The Man On a Donkey Read online

  Christabel laid a hand on her shoulder and shook her. ‘Fiddlesticks!’ she said, and again, loudly and clearly, ‘Fiddlesticks!’

  ‘What’s fiddlesticks?’ Bess sniffed.

  ‘That either of you’ll be wretched all your life long. In a twelve- month he’ll have forgot, and you too.’

  ‘I’ll not,’ cried Bess.

  ‘You’ll see you will.’

  Bess gave a great sob. ‘I must try to forget. It’s sin to love him.’

  ‘You’ll forget sooner if you don’t try,’ Christabel told her, with greater wisdom than her years.

  Bess only shook her head, and drooped in silence for a while.

  Then she started up – ‘A twelvemonth! I can’t endure not to see him for a twelvemonth. Oh! Jesu-Mary! I can’t stay here.’

  ‘You!’ said Christabel bluntly. ‘You, that was glad that always you should live at Marrick.’

  ‘It’s different now. You can’t understand.’

  ‘Tush!’ said Christabel.

  1516

  March 19

  The first of the pedlars to come up the dale every year was a lean, leather-faced, elderly man with a grey donkey, which he called Paul of Derby. The pedlar’s name was Jake, but the Ladies always called him ‘The Lent Pedlar’, because of the season of his visits.

  There were other pedlars with better wares, for this man bought only in Richmond, to sell up the dales, whereas some others went to York and even further. But Jake was one of the most popular because he came after the long winter, and brought news of the world from which the Ladies had been cut off perhaps for months when the snow blocked the road over the fells.

  This year there had been snow lying from Christmas to Carle Sunday only ten days ago. But since then the spring had come with a rush, and from the dale the snow had vanished almost overnight. The Marrick Manor shepherd was reported to have said that the road was clear to Richmond, but they could not be sure of that till Jake actually came into the gate-house late one afternoon.

  Then, when the Prioress had had him up to her chamber, to choose, with the Sacrist, a length of fine linen for a new alb for the Church, and the Cellaress had had him into her office to buy whipcord, and cheesecloth for the summer ewe’s-milk cheeses, he was allowed to come into the Cloister, where the dusk was falling, and spread out the pack that contained more frivolous things: pins for veils, carved wooden combs, purses and girdles of leather or of silk. The Ladies came round him, fingering and turning things over, and he doled out his news little by little, knowing pretty well how much they could be persuaded to buy, and never parting with his last titbits of information till he had given up hope of any more sales.

  So to-night, it was not till Dame Elizabeth Close had at last made up her mind to lay out a shilling upon two bobbins of red and green silk that he sat back on his heels, rubbed his hands together, and said:

  ‘Marry, if I bain’t a fool not to tell your Ladyships the biggest bit of news of all.’

  ‘What, Jake? What is it?’

  ‘Why, none else but that the Queen was brought to bed of a fair child.’

  ‘Knave or girl?’

  ‘Girl.’

  ‘Will she be our queen? What is her name?’ Bess Dalton had bought nothing, for she never had money to spend. Yet she could not help watching and wishing – not cheerfully in these days, as she had used to watch, but with a long face. However, now that the buying was over she could join in the talking.

  ‘Silly!’ said Christabel Cowper, ‘it’s a prince we want to be our king.’

  ‘Aye. There’ll be a knave child soon. King Harry’s a lusty gentleman. They say he—’ Jake gave a bit of high spiced gossip, which embarrassed some of the Ladies, amused others, and interested all.

  ‘What is her name called?’ Bess Dalton asked again.

  ‘The little lady is the Princess Mary.’

  ‘Queen Mary,’ Bess said, trying the name. ‘I should like it well if there were a queen.’

  ‘There never hath been a queen to rule in England,’ Christabel maintained, and none of them knew enough to contradict her.

  *

  At the King’s Palace of Greenwich that same day was sweet and mild. The gardens, bare of flowers and leaf but for primroses, and here and there a company of daffodils, were almost as full of ladies and gentlemen, strolling or sitting, as they would have been on any summer day. And all, except perhaps the oldest, felt the exquisite exhilaration of the spring, so that a waft of scent, a snatch of a blackbird’s song, or only the warmth of the sun on the cheek, brought longing, promise, and rapture, all in one. Below the garden the river ran, glittering, and beyond the river lay the green Essex shore.

  Someone had spread a tawny velvet cloak on one of the benches under the south wall where the sun was warmest, and the King sat on it, a young man in green and white satin, with a complexion like a rose, a small, soft mouth, but a nose fine-boned and imperial. A crowd of gentlemen stood about him, some close enough to join in the talk, others only listening and looking.

  What those said who were talking with the King none but themselves could have understood anything more than the bare words, for their jokes and their teasings were those of men who know each other well, and who play and drink and hunt together. So such a remark as, ‘Mass, he would. Trust him. We all know about his stirrup-irons,’ or, ‘And where was your lute-string that time?’ or, ‘Not the points of his hosen! Oh, Mass! Not again,’ provoked long gusts of laughter, though it was not so much the shared jokes that made them laugh, as their own well-being, and the sweet white wine of the day.

  ‘Look,’ cried one, ‘a bee!’ and pointed to the flower bed below the wall where, above the soft fresh-turned earth, and the small leaves of plants just pushing up towards the light, a worker bee was hovering uncertainly.

  ‘I’ll have him!’ cried the King, and snatching off his velvet cap with its jewelled brooch, flung it towards the passaging glitter of tiny wings and golden brown velvet. ‘I have him. No, Tray! Tray!’

  Others now, laughing and shouting, flung their caps till the flower bed was gay as summer with scarlet, green, blue and carnation colour; then the bee, finding no flowers for its rifling, rose in the air, and went away into the shining blue while they cried after him, ‘Hue! Hue!’

  As they were laughing and picking up their caps, someone said: ‘The Queen’s Grace,’ and the outer parts of the group about the King – those who merely watched and listened – opened a way, by which came into the midst the Queen and her ladies.

  Queen Katherine was five years older than her husband, and to-day, six weeks after the pains of childbirth, she looked older even than her years. So, when she came and stood beside the King and asked, ‘What do you? I heard laughter even within,’ it was more as if an indulgent mother had spoken the question than a wife.

  But when the King told her, ‘Hunting of a bee,’ and proclaimed it a new sport that he would, one day, write a book on, so that every young gentleman should know the courteous terms of that quarry, she laughed as merrily as any of them, and laughed again, softly, looking down into the King’s face as he looked up at her, with the sun making the red gold of his fine, closely curling hair glitter as if it burned. ‘And his teeth,’ she thought to herself with a weakening pang of delight, ‘are like a little boy’s.’

  The King put up his hands and pushed her, gently but masterfully, so that she stood between him and the sun, and then, lowering his eyes, which had been dazzled by the glare, he began to play with the long gold lace of her girdle from which hung an enamel of Paris and his three goddesses.

  ‘But what,’ said he, and dropped the pretty jewel, ‘what’s this?’ and he pulled at the end of a ribbon that strayed from beneath the parted skirts of her crimson velvet gown, and trailed across the gold brocaded petticoat. Quite a lot more came out as he pulled, and he began to laugh, while the Queen snatched at his hand and tucked the ribbon away in a painful embarrassment.

  ‘Oh, Madame!’ cried the King
, still laughing. ‘Fie on your women!’

  ‘No. It was my fault. They had no time to make me ready for Mass, because I slept so long.’

  ‘So long? I know how long you lie abed, sweetheart. Charles!’ He looked up at the big, good-humoured Duke of Suffolk who stood close by, his fine legs in their white hosen straddled wide. ‘Charles, what should you do with a wife that steals from her lord’s bed before it’s light, to hear Masses?’

  Suffolk laughed, and made no other answer, not being one of the quickest witted, but Katherine cried out: ‘Sir, Sir, I pray you! These gentlemen—’

  But the King interrupted.

  ‘No, Madame, these gentlemen are all on my side. So I shall kiss you now, this once, for all the kisses I’ve lost when you go gadding after holiness betimes in the morning.’

  He had her by the wrist and pulled her to him, though she put her hands first upon his, to pull them away, and then upon his breast.

  ‘No, no, my dear!’ she cried. ‘No, Sir!’

  ‘Why not? A’ God’s Name, whom but thou should I kiss this fair morning, and whom but me shouldst thou?’

  She muttered, ‘No – for it is uncomely behaviour.’

  ‘What?’ said he, catching her now by the arms, and drawing her down towards him. ‘To kiss? Or for a king to kiss? Or to kiss openly in the sunshine? There!’

  But she had turned her face away so that he could only kiss her cheek.

  ‘It is not so done in Spain,’ she whispered, at which he cried ‘Fie on her!’ for she was a Spanish woman no longer.

  ‘No,’ she said. He had loosed her, but now she seemed unwilling to move away. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand, and withdrew it sharply; it was the advance and retreat of a young girl, unpractised and shamefaced. ‘No. I am English now. But in Spain I was bred, and what a child learns early, that she cannot forget.’

  He was looking up at her, but, because of the brightness of the sky behind her head, he could not see the tenderness of her look as she added in lower tones, ‘So it will be with our little maid.’ But because he himself was fascinated and amused by the smallness and perfectness of that ridiculous puppet their daughter, a new human being, a microcosm, like a mirror to catch and reflect the universe and the Maker of the universe; and because besides he was a man who loved scholars and loved learning, he answered eagerly—

  ‘It is true. And I have been thinking—’ and, drawing her down beside him on the bench, began to talk of how the child should be taught – first letters, then music and the ancient tongues, then French and Italian.

  ‘Already!’ she teased him, ‘at six weeks old!’ But soon she became as absorbed as he. Some of the gentlemen who stood about gave their opinions on this and that, and the group about the King shifted and settled into a different arrangement, as Suffolk and those of the younger men who cared more for the tilt-yard than the study fell back, and others took their place.

  On the outskirts of the little crowd Suffolk found himself beside one of the Queen’s ladies – a very young lady, gawky and self-conscious, ‘yet,’ he thought, ‘she has the skin of a peach’, and so he began to be pleasant with her, but found it heavy going. Growing nettled he rebuked her. ‘My child, you’re a fool if you take a lesson from your good mistress in how to deal with men. For if a woman wears always her virtue about her, like the boards of her stays, it wearies a husband, and – there are other women more comformable to a man’s liking.’

  He left her then, nodding to her in a friendly way, for he was rarely put out for long. But the girl stood, twisting her hands together and hating the things he had said, both those about herself and about the Queen.

  ‘She is too good,’ she said to herself, and wished that she had been in time to say it to him – ‘she is too good to think of such things.’

  That would not have disconcerted Suffolk, being exactly what he himself thought; but, for the Queen’s sake, he considered that it was a pity.

  1519

  July 15

  Chapter began in the murk and hush that goes with thunder weather. All week a storm had threatened, and had not broken, but to-day, by all the signs, it must break. When the Prioress came to the lectern, to read the daily chapter of the Rule, it was so dark that she had to send Christabel to the kitchen for a taper, and while she went there was silence, without wind, without stir, in the small Chapter House, so that if someone moved her feet upon the hassock of sedges, or if someone’s inside gurgled, all heard. Christabel came back from the kitchen with a burning taper. She lit the two fat candles of the lectern, blew out the taper and went back to her seat. The Prioress opened the book and at that movement the spiry flames of the two candles, which had just steadied and lengthened, flinched aside, and flared out, so that the embossed golden letters and the blue and green and scarlet decorations seemed to crawl and quiver. The Prioress found her place and began to read, following along the lines with her finger. No one listened to the Rule. They knew it too well; and to-day, irritated by the heat and oppression of thunder, most of the Ladies were thinking rather of those sins of omission and commission in their fellows, which it was their solemn duty to bring to light, when the time came for confession and accusation.

  The Prioress finished reading, went back to her chair, and murmured the words which would set tongues free. There was hardly a pause long enough to give any penitent the chance to confess her own faults before the Cellaress coughed behind her fingers, stood up, and accused the Chambress of having more fried eggs from the kitchen, last evening at supper-time, than she and the other Ladies of her Mess should have had – more eggs by three, the cook had said.

  That brought in not only the Chambress but the other two Ladies of her Mess. The Chambress grew shrill in her indignation, the Cellaress’s voice was as loud as it was deep, and old Dame Joan, who was one of the Chambress’s Mess, though she could hardly make her thin piping heard, did what she could to add to the din by clattering the iron end of her stick upon the stone floor. Even Dame Elizabeth Close grew ruffled, and no wonder, for the Chambress, losing her head and striking a sidelong blow at one of her own side, hinted that if too many eggs had been eaten last night it was Dame Elizabeth who had eaten them. This, however, was only a glance at Dame Elizabeth’s known reputation as a trencher woman, and did not, in the eyes of the affronted Mess, mean that they for one moment admitted the charge, either corporately or singly.

  The Chambress, who had just denied having ever asked for more than the just share of three devout and hungry women, was soon hard pressed by the Cellaress. For the Cook had said – (‘God be his judge,’ cried the Chambress) – that he could not help it if some went short when others would not be content with their portion. Dame Elizabeth, whose anger never lasted long, threw in a suggestion that perhaps the eggs were double-yoked. The Chambress would have no such appeasement, and retaliated upon the Cellaress by a general condemnation of her management of the Priory hens. How could such poor starved bags of bones lay anything but eggs that would shame a sparrow. And where hens were poor scrags what wonder if the Nuns pined. Christabel Cowper looked from the soft bulk of the Chambress to the hard bulk of the Cellaress, and put her hand over her mouth so that she could smile.

  ‘And,’ concluded the Chambress, ‘did the Cellaress think that the Priory would take their frumenty this Founder’s Day without a word gainsaying? If so, she was mistook.’

  That sudden diversion, from eggs to frumenty, was too sudden for the Ladies. They needed a moment to work from eggs to hens, from hens to corn, from corn to the Cellaress’s known unwillingness to feed corn to hens in the winter, and from that small meanness to the mouldy corn in the frumenty last year.

  In the short silence which resulted from this preoccupation Dame Anne Ladyman stood up, and accused the Cellaress of talking for a long time – a very long time – through the kitchen window to the miller’s wife of Grinton.

  The Cellaress, turning on her like an angry bull, retorted by a long account of the burdens w
hich lay upon the bowed but faithful shoulders of any hard-driven Cellaress. From that, somehow, the dispute broadened out so as to include the character of the miller’s wife, thence to the honesty of the miller, and so to that of other millers scattered throughout Yorkshire and known to the Nuns before they came to Marrick. In this stage the argument dwindled, since not one of these other millers was known to any but the Lady who happened to cite him as an example of depravity or rectitude.

  Christabel Cowper waited for a pause, and when it came stood up. It was the first time that she had made an accusation, and they all turned and looked at her. More than one face could be seen to fall when she said that she spoke not in accusation, but for the good of the House.

  ‘For there are,’ she went on, looking down at her clasped hands, ‘moths in the vestment press.’

  ‘Moths!’ cried one or two in shocked tones.

  ‘No. Never!’ cried Dame Anne Ladyman who was the Sacrist.

  Those whose faces had fallen brightened again. If this was not an accusation it was as like one as pea to pea in the pod.

  Christabel said, with her eyes on the worried, sagging face of the old Prioress, ‘I fear it is so, Madame; I found one yesterday.’

  ‘Found a moth! Found a night-moppet...’ Dame Anne scoffed – and so on. ‘There’s lavender laid in every fold,’ and more to this effect. ‘Do you think I know nought of embroidery?’ They did not think so. All knew that the Sacrist was the best embroidress that had been in the Priory for long enough.

  When she paused Christabel spoke again, and this time she looked Dame Anne in the eyes: ‘Madame,’ she said, ‘I saw moths yesterday. I killed one and one flew away.’

  All this time the Prioress had said nothing. These days she would rarely speak in Chapter except to mumble the well-known forms, to read, or, when she was forced, to give a decision. Now, as so often, she sat, pressing her white plump hands together, never lifting her head lest she should catch the glances thrown at her, and read in them the reproach that she was past her work.