The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  He kissed Darcy, and said, holding him hard by the shoulder and looking him in the eye, ‘I’m soaked to the bone. Will you lend me a dry gown to put on?’

  ‘That I will. Come within.’ Darcy led him towards the door of his bed-chamber, then, over his shoulder, bade one of the gentlemen, ‘Bring light, James.’

  In the bed-chamber, when James had lit the fire, and set candles, Darcy took Sandys by the arm and brought him to the high-backed bench in front of the hearth where two green cushions were set, worked with the Buck’s Head in silver.

  ‘Now, tell me your news,’ said he.

  Sandys leaned towards him so that their shoulders touched, and said in a low voice, ‘She is with child.’

  ‘You mean the King’s—’

  ‘Sh!’ Sandys looked over his shoulder at the gentleman, leaning against the door, and paring his nails with a little knife.

  ‘Keep me the door, James,’ said Darcy, and when the young gentleman had gone out – ‘Well then, the Marchioness of Pembroke.’

  Sandys nodded, and spat in the fire. ‘Nan Boleyn,’ he said.

  ‘Who told you it?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘She? Told you?’

  ‘She told us all – all that were waiting outside the King’s Chamber.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘God’s Body! a dozen or so – Exeter, Huntingdon, Norfolk, Wyatt too.’

  ‘Who was her lover once.’

  ‘They say so.’

  ‘Well I can believe it. And it’s not credo quia impossibile est.’

  Sandys shrugged and went on.

  ‘I was talking with Wyatt as we warmed our hands at a brazier, when the door of the King’s Chamber opens, and out prances my Lady Marchioness, the Queen’s jewels all over her, aye, even some I can remember to have seen Her Grace wear when first she came from Spain. And this one had more too; they say the King gives her jewels every day. She’d as many as the Virgin of Conques.

  ‘So out she comes, twisting her hands together like this,’ and he wrung his hands daintily together.

  ‘She looks round at us all, and then cries out to Wyatt, naming him by name – “Sir Thomas! Sir Thomas! By the Holy Virgin you’ll not guess what the King says.” Wyatt began to stroke his beard like he does when he’s thinking out one of his pretty sayings, but she didn’t give him time.

  ‘“You know what I told you yesterday, how sharply I long for apples? I told His Grace, and he says it means I am with child,” and back she skipped into the Privy Chamber, cackling like a hen.’

  ‘God’s Soul!’ said Darcy, ‘and did she clap her hands to her belly like that?’

  ‘She did, Tom.’

  They sat together in silence for quite a long time before Sandys murmured, ‘Will he marry her?’ and then answered his own question. ‘But he cannot, unless the Pope at last should give sentence against the Queen.’

  Darcy leaned his head near and spoke with his lips close to Sandys’ ear.

  ‘I was told – but did not then believe it—’

  ‘Tell me first who told you.’

  ‘No, never mind. I was told that about a month ago now this new Archbishop, Cranmer, married them. It was very secret, but folks will talk.’

  ‘But,’ persisted Sandys, ‘no Archbishop can, while the appeal lies at Rome.’

  Darcy looked at him with his head tipped back and angry dancing lights in his eyes.

  ‘You may say he cannot, but this Cranmer will do it. And will declare the King’s first marriage void, if he is set up to judge in the cause.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sandys, ‘that he was Nan Boleyn’s father’s chaplain.

  But he cannot. It is not possible.’ Darcy laughed at him, but grimly.

  ‘You shall see what he can do, and what the King can do now that this child is begotten.’

  May 17

  Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, walked in the fields, for it was evening, and Saturday, and all day he had sat in the Court at Dunstable, trying the matter of the King’s first marriage. Now he took the air with one of his gentlemen. They walked at the foot of a gentle slope that ran up to a small oak wood. The little hill was a hill of gold, so thick the buttercups grew, and the oak trees themselves were greenish gold. A black puppy went with them, flopping and galloping, making parade of having to attend to affairs of great weight, with mischief shining in its eyes; when it came back to them, blundering against their legs, its muzzle was golden green from the gold pollen of the buttercups. On the fringe of the wood the milkmaids were busy among the kine; their voices and laughter came pleasantly, and one of them began to sing. All the birds were singing too, so many and so merry that there was never an instant’s silence; single amongst all their flutings cuckoo called, and called again from the distance.

  ‘Would,’ said the Archbishop, pinching his lower lip between his fingers, as he did when he was troubled, ‘would that I could have pronounced the King’s first marriage incestuous this day, before the Court closed.’

  ‘But, my Lord, you have brought it to a final sentence which—’

  ‘Which I cannot give till Friday next, seeing all the days between are ferial; so that the Court cannot sit.’

  ‘But,’ the gentleman objected again, ‘on Friday—’ and again the Archbishop interrupted him irritably.

  ‘Supposing she hears the bruit of it – Queen Katherine. She hath not appeared to answer her summons – but if she should—’

  He brooded over that, teasing his lip.

  ‘I have written to the King,’ he said. ‘I must write to Master Cromwell. But I shall pray either of them to make no relation of the matter lest she should be stirred to appear afore me in the time, or afore the time, of sentence. For if she came I should be greatly stayed and let in the process, and you know time runs on, and this marriage must be broken before our gracious Queen Anne is crowned.’

  He started forward, going towards the house.

  ‘I shall write now. See to a messenger for me,’ he cried over his shoulder, and went in to write to Master Cromwell of how nearly the process of the King’s divorce was accomplished, and how fearful he was lest Katherine of Spain should appear in the Court to answer in her own cause, in place of that docile and complaisant counsel whom the King had appointed to answer for her.

  May 29

  As well as the house at Mortlake, which Lord Darcy now rented instead of the one at Stepney, he had hired a small house at Westminster to use when Parliament was sitting. The house was old and crushed in between one of the tall kitchen offices of the new Palace of Whitehall, and a house that belonged to the Abbot of Westminster. It had no garden at all, which was strange for Westminster, a countrified place where the Palace sat among greenery, like Richard Crookback’s crown on a thornbush, but the Cardinal had bought and built upon the little garden which it had possessed, thus almost choking the house on one side of light and air. Because Lord Darcy did not care to be without a garden he hired one that lay at the end of the lane, and nearer the river; it was called the Vine Garden, because there was a very old vine in it, fantastically and harshly knotted, but still fertile, and now breaking out with exquisitely innocent and gay young leaves.

  On this day, which was the Friday before Whitsuntide, my Lord came in from Mortlake in his litter. The servants had been sent on hours earlier, so as to have the house ready, but when my Lord came it was all hugger-mugger; in the room beyond the Hall, where the ancient windows had pointed arches, and stone seats under them in the thickness of the wall, the hearth had not yet been cleared of the pale ash of the last fire, nor filled with green boughs for summer. When my Lord sat down on a cushion on the seat below the window, he could hear feet scurrying overhead, and heavy bumps now and again, as the servants set up the beds in haste.

  Presently Lord Hussey came in, so the two lords and several of their gentlemen chose to repair out of the confusion of the house to the little Vine Garden at the end of the lane.

  The Vine Garden, though
small, was a pleasant place. As well as the old vine on the wall there were trim hedges of thorn and box, and a trellis where the first monthly roses were pink and white like raspberries drenched in cream. Close to the gate by which they entered there was a cherry tree, whose fruit, plump, polished, and yellow, was already flushing with scarlet; a blackbird scrambled noisily from among the leaves, and flew away, shouting with fright and proprietary anger as they came in. At the other end of the walk a honeysuckle hedge and arbour were backed by a low wall, and as Darcy and Hussey sat together in the arbour they could hear the slap of the Thames’ tide upon the stones behind them. A salt smell mingled with the scent of the honeysuckle, and seagulls drifted by, golden white against the blue, turning their heads from side to side as they spied about for garbage.

  While the gentlemen sat, or strolled about the garden, the two lords talked, securely private in the honeysuckle arbour. Hussey could tell Darcy all the news there was of Princess Mary, for he was Chamberlain of her Household; he could also tell much of the Queen, for letters had been passing between Katherine and her daughter, even though they were forbidden.

  ‘The Princess—’ Hussey said, and checked himself, not for the first time; that title was forbidden. ‘The Lady Mary,’ he began again, and then struck one palm with the other fist. ‘Blood of God,’ he cried, but keeping his voice low, ‘if you knew how I live now between my wife, whose sweetest name for me is ‘coward’, and these lords who come from the Court to bid me call the – call my Lady – this or that or t’other! She,’ he explained, and Darcy knew that he meant Lady Hussey, ‘she is passionate for the Queen. Oh God! the Princess Dowager I mean, and for – her daughter. But what can a man do other than obey his Prince?’

  Darcy prodded the ground at their feet with his walking staff. He murmured, ‘Women are like that,’ remembering how his dead Elizabeth had, from the beginning, taken this same business of the King’s new marriage. How many years ago was that beginning? Why, the thing had hung over them for close on six years. And now it was come to an end, but to a different end, and by very different paths than any which he or others had dreamed of then.

  For a breath Darcy could have believed that his wife had been right, and all was as simple as women saw it. ‘Here’s a man married. What if he be a king? Here’s his wife and his true-born child. What if she be a lass instead of a lad? There’s a whore. What if she be crowned queen and wear a collar of pearls about her neck as big as chick peas?’

  He sighed, and Hussey beside him swore softly again and went on complaining of how his wife goaded and reproached him. Darcy only half listened. He was thinking that this ‘great matter’ of the King’s, so long ago begun, was perhaps not yet ended. It had spread so far, as a flood spreads, that none could say now where it would cease to undermine, to bring down, to efface. No. Certainly the women’s simple way was not for a man to take when all known paths were hidden, and he must feel about for foothold. ‘But,’ he comforted himself, ‘all will return into place one day,’ and when he thought – ‘If it does not—?’ he answered the doubt promptly. ‘Aye – but it must.’

  In the evening he was promised to supper with the Marquess of Exeter at that same Manor of the Rose which had once been Buckingham’s. Just past Temple Bar the preparations for shows began. The streets too were gravelled, and along one side a railing had been set up, so that the Londoners would not be hurt by scared horses trampling in on them. The conduit in Fleet Street was freshly coloured, as bright as a Book of Hours; the shields of arms were sticky with paint – scarlet, blue, green – and the angels all new gilded. A sort of gallery had been built out above, like a little walled town with a turret at each corner, and the sound of instruments of music and the voices of singing boys came from it and mingled with the noises of the street. A few men of the city stood below, listening and looking up, with the script of the music in their hands, for it was their pageant.

  A dray unloading hogsheads at the conduit held up Darcy’s litter for a while, so he leaned out to watch while he waited. The instruments and voices sounded pleasantly here, and the setting sun made the conduit and its fanciful adornments like a picture of the New Jerusalem. But now something had gone wrong; the music faltered, the viols and recorders played a phrase alone, then played it again, but raggedly. Someone from below cried out in anger, and, when a boy put his head over the rail above, complained, ‘You there, Justice! We don’t want you. That’s Temperance his part.’

  The boy glanced back over his shoulder: ‘Well, Sir, Temperance is – Temperance – Marry! Sir, one of the casks for the conduit to run wine to-morrow was stove in, and Temperance – he’s very sick, Sir.’

  Darcy let out a laugh, and someone else beside him laughed too. When Darcy looked round to see who it was, he found a gentleman on horseback close beside the litter, with many in livery following him; and then he saw that it was not a gentleman at all, but Master Cromwell, Keeper of the King’s Jewels.

  ‘Temperance,’ said Cromwell, ‘will have not only a sore head to-morrow, but a sore backside,’ and he nodded at the enraged citizen, already climbing the narrow ladder, with such a pleasant puckering of the eyes in his laughter that Darcy could not, for the moment, dislike him.

  So they rode up the Strand together, talking pleasantly, and indeed Master Cromwell was a good talker, ranging easily from praise of the great arch the Venetians were busy setting up, to the whole city of Venice itself, thence to speak of the more ancient Italy, with talk of the Cave of Scylla, ‘which,’ said he, ‘I have with mine own eyes seen, but no monster therein, only a row of sea birds sitting and looking out, very solemn and wise, like Justices on the Bench.’ By the time the Keeper of the King’s Jewels pulled up his horse in Candlewick Street and said that here must he take his leave, Darcy had decided that this was a much pleasanter rogue than he had thought.

  And Master Cromwell lingered after dismounting, as if unwilling to part with my Lord. He stood talking, shading his eyes with one hand against the great flood of swimming dusty gold that the sun poured down the street, leaning an elbow on the side of Darcy’s litter, and idly flicking to and fro a pair of new and costly Louvain gloves, dove grey, like his dove-grey satin coat, and stitched with silver.

  The streets were still very full, though it was past supper-time for merchants and working folk; everyone was about, staring at the decorations, though not, Darcy noticed, with that free hilarity that such shows usually brought. People moved slowly, and spoke low to each other. But the shows were plentiful, and every house along the way had hung out lengths of coloured stuffs, or painted cloths or devices. Below the windows of the house opposite, almost hiding the twined roses and pomegranates carved along the timbers, hung damask velvet of crimson red. And even now some wenches and an apprentice or two were leaning out from the windows, to better it with painted shields, white and green, each with two letters interlaced – an H. and an A.

  Master Cromwell twinkled at Darcy, said farewell, and moved away. Darcy told the boy on the leading horse to ‘Get on!’ and he looped up the reins in his hand ready to obey. Just then among the crowd there came three young gentlemen, arm in arm, going towards Westminster, with the sun on their faces. They were opposite the litter when the midmost of the three suddenly stopped and pulled the others up.

  ‘Look you!’ he cried, and freed one arm to point at the lettered shields that hung a little drunkenly, ‘Look you there!’ He had a notable voice, deep, but with a clear note in it that rang above the noises of the street, so that people looked round at him. ‘Why! That’s what we all say of this coronation, and now they write it for us to read – H and A – That spells Ha!’ and he let out a great, derisive ‘Ha! Ha!’ Someone in the street laughed, and then more than one, and a shrill boy’s voice echoed the ‘Ha! Ha!’ and there were cat-calls and more laughter.

  The litter stopped and Darcy found that Master Cromwell was beside him again. ‘Wait!’ said he to Darcy, ‘Who said that? Which way did he go? What manner of man?’
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  Darcy leaned out and peered eastward towards the Tower, and then westward towards St. Paul’s. In that direction he could see the red cap of the young gentleman who had said, ‘Ha! Ha!’ Then it was hidden by the stiff white coifs of a couple of citizens’ wives who had gone by with an apprentice boy following them. ‘By the Rood!’ he answered slowly, ‘I could not say who. Nor I could not say which way. Nor what manner of man.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Cromwell, after a silence. ‘I see. And it matters – but little.’

  His eyes, sharp and small and full of consideration, seemed to be looking through Darcy’s head, as if he were adding up a sum that was written on the green and tawny curtains of the litter behind it. He said farewell again with no less courtesy and sweetness than before, though without a smile.

  Darcy went on to the Rose, and chuckled more than once as he went. The trumpet was blowing for supper when he got there, and he had time only to wash his hands and join them at the board. But after supper, when the candles were lit, he and the Marquess stood together in a window, in a shadow that lay between the cold turquoise of the sky and the warm light of the fluttering candle flames. The Marquess asked for news, but when Darcy began to tell him what Hussey had said he knew it already.

  Then Darcy told him of the young man in the street, and of Master Cromwell’s concern. The Marquess laughed, but at once his face fell again into its expression of tired and fastidious melancholy. He had royal blood in him, and he looked royal, but as if an exiled and weary king.

  ‘Who was he – this young man? Did you see him?’ he asked with so little interest that it was enough for Darcy merely to shake his head:

  ‘I fear that Master Cromwell has notched a tally against me in that working brain of his,’ said he, and at that the Marquess exclaimed with disgust upon Cromwell. ‘A petty usurer,’ he called him in such a tone as one would speak of a louse. ‘Never fear for him.’

  ‘Fear?’ Darcy had not thought of fear, and something made him turn his eyes from the Marquess for kindness’ sake, as from the face of one who has betrayed himself without knowing it. And, because that other, the saucy young man, was so different, he remembered again his face, which indeed he had seen well, and not forgotten. For if a man has but one eye it is easy to remember him; and easier yet if the eye is sharp with scorn, and bright with laughter. Darcy had caught its glance for an instant, and his lips twitched now as he remembered the liveliness and mockery of that single eye. ‘By the Rood!’ he thought to himself, hearing again in recollection the northern broadness of speech, ‘By the Rood! he’s a Yorkshireman I’ll swear, and that’s a bold, true man.’ And he thought with warm love of the North Country, and the men that were bred there.