IN those days there was little time for the mourners to think of their
sorrow till after the funeral. There was a deal to do. There was the
mourning to make, and before that, if a family hadn’t had the weaver
lately, there was the cloth to weave and dye. We hadn’t had the weaver
for a good while, so we were very short of stuff.
Mother told Gideon he must go and fetch the old weaver, who lived at
Lullingford, by the mountains, and went out weaving by the day or the
week. Gideon saddled Bendigo, Father’s horse, and picked up the riding
whip with a queer kind of smile. As soon as he was gone, Mother and I
began to bake. For it wasn’t only the weaver that must be fed, but the
women we were going to bid to the funeral sewing-bee. They would come
for love, as was the custom, but we must feed them.
It seemed lonesome that night without Gideon. He had to bait and sleep
in Lullingford, but he came back in good time next day, and I heard the
sound of the hoofs on the yard cobbles through my spinning. We were hard
at it, getting yarn ready for the old man. He came riding after Gideon
on a great white horse, very bony, which put me in mind of the rider on
the white horse in the Bible. He was the oldest man you could see in a
month of Sundays. He hopped about like a magpie, prying here and there
over the loom, looking at his shuttle for all the world like a pie
that’s pleased with some bright thing it’s found. I had to take his
meals up to the attic, for he wouldna waste time leaving off for them.
It was a good thing the apples were all done, so he could hop about the
loft without let or hindrance. “Now you must take the bidding letters
for the sewing, Prue,” Mother told me.
“Can I take one to Jancis, Mother?”
“No. We munna spend money paying for a bidding letter to Jancis. But she
can come, and welcome.”
“I’ll go and tell her. She sews very nice.”
“But not so well as you, my dear. Whatsoever’s wrong, thee sews a
beautiful straight seam, Prue.”
I ran off, mighty pleased with praise, which came seldom my way. I met
Gideon by the lake.
“Taking the biddings?” he said.
“Ah.”
“Jancis coming?”
“Ah.”
“Well, when you be there, ask Beguildy to lend us the white oxen for the
funeral, oot?”
“To lug Father to the church?”
“Ah. And when we’ve buried Father, you and me must talk a bit. There’s a
deal to think of for the future. All these bidding letters, now, you met
as well have written ’em and saved a crown.”
I wondered what he meant, seeing he knew I couldna write a word, but I
knew he’d say in his own time, and not afore, that being his way. Nobody
would have thought he was but seventeen; he seemed five-and-twenty by
the way he spoke, so choppy and quick, but ever so quiet.
When I got to Plash, Jancis was sitting in the garden, spinning. She
said we could borrow the beasts, that were hers by right, being a
present from her Granny, though she never had the strength to control
them in a waggon nor to drive plough with ’em like I had in the years
after. But she got a bit of pin money by hiring them out for wakes, when
Beguildy didna pocket it. They dressed up beautiful with flowers and
ribbons after they’d been scrubbed.