by S. T. Haymon
‘Delivery, not deliverance,’ she corrected the white-haired man. ‘Nobody’s been holding us captive.’ She looked in admiration at the desk set. ‘Jeno’s done it beautifully. I hope it means he’s feeling better.’
‘Jeno is feeling absolutely OK! Yesterday he is in the Norfolk and Angleby and the clever doctors there say they can do nothing for him. So it stands to reason – if nothing is to be done, is no illness, right?’
‘He still looks peaky. And I see he still needs those sticks.’
‘That man will do anything for effect.’ The Hungarian stopped playing the fool, and said with calm intensity: ‘Don’t worry about Jeno, you hear? Jeno is my worry. If he gets no better I will take him to London, to Harley Street, where the doctors keep a list of illnesses that in Angleby they have never heard of, and is only available to people who pay fifty guineas.’
Jane Coryton bent over the table and picked up a blotter.
‘Keep your hands off, woman!’ The Hungarian warned her away with a large, upraised palm. ‘Is not your present! Is nobody’s present till I make my speech. Ring the bell, Geraldine, my love. Let us begin.’
At his command, the lady weaver, blushing afresh at the endearment, produced a silver-plated dinner bell from among her draperies. It took some time for its genteel tinkle to gain the attention of the crowded room.
Francis Coryton came quietly to his wife’s side. He had taken off his glasses and Jurnet could see for the first time that there was indeed a face behind them. Not a foolish face, either.
‘Ladies and gentlemen – inmates of Bullen Hall both voluntary and certified –’ the Hungarian beamed at an audience already showing its determination to be appreciative – ‘I have been chosen to make this most important speech tonight because I speak so good English. Also because I am bigger than any of the others who wanted to make speech but were afraid to say so because I am bigger.’ Again the man waited for the laughter to die down. ‘But I think I am best chosen because, not to be modest, I am a public monument – No, I promise you –’ raising a hand in rebuke – ‘now I do not make jokes. Bullen Hall is public monument to George Bullen, Viscount Rochford, and I am public monument to Laz Appleyard, also of Bullen Hall, Appleyard of Hungary – a little knocked about a bit, as you say, but still good for a few more years even if my stonework, like on the roof over our heads tonight, isn’t what it used to be.
‘So – now you have my credentials you hear me with a proper respect, eh, when I speak of our friend Francis, who today leaves us for ever. It is true he moves only to the village and, unless we are very careful, we shall be knocking into him all the time and saying to ourselves, “Who is that old buffer? I seem to remember him from somewhere,” but just the same it is an ending: and I speak for all our sorrows when I say that I am sad he goes from Bullen Hall. I fear that our new curator, who looks so kind and beautiful –’ the speaker half-turned towards the settee and sketched a mock obeisance – ‘will give us not nearly so much trouble, and then where shall we be for something to complain about? But there – I make jokes again. That is the worst of allowing a bloody foreigner to make a speech. They never stop trying to prove that they too have the English sense of humour. So now I will be serious. To Francis I need say no more than two words – “thank you.”’
From the applause that ensued it appeared that many of his listeners thought the Hungarian had finished. He waited for the noise to die down, and continued, however.
‘But this is ridiculous! Two words! I must speak more, or you will say is no speech. So I ask myself, what is this “thank you” you make such a clapping about? The man was paid. It was a job.
‘But I answer myself, no: is more than a job, the way Francis has done it. So I say, for us all, thank you, Francis, for the respect you have always given equally to the best of us and the least of us; for the way you have looked after us with love and understanding: for the much you have given and the little demanded in return. And so I say – so we all say – thank you, Francis, with this little gift we give from the heart with warm wishes to you and Jane for your new life, and –’ summoning a humorous ferocity which seemed designed to counterbalance his un-English display of emotion – ‘with warning to Mr Shelden that he will have to be bloody good to deserve for himself half so good a present from us when comes his time to go!’
The applause this time was long and deafening. Jane Coryton put her arms round her husband and kissed him. The retiring curator took some notes from his pocket and put his glasses back on again. The glasses twinkled with complacency at having resumed their proper position in society.
Coryton’s acknowledgment of his gift was graceful, but not unduly prolonged. The ritual accomplished, he called out, his voice loud and strong: ‘Can you hear me at the back? I’ve got something to read to you, and I want to make sure you can all hear.’
When the room had quietened to his satisfaction, he selected a piece of paper from among the sheets he had deposited on the table. ‘I thought of bringing along the original, but it’s a mite frail.’ Again he waited. Then: ‘I want to read you a letter. A letter that will alter your view of a whole period of English history.’
Certain now of every one’s attention, the retiring curator went off at an apparent tangent.
‘I doubt if any of you here, except for Mr Benby, looking for yet another hole in the fabric, has ever been inside that funny little tower some joker in the eighteenth century stuck on to the house in the north-west corner of the North Courtyard. I’ve hardly been there myself, I’m ashamed to say, except that, a couple of months ago, with the date of my retirement looming ever nearer, I decided that I really had to do something about the stuff that’s stored there. I didn’t want the incoming curator to write me off as a complete slut when it came to keeping my house in order. So up I went, with my duster and mop, so to speak, to do what I could in the way of tidying up.
‘In justice to myself, I should say it’s not quite the shambles I’m making it sound. Everything is tagged and packed away – stuff we simply can’t find a place for elsewhere in the house. The Appleyards, over the centuries, though they accumulated ever more possessions, never threw anything away – which is why, as a caretaker now surplus to requirements, I’m getting out of Bullen Hall fast before I too find myself in one of those rooms under the eaves, trussed up in a dust cover and labelled “old retainer, second half of twentieth century”.’
Coryton waited for the laughter to subside.
‘It was the room at the top I was chiefly bothered about. It’s full of chests of drawers stuffed with papers of one kind and another – rent books, old deeds, and so on. Fascinating social history – and the Bullen Hall mice love it, and, even more, the string, tape, or whatever, that’s been used to tie the various bundles together. As it happened, when I’d last been in Angleby, on the Market Place, I’d come upon some balls of plastic string that tasted so revolting – the chap flogging it obligingly gave me a bit to try – I didn’t think even our mice could stomach it. So I bought a whacking great ball, and what I was really in the tower for, that day, was to retie as many as I could of the bundles that needed it. If it led to Bullen Hall mice dying of malnutrition – well, that would be Mr Shelden’s problem.’
This time, the glasses quelled the incipient mirth with an imperious flash:
‘By now,’ Francis Coryton observed, ‘you’ll be all agog, waiting for me to reveal the Secret of the Tower. What you’re going to hear are the details of my own utter imbecility in not discovering it years ago, when I first catalogued the papers stored there. One of the chests, as I knew very well, is full of old scrap books, albums, folios of watercolours done by young ladies of the Appleyard family in Victorian times. The ribbon ties on one of these folios had been eaten through, and as I wrestled with my plastic string – it turned out to be hell to cut – out tumbled a kind of home-made wallet I had noticed several times previously – frayed silk stiffened with muslin, or something similar, and a pocket on the inside
; the kind of thing some young lady of the 1880s might well have made as a Christmas present for Mama. It had an embroidered motif on the outside, and, sawing away at that blasted string – what it really needed was secateurs, not scissors – I had plenty of time to look – really look – at it as it lay there on the floor looking up at me. The motif, in a kind of lozenge on the faded green silk, was yellowed with age, and it took a little while for it to dawn on me that it had once been white: that it was, in fact, a white falcon.’
Elena Appleyard said: ‘The white falcon of Anne Boleyn.’
‘Exactly! The heraldic emblem granted her in 1532 by Henry VIII when he made her Marquess of Pembroke. So much for my Victorian doodad! I put down the string and scissors, picked up the wallet, and examined it properly for the first time – and found out that what was keeping it stiff wasn’t muslin at all. Carefully folded between the two thicknesses of silk were nineteen letters from Anne Boleyn to her brother George.’ A pause. Then: ‘Love letters.’
Chapter Seven
‘My sweet lord and brother,
‘Tomorrow we are away to Windsor where His Majesty hath been assured by one Thomas Bolden, a soothsayer of Dover, that I shall not fail to be brought to bed of a lusty son, whereas if I remain at Greenwich, as I am much minded to do, the child shall be a girl and mine the fault that out of woman’s waywardness would not pay heed to so sage an oracle.
‘In truth, brother, so that I am shortly rid of this burden I bear before me like Salome the head of John the Baptist, I care not if it be maid or mannikin, provided only that its hair be red and not black, so that I may know without peradventure whom I have to thank for this amazing discomfort of the body. Yet indeed if I might only be in Norfolk with the one to whom that body and heart are bound by ties not Hercules himself could sunder, cumbered though I be with this imp within, I would count the journey no more than from my bed to my seat in the window and so back again.
‘This past week we have shown much entertainment to the embassy from France who depart hence tomorrow with gifts of worsted and kersey but nothing of what they came for. Every day, after we have eaten, His Majesty and some ladies of the court dance gavottes and galliards in the French manner in compliment to our guests, whereat the Frenchmen cry La! for wonder, never having seen the like in Paris, nor any other place, I warrant; the whiles myself sits quiet and smiling, my embroidery in my hand, remembering the night when you and I, sweet love, you and I only, danced in the Long Chamber, the moonlight coming through the window and Joris the lute player plucking his strings in the gallery. Else had he not been born with eyes that see only the black of night, such sights might he have seen, that summer eve, as would straightway have struck him blind! – or dead, had he but dared to speak of it.
‘Fare you well, then, in Norfolk, sweet brother. Yet fare you not too well there, lest, being in such wise, you make no shift to come soon to the court, and to the side of one who has for you more regard than is convenient either for her safety or her salvation.
‘From her that is yours wholly, though the heavens fall.’
Francis Coryton looked up from the typed copy he had been reading.
‘It’s signed, “Anne, sister and paramour”.’
For a moment there was a hushed silence. Before the excited voices could break out, Coryton went on: ‘This room, as many of you know, used to be called the Long Chamber. The windows were smaller than the ones we see today, but otherwise everything is much the same as it was then. No electricity, of course – candles perhaps, or torches dipped in pitch, stinking to high heaven. But I think, don’t you, that they danced, the two of them, by the moon’s light only, treading these very boards under our feet.’ The man took off his glasses and raised his head. ‘” If a man take his sister, his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness, it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of the people.” Leviticus, Chapter twenty, verse seventeen – the formulation of one of the deepest and most solemn taboos held by the human race. Today, when we read such cases in the papers, we are revolted. Disgusting! we say. Well, those two were guilty of incest, a crime that strikes at the root of everything we are pleased to call morality. And yet – and yet –’ the man’s face was rapt, his gaze on the past – ‘picturing those two young people four hundred and fifty years ago, dancing by moonlight in this very room to a melody played by a lute player blind as Cupid himself was blind, I can’t help seeing this – this squalid amour, if you like – as something poignant and beautiful. I’ve only read you one of the letters, choosing that particular one because it refers to the room we’re occupying at this moment. But reading the whole correspondence – all on Anne’s side, there are none of George Bullen’s replies – there’s a kind of doomed grandeur, a passionate greed –’ Coryton reddened and broke off, as if he had given away too much of himself. He replaced his glasses, and retired thankfully behind them. ‘So now you know,’ he concluded, smiling, ‘why, despite Jane’s plans for me, I shall not be devoting my new-found freedom to becoming a big shot on the Bullensthorpe Parish Council, or to growing the biggest pumpkin ever seen in East Anglia. I shall be sitting in the Library at Bullen Hall, poring over the love letters of a queen, and, hopefully, writing the book that puts the record straight. I can’t wait to get started!’
As soon as he had finished, the noise broke out unimpeded. The party guests looked pleased, proud to be in on a royal scandal, even if it was four and a half centuries after the event.
Jane Coryton, so kind to the living, said: ‘I can’t see she deserves our sympathy. She set out to catch a king, and she caught him. She knew what the stakes were. It’s George I’m sorry for.’
‘Oh, come!’ her husband protested. ‘George did all right. Until Henry tumbled to what was going on, he loaded his brother-in-law with lands and titles. You even end up sorry for the old monster.’
‘They couldn’t have been happy,’ Jane maintained stubbornly. ‘People still believed in hell in those days.’ She looked down the length of the Long Chamber. ‘It wasn’t all dancing by the light of the moon. Underneath it all, they must have been racked by the most awful feeling of guilt. They knew they were damned to all eternity.’
Elena Appleyard exclaimed quizzically: ‘My ancestors!’
Jurnet was unable to pinpoint who it was who demanded a few words from the new curator, but presently, without overmuch persuasion, Chad Shelden was on his feet, contriving to look at the same time fetchingly reluctant and managerially deft. His jacket of brown velvet was Bohemian as befitted a writer, but expensive-looking as befitted a successful one. Cuff links of gold set with sapphires glowed expensively in his white silk shirt.
‘This is a farewell party for Francis,’ he began with his boyish smile, ‘not a hello party for me. I hope, though, our host will allow me to congratulate him not only on a well-earned retirement, but also on his marvellous discovery. The letters are a wonderful – and valuable – addition to the Bullen Hall collection, and I’m sure I speak for the Trust –’ Elena Appleyard inclined her head slightly – ‘when I say how grateful we are for his sharp eyes. I just want to add how marvellous it’s been to meet you all this evening. Speaking for myself –’ with a charming air of imparting delicious confidences – ‘I can truly say it’s love at first sight. I can only hope that, when you know me better, and discover my sterling qualities – and find out what an intelligent, lovable, and above all, modest, chap I am – you will feel the same for me.’
The laughter that greeted this extravagance was loud but a whit uneasy. As if recognising that sentiments which went down well in NW3 were perhaps a little lush for the Norfolk outback, Sheldon modulated smoothly to another key.
‘You’re wondering about me,’ he asserted, with a forthrightness which went down better than the gush. ‘Very naturally. You want to know, am I hard to get on with? Shall I be making any changes? As to whether we’ll get on together only time will show, but –’ with
a practised and pretty twinkle – ‘let me say I’m hopeful. As to whether I plan to make any changes,’ Shelden continued, the tone still light, but underpinned with a hint of steel, ‘the answer, as I’m sure you’d expect, is yes, of course I do. Francis has set me a marvellous example, but I know he won’t take offence if I say that a new man coming in is bound to have a fresh perspective –’
Jurnet thought: he’s had this speech planned all along. Ever since he came down to Bullen and cased the joint.
Ever since he’d had a talk with Elena Appleyard.
‘As you all know, we simply have to get in more money. The stonework is only one priority. And that means somehow, by hook or by crook, we’ve got to attract a lot more people to Bullen than we’ve managed to do up to now.’ The new curator paused, and regarded his audience with a shrewd blend of amusement and sympathy. ‘Do I see an apprehensive look in your eyes? Of course I do! You love the Hall the way it is – its tranquillity, its exquisite orderliness which you labour so hard to preserve. And so do I. What I don’t like –’ and now the challenge was out in the open, all part of an adroit, if rough, wooing – ‘is that it’s completely unreal. A fairy tale. Is it possible that all the time you’ve been lovingly polishing the silver and dusting the pictures, you yourselves can’t see that dust on the sideboards thick enough to write your names in would be infinitely preferable to the spurious air of refinement which has somehow crept into every corner? How have you lovely people with the best intentions in the world managed to drain off the very life-blood of Bullen Hall, leaving it a wan and anaemic shadow of what it once was, and must become again? Do you honestly think that if Laz Appleyard were alive today he’d feel at home in what is basically – if you’ll allow me to be brutally frank – a boring old house full of boring old furniture that people only come to see when they’re bored out of their minds, and can’t think of anywhere else to go?‘
