Wessex Tales: "Schelin's Daughter" (Story 14) Read online

  Chapter 3

  What to do? Schelin considered his options and settled at last, albeit not without a bushel-basket full of reluctance, on Elfrida. Elfrida knew all there was to know about everything, or purported to, for what she didn’t know she made up as she went along. But, in a superstitious age, the studied appearance of wisdom is wisdom itself. Elfrida had lived alone “for a thousand years and one.” Being the oldest living thing around, barring trees, nobody could gainsay her estimate of her age. She lived in a hovel of hurdles, thatch and turfs, where the oak woods met the strip fields, where the hill slopes met the Vale, and therefore where the flora was most varied, and her supply of herbal ‘simples’ was assured. Elfrida served all purposes beneath the sun, or the dark of the moon for that matter. She was not a soul that a body ought to cross. Having said that, one should stress that, for the most part, Elfrida used her reputation wisely.

  There was not a wart that her juice of poppy or wood-spurge could not erase; not a bone she couldn’t knit; not a growth on the surface of man’s flesh that did not wilt beneath Elfrida’s poultices of yalluc root and juices of the same. There was not a difficult childbirth but she had smoothed the infant’s passage into the world by rubbing nightshade on the mother’s abdomen. And, where labor-toils would surely only end in death, no one but God could tell if old Elfrida eased a woman’s passing from this world with a subtle cup of mead and hellebore.

  Of physic, Elfrida knew much; of human nature and the workings of the human mind she knew more. Mind you, her life’s experience had been among Saxons, souls like herself, of the soil. Of Normans, with their nasal tongue and all their arrogance and worldly aspirations, Elfrida knew not much, nor cared. But they were surely humans of a sort, replete with all the humors, lusts, greed, envy, hurt, desire, that that too-painful state provokes.

  Thus it came to pass that Schelin mounted up one day and rode to the hollow that lay, Gains Cross way, between two spurs of Okeford Hill. This was not a meeting at which Schelin wanted witnesses, so it was with trepidation that he set out, without a translator, to confide his innermost family secret to this formidable ancient in rudimentary Anglo-Saxon. In fact, Schelin’s ‘secret’ had been the butt of gossip and bad jokes for the unwashed tongues and ears in a dozen parishes measured by the compass of a long day’s deer run, up and down the valley of the River Stour.

  Elfrida, for her part, preferred to leave matters of the heart and the head to the priest. It was his territory, a demarcation line that the old woman was content not to cross, the price she was happy to pay for the right to be left alone.

  “Headstrong filly, bin ’er!” Elfrida, nothing slow to women’s wiles, had summed up the gist of Schelin’s mission before his first stumbling sentence was lost in the rustle of leaves.

  “Ah,” he agreed, falling, in spite of himself, into the vernacular.

  “Folk do break suchlike wi’ whips, or soft straw.”

  “Soft straw?” He wondered if he had translated aright.

  “An’ if’n you do break ’en wi’ a whip, a man mid own obedience, but ’tis such obedience as is born of fear. Then ’tis but a passion, see, and never an allegiance to run true. Passion is a humor, like March weather, ’s prone to change. But true allegiance is a bond, a thinking-clear.”

  “Yes,” said Schelin, comprehending nothing, wondering if and what he might have understood. The message was thick, the language thicker. If any thinking-clear rode aloft in his head it did so in tandem, two to a nag, with confusion.

  “When ’tis family busyness, th’obedience that comes of fearing ha’ no part. It is respect a’ needs to feel. Respecting must be won!”

  Schelin said nothing. The two of them studied each other blankly.

  “Tether a young filly to a withy, and a plough horse to an oak,” Elfrida advised darkly. “A body mid be seen to give afore un takes.”

  “We gave her everything!” Schelin seized upon a word and got it right.

  “Saving your lordship’s pardon, ’tis noble to gi’ a child her head, but you gave her the head wi’ the rein. ’Tis five-year-a-day too late for the whip. Us mid break her wi’ soft straw.”

  “There’s no straw softer than what she’s had.”

  “Then us’ll lead her down to reason graceful-like. And she shall drink!” Elfrida lifted her head and laughed—at him, Schelin thought—but if this ritual of humiliation would lead somewhere, he was man enough to bear it. To study him better, the old woman tossed the grey, matted hair back over her shoulder, startling lice. “Ay, sir, but we’ll make your filly to drink.”

  So saying, Elfrida set out what she proposed to do. Seed of nettle for the filly; ash-seed for the horse. That was the crux of it. Elfrida would concoct a potion of nettle-seed in mead, an aphrodisiac for a woman if ever there was one. Nettle-seed would prick the maiden into passion, of that you could be sure. She would make it double strength, mixing it with borage for his virtue of instilling firm resolve. So much for the filly.

  Now, for the young de Mohun, an infusion of powdered ash-seed in mulled wine. Was not ash the wood of great Achilles’ spear? the tree venerated as the earthly symbol of the Norse god, Thor? the wood whose properties had been described by Galen, physician-extraordinary to the Roman court? not to mention the famous surgeon to the Roman legions, Dioscorides! The strength of an ash would stiffen his stick, no doubt at all.

  “Go home,” Elfrida told Schelin. “Invite the young man to your hall to dine. We’ll stick their piggy Norman noses in my trough and make ’em drink.” It was as well that this sentiment was diluted in translation. Not that the old woman much cared. Elfrida, it should be born in mind, had not a lot of use for the foreign aristocracy so recently imposed on England.

  It happened that Elfrida’s young niece, Ethelberta, worked at Schelin’s hall. A typical Saxon was Ethelberta, with cornflower eyes in a long, pensive face, fine cheekbones, and a glory of flaxen hair. Not lovely, mind, but comely certainly, a treat to the eyes and the lust-needs of men, as some could testify, and wise to the ways of the world. Elfrida sent word by Ethelberta that the potions would be ready for a certain feast day; Lionel de Mohun was invited to share meat; and Ethelberta would wait on table, pouring the company’s libations liberally into drinking-horns and cups, along with the humors of passion that waited therein. The day arrived, the sun emerged and swooped across the land until it marked the hour when all downed tools and came, expectant, to the Schelin hall, and sat along the board.

  We must suspect that Elfrida and Ethelberta had had a long, private discussion about Ethelberta’s role in this affair, for though Elfrida had no use for Normans, neither was she one to fart in the face of Fortune. The situation presented a God-sent opportunity to forge an alliance for her family with the brutes: even a bastard infant sired of a Norman must create an obligation by its father’s family. And if the Schelin girl would not seduce de Mohun’s boy, then Ethelberta would.