'The Town House' (2) - Old Agnes's Tale Quiz

Answer: Old Agnes

They were all dancing when Martin returned from the Abbey; because they thought that Martin had perished along with his family, their grief was short-lived as there was no one left who was close to the dead. When Martin came, the first thing he saw was the burnt-out shell of his home, but the dancing and music of Pert Tom's whistle gave him hope.

It was Agnes saying 'Holy Mother of God! We thought you was dead, too.' that told Martin that his family had gone.

"Old Agnes moved towards him and took him by the arm.

She was suddenly sober and aware of how callous their behaviour must seem to him. 'Flared up in the night, your place did. But we thought you was dead too...She...Kate was running around, hunting for you and crying. And with all gone together there didn't seem much to grieve about.'"

Answer: she was the housekeeper

It was a bold step on Martin's part as he had only seen her as a drunken old woman before he built his house, but the steadiness which came over her when she had a kitchen of her own hardly surprised him. She was not to drink again - with her own hearth she had no need to drown her sorrows.

Answer: St Ursula

He had been told that St Ursula was the patron saint of bears and bear-keepers, and had envisioned her as a buxom woman who understood the needs of the travelling man. The image-seller could not bring himself to make any other than a slender virgin saint with yellow hair (taken from his granddaughter's head), but as this customer had paid part down, he added a bear at her side. Old Agnes was not fooled.

The image was wearing blue and the bear signified that 'even a savage bear could be tame in her presence'.

It was the Virgin Mary. Later, seeing what Martin actually got for a wife, she changed her mind and thought that it was St Ursula after all, and she had been upset to have been called by a different name!

Answer: she was being swum for a witch

Old Agnes took an instant dislike to Magda and was averse to touching her, or anything that had been used by her. When she learnt that Magda was unable to sew or cook (except a hedgehog) she was disgusted, but also pleased because it meant that the younger woman would be unlikely to contaminate her kitchen.

Answer: to Peg-Leg's hut

After she trained Dummy's daughter to cook and clean, she left for Peg-Leg's hut, which was on the grounds of the Old Vine. Mary was not as house-proud as Agnes, and soon her kitchen was in a sorry state, especially as the lady of the house, Magda herself, was not interested in housekeeping.

Answer: a month

Magda was to leave just before she spent a year at the house, so Pert Tom was to scratch his head and say, "I reckon I miscalculated. That must be a year, not a month they can't stay in one place." As it turned out, she left because she was with child and went to find a wise woman to terminate the pregnancy.

Answer: a solar

"I never had seen such building. Even the floor was solid oak, every plank about eighteen inches wide and laid as level as a table. And they put in a window, like Peg-Leg said, not flat in the wall, but bowed out, right over the garden I'd made, so it only just missed my lavender bush.

It was all made up of little panes of glass, greenish, about as big as the palm of my hand. All that, just for a woman to dance in!'"

Martin and Magda's son, Richard, was to take his lessons in the room above the solar from the age of six, and when he brought his bride to the Old Vine, the rooms above the solar were the family bedrooms, while the old part of the house was reserved for kitchen, work rooms and Pert Tom's room.

Answer: he had gone to Bywater to buy a ship

Since Martin built his house and took over the Old Vine site, he had set out to destroy the Guilds, or at least to dent them considerably. The Old Vine was virtually self-sufficient, and for that which Martin could not provide for himself and his hotchpotch of workers, he went elsewhere.

The rich and middle-classes of Baildon had all but destroyed him, so he had no time for them once they saw him as a considerable personage with money.

Answer: Richard

"First I had a good look at the baby. If Magda's own brew or the wise woman's muck had marked or marred him, I knew what to do; I wasn't having Martin saddled with something crippled or wrong in the head. So far as I could see, though, he was perfect, thin but healthy and his first cry was real lusty.

Then I paid particular attention to his face. There is a moment - just one moment, when all the newly born bear the stamp of the man who made them. They may lose it and never have it again, but they all, boy and girl alike, come into the world looking like their father will look when he is an old man. Magda's baby was Martin at sixty, bald and wrinkled. Happiness flowed into my heart.

Here it was, the boy he wanted, the boy I had wanted for him."

Answer: he let Owd Muscovy out and he was killed because the people were afraid

As a direct result of this, Martin asked Peter Priest (a defrocked priest who was part of the workforce at the Old Vine) to become Richard's tutor. He promised not to interfere with his methods, so long as Peter never hit the boy over the head, as he had been.

It comes as a shock to remember the events from Martin's childhood, for even though it is barely a hundred a fifty pages before, it was a world apart from the man the character had become. A tribute to Norah Loft's writing ability!