Wessex Tales: "For Viviana's Wedding" (Story 16)

This is one among 38 stories in the collection...

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘For Viviana's Wedding’

  (Story 16 of 38)

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright Robert Fripp 2013

  ‘For Viviana's Wedding’ ISBN 978-0-9918575-4-8

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  Cover image

  The Peasant Wedding,

  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566-’69.

  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

  PD-Art. Wikimedia Commons.

  Cover design: The Design Unit, www.thedesignunit.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Endnotes

  The Author’s Note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  WESSEX TALES

  ‘For Viviana’s Wedding’

  (Story 16 of 38)

  Chapter 1

  The time: a breath of God or so before the year of our Lord 1286,

  being the first decade of King Edward I

  How to sum up the day? The manor of Okford (Adford / Acford / Ockford / Okeford / Okford Schelin, et al) had descended through the male line of a single family since the Conquest—or the Flood, for so it seemed. Two hundred and almost twenty years. Why, that amounted to ten or eleven generations. Now old Okford was passing, through marriage: the last of her line, Viviana de Eskelling was marrying a Turberville. A Turberville! Was a sturdy body to grieve at this news or shout Hurray? They weren’t bad lords, as they came; though, mind you, they were foreigners and their seat was far away, a summer day’s trudge up over the Downs, Bere Regis way.

  “ ’Twill be the death on Okford, Ralph, you mind what I do say.” Old John wagged a finger at his brother-in-law.

  “Keep yr wind in, Granfer,” replied the younger man. “ ’Tis not the crack o’ doom.”

  “You’m but a puppy, Ralph. Sich tales I yeard on Turbervilles as dropped a bunch of ’en to rot in Hell. And there’s God’s truth! Eh, Mary?” Old John appealed to higher authority.

  “Wassat?” his wife shot back.

  “They Turbervilles. Bad blood. As mad as doom.”

  “ ’Tis but a new name gived old times, a new graft on old stock. Bain’t nothing as’ll change.”

  “Garn! Women!”

  “Girt stun-poll! Drink up thik ale, husband! Look to the swine. There’s killing to be done.”

  Old John had lived at Okford, as lad, man, gaffer, codger, nigh on… Well, longer than Methuselah had right to recall. He was born in King John’s time, or so he said, and there was none, even Viviana de Eskelling herself, as dared gainsay that. Young slips, all on ’en, and if Old John were less in local standing than a mighty aged oak, ripe of wizened lore and rustic wisdom, he was at least an ancient storm-split rotting elm that of his years was worthy of respect. Now he sat on the bench by the hearth-pit, clad in the dun-coloured smock he wore from holy day to holy day, bramble-torn hose below, and the same many-layered jerkin of deer-hide he’d fought in at… Where was it? His listeners were often grateful to forget. O yes, Lewes! That’s where he’d fought with Simon de Montfort’s army twenty-two years before, a grey-beard even then. And that, come to think of it, was how he’d met Robert Fitzpaine, who, having captured King Henry in that battle, used the Broad Seal of England to grant himself and his heirs, amongst other things, the manor of Okford Fitzpaine, right next door.

  Old John had seen it all. And he’d spoken to gentry as comrades in arms, and eye to eye! Ah, times past! He always wore his jerkin in cold weather, did Old John, though truth to tell, this summer day was far from cold, save only to old blood.

  Old John had heard the French tongue spoke, by Frenchmen, too, which conferred a cachet upon him as warrior, sage, and venturer in foreign parts.

  But Mary had no patience with John’s nonsense now. She might be his third wife—he’d buried two, the last in labour, taking his seventh child with her—but she was young enough to be his daughter. Ah, but—though Mary was a lifetime younger than her lord and master, she could hold a quarrel to Old John, evening, feast, and morrow, and still have breath for more. Now, though, she bustled around, her feet and the hem of her skirt stirring dust from the ashes and the bare earthen floor, now mixing, now kneading, now fetching in water, now kneading again. Preparing the loaves for the oven at hall. For Viviana’s wedding.

  Dust hung in the sunlight streaming through the open door, each mote a little angel dancing in bright air.

  “An’ you, Ralph,” Mary addressed her brother, “take yrself off, and ’im as well, old useless! Go butcher swine!”

  Mary’s brother shot a look at his antique marriage-relation, seeing him as but a pair of dark eyes above the upturned bottom of a crock. The eyes and their brows shot up to heaven an instant, then lowered the jug and handed it to Ralph, who drained it, fetched up a belch and, raising two fingers behind his sister’s back, winked hard at Old John. Two extraordinary fingers they were, these fingers of Ralph’s, unlike the rest. An archer’s fingers, the flesh broad, calloused, dead as sandal soles; great spatulate digits that could hold a cloth-yard arrow at full draw a minute at a time, and hit a French or Welshman two hundred paces off. Ralph was a born idiot, of that the village was sure. Hadn’t they been able to pack him off with a smile and wave as Okford’s feudal contribution to King Edward’s war in Wales a year or so before? Idiot he might be, with his rictus and his right eye higher than the left, but Ralph returned from Longshanks’ war with a quiver full of arrows and a Welsh longbow he’d picked up on some battlefield that would test the stamina of tougher men.

  And could he shoot! A dozen years and more before King Edward’s army proved the worth of the Welsh longbow against the Scots at Falkirk and made it England’s own, our Ralph was splitting withy rods from fifty paces off! And him the only man for miles about who’d learned to handle one so well!

  “Time, time, time! There’s always time enough for men to watch a woman work!” Mary’s head was turned away, but she knew her men too well. Hitching her skirt before her, she took up a crock and a scoop and was gone through the door to fetch water, leaving the choir of dust-mote angels dancing in her wake.

  “Come on, Granfer.”

  “Garn,” retorted John.

  “You know how she do ho for thee, and no mistake.” (Endnote ref_1)

  “I don’t complain. Good wife she be to I. But I mind how our Mary would a’ been a better sergeant in de Montfort’s army. How thik little baggage would a’ whipped the enemy!”

  Old John got to his feet and waited a spell, unsteady, till the host of little light-bright fairies fled from aforn old eyes. Then the two of them looked out the axe, and the knife, and a bucket for blood for blood-puddings, and set about rounding up swine.