As Meat Loves Salt

‘She has been most kind,’ I hurried to conceal the last loan.

Mother pounced. ‘A pair of what?’

‘Earrings,’ faltered Caro.

‘Earrings for a serving maid.’ My mother stared into the sky, her mouth sulky and closed like that of an old fish.

I was stung. ‘Say rather for ‘my wife.’

‘Your mother thinks I intrude myself among my betters. Give you good day, Madam.’ Caro turned and walked away.

‘Are you now content?’ I burst out. ‘I mean to espouse her, and you had best—’

‘Mother, will you come and see my garden?’ Izzy almost shouted. ‘The Mistress has given me a plot for myself, and I take cuttings of the rare plants.’

‘Indeed, Isaiah, that will be very pleasant.’ And off she went with Izzy, leaving me and my betrothal to come about as we would.

Zeb grinned. ‘Caro is too pretty for her, and you too amorous. That sets her on edge.’

‘Amorous? I did but speak!’

‘It shines out of you.’ He gave a sly laugh. ‘For all she says, methinks she would scarce welcome the bridebed at home. And then, she once hoped we would marry better.’

‘Then you must look for trouble, when the time comes.’ If Mother behaved thus with Caro, she would surely take a whip to Patience.

‘I have ample trouble at present.’ Zeb’s eyes grew miserable.

‘Be easy,’ I said. ‘Patience cannot be at Champains. She will be found in time.’

He glanced at me in surprise. ‘I have been thinking. Perhaps you are right, and I drove her away—’

I shook my head. There followed a rare moment of peace between us.

‘Ah, well,’ Zeb said at last, ‘Mother will come round. Directly you and Caro quarrel, you’ll be her own sweet boy.’

‘We won’t quarrel,’ I replied. Zebedee clapped me on the shoulder and we began strolling back to the house.

‘Have you seen the ceiling?’ Caro pushed open the door of the unused chamber that was to be our married quarters.

I looked up. I had seen it often, without much interest. Now the other servants had cleaned both it and the walls, revealing the fantastic images that crowded there: a shameless hotch-potch of the pagan and Papistical, a whirl of naked and semi-naked forms intended to give the eye the impression of an ascent into the air above the house.

‘Sir John’s taste exactly,’ I pronounced.

‘O no,’ Caro corrected me. ‘Older than that. Godfrey says Sir John’s father hired a foreigner for the painting.’

‘And how do you like it?’

‘Not at all,’ she said at once.

I gazed on the bloated babes carrying lyres and blowing trumpets, the swags of painted stuff and grapes piled up here and there. In the centre, a bare breasted woman conversed like the strumpet she was with two men, one on either side of her. All three were seated on thrones shaped like shells and coloured gold.

Caro pointed. ‘That’s a goddess, the Mistress says.’

‘You are prettier than she.’

My love wrinkled her nose. ‘She is coarse. In need of stays.’

I said, ‘Izzy told me these were painted so that the children conceived here might be beautiful.’

Caro burst out laughing. ‘What, Mervyn—?’

Laughter seized on me also. ‘Why, yes. Look there—’ and I pointed out a chubby infant swilling wine from an upturned horn.

‘Mervyn must have been made in the great chamber.’ Caro wiped her eyes. ‘The ceiling there isn’t fit for a maid to look on.’

‘You will get used to this one,’ I said slyly, and saw her blush.

The espousal was fixed for the next day. My Lady was to send her coach for our ungracious mother, and since our fellows at Beaurepair were also our guests, servants were come in from a neighbour’s house to help Mounseer with the food. Poor Mounseer, he was the only one of us not to have a holiday. But he had consolation in the form of Madeleine, a young Frenchwoman employed to dress hair. Her thankless task was to spin gold from the thin and greying locks of her own mistress, and now she had been borrowed and was to try her skill with ours. I had heard Daskin present himself to her the day before, and since then there was no good English spoken when these two were together, nothing but parly-voo, the two of them talking so fast you might think the words had been banking up in them and were bursting out like the autumn floods. Thus my spouse was freed of brushes, false hair and unguents for one day – a mighty sacrifice on the Mistress’s part. I owned it freely, it was extraordinary how she liked Caro. She was a woman who should have had a daughter.

‘We are made, you know.’ Caro squeezed my arm. ‘She’d let none but me have this chamber.’

‘True,’ I answered her. ‘But when Sir John dies, and he does his best to bring it about, it will be Sir Bastard in the saddle. He’s itching to debauch the maids.’

She sniffed. ‘Do you not think I might refuse?’

‘Would you had heard the talk in March, my love, when he brought his cronies and I waited on their late-night drunks. How the amorous propensities are heated by struggle, and not struggle in play neither.’

‘Ah.’ Her face sobered. ‘He’s one you have to watch, certes.’

‘What, has he touched—’

‘No, Jacob! He does no more than look. While his father lives, we should stick here. I am laying by money.’

‘Are you sorry to change your first bridesmaid?’ I asked. We had been forced in courtesy to ask Patience to carry out the first bridesmaid’s duties, decking our chamber and the rest with flowers against the day, since neither of us had a sister or cousin who could decently claim precedence.

‘Only if she be really lost,’ Caro said. ‘But there will be two bridesmaids. Peter’s sister Mary will take Anne’s place and Anne will stand in for Patience.’ She smiled at me as if to say, Fear not, all will be done.

I eyed the heathens in their painted Heaven. Soon they would look down on our embracings, and I promised them good sport. Though I had never had a woman I understood perfectly what to do, and had an edge on me keen as a new blade: she would not find me shy or cold. We would sleep wrapped in one another, and wake to—

I caught Caro’s eyes on me and flushed.

‘The place will be sweet with all the flowers they can find,’ she said. ‘There were more in July, but—’

The door swung open, making me jump. It was Zeb. I expected a grin and the inevitable jest about inspecting the bed but his face was rapt as if from some vision.

‘Jacob, I heard—’ he corrected himself, ‘and Caro – I heard something they kept from us—’

‘Is Patience found?’ cried Caro.