Under the Hog: A Novel of Richard III

by Patrick Carleton

  The tent of flame broke up and the light shrank again. The stink of rats and ordure in the cellar fought with the thin sourness of the burning charcoal. Nothing was audible from the road above their heads, and nothing they did down here would be heard in the world. If the darkness were to thicken into some abominable shape, if the flames sprang up again to cast suddenly on the wall a shadow with curving horns and wings, no one would hear her screaming. She was alone with the Queen and her set hatred, and the Queen’s necromancer, and with whatever company these summoned.

  There was the sound of a door being bolted and Friar Bungay walked out of the shadows beyond the brazier. His swollen body was draped in a white alb and a chasuble of smoky red embroidered in black with Hebrew letters. There was a tall parchment mitre painted with a five-rayed star on his head, and he had a drawn sword in his hand. He looked ridiculous and terrible. His face shone greasily, like a great larded copper pan in front of a fire.

  “It is time now,” he said with a kind of sickening casualness, as though he were talking about an appointment or a journey. Something like a round hard ball was rising in Jane’s throat. Her kneecaps were jerking. Oh Edward, Edward, why did you die and leave me and the Queen to this? Why aren’t you alive now and we safe, with no need to dabble in abominations and put our souls in danger: or why didn’t you kill Richard when you killed George, instead of leaving us to call in the Devil against him? She tried to speak, but her throat clicked twice before she got the words out:

  “Your Grace, must we — must we go on?”

  Queen Elizabeth looked full at her. The poise of the head on the long throat, that was looking skinny in spite of daily washings with milk, was viperine.

  “We are going on.”

  “You have nothing you need be afraid of, Madame.” Friar Bungay’s voice was that of a midwife heartening a frightened mother. “The spirits will not come visibly; but they will hear us. Remember this is white magic. We control them with holy things and names. Only for your life you must not step outside the circle.”

  He picked up a holy-water stoup and aspergillum from a litter of small things near his feet; sprinkled drops rapidly, talking under his breath; threw something onto the brazier. A blue flame whisked up and disappeared again and an atrocious smell invaded the air.

  “Now,” he said happily.

  The round ball was rising in Jane’s throat again. She could feel sweat streaking the paint on her face. The inside of her body was one hollow in which her heart went backward and forward like a pendulum. Friar Bungay held the sword straight upright, reflected fire veining its blade. His fat, squelching voice became suddenly brazen; blared like a bell.

  “Adonai, Eloim, Jehova, Sadai, Ariel, Sabaoth, very God who commandest all spirits, who hast given power also unto the demons, and that for vengeance, of thy grace be favourable to our enterprise. Elh roceban hor agle goth ioth venoch aubruth. By the terror of thy names be the spirits of air obedient to us. Amen, amen, sela. Per aquam conse-cratarn, signum crucis, gladium conterentem, in nomine magno exaltato valde Jehovae, Adonai, Eloim, adeste principes tenebrarum regni. Adeste, adeste! Io, io, io! I straitly adjure you, foul spirits, wicked angels, stirrers up of murder, authors of incest, masters of sacrilege, teachers of heresy, begetters of all uncleanliness, in his name that cast you out of heaven, to be obedient to me. Come, you wicked ones. Come, you powerful infamous ones, whether out of the air or out of the fire, out of the water or out of the earth. Come to me, by the power of the names of him in whom you believe with tremblings. Agla, tagla, mathon, oarios, alrnozin, arios.”

  The blare of gibberish ceased, leaving a faint after-echo to creep like a worm round the stone walls. The sword-blade swung down into the fumes of the brazier, and the gross red-and-white figure turned slowly and ludicrously on its own axis, directing the point to the three corners of the triangle they stood in. The left hand scrabbled the air with crosses and the lips moved in a wet whisper. Jane’s skin was twitching on her flesh like a horse’s. He had called them. They would certainly come, stirrers up of murder, begetters of all uncleanness. He had said they would not see them: but if they did? Or would it be a worse, a subtler danger, if they did not? Devils could take innumerable shapes. They could show themselves as cats, bears, goats, men riding on horses. They could crawl as pieces of blackness, like huge slugs, or float in the air as a dark cloud. Bodiless, they could make themselves what bodies they pleased; could appear to poor people as gentlemen with full purses, tempting them to ask alms of hell; could hide even in the carvings of church-walls listening for women to tattle during Mass or penitents to make a bad confession. At every deathbed they were secretly present, jumping and grinning like dogs watching a supper-table. Hell washed like an unlimited sea around the thin walls of men’s lives: one crack, and it was in. Here, with smoke and shapeless words they were busy as though with crowbars, prizing apart the frail stones of their own safety, opening a gap for the flood to come crashing in on them. Soon it would come, the tumble of waves of damnation, the utterly hostile, bitter and destructive element in which the soul no longer breathed, in which the familiar handholds of ordinary life and wickedness floated out of reach, leaving them to gasp helplessly, and drink present and eternal death, and drown. The Friar’s voice was blaring again:

  “Messias, Soter, Emanuel, Sabaoth: by these terrible names I summon you, rebellious and contumacious spirits, powerful princes of sin. Why will you tarry? Why will you disobey? Make haste to the summons, by sword and cross and holy water and by the power I have over you. Parinosco, estio, dumogon, davocon, casmiel!”

  With a quick, toad-like squat he dropped to his haunches and snatched up something from a cloth at his feet; heaved upright again brandishing it as though threatening invisible people. A jagged thrust of nausea transpierced Jane’s body. The thing was a rotten human hand, brownish, with a white end of wristbone showing. She could smell it. Sweat was tracking down the Friar’s broad, Neronian face in streams. His voice loudened enormously; became frenetic.

  “I have power, I have power, I have power! See, you rebellious ones. See, you hostile ones. With his hand, with this sword, with power that is in me, with the awful names, Sadai, Ariel, Eloim, I compel you. I prevail over you. See the hands that bind you. Tremble at the names that command you. Sint mihi patifactae portae regni tenebrarum. Io, io, io! Satana, princeps aëris, Lucifer, signifer infernorum, Asmode, negotium perambulans in tenebris, Belzebuth, Belphegor, Barabam, Astarot, Azriel, Belial, adeste in subito. Adeste, adeste, adeste!”

  A scream struggled up into Jane’s mouth and died there. The darkness seemed to be bulging in over the brazier like a blown curtain. The air had turned to sand; could not be breathed. She imagined rustlings of leathery wings, scrape and scratch of feet, sniggers of infernal laughter. In a moment the curtain of the dark would break and the composite and distorted forms of hell jump through it: bird-faced and snake-tailed monsters with goats’ loins, abortions whose bellies and rumps and knees were grinning faces, claw-footed creatures with wings of bats and heads of owls. Friar Bungay, in the apex of the triangle, had turned round on them. His swollen chest heaved with his breathing. He said, panting, in his normal voice:

  “They are here. Give it me quickly.”

  Queen Elizabeth stooped, a black night-bird dropping down on a victim; scrabbled among the cloth-wrapped things on the floor. Was it a child she had in her hands? Jane thought. Oh Jesus, it must not be a child. It was a dummy of wax, child-size, a Ducal coronet on its head.

  The Queen lifted it on her two palms. Her head was thrown back, her mouth open. Her eyes reflected the glimmer of charcoal like lumps of glass.

  “This is Duke Richard of Gloucester, ordained to be consumed at the instance of Elizabeth, the Queen of England.” The thing was thrust at her. She stayed rigid. Feeling and life had gone and she was only a shell of fear. They were there, listening, watching her. Devils were looking at her. Clawed hands and mouths full of long teeth were open, just on the other side of
the dark, gaping and ready.

  “Take it, you fool!” the Queen’s voice stung her. “Say the words.”

  The wax was frighteningly cold against her fingers.

  “This … Duke Richard, ordained to be consumed … the Queen of England.”

  Her palate was dead in her mouth. Large, wet hands snatched the puppet away. Through the swirl and confusion of her fright she could hear Friar Bungay’s voice again: “Great princes of hell, monarchs of all evil, destroyers and corrupters of man’s body, as I pierce this image with the sword, let him be pierced. As this image melts and withers away so that there remains nothing, let him melt, let him pine, let him be undone. Let the skin part from the flesh and the flesh from the sinews and the sinews from the bones and the bones from the marrow. As this image dwindles and is consumed, let him fall, let him be struck down, let him consume utterly away. Swift and sure death come upon him. Instant destruction lie in wait for him. Blasting and blindness without light overtake him. In the eyes and in the breath, in the heart and in the head, in the belly and in the breast, let him be smitten, let him be consumed, let him perish utterly.”

  The Queen’s voice, shrill as a boy’s singing, chanted back to him:

  “Let him lie in his bed, let him lie there sick and sore.

  Let him lie in his bed, let him never rise up more.”

  His full bellow confirmed her.

  “He shall lie in his bed, he shall lie there sick and sore.

  He shall lie in his bed, he shall rise up nevermore.”

  The image of Duke Richard, spitted upon the Friar’s sword, was melting. Great drops like tears ran down the face. One side crumbled suddenly, so that the figure appeared crooked and monstrous. The Ducal coronet withered from the head. The features grew blurred, unrecognisable. The brazier, fed with molten wax, flared suddenly. A great gout of yellowish fire roared out of it; wrapped gustily round the tormented image; sprang up from it, lightening the whole cellar, and mushroomed out under the low ceiling in a spread of smoke. With a tiny sound, the flaring core of wax dropped from the sword-point onto the charcoal and disappeared instantly. An intolerable stink filled the whole place.

  She did not clearly remember how they got her out of the cellar; was not in her full wits until she was sitting on a dirty bed in one of the rooms of the place, choking over a glass of German cordial with the Queen’s hard, green eyes on her. Friar Bungay, taking no notice of her, was mopping his broad face and talking.

  “It will do what is needed. Have no fear for that, your Grace, no fear at all. The charm of the wax puppet is infallible, absolute. To be all the safer, I’ll tell the Office of the Dead for him to-morrow. Said for a living man, it kills like a lance. Or has your Grace heard the Mass of St. Caesarius? That’s sure and good. We shall have no need of my Lord Hastings and his men-at-arms: indeed no. More powerful helpers are taking our part.”

  Oh God, thought Jane, shuddering from the sting of the cordial, nothing can ever help us now. We have destroyed ourselves. We’ve done the sin against the Holy Ghost that Christ won’t pardon. Devils we called and we can never send them away. They are all round us; will go with us when we got out of this place; will slide down the street beside us and pluck at our skirts. They’ll be always with us. Oh God, oh Jesus, oh bright Mary, why did we do it? Why did we do it at all? We’ve destroyed ourselves. We can’t prosper now.

  *

  One of the bars of the small window halved the sun’s dropping disc exactly; split it in two segments the colour of red-hot iron. Lord Anthony changed his position a little to see past it; wanted to fill his eye with the whole picture this time. Beneath him, from the footings of the Castle, Pontefract slid down steeply in a tumble of mottled roofs and wisps of smoke; spread out toward the green links of the Calder and the Aire: a pretty town.

  Lord Anthony drew his hand curiously round his neck, inside his collar. Sunset: it was queer to think, a little hard to believe, that before the hurrying sun had come back to the place where it stood now, the axe would have gone through where his hand stroked; his brain, the best of all his possessions, would not belong to him any more; would have been separated from his body, blinded and deafened, left with no voice or hands to carry its schemes out. Before sunset to-morrow he would be in Purgatory. It would be a long penance: many hundreds or thousands of years. Thou shalt not murder: Holy Harry, with his mouth open in a silent shriek, dead in the Wakefield Tower, blood on him. Thou shalt not commit adultery: women, so many of them, in such soft beds — easy game, not worth the expiation they would cost. Thou shalt not bear false witness: George of Clarence, blue-faced with poison, his life lied away. Thou shalt not envy. He had envied many men, but not for himself alone; for his family too, for the house of Wydvylle. Perhaps that would be taken into account. His own neck was warm and firm under his hand. He fingered the muscles; probed to find the hardness of bone at the nape; stroked the big veins. All those the axe would have to go through: at one cut, please God, a clean finish. They would leave him to the last, and he would watch and say prayers whilst Sir Richard Grey and Vaughan and Hawte were made an end of. The axe would be blunted when it came to his turn; but if it cut the bone at the first stroke it would be enough. Two days ago, after he had been moved from Middleham to Sheriff button, they had condemned him. The shifty-eyed Percy of Northumberland was his judge, mumbling the sentence as though it were an apology, and then Richard Ratcliffe had brought him here, to the four-towered Castle springing from live rock where Richard of Bordeaux had been murdered by Henry Bolingbroke a lifetime ago. It was his sister, Elizabeth the silly Queen, who had brought the end on him. Poor fool, he thought, she will be like my body without my head when I am gone. Her feeble plot had hardly been formed before it was quelled. Ratcliffe, kind to him after a gruff fashion, told him the news: how the Lord Protector, sitting at Council in the White Tower, had suddenly ordered the arrest of Lord Hastings and the Bishop of Ely; had played the comedy of Northampton over again, telling the appalled conspirators to their white faces just what they had done and what they had planned to do: witchcraft in cellars, Writ of Supersedeas to forestall Parliament, murder if need be. Lord Anthony could see and hear him doing it, with his expressionless corpse-face and his small voice. Lord Hastings, the dark-eyed, affectionate man who had hated the Wydvylles when it would have paid him to love them and embraced them when it was too late to help them or himself, did not last even as long as he had. They kept him in the Tower a week; tried him after a fashion; headed him early one morning on a convenient log of timber on Tower Green. William Gatesby, his most trusted follower, had been the one to betray him and the whole design. Trust no one, thought Lord Anthony. I learned that too late in the day. We fall by our friends. Buckingham or Gatesby: there was never a plot that someone wouldn’t sell. Jane Shore had been turned over to the Bishop of London to deal with as a common trollop. Learned Thomas Kemp was not one to let his eye spare an adulteress, but she was lucky for all that; better a public penance with a taper in her hand and her feet bare than the death that was assigned to witches. Queen Elizabeth had been forced to render her younger son up out of Sanctuary. The house of Wydvylle was shattered as though a mine of powder were sprung under it.

  Too many blows dulled the mind so that the greatest shock made the least tumult. Now that everything was strange and fading, in this last stopping-place before death, Lord Anthony found he took the wildest news of all without any amazement; might have expected it. Blind man I was, he thought, with my eyes in the ends of the earth and not in my head. We were not as cunning as we supposed when we brought Edward to the altar at Grafton Regis. Married already: I should have guessed it. The Wydvylles have not profited so very much by their marriages, after all. Pitiful to think of Elizabeth plotting so gaily against Richard, of all men, when he had that in his sleeve to crush her with: poor silly woman, she should have told me the truth, and I would have warned her not to draw a dagger on a man who had a sword at her throat. She has killed me now, and perhaps the chil
dren. Bastards or not bastards, if Richard wants a quiet throne he’ll make an end of them. Richard of England and France, third of that name since the Conquest: that is what the grave is called into which all the pride and devices of the house of Wydvylle go down and are buried. Richard of Gloucester, Richard of England, both unlucky titles: Richard Lionheart spent his best years in prison and died of an arrow. Richard of Bordeaux was starved to death somewhere in this place. He starts with the stars against him; would be best to run no hazards.

  The sun’s lower curve rested as though balanced on a shoal of slate-blue clouds. With a sudden scatter of cries, a flight of rooks began to drift over the town toward the Castle. Lord Anthony leaned his shoulder against the embrasure of the window and continued to look out. The axe to-morrow: not another sunset, even through bars, not another flight of rooks, no more sight or sound. He would not ride a horse again, or drink wine out of a gold cup, or run his long, possessive fingers over the surface of his moss-agate vase. He had loved beauty, and would be blind. That did not matter. Beauty was everlasting. In Italy, after he was gone, men would still carve and paint and build most wonderful things. In London, Mr. Caxton’s creaking engine would still stamp wisdom on paper. French cathedrals would sound still with the golden music of Ockeghem. A hundred years hence his own poems, his translations of Christine de Pisan and the old philosophers, might still be read. Beauty was for eternity, and in the eternity he was bound for it became perfection. It was not that loss that grieved him as he rested himself on the cold stone and saw the clouds crawl slowly and unrecallably up the face of the sun. It was the work to which he had given the best of himself that would go down forever; would die when he died. The house of Wydvylle that had grown like a cedar from his father’s and his brother’s graves would be cut down to make his coffin. So many schemes and sins, such plotting in corners, such clever reading of men’s hearts was wasted. He had ridden his high horse and seen the blood of his enemies: the King’s kinsman, Anthony Earl Rivers, Baron Scales and Nucelles, Chief Butler of England: and in a moment of time, from the least dreamed-of quarter, Fate had broken all of it into nothing; had shown him fragility where he depended on strength, hatred where he was sure of loyalty, as though the cup in his hand turned suddenly into a rotten skull or his own dagger leapt out of its sheath to stab him.