The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘He said,’ Constable broke in, ‘that we meant no harm to the King’s person, but to see reformation.’

  ‘So say all rebels,’ the Archbishop answered him fretfully.

  ‘And so say I,’ Constable affirmed stoutly.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, ‘since we were willing to take him for Captain, we must e’en abide by it.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘We cannot say we knew not what manner of man he was.’

  The Archbishop thought that he was a man of an ungentle and rude port, and said so. He also said that in his mind it was great pity that when Master Aske would have laid down the white rod and the Head Captainship my Lord would not take it up.

  Darcy interrupted. ‘You heard what I said. There are other Lords in this business now. They would grudge were one of their own fellows set over them. Besides,’ he smiled into the Archbishop’s face, ‘how if I, no more than you, most Reverend Father, wish not to appear to the King’s Grace to be the foremost in this Pilgrimage.’

  The Archbishop got up rather hurriedly, and went out, saying something to the effect that he was the King’s most loyal subject, and so it should appear.

  ‘And sworn to this Pilgrimage,’ my Lord threw after him; but the Archbishop shut the door on that and did not answer.

  Darcy looked at Constable, smiling, with dancing lights in his eyes that gave him the look of a lad in mischief. But Constable was jagging at the tongue of his belt and scowling into the fire.

  ‘Tom,’ said he with a jerk, ‘is that the true reason why you refused to be Great Captain?’

  ‘Must I tell the truth to the Archbishop? It were a waste of good coin.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t the truth?’ Constable met Darcy’s smile with an angry, obstinate look.

  ‘Well, would you have me like Master Aske, to dash my name on to paper at the foot of a list of treasons?’

  Constable muttered, ‘He should not ha’ done it. Why did he do it?’

  ‘Because he’s a man that drives his furrow as straight as a stone falls.’

  Constable looked up sharply. ‘You think that of him?’ He considered it a moment and then said that ‘Mass, it was even so. But yet,’ he said, ‘I had supposed you should find him too proud and unreverent.’

  Darcy reached out his staff, and lifted back to the fire a log that had rolled off.

  ‘The salmon, Robert,’ he said, ‘is a great fish, strong and courageous, so that it pleases a man well to take him.’

  ‘What’s this talk of salmon?’ asked Constable crossly, and added, not without malice, that if one of those two, my Lord or the Great Captain, were a salmon, it was not the Great Captain that was taken with a hook in his jaw.

  Darcy laughed at him. But then he said, not laughing, ‘The salmon is Master Aske. My thought was that a man might be as glad to have him for a friend as to take the biggest salmon of them all.’

  *

  That same afternoon those in the castle heard the sound of cheering run like a March dust storm through the streets of Pomfret. When some ran up to the top of the keep to look, they saw the Percy crimson and black filling the streets among the cold broken gleams of pikes and halberts. They could see now the silver crescent of the Percys’ on the banner, and the man who rode beside, in half-armour, with a red cap and red feathers, a long, leggy man on a tall bay gelding.

  ‘That’s Sir Thomas Percy,’ they cried on the top of the keep, and cheered him so that he looked up and waved his hand. For all Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram Percy had been disinherited by their brother, poor, sick Earl Henry, no one in the North but took them for the true Percy heirs, for what the Earl had done was, they were confident, only by the contrivance of that minion Reynold Carnaby with Thomas Cromwell himself.

  Thomas Percy came late into the Great Chamber, so that it was already full of men standing about while the boys and servants went round with water and towels for washing of hands. Percy stood for a moment with his back to the door, and craned his neck to see over the heads of the rest, which he was able to do because of his length. Then he elbowed his way through the crowd till he was close behind Sir Robert Constable and Master Robert Aske, who stood in front of the fire; they had been all afternoon on St. Thomas’s Hill together, outside the town, taking musters of the commons who came in every hour, more and more. Now they talked together as they warmed themselves.

  Percy put his elbow on the Great Captain’s shoulder and leaned heavily on it. ‘Ha! my little Robin,’ he said, ‘you’ve not grown any taller for all your greatness.’

  Aske turned about. He and Sir Thomas had gone fowling together in the days when Aske was a lad in Earl Henry the Magnificent’s Household; they had learnt their Latin and lute-playing together, and known the sting of the same birch.

  ‘No,’ said Aske, ‘but you’ve sprouted feathers,’ and he put up a hand and flipped the end of the crimson feathers in Sir Thomas’s cap, at which Sir Thomas laughed his wild shouting laugh, showing all his fine teeth.

  ‘Behold me,’ he turned himself about, ‘and admire, for it has not cost me a penny, coat, doublet, feathers and all. But Master Collins the Treasurer has gone surety for it.’

  ‘Mind you pay him then.’

  ‘Or will you hang me?’ Percy asked, lightly but dangerously.

  ‘I’ll have no spoil taken.’

  Percy eyed the Grand Captain for a moment, then laughed again, and thrust his arm through his, swinging him round towards the high table.

  ‘Get me and Ingram our rights again,’ he said, ‘and we’re with you to the death.’

  October 24

  Gib chose the way down alongside the river, though it was a little longer, because he did not wish to go up through the village, where it might be remarked on that he was carrying a bundle tied on his staff. ‘Whither goest thou, priest?’ He could hear them so calling to him, and himself lying, along with the truth – ‘To Richmond. To Richmond only, with some of the wench’s homespun to sell.’

  Last night had been one of stormy wind and rain; indeed, it was while he lay awake hearing the pelting rattle of the driven showers that he had at last resolved, after the thing had lain long working in his mind like yeast, to do what this morning he was setting forth upon.

  The woods, as he went through them, seemed strange to his eyes, and being so intent upon his own resolve he thought they were so because he was leaving them for ever, since a man sees a place as it were newly when he knows he will never see it again; yet the truth was simpler than that; rain and wind had brought down most of the leaves during the night, stripping the boughs bare; brightness had fallen from the air, and now lay in drifts of copper, gold, or golden green to be trodden underfoot.

  Now the sky had cleared to blue; at the foot of the hillside the river ran, shallow and quick, winking back the sunshine into Gib’s eyes with every flicker of its ripples. He walked fast, feeling, as the distance lengthened between him and Marrick, a growing sense of freedom and relief. He saw only one man as he went and that was the Marrick swineherd, but him Gib could not avoid, for he stood under a tree watching the swine that thronged all the road, trampling and shoving, squealing and rootling in the mud for the acorns which the wind had brought down. Gib must wait till the swineherd saw him and cleared a way, with much shouting and many blows that sounded dully on the tough, dusty quarters of the swine. Then the fellow would walk along a piece with Gib, chewing a beechnut and spitting it out, and talking, with an intolerable slow pertinacity, of a diseased pig, of its long, mysterious illness, of its death.

  At last Gib shook him off and settled down to his own brisk pace again. Almost he had been driven, as he had walked beside the swineherd, to grit his teeth together to contain this impatience. Yet now, alone again, the very sharpness of his relief promised so well for the future that he was glad he had not passed the man by with a word. ‘Lord!’ he thought, and drew a deep breath, ‘in London I shall not suffer from such fellows, but there wits be keen.’

  In the street at Marske the Conyers’ pri
est hailed him, and would have had him in to breakfast. Gib refused, but since it was the last time he should have to suffer this fool also (for he conceived the Marske priest to be a garrulous and also an idolatrous fool), he consented to drink a cup of ale at the garden fence.

  So, in the pleasant sunshine, they drank a can of ale together, while the women and pretty young girls went by to the well, the pails swinging on the yokes, and now and again a long plaintive chirrup sounding from the creaking well-wheel. Now that the sun was warm a white steam went up from the thatch, and smoke went up too, trembling, hyacinth blue against the hillside, but a stain upon the brighter blue of the air.

  When the ale was finished Gib went on. As he had expected the Marske priest had talked a great deal, and, whether it were of old Perkin or of young Hodge’s little brat, or of how the King should take heed to his Kingdom – ‘but give him an apple and a pretty wench to play withal and he’ll not stir from the fireside, but leave it all to these rogues of heretics’ – whether it were of this or that it was all foolishness.

  ‘Surely,’ he found himself saying again as he climbed the hill out of Marske, ‘such shall I not need to suffer in London,’ and he kicked out fiercely at the stones of the road. Here was he – a man of learning, though that learning might, from his sojourn among want-wits, be a little rusted over – here was he, a man (as he knew) whose thought moved quicker and stronger and more vehement than other men’s slow, turbid thoughts, as Swale ran brighter than a marshland stream – here was he, lit and burning with eagerness to render to God his due service – ‘No! No!’ he cried aloud suddenly, quite scaring two horses that hung their heads over the gate of a little close. ‘No! No!’ he said to himself. It could not be that God meant him to bide in Marrick, only to drone the idolatrous Mass to a few ignorant blocks, and to harbour in his house a simpleton and a lad that was less human, he thought, than a monkey that he had once watched in the window of a great house in London, scratching and picking at itself.

  He switched his thoughts quickly from Marrick parsonage, where perhaps even now Malle was halloing to him to come in to breakfast. Instead he would chew upon one of those grudges and resentments that lay so thickly scattered on the floor of his mind. If there had been any in these barbarously ignorant Northern parts that could have recognized of what quality the man was behind the harsh and hungry looks of the Marrick parson, then, thought Gib, I might have endured to stay. But there was none that had the penetration to see it. Sir Rafe? An ignorant, careless, proud gentleman. His dame? More ignorant, and prouder than he. Trudgeover? A coarse, unlettered fellow, though eloquent, and if he were coarse and unlettered what might be said of the ‘known men’ that were in Marrick, of whom the smith was the best instructed? So, there was none. Yea, but there was one who came and went, one who knew London and London wits, one who might have recognized what manner of man was Sir Gilbert Dawe, Priest. For the rest of the way to Richmond his thoughts circled, angrily yet with a bitter satisfaction, about the oblivious, confident, victorious Master Aske. Never once would Gib let them slink back to the parsonage at Marrick.

  Richmond was full, for it was market day. He saw Sir Rafe Bulmer’s bailiff, and turned hastily down Friars’ Wynd to avoid him. Well, this way lay his road, so why linger where the wall of the Grey Friars began? He said to himself: ‘Because I’ll go the better if I break my fast here, and keep that I have in my poke for dinner. Besides, if I wait awhile there may be those going from the fair with a spare nag that I can ride. So shall I make much better speed.’

  With such good reasons he turned back into the big market place, and bought a piece of hot mutton pie, and ate it sitting on a doorstep. From here he could see, about five houses along, the round jutting window with which Will Cowper had improved the small, frowning face of old Andrew Cowper’s house. The stonework of this window was new and white; one of the glass casements stood open, so that Gib could see right through to the upper light of the window on the far side, which was filled with golden coloured glass upon which was a white lily, the whole very pretty and bright in the sunshine. A plump woman came to the open window and looked out for a moment; her sleeve that hung over the sill was turned back with sapphire velvet. Gib dropped his eyes and bit into his mutton pie. He greatly and bitterly disliked all Cowpers, and with them all those who had so much money that they could spend it upon new round windows, upon golden coloured glass, and sapphire velvet.

  But it was not this which now blackened away the sunshine, and kept his eyes upon the cobbles, where bits of straw and cabbage stalk and all manner of household rubbish lay scattered. The sight of Will Cowper’s house had brought him up with a round turn and he must perforce remember first the Prioress, and then the parsonage at Marrick. It seemed now that his mind (or else it was his conscience) had never forgotten it.

  Someone stopped in front of him; he saw a pair of boots, grey hosen, a brown coat. The Bulmers’ bailiff cried his name; he was already a little drunk or he would not have bidden Gib to an alehouse. ‘And you shall ride back after behind one of the men. If you’ve done your business.’ Gib said he had done his business, and went, and drank, silently and savagely. As the drink worked on him, and his thoughts grew nimbler, and more lightsome, he was chasing one question, yet could not resolve it. Was it God who drove him back, or the Devil who wiled him? Had he determined to go back because (God have mercy!) Malle’s angel and Wat’s angel beheld always the face of the Father in Heaven? Or had he determined to go back so that the Prioress should stand condemned, because she had thrust out the poor creature Malle, whom he had saved? He could not tell, for the two thoughts were twined in his mind like strands of a rope, and his head by now was ringing.

  It was black dark when the horses stopped and the servant said: ‘Here y’are, parson,’ and with his hand rather spilt than helped Gib down from behind him. They rode on, cackling, and then their laughter and slurred words died in the deep silence. He found the gate, and his thought was only, ‘Well, here I can lie down and sleep. Here’s home.’

  His hand, groping, touched the door, which yielded; it was neither barred nor latched. He pushed it open, and saw the little house-place by the dullest red glow of a dying fire, but after the total dark it was bright enough to his eyes.

  Wat lay sprawling just clear of the ashes; his shirt was wide open over his thin, ridged ribs. He was wriggling, wildly throwing arms and legs about, his mouth wide open, and the gurgles that with him passed for laughter came thickly from his dumb throat. Malle knelt beside him; she was laughing too, and tickling his bare skin with a peacock’s feather.

  She looked up first and saw Gib.

  ‘Jesu Mercy!’ she cried.

  Wat sprang up with one quick move, and slipped away so that he stood with his back to the wall. Neither laughed now.

  Gib said: ‘Bar the door,’ and went past them without more words, and up to bed. He pulled off his clothes in the dark, and pitched into the corner the bundle which he had carried all day. It fell with a thud, for there was in it, besides Gib’s best gown and hosen, and two shirts, his copy of the Gospels Englished.

  Well, here he was home again, shackled by conscience; he was where duty set him, but that tender loving kindness which was all God’s service – he could as well render it, as with his fingers make one of the light flashes on the ripples of the Swale.

  October 25

  July propped herself against the edge of the table in Mistress Holland’s kitchen, and nibbled at an almond wafer. She did not want the wafer, having little appetite these days. She did not want to be in the kitchen either, though it was a pleasant room into which this morning the sun came. It smelt pleasantly too of Mistress Holland’s baking, of the herbs that hung in neat bunches from the beams, and of several little birds now turning on the spit against dinner-time. It was a far pleasanter kitchen than July’s own, for which she took no care, and which therefore showed accordingly.

  Mistress Holland talked with one of her maid-servants, earnestly, as two
speak who are concerned with grave matters; their communication was of mincemeat. A big woman, twenty years and more older than July, with a plain face and contented, shrewd eyes, Mistress Holland found young Mistress Machyn rather a trying guest – ‘shy’ she tried to think, though ‘proud’ she feared shot nearer to the mark; but whether the one or the other it would do no harm to leave her for a few minutes to herself. So July sat, and nibbled the sweet crisp wafer, and felt sick, and felt the panic of waiting for disaster rise again into her throat. Since she had always known that what she waited for must happen, why must it be waited for so long? Then – ‘Jesu Mercy!’ she cried inside her mind, since she had caught herself wishing to hasten the cruelty that dogged Master Aske’s footsteps.

  Mistress Holland came and sat upon the edge of the table by her. She also began to eat a wafer, but with a hearty appetite and critical appreciation.

  ‘It was the Ladies of St. Helen’s told me how to make these,’ she said, more because she felt it to be courteous to talk to a guest than because she hoped to interest July. ‘St. Helen’s for almond wafers, St. John Baptist of Holywell for crispey. Every House of Religious, I dare say, has its own choice dish.’

  ‘It was rishaws at the House at Marrick,’ said July.

  ‘Marrick? Is that where you had your schooling?’ Mistress Holland took with both hands this first voluntary remark of her guest.

  ‘I was a novice. I should have been a nun,’ July said, looking straight in front of her at Mistress Holland’s scrubbed board, and at the cupboard where the slipware cooking bowls and crocks stood with light winking on their brown sides through the latticed doors. But she saw the Great Court at Marrick, under a hot afternoon sky, and Master Aske leaning his hand against the gate-house arch, and talking to Jankin the porter.