The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  The Prioress of Marrick let her lip curl. She had Moses and the Prophets; half an hour ago she had had mad Malle babbling of the insatiable tender love of God. Now she had the old Prioress of St. Helen’s – She had not listened to any of these, nor would she have listened though one rose from the dead.

  She moved away, not very tall, but in her fur-lined riding cloak bulky and very stately.

  ‘Tush!’ she said, and no other word of farewell.

  The Chronicle of Christabel Cowper, Prioress of Merrick, Ends Here.

  March 31

  Lord Darcy had dined at the house of the Mayor of Pomfret. He came back to the Castle in the afternoon, going slowly on foot, leaning on a silver-knobbed staff, with one of his gentlemen on either side and two servants behind. The boys and girls were coming back from the fields with primroses. Lord Darcy stopped a string of the smallest of them, and asked for a posy. A little girl, all blue eyes, smudged rosy cheeks, and open silly-sweet mouth, gave him her handful, and then backed away, still staring. He kissed the flowers to her, told the servant to give her a penny, and went on, holding the posy under his nose.

  When he came into the first ward he found a number of horses standing; evidently they had just come in, for the marks of the saddles and girths were still dark upon them. A stranger came towards him, a broad-faced, freckled, sandy man, who pulled off his cap and held out a letter.

  Lord Darcy went on till they were close; then he too uncovered.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to you in the King’s livery, and wearing the King’s badge.’

  Because he smiled, and spoke so lightly, the other conceived that he must talk big.

  ‘I’ve sufficient force with me—’ he began.

  ‘To take me? Why so you shall – when you will.’ And my Lord went on at his usual slow pace. His two gentlemen and the servants thrust by also, stiff as dogs that square up for a fight.

  The King’s man looked after them, hesitated, then followed, but at a little distance.

  April 2

  Aske had waited at Court all day since Mass, standing first on one foot, then on the other, in a kind of blank suspension of feeling. He had handed over to a gentleman of the Bedchamber the letters which the Duke of Norfolk had given him; and now he could only wait. He did not know whether he would wait in vain, to be turned out this evening when the Presence Chamber was cleared; or whether some officer of the Guard would come with a warrant and pikemen, and so he would sleep to-night in prison; or whether the King would send for him, and he would have that opportunity to speak, for which he had come to London. He longed, against his will, that it should be the first; he expected the second; he dared not hope for the last.

  When a yeoman usher came to his elbow, and said that the King had sent for him, his heart gave so great a jump that it sent the blood drumming into his ears. If the King would see him on this Easter Sunday evening, when the Court was crowded with all the great nobles and Ambassadors, then perhaps the King would hear him speak, if not to-day, then some other day. At least, he said to himself, following the usher through many passages and up and down stairs, it must mean that all’s not lost.

  They came to a door in the further part of the Palace; here were the offices in which the Chancellor of the Augmentations and his clerks pursued their business, but Aske did not know that. The usher stopped with his head bent to listen, and knocked. Then he pushed open the door and motioned Aske to enter.

  There were five or six persons standing together in the dusty sunshine of the room; their backs were towards him and all looked down at something at their feet. The room was unfurnished except for a big table and a couple of stools, but piles of leather and folded canvas lay about, and against one wall a number of wicker hampers were stacked.

  The men standing there turned about, and Aske saw that the King was in their midst, and went down on his knee. He saw also that Cromwell was on one side of the King and Lord Chancellor Rich, Chancellor of the Augmentations, on the other; and what hope he had conceived, died at that sight.

  ‘Well, Mr. Aske?’ said the King.

  Aske got up from his knees and came nearer; they were watching him, all of them; he knelt down again and asked for leave to kiss the King’s hand. The King held it out, white and scented; he kissed it, but the King had already turned away, leaving him kneeling in the midst of them.

  It was then that he saw what they had been looking at when he came in. An open hamper stood there half-full of hay. Gold gleamed among the hay, and jewels, like small coloured eyes. On the floor in front of the hamper lay tumbled together gold chalices and silver, jewelled and enamelled reliquaries, the crook of an ancient and beautiful crozier, a small image of silver. Aske looked at these, and knew that the others still had their eyes on him.

  ‘Well, Master Aske,’ said the King again, ‘you have said that the Act of Suppression of the Abbeys was the greatest cause of the detestable treasons of your North Countrymen, and that the hearts of the commons most grudged at it. Now tell me again – in your conscience do you think it was so?’

  ‘Surely,’ said Aske, ‘it was so.’

  ‘And as for you yourself?’

  They had to wait for the answer. Then Aske said, ‘I and all others grudged at it.’

  ‘And do you now grudge at it?’

  During the still longer pause, the King stretched out his foot, broad-toed as a duck’s webbed foot in its yellow velvet shoe. He rested it lightly on the curve of an overturned chalice, rolling the vessel backwards and forwards under the sole of his foot.

  ‘Your Grace,’ said Aske at last, ‘has the whole of the North Country altogether at Your mercy.’

  ‘I’ll have no mercy on traitors, Master Aske,’ said the King. He gave the chalice a push with his foot so that it rang against the rim of a big alms dish. He waved his hand in Aske’s face, saying, ‘Go! You may go!’

  So Aske went out of the room. As he found his way back through the Palace he kept his head up, but he was thinking, ‘Here goes a man that came to London to speak plain, and was afraid to speak.’ He was aware that he would not have been permitted to speak. Besides that, the outrage of seeing the King tumble the consecrated cup with his foot had strangled every word upon his tongue; but still, he knew that he had been afraid to speak.

  When the door had shut behind him Cromwell murmured as if to himself—

  ‘I marvel how such a traitor, seeing his treasons utterly defeated, dare speak so stoutly.’

  ‘A murrain,’ cried Rich, ‘upon so cankered a heart!’

  ‘He is a man much unbroken and rude,’ said Cromwell.

  ‘As yet unbroken,’ said the King, moving away from them. They followed him out of the room.

  *

  Aske came away from Westminster by water and told the boatman to put him down at Blackfriars’ Stairs. This way he could go as easily to Gray’s Inn as to the Cardinal’s Hat. At Gray’s Inn he would find, he knew, men not very ready to be seen in his company; at the Cardinal’s Hat, he could guess, he would find Will Wall, sow-drunk.

  He had not made up his mind which way he would choose to take when he came to Ludgate, and so hung on his heel a moment under the gate-arch. From the west the setting sun poured into the street a flood of gold; when he looked that way his eye, half blinded, could see only dark shapes of people moving, fringed about with silver. He turned to go back up Bowyer Row towards St. Paul’s and heard someone behind him cry, ‘Sir, Master Aske! O Sir!’ and there was little July Savage tugging his arm with one hand, and hauling after her by the other a young, rambling puppy at the end of a scarlet ribbon leash.

  He took in first her shining look of joy, then the glance that she threw over her shoulder towards a slight young man with strawcoloured hair, in his Easter Sunday best of tawny doublet and white hosen. If this were July’s husband he looked a poor rag of a man, but by his expression a gentle and kindly one.

  ‘Sir,’ cried July, speaking first to one then to another, and sometimes, it seemed, to
both of them. ‘You must come home with us. He must come home. Sir, I pray you! Sir, ask him! Oh, it must be so!’

  Aske laughed. ‘This little maid and I,’ said he to Laurence Machyn, ‘(I must still so think of her) – we have been friends many a year now.’

  ‘Oh, many a year!’ cried July.

  Laurence said if Master Aske were not pressed – because it was not far to go – he – his wife – they would take it kindly—

  ‘It’s but round the corner,’ said July, ‘and surely you may not refuse.’

  As they walked together Laurence was planning that when they reached home he would make an excuse and go out again, and leave them there. Yet when it came to the point he found himself unable to do it. They sat round the fire in the solar upstairs talking little, for it seemed that when July had announced that she and Laurence had been walking in the fields beyond Temple Bar, she thought of nothing else but to sit watching Master Aske, with such a light on her face as would have been proper had he been, thought Laurence, an angel from heaven.

  Laurence had sent for wine, and a plate of nuts. He plied Aske with these, and made perfunctory remarks, eyeing his guest furtively most of the time (since he could not endure to look at July), and hating Aske on every count upon which one man may hate another. Aske was a gentleman, and therefore he sat with his chin on his breast in disdainful silence; he was July’s leman, fretting that her husband should be gone and leave him to stretch out his hand, to draw her to him, to – Laurence swallowed hard there, and wriggled on the settle so that July flung him a quick, impatient, chiding glance. Master Aske cracked the nuts in his fine white teeth, and Laurence hated him for that. The man was even hateful for his dark hair, though it gave Laurence some comfort to see in it quite a scattering of grey.

  During one of the many long silences they all heard someone knock, and knock again on the street door below. Laurence turned, listening. ‘That boy’s run forth again,’ he said, half to himself. He missed, therefore, how though Aske neither turned nor stirred, the hand that lay on his knee became clenched till the knuckles showed white. ButJuly saw it, and saw how he sat there, stiff as wood, then slowly turned his head towards the open door of the inner room, where a corner of the Machyn’s blue and yellow curtained bed showed, and beyond it a window.

  Laurence got up and found that July was on her feet.

  ‘No,’ said he sharply, ‘I’ll answer. It may be some drunken fellow.’

  He had hardly gone out when July’s hand was on the latch.

  ‘Out through the window there,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll keep them as long as I may.’

  ‘No – no,’ said Aske, but she had gone, and he was left to realize how close fear had followed at his heels, that he should have been even for an instant so unreasonable as to think that the King might have sent to take him here. Yet he sat very still, and must listen with all his ears, and gave a great start when July came in again, shutting the door softly behind her.

  ‘It’s only the matter of a corpse to be buried,’ she said, and then, ‘What do you fear? What has happened?’

  He said shortly, ‘Nothing.’ But because at that she looked so miserably chidden he would not leave it there. ‘Nothing,’ he said again, ‘indeed. Yet I think they will take me, in spite of the pardon.’

  She shut her eyes, leaning back with her arms spread and the palms of her hands pressed against the door. It was apparent as she so stood, though he only later remembered it, that she was with child.

  She opened her eyes, and turned her head, listening.

  ‘He’s coming back,’ she said. ‘Quick. Promise me. If – if they do, find means to send me word.’

  He said hastily, ‘If I’m taken, I’ll send Will Wall.’

  Then Laurence came in.

  April 6

  Aske had not meant to come again to the Machyns’ house, since he felt himself to be like a man who has detected in his body the unmistakable signs of the plague. But this evening, having vainly waited all day outside the Presence Chamber, as he had waited every day since Easter Sunday, he did, though with compunction, and shame at his own weakness, come to the house in Knightrider Street, and knock. The master was not in, but the mistress, they told him, was in the gar-den, and they took him through the house, and out under the arched passage into the little pleached garden beyond. The honeysuckle was showing grey-green leaves though the vine and the big old mulberry-tree were still stark bare, and there were tufts of primroses flowering in the grass.

  But July was not here, so the boy left him to go and find her, and Aske sat down on the built-up grass bank below the honeysuckle. Above, the setting sun caught and glorified the chimneys of a neighbour’s house, dyeing them with fiery sanguine, but the small hidden garden was full of shadow, and of peace. As he waited there in the quiet for a little while he almost forgot the blackness of the present.

  July, sitting with her face towards the screens at the end of the servants’ table in the hall, had seen him go by to the garden. So had the little grey-haired man, wearing Lord Privy Seal’s livery, who sat opposite her, but neither had made any comment. Master John Heath, a cousin of Master Henry Machyn, and so, though distantly, a cousin of Laurence’s, was a man of an orderly habit of mind. The sight of Aske in the house had been a surprise to him, and certainly must be looked into, but he would first pursue that enquiry for the sake of which he had come, and only afterwards attend to the other.

  ‘So,’ said he, ‘you have had no communication with your sister since you came hither to London?’

  ‘I have told you – none.’

  ‘No letters? No messages? Come, sweet cousin, it’s not that you are thought to favour her treasons, but if she wrote to you, there might drop a word, to you innocent, but to us disclosing or confirming her guilt.’

  ‘I have had no letter, nor message. I never thought to have.’

  Cousin Heath rooted thoughtfully in his ear, watching her. ‘Yet, said he, with a cunning look, ‘you do not ask, “What treason?”’

  ‘Because,’ said July, ‘I do not care. I do not care what she has done. I do not care what she suffers for it.’

  If she had spoken wildly he might have thought that she lied because she was frightened. But here, he could not but know, was the calm and deadly truth.

  He leaned towards her, and began to explain how, hearing that his cousin Laurence’s wife was sister to this traitor, he had begged that he himself might question her, rather than another, sure as he was that there was nothing but innocence and loyalty in Mistress July – ‘as I now hear and can vouch for,’ he said.

  July, thinking of Aske in the garden, looked at him with a blank face.

  ‘But,’ said Laurence’s kinsman, ‘besides that your sister and her paramour have raised insurrection lately, sending hither and thither to call men out, it was she, we know surely, who set on Bigod to rise, whose detestable conspiracy has given the King’s Grace fresh cause to have those of the North Country in his dread displeasure.’

  ‘She did that?’ July cried, not calmly now. ‘If she did that—’

  ‘Tut! Tut!’ he said, and tried to pat her hands as they tore at each other on her lap, but she took them out of his reach. He began to find her agitation suspicious.

  ‘“If she did that,”’ he said, ‘and so she did, she will die for it. Do you know how?’

  July shook her head. She was thinking – ‘It is her doing. It is her doing that he is endangered.’

  ‘She will be burned alive.’

  ‘She will deserve to be so,’ said July, and again he could not but recognize the very accent of truth.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can see that indeed you favour not your sister’s doings, so we will let that alone.

  ‘Yet there is another matter.’

  He hitched his chair nearer to hers, and said, speaking low, ‘This man Aske, that I saw come in – Will he speak openly to you if you should put questions to him?’

  *

  When he had sat
in the garden perhaps a quarter of an hour Aske began to suspect that July had been told by her husband to have no more dealings with him. As that was but too probable, the only thing to do was to leave, making some excuse if he saw anyone on his way out.

  So he came back to the house, and opened the door leading to the screens passage. The door opposite him was open on the street; July stood there, and with her a small grey-haired man, who leaned close and whispered in her ear. Robert Aske saw Cromwell’s livery colour; before he knew what he would do, he had shut the door softly, and gone back a few steps into the garden. He remembered now that July’s sister was a whore, and July herself a liar. He thought, ‘She is to betray me to them.’

  July found him standing there. She was so glad to see him, for all her fear, that she thought nothing of the sternness of his look, except that for a few minutes she might be able to soften it.

  ‘Come,’ she said, ‘come beyond,’ and went past him towards the further garden. For a moment he thought to turn and go away without a word, yet he followed her.

  But when she sat down on the grass bank, patting it to show that he should sit beside her, he would not, and standing in front of her he said, ‘That man you spoke with – he is one of Cromwell’s.’

  She nodded. ‘He is a cousin of my husband.’

  He looked down at her, and now her eyes shrank from his, and she turned her face away.

  ‘And,’ he said, ‘when I have talked to you, you shall report my words to him.’

  She did not look up, or speak, or even shake her head.

  Nor could he find any more to say. If it was true there was nothing to be said. But then – how he did not know – but he knew that it was not true, and that he could trust her, if no other. He said suddenly:

  ‘I did not think you would betray me,’ and – ‘Nor I do not think it. Surely I know you will not.’

  She broke down at that, caught his hand and clutched it in both of hers, bowing herself over it, so that he felt her tears fall on his fingers. She told him, so far as he was able to distinguish her words, that indeed she could not – ‘Oh! do you not know that I could not?’