‘A white deer is good luck!’ he told her. ‘I’ve never seen another. I thought you would make a good mother for it.’
Emily kissed him happily, though she soon learned the hard way what it is to care for another creature’s baby. The little fawn could go for a long time without food, but the moment that it smelt milk it would begin to struggle to its feet, and its bleating grew loud and shrill. The old family shepherd showed her the trick of putting her hand in the milk and getting the fawn to suck her fingers to persuade it to drink by itself.
The fawn survived and began to grow into a fine doe. It followed Emily wherever she went; they became inseparable.
But times were changing. Richard and his children did not realise how much. They were shocked to hear that King Henry had decided to put away his true wife, Catherine, and marry his whore, Anne Bullen. How was it possible for a marriage – especially one of such a long duration – to be dissolved on a whim?
Worse was to follow, for the king, no doubt influenced by bad council, foreigners and above all his base-born chancellor, Cromwell, seemed determined to break with the Holy Father in Rome and bring damnation upon the whole country.
The male portion of the family debated and argued at table and away from it. They were united in their determination not to change their faith in any way. ‘How can a king change what God has ordained?’ they asked. In this, they shared the opinion of most of their neighbours in the North. What they could not agree on was what to do about it. The younger hotheads were all for local landowners raising troops and riding to London to demand that the king change his evil advisors. Older and wiser heads pointed out that this king was not a man who brooked criticism from anyone. ‘Your heads would decorate London Bridge before your feet were out of the stirrups!’ said their father.
Francis said, ‘The king listens to arguments. We should write to him setting out our points carefully.’ But the other sons laughed at him, saying that they were not lawyers but the sons of a gentleman. In the end, the wiser councils prevailed and nothing was done – for the moment.
Meanwhile Emily’s doe was fully grown. She saw that the time had come for her pet to return to the herd and that it would be cruel to keep her a prisoner. She knew that her brothers would never kill her doe and so one day she took her into the deer park, where the herd was feeding. The doe trembled with excitement when she saw others of her kind and tentatively approached the herd. A fine stag caught her scent and came trotting out to meet and claim her. Emily returned home a little sad, but knowing that she had done the best she could for her friend. In the years following Emily often saw the doe running with the herd; flashing in the sunlight as the deer streamed along a hill or shimmering white among the trees of the wood, but they did not approach each other again.
One day a neighbour came galloping to the gates of Rylstone Hall. He brought news that, at first, no one could believe: the king had ordered commissioners to investigate all monasteries and decide whether they were being properly administered. They had the power to close any that were found wanting.
‘It’s just an excuse invented by court lawyers for stealing the Church’s property!’ declared Richard.
‘Like enough it’s the king who will eat the goods,’ said Christopher, another of the sons. ‘He grows as fat as Pig Ellen – and as greedy!’
His father struck him for insulting the king, but his view was silently held by many. The news soon spread to the commoners and they were consumed with fear. If the monasteries closed, who would help to feed the poor in times of famine? Who would provide them with care when they were ill? Who would keep the powers of darkness at bay?
The great landowners of the North and their people were never friends of change. They wished to live the life that their forefathers had lived, safe in the certainties that had sustained them for centuries: their religion, administered by priests in the magic language, Latin; the social hierarchy where everyone knew their place, their responsibilities, their obligations. New ideas, new men, new practices they rejected as dangerous to order, and order, in a troubled region like the North, was thought more important than anything.
Emily heard talk of a pilgrimage as she sat at the family table. It would not be to a holy place but it would be a holy thing itself, formed of abbots, priests, lords and ordinary people. They would go to London humbly and prayerfully to beg the king to spare the monasteries and, by ridding himself of certain evil councillors, to make his people happy.
It seemed to Emily to be a good idea. Surely the king could not refuse a request from so many good people? Francis alone held out against the family joining the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, because he did not trust the king – or any king for that matter.
‘Henry will see this as rebellion and use it as a reason to break the power of our northern lords. No king can bear rivals and we northerners have trodden on his toes once too often.’
His father and his brothers ignored his view, saying that they were ready to die for their religion if necessary. In the end it was decided that Francis could remain behind to care for the estate, while father and sons went south with the Pilgrimage.
Day after day passed by without any news reaching Rylstone Hall. One day, Emily and Francis rode out together to view the deer. It was the season of the rut; rival stags were belling out their challenges to each other and then rushing together again and again with a great clash of antlers. Emily could not see her white doe. She shivered in the brisk wind.
‘God protect our father and brothers!’ she murmured.
‘Amen’ her brother replied, but he looked troubled.
News began at last to dribble in. It seemed that the Pilgrimage had not reached London. It had met the king’s forces and there had been a stand-off, neither wishing to fight the other. Perhaps if one of those great Northern lords had been prepared to take charge the king might have been forced to grant some of their requests, but none did, and so at the first mention of a pardon for all who departed quietly, men began to drift away. Richard and his sons returned angry and humiliated.
The monasteries closed. Bolton Abbey was despoiled and its treasures carried away by men who suddenly became rich. Only the monastery church remained in use, a simple parish church now. Time passed. The old king died and went to be judged by God. His young son, a fierce Protestant but mercifully a weakling, died soon after. At last, Mary, a true Catholic queen, came to restore the land. Around Rylstone people breathed more freely, now the old ways would return, they said. Some of the Norton family agreed with them. Others, like Francis, were not so sure. As time went on, the new queen did not thrive. She had no children; she was ill. Men said she was wasting away. Now all the Nortons were alarmed. The next in line to the throne was another Protestant, the bastard Elizabeth. Surely the followers of the true religion must stop her taking the throne!
Upon Mary’s passing, Elizabeth was crowned. She showed no intention of undoing the evil her father had done. She pretended to be gracious and forgiving, but it was only a matter of time, thought the Nortons, before she remembered the Northern lords and wished to bring them to heel.
There was no talk of persuasion. Force of arms, they decided, was the only way to remove this upstart queen and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Now free speech at dinner in front of servants or women ceased. Emily heard whispering, doors closed on her and there was an atmosphere of conspiracy. She knew they were planning rebellion and fear grew in her heart. Her brothers asked her to make a banner for them, embroidered with the five wounds of Christ. They began to practise more with sword and buckler. They almost abandoned hunting in favour of polishing off their fighting skills.
Emily implored Francis to tell her what was happening, but he shook his head and said that the time was not yet ripe. She took to visiting her mother’s grave in Rylstone church to pray for her family.
Then there was a day of bags being packed, of whinnying horses being groomed and harnessed. Men she did not know gathere
d in the courtyard. Her father called her into the parlour and kissed her. He told her that he and eight of her brothers were going to join an armed rebellion led by the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland.
‘You must be a brave lass and keep the hall while we are gone.’
‘Is Francis going with you?’
‘He is, but only as my squire. He says he will not fight against the queen, foolish lad. We shall see!’ replied her father.
They rode away in great style, her father and her nine brothers, proud beneath the banner she had worked for them. What could she do but pray for their safe return?
Her prayers were destined not to be answered.
Once again, a neighbour on a sweating horse galloped to the gates of Rylstone Hall with news, but this time his eyes were red with weeping.
‘Mistress Emily, you must be brave,’ he began, and Emily knew that all was lost. White as her own doe, she led him into the hall and sat with him at the empty table while he told her of the failure of the rebellion; of the capture of her father and brothers.
‘The Queen’s Grace now says that all those who went on the Pilgrimage of Grace have forfeited by this uprising the pardon given to them by her father. She will have blood, Mistress Emily. Her anger is terrible, they say.’
‘Are my father and brothers then, dead? I thought them only captured.’ He hesitated.
‘They live yet, mistress, but in prison and condemned to be hanged for treason.’
Emily stared at the wall before her, still as an alabaster monument.
‘And what of my brother Francis? Was he also taken? He swore he would not fight!’
The neighbour looked down at his hands and said nothing.
‘Speak!’
‘Your brother Francis did not fight, they say, but when your brothers and father were taken he picked up their standard, the one that bore the five wounds of Christ, and escaped with it. But as he rode past Bolton Priory, Sir George Bowes and his henchmen met with him by accident and, thinking to gain favour with the queen, slew him …’
She fell forward onto the table as though he had struck her with a hammer. The neighbour shouted for the servants who chafed her hands and temples and laid her in bed. ‘Your message has surely killed her!’ they said, but she was not dead. Next day she rose from her bed to begin her duties as the head of the shattered household.
Her first duty was to find Francis’ body and bring it home for burial, but even that was denied to her, for his killers, struck with guilt perhaps, had had him buried in the churchyard at Bolton Priory. She rode over there as soon as she felt strong enough and spent many hours praying by the newly piled earth that marked his grave.
A cold winter’s day brought a group of six men on tired horses into her courtyard. They were heavily cloaked and led three pack mules bearing three black sinister loads. Though they were muffled up to the eyes, Emily had no sooner caught sight of them than she ran weeping to meet them, for she recognised some of the brothers that she thought lost forever.
They told her that though their father and her brothers Christopher and Thomas had been executed, the king had shown mercy to six of them. ‘We have brought the others back with us to lie in their own land,’ they told her. They decided to bury their dead at Bolton Priory next to their brother.
Now the wrath of the queen broke over the North like a tidal wave. Anyone who had been involved in the Pilgrimage of Grace was to be punished. Hangmen had never been so busy; in every town and village known to have taken part people were hanged; lords, knights and gentlemen died as well as commoners.
The Norton family had only a little time together before the final blow struck them. Their father, having been hanged as a traitor, had forfeited his estates to the Crown. Soon the sequestrator arrived with his men to take possession and the remaining Nortons had to leave their family home. They were destitute, forced to rely on their neighbours for shelter and the very food they ate.
The remaining Norton brothers no longer dared remain in England. Being young and active they went abroad to seek their fortune in foreign wars, but their sister refused to go with them. She became a wanderer, freely offered shelter and sustenance by those who still clung stubbornly to the old faith. She walked the moors in all weathers from cottage to cottage, unwilling to be a burden for too long. Sometimes she walked to Bolton church, the only part of its monastery to remain in use. She could often be seen there as months turned into years, praying in the nave or by the graves of her father and brothers.
One day she could bear the separation from her old home no longer. She walked the long miles to Rylstone to sit once more in the deer park near Norton Tower where she and her brothers had once played.
As she rested under an oak tree and looked around at the familiar landscape, she saw, beyond the yellow summer gorse, a herd of deer. There was a white one among them, who seemed to be watching her. Slowly, cautiously, it left the herd and came towards her. Trembling with something like hope, Emily held out her hand. Gracefully the white doe stepped up to her and bent its head to lick her salty palm. Then, with a sigh, it settled itself down beside her just as it had when it was a fawn. Emily, comforted at last, wept for her lost family as she had never been able to before.
From that day on the two became once more inseparable. Their two souls drew closer together until they seemed like one. Lonely shepherds grew familiar with the sight of them walking slowly, gracefully together along the top of a hill or drinking at a moorland pool as they travelled between the churches of Bolton and Rylstone. On moonlit nights, they might be seen sleeping curled in the bracken or sheltering from rain below the rocks of Rylstone crag.
How long do deer live? Longer than Emily, it seems. Her hard life and grief soon wore down what was left of her youth and health. She died long before her time and was buried by her former neighbours next to her mother in Rylstone church. Not long afterwards, the white doe was seen for the first time on its own at Bolton. Some folk believed that Emily’s soul, unable to bear leaving the graves of her family even for the joys of heaven, returned again and again in the ghostly form of the white doe. But it may be that her lonely, unquiet soul still clung to that of the living friend of her youth until the white doe too lay down to sleep for the last time by Norton Tower.
POTTER THOMPSON
Swaledale
On the banks of the Swale rises a huge rock on which the old market town of Richmond stands. A poor man by the name of Potter Thompson once lived there. He made the simple pancheons and jugs used by dairymaids up and down the dale, and sold them in the market or carried them up Swaledale loaded on his old donkey. It was a hard life, for his pots sold very cheaply and he had a nagging wife to support; she was always telling him how lazy and stupid he was. He was a cheerful man nevertheless, especially when he was away from home, and Richmond folk were fond of him, though, as they said, he would never set the Swale on fire.
When his wife’s tongue drove him out of the house, he would wander about town hoping that someone would buy him a beer, or he would stroll down to the river and enjoy the sight and sound of the swirling water.
One day, when his wife was more than usually angry at the pittance he had brought home from the market, he stomped down to the river to cool off, for he had answered her back, which was always fatal. It was a cold and windy day. The river was the colour of tea, made so by the ironstone upstream – no, not tea, he thought, more like beer with the curling cream foam on it. ‘A river of beer!’ he thought. ‘Now that would be a thing to see!’ He fell into a happy dream imagining it.
The path he was on went right along the foot of the castle rock. He had been on it many times, but suddenly he woke from his beery daydream staring at a narrow black hole in the rocks that he had never seen before.
‘What’s this?’ he wondered to himself, peering into its depths. The stories his grandmother used to tell him came into his mind: smugglers’ tunnels, highwaymen’s caches, treasure caves. A feeling of recklessness tha
t he thought had been nagged out long ago seized him. ‘I could just squeeze in there,’ he thought. ‘Now is my chance to be a hero!’ He saw an image of himself emerging from the hole bearing a chest of gold. ‘I will go in!’
Gingerly he pushed himself into the opening. It was dark. So very dark.
‘Fool!’ he thought. ‘I haven’t got any matches – or a candle, for that matter! Fine treasure seeker I am!’ He was standing there in the dark, wondering whether he should go and get a lantern or just go on anyway, when he noticed that the darkness did not seem as black as he had first thought. Some sort of light was coming from the end of what he now saw was a long tunnel. Nothing terrible had happened to him so far, so he plucked up his courage and, bending low to avoid projecting rocks, he crept along the tunnel. He felt more alive than he had for years!
The illumination grew stronger as he went and he could now see it was not the cold light of day, but a warmer, pearly light. The air was warmer too, pleasant after the cold wind outside. The way led downwards. Soon he noticed that the roof of the tunnel was growing further away and the tunnel itself was opening out into a cave. He hesitated. ‘Might be a dragon or anything in there,’ he thought, listening hard and glancing nervously back over his shoulder. ‘Still, it’s not too far to run if I need to.’
Bravely he stepped forwards into a huge chamber, right underneath the castle, as far as he could guess. At first he could see nothing but a stony floor littered with fallen rocks. He heard a strange, repetitive sound that he could not quite place. Then his eyes seemed to refocus and he could see that in the middle of the cavern was a stone table. Something on the table glinted and the pearly light appeared to be coming from that object.
‘There really is treasure!’ he breathed. Walking carefully, trying to avoid the huge rocks, he moved towards the light. On the table was a great horn of ivory, bound with silver and inlaid with gold. Next to it was a magnificent sword in a richly decorated scabbard. Jewels flashed in the hilt: blood-red rubies, amethysts the colour of violets, topazes as yellow as the sun.
North Yorkshire Folk Tales Page 2
