The Bridge

Saturday, June 29, 1816

“The plank bridge at Hope ford went at midnight, Your Grace,” Preece said. He stood on the library hearth with water running out of his coat. “Will Gwilliam’s wife has come over the top on foot to tell it. She was two hours in the dark.”

Gideon had been awake. He had heard the rain on the leads for three nights together, and at four that morning he had been standing at the window, watching the grey come up over a valley that had turned to water.

“Report it in order.”

“The old man keeps forty ewes on his lower meadow across the river. They’re in the wool yet, it’s been too cold to shear. Last night he saw the Corve coming up, and he went down with his two lads to drive them onto the Tump. That’s a hump of ground at the far side of the meadow, with thorn trees on it. Mrs. Gwilliam followed with a lantern. The planks went behind them. Then the water came round the back of the Tump by the old mill leat, and they’re on an island, the four of them and the sheep. Will’s wife says it was the size of a stackyard at two o’clock and it’s getting smaller.”

“From their own bank?”

“Three hundred yards of river in spate. No man could swim it, nor horse.”

“And the leat side?”

“Sixty yards, maybe, and not so deep. There’s the old hay road goes through it, gravel bottom.” Preece stopped. He turned his hat round once. “But that’s the far bank, Your Grace. To come at it, you must go two miles up the drove road on the other side. And the only way onto the drove road is—”

“Brackenhope Bridge,” Gideon said.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. The clock on the mantel was loud.

He had known since Preece’s second sentence where this was going. He had looked at the map of that meadow on his wedding night, and he could see it now, the blue line of the river and the thin grey line of the leat. He could see the bridge too, two miles south.

“The harvest waggon,” he said. “The big one, with the high wheels, and four horses. Every rope in the stables, and the well rope with them. Four ash poles and a dozen hurdles. I want Pugh, Hotchkiss, Oakes, and any man in the yard who is not afraid of water. Send to the village for Bebb, since he knows the river. Tell Mrs. Hobday to have fires and blankets ready in the kitchen for four people. She is not to wake the Duchess.”

“And you, Your Grace?”

“Have Corporal saddled. I shall be in the yard in ten minutes.”

Preece went out at a run.

Gideon stood where he was for the length of three breaths. Then he went up for his boots.
***
It was full light when they came down the Ludlow road, grey and streaming. He rode ahead of the team. He heard the river before he saw it.

The bridge had two stone arches and a roadway wide enough for one waggon. On the upstream side the parapet stood as it had for two hundred years. On the downstream side there was a gap of four yards in the middle, where the coping and the courses under it had gone. Preece had had hurdles lashed across it in November. They were still there, grey and sagging, tied with twine.

The Corve was a foot below the crown of the arches. It was brown and fast, and it carried whole branches.

He had not seen this place since he walked away from it on the morning of the fifteenth of November. He had made sure of that. He had ridden north on his own land for a fortnight and never once south.

Corporal stopped at the foot of the bridge, because Gideon had stopped him. He had not meant to.

Behind him the waggon came up and halted. The near leader threw up her head at the noise of the water and tried to back. Hotchkiss swore at her, and she backed another step into the shaft horses, and the whole team began to bunch.

“Hold them,” Gideon said. He did not shout. “Hotchkiss, sit still and keep your hands down. Oakes, take my horse.”

He got down. His legs did what they were told, which surprised him.

He walked to the mare and took her by the cheek strap, close under the bit. She was a big grey, wet and frightened, and she rolled her eye at him. He put his other hand flat on her neck.

“You will not like it,” he told her quietly. “No more do I. Walk on.”

He led her onto the bridge. He put himself on her off side, the downstream side, between her shoulder and the hurdles, so that she could not see the gap and would have to go through him to reach it.

That put the gap on his right. He could see every inch of it.

The broken edge of the stone was still pale. It had not weathered yet. He saw the twine on the hurdles and the water below them. Forty yards down a willow leaned out over the flood with its lower branches under. He had not known it would still be standing.

He looked at it. He made himself look, as a woman in a glasshouse had once looked at his face, properly and once. Then he looked at the road between the mare’s ears and kept walking.

The wheels ground on the stone behind him. He counted his steps and reached thirty-one.

He was on the far bank, with wet gravel under his boots, and he had crossed it. He felt nothing at all. He knew that kind of nothing from the field. The feeling would come later, when there was time for it.

“Drove road,” he said. “Trot where the ground is sound. Oakes, my horse.”
***
The Tump was the size of a threshing floor.

He saw it from the bank of the leat, across sixty yards of sliding brown water. There were three thorn trees and a grey huddle of sheep packed so close that they looked like one animal. There were four people. A woman sat on the ground with a shawl over her head. The tallest of the men stood at the water’s edge in a shapeless hat, quite still, watching them come.

“It’s dropped a yard of ground since I saw it last,” Bebb said. He had come pelting after them on a cart horse. “The hay road goes in by that post, Your Grace, and comes out by the middle thorn. But I’d not swear it’s all there. The leat scours.”

“Then I shall find out. Pugh, the well rope.”

He took off his coat and his boots. He tied the rope round his waist himself, with a bowline, and gave the end to Pugh and Oakes together.

He had done this in November, with six men on the rope. He noticed it and set it aside.

He took an ash pole and walked in by the post.

The cold shut on his legs like a trap. The gravel was there under his feet, hard and ridged. He went forward, sounding with the pole before each step. The water came to his knees, and then to his thighs. Twenty yards out it came to his waist and pushed at him steadily from the left like a shoulder in a crowd. At thirty yards the pole went down a foot deeper than it should have. He stopped and felt to the right, and found the hard bottom again where the road had bent. He marked the place in his mind against the middle thorn.

He came out on the Tump with his teeth shut hard, so that they would not be heard.

“Mr. Gwilliam.”

“Your Grace.” The old man’s face was grey under the brown hat. He had been standing in the rain for six hours. “I’d not have sent for you. It was Will’s wife.”

“She did right. How deep was this channel at midnight?”

“To the knee.”

“It is to my waist now. Then we have an hour, or a little more. The road is sound except at one place, ten yards this side of the middle, where it has gone on the upstream edge. I am going to bring a waggon over. It will take ten ewes at a time. Your wife goes on the first load.”

“A waggon’ll not stand in that. The water’ll swing her tail round and have her off the gravel.”

“It would if I let it. I shall have a rope on her from that oak.” He pointed upstream, to the far bank, where a big tree stood forty yards above the hay road. “It will be made fast to the fore-carriage, on the upstream side. The current pushes her down and the rope holds her up, and she swings across on it like a gate on a hinge. We took nine-pounders over a river in Spain that way, in worse water than this. Have your sons ready to lift.”

He went back the way he had come.

On the bank he gave his orders. There were eleven men, and he gave each of them one thing to do and told him when to do it. Bebb and two others were to carry the long cart rope to the oak, take three turns round the trunk and stand by to pay out. Pugh was to make the other end fast to the fore-carriage with a timber hitch. Hurdles were to be lashed along both sides of the waggon bed to pen the sheep. Hotchkiss was to drive at a walk, and never faster.

“You will steer for the middle thorn until I raise my hand. Then you will bear right a waggon’s width and hold it for ten yards. If a horse goes down, you sit still and let Pugh cut her out. You do not jump. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” said Hotchkiss, rather white.

“Good lad. You brought three hundred pots over a hill without cracking one. This is only sheep.”

He mounted Corporal bareback, in his wet shirt, and rode into the water on the downstream side of the leaders.

The first crossing was the worst, because nobody yet believed in it. The grey mare fought. The waggon lurched at the bad place, and he felt it begin to slew. Then the stay rope came taut from the oak with a crack like a whip, and the tail came straight. He raised his hand. Hotchkiss bore right.

They came up onto the Tump with water pouring from the axles.

The Gwilliam sons were broad, silent young men. They lifted the ewes over the tailboard as if they were sacks, and the ewes weighed like sacks, with their fleeces full of rain. Mrs. Gwilliam was handed up last and sat down among them without a word.

“Ten,” said Gwilliam.

“Walk on.”

It was as he brought that load up the far bank that he saw the dog cart.

It stood on the drove road with a groom at the pony’s head, and it was piled with blankets. His wife was getting down from it. She had the grey cloak on, with the hood up, and a can in one hand that steamed.

She was at the waggon before the wheels stopped. She and Oakes had Mrs. Gwilliam down and wrapped and sitting on the cart step with a mug in her hands in rather less than a minute.

Gideon turned Corporal on the bank. His wife looked up at him from under the wet hood.

“You told Mrs. Hobday not to wake me,” she said. “Mrs. Hobday has better sense. Go on. I shall not get in your way.”

He went on.

He went over three times more. The water rose with each crossing. On the second it was over the hubs. On the third the Tump was half its size, and the ewes that were left had begun to mill and cry. On the fourth the water reached the waggon bed, and he sent Pugh out along the stay rope, hand over hand, to stand at the bad place with a pole as a mark.

He did not raise his voice once. He had learned twelve years ago that frightened men and frightened horses listen best to a man who sounds as though he has done it before. He said, “Pay out. Hold. Bear right. Walk on.” He said it at the same pitch each time. The men did it, and after the second crossing they did it before he spoke.

On the last load a ewe went mad and jumped the hurdle.

She hit the water on the downstream side and went under. She came up three yards from Corporal’s shoulder, with her eyes rolling. Gideon leaned out as far as he could and got his hand in the wool of her back. She weighed as much as a man. He hauled her up across the gelding’s withers by main force and held her there, kicking, with his forearm across her neck.

Corporal had carried wounded men and did not think much of sheep, but he stood.

They came out. Gideon dropped the ewe on the grass, and she lay a moment and then got up and shook herself and walked off to the others, complaining.

Gwilliam climbed down from the waggon. He was stiff, and he held to the wheel. He went along the bank and counted his flock, touching each back as he passed it. He counted them twice.

“Forty,” he said.

He looked across the leat. The three thorn trees stood in the water now. There was no ground under them at all.

Then he turned round. He took off the brown hat with both hands and held it against his chest, and stood bareheaded in the rain with his white hair plastered flat. He had done it before only to scratch his head.

“I said some words in the lane a fortnight since, Your Grace.”

“You did. They were true.”

“They was true then.” The pale blue eyes went over him, the wet shirt and the bare feet and the patch. “I’ll not say them again. Tuesday, was it?”

“The first Tuesday.”

“Then the wife’ll cut the bacon thick,” said Isaac Gwilliam, and put his hat back on.
***
The waggon went ahead with the Gwilliams in it, bound for the castle kitchen. The sons stayed to fold the ewes in a high pasture of Bebb’s. Preece rode beside the waggon.

Gideon rode behind with a blanket over his shoulders, and the dog cart came after him. He had his boots on again. He could not feel his feet in them.

At the bridge he pulled up, and this time he had meant to.

He got down and gave the rein to the groom. “Take him on. And the cart.”

“I shall walk the rest,” his wife said. She climbed down before anybody could hand her. “Go on, Jem.”

The cart rattled over and away up the road. They were alone on the bridge, in a rain that had thinned to a drizzle. The river went under them with a sound like a mill.

He went to the gap and stood facing it. She came and stood beside him, on his left, and kept silent.

The feeling had come now, as he had known it would. It was in his hands. He put them on the broken stone to keep them still.

“You know what happened here,” he said.

“I know that they went over in the flood, coming home from Ludlow. All the village knows that.”

“The village does not know why they were on the road.” He looked at the willow. “It was the rent audit. The fourteenth of November, a Tuesday, at the Feathers. The tenants pay their half-year, and then there is a dinner, and the Duke takes the chair. My father did it for forty years. It was my place.”

She waited.

“I had been home three months. I had this.” He touched the scar, briefly, with two wet fingers. “I told Edmund that I would not sit at the head of a table while five and forty farmers tried not to look at me. I was not ill, and I had no other business. I only would not be looked at.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed. He said he would go and tell them I had a cold, and that Bella could come and buy ribbons. He said that they would be home by ten.” His voice had gone flat. He could not help that. “It had rained three days, as it has now. I was in the library when Preece came. I went in from that bank with a rope on me, just as I did this morning. This morning I brought out forty sheep.”

He stopped there, because the rest of that sentence was not one he could say.

He knew what came next. He had heard it from Quince, in a letter, and from Preece, and from the bishop who took the funeral. You could not have known. It was an accident. You must not blame yourself. Every one of them had said it kindly, and it had not helped.

He waited for her to say it.

She did not. She stood with her hands folded in her wet cloak and looked through the gap at the water. He could see the side of her face, the spectacles misted and a strand of brown hair stuck to her cheek.

“I cannot tell you that it would have gone otherwise if you had been in the carriage,” she said at last. “Nobody can tell you that. You will go on asking, I suppose, and I shall not insult you by answering.”

“No.”

“But I will tell you what I see, since we are to be plain.” She put out her hand and took hold of the top bar of the nearest hurdle. It moved under her fingers. The twine had rotted. “I see a hole four yards wide in the parapet of the only bridge between this village and its market. It has been tied up with sticks for seven months. Carts go over it every day, and the river is a foot under the arch. Mrs. Gwilliam came over it an hour ago in a waggon.” She turned her head and looked at him straight. “Then mend the bridge, Gideon.”

He heard his name.

Nobody had used it since Edmund. His mother had, and his brother, and no one else living. It came to him in her voice, low and rather hoarse from the cold. She had not softened it at all.

She had said, on their wedding night, that she could not use it yet. He had not expected to hear it for a long time.

He looked at the hurdle, and at her hand on it, with a faint stain of pink still under the thumbnail. He looked at the pale broken stone.

He had left it. He had not been able to look at the place, so he had left a hole in a bridge for seven months, with a river under it.

There were hoofs on the road. Preece was coming back on his cob, anxious, to see what had become of them.

“Preece.”

“Your Grace?”

“How many men are there in this parish and the next with no work? You found me six in May.”

The steward pulled up. “There’s no hay to make, and there’ll be no harvest to speak of till October. I could find you thirty by Monday, and turn away as many again.”

“Find the thirty. This parapet is to be rebuilt, the whole downstream side, in dressed stone from our own quarry. I want it a foot higher than it was. The roadway is to be relaid and the approaches banked. Get a mason from Ludlow to direct it. The labourers will have eighteen pence a day.”

“Eighteen pence!” Preece stared. “That’s harvest wage, Your Grace.”

“They will get no harvest wage from anyone else this year. They may have it from me. I want it finished before the November floods.” He took his hands off the stone. They had stopped shaking. “Begin on Monday. Take those hurdles down first and put up a proper rail. I have looked at them long enough.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Preece got out his pocket-book, found it soaked through, and put it away again. He was smiling. “Monday.”

He turned the cob and went.

Gideon pulled the blanket off his own shoulders. It was wet on the outside and nearly dry within. He put it round his wife’s, over the grey cloak. She let him, and he held the two edges together under her chin a moment longer than was needed.

“Will that do?” he said.

“The blanket, or the bridge?”

“Both.”

“The bridge will do very well.” Her eyes were bright behind the misted glass. “The blanket ought to be on you. You have been in a river since five o’clock.”

“I have been in colder ones. You are shivering, Linnea,” he said. “Come home.”
***