Chapter Eleven Cider #3
‘You asked.’
The field sloped gently as the pair walked to where the water ran, leaving the celebrations behind.
It was nice to be alone – alone with him.
She would’ve told him, were it not for the sounds which found them.
Despite the warning Jack had given, Kensa was not prepared for what met her next.
Mr Aldridge was sat, fully clothed, in the shallow brook that ran downhill to meet the sea.
He was laughing into the water, talking, cooing at it.
His whole lower half was submerged, while his palms slapped his damp thighs, cheeks rosy as plum wine.
‘I’ll take him at the waist, you get his arm over your shoulder,’ said Jack.
It was an odd drunkenness that claimed the curate, for it held little resemblance to any inebriation Kensa had known. Rather, it was as though Mr Aldridge occupied a world only he could see. His speech was disjointed, with full sentences dribbling forth or cutting off halfway through.
Kensa hesitated. ‘He seems mad.’
‘We’ll get the wise woman to visit him come the morning, if he’ll let her.’
‘See, this is what too much praying does to you.’
‘Mind yourself,’ said Jack, grinning. ‘People’ll call you a witch.’
Mr Aldridge was a sodden weight. Kensa hooked the curate’s arm around her neck and pulled, while he dripped stream-water onto them.
Rip, went the seams on Kensa’s dress, right under her arms. She thought it best not to tell Jack and, if he noticed, he did not comment.
Rather, the curate did all the speaking for them.
‘Now, I really shouldn’t,’ said Mr Aldridge. ‘Oh, well, go on then, I will! You’ve twisted my arm, you saucy little—’
‘We’re taking him to his home, Kensa, not yours,’ said Jack, steering them onto the higher path as he corrected their course.
‘Oh,’ Kensa hiccupped in reply.
Mr Aldridge swayed, blushed and humiliated himself with each step towards his abode.
It was a pretty detached cottage with innumerable windows, inlaid with fine Bristol glass (as the villagers had been told at many a sermon).
It sat upon Trevanion land, for it was he – the baronet – who funded the curate’s hours at the church and ministrations in the village.
Unusually, those wide windows, the ones Mr Aldridge bragged about, were closed, their curtains shut tight.
It was there, upon his front step, that Mr Aldridge’s sobriety snapped back into place. ‘What’re you doing here?’
Kensa hastily unravelled herself from the man and Jack eased back, still within arm’s reach, waiting for Mr Aldridge to sway again.
He did not. His senses had returned from wherever they had been.
With them came fury. ‘What tomfoolery is this?!’ He noticed Kensa, as though for the first time.
Mr Aldridge’s finger wagged aggressively at her, keeping her at bay.
‘I should have known you’d be involved, harlot. ’
Kensa reeled back. ‘Me?’
Jack stepped forwards. ‘You have no right to address her like that.’
‘I am a conduit for God’s judgements and it is he who decides—’
‘Enough,’ Jack snarled, with surprising fierceness from a man usually so temperate and restrained. ‘Miss Rowe came here to help and this is how you treat her? No, you won’t interrupt me when I’m speaking, is that understood?’
The men argued, batting unpleasantries back and forth. Kensa was tired. As if she’d been swimming too long and was too far out to go back. A door slammed and Jack cursed. She had never seen him this angry. It made her feel even worse.
‘That damned drunken fool,’ said Jack, bouldering up behind her, before coming to an abrupt halt. ‘Are you crying?’
‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘Yes.’
Everything tumbled out. Derwa’s harsh words, the encounter with Sir George and Isolde’s warning.
Until she could barely form a sentence that did not set off another wave of tears.
Jack pulled her into his collar where she babbled ridiculous statements about how she missed her mother and had ruined her dress and was sad about the Weaver’s ewe and how she never knew what to say to Elowen.
And she was going to die one day and for some reason that seemed awfully pressing, even though she knew it would not be for a long time yet.
Jack clumsily patted Kensa’s back, murmuring softness as one might to a whining pup.
It was good to be near him, her face in his linen shirt and its scent: pepper and soap and freshly cut hay.
When at last her tears ceased, Kensa pulled away.
Jack cuffed her nose with his sleeve. ‘All right?’
‘It’ll be my courses,’ she sniffed. ‘I always get sad whenever they’re nearing.’
‘Or it’ll be the cider.’
‘That too,’ admitted Kensa. Sunburned, anxious, dizzy, she thought on the cob-walled dwelling she had grown up in, of Elowen going to sleep in her bed, of her mother’s late-night voice and how it was to be held by someone who loved you and if – in that holding – he’d smell like a meadow at summer’s height.
‘I want to go home,’ she said at last, then retched and heaved her stomach across Mr Aldridge’s front step.
‘There we are,’ said Jack, staying close. ‘Do you feel better?’
‘Mmhmm.’
‘Good.’
Jack took a measured pause, then thumbed the drool from her chin. Slowly, with patience aplenty, he walked her all the way back to Bohortha.