Will Wall, who waited at the Silver Crescent with the other servants, took quite a long time to cover the short distance between the tavern and the Chapter House, being, by the time the meeting broke up, pretty sodden with drink. When he reached the Chapter House only the porter stood there, swinging his keys. Will leaned against the door jamb and looked into the high, vaulted place. He rumpled up his hair all over his head and said, in a blurred, reflective tone, ‘They’ve gone away. Where’ve they gone to?’
‘The Grand Captain’s there.’
‘By Cock! He is, is he?’ said Will. ‘And what’s he doing there? Cock’s Bones! I’ll go see.’
Aske heard him coming and raised his head. He knew from the sound of Will’s footsteps, before ever he saw him, what the fellow had been up to. And now Will was leaning over him, swaying and bleary. Aske gave him a push.
‘Take your ugly face away. You stink of ale. I shall be sick.’ He got up heavily and began to go towards the door.
‘Lord!’ cried Will, with a cackle of laughter, when he saw Aske stumble, ‘if I’m drunk, you’re drunk too.’
Aske said through his teeth, the pain being very severe, ‘I’m not. It’s the colic.’ But Will would have it that his master was drunken too, and linking arms, rambled on beside him out of the Chapter House and into the moonlit streets singing loudly. In spite of the pain Aske could not help an inward wry smile, so like to a pair of homing roysterers they must appear; the height of the dismal joke came when they two with one consent diverged in order to be vilely sick. ‘God’s Mother!’ said Aske to himself, wiping his forehead with a shaking hand and laughing feebly, ‘Like man, like master!’
They got back somehow, and after some time, and Aske called to Chris Clark to come and undress him. But Chris came up the stairs saying there was ‘a gentleman from the South’, and he looked at Aske with a look that meant more than the words. So Aske sat down on the bed and the gentleman came in, and delivered his news, which was of moment, and urgent, and very secret; and then Aske must write a letter to my Lord Darcy, and Chris Clark must mount and take it. By this time Will was snoring, and all the others in the house off to bed, so Aske lay down, dressed as he was, to sweat and shiver, to fall dizzily to sleep, and to waken hearing a voice cry in his ear, ‘Look you well upon that matter, for it is your charge. For if you do not you shall repent it.’ In his dream it had been his charge to prop up with his two hands the tower of the Church at Aughton, which was toppling over, and he had known that his hands could not avail.
November 30
Malle and Wat stood on the edge of the Swale just below the stepping-stones. Malle had the Nuns’ big mule, Black Thomas, by the bridle; the steward had lent him to Gib to take a sack of wheat and a sack of rye to the mill to be ground for maslin. Thomas stooped his grey velvet muzzle, soft as a night-moth, down to the water, and began to draw in deep gurgling draughts.
Malle let him finish and then nudged him with her elbow and he began to go over. The water was biting cold so that Malle and Wat went trampling and splashing to be quick across, but Thomas trod as daintily as though he could walk upon eggs without cracking them, tossing his ears and switching his long tail.
When they were over Malle stopped to wring out the skirts of her gown, and Wat began to dance about to warm his feet again. Black Thomas tripped the bridle out of Malle’s hand and went on along the track by himself.
Malle said, in a muffled voice, for her head was between her knees as she tried to reach the hem of her skirt behind—
‘All’s smitten through with Him. Love, frail as smoke, piercing as a needle – near – here. He that’s light has come into the clod.’
She stood up and for a minute seemed to listen to the unceasing voice of the Swale.
‘So,’ she said, ‘yon brown cows, and the grass, and us, all things that’s flesh, for that He is flesh, are brothers now to God.’
Then, ‘Look,’ she cried, ‘look! There’s Thomas rubbing off the rye sack against the tree. Run! Run!’
So they ran, while Malle cried out ‘Shoo! Tom. Shoo! Tom, wicked old whoreson!’
December 9
Robert Aske came home to Aughton in the dusk. The windows of the Hall were lit, and he could see, as he crossed the Court and the dogs met him, the arms of Aske, de la Haye, Clifford, and Bigod shining coloured upon the colourless twilight. Inside the Hall door there was a warm steamy smell, such as would always hang about the house once a month while the ale was brewing. A couple of servants were just coming out of the kitchens; they were carrying dishes of eels in broth; when they saw him they cried, ‘God’s Mother!’ and ‘It’s Master Robin!’ and ‘Hast ‘a come home, Master?’ and one of them tipped his dish so that the broth ran over, as he turned to shout over his shoulder that Master Robin was come home. So Aske must stay a while in the Hall while the servants crowded in, to tell them what had been concluded at Doncaster yesterday. When he stopped speaking there was a deal of shouting, and as he went down the passage to the Parlour, a great burst of talking and laughter, and someone singing a song of the Pilgrims that others took up.
He went into the Parlour and shut the door behind him, and the noise outside was cut off. ‘Give you good evening,’ he said, but for a moment they all sat in silence round the table, staring at him, and saying not a word.
Then Jack cried, ‘Robin!’ and started a fit of coughing that bent him double. Dame Nell turned her eyes from Jack to his brother, with a look as fiercely accusing as if Robin had been to blame for Jack’s cough as well as for everything else. Beside Nell was a young girl, very pretty, whom Aske had never seen before. She half got up, and then sat down again. Jack’s two younger boys, together on a bench, lifted their eyes from their trenchers and stared as they ate. But Julian, Jack’s youngest daughter, came rushing across the room, oversetting a cup of ale on the table; she threw her arms about Aske’s neck and kissed him.
‘Julian!’ said her mother, and the girl went back to her place, but with a smouldering, obstinate look.
Jack got up then and kissed his brother and asked, very husky, ‘Well, Robin, what news?’ but Dame Nell cried, ‘No, I’ll have no talk of these treasonous doings.’
So Robert sat down, and, since no one else spoke, asked, ‘Where’s Hob?’
It was Nell answered him. ‘Hob’s in London – safe.’
‘Good!’ said he, in that same cheerful tone that always enraged Kit, and now had the same effect on Nell, who cried, ‘And no thanks to you for that.’
But Jack said hastily, ‘This is Hob’s wife,’ and Robin looked at the pretty girl, who smiled again at him, though dubiously, and with a sidelong glance at her mother-in-law.
As they ate their supper, talking disjointedly, and in a thorny, uneasy way, Robert wondered if Will Monkton were having such a cold home-coming as this. He thought also of my Lord Darcy, of Constable, of many other men both gentle and simple with whom he had been in company so lately. His heart felt hollow as a bucket and heavy as lead.
It was early yet when he stood up, and said now he’d take his candle and go to bed.
‘Julian and the little ones,’ said Dame Nell, looking down at her sewing, ‘have the room you and Kit had. But there’s a bed in the room over the buttery, and Will Wall can carry up a pallet from the Hall.’
The room over the buttery was an upper servant’s room but Robert did not care for that. He said, ‘I’ll tell Will,’ and then Julian jumped up.
‘I’ll see to it,’ she said, and went out in front of him with such a look over her shoulder at her mother as made Robert think, ‘Here’s one that needs marrying, or there’ll be bickering in this house.’ Jack certainly ought to have beaten her before things came to such a pitch that a maid could behave so to her mother.
But as they went side by side through the Hall she tripped up his thoughts about her by suddenly coming very close, and taking his hand in hers. She gave it a hard, quick squeeze, with a sort of shake, and dropped it again, saying, ‘You shall sl
eep in your own room. No, you shall. Dickon and Jack will never wake at moving.’ So, as they went up after Will and a maid-servant, Robert Aske was thinking not of her ill behaviour to her mother, but of the way she had caught his hand, and how she alone of them all had welcomed him.
Upstairs, when the two little boys had been carried off sleeping, and the room put to rights, and Will had been sent off by Julian to fetch caudle for his master, Aske took his niece by her two hands meaning to kiss her good night. But instead of letting herself be kissed she shoved him masterfully back towards the bed, sat down herself, and dragged him down beside her.
‘Now,’ said she, ‘tell me what you stayed to tell the folk in the Hall to-night. For I heard your voice before you came in.’
He looked at her sitting beside him on the bed. She was at that stage of growth when a girl can change in a few months, and she had changed since he saw her last September. Then she had been a coltish creature, with abrupt, almost harsh, features, dark straight brows and a square face. Now she was ungainly no longer, though she was big, broad, and strongly built, being far more like in that to the Cliffords than she was either to Askes or to her mother’s Rither kin. In face she had a likeness to old Sir Robert – and, Aske supposed, to himself – being a maid far from maidenly prettiness, with a dark line of hair upon her upper lip; yet she had a fine mantling flush at times, that gave her a sudden comeliness, and she wore it now.
‘Tell me – everything,’ she urged.
‘Do they know nothing at Aughton?’ he asked, half teasing.
‘Who would tell me?’ she cried, rudely and scornfully. ‘You heard my mother to-night. And my father dare not—’ His look checked her but she added obstinately, ‘The servants think that I am as my mother and my father.’
Aske thought, ‘Surely she should be well beaten. Or should have been a lad.’
‘But,’ she said, as if she knew his thought, ‘if I’d been Hob, Uncle Robin, I’d not have left you.’
‘I sent Hob back,’ he told her sternly.
‘You couldn’t have stopped me from coming on.’
He turned his face and looked at her. It was all wrong that she should speak so. She was a wilful, saucy, unbroken wench, but to be with her was like warming his hands at a fire. He half smiled. ‘Truly, and I think I could not, neither. Well. What shall I tell you?’
‘There was a great council at York. I know that but no more.’
‘Then we came to Pomfret—’ He locked his hands about one knee and began to talk. As he talked he forgot the familiar room in which he knew by heart each knot and shake in the beams, every twist of the painted leafy trellis pattern on the walls; he forgot the single candle burning on the stool by them, and casting their shadows, huge and distorted, across the floor and half-way up the door; he forgot his niece in her old frayed gown of blue and red, and white country kerchief. Instead of these he saw the crowded Hall at Pomfret where my Lord Darcy, Constable, and all the rest, gentlemen and commons, sat on benches, like the King’s Parliament at Westminster, a great, solemn and an earnest company of men.
‘The best blood of the North,’ he told her, ‘was there, and that’s not all noble blood, July, but also the yeomen and the poor commons of Yorkshire.’ He stopped and she saw his eye had kindled, but when he went on it was more lightly.
‘We talked and talked. And when we did not talk, I wrote. We drew up Articles that the Duke should be given to carry to the King. We took three days over it, and the spiritual men over their Articles took two more.’
‘And then?’
‘Then ten of us went to Doncaster. No. Not I. But those ten carried the Articles, and asked for safe conducts. Next day three hundred from our part rode into Doncaster. We lay at the Grey Friars and my Lord of Norfolk at the White Friars. Then we chose twenty, and those twenty of us went to him. And there, being chosen to speak for all, I argued the Articles.’
‘You!’ she cried with a bright flush, and a ring of pride in her voice that he could not miss. He put his arm round her, and felt her body, young, solid, yet supple, close against his.
‘The Duke read out to us the King’s free pardon for us all, and declared His Grace’s promise of a free Parliament, and pledged his own word that the Abbeys should stand till that Parliament be met.
‘When I got back to Pomfret that night it was too late to declare the same to the commons, but next morning early I sent the bellman round, and had them all to the Cross and told them. After, I went again to Doncaster, but then comes one riding in haste from Lord Lumley, saying that the commons would not be content but if they saw the King’s Pardon and the Great Seal. They were crying again to fire the beacons, and that we gentlemen had betrayed them.’
‘Shame on them!’ she cried.
He shook his head. ‘The commons,’ he told her, ‘are like dogs that have been scared when they were whelps. They’ll trust a man, and then at a word or a look they’ll remember what men once did to them, and, when they remember, they’ll either run, or bite. And after they’ll trust again.
‘So back I went to Pomfret, by consent of all, and the rest of that day I talked. Mass! I marvel my tongue was not quite worn out talking to the commons there. Good men they are, niece, but obstinate, and some of them have skulls as thick as a clog sole, and it’s as difficult to draw a notion out of their heads as to drive it in. But by evening I had contented them, and sent to Doncaster to have Herald Lancaster with the Pardon; who came, after dark.’
He looked at Julian, and gave a little laugh. ‘There were, among those gentlemen with me, I’ll not say who, that would have had me turn all out once more that night to hear the Herald’s message, fearing, they said, that the commons should murder us in our beds. But I said, “Well, if to-night I be murdered, in my bed it shall be, for nothing shall keep me out of it longer!”
‘So next morning, on St. Thomas’s Hill, where Constable and I had used to take the musters, the King’s Pardon was declared to the commons, and received of them, and then—’
He stopped abruptly, and looked at Julian as though he saw her again after being away at a great distance. ‘Then – they all went away – I watched them most of that morning, from the top of the keep. When they’d all gone, and the town was empty, except for us few gentlemen – I – I could have wept.’
She asked, after a little silence, ‘Was that this morning?’
‘No. Yesterday.’ But to him it seemed half a year ago already. He said, more to himself than to her, ‘And I should be on my knees to God for His grace to us, instead of talking so like a thankless fool.’
‘What then?’
He went on, after a moment, ‘Then we that were left rode back again to Doncaster, and there, in the White Friars’ Frater, we all, kneeling on our knees, tore off our badges – look, you can see the mark.’ She looked, and saw where his finger touched the breast of his doublet, a line of stitching and a patch where the colour seemed deeper than round about. ‘I prayed, and they granted me, that they would never call me Captain any more. The white rod I carried I tried to break across my knee, but I could not.’
‘What did you do with it then?’
‘Kicked it under the table. The poor Friars will have a fine sweeping up to do with our badges and all.’
He was smiling, but she stretched out her arms with the hands clenched, and letting out a deep breath, cried, ‘So you did that which you set out to do.’
‘If God speed us. The Duke will go to the King now, and the King must ratify the terms.’
She started round, and stared at him. ‘So it’s not finished yet?’
‘Our part is finished. And – yes – it is as good as finished.’
She sat brooding with her chin on her fists, and after a while he answered her silence, almost as though she had been a man, not a chit of a girl.
‘The Duke,’ he said, ‘spoke in the King’s name, knowing the King’s mind. With a free pardon, and a free Parliament, we need fear nothing. The rest will be done by tha
t free Parliament, held here in York.’
‘And the Duke?’ She turned to him with her obstinate, truculent look. ‘You will trust him? And the King?’
He rebuked her sternly, almost fiercely for that, saying that he marvelled to hear her speak so. ‘For if,’ he said, confusedly but with vehemence, ‘if I may not trust – if such men – if – surely I would, rather die.’ Then he was silent, for in the bottom of his mind there was a thought which he could not find words for, nor even plainly know its meaning. But like a dread in a dream it lay there nameless – if there could be such treachery as that she glanced at, he had rather not have been born, for God Himself could not prevail against it.
But he shook it off, and came back to the ordinary world.
Julian sat beside him, crimson and scowling after his rebuke. He put his hand on her shoulder.
‘I thought once,’ he said, ‘much as you do about my Lord of Norfolk, because of a thing that was told me. He would have had one to – well, to betray me.’
‘But that one would not?’
‘He would not. And now I see that the Duke so dealt because of his loyalty to the King. So I count he shall be loyal also to us. He spoke long with me, Julian, most graciously and frankly too, standing in a window at the Grey Friars’.’
‘I see. So it is well.’ She jumped up from the bed, then put her clenched fists against either of his cheeks, chafing them roughly.
‘You great hoyden!’ he said, laughing and catching her wrists. ‘It is because I am so glad.’
He got up and kissed her, bidding her ‘Good night, sweetheart.’
December 18
Julian Aske slipped into the dairy, sure that no one had seen her. She dipped a canful of cream, and stood with it in her hand behind the door, spying through the crack between the hinges till Uncle Robin should come through the gate. From the window upstairs she had seen him walking across the ings, so there would not be long to wait. When he came she would walk out, with the can of cream in her hand, meet him in the Court as if by chance, and give him warning. Then he had only to turn and go out of the gate again, and to Aughton Landing where already Will Wall and Uncle Will Monkton must be waiting with the horses.
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