The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  *

  The steward stood where he was until the Ladies were out of sight. Now, for the first time for close on four hundred years, there were no nuns at Marrick. But he was not thinking of that as he turned back into the gate. Before Sir John arrived there was much to be done; he gave his orders curtly, and even before dinner was ready the servants were all about the place, sweeping up stale rushes, scrubbing, unpacking trussing-beds and coffers that they had brought on the baggage animals, shaking out hangings, lighting of fires.

  Most of Sir John’s men were of the new persuasion, and glad to see the houses of religion pulled down. One or two of them opened the aumbry in the cloister, and there came upon a few books which the Ladies had left behind. They found great cause for satisfaction, as for laughter, in tearing out the pages of these books and scattering them in the cloister garth; one of the books was very old and beautiful, gay with colours and sumptuous with plumped-up burnished gold; another had initial letters of a dusky red like drying blood; when the pages were strewn about the garth it looked as if flowers were blooming in November.

  Two only, out of those who had come this morning from Coverham, took no part at all in this business of setting the House to rights for its new owner. One of these was Sir John’s old priest, the other was the woman Malle, who was the priest’s servant now, and had therefore, with him, so strangely come back to Marrick.

  The old man sat down on the horseblock for some time in the sun, then wandered out and down to the river, to pace the level bank there just below the stepping-stones, telling his beads, and letting the unceasing hushing of the water fill his mind with peace. There was nothing for him to do but wait. His stuff was among the rest that had been unloaded in the Great Court of the Priory, but he knew that the steward would have no time to think of sending it to the parsonage till all was ready for Sir John’s coming.

  Even before he came down to the river Malle left him, to drift about looking here and there, more as if she were searching for something or someone than merely revisiting places that had once been familiar. After going to the edge of the woods and staring up over the little wooden gate at the foot of the Nuns’ Steps, she came back into the kitchen, then into the Great Court and climbed the outside stair that led up to the door of what had been the Prioress’s chamber. It was quite empty now; all the goods of Christabel Cowper, last Prioress of Marrick, had been taken away; there were no rushes on the floor nor wainscot on the walls; only cobwebs, and the marks where the wainscot had been. Over the hearth the old painted letters, which had been hidden by a small but specially fine piece of arras, showed once more – I.H.S. Malle could not read but she knew that the symbols meant, somehow, God, so she curtseyed and crossed herself.

  From the Prioress’s chamber she wandered over to the guest-house, and stood inside the door of the upper chamber, just where she had stood when my Lord Darcy had sat on the bed, with his hands on the cross of his walking staff, questioning about her visions. She did not remember him nor his questions because something in her that had been a restlessness was strengthening into belief; she began to know that if now she sought, she would find.

  So she went quickly once more across the Great Court and into the Cloister. The crumpled pages of the books were sidling about the grass, the flower beds, and the Cloister walks as a light fresh wind shifted them. She stooped to pick up some that moved just before her, because they were pretty to look at; from between two of the red-lettered pages a pressed flower fell, the bell of a wild foxglove, pale purple, frail, and half transparent; she did not know that Julian Savage had put it there one day, because Robert Aske had worn it on his finger, like the finger-tip of a glove, while he talked to her. She had put it there for a charm to shield him from hurt.

  Two men coming down the day-stairs shouted at Malle; they knew that she was at least three parts fool, and they laughed loudly as she bolted out of the Cloister and into the Great Court again. She had meant to go into the Church, but, since she did not dare until the two men had gone away again, she began peeping into the stables on the opposite side of the Great Court. In them some of the beasts stood, patient and idle, only their mouths working; there were empty stalls too, for some had been led out to the fields; this morning the Priory servants had each done as seemed best to himself now the bailiff was gone already, and the Prioress to go by noon.

  After the stables she looked into the dove-house; the sleepy crooning there had a summer sound, which made it seem that time had turned back. She went next into the guest-house stable. Leaning in one corner among some pea-sticks was the fishing rod that Master Aske had put there on the afternoon when Malle had sat here peeling rushes for lights, while the rain poured down outside. She did not now think of Master Aske, nor of that day, nor of any time since, because all the sorrows of the world were clean washed from her mind by the shining certainty that was growing in it.

  So she would wait no longer for the men, but went back, hurrying, into the Cloister, and so into the Nuns’ Church.

  But He was not in the Nuns’ Church. The door in the wall that separated the Nuns’ from the Parish Church was open to-day; so she went through. Here Gilbert Dawe had told her that He was dead, and now lived, and was alive for evermore. But He was not in the Parish Church either.

  She did not know where else to look, and it was without thought or intention that she came to the Frater and opened the door; there was no supposing that He would have come to that room. No one ever used it, except at great feasts like Christmas, since for a long time the Nuns had eaten by Messes, each Mess in its own chamber.

  Yet to-day the Frater had been used. To-day, instead of eating in their chambers, all stripped of furnishing, the Ladies had breakfasted together, according to the ancient Rule of their Order, but hastily and in confusion of mind. The disarray of that hurried meal lay upon the table, and the sun, shining through the painted glass of the windows in the south wall, spilled faint flakes of colour, rose, green, gold, upon the white board-cloth.

  There were eleven wooden trenchers set on the table, with crumbled bread and bits of eggshell on them. There were eleven horn drinking-pots too, and several big platters, all empty, except that there was upon one a piece of broiled fish, and on the other half a honeycomb.

  The Chronicle is mainly of five: – of Christabel Cowper, Prioress; Thomas, Lord Darcy; Julian Savage, Gentlewoman; Robert Aske, Squire; Gilbert Dawe, Priest.

  There are, besides, the King and three who were his Queens, and many others, men and women, gentle and simple, good and bad, false and true, who served God or their own ends, who made prosperous voyage or came to shipwreck.

  There is also Malle, the Serving-woman.

  Elevaverunt Flumina Fluctus Suos: A Vocibus Aquarum Multarum.

  Mirabiles Elationes Maris: Mirabilis in Altis Dominus.

  The floods arise, O Lord: The floods lift up their noise,

  The floods lift up their waves.

  The waves of the sea are mighty and rage horribly: but yet

  The Lord that dwelleth on high is mightier.

  Christabel Cowper, Prioress

  She was born in 1495 at Richmond in Yorkshire. Her grandfather’s house stood looking up at the barbican, and at the proud head of the great keep above the barbican, across the wide and steep square. Old Andrew had built the house of stone, very solid: very small as his son came to think it. But the warehouse behind, where the wool was kept, was large; for that, to Christabel’s grandfather’s mind, was far more important than the place where he ate and slept.

  Christabel’s father, Andrew Cowper, was not so good a man of business as old Andrew; but then, he had a better start, for when the old man died there was gold money, mostly in coin of Flanders and Spain, in leather bags, hidden in the recess behind the red and white curtains of the great bed. Only Christabel’s father, as well as old Andrew, knew the secret of that hiding-place, and he was not told of it till he was a grown man of twenty-five, married, and with four children of his own.
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br />   As well as the hidden gold there were silver gilt cups on the livery cupboard in the great chamber downstairs, and in the chest at the foot of the old man’s bed there were six bags of silver, and a standing cup made of a polished cokernut enclosed in roped bands of silver gilt, which he drank out of during all the Christmas Feast, and at Easter, Whitsun, and upon St. Andrew’s Day. The name of the great cup was Edward.

  When old Andrew knew that he was dying he sent for one of the Grey Friars, an old man too. They had birds’-nested and played at marbles together in the old days, and snowballed in the square below the window that very day that the snowy field of Towton was dabbled red with blood.

  Andrew Cowper told Brother William that he wanted him to make a will, so the other old man sat down by the fire, and taking on his knee one of the square scrubbed chopping-boards from the kitchen, spread his parchment on it and wrote down what he was told.

  It took long to do, for it was a stormy day in November and the wind brought the smoke swirling out from the chimney till it filled the room and the air was blue; the smoke caught old Andrew’s chest, and sent him off into long fits of coughing that left him panting and speechless.

  The beginning of the will was all in Latin, for it was about the money that was to be spent on the old man’s obit, and on a mass every year on St. Andrew’s Day, and on wax candles for the rood-loft in the Friars’ Church, and on a cow to give milk to the poor of Richmond; and besides the money for these pious purposes old Cowper’s best velvet gown was to be given to the Friars to make a cope.

  After these things they came to the rest of the old man’s clothes, and the beds, and kitchen pots and pans, the hangings, a golden chain, silver spoons, and all the household stuff that was to go to son Andrew and his two brothers and sisters, and to son Andrew’s sons and daughters. Here Brother William gave up the Latin, fetched a deep sigh, relaxed his toes which had been crimped upwards with the effort – for his Latin was rusty – and wrote the rest in English.

  Andrew got most, which was natural, for he was to be a merchant and freeman of Richmond as his father had been. But the other two sons had money, or a bit of land here and there which old Cowper had bought, and the daughters had money too, though much less than the men, and enough to buy themselves a mourning gown each. Andrew’s sons came off almost as well as their uncles, but his daughters, grown women now except for Christabel, had no more than a silver spoon of the Apostles each. Except, again, for Christabel; to her the old man left his great cup Edward – the cup made out of a nut.

  There was a great quarrel over that when the old man was dead and buried. But Christabel got the cup and held it, while the quarrel raged, and her two married sisters, and the one not yet married, and her brothers all said what they thought of a bequest so outrageous. They had known, they said, that Christabel was the favourite of their grandfather, but their father, or their mother, or the old friar should not have permitted him to do anything so foolish and unfair. The eldest married sister, who was of an excitable disposition, was even heard to murmur something about sorcery, though when pressed she only mumbled, ‘Well, how could he have done it else? No, I don’t say it was – but—’ They all agreed however that it was as absurd as it was wrong of the old man, knowing quite well that Christabel was to be a nun, to leave her the cup. What did nuns want with a cokernut cup which had come from Flanders, and was a rarity, and very costly, and his favourite cup into the bargain?

  Christabel was twelve at the time, a square-built, solemn girl. She sat clutching the cup, pressing it into her lap, really afraid sometimes that they would try to wrench it out of her hands. If they had she would have struggled with them, but they kept to words, and with words she met them. It was hers by will, she told them, and why should not a nun have a cup, and the old man had always promised it to her (which was not true, for the gift had surprised her very much), and she could not see that being the youngest made her any worse than the rest of them, and – going back again to the beginning – it was hers by her grandfather’s will.

  She was only a child, but while they lost their tempers she kept hers, and in the long run she kept the cup. What was more, being puffed up by her success, she asked to have it to drink out of the very next Sunday, being the Feast of St. Andrew, as her grandfather had done. Her mother refused, and was so put out by the request that she beat Christabel handsomely, and recommended her to learn to be of a meek stomach or she’d come to ill some day.

  Her father however only laughed when he heard of it, and said she’d be prioress at Marrick before she’d done. He was a very easygoing man, little like his father except in his size and big bones. He dressed always like a gentleman, everything not only very trim and good but also gay. Quite a lot of the gold from behind the tester bed was spent on a gold belt buckle, and a brooch for his cap which had a naked woman in a circle of leaves, holding a pearl in her hand. Perhaps it was right that he should dress so much more fine than his father, seeing that his wife’s mother was a second cousin of my Lord of Westmorland. Certainly Christabel thought it was right; she liked to watch him amongst the other merchants of Richmond; he looked well, he made a good show, though she knew inwardly even at this early age that he was not the man his father had been, and worried herself sometimes lest he should make some disastrous mistake that would lose money, and besides that make them all look fools before the more provident merchants of Richmond. She tried once to tell her mother of her anxiety, but only got her ears boxed for speaking so undutifully of her father.

  As time went on Christabel thought less of her father, who was kind and careless, with now and again a fit of temper when he had drunk too much. And at the same time she grew into a feeling of kinship with her mother. Christabel believed that though her mother had boxed her ears, yet she also watched Andrew Cowper with anxiety and irritation. Christabel’s eyes would go from one to another at table, reading or guessing by the signs in her mother’s hard, pale face, at the hidden but embittered disagreement between them when Andrew came in with a new jewel or talked large before friends of the arras he would buy for the hall. Christabel approved of her mother, though she got no tenderness, and indeed barely kindness, from her. Only one thing she must disapprove of – ‘If I’d come of such a house,’ she decided when she was not quite thirteen years old, ‘I’d not have married so low.’ She felt, because she had her mother’s blood in her, that she could despise her father. And always a thought rankled – ‘He has no right to waste that which my grandfather had laid up, which is for us.’

  Christabel had not been able to despise her grandfather, in spite of his plain merchant blood, even when she began to grow up and count these things as important. When very small she had been his pet, to be carried round Richmond, tossed up on his shoulder, and fed with cakes, wafers or strawberries. When she was a little bigger than that she would trail after him, stumping along on sturdy fat legs, hanging on to the long metal-studded tongue of his belt, or tugging at his gown as she grew tired, to ask him for a pick-a-back.

  But as she grew older Andrew had occasion more than once to box her ears for impudence, and once he took his stick to her and beat her. She never forgot that, and always would behave herself very meekly while he was in the house, but she never loved him after, nor went willingly near him; and when they told her that he had left her his great cup Edward, privately, deep down in her own mind, she thought the less of him, as if it had been a weakness in him not to know that she did not love him.

  It was when she was eleven that her elders told her that she was to be a nun, and Christabel, having been taken a little while before by her mother to her eldest sister’s second laying-in, decided that it was on the whole better to be a nun than a married woman, even though the clothes nuns wore were not near so fine as her sister’s grey velvet night-gown with the white fur. However, she had noticed that the Prioress of Nun-Appleton, who was the sister of Christabel’s sister’s husband, and who came to the christening, wore a silk, and not a linen, veil
, and that her girdle was of silk too, and that the skirt of her habit opened up at the front over a damask petticoat which, though black, was very rich. As she rode home pillion behind her mother, with her cheek jolting against Elizabeth Cowper’s shoulder-blades, she announced that when she was a nun she would wear a silk veil, and a silk girdle, and a gold pin; she threw that in as an extra flourish. Her mother, who had been too busy to notice what the lady prioress wore, and who was now running over in her mind all the things which she would send from Richmond for the new baby, only said: ‘That you will not. For nuns must not wear such things.’

  ‘I shall. I shall. I shall,’ Christabel whispered, and because she could not stamp her foot she thumped Grey Hodson’s flank with one heel. Her mother did not hear; Grey Hodson was old and too staid to show resentment; and reflecting afterwards Christabel came to the conclusion that it was well her declaration had gone unnoticed. ‘I shall not tell them what I shall do,’ she thought. ‘But when they have made me a nun I shall do it. And I shall drink from the cokernut cup whenever I please.’

  A year and a half after old Andrew Cowper’s death Christabel’s father and mother took her to Marrick, where she was to be a nun. It was more than ten miles up the dale, and to reach it you had to leave Swaleside and go up and over the fells. That, since they would take a mule laden with all Christabel’s stuff, meant a whole day’s ride, and an early start.

  The night before they set out Christabel was sent to bed specially early, and not to her own bed in the little attic but to her parents’ bed in the great chamber. Her mother came and fussed about the room a bit while Christabel undressed, and even when she had slipped into bed and lay, naked as a fish, between the sheets. It was as if Mistress Elizabeth Cowper felt that she had forgotten something, or left something undone – ‘and yet that,’ thought Christabel, listening to her movements, ‘is not possible’. She knew that her mother was a most methodical person and that everything was sure to be completely ready for to-morrow.