After a long morning in the open, burning field, and dinner eaten in the shade of an ash tree with all the hay-makers, the girls were content for a while to lie idle, watching the women move along the swathes with their rakes, the men gathering the small kyles into pikes, then tossing up the pikes onto the wains. Their voices came pleasantly in the heat, and pleasantly too the thin hiss of the hone on a scythe blade from a nearby close, where one of the Marrick yeomen was cutting his hay.
The two elder novices dozed, slept, wakened, and dozed again. Jane had curled herself up against her mother’s thigh; whenever the other two wakened they heard her talking.
She said, ‘Madame, there were many knights that had their pavilions set at the ford below the Priory... where the stepping stones are... I saw a dipper there yesterday; he told me he had three eggs in his nest... He said he would show them to me one day when he had leisure... There was a red pavilion, a gold pavilion, and one all stripes of blue and green. Every day the knights ride into the Dale to find Paynim knights to joust with, and damsels to deliver.’ She paused to stretch and yawn like a puppy, then laid her cheek down on her mother’s knee. After a while, ‘Madame,’ said she in a drowsy voice, ‘wot you that there is a mermaid at the Priory?’
Her mother, never surprised, never incredulous, remarked placidly, ‘Nay. In truth?’
Jane sat up to explain that ‘she was a mermaid but the Lady said she could not be so she was not’. She hesitated, then said, ‘Some say she is a fool, and some that she is a holy creature though foolish. But we must not speak abroad of what she has seen, because the Lady will be angry.’
She wriggled herself nearer. ‘I asked her, Madame, how it was to live beneath the sea, and of the caves and palaces there. She would not tell. But she told me what she saw last Twelfth Night. Can I tell you?’
Her mother snipped off a length of green silk, puckering up her eyes against the light. ‘Tell me, but not others,’ she said.
‘Malle—’ said Jane, ‘her name is Malle – Malle went up to the Manor that night to fetch a feather bed; there were so many guests at the Priory that there were not beds enough, and then Dame Anne Ladyman’s sister came.’ She giggled. ‘July and I had to sleep in the same bed, and we talked till the Ladies woke for Matins.’ She turned to smile at July, but July’s eyes were shut.
‘It was the time of the great snow, and the moon shone, Malle said. And as she came back by the woodside there ran two boys after her down the hill, and about the snowy field, the one chasing the other. He who was chased was laughing full sweetly, Malle said. She said that when she heard Him laugh she knew it was God’s little Son. She said none other but He could laugh so happily as that, since none but only He knew joy so nigh. And, Madame, Malle said—’
‘Did Malle say that?’ Jane’s mother asked.
Jane stopped, considering. ‘I think she did.’
The eldest novice, who had wakened, interrupted here, with brutal frankness.
‘Jane is making it up. Malle doesn’t talk like that. She is only a fool, and stutters when she talks. She would not say such things.’
Jane flushed. She shrugged the eldest novice off with her shoulder, and spoke only to her mother.
‘That is what she meant to tell me. That is what she saw.’
‘And,’ said the eldest novice, ‘you know, Jane, that we are forbidden to tell her foolish sayings.’
Jane’s mother turned the conversation easily and pleasantly by reaching out a dangling handful of cherries from the little pannier, and bobbing them against Jane’s lips. The others sat up too, and all ate cherries, and soon after tied on their straw hats, and went out again to help with the hay.
As the two elder girls went raking one after the other along a swathe, the eldest novice spoke gravely of Jane’s disobedience in talking of Malle’s crazy sayings.
‘Humph!’ said July, and would not, though the other tried to persuade her, say any more for a time, only, ‘Let her alone. There’s no harm in that.’
‘Dost thou then,’ the eldest novice asked, ‘believe in this foolishness?’
July thought, – ‘If it is true! If God knows joy! If we coming toward Him come nearer to joy, and that without fear!’
To the other novice she said, ‘Nay.’
‘For,’ said that young lady, who had reached her priggish age, ‘if any were to see such a vision it would not be a wench like Malle, but the Prioress, or one of the Ladies, or even...’ She stopped there, without mentioning novices.
July thought, – ‘Jesu! Mary! St. Andrew! Let it be true!’ Then she thought, – ‘I shall find Malle and make her tell me that it is true.’ But very soon she knew that she would not dare do that, for fear she should find out that it was a lie.
August 20
The King came in to sup with the Queen in her apartments. In the antechamber one of her ladies was playing on the virginals, others were reading, or whispering together; two of the youngest were playing with a kitten. Everything seemed as usual, but when the King had looked sharply round, not one of them, as they rose to curtsey, would meet his eye. He indicated with a wave of his hand that no one should follow him into the Privy Chamber beyond, and went by quickly.
The Queen sat there, alone, between the yellow candles and a lowering red sunset. She got up from her chair and curtseyed very low; her eyes were on the ground but at the look of her the King knew that he had guessed right, and that though in the antechamber all seemed pleasant pastime and cheerfulness, a storm had raged here lately. Besides, it had by no means escaped his notice that one of the Queen’s Maids, who should have been in attendance, was not.
‘Madame,’ he said, lowering his head, and going straight at the point, ‘where is—?’
The Queen did not even give him time to speak the girl’s name.
‘She is not here. She is not here,’ she burst out; and now she raised her eyes and braved him. ‘I will not have her here. Oh! I know. Jesu! But I can see. And I’ll have no rutting here among my maids. She shall go home.’ She gave a sudden sharp cackle of laughter. ‘Christ! Now you will say that it means nothing that you must sit by her, and lean over her and paw her – Ah!’
She stopped because he had moved so abruptly.
‘No, Madame,’ he said, not speaking loudly at all, but – she could not help herself – she started back as if he had raised his fist to her, and could only hope he did not see how fast her breath went.
‘No, Madame, I shall not say that. But I shall remind you of what I have done in raising you, and what you were before I raised you. And I shall counsel you to be content with what I have done, the more because if it were to do again, I would not do it.’
He smiled at her unpleasantly, and she covered her face with her hands, and sank into the chair again. She looked beaten, but as she sobbed, partly from the trembling of her nerves, and partly for design, she had indeed snatched her courage to her again.
‘It is my great love – my great love for Your Grace,’ she murmured.
He began to fidget about the room, and she let her sobs cease, but she fetched a trembling sigh.
He said, ‘Well, well. Come to supper.’
She caught his hand and kissed it, and then covered her mouth with her fingers, because he had pulled away from her so sharply that the claw setting of a great ruby on his finger had torn her lip.
August 28
Robert Aske was coming back from Aughton Landing. One of the barges which brought goods up into the country from Hull had arrived there after dinner-time, and Aske had hoped that among the stuff for Aughton would be a ream of paper that he had sent for. But the master of the barge knew naught of it, though he had set ashore barrels of fish, several casks of wine, the lock of the parlour door which had gone to be mended, and two sugar loaves. Aske left the servants to bring these up, and started for home alone.
The evening had fallen quiet after a windy day, and white clouds, plump and pillowy, wallowed lazily across the sky. In that huge open countr
yside it was like being below the water of the sea, and looking up at the hulls of a fleet of ships sailing by above. Beside him his shadow, stretched and lean, slid smoothly, or flickered over unevennesses in the grass of the ings. Just before he left the river bank he startled a swan which had been standing there; it tottered clumsily towards the water, leaning forward with its wings spread; in a second more it was in the air, beating with great slow wailing flaps down the course of the river; only when it had gone far along did it rise, and then for minutes he could see it still, sailing towards Bubwith, white against the white clouds that lay low on the horizon there.
As he came near to Aughton the church bell began to ring; it must mean that the harvest was over, and that the great open field from which the corn had been carried was now broken, so that the cattle could be driven in to pasture upon the stubbles. But as well as the clanging of the bell he could hear, as he came up beside the old grassy mound where the de la Hayes had had their castle, that there was an unusual stir in the house. Dogs were barking and men shouting; he walked more quickly; it would surely be Jack, come home after a fortnight’s visit to Marrick – both to Marrick Manor and to the Priory, since Dame Nan Bulmer at the one and old Dame Eleanor Maxwell at the other were both kinswomen, the one on the Aske side, the other on the Clifford.
Jack it was, and very pleased to be home. At supper all the talk was of what had happened at Aughton since he went away – to the children, the harvest, the beasts, the dogs. After supper he and Robert went out in a late clear afterglow, so that Jack might have a look round; he was not content to wait till morning, so eager was he to be truly Aske of Aughton again.
Yet as they leaned on the stackyard gate looking out on the lane Jack did not talk at all, for a while at least, of Aughton, but of their people at Marrick. As Robert listened, hearing news of Dame Nan’s hawks, and Dame Eleanor’s rheumatism, he wondered if Jack knew that it was better not to talk before his wife of Aske kin; he wondered too how anyone could be so jealous, and with so little cause, as Nell.
But then – his mind wandered – Nell’s tempers were small things, sharp and sudden, like flaws of wind on the water, but like those only shaking the surface of life, which, here in Aughton, was all unstirred below. Here, but for such shallow troubles, was a great familiar peace. He looked down the lane; the elms were gathering twilight in their dusky leaves; tags and streamers of the harvest hung from their lower branches to show where the wains had passed; now a herd of cows came lazing along, driven by a young fellow in a green hood, who gave out now and again hollow, owl-like cries, which in no wise hastened the slow beasts. With the boy was an old man, who carried aloft on his shoulder a dumpling-faced infant. Both young man and old must have sworn that oath that every grown person in England had sworn, except so very few. Jack too had taken it, and Robert dared not ask him what he made of it all. Yet here perhaps it might seem to Jack and the others that there was no force at all in the oath; what King Harry did in London came to Aughton as no more than hearsay, and would not change a thing. ‘At least,’ Robert Aske thought to himself, ‘nothing has changed here. At least here for a while I need not to think that it has changed. At least I can forget London where I know that all has changed.’
The cows were passing. Jack, forgetting for the moment Marrick matters, told Robert the age, the parentage, the quality of each beast as they went by, swinging their heads, switching tails, and casting a wild look sidelong on the men at the gate. When they had gone the whole air was sweet with the smell of milk.
Jack turned so that he leaned his shoulders against the gate. ‘Tell me, Robin,’ he said in a doubtful, hesitating way, ‘what think you of visions?’
‘Visions? What visions?’
Jack laughed, as it were apologetically. ‘You’ll call me a fool for thinking on it. But there was that in the poor creature – though they say she’s crazed – yet there was that made me—’
When Robert interrupted, demanding to know what in God’s name he was talking of, he said, ‘Of that poor fool the Nuns call Malle.’ He twisted his head to look down the lane, and added, ‘I’d not use the Nuns’ cows to lay a patch on ours.’
‘What visions?’ Robert Aske rapped out, so sharply that Jack turned towards him. But he, lest Jack should see his face, had hitched himself up to sit on the top bar of the gate. ‘What visions?’ he asked for the third time.
So Jack went on. ‘This Malle, who – well, I’ll tell you it, Robin, as it happened. I was up at Marrick, coming back to the Manor at dusk, in a great rain that drove so hard that I had my head down and saw nothing till the horse turned aside. She was in the way; she’d a great bundle of faggots on her shoulder, and she stood in the rain, as soaked as a washing-day clout, but she never moved, only stood staring.
‘Staring at what?’
‘Into the window – but it was shuttered – of the last toft of the village, for I had come just to the town end.
‘She said, without looking at me, “He is within. He blesses the children.”’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Robert. ‘You said the last toft. That’s where that wench Cis—’
Jack held up his hand. ‘I know what you’ll say, Robin, but let me end. Quod she, “I looked in. The shutters weren’t close. Cis was stirring the pot for supper, and the pigs and hens were driven in for the night. I could see the sow lie in the corner, and the hens roosting.” Then she said – but, of course – however – she said – “I saw Him, a young man by the fire, tired from way-faring. He had his boots off to ease his feet. One of the little wenches leaned against his thigh and the babe was on his knee, and two of the little knaves played in the ashes at his feet. I saw Him,” quod she, “lay his hand on the little wench’s head.”’
When Robert said nothing at all Jack said:
‘I know you’ll tell me it were no strange thing to see a young man, or men not so young, in that toft at night. Her husband’s dead now – not that it made much odds when she had a husband. The Bulmers say not more than half that string of brats were his begetting.’
‘Did you,’ said Robert, ‘see in? Was there – was there – one with her?’
‘No. The shutters were close when I came.’ Jack turned now, and looked up at his brother. Robin sat humped on the top bar of the gate, watching, with his one eye puckered up, the bats that swung busily in the darkening air.
‘I knew,’ said Jack, ‘that you would laugh. And indeed the common talk is that the woman is crazed.’
‘I? Laugh?’
‘Robin ! You believe that indeed she saw—’
Robert Aske had jumped down from the gate, and now moved away towards the house. As he went he said:
‘I warrant that when He went about in Jewry He did not deny to bless bawds’ children, being so merciful as He was.’
‘But,’ Jack persisted, ‘you believe it a true vision?’
‘If ever,’ said Robert, marching on ahead and speaking in a voice that sounded angry, ‘if ever there were a day in which Christian men needed a sign to ensure them of God’s forgiveness, and if ever there were a place, that day’s to-day, and that place England. And if any man needs it in special—’
‘But such a simple creature, so ignorant.’
‘I shall go to Marrick, and find out for myself.’
‘When will you go?’
‘Sometime,’ Robert Aske answered, roughly, because as soon as he said he would go he knew that he would not go. He would not act the lawyer with God’s word, to doubt it, to haggle, and probe. ‘No,’ said he to himself, ‘I’ll take it, thanking God for his mercy.’
September 30
M. Eustache Chapuys looked up from the letter he was writing, stared, with eyes that did not see, at a cupboard with a jug of wine and a silver pot on it, and stroked his lips with the end of the quill he was using. These long despatches of the Imperial Ambassador to his master took up both time and thought. He bent again to his writing and for a while the pen chirruped almost as steadily as a cricket b
y a warm hearth.
At last M. Chapuys cast down the pen, yawned, stretched elaborately, and picking up a glass of late carnations sniffed deeply at the spicy scent. Then he threw one leg over the arm of the chair and began to hum softly. Now and again he glanced over his shoulder at the letter; it was a good letter, he thought. He was of the opinion that the Emperor Charles was lucky to have such a man as himself in England in these difficult times. An ambassador here to-day, he thought, needs to be fearless, subtle, ingenious, perspicuous; he must be such an one as is able to keep on good terms with the King and Thomas Cromwell, now Master Secretary; for otherwise he could do nothing to help Queen Katherine and the Princess. All these qualities M. Chapuys conceived himself to have. And, being no fool, but a good judge of men even when it was himself he judged, he was right. Not exactly young, he had a young man’s nicety in dress, as well as other qualities which a man usually leaves behind him before he reaches middle age. He was still sanguine, flippant, and eager; he was also wary, or he would not have served the Emperor Charles, but it was as though he played a game in which caution was necessary, and amused himself thereby.
After a little while he swung to his feet and went across to the window. It was a large window, of five casements in a row, with wooden mullions between. If he had opened one and looked out and up he would have seen, as well as a row of empty swallows’ nests, a tangle of rich and various carvings – vine leaves, grape bunches, twists of ribbon, peacocks, unicorns, and wild men whose hair became vine tendrils and whose bodies tailed off into fishes. Opposite, on the far side of the Cheap, the houses were adorned with similar, though even more opulent, carving; for on that side as on this the Goldsmiths lived, and their houses, not so very long builded, were the pride of Londoners and the admiration of strangers.
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