The Fifth Queen

by Ford Madox Ford

  And one of these tenants, holding two hundred acres in a simple fee from St Radigund’s for a hundred and fifty years back, had been always a man of the name of Hall. It was an Edward Hall that Mary Lascelles had married when she was a maid at the Duchess of Norfolk’s. This Edward Hall was then a squire, a little above the condition of a groom, in the Duchess’s service. His parents dwelled still on the farm which was called Neot’s End, because it was in the angle of the great dyke called St Neot’s and the little sewer where St Radigund’s land had its boundary stone.

  But in the troublesome days of the late Privy Seal, Edward Hall had informed Throckmorton the spy of a conspiracy and rising that was hatching amongst the Radigund’s men a little before the Pilgrimage of Grace, when all the north parts rose. For the Radigund’s men cried out and murmured amongst themselves that if the Priory was done away with there would be an end of their easy and comfortable tenancy. Their rents had been estimated and appointed a great number of years before, when all goods and the produce of the earth were very low priced. And the tenants said that if now the King took their lands to himself or gave them to some great lord, very heavy burdens would be laid upon them and exacted; whereas in some years under easy priors the monks forgot their distant territory, and in bad seasons they took no rents at all. And even under hard and exacting priors the monks could take no more than their rentals, which were so small. They said, too, that the King and Thomas Cromwell would make them into heathen Greeks and turn their children to be Saracens. So these Radigund’s men meditated a rising and conspiracy.

  But, because Edward Hall informed Throckmorton of what was agate, a posse was sent into that country, and most of the men were hanged and their lands all taken from them. Those that survived from the jailing betook themselves to the road, and became sturdy beggars, so that many of them too came to the gallows tree.

  Most of the land was granted to the Sieur Throckmorton with the abbey’s buildings and tithe barns. But the Halls’ farm and another of near three hundred acres were granted to Edward Hall. Then it was that Edward Hall could marry and take his wife, Mary Lascelles, down into Lincolnshire to Neot’s End. But when the Pilgrimage of Grace came, and the great risings all over Lincolnshire, very early the rioters came to Neot’s End, and they burned the farm and the byres, they killed all the beasts or drove them off, they trampled down the corn and laid waste the flax fields. And, between two willow trees along the great dyke, they set a pole, and from it they hanged Edward Hall over the waters, so that he dried and was cured like a ham in the smoke from his own stacks.

  Then Mary Lascelles’ case was a very miserable one; for she had to fend for the aged father and bedridden mother of Edward Hall, and there were no beasts left but only a few geese and ducks that the rebels could not lay their hands on. And the only home that they had was the farmhouse that was upon Edward Hall’s other farm, and that they had let fall nearly into ruin. And for a long time no men would work for her.

  But at last, after the rebellion was pitifully ended, a few hinds came to her, and she made a shift. And it was better still after Privy Seal fell, for then came Throckmorton the spy into his lands, and he brought with him carpenters and masons and joiners to make his house fair, and some of these men he lent to Mary Hall. But it had been prophesied by a wise woman in those parts that no land that had been taken from the monks would prosper. And, because all the jurats, bailiffs, and water-wardens had been hanged either on the one part or the other and no more had been appointed, at about that time the sewers began to clog up, the lands to swamp, murrain and fluke to strike the beasts and the sheep, and night mists to blight the grain and the fruit blossoms. So that even Throckmorton had little good of his wealth and lands.

  Thus one morning to Mary Hall, who stood before her door feeding her geese and ducks, there came a little boy running to say that men-at-arms stood on the other side of the dyke that was very swollen and grey and broad. And they shouted that they came from the Queen’s Highness, and would have a boat sent to ferry them over.

  The colour came into Mary Hall’s pale face, for even there she had heard that her former bedfellow was come to be Queen. And at times even she had thought to write to the Queen to help her in her misery. But always she had been afraid, because she thought that the Queen might remember her only as one that had wronged her childish innocence. For she remembered that the maids’ dormitory at the old Duchess’s had been no cloister of pure nuns. So that, at best, she was afraid, and she sent her yard-worker and a shepherd a great way round to fetch the larger boat of two to ferry over the Queen’s men. Then she went indoors to redd up the house-place and to attire herself.

  To the old farmstead, that was made of wood hung over here and there with tilework with a base of bricks, she had added a houseplace for the old folk to sit all day. It was built of wattles that had had clay cast over them, and was whitened on the outside and thatched nearly down to the ground like any squatter’s hut; it had cupboards of wood nearly all round it, and beneath the cupboards were lockers worn smooth with men sitting upon them, after the Dutch fashion—for there in Lincolnshire they had much traffic with the Dutch. There was a great table made of one slab of a huge oak from near Boston. Here they all ate. And above the ingle was another slab of oak from the same tree. Her little old step-mother sat in a stuff chair covered with a sheep-skin; she sat there night and day, shivering with the shaking palsy. At times she let out of her an eldritch shriek, very like the call of a hedgehog; but she never spoke, and she was fed with a spoon by a little misbegotten son of Edward Hall’s. The old step-father sat always opposite her; he had no use of his legs, and his head was always stiffly screwed round towards the door as if he were peering, but that was the rheumatism. To atone for his wife’s dumbness, he chattered incessantly whenever anyone was on that floor; but because he spoke always in Lincolnshire, Mary Hall could scarce understand him, and indeed she had long ceased to listen. He spoke of forgotten floods and ploughings, ancient fairs, the boundaries of fields long since flooded over, of a visit to Boston that King Edward IV had made, and of how he, for his fair speech and old lineage, had been chosen of all the Radigund’s men to present into the King’s hands three silver horseshoes. Behind his back was a great dresser with railed shelves, having upon them a little pewter ware and many wooden bowls for the hinds’ feeding. A door on the right side, painted black, went down into the cellar beneath the old house. Another door, of bars of iron with huge locks from the old monastery, went into the old house where slept the maids and the hinds. This was always open by day but locked in the dark hours. For the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master’s throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that their poor cellar afforded. The floor was of stamped clay, wet and sweating but covered with rushes, so that the place had a mouldering smell. Behind the heavy door there were huge bolts and crossbars against robbers: the raftered ceiling was so low that it touched her hair when she walked across the floor. The windows had no glass but were filled with a thin reddish sheep-skin like parchment. Before the stairway was a wicket gate to keep the dogs—of whom there were many, large and fierce, to protect them alike from robbers and the hinds—to keep the dogs from going into the upper room.

  Each time that Mary Hall came into this home of hers her heart sank lower; for each day the corner posts gave sideways a little more, the cupboard bulged, the doors were loth to close or open. And more and more the fields outside were inundated, the lands grew sour, the sheep would not eat or died of the fluke.

  ‘And surely,’ she would cry out at times, ‘God created me for other guesswork than this!’

  At nights she was afraid, and shivered at the thought of the fens and the black and trackless worlds all round her; and the ravens croaked, night-hawks screamed, the dog-foxes cried out, and the flames danced over the swampy grounds. Her mirror was
broken on the night that they hanged her husband: she had never had another but the water in her buckets, so that she could not tell whether she had much aged or whether she were still brown-haired and pink-cheeked, and she had forgotten how to laugh, and was sure that there were crow’s-feet about her eyelids.

  Her best gown was all damp and mouldy in the attic that was her bower. She made it meet as best she could, and indeed she had had so little fat living, sitting at the head of her table with a whip for unruly hinds and louts before her—so little fat living that she could well get into her wedding-gown of yellow cramosyn. She smoothed her hair back into her cord hood that for so long had not come out of its press. She washed her face in a bucket of water: that and the press and her bed with grey woollen curtains were all the furnishing her room had. The straw of the roof caught in her hood when she moved, and she heard her old father-in-law cackling to the serving-maids through the cracks of the floor.

  When she came down there were approaching, across the field before the door, six men in scarlet and one in black, having all the six halberds and swords, and one a little banner, but the man in black had a sword only. Their horses were tethered in a clump on the farther side of the dyke. Within the room the serving-maids were throwing knives and pewter dishes with a great din on to the table slab. They dropped drinking-horns and the salt-cellar itself all of a heap into the rushes. The grandfather was cackling from his chair; a hen and its chickens ran screaming between the maids’ feet. Then Lascelles came in at the doorway.

  III

  THE SIEUR LASCELLES looked round him in that dim cave.

  ‘Ho!’ he said, ‘this place stinks,’ and he pulled from his pocket a dried and shrivelled orange-peel purse stuffed with cloves and ginger. ‘Ho!’ he said to the cornet that was come behind him with the Queen’s horsemen. ‘Come not in here. This will breed a plague amongst your men!’ and he added—

  ‘Did I not tell you my sister was ill-housed?’

  ‘Well, I was not prepared against this,’ the cornet said. He was a man with a grizzling beard that had little patience away from the Court, where he had a bottle that he loved and a crony or two that he played all day at chequers with, except when the Queen rode out; then he was of her train. He did not come over the sill, but spoke sharply to his men.

  ‘Ungird not here,’ he said. ‘We will go farther.’ For some of them were for setting their pikes against the mud wall and casting their swords and heavy bottle-belts on to the table before the door. The old man in the armchair began suddenly to prattle to them all—of a horse-thief that had been dismembered and then hanged in pieces thirty years before. The cornet looked at him for a moment and said—

  ‘Sir, you are this woman’s father-in-law, I do think. Have you aught to report against her?’ He bent in at the door, holding his nose. The old man babbled of one Pease-Cod Noll that had no history to speak of but a swivel eye.

  ‘Well,’ the grizzled cornet said, ‘I shall get little sense here.’ He turned upon Mary Hall.

  ‘Mistress,’ he said, ‘I have a letter here from the Queen’s High Grace,’ and, whilst he fumbled in his belt to find a little wallet that held the letter, he spoke on: ‘But I misdoubt you cannot read. Therefore I shall tell you the Queen’s High Grace commandeth you to come into her service—or not, as the report of your character shall be. But at any rate you shall come to the castle.’

  Mary Hall could find no words for men of condition, so long she had been out of the places where such are found. She swallowed in her throat and held her breast over her heart.

  ‘Where is the village here?’ the cornet said, ‘or what justice is there that can write you a character under his seal?’

  She made out to say that there was no village, all the neighbourhood having been hanged. A half-mile from there there was the house of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, a justice. From the house-end he might see it, or he might have a hind to guide him. But he would have no guide; he would have no man nor maid nor child to go from there to the justice’s house. He set one soldier to guard the back door and one the front, that none came out nor went beyond the dyke-end.

  ‘Neither shall you go, Sir Lascelles,’ he said.

  ‘Well, give me leave with my sister to walk this knoll,’ Lascelles said good-humouredly. ‘We shall not corrupt the grass blades to bear false witness of my sister’s chastity.’

  ‘Ay, you may walk upon this mound,’ the cornet answered. Having got out the packet of the Queen’s letter, he girded up his belt again.

  ‘You will get you ready to ride with me,’ he said to Mary Hall. ‘For I will not be in these marshes after nightfall, but will sleep at Shrimpton Inn.’

  He looked around him and added—

  ‘I will have three of your geese to take with us,’ he said. ‘Kill me them presently.’

  Lascelles looked after him as he strode away round the house with the long paces of a stiff horseman.

  ‘Before God,’ he laughed, ‘that is one way to have information about a quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.’

  ‘Oh, alack!’ Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands.

  ‘Well, we are prisoners till he come again,’ her brother said good-humouredly. ‘But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.’

  She said—

  ‘If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.’

  He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably. He said very slowly—

  ‘Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old Duchess’s?’

  She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his fist.

  ‘The Queen’s Highness was such a child,’ she said. ‘She cannot remember. I have lived very godly since.’

  ‘I will do what I can to save you,’ he said. ‘Let me hear about it, as, being prisoners, we may never come off.’

  ‘You!’ she cried out. ‘You who stole my wedding portion!’

  He laughed deviously.

  ‘Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.’

  ‘You lie!’ she said. ‘You gar’d me do it.’

  The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.

  ‘Come upon the grass,’ he said. ‘I will not be heard to say more than this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly brother.’

  Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his elbow.

  ‘Tell me truly,’ she said, ‘shall I see the Court or a prison? … But you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yard-man. I would become such a liar as thou to come away from here.’

  ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘this I tell you most truly: that this shall fall out according as you obey me and inform me’; and, because he was a little the taller, he leaned over her as they walked away together.

  On the fourth day from then they were come to the great wood that is to south and east of the castle of Pontefract. Here Lascelles, who had ridden much with his sister, forsook her and went ahead of the slow and heavy horses of that troop of men. The road was broadened out to forty yards of green turf between the trees, for this was a precaution against ambushes of robbers. Across the road, after he had ridden alone for an hour and a half, there was a guard of four men placed. And here, whilst he searched for his pass to come within the limits of the Court, he asked what news, and where the King was.

  It was told him that the King lay still at the Fivefold Vents, two days’ progress from the castle, and as it chanced that a verderer’s pricker came out of the wood where he had been to mar
k where the deer lay for to-morrow’s killing, Lascelles bade this man come along with him for a guide.

  ‘Sir, ye cannot miss the way,’ the pricker said surlily. ‘I have my deer to watch.’

  ‘I will have you to guide me,’ Lascelles said, ‘for I little know these parts.’

  ‘Well,’ the pricker answered him, ‘it is true that I have not often seen you ride a-hawking.’

  Whilst they went along the straight road, Lascelles, who unloosened the woodman’s tongue with a great drink of sherry-sack, learned that it was said that only very unwillingly did the King lie so long at the Fivefold Vents. For on the morrow there was to be driven by, up there, a great herd of moor stags and maybe a wolf or two. The King would be home with his wife, it was reported, but the younger lords had been so importunate with him to stay and abide this gallant chase and great slaughter that, they having ridden loyally with him, he had yielded to their prayers and stayed there—twenty-four hours, it was said.

  ‘Why, you know a great deal,’ Lascelles answered.

  ‘We who stand and wait had needs have knowledge,’ the woodman said, ‘for we have little else.’

  ‘Aye, ’tis a hard service,’ Lascelles said. ‘Did you see the Queen’s Highness o’ Thursday week borrow a handkerchief of Sir Roger Pelham to lure her falcon back?’

  ‘That did not I,’ the woodman answered, ‘for o’ Thursday week it was a frost and the Queen rode not out.’

  ‘Well, it was o’ Saturday,’ Lascelles said.

  ‘Nor was it yet o’ Saturday,’ the woodman cried; ‘I will swear it. For o’ Saturday the Queen’s Highness shot with the bow, and Sir Roger Pelham, as all men know, fell with his horse on Friday, and lies up still.’

  ‘Then it was Sir Nicholas Rochford,’ Lascelles persisted.

  ‘Sir,’ the woodman said, ‘you have a very wrong tale, and patent it is that little you ride a-hunting.’