The Unfinished Sequel to The Corner That Held Them (Part 2 of 2)

Editor’s note: The first part of Warner’s unfinished sequel to The Corner That Held Them was published in The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 2020:1, pp. 8–38. The sequel resumes below, first with the typescript pages numbered 33–46 (TS 3, pp. 1–9 below), which continue the narrative, and then with a separate gathering of four unnumbered pages (TS 4, pp. 9–11 below); these describe Thomas de Foley, whom we encountered first in The Corner That Held Them, from the enamoured point of view of Martin Hawte, one of the pilgrims in the sequel.

The typescript of these pages represents an ongoing version as against a fair copy, and the reading text below has silently (but conservatively) corrected self-evident mistypings, slips and errors.

Wilkin ¹ opened his eyes, crossed himself, and went to the door to see what sort of day it was. It was a day the Lord had made, another version of the first hopeful day of creation. Not disheartened, the Lord went on making days, and every morning had his hand on it, and every evening was like a coverlet spread over christians who had spent another of their days. And it was a pity that people who were by their condition obliged to talk a good deal about the weather should so often speak of it hastily and injuriously. This year the Lord had made his easter sunday completely wet. Not cold, not windy; but wet all over and all through with a solemn drenching rain. The flagstones in front of the church were washed so clean of their winter’s dirt that the church seemed to float on its own reversed image, like a swan. Like a swan; but even more, like the Ark. The fact that the church on earth is like Noah’s ark in the flood could not have been better shown. And when they went in to it, how warm it was, how safe, and how dry; and in the middle of all this water the thought of the wine that was Christ’s blood was like a ruby in the mind. But the pilgrims had been extremely cross. The best they could find to say of such weather was that it had been sent to them because of their sins. They also said, and that was the worst they could say, that since the pilgrim who called herself Sibbie Dunfold (for some reason, they would not even allow the poor creature to be in the right over her own name) ² had joined them, everything had gone wrong, and that she must have brought a curse with her.

And they said this while the poor creature [was] lying in a corner of the inn kitchen, so crippled and stiff with the bone ache that she could not drag herself to mass on Easter Sunday. ³ This was her first going on a pilgrimage, and she was unused to walking such long distances, and day after day; and on Tuesday in Holy Week, after she had fainted twice, Sir Martin Hawte had put her on his horse to ride the rest of the way. The next day again she had ridden, and in the morning she had plucked up enough spirit to exclaim her gratitude, and apologise about her weakness. But by mid-day her face was wrinkled with pain and her tears ran down it, and by the day’s end she was in such a stupor that Martin Hawte, and the elder Bluett had to walk on either side, holding her in the saddle. Dismounted, she could neither walk nor stand, but crawled on the ground, inattentive to anything but her own pain. There was a midwife in the town, and Sibbie was carried to her house, and put in to a bed. And there she still lay, and the pilgrimage halted because of her. The most part of the pilgrims had been in favour of going on without her; and would have done so, with the good excuse that Easter was coming, and their pilgrimage had been planned to include the celebrations at the Abbey church of St Edmund in Bury. ⁴ Only Martin Hawte refused to leave her, and pulled some of the waverers on to his side; and when he had won over the friar, Brother Sampson, ⁵ and Madge Harding, the crippled man’s wife, had quarrelled with some of the other women on account of their fraud in outbidding her over some dried sprats, and came to reflect that besides greed and cozening they were also lacking in charity, the rest gave way, and it was agreed that all should wait until the one could travel again.

Now it was the Tuesday after Easter, and they would probably set out again, for overnight the sick woman had declared herself well enough to walk, and the midwife had said she was well enough to ride, if a frame were fastened to the saddle against which she could lean for support. The midwife was immensely taken by her lodger, and declared that this pilgrim was as nearly a saint as made no matter, enduring such pains with meekness, and being so grateful and pretty-mannered throughout it all. Saints are as God wills and God’s church pronounces. Perhaps Sibbie Dunford was a saint. To arouse so much dislike and prejudice amongst her fellow-pilgrims might well be a mark of it, for saints who in heaven wear garments smooth as lilies, on earth are wrapped in the haircloth of their fellow-men’s antipathy. If she were a saint, then he was the greater sinner not to like her better. Considering her, he could find nothing against her; but when she came suddenly into his mind, it was as though he were confronted by something repulsive, and this something always shaped itself into the same mind’s-eye visage of a wicked old man, who was somehow riding on her back, with his dry hands clasped round her throat.

These mind’s-eye visions (though this particular one was disagreeable) did not trouble Wilkin Shaw. Even as a boy, running errands for his master the taverner, he had seen the thoughts of men in liquor detach themselves and stand at the drinker’s elbow like slaves or like masters; and when the man went out, staggering and belching, the shape followed him. It was more to the purpose that he could hold an egg in his hand and say faultlessly whether it was the egg of a hen or cockbird. How it was done, he could never say, for it was done before he could take part in it. The parish priest had told him sharply that to see visions was the next neighbour to trafficking with the devil, and that he must see no more – or, if he did, do penance for it. He did his best to obey, confessed, and was contrite, fasted, and prayed on the cold stones till his legs went from him for cold. No one could have been more earnest to amend, but it was no use. Looking up in contrition he saw a haunch of venison, coloured as richly as Saint Martin’s cloak, ⁶ cradled on the priest’s knee. Creditable visions, such as he prayed for, were slow in coming, and did not come at all until long after he had left off hoping or praying for them. Then, one calm summer’s morning, he saw the angel of death step aboard a fishing-boat, and sit down modestly among the boat’s crew. The oars plashed, presently the sail went up, and the boat went lightly forward, catching the land breeze, and hid itself in feathery vapours. And he had felt a certainty that with death on board, no harm could come to the boat’s crew, though they must be drowned, as drowned indeed, they were.

On three more occasions (all in the one year), death was visible to him, and always the same gliding thoughtful personage, of neither sex. After that, he saw no more of him. Now you see me, and anon, you see me not. Wilkin had heard these words of scripture read in church, ⁷ and they struck him as so apt and reasonable that when his wife died it was neither surprise nor slight to him, he did not feel slighted because death had not revealed himself. She was a good woman, crippled by having given birth to a deformed child, too large for her frame, and for twenty years they had lived patiently together. After her death he looked round on the dead room ⁸ and was saying to himself that her spinning wheel should be given to Widow Robins, when, all of a sudden, he saw himself go by the door, carrying a bundle, and with a staff in his hand, and on the cloak a cross was patched, the sign of going a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It took him a month, for he was not a hurrying man, to go after himself.

And now it was Tuesday in the White Week, ⁹ and the twenty-second day of his pilgrimage, and after hearing mass they would set off again. It was a day the Lord had made, a very pretty day, with a little mist that would presently thin out and away, and leave a warmth of spring behind it. But first he must find his hostess and bid her goodbye. Since Good Friday he had lodged free in her barn, and had every day a good bowl of soup given him, in return for having helped her over a setting of eggs. This talent of his was going to be very valuable to him. All over the world, so he understood, people keep poultry, so this talent of his was going to be very useful. ¹⁰ He had not much money, he had a poor knack for soliciting alms – and by all accounts, Jerusalem was a costly place to get to, and costly, too, when you were there. Having stayed so long in the town, their departure was that much more of a business. Farewells had to be said, and errands confirmed for the last time. Many of the pilgrims, especially among those who were skilled and hardened in pilgrimage, were running errands to the Holy Sepulchre, carrying beads and crosses that were to be blessed there, or conveying an offering, or undertaking commissions about masses and articles to be bought and brought home. Naturally, one did not do these things without reward, gifts of food or clothing to help one along the way. It was unusual for a pilgrimage to stop at Lapham, ¹¹ if it had not been for the mishap [to] Sibilla Dunfold, this pilgrimage would not have too, would have pressed on to the usual stopping-place beyond. To have pilgrims all over the place, and staying for all the ceremonies of Easter had roused up many of the townsfolk to a sense of their opportunities. Now they could get their affairs done for them in Jerusalem by a sure hand, by the hands of persons like themselves and of the same social standing; and, when all’s told, one feels a securer confidence in persons who are no better or worse than oneself than in [   ]. ¹²

There were so many bundles that in the end it was decided to hire a cart – if one could be got at a cheap rate from some one well-affected to pilgrims. It was the friar who hatched the project, and argued for it with persuasive reasons, each one poised on a finger of his left hand as though they were headings in a sermon. Imprimis, they would travel faster unencumbered by baggage, and so make up for the time lost during Sibilla’s illness; next, if any one else happened to be invalided in the same way, the cart would [enable] them to act christianly by a sick person and yet keep travelling, and meanwhile, she herself could sit in it. Next, this would free Martin Hawte’s horse for its proper rider – and a pilgrimage is always the better for one or two horsemen; who can strike fear into the hearts of robbers and ride down mad dogs; he had many other such convincing reasons, and an answer for every objection, and in the end it was he who went off to do the bargaining, and came back beside a cart whose axle squeaked like a pig-killing, drawn by an old blind horse, that had been due for slaughtering; but now it could go another trip between the shafts and taste another bite of spring grass. The crippled man made a last try to foul this arrangement, saying that the cost of hiring might seem little to a friar, but was a great sum to any ordinary pilgrim, and that with the costs ahead of them in France, and at Venice, where they would not sell you a sausage end for less than twopence, this was no time to throw away money. It was clear that in Friar Sampson ¹³ he suspected a rival.

The friar worsted him, saying that there was on the one hand prudence, one of the seven cardinal virtues, and on the other hand, there was despair of God’s providence, which was accidy, ¹⁴ and a deadly sin; the cripple, in his opinion, was parading the latter as the former. And then a whole new reason for travelling with a cart was bestowed on him, and he explained that those who carry bundles are bound to think of them, their thoughts grovel under a load of worldly gear and worldly considerations; whereas, with the weight of worldly gear falling on the horse alone – a soulless creation, he said, his eye resting on the beast, who turned his blind head towards this strange voice, and seemed to be listening with anxious attention to this analysis of his lot in the world, to whom the burden of a load of dung would be no heavier than if it were a load of the equivalent weight of bones of the saints – the pilgrims would be free to give their minds to heavenly things, and thus make better speed not only along the road to the south but also along the road to heaven.

Even while he was speaking, bundles were being placed in the cart. Sibilla was hoisted in after them, and the party was just beginning to move when a voice hallooed, and Gib Corder, the man with the scarred wrists, came galloping up, with a bundle in his arms.

‘You left your business late,’ said the crippled man, trying to reassert his position among the party. ‘Where have you been all this time? Well, put it in the cart, and let us be off.’

‘Cart?’ he said. ‘What cart?’ Seeing the cart loaded with Sibilla and the baggage, he looked taken aback.

‘I’ll shoulder it,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t see where it can be put.’

Instantly they all fell on him, insisting that he should do as they had done.

‘What’s in it, then? Is it so precious you won’t let it out of your hands?’

‘Are you loading yourself up for a penance? Lent’s over!’

‘It’s a roast goose, and he’s minded to keep it safely for his own eating.’

‘Roast goose? No, it’s some drab’s baby that he’s going to bury for her, more likely.’

Shaking his head as though their speculations were wasps round his ears, he hoisted his bundle into the cart.

‘I made sure you’d be off,’ he said. ‘I’ve never run faster in my life. The old woman kept me, talking about how I was to say this and that about it, when we come to Jerusalem. I haven’t got my breath back yet.’

He rubbed the sweat off his face. ¹⁵

‘What are we waiting for?’ he asked. There was no need to answer him, for at that moment Madge struck up her hymn, Wilkin, who had been told off to guide the horse, gave a tug at the bridle, and the party set off. The friar climbed nimbly into the cart, and sat down by Sibilla.

The morning’s mist had lifted, there was dew and a sparkle on all the near objects, and those further away looked tender and at peace. So too, did Friar Bartram. The clouds of management had lifted from him, his face expressed a peaceable sense of victory. His hands folded on his stomach seemed to have their independent enjoyment of the sun. The track presently took them alongside of a coppice, where the grey-green leaves of the honeysuckle were already clouding the winter perspectives. A pair of squirrels went flightily through the hazel boughs. He watched them with friendliness, and then turned to Sibilla, asking her if she had ever eaten squirrel stew? – properly made, he added, with a good handful of beechmast ¹⁶ kernels thrown in to the pot a few minutes before serving. Regretfully – for she craved to fall in with the notions of this excellent man, who had got her into a cart and was a servant of God – she replied in the negative; but ventured on to ask if there would not be a great many bones in a stew made from such small animals. That was part of the pleasure, he answered: if the squirrels were cooked to a proper degree of tenderness the meat came easily from the bones, and at the same time there was the entertainment of giving a skilful thrust of the tongue, and getting the sweet small mouthful you had earned by your skilfulness. ‘And have you ever observed,’ said he, remembering morality and his duty towards the lay and simple, ‘that tongues harm no one while kept to their first natural purpose of nourishing the man?’ Sibilla said that this thought had not, till now, exactly struck her, though she had always abhorred anything like gossip. Turning to her again, with a more serious intention, he continued, ‘And have you ever eaten roast hedgehog?’ ‘Never!’ she cried out, with as much feeling as though he were confessing her. But he said that she had missed a real pleasure by not having done so. A plump hedgehog, wrapped in a thick clay jacket, and roasted under the embers, was as sweet as any pork, and finer eating.

‘We friars have to learn how to fend for ourselves. We might lose our way. Or the provision we carry might have grown mouldy, or been tainted when it was given to us. Some people have no conscience, and the food they give us is what they have kept back from their pigs. Anything will do for a friar, they think. But God spreads a table in the wilderness. There is always something to be found, and by a little skill, and knowing what’s what, and carrying a few peppercorns, and so forth, I have often eaten better and with more relish out of doors than in under a roof. There are very few times of year when it’s not possible to put together some sort of meal. Though late summer and autumn are best, because of mushrooms.’

‘But how do you manage for grease? Mushrooms cooked in water have a ragged kind of taste. They give a flavour but are nothing in themselves. Of course, if you happened to have a scrap of bacon rind…’

‘Bacon rind, yes. Even if we are not given much bacon, there will be a good proportion of rind with it. But some mushrooms should not be cooked with grease. Jew’s Ears, for instance. Only a fool would fry a Jew’s Ear.’ ¹⁷

‘Jew’s ears? But aren’t they poisonous?’

‘No, no,’ he said soothingly. They are wholesomer than many things we eat as very wholesome. Kale, for instance. Only strong stomachs can thrive on kale.’

‘One must blanch it. Blanching takes out the wind. Does much wind breed in your guts?’

‘No, no! God apportions the wind, withholds it from a friar, and sends it to his monks and his canons – his hurdled flocks.’

‘And nuns.’

She had laughed as she spoke, remembering the rumbles and plaintive bleatings that had resounded so dissentingly during the mealtime lectures in the refectory at Oby. ¹⁸ Aghast to think how nearly she might have betrayed herself, perhaps even had betrayed herself, she laughed again, a wilting little titter, since she dared not be silent, and could not think what to say. Her glance, wandering anywhere that was not to the face of the friar, encountered the staring eyes of the man who had put his bundle into the cart, and now walked behind it. It seemed for a moment as though she had met her own terror there, reflected in that look of haggard and despairing stupor. Well, he at any rate, had not heard her self-betraying words. Whatever the fear that bit him, it was enough to keep him busy and harmless. She had nothing to dread from him.

As though from another world, and another epoch of time, Friar Bartram’s voice said, speaking in more guarded and enlisted accents, ‘Flatulence is to be respected, when it bears witness to the austerities of the cloister. King David in the [forty-fourth] psalm testifies to holy belches. ¹⁹ But what you say of kale is very true.’

She began to breathe again, for certainly he had addressed her as an undoubtedly lay person. During the remainder of their conversation she was careful to remain as lay as possible; and though from time to time she gave a glance to Gib Corder, his expression of stupefied terror remained so unchanging that she lost all curiosity about it. In her necessity, it had seemed providential. Now it was merely a part of him, as naturally unchangeable as the weathered blue of his coat or the scars on his wrists.

As the morning wore to noon, it grew hot – the first hot day of the season. The air was full of the gay screeching of birds, the compacted clouds lolled in the rinsed blue of the skies, the banks were full of primroses, the flies clustered about the pilgrims. It was a delicious day to be riding in a cart, and Friar Bartram found no lack of subjects on which he enjoyed discoursing to his companion. Though her appearance was against her, for she had a rather unpleasant over-eager expression, the face of a woman who might become a nuisance, she was a very conversible creature, and free from the cackling egotism that defaced most lay women of her class. Sibilla, too, having recovered from her scare, found her companion remarkably conversible, and delightfully unlike the friars who had come to the convent. And Gib Corder, ²⁰ trudging behind the cart, heard their conversation as though it were a trickling of water washing a hot wound. While they went on gabbling like that, cocked up in the cart, pilgriming without sweat or foot-sore, too comfortable to shift among the baggage, his sack travelled quietly along with them, and was nobody’s business.

But how was he get it back at the day’s end, and to be sure that no one handled it but he?

******

Editor’s note: The main narrative of the sequel ends here. The passage below also derives from The Corner That Held Them in that it tells us more about Thomas de Foley, Prior of Etchingdon, the worldly cousin of Prioress Alicia de Foley. In the novel Thomas’s influence and patronage won for the nunnery the funds which secured their finances for the first part of the book. He falls into disrepute owing to a financial irregularity of his own, but is seen to have returned to favour later in the book.

The admiring point of view in this passage is that of the young Martin Hawte, one of the pilgrims we first meet in the sequel. At the time of the pilgrimage itself Martin is 45. The passage comprises four unnumbered sheets, typed using a red ribbon.

Notes

1. That is, Wilkin Shaw, whom we discover as the centre of consciousness as this section begins. ⮭
2. The other pilgrims are right to be suspicious about her name; she has given it out as Sibella Dunfold (instead of Dunford). ⮭
3. The typescript is not consistent about whether or not to capitalise religious terms. ⮭
4. The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is about 40 miles on foot from Norwich, where the sequel begins. ⮭
5. Warner seems not to have yet decided on the Friar’s name, which changes from ‘Sampson’ to ‘Bartram’ in the later pages of the sequel. ⮭
6. Martin, Bishop of Tours (316–97). ‘According to legend, he once came upon a poor man on the road, shivering in the cold, and cut in half his military cloak to share it with him. That night Christ appeared to him in a dream wearing the piece of cloak he had given away.’ See https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/31/lorenzo-lotto-saint-martin-dividing-his-cloak-with-a-beggar-italian-about-1530/. ⮭
7. ‘A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father’ (John 16:16: King James Version). ⮭
8. In the typescript ‘smoky’ has been crossed through and replaced with ‘dead’. ⮭
9. ‘White Week’ usually refers to the week following Whit Sunday (around seven weeks after Easter), but the context makes it clear that Wilkin is here referring to the Tuesday after Easter. ⮭
10. The sentence beginning ‘All over the world’ seems to be a rethought version of the previous sentence beginning ‘This talent of his’, but the typescript retains both. ⮭
11. Lapham, or Lopham: a village in Norfolk, about 20 miles from Bury St Edmunds. ⮭
12. The typescript has a brief lacuna after ‘than in’. ⮭
13. The typescript leaves a gap for the name and ‘Sampson’ has been supplied in Warner’s hand. In the rest of the sequel he is called ‘Bartram’. See note 5. ⮭
14. ‘Accidy’ (or ‘accidie’, ‘accedia’): ‘spiritual sloth, mental weariness’ (Oxford English Dictionary). ⮭
15. TS 3 at this point continues with two versions of a very similar four-line paragraph. It seems clear that Warner decided as she typed to revise her first version of the paragraph. The second version of the lines is given in the reading text of the story above. The first version reads as follows: ‘“What are we waiting for?” he asked. The friar climbed nimbly in to the cart, and sat down beside Sibilla. Wilkin, who had been told off to guide the beast, gave a tug to the bridle rein. Madge struck up her hymn, and they set off.’ ⮭
16. ‘Beechmast’: ‘the fruit of the beech’ (Oxford English Dictionary). ⮭
17. ‘Jew’s Ear’: ‘Any of several cup or ear-shaped fungi; spec. (a) a jelly fungus, Auricularia auricula-judae’ (Oxford English Dictionary). ⮭
18. Oby is the nunnery from which Sibilla has absconded. It is the main setting of The Corner That Held Them. ⮭
19. The typescript leaves a lacuna before ‘psalm’, presumably for the relevant number to be added later. The Vulgate Latin version of Psalm 44 (Authorised Version Psalm 45) starts ‘Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum’; the King James Version has ‘My heart is inditing a good matter’, but some commentators take ‘eructavit’ to signify ‘has belched’. Warner may have been thinking of lines 1933–4 of Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale: ‘Whan they for soules seye the psalm of Davit, / Lo, “buf” they seye, “cor meum eructavit”’. ⮭
20. The TS reads ‘Gib Cornell’, Warner either forgetting his name as previously given or thinking about changing it. ⮭
21. ‘He thought’: ‘he’ refers to Martin Hawte. ⮭
22. ‘Gurgoyle’: one of several variant spellings of gargoyle. ⮭
23. There is a half-line lacuna in the typescript at this point. ⮭
24. ‘Weaponsalve’: ‘An ointment superstitiously believed to heal a wound by sympathetic agency when applied to the weapon by which the wound was made’ (Oxford English Dictionary). ⮭
25. There is a lacuna in the typescript after ‘Martin’, suggesting that these pages were written earlier than the main narrative of the sequel, in which he is introduced as Martin Hawte, one of the party of pilgrims. ⮭