‘Yet no sure news.’
‘Enough. And so ill news that I am sick to hear it.’
‘Then the better to wait.’
Aske caught at his temper.
‘If,’ he said slowly, ‘if they have yielded already in Lincolnshire there is nothing we should wait for. If they have not yielded, and we hold Pomfret, they may take courage from it.’
‘Then,’ Mr. Saltmarsh dropped the words one by one, provocatively, ‘then, if Pomfret must be taken, a’ God’s Name go and take it.’
‘A’ God’s Name I’ll go if I go alone,’ Aske cried, in such a voice and with such a blaze of anger in his eye that till he slammed the door on them not one of those left behind spoke or moved.
But then Lord Latimer drew towards Lord Scrope, and they put their heads close. Master Collins came up beside Lord Lumley; he, pleasant good man, was distressed to think of the good dinner so interrupted and left spoiling, for already two or three of the Howdenshire Captains had gone hurrying after paptain Aske.
Metham and Saltmarsh had come together at the open window. Metham leaned out; he laughed, then pointed his finger:
‘There he goes. And in what a fume!’
Saltmarsh leaned out too, and together they watched Aske, a little man, very angry, and in a great hurry; they saw him snatch the quill from behind his ear, stare at it as if it were strange to him, and throw it down.
‘Let him go,’ Saltmarsh said; he was still much huffed, and red about the ears. ‘He is,’ said he, ‘of too rude and tyrannical a humour to be borne.’
*
Aske came to his lodging still angry, and still very much in a hurry. As he ran up the stairs he was calling for the men to turn out, and for ‘Ned! Ned!’ to come and arm him; and he was thinking it was well Ned should do it, because he was a quick handy lad, and always cheerful; but if Will Wall had been on his feet, instead of ill in bed, Ned would have been driven off for Will to fumble and bungle, and, besides that, to start a bickering with his master. ‘For he’s a difficult fellow these days,’ thought Aske, ‘or else I am,’ as he flung open the door of his chamber.
Will stood up from the bed. His face was like paper, and he looked about as sturdy as a rag in the wind.
‘What! Are you here?’ Aske cried, and added hastily, ‘I’m glad of it. You’re better?’ But already he had seen Will’s face fall and his mouth shake. Then he saw beside Will’s feet, neatly laid out in order, all the pieces of Sir Robert Aske’s armour, which he had brought from Aughton. They were ready for him to put on, and Will, stooping slowly, was lifting the padded coat that went on first. Aske ripped open the buttons of his doublet, and threw it and his coat together on the bed. He must even suffer Will; he could do no other. When Ned put his bright, smiling face round the door Aske bade him to see to the horses.
So while Will armed him he stood very still, helping when he might, as unobtrusively as possible. But often Will would push his hands away, and then fiddle over a catch or a buckle that might have been righted in an instant. One thing there was to the good; he did not talk; but that, Aske supposed, was because he needed all his strength; sometimes when Will’s hands came down on his shoulders he thought it was only thus that the man managed to keep himself upright.
When at last it was done, and Will stooped over the buckle of the sword belt, Aske struck him lightly on the shoulder in place of farewell, and thanks, and all that was not to be said.
‘And now off you pack to bed again, and lie snug till I come back from Pomfret,’ he told him cheerfully.
But Will, straightening himself, showed a face tragical and quivering.
‘And,’ said he, ‘if I was not the sot that I am, I’d be beside you, to die there. For here you go to the assault of a strong castle, and there over the water of Humber – they have – they have—’
Aske turned his eye away from Will’s face. He could hear the horses stamp on the cobbles of the yard; it must be much longer than the half-hour he had given the others to be ready at Micklegate Bar.
‘Have they surrendered then, in Lincolnshire?’
‘You know it?’ Will cried. ‘They told you as you came in.’
‘It was easy to guess.’ Aske gave a little laugh, and then was silent for a moment. ‘Well, I must not fail of Pomfret, let Lord Darcy shut his gates or no.’
He touched Will on the shoulder again, but absently as if already his mind was on the road, and went out. Will blundered back to the bed, flopped down there, and cried shamelessly for a while. But in the end he took comfort, seeing, in his mind, Master Robin stand, and hearing him laugh. Will remembered the hero called Samson, who had plucked up posts, gates, bars and all from some Jewish city, and carried them away on his shoulders. Master Robin looked, Will thought, like as if he could carry away the world on his shoulders, if he should resolve to carry it.
There were about three hundred men waiting at the Bar, Howdenshire men mostly, with some from Beverley. It was few enough; but Aske hid his chagrin; and anyway, speed was more than force in this, he told himself. Besides, though few, they were of the best sort of yeomen, and there were Aughton fellows grinning at him in the front ranks, and Will Monkton with them.
They made such good speed that in order not to reach Pomfret in daylight, and so betray their little strength, they must lie up somewhere for a while. So for an hour of twilight they waited in the cold whispering shadows of a little wood just across the Aire.
Aske and Monkton tramped up and down together to keep warm, while the wind flapped the hem of their cloaks against their steel back and breast pieces with a hollow sound. Monkton glanced aside more than once at Aske, but he plodded in silence, and with a grim face. At last Monkton spoke:
‘Robin!’
‘Anon?’
‘You did not well to rate Metham and Saltmarsh with so rough a tongue.’
‘Did I not? Oh? I did not well?’
‘Now, Robin,’ Monkton began, but Aske bore him down.
‘No, I’ll not hold my tongue, neither for you nor no man. Why would you all have me whisper, cog, speak smooth?’
Certainly he was not whispering. The men stared at them, and Monkton wished with fervour that Robin’s voice were less pow-erful, or his patience longer. ‘Robin,’ he thought, ‘used to be a good-humoured fellow,’ but not seldom in these days he had felt that he did not know this brother-in-law of his, whom, for so many years, he would have said he knew.
He declared, with more than his usual doggedness, that such language as Aske held towards the others might estrange them from the commons’ cause.
That brought Aske’s anger to blow against himself. What! did he think there were any such in the host? ‘No, by God’s Passion! for I think there are none with us but are willing to go forward in their hearts,’ and Monkton could see, even in the dusk, how his face had turned darkly red. ‘There are none,’ said he again, as if by vehemence he could make it be so.
Yet after he seemed to wait, as if he knew that that was not all.
‘And listen,’ said Monkton, ‘to what I heard. For those two were at the window when you were gone, but I stood below in the doorway. Saltmarsh said you should break your teeth against the walls of Pomfret. And Metham said – let you go and have your will, so as, if our pilgrimage miscarried, you should be clearly seen to be ringleader, and so come under the King’s vengeance in especial.’
Aske flung away, laughing loudly. ‘Shall I listen or care to hear such talk as this?’
He stood apart, biting at his knuckles. The long, impatient sighing of the wind went through the wood, and there were incessant small noises like water trickling, but it was dry leaves that fell spindling past branches, and past other dry leaves not yet fallen.
He came back to Monkton. ‘It’ll be full dark by we make Pomfret now,’ said he, and shouted to the men to make ready. He became suddenly cheerful, and Monkton could not see that his words had been at all heeded. Yet what he had said was there in Aske’s mind, unregarded as a thorn
in a man’s thumb, which he will feel only when there is pressure put on it.
October 19
Aske, having waited at the gate of Pomfret Castle in a heavy cold rain till the hostage for him (it was George Darcy’s eldest son) was brought out, now had to wait again in the Great Hall, while the gentleman went up to announce him to Lord Darcy and the great men above. There were a few young gentlemen, none of whom he knew, standing at the hearth; they looked over their shoulders, drew themselves closer together, and went on with their guarded talking. The servants who were clearing away the tables after dinner had, he could see, one eye on the gentlemen and one eye on him. But he would not look at them; he guessed that if he gave them half a chance they would be all about him, and shouting for the commons. Even as it was, when the gentleman who brought him in came back to bid him in to my Lord, one of the women at the screens cried out shrilly, ‘God save you, Sir, in your pilgrimage!’ Aske turned and raised his hand, but he neither smiled nor spoke, and went on upstairs.
In the Great Chamber there were many lights, which, after the dark afternoon outside, dazzled his eye. For a minute he could see only lights – firelight, candlelight, torchlight – and among these the forms and faces of many men, but none of them clearly. Then, as his vision steadied he could see my Lord Darcy on a high-backed settle beside the hearth, and beside him, haughty and beautiful in his violet velvet, the Archbishop. Sir Robert Constable sat on my Lord’s other hand upon a stool; his sword trailed out behind him like a long, black, silver-tipped tail. On the hither side of the Archbishop was another priest with a clever, ugly, inscrutable frog’s face. Beyond, and behind these, there were faces he half knew or did not know at all. He bowed to them and some of them did the same to him, but all watched him, in silence, waiting to see what he would do.
He went, his wet cloak dripping, to the hearth, set his foot on the edge of it and stretched out his hands to the warmth, not looking at any but keeping his eye on the flames, because he was thinking of what he should say, when he must speak. It mattered very much, he considered, what he should say.
Lord Darcy bade someone, ‘Take his cloak,’ and a gentleman came near, to whom he slung off the heavy wet fustian, and who then went away out of the room with it.
‘What is that you carry?’ Darcy asked.
‘What? This?’ Aske touched the white rod which he had tucked under his arm, then told them, what my Lord already knew, that it was the rod of his Captainship of the commons.
‘And you carry it here – within the King’s castle?’
‘It was given me,’ Aske said, his eye still on the fire, and his thoughts on the words he should speak, ‘so I carry it.’
Constable muttered under his breath that ‘this was the same Robin Aske as ever!’ He glanced at Darcy, but could make nothing of his face, except that he was watching Aske closely. The Archbishop ceaselessly twirled a ring upon his finger without raising his eyes.
In a moment Aske said:
‘My Lord, shall I speak?’
Darcy bowed his head in a very stately fashion.
‘Speak freely!’
‘Freely?’ said Aske, but half to himself, as if he were still within his thoughts. ‘Surely I shall speak freely.’ But still for a little longer he was silent, and to more than one of them as they sat watching him it seemed that he gathered up some strength that was in him, before he lifted his head and spoke.
When he had done he looked round about at them, and then only at my Lord. ‘And now,’ said he, ‘it is for you to answer me.’
Lord Darcy said that he must take counsel, so Aske was led away into the Privy Chamber beyond. When he had gone each man waited for his neighbour to speak.
‘Well,’ said my Lord to the Archbishop, who had flushed to his silver hair. ‘It was to you he spoke first. Let us first have your counsel then.’
‘Fie!’ cried the Archbishop, ‘that such a man should so rebuke the Lords Spiritual who have the cure of souls of all lay persons, saying we have failed of our duty in that we have not been plain with the King’s Highness—’ He stopped there, because Lord Darcy laughed shortly, remarking that, well, surely this man Aske had been plain.
‘Plain!’ the Archbishop repeated, heightening the word by his tone of outrage. ‘But for us – for me – I vow before God I would have stood against the King’s Grace’s will in – er – certain things – to the death, if I could have prevailed. But it would have served nothing. To have resisted would have been death, and,’ he added hastily, ‘death profitless,’ and then went on to say that perhaps on the other hand this man Aske spoke not much amiss with regard to the temporal Lords, who should have warned the King.
‘Enough!’ Darcy interrupted him, and turned to Sir Robert Constable because he felt him fidgeting alongside.
‘And you?’ he asked sharply.
Sir Robert gave up fretting with his feet among the rushes; he planted them squarely, and tugged his sword round so that it was near to his hand.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that he speaks as an honest man.’
George Darcy sprang up with such amazement, incredulity and disgust written upon his face that his father laughed aloud. But my Lord said, before George could speak, ‘Come now, here’s little to the purpose. You all heard him say that he and his would assault to-night. How shall we answer him?’
‘But,’ cried the Archbishop, ‘he cannot so soon. And my Lord of Shrewsbury will be here—’
He looked round, much less confident than his words, and caught Constable’s eye, who growled that to his knowledge Master Aske was a man who acted with speed.
‘By the Rood!’ Sir George Darcy said with bitter disdain. ‘Let the commons assault! What then? Here’s the King’s strong castle to be held.’
‘Mother of God!’ cried Darcy, ‘to be held by whom, son George, and held by what? Here are we few, two of us spiritual men, and there are a parcel of gentlemen of ours that will fight. And what of the rest?’ He looked all about and no one answered. They had heard enough of the muttering that went on in corners, and seen the unwilling service that was done by servants and soldiers alike. ‘And,’ my Lord concluded, ‘with what shall we hold Pomfret? Marry, with quarter-staves and fleshing knives, for of munitions of war there be none.’
‘Yet,’ the Archbishop protested, obstinately, but with a quaver in his voice, ‘so great a castle – do we but shut the gates—’
‘Mother of God!’ Darcy broke in. ‘Can you no better counsel than that?’ and there was a silence broken by Constable who asked ‘Shall you then surrender the castle, and, as he saith, take their oath?’ Darcy gave him an angry look and answered that if the castle had been well furnished ‘nor he nor any should have had neither the one nor the other but to his pain.’ Then he said: ‘Well, here’s my counsel. Call him in and say we must have till Saturday eve. If he will tarry till Saturday maybe he’ll tarry till Monday, and by Monday, who knows—?’
So Aske was fetched in again, and my Lord said, speaking haughtily and roughly:
‘Well, here’s your answer. I neither can nor will give up the King’s castle.’
‘Nor join us,’ said Aske slowly, ‘in our Pilgrimage?’
‘That’s a fine new name for an unlawful scurry against the King’s Grace and the peace of the realm.’
It came to Aske then, like a great blow, that he had failed. He had spoken as well as he knew, plainly and truly, and they looked at him still with unbending, wooden hostility.
It was more difficult now to meet their eyes, knowing that he had failed, but he made himself do it lest there should be one among them who would be of the commons’ fellowship; he found himself looking first, and also last, at Sir Robert Constable, but he would not raise his head, and Aske thought – ‘Why should I think it? Always he would be set against me.’
He said: ‘Then we shall assault you, by every means whenever we will. You cannot hold the castle. Not one of your servants, nor of the soldiers neither, but is on our side.’ Then he s
truck his hands together, being much moved by failure and a sort of bewilderment it had brought him into, that they should not understand, or should not believe what was so plain to him.
‘Yet,’ he said, ‘I had looked for more than to have Pomfret in our hand. I thought to have had you with me in our high cause; some of you at least. You, my Lord,’ he looked at the Archbishop, ‘you in especial.’
The Archbishop caught the changed tone of his voice and grew haughty.
‘And what would you have had of me?’
When Aske said, ‘To have your counsel, and that you should be mediator for us with the King,’ the Archbishop took him up.
‘Then it were not well I should be joined with you, for a mediator should be neither of the one party nor of t’other.’
Aske looked at him, saying nothing, and he went on, with an offer to come on a safe conduct and declare his mind to the commons, as to the righteousness of their cause.
Still Aske was silent, and the Archbishop, growing bolder, said, with the judicial air of one teaching logic in the schools, that, as for giving counsel, first it must be considered whether their enterprise were lawful, ‘for—’ said he, with a noble and lofty look, ‘you may have my body by constraint, yet never not my heart in the cause unless—’
‘No, my Lord,’ Aske interrupted him, speaking softly, ‘I shall not give you safe conduct to come out to speak to the commons.’ Then he cried, in a voice that startled them all, ‘Oh! you Churchmen, Archbishops and bishops, and all the sort of you, will you never deal plainly with a man? Did you stay to speak with the commons when they came to you at Cawood? By God’s Wounds! I have heard how you fled away. And you did well, for there are men among them would be without mercy, should you fall into their hands. “Safe conduct?” God’s Bones! That you may so snarl up a plain thread that none can disentangle it. For you Archbishops and bishops are able to find wherewith to justify yourselves that ye let not out the squeak of a mouse against the King’s doings. But we that have taken arms can see—’ He stamped his foot, and then, ashamed to have let himself be so mastered by anger, turned back to my Lord. ‘So there’s no more to be said.’
The Man On a Donkey Page 61
