They come to the wood-pile. James stretches out his arms for the boy to load him. From the logs comes a reek of earth, fungus, rotting bark.
'Take from the back there, Sam. Are they drier there?'
'They all has a little wet on 'em.'
'Fetch out those at the side there - the beechwood.'
It has been a hot summer, a wet, mild autumn; a poor harvest. Wheat is fifty shillings and eight pence per quarter; up three shillings over the previous year.
'We'll take what we have, Sam, and dry them at the fire.'
They move back towards the lights. A young dog, restless at the end of its chain, sets up yapping. From James: 'Hush, sir!' It slinks into its shadow, ears cocked against the movements, the soft calls of the country beyond.
Using his elbow on the latch, James opens the kitchen door. There are sudden, good-humoured complaints about the cold from the men at the table until Sam pushes it shut with his heel. They lay down the logs and brush the earth from their coats. At the table, twelve men, fat and thin, are doing their all to eat back what they have lost by the tithe. To eat and drink it back with a kind of hilarious determination. James knows most of them, most know him - know him, if not exactly what they should make of him.
Tabitha drops a jug, one of the big ones. It explodes impressively at her feet, drenching her stockings in clouds of cider. She cries, more from fatigue than shock or fear of Mrs Cole who is serving in the parlour. The farmers cheer. James goes to her, says: 'Go to bed, Tabitha. Sam and I shall serve them.'
The tithe supper, an event entirely pleasing to no one, is drawing to its end. The table is massed with cups and glasses, greasy plates of dented pewter; with the sucked and shattered skeletons of duck and chicken and hare, the browned, nubbed bones of the beef, sharp mutton bones.
'How then, Sam,' says James, will all these beasts find their parts on Judgment Day?'
'Taint just gonna be folk, then?'
'Bless me, no. Chickens, cats, Jonah's whale.' He looks down at Sam: an agile, scrawny, wonderfully ugly boy of eleven years. At fifteen he will be untellable from any red-faced son of the plough in spotted neckerchief and leather breeches, roaring in some market town. By thirty he will be one of these at the table; still lusty, but already half broken by work and worry, drinking to forget.
They sit together on the bench beside the fire. James feels its heat against his face.
Sam says: 'You said as you were gonna tell the story, Dr James.' Dr James: a form of address used openly only by Sam, privately by others.
'What story was that, Sam?' Knowing well what story.
"Bout the race.'
'Oh yes.'
'An' the queen an' that.'
'An empress, Sam. Better than a queen.'
'An' 'bout Mary.'
'Can you hear in all this rumpus?'
Sam nods.
For James this is an experiment; turning his life into anecdotes for a child. A series of small, safe detonations, preventing him, he trusts, from bawling a stream of fearful, undigested revelations to a stranger, or - worse - to one who knows him. And Sam is a good listener, tolerant of revisions, following the story as he follows a plough blade in the fields.
'And where did we arrive to upon the last occasion?'
Says Sam: 'Your friend, Mr Gummer.'
A vision: Gummer's face, that is, the eyes, for the rest is muffled by a scarf against the cold. Could he possibly have described Gummer as a friend?
James drinks from his cup, draws off one glove, wipes his lips with the back of his hand; feels the mottling of the scars.
You know, then, how I first met Mr Gummer when I was a boy, how he stole upon me while I lay on my belly in the grass on the old hill-fort the day of the wedding and how, after my fall out of the cherry tree . . .'
'An' breakin' your leg.'
'Indeed . . .'
'An' the fella what set it . . .'
'Amos Gate, the smith. Good, then. Now, after my leg was mended - it has unmended since - there was ... a sickness in the house. A very sharp sickness, so that my mother and brothers and sisters were all carried off. . .'
'All?'
'Ay, all,' confirming his lie. 'Leastways, I was alone, and set out
to walk into Bristol to find Mr Gummer, thinking that he, who had shown a kind of interest in me, might take me in. I was younger than you are today, Sam, and yet I walked the whole of that road, mostly through rain as I recall. Have you been in the city, Sam, in any great city?'
Sam shakes his head.
'No more had I. Such a prodigious number of people! Soldiers and sailors and fat merchants; fine ladies holding their gowns out of the muck - for the city is much more filthy than the country. It was the first time that I ever set eyes on a black man or a Chinee. And there were ships from every blue corner of the world, one next to the other like creatures in a pen. And shops, Sam, lit up like Christmas, and a vast to-ing and fro-ing, a vast racket of men and beasts. Now, finding Mr Gummer among this, hmm, entropy, was, you may imagine, a far from simple business, and yet by following my nose I did find him and very surprised and, after a manner, pleased he was to see me, though I must tell you, he was not a kind man. But as I was not a kind boy we were a match of sorts. That was the . . .'
'Hallooo there! There's men dyin' o' thirst here!' Several of the company are waving their mugs as
