then. At the end of the clearing a woodman’s shelter or it might have been part of the hut dripped from its thatch that sagged and was all looped about with bedwine as no one tended it now and she took my hand and we went in.
    She looked at me first and then wiped my brow and I thought of the Virgin and Christ, and Mary Magdalen that tended Him and wiped His feet, and all my thoughts were whitewashed over, for the deer running through the forest had become a painting on a wall, that her hand brushed over and over. She took my arm and it stroked her legs with its hand where the skirt had been lifted so the white skin was open to the air.
    I felt inside her like a ewe and she was the same warmth. I was pleased, somehow, that Ruth and the ewe and Anne were the same warmth. There were no more pictures. I went inside her as a man does and her skin was open to the air and was soft and full where I touched it. She was happy.
    The rain began again and dripped on us through the thatch and I buried my loneliness inside her.
    Then I went back up to the fold and saw the boy off with a penny. I had no more pictures nor whisperings. Only the voice in my ear that was a woman’s and was warm as my own fleece that I sat there in thinking of the next time she had said when I might return to the wood and only a penny for the page and his silence.
    And the next time we lay on bluebells and it were sticky, and in the autumn the bedwine dropped his old man’s beard into her black hair and I said it was her crown of silver, but she said nothing. In the winter I brought a fleece with me and wrapped her in it so she wouldn’t shiver. For it snowed some of the times.
    And this went on, oh, for years, until I couldn’t see the bedwine plumes in her hair no longer before I blew them off. Then she sickened and died one winter. Sometimes she would whisper the name of Gabby in my ear. And I an old man!
    She was the last witch I ever knew.
    I was a little mad, probably.
    That’s the story.
    [Reprinted by kind permission of
The Wessex Nave
.]

2
Friends
1689
     
    IT WAS NOT snowing when we set out. The barest places can look heavenly under a bright moon and it was so then. If it had been in any way otherwise I can assure you we would not have set out.
    The funeral of good Reverend Josiah Flaw had been fitting but full of sorrow. His assiduousness did cause his death: one stormy evening had him out to administer his flock, whereupon a chill came upon him and he forthwith sunk into the lap of our Lord.
    Though his living was as mine and bore barely a roof yet he too was at every beck of those ’twas his ill fortune to mediate for betwixt the ire of the Lord and their gaming and fornication and drinking and covetousness and all the customary excesses, my children. O horrible oaths likewise do our ploughmen bellow, our sowers bark, our reapers bawl at every interposing stone. But when I have flung up my hands at their wantonness, Josiah Flaw was ever zealous for their betterment, that every peasant in his parish might praise the Lord as they delved and not scandalise the very corn.
    His being the parish of Bursop.
    It too does have its gaggle of ranters. It too does have its precious life-blood sucked, a cheating zeal that sups up as the east wind among the rabble, and leaves our churches hollow.
    You shalt see how deep to the heart hath this poison entered, my children, when this true history is wound up.
    ’Twas not snowing nor in any ways foul when we set out. We thought to foot it back in no more than two hours, the said parish not being unknown to most of you as lying on the northerly edge of our chalkland yet, alas, without a convenient road between us on account of I know not what but those customary reasons that come betwixt convenience and human kind.
    The snow