The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘You want my husband?’ she said.

  ‘Are you Mistress Machyn?’

  She nodded and thought to shut the door. Yet that likeness of his, that she could not account for, made her pause.

  ‘My brother,’ he said, ‘made me swear on the Cross I should come to you. He could have no ease till I swore it. I’d have come sooner, but’ (he dropped his voice very low) ‘they had me in Newgate, to question me.’

  ‘Come in,’ said July.

  ‘No. Better not.’ He glanced about again. ‘The sooner I’m away the better for you. But I promised Will—’

  ‘Who is Will?’

  ‘My brother. Will Wall. But Will’s dead. He was Mr. Aske’s servant.’

  July could say nothing because of the loudness of that name in her ears, or else it was the blood drumming there.

  ‘Will died a week after they took Master Aske. He came to me at Ware before daylight, for they’d taken his master about midnight. I knew then that Will was a dead man. The moment I saw him I knew it. He raved all that week, clawing and striking at his breast, saying it was he that had brought his master into treason, crying out, “He was hid, and I brought them to him,” and crying out, “Oh, my master, my master, they will draw him, and hang him, and quarter him!”’

  ‘Stop,’ cried July, but she had not voice enough to make him hear her.

  ‘He made me swear I should tell you Mr. Aske was taken, for so, he said, he had promised to do. And just before he died he said I should tell you also that his master was taken by night in naught but his shirt and shoes. I’d ‘a come before, but they took me—’ He stopped then because the young woman had shut the door in his face.

  *

  Laurence came in a while after and shouted for July. She heard him well enough from the kitchen, but did not answer. Then she heard him go upstairs. After a moment he called again, ‘July! July!’ and came to the kitchen door, so she had to go out to him.

  ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘I can nowhere find my blue hosen.’

  July put her hand to her mouth, looking not at him, but out towards the garden. The sun shone through the open door – a bee came in – lingered, and then went off again. There was summer in his humming, and in the silence he left behind him, and in the smell of chopped mint that came from the kitchen. But her mind was frozen; only her heart ached as she felt it beat heavily. The hiss of a pot boiling over, a shriek and a peal of laughter from the maids, made her start, but still she felt that she was not properly awake.

  ‘Why do you want them?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve torn these on a nail. That fool Nick’s no craftsman. I shall turn him off.’

  ‘I mended your grey,’ said July, with a huge effort. ‘It is not warm enough yet for them.’

  ‘I – I am busy. Can you not find something? You have plenty.’

  Her voice nearly broke on that. She turned and went away into the kitchen. ‘Plenty of hosen.’ So he had, and coats, and doublets, everything. He was warmed, fed, and cared for. She would have been glad, that moment, to do him an injury for being so.

  She had forgotten Laurence, because her thoughts clung so tormentedly to the other, when she heard her husband call again, ‘July, come here.’

  As she climbed the stairs he went back into their chamber. She found him standing in the midst; the floor was strewn with clothes, tossed here and there, gowns, shifts and shirts, doublets and petticoats.

  He said, ‘My black doublet is gone too, and that red camlet coat, and two of my best shirts.’

  When she said nothing, and did not even look at him, he asked, ‘Where are they?’ and came nearer to her, to say again, and louder, ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Master Aske—’ she began.

  Laurence stepped back. His foot caught in one of her gowns so that he almost fell. Now he could not look at her, any more than she could look at him.

  She said in the smallest voice, but it was steady, ‘He has been there this two months, through all these late frosts and cold, in but his shirt and his shoes.’

  Stealing a glance at her he saw her whole face shake, and again grow still. She looked straight before her through the window but she pointed to where the curtains of the bed moved gently in the sweet air. ‘They are there,’ she said, ‘under the bed. I should have sent them to him.’

  ‘How?’

  She said, ‘I do not know:’

  The look of her and her voice so cut him to the heart that he could not endure it. He went past her, downstairs, and out into the street.

  *

  Outside the Tower that evening a man hung about till it was almost time for the drawbridge to be lifted and the gates shut. Then, seeing a sour-looking grizzled fellow going in, he seemed to take courage, stepped forward and stopped him.

  ‘Gossip,’ said he, ‘there’s a gentleman in there called Aske.’

  ‘There is,’ the old fellow agreed.

  ‘Can I... How can I get this to him?’ With one hand he held out a bundle, and with the other fumbled in his purse.

  ‘Are you a friend of his?’

  Laurence dropped the angel that he had between his fingers, ‘My wife—’ he began, and then stood dumb, his eyes downcast, the very picture of a shamed but acquiescent cuckold.

  The old man chuckled softly. ‘By Cock!’ he said, ‘so it is with these gentlemen, and this one with his filed tongue would be harder for a wench to resist than another. And he has mettle. I know something of mettle. I’ve seen prisoners enough in my day, but this one—’ He seemed to recollect himself, and growled, ‘Saving that he’s a pestilent traitor.’

  Laurence shoved the bundle at him, and said with more violence than so gentle a man could have been thought capable of, ‘Here. Will you take it or no?’

  The old man took it. ‘Aye. He shall have it to-morrow. A murrain on him for a traitor.’ He picked up Laurence’s angel out of the dust, and stumped away across the bridge.

  In bed that night, with the candle blown out, Laurence kept silence a long time. Then he cried out in a harsh, rough voice:

  ‘I took that bundle. The gaoler says he shall have it tomorrow.’

  After that they lay far apart in the wide bed, awake and silent. She could not speak, and he would not.

  May 13

  The sunshine, which when Aske first came to this place had only touched the stones of the wall and brought its fleeting warmth as low as to his knees, now, unless clouds cheated him, lay for a longer time each day upon the floor, so that he could even warm his feet in it for a little while. He was standing in the precious sunshine, turning himself slowly about, when he heard the key rattle in the lock, and old Ned Stringer came in, shut the door, and tossed a bundle on the floor between them.

  ‘There’s what you’ve been asking for,’ said Ned, with his sourest face.

  ‘What is it?’ Aske stared at him, then at the bundle.

  ‘Looks to me like a coat for your back.’

  Aske stooped. He fumbled at the knot before he could get it open. Then he looked blankly at Ned. ‘But these are not mine.’

  Ned cackled at him – ‘Do them on. Who cares if they’re yours? No, they’re not yours neither, but they’re from your leman, Master, brought by her own husband. (Out on you for a rank seducer!) Though he seemed a poor fellow, yon husband, with his foul teeth, and lank hair; and women’s hearts are frail.’

  Aske, looking down at the open bundle and hearing Ned’s words, saw again Laurence Machyn coming across the little twilight garden in this same black doublet with the crimson sleeves; a poor, awkward creature Aske had thought him then.

  But now he said: ‘Hold your tongue, you fool. She’s no leman of mine, and may God reward him for his good charity, for he’s a truer friend to me than any other.’

  ‘Tell me that!’ said Ned, and went away sniggering.

  May 14

  Just before dusk Mr. Kingston, Lieutenant of the Tower, came to inform Lord Darcy that his trial would be to-morrow, at Westminster. Darcy sat ove
r the fire, alone, for to-day the two Percys and Constable had been moved to other quarters, and Kingston, seeing him as if for the first time, said to himself, ‘He is old. He is ill.’ He tried to remember how old the old man must be, but could not.

  And then Darcy looked up at him with such a quick frosty gleam in his blue eyes that Kingston could not think of him as old at all.

  ‘So Master Cromwell has his false witnesses ready at his tail,’ said my Lord, and laughed.

  ‘Do you doubt,’ said Mr. Lieutenant, ‘that you shall have justice?’

  ‘I doubt it sorely,’ said Darcy in a friendly, open tone.

  Kingston shook his head.

  ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I shall show you that you mistake if you think the judgement is foregone, or that my Lord Privy Seal is your enemy.’

  ‘Oh! I mistake?’

  ‘Truly you do. As we drank wine but now in my lodging, Beauchamp, Audeley and some others being present, my Lord Privy Seal spoke of your trial. Quod he, “My Lord’s peers may condemn him, for the King’s honour’s sake, but by God’s Passion, I myself will travail to obtain his pardon, the which I am well persuaded the King will not refuse to grant.”’

  Darcy had his hands spread out upon his knees and seemed to study them.

  ‘Cromwell said that?’ he asked softly.

  ‘He did. He did. I heard him speak so with my own ears.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Darcy, ‘that the old Cardinal’ (he meant Wolsey) ‘said one day to me that he knew no deeper head than this Cromwell’s. And I’d say, “Nor no blacker heart.”’

  ‘Fie!’ cried Master Lieutenant. ‘How can you so rail on one that would befriend you?’ And he began to pace about the chamber till he came to a stand near Darcy, looking down upon him with a reproving frown.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, tilting his head to look up at Kingston, and speaking with a mocking lightness, ‘I never thought that in these days my peers would do for me what I and others did for my Lord Dacre, maugre the King’s and Cromwell’s teeth – namely to acquit me of treason. But now, these words of Cromwell’s being known, there is none that may wish me well but will, for the King’s honour’s sake, cheerfully cast me as guilty, supposing that my life will be spared.’

  ‘And then my Lord Privy Seal will get your pardon.’

  ‘Master Lieutenant, are you so simple?’ He put out a hand, and waved it to move the Lieutenant from his side. ‘I’ll ask you,’ said he, ‘as Diogenes the Greek asked King Alexander, to get out of my sunlight, or rather my firelight, for either is very dear to us prisoners.’

  Master Kingston did not stop after that. Darcy sat on, wrapping himself closer as the fire died down, turning over in his mind all the charges that they might bring against him to-morrow, and his answers; recalling as much as he could of the letters which they might have seized, besides words of his which they might have by report of persons indiscreet or malicious.

  ‘Well,’ he thought, ‘it’s not from the answers I have given to their interrogations that I shall be charged,’ and he laughed to himself as he recalled those taunts of his which the clerks had written down word for word, until Privy Seal had cried, ‘Enough. Enough. Write no more of that.’ For when they questioned him of his doings he had replied by accusations, and these not against his companions in rebellion, but against those very men who sat at the Council table, and others, not present but in favour, such as my Lord of Norfolk, and his son Surrey.

  So he rehearsed his case in his mind, wary as a fox, fierce as an old wild boar. ‘And we shall see,’ he said to himself, ‘when we come to Westminster Hall, whether they will muzzle me so that I cannot speak.’

  Yet, because he was, for all his spirit, an old man and frail, more and more his thoughts began to slide from what must be to-morrow to what had been, and especially to what had been long ago; so that in his mind he was in the little chapel at Templehurst, which he remembered as far back as he remembered anything. There was the smell of incense, and the fume of snuffed candles hanging in the air; there was the great painted crucifix above. And at the same time he saw all the candles that stood upon his father’s hearse in the chapel blow one way, so that the light slid and rippled over the pall of black and gold tissue. And now, because he himself was little Tom once more, his father stood before his eyes, immensely tall. The servants were dressing him in a gown of rayed cloth that had many gold buttons fastening it all the way down the front from the high collar to the fur-trimmed hem. And little Tom had a pair of wooden knights, carved and painted, and each man jointed on his saddle, that rode at each other as you pulled the strings underneath. They met with a crack, and he woke at a great jerk of his head nodding forward on his breast.

  It was time to sleep, since his wits must be keen to-morrow. He got up, and beat on the door to let them know that his servant should come to him.

  May 17

  July went out shopping very early, with Dickon to carry her basket. She bought a young sucking pig in Newgate Street, and told Dickon to carry it home, saying that she would go on to Goldsmiths’ Row because she desired a new silver cup. But when she had watched him out of sight she set off to walk to Westminster.

  She found that she should have reached the Great Hall there an hour earlier if she wished to see anything, or even to hear much, of this trial of the Northern rebels. All she could do was to press into the crowd that filled the further end, and there stand wedged, hearing less of the trial itself than of the conversation that went on round about her. For, since all thereabouts must needs miss most of what was going on, they took no pains to listen, but talked, comfortably and pleasantly, among themselves. ‘And he with the one eye was the traitor Aske?’ said a woman. ‘God put out his other!’ ‘By Cock!’ said a big man, ‘but they’ll have their deserts. You shall see that they’ll be cast, as Lord Darcy was two days ago, and so they’ll hang one and all.’ ‘Nay,’ said another, ‘but Lords die by the axe.’ And then they disputed of that, and of the hanging and drawing of lesser traitors. But when July took her hands down from under her veil, unstopping her ears for a minute, they were saying how slow in hatching their goslings were this year. ‘Ah! That’s this long drouth,’ said a man, and then a thin woman cried, ‘Chip their shells for them, neighbour, chip their shells.’

  So July kept her thumbs out of her ears, and strained to hear what was spoken beyond the crowd, where Master Aske was being tried for his life. But someone over there would cough and cough, so that though she listened for his voice she could never be sure that she heard it.

  By dint of squeezing and pushing, which brought her black looks from those she pressed against, she managed after a while to draw nearer. But now it was the man with the cough who was answering questions, and what with the huskiness of his voice and his fits of coughing she could make nothing of what he said, and grew almost as impatient with him as the judge was, who would often break in, crying ‘Well, I cannot hear you,’ and to the King’s Sergeant-at-law. ‘Go on to the next point since he cannot or will not answer.’

  And Aske, almost voiceless and fighting for his life, felt a rage, and a cramping fear at this malignant injustice which was grappling him down. They were charging him with those things for which the King had granted pardon, and with those things which he had done to keep the country stayed when Bigod rose, only there they twisted his honest deeds and words to treason. For treason they made it that he had not disclosed how Levening had desired his intercession with the Duke of Norfolk; yet to the Duke himself he had disclosed it, when he interceded with him for Levening. And, had he not disclosed it, of what had he then been guilty, seeing that the jury at York had acquitted Levening of treason?

  But now it was treason even to have trusted that the King should keep the promises which he made. The blank wrong, he thought, would have kept him dumb, even if his voice had not failed him; and his brain also seemed both blind and bound. Yet, because he was a lawyer, he fought them inch by inch, beating them off from one charge after another; and al
l to no purpose, for like a sea tide they always came back over the same ground, and if any charge might not in itself amount to treason, ‘Well,’ said they at last, ‘each one plainly showeth your cankered traitorous heart, and together amount to very great treason.’

  ‘Jesu!’ cried Aske then, finding a little his voice, ‘now know I what I never learnt before, that ten white pullets make one white swan.’

  ‘It shall not profit you,’ said the judge, ‘to jest at the King’s justice.’

  At last July realized that the judge’s voice, which had spoken so long in a dry, unbroken drone, like a bluebottle shut in a room, had ceased. There was a stir, and the sound of footsteps; far off a door whined, and then shut. A pause followed during which her neighbours in the crowd shuffled their feet and shifted restlessly, telling each other that dinner would be cold if the jurymen were long. This period was broken by the sound of raised voices from the direction of the Court. ‘What’s that? What do they say?’ Everyone lent an ear, and then the words came, passed back from mouth to mouth – ‘They plead guilty.’

  ‘Who? Who? All?’ So it was questioned, impatiently, for this was a tame ending for a trial. But July only shut her eyes, and shut her lips and waited, almost not breathing, till someone said, ‘Nay, not all. Only the Percys, Sir John Bulmer, and Hammerton...’ ‘And Bulmer’s whore,’ the word came next. That was the first time July knew that Meg was there among the prisoners. It meant nothing to her.