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

  Chapter 3

  Tomorrow was wedding, and up at the kitchen house hard by the hall, all hands were employed to their tasks. Sarah, the cook, had her eye on a pig, a pig on a spit turned by Gilbert, the byre-boy, a lad who was grateful enough in the winter to come to the kitchen and sit at the spit, but this day was too warm to be roasting at fire.

  “How much longer, Sarah?”

  “Till ’tis done.”

  “I mid to threshing, mind.”

  “There be men enough to thresh. Turn thik spit, boy!”

  There was Meg from the dairy, sat on a stool in the door with her face to the sun, churning whole-milk to butter—ka-thunk, ka-thunk—in a wooden plunge churn, her piston so rhythmic it paced all the rest to their tasks. Except Gilbert.

  Right shapely she were, Gilbert noted, one eye on the pig and the other on Meg where she sat in the sun. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, went Meg’s plunge-churn; ka-thunk, ka-thunk went young Gilbert’s heart. A right beauty she were, thought Gilbert, not marked wi’ the pox. (Now, ’tis best that beauty doth lodge in the eyes of beholders, for Meg were as plain as a wall, though ’twere true that a dairymaid’s work with the milch-cows would keep her face free of the pox.)

  And then there was Gertie. She that had raked out the hall and the kitchen was stirring the dust with a besom, complaining of folk who left messes behind for true Christians to clean. And the louder she grumbled, the more she stirred dust from packed earth and the bracken a-strewn on the floor, until Gilbert was sneezing and dust clouds were reeking as thick as the smoke from the fire they encouraged to keep away flies.

  “Keep thik spit turned, Gilbert, or ’ee do burn!” Sarah basted the carcass of the spitted pig with a small brush of twigs.

  “I can’t breathe for dust, Sarah.”

  “Gertie,” Sarah called, as tactfully as she might. “Help me fetch in water for the kettle. I’ve these kids to seethe yet.” The bodies of two little goats lay beside the hearth stones, the eyes of one open in dead surprise, glazed over with dust.

  Gertie returned with, “I’d a-fetched ’un hours gone by, but ’tis that smeechy! [dusty!] Like hobs o’ Hell in here. Some folk don’t have a care how they do live!”

  But she put down her broom and they filled the great kettle, a bucket or two at a time, so the precious old iron wouldn’t crack, and they shifted the cauldron around on its hinge till the goats and the pig shared the flame. Then they boiled the goats—hide, hair, and hoofs—in their skins, for it made the meat sweeter that way.