The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  The fellow from Grinton caught the two Ladies up, and stood beside the Cellaress as they watched the birds, which now sailed on past them.

  ‘Good eating they be,’ says he, watching them wistfully. ‘I tasted their meat once. It was at Sir Rafe’s marriage, and some was left, and came out to us that were eating in the great garner.’

  ‘Tcha!’ said the Cellaress, and moved sharply away from him. ‘These fellows think of nothing but their bellies. And how he stinks of garlic and I don’t know what else!’ She fanned the air under her nose, and walked quickly on. Dame Elizabeth agreed breathlessly; she found it difficult to keep up with the Cellaress.

  Behind them, at a good distance, trailed the man from Grinton. He was indeed a dirty creature, with foul teeth and a look of a hungry stable cat. But then he had eight children and a thriftless wife. That also was perhaps his own fault.

  February 28

  Lord Hussey had just gone away from the house which my Lord Darcy had hired at Stepney, when Lady Elizabeth came to her husband in the upper privy chamber, beyond the great chamber, where the two lords had been alone together. She looked about it, and could see no one, but, ‘Bet! Bet!’ Lord Darcy called to her, and she found that he was standing in the deep window, looking down at the road, where in the early twilight the last of Hussey’s gentlemen was turning the corner beyond the orchard wall. She said nothing for a minute, and, after the First quick glance, did not look at him. But that had been enough to tell her that my Lord was angry.

  She said at last, not beating about the bush as many wives might, but going to the heart of the matter because she was a great lady and her husband’s trusted friend, ‘Tell me, Sir, what my Lord has said.’

  Darcy turned to her. ‘That fellow Banks will have a writ against us.’

  He was silent again, and, because she dreaded his silent anger, knowing him, old man as he was, capable of some wild doing if he brooded on a wrong, she prompted him. ‘It is this business of my Lord Monteagle’s will?’

  He told her ‘Yea,’ and she thought he would say no more, but suddenly he began to talk and to stride up and down the room, whacking at the table and the cupboards with his staff. ‘Was not Monteagle my friend? Did he not leave his son in my charge? Am I a man to waste the boy’s heritage as this villain says?’ She heard him grind his teeth as he came near her. ‘And he says – this Banks – that Hussey and I crept into poor Monteagle’s friendship when he was ill, by feigned talk of holy things. Am I such a man? Am I, Bet?’

  He came and stood staring down at her. She shook her head.

  ‘But he will have a writ against us, and hath procured a fellow in the Cardinal’s house to be his friend.’

  ‘But who? But what can he do?’—

  ‘You won’t know him. Thomas Cromwell is his name. An apt servant of his master, and, they say, hath his master’s ear. And much justice I’m like to get from that same Cardinal who voided me from my office at Berwick, as if I were...’ Lady Elizabeth had heard it all before, and heard it patiently again. ‘But,’ she tried to sooth him when he had finished, ‘he cannot prevail so manifestly against justice.’

  ‘Who? Banks? The Cardinal can. There’s nothing in England he cannot.’

  She watched him as he stared out of the window. She was very well content with this second marriage of hers, and now she suddenly slipped her hand through his arm and pressed it, meaning to show him that she was angry with them that could believe such a charge against him. By all she knew of him he was not one to cheat the son of a friend who was dead, and that son left in his charge.

  He took her hand and smiled at her, but stared out of the window again, and she saw him gnaw his lower lip, and the pressure of his fingers grew hard so that she was sure he had forgotten her.

  He said: ‘His servants’ servants will bear rule over us nobles soon,’ and after he had brooded a while she heard him mutter, ‘If fair won’t serve, then must foul. But some means we shall find to tumble him down.’

  ‘Ah! Sir!’ she cried out, because it seemed so hopeless a thing, and dangerous, to work against the Cardinal. He turned on her angrily.

  ‘You don’t understand, being a woman. No man can meddle in things of governance and keep his hands quite clean. If the honest men should try always to deal honestly, then they would leave the field to the knaves, and they should rule all.’

  She saw that they were at cross purposes, and let it be so. After a silence she said:

  ‘That fur on the sleeve of your gown is worn quite away. You must use your red say for a while and the wenches and I will see to this. There’s a marten fur on an old gown of mine that will...’

  ‘Mass!’ he cried impatiently, interrupting her, but then he laughed. ‘Never, you tyrant, will you suffer me to wear the old stuff that I like. What does it matter if the budge is rubbed?’

  She told him, as she had told him fifty times before, why such a thing should matter.

  March 19

  Master Cheyne came into the solar where Margaret was sitting by the fire with a heap of his shirts on the floor beside her, and a lute on her knee.

  He looked at the shirts and at the lute, and then turned away and threw down in the window the birch that he had been using. He said that if that brat didn’t learn her manners he’d not keep her. He did not say it blusteringly but rather in a flat, casual way, as if he had said that it would rain before night. But Margaret had learnt to know him well enough to fear that tone more than she would have feared another man’s bawling. She put down the lute, though she knew that it was too late, and picked up a shirt. As she stooped over it she was deciding that if he turned July out, she would go too. It was not that she had any tenderness for the little plain sister. Yet it would be worse than ever to be alone here. And they two were Staffords, she and July. He should not – she felt the heartening glow of pride rise – he should not wrong that blood.

  ‘I’d be loath we should lose the profit of her marriage.’ She did not look up, but she knew that she had his attention. ‘My Lord our uncle left her a portion for her marriage, or to dower her in religion.’

  He came then and sat beside her and began to question her closely. When she had told him all she knew he was silent, rubbing his chin. She knew that he was angry, both because she herself had no portion, and because Julian’s was so small a thing. But she did not think that he would now send Julian away.

  August 14

  ‘But she will live?’ said Sir Rafe Bulmer.

  Dame Christabel, holding the veil under her chin to keep the wind from flapping it across her face, answered that, ‘Thank God, the Lady would live,’ and soon after that Sir Rafe Bulmer and his wife rode away from the Priory.

  As they passed the East Close on the way home Sir Rafe heard Nan give a little giggle, and turned, and cocked an eyebrow at her.

  ‘So there won’t be a new Prioress yet,’ she said, and he laughed out loud, though he told her not to be a ribald. ‘And cannot she be content,’ he said, ‘to be Cellaress, and Treasuress also?’

  ‘All the same,’ she told him, ‘I like Dame Christabel.’

  ‘I like a woman to be gentle and meek spoken... womanlike,’ he argued, forgetting how little the young wild thing riding by him in a shabby green gown, stained with the cast of her hawks, was like the women he thought he approved of. ‘And,’ he said, speaking almost to himself, ‘if Dame Christabel were Prioress we should never get those closes up at Owlands from the Nuns.’

  Dame Nan knew all about those few closes of good grazing up among the sheep-walks of Owlands; they had been granted to the Nuns by her ancestor, that Roger Aske who had founded the Priory, and every Aske after him had wished them back in the Manor. Sir Rafe, though no Aske, wished for them most vehemently, and meant to get them if he might.

  They turned up the hill and the track grew very steep; she, riding feather-light on her big horse, took the lead. Half-way up she turned to say over her shoulder:

  ‘I think we might get them from her.�
�

  ‘Never,’ he said, and then, because he greatly respected this girl’s shrewdness, – ‘How?’ and he drove his horse up alongside hers to hear the better.

  But Nan shook her head and was vague. She was thinking, she told him, that if ever there came a time of great need at the Priory, then, ‘She wouldn’t be afraid to sell them, if there were need. The others would be afraid.’

  He admitted the truth of that. ‘But what sort of great need?’ She could not tell him.

  September 18

  Lord Darcy sat in the closet that led off from the Council Chamber in the Castle of Pomfret. It was chilly there, so they had set a brazier of coals near his chair, and, since the day was gloomy, candles burnt on the table among the scatter of papers that he and the steward, Tom Grice, were busy with.

  They had talked of Darcy’s Manor of Torkesey in Lincolnshire, looking through old parchments, and a copy of the Lincoln Doomsday to trace out my Lord’s rights, and had come now to the matter of the Prioress of Fosse, whose predecessor had cut down thirteen oak saplings in the waste of my Lord’s Manor there, claiming that they grew in her freehold. But she had lost her case, and now this new Prioress must pay to my Lord 117s.

  ‘They were but little saplings,’ said Tom Grice, biting on his knuckles, and looking at his master under his big rough eyebrows.

  ‘Well?’ Darcy’s tone was not encouraging.

  ‘The Bishop of Lincoln thinks the fine very grievous.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt.’ Darcy was stiff. It was clear that Tom Grice agreed with the Bishop.

  ‘Look you, Tom,’ said Darcy, with that sudden comradely tone that made men love him, ‘you think that because these ladies are in religion I should deal softly with them. But I’ll not. If it is a grievous fine, yet they shall pay it. They have land and rents of their own, and for what? To serve God?’ He gave an angry laugh. ‘Snug in their beds perhaps. Oh, no! it’s not only of the Nuns of Fosse I’m thinking. It may be a well-ordered House. But all these religious live easy and lie soft. I tell you, Tom, there’s no estate of the realm so meet to be reformed as the religious, and the clergy.’

  He shifted his papers about on the table impatiently, and said: ‘Now, what of the woods in Knaith Park? How much can we fell?’

  Tom Grice, having in mind Lord Darcy’s debts, understood that he must choose between the Prioress of Fosse and the woods of Knaith Park. My Lord would not, and could not, spare both. Tom abandoned the Prioress. ‘It were pity to fell at Knaith,’ he said; and they began to argue that out.

  November 20

  Julian wakened up at a sound, but too late to know what it was that had wakened her, so she was frightened, and her heart was pounding before she was fairly awake. And then the light from the torches, carried before the merry party of gentlemen just going by, cut like a knife through the shutters, and began to slide, silent and furtive, across the unceiled timbers of the floor above, rippling over the big cross beams like a snake. Last of all it ran down the wall in a long pencil of brightness, and then was eaten by the dark. Julian began to scream, and then buried herself in the bed lest Master Cheyne had heard her.

  1526

  July 8

  The Cellaress and Dame Bess Dalton came slowly along the side of the wood from the house of the parish priest.

  ‘Poor soul!’ said Bess, and sighed.

  ‘He can blame none but himself,’ Christabel told her. ‘For years he has soaked himself in ale.’

  They had been to visit the old priest in the parsonage which was just beyond East Close. He lay sick in bed, with his face still twisted, but had now got again both his speech and the use of his hands, and, so far as Christabel could see, was likely to live.

  They stood for a moment at the gate of Kid Close before going out into the heat of the open field.

  Christabel thought – ‘How these old people live on!’ The Prioress was in her mind, as well as the priest, and down at the bottom of her mind, in a place nearly dark, even to herself, was the thought that it would be well if there were a way by which they could be made to yield place to others, younger, more able.

  October 3

  Although there was a moon outside the window, inside the curtains of the bed it was quite dark. Lord Darcy, wide awake, and restless because of the unseasonable warmth of the night, shifted uneasily, and, because he had a troubled mind, he sighed.

  ‘Sir?’ his wife whispered, and, ‘Tom?’

  ‘Go to sleep, Sweet.’

  ‘What’s amiss, Tom?’

  ‘It’s too hot for October,’ he told her, but the obvious truth did not put her off. He felt her hand grope for his, and when she had found him she said again, ‘What’s amiss?’

  He broke out, and it was with a great sigh – ‘By God’s Death! I think all the world’s amiss.’

  ‘Is it,’ she asked, ‘this great battle in the East that the infidels have won?’ It was only a little more than a month since the King of Hungary and most of his chivalry had fallen at Mohacz, and the Turk was pouring into the eastern parts of Europe.

  He told her it was that, but she asked, ‘And what else?’

  He said nothing for a moment, and she felt him move in the darkness, and knew that he had shaken his head.

  ‘If you were not a woman who is as secret as any man,’ said Darcy, ‘I could not tell you. Come near that I can speak low.’

  When her head was close to his mouth he told her, in a whisper. At first she could not believe him.

  ‘The King put away his wife? Divorce the Queen? After all these years? How many? Fifteen or more. He cannot. Why should he wish?’

  She was silent, and then murmured, ‘How do you know this thing?’

  ‘Never mind how, but I know. There’s the Bishop of Bath in Rome treating with the Holy Father of it.’

  ‘Shame on him then – the Bishop I mean.’

  ‘Oh! He likes it as little as any. “Istud benedictum divorcium,” they say is what he calls it.’

  She took him up. ‘“As little as any?” You like it little?’

  He moved restlessly. ‘God knows—’ he began again. ‘If it’s the King’s will—’

  ‘Fie on you, Tom,’ she cried, ‘it can’t be God’s.’

  He stiffened at her rebuke. ‘The King needs an heir.’

  ‘The Princess Mary.’

  ‘She’s a girl.’

  ‘She’s lawful. But there’s the bastard boy as well.’

  ‘Hush!’ he told her, but she said she was not afraid to speak the truth, and Henry Fitzroy might be Duke of Richmond but certainly he was a bastard.

  ‘And why else,’ she persisted scornfully, ‘does the King wish it? There was great talk about that niece of Norfolk’s, the Boleyn girl. Ah!’ She read his silence. ‘It’s that, is it?’

  After a long time she turned suddenly towards him.

  ‘Tom, why will you suffer this as if it would be well?’

  He told her, hesitating at first, but then in a hard tone – ‘For an heir for one thing. And for another because, in so great a business as this will be, we may find means to pull down the Cardinal.’

  She drew away from him, but he could hear what she muttered to herself – ‘God forgive you men!’ she said.

  November 1

  When Julian heard one of Master Cheyne’s men say that he was going down to Asselyn’s Wharf to find the master of a ship unloading there, she waited till he had gone out of the house, and then ran after him, and asked if she might go too.

  He looked a little doubtful, but made no trouble. She could come if she would, but she must be a good lass, and hold on to his coat, and not go roving off nowhere alone. So she went with him, one hand clutching the skirts of his brown coat, and the other pressed tight to her thin, flat chest to keep the precious scraps of silken stuff from slipping down inside, out of reach.

  Those precious bits she had found in the yard a week ago, and swept up in her hand, and hidden, meaning to keep them for always. They were bits thrown aside
from the making of a gown for Meg, of a scarlet silk so brilliant, rich, and lustrous, that the stuff seemed to hold in it a light and life of its own.

  But just after she had found and hidden the pieces, she had seen, when at Billingsgate with one of the women who had gone to buy fish, the Ship. The Ship had been quite a long way off down the river, but near enough for Julian to see great yellow and green sails, and pennons of all colours straining out upon the wind. Among all the shouting and stir of the fishermen and the housewives and the servants on the wharf, the voice of the Ship’s trumpets had come across the water, sharp, eager, and confident as she moved off down the river towards the sea. The Ship was a lovely thing, and more, she was free and was going away.

  All the way home Julian had tried to find out where the Ship was going, but the woman could not tell her. However, it did not matter very much. That night in bed Julian suddenly saw a way of following the Ship, a way of belonging to the Ship, or else of possessing the Ship; she was not sure which.

  So, to-day, when Master Cheyne’s man was talking to the little wizened master of the Trinity of Calais, which was to Julian’s eyes a small and wretched craft, she let go his coat, and slunk off to the edge of the wharf, till she was looking down into the restless green water that sidled by, slapping at the wooden piers of the wharf, and then dipping past, sleek and shining.

  Julian took out the little bundle from inside her gown, clutched it once as hard as her hand could close, so as to say it good-bye, and threw it down into the water. It spread out, a brilliant spatter of scarlet, for one instant, then darkened sadly as the water soaked through it. That shocked Julian so that she cried out, for she had thought of it sailing on after the Ship in all its bravery. But still, it did begin to sail. She followed it with her eyes, leaning over till she began to be dizzy, and then went stumbling backwards just as Master Cheyne’s servant found and snatched her. He took her home, holding her not very gently by the arm the whole way, and all the way Julian wept for the lovely silk which she had thrown from her.