The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  He swung about at the hearth. ‘Have you writ that?’ Will, his pen still scurrying, nodded.

  ‘Then write this,’ Aske said, tramping off in the other direction. ‘“For I will assure you that I will have nothing of no man, but that it may be lawful and reasonable done.”’ He stopped, biting at his knuckles, said – “‘Wherefore—”’ Then, ‘No, it’s enough. Conclude – “And therefore fare you well from Selby the tenth day of November.”’

  But though he had said it was enough, when he had read through what was written he twitched the pen out of Will’s fingers, and, with one knee on the bench, began to write a postscriptum. ‘If you have the spice plate, send it me with haste.’ The pen flew over the paper. ‘It is pity apart from God’s sake to do anything for that House that so unkindly doth order me.’ Will looked up to Aske’s face with its black frown; these days, Will thought, his master was angry where he had been positive, bitter where he had been stubborn, and very seldom merry.

  Then he saw that Master Robin had stopped writing to listen. ‘Open the window, Will,’ he said – but before it was open Will had heard the sound of a horse ridden very hard. Aske ran out into the street.

  Yet, when he had stopped the messenger and almost hauled him out of the saddle, he came back in silence into the parlour with the fellow behind him, and sat down on the bench.

  ‘Well,’ he said then, ‘what’s your errand?’

  ‘My Lord Darcy says, “Come back to Templehurst. There’s a letter from Sir Robert Bowes and Sir—”’

  ‘Did he say no more?’

  ‘He told us all in the garden, “This messenger says all will be well.”’

  Aske got slowly from the bench. He turned his back on them and went down on his knees with his head between his fists against the edge of the table. Will knelt too, and the messenger, after fidgeting with his belt a moment, did the same.

  No more than two minutes after that Aske set off for Templehurst, on the horse which the messenger had ridden. He would not have Will come; he must go back to Wressel. But he laid his arm for a minute across Will’s shoulder and said, softly and quickly in his ear, ‘Oh! Will, I had forgotten that God might have mercy on us, and lay to His hand on our party.’

  Then he looked down at his knees. ‘See, I have knelt in a puddle of ale.’ He laughed, and Will heard him laughing as he went out and swung up into the saddle.

  Lord Darcy and his people were at dinner when Aske reached Templehurst. He came up the length of the Great Chamber just behind a big ham and an apple pie; he laid his hands on the shoulders of two who sat opposite my Lord. ‘Come, make room, make room,’ he bade them, and vaulted over the bench to the place between them.

  Lord Darcy said: ‘Where did they find you?’

  ‘At Selby.’

  ‘And the messenger? And your servants?’

  ‘Oh! Somewhere behind.’ Aske waved his hand vaguely. But when he had eaten a little he looked up and around from one to another, and laid down his knife.

  ‘Your messenger said, “All will be well.” Is it well? What does Bowes write?’

  ‘Well, there it is.’ Darcy threw the letter to him over the table.

  When Aske had read it he slammed it down on the table and then gave it a great blow with his fist so that the dishes jumped.

  ‘It’s a lie that I moved war newly since we were at Doncaster. You all know that I have not. I have stayed the people wherever I could. And after Pomfret, God knows, I could stay them hardly.’

  ‘Good Master Aske,’ Darcy interrupted him, ‘we shall answer these letters, but after dinner.’

  ‘I shall answer them article by article,’ said Aske, and after that sat eating without lifting his head. After such hope as he had had this was too sore a trouble for him to take it lightly.

  When dinner was over my Lord said it would be well to send out messengers to fetch some of the other Captains, because, besides Aske’s answer, this letter should receive an answer from them all. So those of the commons who had come to Templehurst to hear the news went off, as well as certain servants of my Lord. Darcy himself went into his Privy Chamber; Aske took pen and paper to the little chequer chamber where he could be undisturbed.

  He had barely finished his answer when a lad came saying that my Lord would speak with him, and so led him through the house. It was a great house, and crowded with servants, all in the green livery, besides gentlemen sitting talking, singing or diceing round the fires, for evening was closing in, and within doors it was almost dusk. Every here and there in little closets or at the wider parts of passages, there were barrels of arrows, or stacks of bow staves or of pikes. Aske thought to himself as he went after the lad, that my Lord Darcy was master of a big meiny, and well furnished; he remembered how he had, like every lawyer, condemned the bad old days when the lords had each an army of men in his own livery, to fight for one or other of the two Roses; but now it heartened him a little to see Lord Darcy’s strength.

  ‘And I need heartening,’ he thought, with an uncheerful smile, as he came to the Privy Chamber. Kit’s words at Wressel, the letter he had answered at Selby, now this lying accusation which Bowes and Rafe Ellerker had believed – all these things together had borne him down.

  He sat down by my Lord upon the settle. Darcy put a letter into his hands, and then got up, and began to move about the room behind him. Aske leaned forward holding the letter aslant to catch the light of the fire, and so read it to the end.

  He did not stir when he had read it, and he knew that his face did not alter, whatever was the alteration in his mind. When he first took the meaning of what the Duke bade Darcy do, he thought: ‘He would not do it,’ and then hearing how Darcy prowled restlessly behind him, and between him and the door, down went his confidence like a shot bird. He thought, ‘It was always what I feared,’ and he read again—

  ‘In your life I think ye never did such service that both to His Majesty shall be more acceptable taken, nor that shall more redound to your honour and profit. My lord, the bearer, your old acquaintance, can show you how like a friend I have used me to you all this time.’

  ‘Like a friend.’ And the letter was signed – ‘Your loving friend, T. Norfolk.’

  So the Duke of Norfolk, who was Darcy’s friend, expected him to do it.

  Darcy had stopped moving about and now stood still. ‘Well,’ thought Aske, ‘I must say something.’ But he was thinking that there were five gentlemen and several of Darcy’s servants in the room outside, and himself one man alone.

  He said, in a flat voice without looking up:

  ‘They want me “alive or dead, but better alive”.’ He had been about to say, ‘I’ll see it’s not alive,’ when Darcy cried—

  ‘Alive, or your head in a sack. He said that to me. God’s Bones! but that he was mine old acquaintance, and besides came on a safe conduct—’ He broke off, and coming to the settle leaned over, and snatched the letter from Aske’s hand. ‘What I have answered to Thomas Howard,’ he said, ‘is between me and him. But there was need I should show you that letter. God’s Bones!’ he cried again, and Aske heard him rap out with his staff at the frame of the bed as he went by it. Then he stooped for a long time over a fine little coffer bound with steel and with five locks of steel, till he had put away the letter and locked it safely in.

  Aske stayed where he was, his face burning, and not with the heat of the fire. He felt himself, for his suspicion, no better than a cur.

  He said the same to Sir Robert Constable that night. They were sharing a bed; Sir Robert lay already between the sheets; Aske had sent away the servant, and now he sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirt and hosen.

  ‘Did you conceive,’ cried Sir Robert, when Aske told him, ‘that Tom Darcy would act so?’

  Aske hung his head without answering.

  ‘It’s well you did not say it. He could not have forgiven you, I think.’

  Aske muttered that he thought shame ever to have – but—

  Constab
le, watching him, felt a spark of their old enmity kindle. But it was the last spark. He had never seen Aske utterly abashed before, never, in all his experience. To see it now tickled his vanity; the cause of it wakened his generosity; so the spark dwindled and was quenched.

  ‘Never,’ he said, ‘would Tom betray a man. Though I grant you I myself find him over fond of policy and subtlety sometimes. But then he hath a very busy working head. But this is a different matter.’

  ‘I did not know,’ said Aske, ‘what to think of him.’ He twitched his shirt out, and as he plucked it over his head he said: ‘I knew, and did not know, I think.’

  ‘Well, you know now.’

  ‘By God!’ Aske turned his face, ‘now I do know.’

  There was something so warm, and so moved, in his look that Constable was moved too. They faced each other for a short instant. Then Constable, drawing up his knees, drove with his feet at Aske’s backside, hoisting him off the bed.

  ‘A murrain on you!’ Aske cried, rubbing himself. He was laughing, but each of them knew that a line had been passed.

  November 14

  It was a perfect hunting morning, blue above, lightly crusted with hoar frost underfoot; the shadows of the bare trees, delicately pencilled and perfect in every branch, lay stretched across the clean ridged plough lands, as the King and his Court went by with noise of trampling hoofs, jingling of bells and the tantara of horns; above them the gulls, in from the sea, turned with a flash, then flowered into golden white, sailing.

  *

  The King was in a good humour. The Duke of Norfolk, who rode beside him on the one hand, and my Lord Privy Seal, who rode on the other, got each a teasing that the King pitched loud enough to be heard by those that came behind; so when the King laughed, these laughed too; their laughter, which Lord Privy Seal bore with apparent complacency, was to Norfolk a hair shirt on his shoulders.

  So when, within the forest, they waited for the huntsman’s horn to tell them of the game afoot, Norfolk let himself be edged to the outside of the crowd, in the midst of which the King’s green velvet cap and white feather could be seen above the rest, mounted as he was upon a tall black gelding. Norfolk did not look that way, but downwards and side-long, winning for the moment, in spite of the crowd, a fragile, narrow privacy.

  There had been murder done just here, sometime this bright morning; a scatter of feathers filled a little grassy hollow; a spot of royal sanguine, on which the dogs pored and sniffed, lay upon the dark, s0ft earth. The feathers were grey, and black and grey like mussel shells; Norfolk’s eyes being on them he saw instead, in his mind, the long low shore opposite Orford, and the heaps of mussels there. It was lonely on Orfordness, lonely and quiet unless tides and winds were angry. At Orford and thereabouts, and at Framlingham, and in all those places where Howards were lords of the soil, Thomas Howard was a man different from the Duke of Norfolk who had ridden by the King’s side, his ears burning, cackling with a sick and raging heart at the King’s baiting. He wished now that he was there and not at Court; he almost truly wished it.

  One of the huntsmen came trotting by, circling the crowd, with the dogs after him; the hoofs of his horse trampled the spilt feathers, not with the brittle cracklings of mussel shells, but in the silence of a trodden cloud. Then a dog bayed, the horns blew, and the hunt crashed away down the glade, with the slipping, flickering shadows of the bare boughs racing over them. Norfolk rode light, and rode boldly, so he was soon able to choose his place. He came to the King’s bridle hand, and clung there, not to be dislodged by any other, for the rest of the hunt.

  When he came again into the chamber he had been given at Windsor, there was Perce Creswell waiting for him beside the fire. So Norfolk sent everyone away, and then Perce drew out of his doublet the letter which Lord Darcy had written three days ago at Templehurst. The Duke took it, but before he opened it he asked:

  ‘Will he do according to my counsel?’

  Perce shook his head. ‘By no means could I prevail on him.’

  So Norfolk read the letter through, hurrying on to the part he least liked to read, and reading with a shrinking mind.

  ‘Alas, my good lord,’ it was written in Darcy’s bold, round, tumbling hand,—

  Alas that ever ye, being a man of so much honour, and great experience, should advise or choose me to be a man of any such sort or fashion, to betray or deceive any living man, French, Scot, yea or Turk. Of my faith! to get and win to me and my heirs four of the best duke’s lands in France, or to be King there, I would not do it, to no living person.

  About an hour later Perce Creswell stood before my Lord Privy Seal looking down at the table which was heaped with papers; among them was a very dainty silver-studded leash for a hound; there was a little wrought coffer too of steel work overlaying some light coloured horn; the coffer stood open, and from it trailed a pair of beads of ivory and cornelian; the room was warm and smelt heavily, though sweetly, of musk.

  ‘What my Lord Darcy wrote to my master,’ Perce said, ‘I do not know.’

  ‘No?’ Cromwell did not raise his eyes from his two plump hands, spread, starfish-wise, on the table before him. ‘But if there were words that you can remember—’

  Perce said: ‘My Lord Darcy showed himself much displeased at my master’s letter. He went about the room, halting on his staff, saying, “I cannot do it. I cannot do it, in no wise, for I have made promise to the contrary.”’

  ‘Ah!’ Cromwell snatched at a word. ‘A promise?’

  ‘So he said. And he said further – “It shall never be said that old Tom shall have one traitor’s tooth in his head. Not the King nor none other alive shall make me do an unlawful act.”’

  ‘Fie!’ said Cromwell, but softly, ‘is it an unlawful act to take or kill a rebel?’

  ‘I say what I heard,’ Perce mumbled, and Cromwell nodded for him to proceed. ‘Then he, leaning at a window and fretting at the catch thereof, said: “My coat armour was never stained with any such blot.” And he said: “My Lord’s Grace, your master, knows well enough what a nobleman’s promise is.” And again: “For he that promiseth to be true to one and deceiveth him may be called a traitor, which shall never be said of me.”’

  ‘Why,’ said Cromwell, ‘here’s a great talk of promise, and promise again.’ He looked up, so that Perce saw his bland, quiet face, with the sharp pig’s eyes. ‘And did my Lord Darcy seem to bear your master an ill will for his counsel?’

  Perce looked down at his cap. ‘He believed not that it came of my Lord’s device.’

  ‘Then of whom did he conceive that it came?’

  Perce shook his head. He wished he did not so clearly remember what my Lord had said as to that man of whose device he conceived this thing had come.

  Cromwell picked up the pair of beads, and began to run the pretty things through his fingers, but he was not praying. He smiled, thinking, ‘Surely my ears should have burned—’ Then he stopped smiling. ‘Surely, God willing,’ he thought, ‘those words shall return home to roost.’

  ‘And was that all?’ he asked.

  Perce, greatly relieved, said: ‘That was all, bating sundry great oaths.’

  November 18

  From the windows of Wressel Castle you could not see twenty yards across the flat deserted meadows, the mist lay so thick. It crept also into the house, filling the rooms with a clinging chill, for it was a fog that followed on frost. Kit Aske, waiting while the servant went up to enquire whether the Grand Captain would receive him, felt the ache of his back which came with such weather, and chewed the bitter-ness of having to wait on Robin’s convenience, and of hearing Robin called ‘the Grand Captain’.

  When they brought him upstairs to the Earl’s bed-chamber – ‘No less,’ thought Kit, ‘will content his pride’ – Robin was standing in shirt and hosen while Will Wall helped him into the velvet and steel brigandine.

  He put Will by and crossed the room to Kit, shrugging himself into the coat as he came, and laying his hands on Kit’s
shoulders, kissed him lightly and went back to the fire. Kit was nothing softened by the greeting, nor by Robin’s casual, ‘Well, Kit, you’re welcome. Now about those fellows of Skipton—’ Not even if Robin were in a hurry to be gone did that excuse his positive dictatorial brevity, the manner in which he interrupted, or contradicted, Kit; Kit did not even try to conceal his resentment; soon they were at it ding-dong, disputing whether or no, had the Grand Captain chosen to attack, he could have taken Skipton Castle.

  Yet the quarrel, which might have eased Kit’s mind, was constantly interrupted: a gentleman would knock and look in to ask a question; the clerk steadily writing at the corner of the room in a welter of papers would come forward with a pen for the Grand Captain to put his name to a letter; Robin must, for this that or t’other reason take his attention from the argument, so that he only seemed to sustain his part in it for a pastime; and that was bitter to Kit.

  So, at last, he himself broke it off, saying, ‘But whether it were Skipton or the King’s Tower at London you would say you should take it. Yet it was not to speak of this that I came. Shall I speak with you alone?’

  Aske looked at him. ‘You shall. But I may not stay long.’

  They were silent till Will, the clerk, and a boy who was trussing up such of Aske’s harness as he was not to wear, went out of the room.

  ‘Well,’ said Aske, ‘now what will you say?’

  If ever there had been any motive of brotherly kindness which had brought Kit here, by now he had forgotten it; certainly he found a sour pleasure in the news he brought.