The Man On a Donkey Read online

  Dame Elizabeth stood for a moment at the door, looking across the thin slit of light that came between the shutters, to the blank curtains of the bed in the dusky corner of the room. Not a sound nor stir of movement came from the child behind them.

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  ‘We shall start at sunrise.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  Mistress Elizabeth lifted the latch, and Christabel held her breath, waiting for the sound of the door closing which would tell her that she was alone. But her mother still lingered.

  ‘You must be a good girl and heed what you’re told.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  She heard her mother sigh sharply, as if with exasperation. ‘Well,’ said Elizabeth Cowper rather loudly, but more to herself than Christabel – ‘Well. It’s the best for you. I’ve done what I can for you all. Go to sleep.’ The door shut sharply even before Christabel had time to reply – ‘Yes, Madame.’

  So she waited a little, listening to her mother’s deliberate, heavy tread. A stair creaked, that was the sixth one down; another creaked with quite a different note, that was the last but one; then she heard the parlour door shut. She waited till she had counted over her fingers twice, then she pulled her feet from under the sheet and the green counterpane, and slid out of bed. But still she stood listening.

  There was no sound in the house. From the yard outside came a steady burr, which she knew for the noise of Marget’s wheel. Old Marget always sat out in the yard spinning on warm evenings, following the sun from the edge of the wall to the mounting block, then to the hay-loft steps, and last of all, when the sunshine was no more than a narrow wedge, to the corner by the pigstyes.

  Christabel slunk across the room meaning to ease up the latch of the shutters and look down on Marget, but thought better of it, because Marget might look up. A knife-blade of sunshine still slit through the dusk from the joint in the shutters. She turned about in it, like a joint on a spit, twitching her shoulders, and enjoying the delicate warmth on her naked back. Then, with a sudden skip, she made for the bundles that lay alongside the wall at the far side of the room. Her purpose in stealing out of bed had not been any thought of taking a last look at the yard, the wool-store, or Marget, but to feel and finger and prod the bundles.

  The biggest of them was bulgy and soft, and swelled up between the cords that bound it; that was the feather-bed and the fustian blankets, and the two pairs of sheets. The second was not so billowy, but it was heavier and had a hard core to it, for in between the bolster and pillow there was a little square chest of ashwood that held, wrapped up in a tester of painted cloth for the bed, a silver spoon and two candlesticks, two pewter plates and a little brass pot. The two other bundles were quite small. In one was a pair of tongs, a frying-pan and a skillet. In the other, which was the smallest of all, were her three new shifts, two pairs of shoes, and the habit of a novice of the Order of St. Benedict – white woollen gown, white linen coif and veil, with enough woollen cloth to make hosen for the next two years, and the great cup Edward – all these things packed up in a coverlet of striped say, red, white and green.

  Christabel hung over the bundles, wriggling her fingers into the folds in the hope of touching what was inside, poking them, thumping them gently with her fist, feeling them softly all over. She did not envy her eldest sister, even though she had married a knight, and he was just now building a new house which would have glass in all the windows of the Hall, and of the summer and winter parlours – and carved wainscot too. If Christabel could have had the house without the husband it would have been different. But as that couldn’t be she thought, ‘This is better. He tore Meg’s best sheets tumbling into bed drunk with his boots on. No one can tear my sheets. They’re mine.

  She punched the big bundle again, possessively and defiantly, and then, hearing a door open downstairs, scuttled across the room and dived between the curtains of the bed.

  *

  Next morning the dale was still full of mist when they turned up the road which led to the fells, but here the sun was warm on their backs, the larks were up, and the sky blue without a cloud. Their shadows, jerking along the road before them, were absurd pointed shapes; the two big bundles corded on the mule’s pack saddle showed in the dust like shadows of another and huger pair of ears. Christabel, riding pillion behind her mother, kept looking back – not to see the shadows, nor to see the last of Richmond, where the smoke was going up as the mist cleared, thin and steady and blue as hyacinths, against the woods beyond the town; but to see her goods coming safely after her.

  There were, as well as the mule laden with her gear, two others going light. On the way home all three would be almost hidden below the great sarplers of wool, for Christabel’s father would be buying wool up and down the dale – wool from the Manor and Priory at Marrick, wool from the little House of Cistercian Nuns a mile down the river, and from the Manor at Grinton and the Manor at Marske. The two seven-pound leaden wool-weights, bearing the King’s leopards and lilies and joined by a strap like a stirrup leather, hung down on either side of his horse in front of the saddle.

  They stopped about noon to dine, and sat down on a bank beside the road. The turf was short, crisp and wiry, and meddled with bright pink thyme, and yellow crow’s-foot. A shepherd came near as they sat eating, and crossed the road, his flock going before him. They were fresh from the shearing, very trim in their black and white, small black faces, neat black stockings, and some spotted with black; when the sun shone through their ears it made them rose-red. On the wool of every sheep the shear-marks showed like ripple-marks.

  The shepherd knew Master Cowper quite well, and stopped to talk. The Wool-man gave him a pull of ale out of the leather bottle, and a bit of brawn between two tranches of white bread; when the shepherd saw the white bread the look came into his eyes that a dog has when it is begging, rapt and exalted. While he ate, with his crooked staff leaning on his shoulder, Master Cowper talked to him about wool, and the condition of the dale sheep, and the good weather they had had, – praise the Saints – for washing and shearing. And the shepherd, his mouth very full, nodded or shook his head in answer, and only when necessary tucked as much of the victuals as he could into his cheek, and spoke indistinctly through the crumbs.

  Christabel watched first the shepherd and then her father, for once approving of him. Master Cowper looked well, with his long legs stuck out before him in leathern riding hosen, and his doublet of fine holly-green Flanders cloth. He sat leaning back on his hands, very much at ease, and his beard jigged as he talked.

  ‘The shepherd thinks my father to be some very great man,’ Christabel decided to herself, forgetting that the shepherd knew every Wool-man who went up the dale.

  He moved on at last over the fell top, into the great silence of blue air above green turf, and even the sound of his piping died – for he had laid his pipe to his lips when he parted. In the noon heat Andrew Cowper and his wife and the servant drowsed; Christabel sat looking along the road, where it dipped and rose again and vanished over the long lift of the fells, going towards Marrick.

  They reached Marrick Manor in the early evening, and the bailiff came out, a great fat pleasant man who shouted for ale and cakes, and a dish of strawberries. So they all sat down on the benches inside the Hall, and Andrew Cowper talked again of wool. When Christabel had drunk dry her cup of wine and water, and shaken the crumbs from her lap, and licked as much of the pink of the strawberries from her fingers as she could, she stole out and stood on the steps looking about her. Across the dale there were woods; below her were woods; looking back towards Richmond there were woods too, with crags of stone sometimes breaking through, steep as the walls of the castle at Richmond. Only behind the Manor, in the direction from which they had come, there were the open fells, while further up the dale a great crouching hill, spined like a beast, and dark with heather, split the wide dale into two narrow valleys; beyond that hill were fells and more fells,
higher and higher, melting now into colourless disembodied shapes as the sun stood low over them.

  When her parents were ready they all left the Manor; the bailiff kissed Christabel, and pinched her ear, which she resented silently, and called her his pretty little sweetheart, which pleased her. Perkin, with the laden mule, was to go down by the longer way, but the others by the steps. So, when they had gone through some little stone-walled closes, they came to a flagged walk of stone that ran down the steep slope, dived into the woods, became steeper, and turned into great slabbed steps of stone. Christabel went bouncing down them at a run, bunching up her skirts with both hands. Sometimes she would stop, and look back at her parents, but mostly she looked forward, peering through the trees for a sight of the Church and the Priory. The trees however were too close, and the slope too steep; only now and then she caught a glimpse of the spined, sleeping hill at the head of the dale, or far down on the left, the quick, shallow Swale, running clear brown, and flashing white sparkles of light from its ripples.

  Then, quite suddenly, they were out of the woods, and upon a steep slope of clean turf, and there, just below, was the Priory; you could have thrown a stone down into its Court. The chief thing among the buildings was, of course, the Church, with its tall bell tower, but all round that there were stone-slatted roofs, and lower and smaller roofs of thatch. Christabel, searching the buildings with her eyes, saw an orchard, and there were ladies in it, walking about in twos and threes under the trees. They were everyone in black and white. One of them stopped and pointed upwards and spoke, and they all stood looking towards Christabel; she heard an exclamation go up from them, and, though she could distinguish no words, she said to herself, ‘They were watching for me to come,’ and she felt important. She did not know how little important a thing need be, and yet the Ladies would be watching for it.

  When the parents had sat talking a little while with the Prioress they said good-bye to Christabel, refusing an invitation to supper but accepting one to dine to-morrow at the Priory. They bade Christabel be a good girl, and serve God truly, and learn what she was taught, and do what she was told. She was to be sure and mind her manners, and not wipe her fingers, if they were greasy, on the table-cloth, and certainly not on the hangings – that from her father – and to keep her clothes neatly mended, ‘not cobbled, mind you’ – this from her mother.

  Then they both kissed her, and her father put her hand into that of the Prioress. The Prioress’s hand was hot and damp, as was natural with such a large fat woman on a warm evening, but Christabel did not like it, so she wriggled her hand free, and then waved it to her parents as though that was why she had wanted to get it away.

  She stood beside the Prioress on the top step of the outside stairway of stone that led up to the Prioress’s Chamber, where they had all been sitting. Her father and mother went along the Court below, turned at the gateway and waved their hands to her; then they were gone.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Christabel sharply.

  ‘There! There!’ the Prioress comforted her. ‘Thy mother will be here again to-morrow.’

  Christabel said, ‘Yes, Madame.’ The dog which had certainly intended to make a convenience of one of her two bundles, dumped down by Perkin in the Court, had changed its mind and preferred the leg of a wheelbarrow. But she hoped the bundles would not long be left where they were.

  ‘I will show you the Cloister,’ said the Prioress, and they went down, Christabel alongside the sweeping bulk of the Lady, through the narrow Great Court, where hens followed hopefully, and an old grey pony looked out kindly at them from over a half-door. They turned under an arch just beyond the bell tower, and found themselves in the Cloister, which, after the open Court, seemed very dark. It was very small too, small and somehow countrified; mustard was laid out to dry upon a trestle table along one wall, and there was a bunch of teazles hanging from a nail beside the door into the Church.

  At the far end of the west walk, in which Christabel and the Prioress stood, there were two children, a boy a couple of years or so younger than Christabel, in a brown coat and with brown curls, and a girl who looked to be about her age. The boy was whipping a top and took no notice of them; the girl jumped off the low wall, between the Cloister arches, crying—

  ‘Look, John! She’s come.’

  John said, ‘I care not,’ and gave a great slash at his top, but so unskilfully that it scuttered across the stone flags on its side, bounced off the wall and lay still.

  ‘Come, John! Come, Margery!’ the Prioress called them, and they came, staring all the time at Christabel.

  The Prioress told Christabel that Margery Conyers was a novice; this Christabel could see for herself, since Margery wore a white woollen gown just like the one in Christabel’s own pack. ‘And John is her cousin.’ Christabel would not have known that, for Margery was a thin child with a large nose and a little proud mouth, whereas John’s face was round, snub-nosed and merry.

  ‘Lout down, knave, lout down!’ said the Prioress, tapping him on the shoulder, so that he bowed to Christabel. He did it awkwardly and looked at her with a pouting face, but then smiled at her suddenly, a bright, sunshiny smile.

  Behind and above them the bell in the tower began to ring, and several of the Ladies came into the Cloisters from one side and another, arranging their veils and pulling up their black hoods which had lain on their shoulders.

  ‘After Compline,’ the Prioress said, moving towards the Church door, ‘you shall have supper.’

  ‘Yes, Madame.’

  It was a strange thing, but till that minute Christabel had never thought that, of course, nuns were nuns in order to go to church over and over during the day and night. She looked back over her shoulder and was sorry to see that John had returned to his top, though Margery was coming after them into the Church.

  ‘You shall lay off these to-morrow,’ the Prioress said, touching Christabel’s blue hood as they curtseyed before the Rood.

  ‘I have my habit in my packs, Madame,’ Christabel answered sedately, and she thought, ‘There is supper to look forward to.’

  Now The Chronicle Begins

  1509

  July 20

  The last loads of the hay-harvest were bumping and bouncing along the rough track homeward to the Priory. The sun, low down over Mount Calva, filled all the dale with gold, and shot long shadows before them. Those of the Nuns who had come out to help stood while the wain moved off, flapping their hot faces with the big straw hats they had tied on over close coifs; no one wore veils in the hayfield. Some of them had taken off their black gowns and worked with the white woollen undergown – more yellow than white from repeated washings – tucked up over their girdles.

  ‘Where,’ said one of them, ‘are those children?’ and they turned to look back across Applecote Ing, where the mown grass was all rough from the scythes, and smudged with small grey strewings of hay which the rakes had missed. The Ing, which had been so full all day with horses and wains, and men and women raking and pitching the hay, was empty now.

  Margery Conyers said, looking at her feet, that ‘they two had gone up towards Briary Bank’, so the Ladies stood staring up and calling ‘John! Christie!’ and telling each other to shout louder.

  But they must have cried loud enough, for now they heard John’s shrill hail, and down the slope the two young things came pelting, hand in hand.

  ‘Truly,’ said one of the younger Nuns, ‘it’s as well that that boy’s going away.’

  An elder, smiling to see the two, told her, ‘Lord, there’s no harm.Christie’s a little mother with him. I love to watch them.’ They came near and stood panting.

  ‘John made me this garland.’ Christabel pointed at the honeysuckle garland aslant on her hair. She shot a quick glance at Margery Conyers, who stood in the background, and gave her a triumphing smile; then she looked at John, and smiled very differently.

  He said, ‘It’s all awry with running down the bank,’ and he straightened it for her. The two
young faces were grave and happy, and close together, for John, though he was nearly three years younger than Christabel, was grown so tall that they stood the same height.

  ‘Go along with you, go along,’ the Ladies told him, and, ‘Go you with them, Margery.’ So Margery went on alongside the others, but as they were hand in hand again she walked a little apart.

  By the time the hay had been tossed up on the new rick the sun had set; only the top of the bell tower was still bright, and when the pigeons, which had been disturbed by the shouting and stir, floated down again, wings raised and spread, they dropped out of the sunshine into shadowed air.

  But if the Great Court were in shadow the Cloisters seemed almost dark; and more than dark, for after the long day in the sunny, sweltering field, the familiar, small sheltered house suddenly seemed strange. It was as though, while they had gone from it, it had also slipped away from them; as though, empty since dawn, it had been engaged upon some business of its own, and was not quite the same, and never would be quite the same again.

  It was the children who felt it most, though they only stood still, looking round with quick, searching glances, and then looked at each other.

  One of the older Nuns said, ‘How strange – yet it’s only this morning we went out.’

  Then all of them went towards the laver beside the Frater door, where there were twelve little wainscot cupboards – one for each of the Nuns to keep her towel in.

  Someone turned on the watercock, and the water tumbled out in a shining glassy curve; even the sound of it seemed cooling, and the older Nuns were already splashing their hot faces, and bathing hands and wrists with exclamations of satisfaction.