He shook himself like Cassie, his wolfhound. The world tilted. He put one hand on the tree to steady himself.
Dizzy and hollow. Diseased in his soul. No way to head into a new, unknown life.
He lifted his hand from the belly of the tree. He should not have come here. She always unsettled him.
He slid back down the slope of the beech hanger on last year’s dead leaves, towards the mill pond. Often before this he had found his reason again in that dark water, when he had thought it was lost.
The mill still slept its winter sleep, locked up around the last season’s chaff and dust. The big wheel dripped, heavy and unmoved by the trickle of the closed-off race. The mill pond above the race, where Bedgebury Brook joined the lethargic Shir, brimmed with melted snows and spring rains not yet needed to grind corn. The surplus tugged at the tips of arching grass blades as it poured downstream through the open sluice.
John stepped out onto a stony shelf above the pond. Another self looked back up from the dark water. A cloud of early gnats hung and sideslipped just above the surface. To his right the Shir ducked in and out of the trees, back upstream toward the three fish ponds, in slow green bends. Silver teeth of young nettle leaves and dark matte-green lance-heads of burdock grew at his feet. Across the pond, black-trunked willows eased into leaf. The branches of a fallen willow drew v’s on the current. The stream, the pond, the plants, the trees, and his reflection wavered as if John looked through the uneven glass of a window pane.
A fish leaped. John’s reflection heaved and rippled. He stripped naked, drew a deep breath and dived.
The icy water, still cold from the winter, peeled him as cleanly as a willow rod. It stripped away thought, leaving a pure white core of muscle and bone. He surfaced, gasped, shook his head like a dog, alive with the shock. Cold eddies caressed his toes in the brown-green depths. Icy liquid fingers squeezed his balls tight into his groin and tugged gently at the dark hairs on his arms and shins.
He coiled and slid under again. He turned among the fragments of floating leaf and weed, opened his eyes to look up through the faint cold green light to the silver underside of the water, his eyelashes heavy with bubbles. He knifed deeper. Let himself drift upwards through the layers of warm and cold water until he burst through the silver into the air.
The air flowed freely into the crevices around his heart. He took a deep breath and felt his weight lighten. He pulled himself back below the surface and swam until the water threw him up again.
One foot touched ground. He stood and scooped the water in cupped hands over his head. When the last drop curved behind his left ear and fell from his lobe, he scooped again. Then again. His skin quivered under each delicate, chilly blow. He shook his head, opened his eyes and saw the woman standing on the far bank.
Cat. His former weeding woman, now married to the cooper. Who had deserted his garden and bed for a lean-to attached to the cooperage in the village. The gnat swarm sideslipped between them. Her shape quivered.
‘Good day, Cat.’
‘John.’ She moved from the bushes that hid the mouth of the path onto the ledge beside his heap of clothes. ‘I had forgotten how long and lean you look. Sleek as an otter with your curls plastered back. I thought I’d always remember, but it goes so fast.’
‘And there’s another to remember now instead.’
She smiled. Neither of them moved. John stood naked in the green-brown water up to his chest. The woman, in a dirty brown wool work skirt, unlaced bodice and linen shirt, looked down as she rerolled one sleeve to her elbow. Finally she nodded equably. ‘That’s so.’
‘Is all well?’ He hadn’t seen her since the wedding. He didn’t know whether he had avoided her, or she him.
‘More than well.’ She made no move to leave.
John began to feel foolish. He was too fragile, just now, for games. He looked at his clothes. Cat followed the direction of his glance.
‘No need to feel modest with me,’ she said, but her eyes grew suddenly uncertain.
A shiver of possibility rippled over John’s skin. He swam two slow strokes back across the pond towards Cat and his clothes. Then he stopped and looked at her again.
‘Oh, John,’ she said. ‘I followed you here. A married woman. Isn’t that wicked?’
‘Only if you leave me now.’
Cat stepped back off the ledge. ‘This way,’ she said, ‘along here.’ She picked her way around the pond edge, over kingcups and mud to a thicket of yellow-green willows. She parted their curtain with her hands and vanished like a player from a stage.
John waded from the pond, shedding water like a ship in a storm and slipped after her into the green haze. A sudden lustful hope nearly blinded him. Cat stood by the leaning trunk of a mature tree, thick-trunked herself but still graceful. He had seen her dark blond hair, now caught back in a cap from her square-cornered face, drifting as loose as the willow fronds on the water. His gut lurched and his member stiffened.
‘You say things are more than well with your cooper,’ he said thickly.
‘And I mean them to stay that way.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘We’re a good solid match. But I’ve thought of you…and how sudden I married. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.’
‘Did you follow me just to apologize?’ Lust teetered towards humiliated rage. She had flushed him into the open only to leave him there.
‘No. I thought you’d not object to one last time.’
He couldn’t speak. His mouth dried. His pulse drummed in his ears. In his strange ill state, he had misjudged her. He had forgotten her inability to toy with what she saw as the truth. At times her solid directness had weighed him down when he had wanted apostrophes, trills and flourishes in their passion. Now she held him in place.
She offered her mouth for him to kiss, then leaned back in his arms. He sank his face into the warm curve of her neck. She smelled strong but sweet, like his herbs.
‘I wanted to see,’ she said dreamily, ‘how it is, just once, when we don’t fear making a little bastard. I mean one last time, don’t mistake me.’
‘No,’ he promised, with his muzzle in the cup above her collarbone.
They had seldom mistaken each other, which was why he had liked as well as desired her even when he hankered for something more.
Cat broke back out of his embrace and lifted the hem of her skirt. ‘Here, let me dry you a little.’
‘Come back!’ He slid his wet arms under the petticoats, feeling for her warm skin. ‘Oh, sweet Heaven, you’re so warm, and I’m so cold!’
‘Not for long.’ She rubbed his bare chest and then his thighs. ‘You are a fool to swim so early.’
He grinned suddenly. The wolf eyes gleamed. ‘But look what it brought me!’ He felt suddenly easy with her again, as he had for two and a half steady years before she married the village cooper, when he had watched her crouched near him in the gardens intent on slaughtering infant weeds and only half-aware of his eyes. He slid his hand into her bush. ‘No fool, Cat. Not at all.’
She hissed between her teeth, blinked, then smiled into his eyes. She pulled her low-cut bodice from her shoulders and eased her brown nipples up into the reach of his mouth and fingers. He pressed her back and down. She twisted away.
‘Not on the ground. I can’t carry all those witnesses on my back and sleeves and hair. Here. Come over here.’
She leaned forward with her hands on a willow trunk, her skirts and petticoats bunched across her back. He thrust himself home between her magnificent haunches.
A familiar place he thought he had lost. Warm, friendly, familiar.
‘Oh, God!’ she said,