She gave the child in the curve of her arm a little shake. ‘Wake up, Moll! We’re here! and see, there is grandmother!’
A silken shimmer of candlelight flowered from the open door into the greyness of the wild November afternoon, and Lady Vere was on the steps as though she had known by magic when the coach rounded the corner of the church, her hands held out, crying, ‘Anne! Anne my darling! My two darlings!’
Anne thrust open the door and tumbled from the coach almost before the steps were put down, Christian following with Moll still half asleep, and flung herself into the older woman’s arms. ‘Mother! Oh mother, I’m so glad, glad of you!’
‘And I of you! I can scarcely believe that you are here at last!’ The two women clung together on the steps, laughing and crying a little as the wind swooped about them. ‘I have hardly known how to make these past two days fly quick enough since your message came!’ Lady Vere said.
Then Anne released herself and turned to draw forward Moll who stood clutching Dandelion, blinking the sleep from her eyes and looking up in wonder at the strange tall lady who her mammy called mother, and who called her mammy, ‘Anne my darling.’
‘And here is Little Moll. Make your best curtsy for grandmother, now.’
Moll did her best, first carefully putting down the ginger kitten, who, not liking the wet, promptly shot into the house; but the curtsy was a wobbling and top heavy affair, and she forgot to pick up her skirts, and got her feet tangled up in each other, and ended sitting on the wet step, which was cold and cheerless to the behind. Christian scooped her up again, scolding, but the tall lady laughed and said, ‘How can anyone curtsy when they are half asleep? She will curtsy for me most beautifully tomorrow. Now it is more important to feed her and put her to bed.’
And with a vague flurry of orders about the horses and the livery stables in the village sounding in her ears, Anne found herself swept indoors; into a hall where candles were already lit though it was still daylight outside — her mother had always lit candles to welcome her dearest people, whether guests or family, Anne remembered — into a little enclosed world of warmth and laughter and soft cries far from the boom of guns, old servants to whom she was not ‘My Lady’ but only ‘Mistress Anne’, and her mother’s little Italian greyhound had chased Dandelion up to the top of the carved court-cupboard.
In all the turmoil of arrival, of welcoming and being welcomed, of retrieving Dandelion, of getting Moll fed, blackcurrant possetted in case she had taken cold and into bed with Bathsheba and the kitten in attendance as usual, and changing her gown crumpled with the long journey for one almost as crumpled from being so long packed with no time to shake the creases out, Anne and her mother had no time to really look at each other. But that could wait; they had a long time ahead of them.
A quiet moment came at last, and Anne was alone in the little firelit, candlelit parlour.
The candles were reflected in the window panes, but through the transparency that her own shadow threw on the glass, she saw the wind and the sweeping rain, and the brooch spire of the church rising above the elm trees. Not very long after her father’s death, she had been married in that church; walking through the little gate from the Vere garden and up the path under the elm trees through a green refreshed summer shade, in a gown of carnation tuft-taffetas, which she knew now must have become her as ill as any colour could do, to find Thomas waiting for her, lukewarm to the edge of unwillingness, even as she was herself, and agonizingly kind. Her mind reached out to him in a sudden rush of protective longing; Thomas lodging at the Three Blackbirds in Fleet Street through that six years distant summer. She had always been sure that it was damp beds at the Three Blackbirds that had brought on his attack so soon after the wedding. Thomas who, for all she knew, might be sleeping in a shepherd’s bothie or wrapped in his cloak under a hay stack tonight.
The door opened behind her, and her mother came rustling in. Lady Vere’s heels always seemed to tap more than other women’s; odd, how one forgot things like that. ‘Oh Anne love, come away from that cold window. What are you thinking of, standing there staring into the dark?’
‘It isn’t dark yet,’ Anne said. ‘I was thinking how it rained, on the night before I married Thomas.’
‘It cleared up beautifully next morning, and everybody was able to walk in the garden, instead of packing into the house until it flew apart at the seams,’ said Lady Vere. ‘Come to the fire now. Elizabeth and Catherine are coming tomorrow.’
Anne turned from the window, and found that her mother had seated herself in the high carved chair beside the hearth. The little Italian greyhound pattered across to her and cuddled down with a sigh into the lustrous fold of her skirt.
How beautiful she looked in the firelight. It had always been a grief — quite openly expressed — to both her and her daughters, that she had not contrived to pass on to them any of her own good looks; the fire bringing a soft colour to her face and waking the faded lights in her hair under the cobweb of black lace that was flung with such seeming carelessness across it; the long slim hand — at least she had passed on to Anne her hands — with its one great jewel, as she stooped to fondle the pricked ears of the little dog.
Anne left the window and crossed slowly to her. She sank on to her heels on the hearth, and laid her arm across her mother’s knee. ‘I did not think that I could bear to come south. But it is good to come home to you again, mother — just for a little while.’
‘Just for a little while? That sounds so very fleeting,’ Lady Vere said. ‘I must make the most of you while I have you ... Supper soon, and then we must have a long, long talk. I hope you are not too tired, for I can’t let you go to bed till all hours tonight; there is so much I want to hear after all this time.’
‘Four years,’ Anne said.
‘Four years! What a long, long while! And so much has happened ...’ Lady Vere bent down. ‘My dear, I never saw the baby Elizabeth. She was not even thought of when you brought Thomas and Moll back that summer.’
For a while after that they were quite silent, looking together into the fire. Then Lady Vere moved, saying, ‘I still have not truly had one good look at you; there seems to have been so little time since you arrived,’ and took Anne’s face between her hands as she looked up at her, and turned it to the light of the slim honey-wax candles. ‘Ah, you’re so tried; you must go to bed early after all; and thin — you are too young for lines on your forehead and under your eyes. We must make you eat and sleep and laugh and grow fat, while you are here.’ She was silent again a moment, looking more deeply into Anne’s face. ‘Yes, and you are sick and sore at heart because the man has made you come away and leave him to have his war alone. Oh, I know; and you have changed — so much.’
‘I have had four years to change in, mother.’
There was a little silence, Lady Vere still looking into Anne’s face cupped between her hands. ‘You have changed by more than four years,’ she said at last. ‘You’re an infinitely richer woman than you were when I saw you last,’ and bent and kissed her on the top of her head just as she, Anne, would have kissed Little Moll.
Chapter 20 - Civitas Dei
During the months that followed, news came from time to time to the pleasant rose-red house at Hackney; some of it true, most of it false, for that winter the rumours were flying like feathers in a squall. It was common knowledge and no rumour that the King had determined even last autumn to bring back from Ireland the troops sent over so long ago that everyone had almost forgotten about them, to quell the Roman Catholic revolt. Part of the force, brutalized by long and wild service in Ireland, had already landed in Flintshire, and been placed under the command of Lord Byron whom the world at large called ‘Bloody Byron’, and this nobleman had begun proceedings by laying siege to Nantwich. By mid January the word flew south that General Sir Thomas Fairfax had been ordered to raise the siege. But that again was no more than rumour; nothing to prove or disprove it, so far as the anxious woman in the house at Ha
ckney was concerned.
In February Anne took Little Moll the ten mile journey to spend a few days with Thomas’s surviving grandfather in the pleasant riverside village of Hammersmith.
Lord Mulgrave was eighty-nine, and could not be so very far, Anne supposed, from the end of his earthly days; and, though his mind was as clear and his grasp on present events as strong as a young man’s, he had an old man’s tendency to look back instead of forward, to dwell for his own pleasure on the past. He had a rich past, as well as a long one; a past that seemed to Anne to belong to another world. He had served under Leicester in the Netherlands; he had been knighted for his service against the great Armada of Spain; twenty years before he became President of the North. And he spoke the great names, of Leicester himself, the Queen’s Bonnie Cock Robin; of Ralegh and Essex and the twisted Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, who had once virtually ruled England between them, as a man speaks of friends who have but that moment left the room.
But on the third evening of Anne’s visit, he was not talking of the past, as he sat, one pointed elbow on the arm of his chair and his hand curved about the silver bowl of his pipe. (‘When I can no longer enjoy tobacco,’ he had said, earlier, when asking her leave to smoke, ‘I shall know that the time has come to die.’) He was discussing the latest news from London.
The danger in the north had been eased for the moment by the breaking of the siege of Hull, and by Fairfax and Cromwell’s combined action in Lincolnshire, but the general situation was still so critical that Parliament had authorized impressment weeks ago. Now came news that Essex’s Army had been fixed at a permanent establishment of ten thousand Foot and four thousand Horse, with regular monthly pay and that Colonel Cromwell had been promoted to Lieutenant General.
‘So our Wild Man of the Eastern Counties begins to have his way,’ said the Earl of Mulgrave, blowing a slow cloud of blue Virginia smoke.
Anne, on the low cushioned window seat, shook her head. ‘A patched up thing instead of one whole and new? I doubt if General Cromwell is a much satisfied man today.’
‘What is he like now, this General Cromwell?’ asked the Earl, reflectively.
‘Thomas says that he is one of those great souls whose greatness only flashes out like a sword from its sheath in time of a nation’s emergency,’ Anne said simply. ‘He says that Cromwell is a genius with Cavalry and a better horse-master than he is himself.’ If Thomas could be so generous, then so must she.
‘And you?’ Lord Mulgrave said.
‘My opinion can have little weight. I have not fought with him. I only met him once — when he came over from Lincolnshire to take counsel with Thomas and his father in Hull.’
‘I can come by men’s opinions of the new Lieutenant General easily enough. I would like yours, because you are a woman, and have views of your own and, I think, see below the surface perhaps a little farther than some women.’
Anne turned again to look out across the lawn, through the cedar’s shade as through another window, to the grey river beyond. But to the old man watching her profile in the thin reflected February light it seemed that those huge brilliant eyes of hers — luminous, he thought suddenly, as a cat’s — were looking beyond physical distance; backward perhaps into that evening in Hull, or forward into some immeasurable depth of future. ‘It was after dinner,’ she said slowly, ‘and they had been in Council upstairs, he and Thomas and Thomas’s father and Lord Willoughby, and they came down at last to warm themselves at the fire. He seemed to hold all of us — the whole room — in the hollow of his hand. Thomas’s father and Lord Willoughby were —’ she broke off, searching for the right word — ‘not against him — apart from him, in a kind of armed truce; but to Thomas, it was as though he gave back — something that we had begun to lose.’
‘Civitas Dei,’ Lord Mulgrave said very quietly, after a long pause. ‘A city not made with hands.’
She turned her brilliant gaze back to him once more. ‘Yes,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Yes, a city not made with hands. We all had some kind of vision at the outset; but the vision gets lost and — muddied, by supply difficulties and the day to day business of campaigning, and by political schemes and tangles.’
The old man’s face dimmed for the moment as though the shadow of a grey wing had brushed across it. ‘That, my child, is one of the sorrows of the world, and has been since the Fall. Always it is the same; with a cause, even with a picture or poem. At the outset there is the vision. But our own struggles to seize and translate it, sully the brightness. In giving it flesh, something of the spirit is lost.’ Under the finely trimmed silver beard, his thin lips softened into the shadow of a smile. ‘Saint Paul found much the same trouble in building the Christian Church ... And so Cromwell was able to rekindle something of all that for Tom in danger of losing it ... Would you say that that was because he himself has the vision, as Saint Paul had it not?’
Anne hesitated. ‘No,’ she said at last, slowly, as though feeling her way. ‘That is the strange part. Oh, he has the vision — his purpose clear before him and God in his heart as I have not felt God in any man’s heart before. But his feet are so strongly — so deeply rooted in the ground that in the end he will always be bound by practical needs.’ (How was she so sure of all this? She did not know; but she was sure.) ‘He has not Thomas’s strength of goodness. He will always do what he believes God has told him to do, but he will always believe that God has told him to do the things that he himself determines to be needful.’ She broke off the tangled sentences, striving for clear thought, for her own sake as well as for her listener’s. ‘If what is right and what is necessary should ever conflict, in the last resort he will do what is necessary.’
‘The world needs such men,’ Lord Mulgrave said, ‘to cut through the tangles wrought by the men who in the last resort will do what is right.’ And she was not sure whether he was laughing at her or in deadly earnest.
‘He gave Moll a Roman coin that he said he had carried since he was a boy; a gold coin with a king’s head on it — cut off at the neck,’ she said in a small voice that rang clear and brittle as a glass bell.
Why had she said that? Now he was certainly laughing at her. But no, his voice was only immeasurably kind. ‘My dear, there are many coins bearing king’s heads severed at the neck. Can you really fear that the fact of General Cromwell’s treasuring one bodes that particular ill to — anyone?’
‘A man said to me in Hull, that it could scarcely influence Fate,’ Anne said. ‘Put like that it — sounds insane of course ... But he believed that the King will die, for all that, because he is — who and what he is, and carries his own death within him as the seed carries the flower.’ And then with a terrified swerve away from the main issue, to the part of it that she could contain: ‘One thing I have to thank God for, that if ever — that happens, Thomas will have no part in it.’
‘No, I think myself that he would not,’ Lord Mulgrave’s tone was completely unemotional.
‘I know,’ Anne said.
He cocked an eyebrow, teasing her a little, coaxing her as though away from the edge of a sudden and unexpected abyss. ‘How fiercely sure you sound: are you by any chance making the mistake of thinking that one human being can ever completely know another?’
‘I know that about Thomas at all events,’ Anne said, and suddenly the grey mood of her fear was laced with laughter. She swirled round from the window. ‘Have you read the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha? Can you think of the Don forswearing his own conscience to make terms with the Windmill-Giants?’
He lay back and looked at her through the fronding tobacco smoke, with a kind of luminous enjoyment that was like the distilled essence of laughter. ‘Now why did I never see the likeness before? Why have I missed, all this while, the pleasure of knowing myself for Don Quixote’s grandfather? You are of course completely right, Anne my dear — I think perhaps, at least where Thomas is concerned, that you are right more often than I shall ever be...’
Steps so
unded across the wide hall as he was speaking; a knock sounded on the door, and Anne glanced quickly towards it, her heart giving the lurch of dread and expectancy that it gave at any sudden appearance, these days. ‘Enter,’ Lord Mulgrave said, and the door opened, and closed again behind a manservant who advanced to the side of his master’s chair, dividing his bow between him and the still woman in the window. ‘My Lord ... a Lieutenant Hill, My Lady, begs for a few words.’
Hill. The name fetched Anne up from the window seat in a flash of movement. It was a common enough name, and yet —
‘Would you rather receive him in private, Anne my dear,’ said Lord Mulgrave.
‘No no — that is, not unless you —’
He made a little sign to the servant, who withdrew. She heard a mutter of voices and the jink of spurs outside, and then a ghost stood in the doorway, advanced into the room; the ghost of a hard-bitten Yorkshireman home from the Swedish wars, who she remembered well. He was bowing stiffly before her. ‘Lady Fairfax — My Lord.’
‘Cornet Hill!’ Anne cried. ‘No, Lieutenant, is it not? William Hill, how are you won clear of the Royalists and back to us again?’
He grinned, a grin that cracked his hard brown face as though it were a nut, but left his eyes weary. ‘They turned me loose as not being like to give them any more trouble, wi’ a pulped elbow; but happen I’m tougher than they bargained for.’
He looked so gaunt, so dusty; his eyes seemed to have sunk back into his head as though pushed there by the fingers of pain and want. ‘Yes, your elbow —’ Anne looked at the sleeve of his tattered russet coat as though she expected to see it still dripping red. ‘Your poor arm — how is it?’
‘Fair to middlin’, My Lady.’ It was the typical dale answer that told her precisely nothing. He bent it a little awkwardly, and began to fish inside the breast of his coat; and she moved nearer quickly.
The Rider of the White Horse Page 24