‘It seems that my mother is as conscientious as ever in the discharge of her duties,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘Nothing escapes her notice.’
Lady Bryan had better watch her out for her little slips of the tongue, I thought, or there will be another one in the Tower.
Late in summer the Queen was well enough to join the King on his progress and when they returned to court everyone knew that she was no longer pregnant. There were even rumours that she had never been pregnant at all.
‘Gracious me, do the courtiers think she stuffed a cushion under her stomacher?’ Mistress Pudding said.
This was not the worst of the gossip. Lady Mary was allowed to visit the court at Greenwich and she suffered severe stomach pains and vomiting. She pleaded for her mother to be allowed to visit her, but the King would not allow it. Lady Mary blamed Queen Anne for her sickness. Fitzroy had also been seriously ill. In the outer courtyard people began to gossip that the Queen had attempted to poison her stepchildren.
‘It would be easy enough for Anne Boleyn to get antimony,’ Aunt Bess said when she came to the confectionary with clean caps and aprons. ‘Most households have a stone or two to use as an emetic to cast out evil humours. Your father asks me for one occasionally to void his stubborn bowels. Everyone knows that it is poisonous in large amounts. Lady Mary’s was indeed, so I’ve heard, a painful, vomiting sickness.’
‘It was a very sudden illness that struck the Lady Mary and the king’s beloved son, and Queen Anne Boleyn has much cause to hate them both,’ Mother said, and she had that look on her face which meant that she had more to say and was pausing for a moment only so that her words would have greater effect. She lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘A sudden illness can be brought about by the sorcery of a witch.’
‘Joan, speak not one more word. Surely, you cannot believe that the Queen would …’ Mistress Pudding said in a hushed tone as if afraid that the very walls were listening to our conversation. ‘I cannot have such talk in my confectionary. You know that I cannot. Would you have us all sent to the Tower and follow the Nun of Kent to our executions?’
‘The Lady Mary is always having pains and vomiting,’ I said, glaring at Mother. ‘It happens every month. You would think she is the only woman to have to suffer with her terms the fuss she makes, always asking Lady Shelton for this food or that food which is out of season and asking for physicians to give her physic.’
‘Every month, Queen Anne will be counting the days again, wishing for her baby boy, while she watches her husband loving his bastard son, just like poor Queen Katherine had to do,’ Aunt Bess said.
‘Who would have thought it to be so difficult for our King to get his boy. The French King has sons a plenty,’ Mistress Pudding said.
‘The King might name his bastard for his heir,’ Father said, when I visited him in the bakery. ‘In which case, he can get rid of Anne Boleyn and her English Bibles and welcome the new Pope Paul to England. That little duchess you’ve told me of might fancy a crown upon her husband’s head.’
‘The Duke of Norfolk would certainly enjoy seeing it there. That would bring a smile to his sour face. But this could not be. The heir has to be legitimate, Father.’
‘King Henry changes laws to suit himself. A king who can get rid of a pope and a wife can do anything he pleases, even to stripping out our hearts and telling us what to believe.’
Father looked at me so strangely when he said this, with his face so gaunt and hollow, I had to look away. I wanted to make him feel better but I could think of nothing to say.
Chapter 17
28th August 1558
I cannot forget the terrible plea I made to God in my fear, on the day when the searchers came and set upon White Boy. My husband sees that I am fretful and asks what is amiss; what ails me? I cannot tell him that I have cursed our precious, unborn child. Our priest gave me no relief at confession. My penance is no trial; Mass and compline daily. He cannot ask a pregnant woman to fast. The priest has probably mumbled the same weary response to every one of his parishioners who entered the confessional before me. His faith in the old religion is no truer than mine. He believes what he is told to believe. He was a true friend of the gospel for King Edward and took a wife. Now he is a Roman Catholic for Queen Mary and his wife has vanished.
My husband says that our priest is like the river: he has no colour of his own but changes his hue according to what drifts upon him. What faith will Elizabeth expect of him when she is Queen, I wonder, for my husband has heard tavern talk that Queen Mary is mortally sick of a tumour in her belly even though it be treason to speak of it.
If the new religion had never come I would be satisfied with the old ways. The priest would bless me with God’s forgiveness and my guilt would fall away like skin from a coney. When the priest is faithless God becomes distant, and folks look elsewhere for their souls to be healed.
Aunt Bess knows of a cunning woman who dwells beside the river.
*
My husband is sitting at the hearth rubbing his longbow with a mixture of resin and tallow.
‘My aunt has been talking of a wise woman who lives by an old stone bridge beside a little ruined chapel,’ I say idly.
‘What old wives’ tale has given your aunt an interest in such a place?’ he asks. ‘Do mud nymphs live beneath to cast their evil spells upon travellers who pass by.’
‘My aunt has more sense than to listen to tales of nut-brown maids beneath bridges,’ I say. ‘We were merely talking of where we might find thousand-leaved grass that the boatmen use to close up wounds and prevent swelling.’
‘It is merely common yarrow and grows in abundance in the field where your aunt lays out her laundry to dry.’
‘Mistress,’ White Boy prompts, ‘did not your aunt tell you that it is a bridge where pilgrims would travel in the olden times?’
‘There are many old bridges upstream and downstream, each with a chapel either ruined or no and a hermit or sprite to boot. If that’s your fancy, take your pick,’ my husband says.
‘But only one sacred shrine where pilgrims would touch the habit of St Augustine who caused the blind to see,’ White Boy says.
My husband ignores him and turns to me. ‘Pray tell your aunt to keep away from our servant with her meddling nonsense.’
I am silent. My husband curses as he struggles to stretch the hempen string into the horn nocks with his waterman’s calloused hands.
‘This wise woman has a fragment of St Augustine’s habit,’ I say conversationally, as if I were talking of a dish of thrushes in the cook shop.’
White Boy goes to my husband at the hearth. He takes the bow and fits the string with his little rats-feet hands that can see.
‘Master, I should like to visit this wise woman.’
White Boy cannot see that my husband’s face is flushed livid but, somehow, he senses his anger and edges himself into the corner of the settle even before my husband speaks.
‘Shame upon you, my wife. Would you take our good honest servant to a thieving piss-prophetess to touch an old rag that she probably found in the jakes and let him believe that by some miracle his sight will be restored?’
Never has he spoken to me so harshly and before our servant too.
‘Nay, nay, master,’ White Boy says urgently, like a schoolboy excusing himself from a prank. ‘I expect no miracle. Only maybe that I might walk in the footsteps of some blind beggar who was healed and share his joy.’
My husband comes to where I am sitting at the table cutting up one of Mother’s linen petticoats to make a cap and smock for the baby. ‘And you my wife? Why do you wish to consort with evil? You are six months gone with child. Would you have the babe injured by the devil’s demons?’
‘It is natural for a pregnant woman to wish to consult an older, wiser woman.’
‘Your aunt is old and believes herself to be wise. Consult her.’
I say nothing. We hear the fire crackling and the cook pot bubbling. White Boy plucks
the hemp upon my husband’s bow as if it were his harp. The dull sound vibrates, keeping time with the rise and fall of my husband’s angry breast. Music to fuel his wrath.
‘There is more to this than you are telling me.’
How can I tell my husband that I have cursed our child?
‘I need to see this woman before my time comes. It is women’s business.’
‘Secrets, secrets, always secrets with you Avis.’
‘We are all secretive. It is the way we live. The times have made it so.’
He has his own secrets. His night-time journeys across the Thames have become more frequent. I would remind him of these but think better of it.
After a while I tell him that even priests have visited wise women.
‘Tis common knowledge that Cardinal Wolsey visited the Nun of Kent at the monastery of Syon to hear her prophecies.’ I know my husband has fond memories of the old cardinal.
‘Much good it did him.’
‘She prophesied the death of Anne Boleyn.’
‘She said a Queen would burn. That has not happened yet.’
‘Friar Peto from Greenwich foresaw that when King Henry VIII died, God rest his soul, dogs would lick his blood. And it happened thus that upon St Valentine’s Day, when the old King’s coffin rested at Syon on its journey from Westminster to Windsor, blood oozed from it and the dogs …’
‘Dogs within the sanctity of a chapel. I think not, Avis. Peace, peace, enough. I’ll listen to no more of these wives’ tales. He places his hand on the top of my risen belly. ‘I could rest a pot of ale here and it would not tip. Fetch the jug, wife. Let us see if it be so.’
My husband is laughing now and White Boy joins in, relieved that the anger around him has dissolved.
‘Do you know the place where thousand-leaved grasses grow by a bridge with a ruined chapel?’ I dare to ask when he is calm and supping his ale.
‘Aye, I know of it,’ he admits with a heavy sigh.’ It is many miles upstream. There was a shrine to Our Lady for a hundred years or more until Cromwell persuaded King Henry to destroy it in 1538. The little chapel is dedicated to St Augustine of Hippo and is in ruins. I know nothing, mind, of any old hag who dwells beneath the bridge.’
‘It is not a man’s business to know of such women.’
*
He takes me, of course, to visit the wise woman.
‘If you must go then let it be soon, before the hazardous late autumn tides,’ he says several days later as if we had never quarrelled. A tallow candle lights our bedchamber where I lie reading my English New Testament. He opens the shutters and stands at the window watching the sky.
‘The half-moon brings low neap tides. I will take you the day after the morrow when the tides be lowest. We will need to find accommodation overnight in the hamlet and wait upon the tides the following morn. Your aunt must accompany you.’
‘There is no need to trouble my aunt.’ My voice is croaky as if I am about to burst into tears. I am excited and ashamed together. He will lose two days’ earnings and he must pay his company dues come Michaelmas.
‘There is every need. I’ll not accompany you into this witch’s lair and I’ll not have you go alone. Your aunt with her long mule’s face and her talk of devils and sprites will be a match for any old hag.’
‘I need to speak alone with the wise woman,’ I insist. ‘Aunt Bess will hinder my purpose. All her talk is of the Mary Rose and how King Henry watched her sinking and has been thus these eighteen years. I will speak with this woman alone, or not at all.’
*
I tread upon old stone steps worn away at their centres through hundreds of years of pilgrim footsteps. Time shrinks. I could be the first traveller to cross this bridge or the last. Over the centuries the feeling is the same: the expectation that something mystical will happen; the hope of becoming closer to God; of being blessed; of finding peace and promise for the future.
My husband has given me a silver noble. ‘The old hag will speak fairer for your greater charity.’
A humble wattle and daub dwelling lies beside the bridge against the ruins of a little chapel where, for many centuries, pilgrims would have kneeled before the holy shrine to St Augustine. A hide drape makes shift for a door and it is a man’s voice that bids me enter, if I come in peace, yet it is a woman’s gentle hand that leads me through the dim interior to a bench beside a trestle. She pulls aside a ragged window blind and I see her clearly.
She is the very antithesis of the dirty old hag my husband had feared. She is around my age. Certainly, she could not have reached two score years. Her skin is pale and smooth. She wears a white wimple, crisp and clean, so at first I think she is a nun. Her woollen gown is plain and brown but it is not a nun’s habit and, anyway, the cloth is too soft and costly. At her wrists are white lawn ruffles, such as titled ladies might wear. Although a book of prayers hangs from her girdle I see she has no rosary. Does she not know that Queen Mary’s laws have returned the Roman Catholic religion to our country? I wonder if she is a Protestant and I am afraid, as once I was afraid to be amongst Catholics. Where is the man who spoke to me at the threshold? for I cannot see another person in the small chamber. Does he hide somewhere spying, trying to entrap Reformist recusants to become fuel for the Queen’s stakes?
‘You know upon what day you make your pilgrimage?’
Her voice startles me. The male voice that welcomed me belongs to her. It is as if a man were using her mouth to make his utterance. As if she were speaking in tongues.
‘Are we alone?’ I ask, peering around the central hearth into the darkness. I am ready to run back to my husband who waits across the river in his wherry.
‘We are alone, goodwife. I ask you again, do you know upon what day you have made your pilgrimage?’
I tell her that it is the twenty-eighth of August.
‘St Augustine of Hippo died upon this day.’
I tell her I did not know it. There are so many saints. Too many to remember.
‘You have come, quite by chance, to the site of an ancient shrine dedicated to St Augustine upon the anniversary of his death?’ she questions. ‘I am intrigued. What caused you to choose this day above all others?’
‘The moon and the tides,’ I say simply.
‘The moon and the tides,’ she repeats with great deliberation. ‘Water and the heavens. Know you then, goodwife, that the forces of nature and the heavenly bodies have together brought you to me.’
She speaks as if I have not come of my own choosing on a day that my husband deemed to be safest for the river currents, as if I have been charmed by forces beyond my control. Who is this person who lives in a beggar’s hovel yet wears fine clothes, who appears to be a woman yet speaks like a man, who gives the appearance of being a nun but talks like a magus? There are books and writing materials upon the table. She is an educated woman for sure. There is no fire in the hearth, no lingering odour of wood smoke or cooking, no hint of fresh herbs or spices. Only a dusty earthiness. How does she live, this moth woman who waits in darkness for visitors to let in the light?
‘My aunt advised me to speak with you,’ I say.
She takes a handful of nuts from a bowl and throws them into the rear of the chamber. I hear rodent sounds; shuffling and scratching.
‘You have been thinking upon the teachings of St Augustine, goodwife. This is why you have come to this place upon this day.’
‘Madam, I know nothing of the teachings of St Augustine except that I have heard from my aunt that he gave sight to the blind.’
‘Have you not given thought this day to the nature of time.’
This is not a question. She is telling me that she knows my thoughts.
‘Only that I have, upon ascending the steps of this bridge, thought of all past pilgrims who have travelled here and of those who might come later, and thought I saw the centuries meeting here, at this place.’
She asks me if I know that St Augustine wrote of walking up a flight of stairs
and entering “the vast meadows of memory”.
I tell her again that I know nothing of the works of St Augustine. I am uneasy in my mind. It is a strange and mysterious notion indeed to be thinking St Augustine’s thoughts upon his death day.
‘Have you not also this day, thought of the nature of free will in matters of religion?’
I do not know how to answer. This seems like reformist thinking to me and I am afraid. My husband has talked to me of humanist pamphlets he read in Edward’s reign. I dare not discuss such matters now. It is heresy. We are all supposed to be Catholics. We must submit to the Pope and to God’s will.
‘Goodwife,’ she reproves in her solemn priest’s voice. ‘You entered upon this journey knowing nought of St Augustine except that he is the patron saint for sore eyes, yet you have been contemplating his theology for many days. You have wished to feel the presence of God and craved for God’s grace and forgiveness. This is so, is it not?’
Who is this woman who knows my most secret thoughts? When I kneel down to pray at my bedside can she hear what is in my head?
‘Who are you?’ I whisper.
She makes no answer. In the dark recess of the chamber I see nothing, only hear the rodent scurry and scratch amongst the rushes; hear its teeth gnaw greedily into the nuts.
Better not to tell my husband of this creature. He will believe for sure that the woman is a witch and this rodent is her familiar spirit through which she makes her pact with the Devil.
He will say she hides the Devil’s mark beneath her wimple. He is a brave man, my husband. He will shoot London Bridge for a hefty fare when the tide is on the ebb, the river high and the current strong, though other boatmen shake their heads fearing for their lives. Only evil does he fear: the Devil and his demons. Witches.
Mayflowers for November Page 16
