The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  No, July could not go because the Prioress had been particular that Dame Eleanor must see that it was the right, fine, Flanders weave. And Dame Eleanor could not leave July on the bridge, because that would not be seemly. And they could not go both together, because Dame Bess would come and would not know where to find them. The problem seemed insoluble. ‘And there will be no time if we wait, for now there’s but time to be back for dinner.’ Dame Eleanor looked towards Framlington Edge and wrung her hands together; no help was visible in that direction; she looked back over the bridge towards Grinton and her face brightened. She pushed July gently aside and, moving a few paces, held out her arms wide as if to stop a runaway horse.

  Master Aske, who was strolling across the bridge idly twirling in his fingers a young foxglove spike, stopped, pulled off his cap and wished her, ‘Good-day, cousin. What’s your will?’

  She explained the dilemma to him, holding him firmly by the wrist, and talking a great deal and fast, with soft mumbling motions of her lips rather like a rabbit. He listened gravely but once or twice his eye caught July’s and she could have sworn that there was a laugh in it.

  ‘So, cousin,’ the old lady concluded, ‘if you should stay here with this young gentlewoman till I return, all will be well.’

  He said he would, and nodded so that she should get his meaning.

  ‘You will not leave her?’

  He said he would not, and shook his head.

  ‘You will stay here till I come back? You understand?’

  He said he understood, and she went off, in a great hurry, but turned and came again to say that he need not stay if Dame Bess returned. ‘But do not leave the young gentlewoman alone.’

  When she had gone right away he turned his eye on July, and the laughter in it was plain to see.

  ‘If I mistake, correct me. But I think I am to stay with you,’ said he.

  There were quite a number of people passing one way and another over the bridge, and now a train of pack-horses came along, their bells jangling. Master Aske led July to one of the angles over the buttresses of the bridge. He leaned his elbows on the parapet and looked down at the river. She looked at him.

  He talked, lightly, of this and that. He was staying up at Marrick Manor. He had lost a hawk the other day in the woods. Fenland such as he knew at home he liked better for hawking than these thick woods. By and by he plucked one little glove finger from the foxglove spike and stuck it onto his forefinger.

  ‘That,’ he said, poking it up to show her, ‘was what we did when we were little brats.’

  He was surprised when her hand came down and snatched it off.

  ‘There is poison in it,’ she cried. ‘It will do you a mischief.’ He saw that her eyes were very round and serious, and he laughed.

  ‘That’s fiddlesticks. I’ve done it a thousand times.’

  She faltered, ‘There is poison in it. Anyone will tell you,’ and she slipped it on her own finger.

  ‘Silly little wench,’ he said, but kindly. ‘You see, you don’t believe it yourself.’

  Yet she did at least half believe it, and was afraid in a kind of misty way, but much more glad to be sharing the danger with him.

  He was silent for a little while, and again July watched him. Now that he was neither laughing nor talking his mouth was shut very tight and hard, and his heavy brows were drawn into a straight frown. She cried suddenly, feeling as if the shadow of a cloud had fallen on her face, chilling it, ‘Oh, Sir! What’s amiss?’

  He started round, frowning now at her – a thin girl at her most awkward raw stage, and looking younger than her fifteen years.

  She said, with her eyes on his, ‘I would do anything for you, Master Aske.’

  He flushed at that, though she did not. ‘What a child!’ he thought, and felt suddenly warm towards her, forgetting for a moment that she was Margaret Cheyne’s sister.

  ‘That’s a large offer,’ he said lightly, but yet he was moved, though he did not come near to guessing how amply true her words were.

  She repeated, ‘What is amiss?’ and the frown returned to his face as he looked up the Dale to where the great hump of Calva drowsed in the heat.

  She thought that he was not going to answer, and she had no other words to move him, but suddenly he began to speak. It was about Statutes, Laws, Parliament, Thomas Cromwell, the Bishops, the King. In all this she did not follow him well, but when he spoke of headings and hangings, and, driving the words through his teeth, of butchering deeds that he had himself seen done, then she understood only too well and felt her face and her very heart grow cold from fear, even when he broke off short and muttered, ‘No need for you to know these things.’ But it was as if she had always known them.

  After a while he turned to her again with a sharp, bitter look.

  ‘This is treason now, by these new laws, only to speak as I have done to you.’

  ‘You will not speak so to others,’ she urged him, and he shook his head and turned away. To Will Wall he had spoken, because Will would betray him as soon as his own hand, and now he was speaking to this child and it did not occur to him to wonder why.

  ‘So,’ he said bitterly, and shrugged, ‘we have now taken that oath.’

  She said, eagerly, ‘Why! Yes!’ being thankful to find him disposed to talk of such a harmless, unbloodied topic as an oath. ‘We took it in the Chapter House, each one of us. The Prioress said we should, or the House would suffer.’

  ‘That was how we all took it. Priests and Monks so that the Church should not suffer, and I—’

  ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Oh! your hand!’

  He looked down at it. His knuckles were bleeding where he had struck his fist against the coping of the bridge. He put it to his mouth and then lowered it to tell her, ‘It’s nothing,’ and whipped it behind his back as he saw Dame Eleanor and Dame Bess bearing down on them, and the two Priory servants carrying baskets and bundles.

  That afternoon when the Novice Mistress set the girls their task of reading, July asked that she might read in the book called The Revelation of Divine Love, and when told she might, fetched it, and settled herself in very studious solitude apart from the others.

  She had feared that the pages for her reading might be prescribed, but no, she was free to choose, and it did not take her long to find the place that she wanted, and to slip into it, unnoticed of any, the foxglove cup which she had taken from Master Aske’s finger.

  When she had done that she let out a soft breath of relief. This doing of hers was a spell or an invocation – she didn’t know which. But as the poisonous foxglove had no power to harm him, ‘so,’ she thought, ‘if I lay it on that page, among those very words, and it stays safe there, he shall be safe.’ Not even to herself would she own what it was against which she wished to assure him, but seeing that he was dearest, she must fear for him always the worst.

  To comfort and give herself confidence she read over many times that afternoon the words in which the charm consisted, turning back again and again to where the foxglove cup, limp now and flat, lay pressed between two pages.

  ‘See I am God,’ the book said—

  See I am in all things. See I do all things. See I never left my hands of my works ne never shall without end: see I lead all things to the end that I ordain it to, fro without beginning, by the same might, wisdom, and love, that I made it with. How should anything be amiss?

  October 1

  ‘Get me out the King’s letter. There is the key.’

  The Archbishop dropped the key of the painted coffer on the table and went away to the window. There was little there to be seen but rain driving before the wind, the tossing branches of the trees and leaves that streamed away among the rain.

  The little wainscoted room, with its books, and viol on one table and recorder on the livery cupboard, and the brightly burning fire, was much pleasanter, but it was unwillingly that Dr. Cranmer moved back to the table where his secretary had laid out the King’s letter. It was dated
just a fortnight ago, and this was not the first time that the Archbishop’s secretary had taken it out of the coffer, and afterwards laid it there again, with its command not yet fulfilled.

  The Archbishop stooped over it, as though he must read it through in order to master it; his secretary picked up a quill and tried the nib on his nail. He kept as much of his attention on that as was necessary not to seem to watch his master, but enough of it was free to make him raise his head as the Archbishop lifted his eyes from the letter.

  ‘If,’ said the Archbishop, ‘I should put it to His Grace once more how the Scripture may be so interpreted, and indeed I think truly so interpreted, indeed I do—’ He lost himself and began again. ‘If I put it to him and show him in Scripture how the Bishop’s jurisdiction is by the law of God—’

  He waited, but the secretary seemed now to be completely absorbed in testing the quill.

  ‘You think I should not?’ The secretary almost imperceptibly shook his head.

  ‘There are,’ the Archbishop admitted, ‘other ways of interpreting the same Scripture.’ He sighed. ‘And if our jurisdiction come neither from Scripture, nor from the Bishop of Rome, as none holds now, then is Master Cromwell true to his logic when he argueth that it must come from the King, and so by the King may be intermitted.’

  He drew a quick breath as though he had reached a decision, and said, ‘Write – “To the Bishop of Winchester”.’

  But after that he got no further. He stood up and began to roam round the room.

  ‘It is strange,’ he said, speaking to the secretary, but looking into the fire. ‘It is strange and new that the Bishop’s visitation of their own dioceses should be inhibited, and Master Cromwell visit here and there throughout my province. It is very strange – I did not think—’ He coughed.

  ‘What other letters are there?’ he asked.

  The secretary said letters from Lord Lisle and others about the weirs in Hampshire.

  ‘A troublesome business,’ says the Archbishop. ‘Read me the letters.’

  When the letters about the weirs had been answered it was time for the Archbishop to go to dinner. The secretary locked up the King’s letter in the painted coffer and gave the key to his master. ‘To-morrow,’ said the Archbishop, ‘I shall write to the Bishops what is the King’s command.’

  October 5

  The Nuns’ Priest had been back at the Priory for a week. He had told the Prioress, in private, that his conscience was quieted, and he rattled past the omitted words in the Office so confidently that it was plain he had well rehearsed the new Office. Rarely, before he went away, had he had anything to do with Gib Dawe, but to-day, meeting him by the churchyard gate, he brought Gib up to his snug room, where a fire burnt pleasantly and there was a jug of French wine in the cupboard.

  The Nuns’ Priest told him to sit down, and poured out some of the wine for each, and then began to talk about the woman Malle and her visions. He said that he wanted to know Sir Gilbert’s opinion, and in the caressing way he had he patted Gib’s bony forearm with his plump, smooth hand; but it seemed rather that he wished to tell Gib that he himself thought visions to be awkward, chancy things to deal with. ‘Marry,’ said he, ‘though she be no Nun of Kent, seeing visions of Kings and Queens to bring her to the gallows, still less would I be as those unhappy priests who were hanged together with the Nun,’ and his hand went down to his silver-plated belt and caressed the roundness under it, as if he reassured his belly against the executioner’s knife and scrabbling hand. Indeed it seemed that his thoughts had gone that way, for he shuddered, and for a minute his face became quite pinched and pale.

  ‘So,’ said he, ‘I would have naught to do with these things, but I think to warn the Lady that there is much talk of them, which, I believe, she doth not hear.

  ‘And also,’ said the Nuns’ Priest, reaching out for his wine, ‘what has this poor soul seen and heard but common folk and common things – neither saints nor angels, nor Our Lady and Her Son throned in bliss, but a young poor man, and simple shepherds? And not in Church neither, but openly in the Dale. Mass! It’s not seemly.’

  He tipped up his can and drank, and Gib watched his throat working as the wine ran down; it was a thick throat and above it a plump, close-shaven jowl. Gib got up abruptly.

  ‘Seemly?’ said he, very harsh. ‘And what were those holy shepherds but plain, poor, homespun men such as our shepherds to-day? And what was the Lord Himself but a carpenter’s son that swinked and sweated over a bench?’ He stopped, and even in his anger must laugh at the way the other’s jaw had dropped at his fierceness.

  ‘So you believe,’ said the little fat Priest, ‘that these be true visions?’

  Gib began to say that he did, but that was purely out of contrariness; it was long since he had put any faith in Malle’s visions, and honesty pulled him up short, so that he had nothing better to say than ‘Tsha!’ He left the Nuns’ Priest by the fire with the wine at his elbow, and a dish of filberts, and a book of tales beside him on the bench, and went out into the wind, and into a cold driving rain that had begun to fall.

  At the parsonage house the chimney was smoking and the pottage was burnt. It was a very scurvy dinner. Then Wat managed to trip and spill some of his pottage over Gib’s shoe. Gib got up and beat him, and throwing him into the shed beyond the dairy, shot the bolt on him. But when he came back to the house place he could still hear Wat’s whimpering, and after a bit he took his own bowl and tipped what was in it onto the fire, making a worse foul stink than ever.

  After that he sat with his arms tight about his knees, staring before him at the bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters, a long string of onions, and the ox harness for the plough.

  He wished he could have denounced the Nuns’ Priest for unbelief, but himself he could not believe the visions, though not for the same reason. That talk of the young men going up to Keld, which had seemed to mean freedom, he had long put away from him. And surely, if God showed visions to any these days, it would be of threatenings of wrath and judgement. An angel with a burning sword, devils dragging rich men to hell – these he could have readily believed. But Malle, so far as he could hear, had talked only of bliss and of peace. Wat’s whimpering went on and Gib shifted his shoulders as if something galled him. To be rid of it he went and fetched the book of the Scriptures and, opening at the Book of the Revelation, read of the casting down of Babylon. As a background to the mighty winds and trumpets of that Book his mother breathed hard at the pain that gnawed her belly, and sometimes groaned; occasionally Wat cried out, but at last he seemed to fall asleep.

  October 8

  The two Ambassadors of His Most Christian Majesty, Francis I of France, to the King of England, sat together at a table on which their wine stood among a litter of paper, pens and ink. Monseigneur Antoine de Castelnau, Bishop of Tarbes, had been writing with his own hand instructions for his fellow, the Bailly of Troyes, who to-morrow would return to France to report to their master. The instructions lay now spread out before them, sprinkled over with fine powder of cuttle-fish shell, ground small, to dry the ink. As they waited, the Bishop stretched out a hand for his wine; it was in a goblet of Venice glass, and it was wine of his own country; he held it towards the candle flames till the edges grew translucent with a glorious colour. Then he lifted it to his mouth, breathed in the faint, vinous aroma, and at last drank.

  ‘Hah!’ said he pensively, ‘I know the vineyard where those grapes grew,’ and his mind saw it, and the bleached rocks of the higher hills above, while his eyes rested on the lined and bearded face of the Bailly. ‘And you will be home in time for the vintage.’ He sighed, and began to talk about a new vineyard he had planted, and a garden at a small house in the hills which was very dear to him. Outside a wild wind caught the notes of the chimes from a nearby church, swinging them close and away as if they had been a shaken banner of sound. After the chimes ceased there came the sharp rattle of heavy rain upon the window, and smoke swirled out from the hear
th.

  The Bishop recalled himself from his thoughts of France, and none too soon, for the Bailly, an impatient man, was drumming his fingers on the table edge. The Bishop tipped the powder back from the paper into the box, blew the last grains from the page, and gathered the other sheets together.

  ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘our master can do what he will with this King, so great is King Harry’s need of a friend, and so many his enemies.’

  The Bailly nodded shortly. All this was in the written instructions, but he knew the Bishop too well to think that he would get off without a repetition of it, unless he avoided that by taking his leave; but the Bishop’s wine was good and plenty, and while this storm of rain lasted he would remain; better the Bishop’s prosings than to be abroad, exposed to this sacred climate of England.

  ‘If any Prince, the Emperor or another—’

  ‘What other?’ the Bailly cried scornfully.

  ‘If there were any other. If any Prince were to take up the quarrel of the Queen Katherine and her daughter, the people love them so well they would rise.’

  ‘Hm!’ said the Bailly.

  ‘Such is the opinion of noblemen, and commons; yea, and I have heard it spoken even by the King his servants. You yourself—’

  ‘They talk,’ said the Bailly.

  ‘There’s too much talk to take lightly. See how openly the poor folk cry out against this Queen Anne, calling her—’ He hesitated, and the Bailly with his curt laugh supplied a string of names which the poor folk, and others not so poor, called Queen Anne.

  The Bishop held up his hand. ‘There is also the subversion of religion. Also this terrible weather, whereby the harvest’s half destroyed.’

  ‘Mordieu!’ said the Bailly. ‘You do not need to tell me about the weather.’

  ‘And they fear also an interruption of trade with the Emperor’s countries. That, with the scarcity of bread, would be a shrewd blow, especially if our master were to refuse corn. And if the Emperor were to move war—’