by Lucy Beckett
It was quiet in the village, dinner-time, when he walked past the houses. He took the lane up the narrow valley to Arden. It was a lifeless day, overcast and dull. He walked quickly, hearing his footsteps in the empty lane, hearing the absence that accompanied him. The same cow-parsley was high, seedy, musty, by the white stony ruts of the lane as it had been the day Tom fetched him down from Arden to Easterside.
When he reached Arden, he looked down the track that led to the mill. It was not his any more. Smoke came from the chimney, and at the side of the millstream a wagon was being unloaded by two men he did not know.
He went on past the shut gate in the priory wall and round to an old door into the nuns’ kitchen garden. The latch had been rotten, was rotten still. There was groundsel growing between the rows of beans and dandelion clocks thick along the path. He looked at the apple trees. Clusters of spurs had grown out unpruned by the greened-over cuts that Robin’s knife had made. He heard laughter from the bakehouse door, which was propped open. He went and looked in. A nun he remembered and two other women were standing at the table kneading dough, their arms floury up to the elbows. A warm smell of sweat and yeast blew out at him. The idiot-woman sat on the floor by the oven where she had always sat, rolling together and pulling apart a dirty piece of dough.
After a few moments one of the women saw him. “Well I never! What dost tha’ want, lad?”
The nun looked towards him, but he was against the light and she did not recognise him. He shook his head and ran off through the garden. When he was outside he looked back through the crack between the door and the wall and saw the nun standing on the bakehouse step. She peered about, her elbows against her sides and her hands in the air so that flour should not fall on her habit. She shrugged and went in.
He had only come to see.
He walked slowly. The lane back to the village seemed too short. There was nowhere he could go except to Easterside, and he did not want to get there before dark. He found the empty shell of a blackbird’s egg lying in the ditch and spent some time hunting about in the hedge until he found the deserted nest. At the bridge he slithered down the bank and stared into the shallows for lurking trout. Not seeing any, he set flat stones spinning across the pool, counting the number of times they jumped.
The village church stood by itself close to the river, a short way down from the bridge. As he passed the gate of the churchyard, he saw something bright through the leaning gravestones. He opened the gate and went down the path. The bright thing was a wreath of flowers, roses and blue cranesbill and lilies of the valley, twined with branches of rue and myrtle and laid on a fresh grave. The squares of turf, their edges cut straight with a spade, had not long been put back on top of the mound of earth. They did not fit close together, so that there were gaps between them through which the bare earth showed. He looked round. The grass on the other graves grew dense and even as in a field, and the mounds were almost level with the ground.
The gaps between the sods oppressed him. He wanted them to grow together quickly so that the grave would be no different from all the others. He knelt down and began trying to push the edges together, but they would not move at all unless he lifted a whole piece and slid it up—they were very heavy—and then he had opened a wider gap further down. He started to cry, seeing that it was useless. He shook his head and gritted his teeth. He would not give up. He would shift them all until they were so close that no earth showed between, and then he would find a spade and cut some turf from somewhere else to cover the spaces he had made.
He stayed on his knees, lifting the lumps of grass and soil with both hands. Some of them broke as he lifted them because they had dried and crumbled easily. He had reached the head of the grave and laid the flowers beside him on the ground when he saw the priest, Master Husthwaite, coming down the path towards him. He sat back on his heels. His hands were black with soil, and he could feel tears dried on his face and smudges where he had pushed his hair out of his eyes. He waited to be shouted at. The priest stopped at the foot of the grave and looked at what he had done, then at him.
“Was she your friend?” he said.
The kindness of the question confused him.
“She was—aye, she was,” he said, getting to his feet and brushing the soil off his hands. “She did it, I know she did it, but it wasn’t right of them to kill her for it. It was the black dog made her do it. She’s not ever worried sheep, and I know she never would again. It was—”
He saw the blank look on the priest’s face and understood his mistake. He looked down at the grave, the uneven patches of bare earth. He did not know, it had not occurred to him even to wonder, whose grave it was.
“No.” He stood desolate now, his hands hanging at his sides. “I don’t know what they called—her—that’s buried here.”
“And your dog?”
“This morning, at the shearing. My brother killed her for worrying sheep. I had her from a pup, at Arden.”
“You’re Thomas Fletcher’s boy, from Easterside.”
They seldom came down the mile and a half from the farm to the church on a Sunday morning. Now and then his father would wake in a fit of terror, put on a clean shirt, and bellow round the yard that they were all to hear Mass for the peril of his soul. Tom would raise his head, look at his father with contempt, and go on with his work. But he, impressed and afraid, would go with his father and all the way would hear him mutter to himself: “She’ll not rest for my evil ways. She’ll not rest, not while I’m dead and gone.”
They would stand at the noisy back of the church where the young men talked and laughed through the Mass. But his father would be among them stock-still, his eyes closed and tears creeping down his cheeks. Then he would go to the ale-house and get drunk, and he himself would run off to the river and sit until he was hungry, watching the water slip past under the trees.
“Aye, sir.”
“Put back the flowers. Good lad.”
He straightened up, and the priest said: “The woman who lies here was a good soul, past three-score years, and I have no doubt she rests in peace. Come with me. I shall say Vespers now and pray for all the dead.”
In the church he knelt where he was told, at the altar step, while the priest said softly words he did not understand. Afterwards the priest took him back to his house at the bottom of the village. In the dark parlour, where he had never been before, Master Husthwaite gave him bread and butter and strawberries to eat, and milk to drink. While he was eating, there was a knock at the door. The priest went out, telling him to wait until he came back. He looked round the parlour. There was a piece of stuff on the wall, fringed at the ends, with a dark, intricate pattern on it. He touched the pattern with his finger and found that the surface of the stuff was soft, almost like the fur of a cat. There was a chair beside the hearth with arms carved like rolls of parchment. On the seat of the chair he saw a very small book. He picked it up and opened it, taking it to the window so that he could see it better. He had not held a book in his hands since he had been at Easterside.
Some of the letters in the book were different from those in the prioress’s hornbook, from which she had taught him the alphabet and the Our Father. The few words he could read meant nothing to him. It must be Latin. He turned the neat pages. Something about the book, its smallness, the fineness of the writing, made him long to be able to read what was written in it.
The priest came back, stopping on the threshold at the sight of him with the book in his hands. He closed it and began to say that he was sorry, but the priest waved a hand towards him and shut the door gently.
“No, no. You did right. But you have not learned to read?”
“No. Aye. The prioress taught me, when I was a lad, at Arden. But there are no books in my father’s house, and I have near forgotten. And she never taught me Latin, though she said she would. It’s a long while since.”
The grey light from the window fell on the priest’s face; the look he saw on it gave him th
e courage to say:
“Will you tell me, sir, what is written in this book?”
“Ah—that book. I copied it myself, long ago, when I was not much older than you are now. I was a student then, in a city far away from here, a city called Padua.”
He opened it again. “But it’s so gradely done.”
The priest laughed. “That was how we all wrote when I was a boy. And we copied those old scripts in Italy, in the sunshine, as if we had travelled the ages ourselves to bring them back.”
He took the book from him.
“This one tells of bees.”
“Only bees?” He was disappointed.
“Bees. How to care for them, how to make a hive and where to put it, how the bees live and fight, how they raise their young and gather honey.”
“But—But the prioress told me Latin was the language of God and the Church.”
“The prioress was right. But Latin is the language also of other things. All that is told here of bees and bee-keeping is set down in verses of great beauty. The poet who made them used every skill he had, every device of craft and guile, so that they should be fair and memorable. When you have understood their words and learned their measure, this book will stay with you always, for its grace. You might not be able to repeat a single verse of it, but there is that in the whole which you will never forget.”
He stooped to pick up from the floor the cup out of which Robert had drunk his milk.
“The verses are like the chased silver of this cup. It would be possible to read the book for what it teaches of bees, as it would be possible to hold this cup only to drink from it. You did, I daresay. But look at it now.”
He held it out. Robert took it and looked, in the weakening light. He saw, delicately drawn and just raised from the silver surface, the figures of a man running, a woman with her hair loose behind her, also running, rippling water, a tree, the same man with his head bent, still and sorrowful. Then he had turned the beaker right round, and there was the man running once more.
“A drink from that cup will quench your thirst no better than if you had drunk it from an earthen pot that you might break tomorrow and think nothing of. The potter has already thrown a hundred more you could not tell from your own. But once you have studied the silver beaker, touched it often, and learned its lines, you will not forget it as long as you live, though you could not draw the smallest part of it.”
“What does it mean? Who is he, the man, and why is she running away?”
“He is Apollo, she Daphne. In the tale, Apollo loved Daphne, but she was afraid and ran away from him. He followed her through the fields and between the trees, but she only grew more frightened and ran faster than the wind. At last when he had almost caught her, she reached the bank of the river Peneus. The river was her father, and he changed her into a tree. Then she was free. Only the brightness remained in her, but this too Apollo loved.”
He turned the beaker round in his hands. He saw the speed in the running, the fear. He traced with his finger the waters of the river, the leafy branches of the tree, but not Apollo grieving.
He said: “Was it her dying, when she was changed into a tree?”
“Aye. It was her dying.”
That night he slept in a bed in Master Husthwaite’s house. The next morning he and the priest sat side by side in front of a grammar-book, and he began his first lesson.
Unwillingly, he let the memory fade. After fifty years the whole day had come back to him, as fresh and clear as if it had been today.
He shook his head, to rid it of the past, and worked for a time, his pen scratching in the silent library.
When he looked again out of the window, it had stopped raining. The cobbles in the court gleamed under a white sun.
He looked down at his old hands resting on the book. They had turned Master Husthwaite’s silver cup in the twilight. They had held the neat copy of the fourth Georgic and lifted the crumbling sods in the churchyard. When they were already old, they had picked up the child from beside his mother, put him in the cradle, and given him away. Soon they would be folded in the grave, and the grass would grow together over them and all they had touched.
He stood up and opened the casement. The air was fresh and damp, the dust laid. A man trotted into the court, reined in his horse, and shouted, so that the horse danced sideways on the cobbles: “The cardinal returns tonight!”
He shut his book and stood for a while longer, watching and listening as the palace came to life.
10
July 1558
Don Gomez Suarez de Figueroa, Count of Feria, at the court of Queen Mary at Richmond, to King Philip of Spain and England, in Brussels; July 1558.
“. . . Your Majesty’s instructions as to my departure from England having been safely received, I shall leave for Flanders with all possible speed, trusting to be of service to your Majesty in whatever negotiations with the ambassadors of the king of France it may be judged expedient to undertake. I shall take my leave of the queen at the earliest opportunity; her Majesty’s health is not, I fear, greatly improved of late, although on some days she has been well enough to receive certain councillors in her privy chamber. There is no immediate anxiety for her life; I doubt, however, whether we may now look for any return to that vigour of mind and body which she showed at the start of the war. The cardinal-archbishop ails also, of the quartan fever it is said, and his household so protects him from the demands of state that it is now difficult to approach him even by letter.
“All in all, I must own to your Majesty that I shall not be sorry to quit, for some while, this realm and Kingdom of England, where there is no love or goodwill shown to any Spaniard, so that my servants are afraid to go about the streets on their lawful occasions for the slanders and jostling they may expect to receive, while I myself am in these last weeks addressed with the scantest courtesy by the ministers of the queen. Every honest Catholic councillor has at his back two or three Protestant lords and gentlemen lurking in the shadows in expectation of the coming of the Lady Elizabeth to the throne when the queen shall have departed this mortal life. It is said, moreover, that the common people no longer attend the Mass in the numbers that were seen two or three years gone by and that in the city of London heresy is grown so rife that Bishop Bonner is at his wits’ end to know what to do for the best. Seven heretics, the most insolent and loud in error of those taken at Islington in May, were indeed burned in Smithfield on the eve of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, but the uproar and tumult among the mob was so great that it has been resolved to burn a further six outside the city, at a place called Brentford, in order to prevent any other such disturbance of the peace.
“The body politic must without doubt be cleansed of these warts and pustules, but there is scarce any encouragement given to the many who have thus far resisted the blandishments of the new opinions, and for this I cannot but hold the cardinal to blame, sick though he now be. To allow heretics burned at the stake so to become the heroes and exemplars of the meanest rabble (which it is not the custom in London to suppress by force of arms) has been the very grossest fault of policy, though I do hear that in the more distant parts of the realm there are less or none of these disorders and the people there do show a fairer loyalty to the Church of their fathers.
“God willing, I shall be with your Majesty in Flanders, to my great joy, before the month is out.”
11
July—August 1558
On his return the cardinal was carried through the courtyard on a litter. He had become very ill at Richmond, and for three weeks after his return he did not leave his room. Robert Fletcher heard no one say that he was close to death, but he saw the worn faces of secretaries and chaplains and how quietly they walked the galleries, as if they were afraid to wake one who slept. Every day a messenger came from the queen and clattered out of the gate ten minutes later, taking with him the letter that had been prepared for him. Meals were eaten in silence. Signor Bernardi and two or three others stayed b
ehind in the chapel after Vespers on their knees, and one night at supper he saw an Italian nobleman who had arrived that afternoon rise from the table having eaten nothing and cover his face with his hands.
He did not feel shut out from their anxiety. He, too, prayed that the cardinal would not die, and beneath his prayer lay both a longing to see him again and sadness for the imminent falling apart of the peaceful household. He was grateful to them all for their discreet courtesy; it was impossible to mistake its source.
At the beginning of August the weather again became hot and sultry. The streets stank, the river at ebb tide flowed low and greasy, and the air was so still that from his window in the library he could hear the shouts of the ferrymen on Millbank. In the space of three days two of the guards and a boy in the kitchen died of the plague. Undressing at night behind the panelled partitions of the clerks’ chamber, he knew that the rest, like him, were looking for the reddened swellings that almost certainly meant a rapid, painful death.
The cardinal had been ill too long for his disease to be the plague.
In the second week of the month there were two days of storms. Afterwards the sky cleared and the sun shone as brightly as before, but the air had a new freshness. A breeze agitated the leaves and ruffled the surface of the river. The faces about him lightened; footsteps quickened in the flagged hall; people smiled as they greeted each other in the mornings. The cardinal was better.
His spirits, also, had risen at the change in the weather. He remembered how in the winter of his death even Master Husthwaite had been cheered by a warm day, by an afternoon when he could sit in the doorway and feel the sun on his face. He remembered also that to talk of the weather would bring a little life back to his voice. How many inches of snow had fallen, how quickly it was thawing, whether the wind had shifted to a new quarter, whether the rain had come in time for the sown corn. These were things that were the same as they had been when he was young.
