November 3
Gib came back with the flour from the Nuns’ mill. He drove the donkey on very fiercely, and reached home breathless and red though it was a chill evening with a raw wind from the east. Yet when he had dumped the sack into the big flour bin, and turned the donkey out to graze, there seemed to have been no need for hurry at all, for he sat down on a stool by the fire, with his fingers idle and no book on his knee.
When his mother came in and asked had he got the flour, and good weight, and no mixing of rye-flour like that naughty fellow the miller was like to make, Gib only grunted. But when she was just going off with the pail to milk he said, ‘Miller said he’s sold the brat to the miners.’
‘Did you ask?’
‘No. I heard him say.’
She went away then, nodding her head, and muttering, but to herself, that it was good hearing, for now there’ll be no talking. Gib sat still by the fire, scraping out the dirt from under his nails with a thorn, and with thorns pricking into his mind so that he shrugged his shoulders and wagged his head to be rid of them and could not.
At last he gave a sort of groan, pulled on his shoes again, and picked up his staff from the corner of the room. Just then his mother came back with the full pails, and ‘Where are you going?’ she asked him.
‘To fetch the brat,’ he told her.
She slopped the milk over, she was so surprised, and that angered her as well as the anger she might well feel at such foolishness. So she railed at him: would he have all the village and the Ladies know that he had taken that trull from Marrick, and got children on her? And see how he had made her spill the good milk. And if the miners had taken the child, what then? Would he to Jingle Pot mine this night, with the dark coming on, and the miners naughty men that cared for none, neither priest nor layman.
Gib, as answer to all that, told her that it was right for a priest to have a wife, and she laughed at him, and asked whether the miller’s wench had been his wife. He said no, and let her talk on. But at last he shouted at her, ‘I’m going. And I shall bring him back,’ and went away, as angry as she was, and more unhappy. He did not want the little knave. He did not want it to be known that he had taken the miller’s girl with him when he went. But he knew that this thing was laid upon him, and he must do it.
He came back by star-light, dragging after him a boy of five who whimpered and moaned, but who could speak no word, and whose voice was not like a human voice. Gib had paid a price for him, and all the way from Jingle Pot the child had struggled and cried. Gib’s patience was out long before they got to the cottage, where all was dark and the fire dead. He shut the boy into the lean-to beside the house with the donkey and the sow; there was no window and he barred the door so that he could not break out and run away.
December 26
Sir John’s men, and the maids he had hired to serve Meg in the hired house, had been busy in every corner and on every stairway making garlands and swags of holly, bays, ivy, box and yew. Now these hung from the row of wooden pegs at the top of the walls on which the painted cloths and the tapestries were stretched, so that the gods and goddesses, the virtues and vices, the huntsmen, woodcutters, falconers and hunting dogs looked out from under real instead of pictured branches.
The kitchen had been furnace hot for a week past, and there was still, every day, a great business of baking. July, slinking about the house in the quiet way she had learned, came there, and stood beside one of the maids who was beating batter for a cake, full of raisins of the sun and spices. Her plump fingers showed pink through the batter, which was richly yellow, sticky with honey, and spotted with plump raisins and the black eyes of currants. About the wooden bowl lay the broken shells of a score or so of eggs. The woman bade July hold out her palm, and slapped into it a lump of sweet dough. July drifted off again, licking it with her tongue.
In the Hall they were laying places for dinner, so she did not stay there. In the solar, she could tell by the noise that came from it, there was a merry company. She meant to slip by the door, but it opened just too soon, and Meg burst out, laughing and running. After her Master Aske came, his hands stretched out, his face muffled in a hood, for he was Hoodman Blind. After him the other guests crowded the narrow passage, laughing and calling on him to catch Meg, or on Meg to give him the slip.
Aske caught Meg just beside July and threw his arms about her. For a second Meg tried to drag away, but could not; then she turned and drove her fist at his covered face.
He let her go, stepped back against the wall of the passage and stood there so long that July thought, ‘Oh! She has hurt him!’ and for a minute she thought to strike Meg. But just then he pulled off the hood, and he was laughing.
Meg and he went back into the solar, and the door was shut, but July knew that he was angry (though he laughed); very angry, as if he had wanted to hurt Meg. July was not surprised at that, because Meg had hit out hard, yet somehow she was frightened. And as for Meg, her sister knew very well that warm shining look she gave to a man, and the way she leaned towards Aske as they went back into the solar together.
1532
January 1
The clerks of the Great Wardrobe were busy already setting down in fair copy the gifts which had been sent that day to the King, by nobles, gentlemen and commoners. They had their rough lists, made out when the servants brought the gifts from their masters, but now they must go through all again, weighing, counting, and carefully describing the stuff before it was carted away to the Great Wardrobe. Some of the gifts were not in the gallery at all: ‘A pair of geldings, grey and a black bay,’ had been led off to the stables; ‘a beast called a civet’ and a leopard were jolting away in their cages to the menagerie at the Tower.
But in the gallery, all over the floor, on the window-sills, upon chests and benches lay the King’s New Year gifts, and amongst them moved certain of the clerks, while others sat with their lists and their pens ready; these last would call out the name of a giver, and the other clerks would answer with the gift. The names were first those of royal persons, for the lists went strictly in order of precedence.
‘By the Queen,’ the list began, but there they must leave a blank, and a blank also for the Princess’s gift, for the King would accept nothing from either of them. After that there were the Bishops’ gifts.
‘Carlisle?’ ‘Two rings with a ruby and a diamond.’
‘Winchester?’ ‘A gold candlestick,’ and so on.
Next came the Dukes and Earls, and first among these, though he was neither, Sir Thomas More. ‘The Lord Chancellor?’ said one old clerk, and another answered, ‘A walking staff wrought with gold.’ These, the noblemen’s gifts, were mostly of gold – gold tables and chessmen, a gold flagon for rose-water – ‘The weight?’ asked the old clerk who was writing the list – and they weighed it and told him.
‘Ten sovereigns in a glove.’ ‘Have you counted?’ The old clerk checked his pen till the sovereigns were tipped out and counted.
Then there came the gifts of lords.
‘The Lord Chamberlain?’ ‘A pair of silver-gilt candlesticks.’
‘Lord Darcy?’ ‘Gold in a crimson satin purse.’
‘How much?’ ‘Six pounds, thirteen shillings and four pence.’
‘Lord Lisle?’
Again there was a pause, a long pause, for the clerk counted twice. ‘Twenty pounds lacking six pence,’ he said, ‘in a blue satin purse.’
‘Lord Audley?’ ‘A very pretty gift. A goodly sword, the hilt and pommel gilt and garnished.’
‘Tchk!’ says the old clerk, ‘I have writ as you said, “A goodly sword”. But no matter.’ He peered at the sword in the other’s hands. ‘It is, as you say, a goodly sword.’
After the lords came the Duchesses and the Countesses.
‘The old Duchess of Norfolk?’
The clerk had opened a little gilt and enamelled box, very curious work. ‘“The birth of Our Lord in a box” is what I have writ here,’ the old clerk prompted him, a
nd they left it at that.
And so they went on, through the Ladies, the Chaplains, the gentlewomen, Knights and gentlemen, down to ‘A dumb man that brought the jowl of a sturgeon’.
*
Master Aske came in with another gentleman from Gray’s Inn. Those two and Meg, and one of Sir John’s boys who had a sweet voice, sat by the fire singing while Meg played on the box regals Sir John had bought for her. Sir John sat by her, toying with her neck, or arm, or the gilt ball of her girdle. Now and again the servants brought wine, and spiced ale, which they drank till they were pretty merry, and very well pleased with the world.
Just before the candles were lighted July came in and sat down beside Meg’s woman, away from the fire, but below a branch candlestick so that they could see to sew.
Meg saw her, and called out to her that here was kind Master Aske who had brought her a New Year’s gift. Master Aske was singing just then; he smiled at Meg, and with his hand that was beating time he made a little gesture towards July.
At the end of that song they began another, and after that talked, and then asked riddles. When it was quite dark outside Master Aske and the other gentleman got up and said good-bye. Master Aske stood looking down at Meg, one hand on his hip; he was telling Meg about a masking there was that night at Gray’s Inn; July bent her head and kept her eyes on the shift she was sewing, because she knew that he had forgotten the New Year’s gift, and she would not remind him, not by so much as a look. As he went out she sat as still as a stone, and a stone seemed to her to be sticking in her throat.
January 6
As Sir John and his household sat down to dine on Twelfth Night Master Aske came in. He had been invited, and now made his excuses for being late – ‘And it’s not,’ said he, ‘that I stayed to see whether I could have a better dinner at Gray’s, but my man did, and drank himself to sleep, so that I had to dress myself.’ He was dressed in crimson cloth, and crimson satin, under a black coat – all pretty well worn and carelessly put on, but his shirt was very fresh and fine with black Spanish work round the collar.
All that July saw, and then kept her eyes on her platter, because Master Aske’s eye was looking about the room as though he sought someone.
‘Sit down then. Sit down,’ Sir John Bulmer cried.
‘A moment, pardon me. Ah – there she is.’
July knew that he was coming towards her. He stretched out his hand over her shoulder, and there were a dozen gilded sugar plums in it.
‘See, Mistress, a New Year’s gift that a careless fellow brought, and then forgot.’
July raised her head. He had been looking down at her with a smile, but now he was looking away, and July knew that his eye was upon Meg.
‘I do not like sugar plums,’ she said, in a voice that was not her own.
‘What! you do not like—?’
He stood behind her still, and his hand was still stretched out with the sugar plums in it. He began to toss them up and down on his palm as if he were wondering what to do. ‘My niece Julian would give her soul for sugar plums,’ he said; and then, ‘See, I’ll set them here, and you shall do as you will with them.’
He tipped them out on the table and they rolled between a dish of stewed eels and a big mutton pasty.
Then he went away, and sat down where Meg made room for him beside her.
When dinner was over July found a place where she could be alone. There she laid the sugar plums in her lap and wept over them silently and steadily, till a good deal of the gilding was washed off them. Now and again she ate one, but that only made her more miserable, because they tasted of tears, made her throat ache, and gave her hiccups as well. Altogether her misery was extreme. Either she had hurt Master Aske or made him angry; probably the latter. She imagined him telling Meg, or his friends at the Inn, of the girl who behaved herself so unmannerly. Next time he came he would look at her with cold disapproval, or else speak a hard word. Yet the worst he could say was better than that she should have hurt him. The catastrophe of her wickedness loomed over her, darkness without a star, unbearable and irremediable.
January 8
There was snow on the wind, but sunshine in between the squalls, and the Prioress chose a sunny interval to go across the orchard to the work-house to look over the new flails which the carpenter had been making. One of them hung ready on the wall, and the willow hand-staves for two more, peeled, and dried in the oven, lay beside the holly swingles on the bench. They waited only for the cap and thong of oxhide which would join swingle and stave. The Prioress, who liked to oversee these things herself, picked up each stave and swingle, one after the other, and turning towards the doorway looked along it to see that it was duly straight.
It was so that she saw Gib Dawe, who was passing the door. He had come to ask the Nuns’ bailiff for some of the Priory dung for his garden, and he was not pleased to see the Prioress, because he knew that she did not like those who asked for Priory stuff, even for dung. ‘And of that same grudging humour,’ thought Gib, ‘are all the rich of the earth.’
He had almost got by, but heard her call his name, so he came back and stood in the doorway, peering into the brown, dusty twilight of the shed where the sunshine struck in, smoke blue, and where there hung always a pleasant mingled smell of sawdust, oil and leather.
‘Sir Gilbert,’ said the Prioress, ‘what is this I hear of you?’
Gib wondered what it was; she might have heard more than one thing that would not please her.
‘How can I tell, Madame?’
‘For a priest to stumble into fornication,’ the Prioress told him, with her cold grey eyes narrowed against the sun, ‘is one thing. And it is long ago and all but forgotten. Yet it’s another matter that he should make an open scandal of it.’
Gib knew now that she had heard the talk about him taking into his house the dumb child. He had his answer ready.
‘Madame,’ said he, ‘I count it no scandalous thing, but meetly right for priests to marry and beget, even as other men. For if you read in the Scriptures—’
‘And what,’ cried the Prioress, ‘have the Scriptures to do with it? Priests do not marry.’
‘That is in these latter times. But in the first, most holiest ages of the Church, as we may read in the Scriptures—’
The Prioress took fire at his schoolmastering tone, and tossed the hand-stave clattering down on the bench.
‘What is your Scriptures against the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? Yea, and if that were not enough, Popes of old time and every time, that are successors of our lord St. Peter.’
‘Ha!’ Gib was triumphant. ‘Peter Bar-Jona was himself a married man.’
He thought that would end it, but the Prioress was stouter of heart and quicker witted than he knew. It took her a second to realize of whom he spoke so lightly, as if he spoke of Jankin the porter. But then she answered like a flash; ‘Was he then Pope of Rome when he had a wife? Was he priest at all?’
A man might have given him time to find a retort, but not a woman – certainly not the Prioress. She laughed in his face, and waved her hand as if to brush him and his argument away. Her sleeve was lined with fur, and as she moved a smell of musk came to him.
‘The Scriptures,’ he began, in a voice that should have frightened her, but she laughed again.
‘Lord! You and your Scriptures! You’ve but the one word, like my brother’s talking popinjay bird. And will you tell me that your Scriptures say the blessed St. Peter was a fornicator like you?’ She looked up into his face quite unperturbed by his glance of smouldering fury, and now she spoke in a tone casual, reasonable, almost friendly, that galled him more than any other could have done.
‘Go your ways, Master Priest, and hold your tongue about your sin, and the fruit of your sin. If the miller put force on you to take the brat (though what they say is that you sought him out wilfully), then keep the lad, but keep your mouth shut as to who begot him. Say that you needed a boy in the house to help the old wife, your mo
ther. Say what you will that’s not the truth. But how will you curse me the young maids and men when they fall into incontinence, when you declare yourself, unashamed, a fornicator?’
She stepped forward then, and Gib must move aside to get out of her way. He stood awhile after she had left him, biting at his nails, and then went home, still raging. ‘It’s easy,’ he thought, ‘for a woman’s tongue to outrun a man’s.’ But that comforted him little. ‘She would not let me speak the truth, being a woman benighted in the old ways,’ he told himself, but that only spread salt on his raw self-respect. And truly the grudge he had against her was deeper. He told himself, ‘It is for mine honest dealing in taking charge of the lad, and for avowing the true pure knowledge of the New Learning, that I am rebuked.’
He should have rejoiced so to suffer for righteousness. He had brought the lad home, laying on himself that penance for the old sin, that he might be at peace with himself. A little also he had taken pleasure in braving, as one having the New Learning and new light, the censure of the ignorant. But the presence of the dumb brat in the house nagged at him like a toothache, and for a toothache few men would endure to be chidden.
January 30
Meg had gone out with Sir John to buy stuff for yet another gown. She had already, hanging from the perches in her chamber, gowns of green velvet and carnation satin, of white silk and blue silk, of black cut velvet with cloth of silver, and now she must have a gown of cloth of gold of Lucca. Sir John had pledged a gilt cup and a collar of enamel, and they had gone off to buy the stuff for it.
Master Aske, when he heard they were from home, said – ‘no matter, no matter, he would sit and wait awhile’ – and went into the Hall. July was there in the sunshine of one of the windows, with a piece of sewing, and old Mother Judde sat spinning by the hearth; she had a tuneless sort of song which she sang to the buzz and rattle of the wheel, and her attention was divided between the thread and a twelve-months infant belonging to one of the women, which was crawling about by the hearth.
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