“But —”
“I’m going to Rushton. Then, a bark to the Netherlands. After that, south. Wherever God sends me.”
“On foot?”
“Of course.”
“How will you live?”
“You’ve heard of the lilies of the field.” There was an entirely new light, a transcending serenity in Godric’s eyes. “Sounds mad, doesn’t it?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Christ’s work. Simply that. I must follow him.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Yes, Godric, I think I do.” Ralf was overawed. He had not known that Godric possessed such courage. The path he had chosen was the hardest imaginable. It was also, once embarked upon, the easiest. He had given himself to Christ. He had taken the gospel at face value and become a disciple. “That’s wonderful,” Ralf said. “Really wonderful,” and he saw that the seeds of this had been in Godric from the first.
“How did you get on at Portsmouth? Your father told me you were there.”
When Ralf had told him, Godric said, “That’s wonderful, too.”
“Except it will never happen. You know why.”
Godric merely smiled. He stood up, and Ralf did the same.
“I ought to be going if I’m to catch that bark,” Godric said. “I’ve left you a letter. I didn’t think I’d see you. But I’m glad I did. Very glad.”
“Me too.”
“So. Goodbye, Ralf.”
Ralf felt tears coming to his eyes.
Godric was still smiling. “We two shall never meet again.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“You’re right. Anything can happen, can’t it?”
“Eloise believes —”
“You do as well. She told me.” Godric held out his hand, just as he had done, years ago, on the evening of their first meeting, under the yew. Ralf began to respond, but it was not enough: he flung his arms round his friend.
Godric was the first to draw aside. “My letter is quite brief. I may as well tell you what it says. The manor is lost.”
“What?”
“My father lost his case. You know about the case?”
“A little … something. The Church …”
“We got the verdict three days ago. The King ruled against him. He’s penniless.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s God’s will. You taught me that.”
“Did I?”
“I offered to stay and help, but he gave me his blessing. My earthly father, I mean.”
“Even so,” Ralf said, trying to picture Mape without its baron.
“I can see you haven’t understood yet.”
“Understood what?”
“He can’t pay the dowry. The wedding has been cancelled.” Godric’s smile was continuing. “You are acquainted with my sister, I believe?”
“Eloise?”
“Yes, that’s her name.” His smile broadened even more. “She’s at the Hall. She won’t be there for ever.” He picked up his bundle and hefted it over his shoulder. Head turned, holding Ralf’s gaze for a final moment as he moved away, he said: “You won’t find a better one, Ralf. Don’t let her go.”
* * *
Gervase, seated at the desk in his private office at the Hall, was surveying the disarray of papers and parchments, the folios and rolls, spread out in front of him.
He had returned yesterday, very late, from London, where he had gone to consult Chevalley and to try to salvage something from the wreckage. The house in the Wooleries would by now be on offer, for sale to some other notable desirous of being close to the centre of things. Gervase had slept his last night there.
He slipped the ribbon from another roll and scanned the contents. This one also was of no importance. He tossed it on the floor to join the others.
All this nonsense had to be got through. All these affairs had to be wound up; all these outstanding matters had to be dealt with; and yet, and yet, as he worked, he found his mind centred not on the manor itself, or on his children, his own kith and kin, but on Hubert. Who would look after Hubert, once the de Maepes had gone? Who would feed him? Who would let him ring the bell? Without his bell, Hubert would pine away and die.
Gervase would write a note of recommendation for the next lord of the manor, whoever that might be; to whom it might concern. But perhaps Henry would not grant Mape to another layman at all. Perhaps the rumour was right and he would gift it to the Church, provided enough prayers were promised for his royal soul – loud and fervent prayers, to expiate the lengthy and various catalogue of his crimes.
It seemed that, for eighteen months or more, despite the remonstrances of Cardinal Pellegrini, he had not been paying His Holiness quite enough for Sicily. The Pope was out of pocket. His patience had finally snapped. He had threatened the King with excommunication.
For fear of their own excommunication, the barons would withdraw their fealty from a king who had been cut off from the sacraments. If the Pope carried out his threat, Henry would lose his crown.
Frenetic efforts were being made to repair the damage. These did not include displeasing the Vatican by finding against them in some pettifogging molar dispute.
Chevalley had done his best at the hearing, but the Church had saved their deadliest weapon till last. Their man had produced a quotation from Ovid. Since Ovid was one of the pantheon of the most revered and infallible, the most hallowed, authors of classical Latin, every word he had committed to posterity was regarded as chiselled in stone.
In a poem called Remedia amoris, or Love’s Cure, some wily scholar in Alincester, or Rochester, or Rome, had unearthed these immortal lines:
Ipse potes riguis plantam deponere in hortis,
Ipse potes rivos ducere lenis aquae.
Roughly translated, by someone with as little interest in poetry as Gervase de Maepe, they could be rendered thus:
You can bed out plants in the moist soil of your garden,
And make little channels of fresh water to flow through it.
The noun “rivus”, in antiquity, therefore, had unequivocally owned, besides its primary sense, the meaning “channel, artificial water-course”. What better example of an artificial water-course could one adduce than a culvert and its tailrace?
Rivus. A single five-letter word. The rest of the definitions had been sidestepped, cleverly slid past, rendered unimportant. No sane man with even a smattering of Latin could now doubt that the tide mill was sacred. His Grace had even, most considerately, coined a new name for it: molendinium aquaticum maritimum, and henceforth thus would all sea mills be termed.
Gervase suspected that William had held his friend Ovid back till the last and most expensive moment. He had wanted to make an example of a baron who had presumed to slight him. In the later stages there had obviously been close coordination with Rome, so that, on the day of the hearing, Henry’s nose could be appropriately rubbed in it. And now both the baron and his king had been humbled. They had been crushed in the clutch of a greater and more unscrupulous power.
Gervase could not blame Henry. That was the way politics worked. He had forgotten its golden rule: at court, there was no such thing as loyalty, or even friendship.
The Treaty of Paris had just been ratified. The pacifist faction had already fallen apart. For nothing. All for nothing. His years of expense and manoeuvring had been for nothing.
Godric’s decision to leave Leckbourne had been reached coincidentally; fortunately, really, since Gervase no longer had the funds to keep him there. Margaret was still in a lather about it. She did not yet understand.
Gervase paused in his work, thinking with pride and affection about his youngest son. Aged only nineteen, he had found the contentment that had eluded his father all his life – till now.
How did the popular saying go? “Every advantage has a disadvantage, and every disadvantage has an advantage.”
Someone el
se could worry about the manor. Someone else could pore over the ledgers, chase after the serfs, and fret when the weather turned bad. Someone else could run back and forth from Sussex to Westminster; could tolerate the bores and lickspittles at court; could plot and plan and hatch pointless intrigues to prostitute his wife and daughters on the altar of country. Someone else, in short, could be the lord of Mape.
He did not know where the family would go. His son-in-law, Warwick, would probably insist on taking them in. He might also want, for honour’s sake, to settle the rest of Fitz Peter’s bill. Warwick lived far from the coast. The sea was one thing Gervase would very much miss; so would Eloise.
Matilde had a house, not grand, where she might think of repaying a fraction of the hospitality she had enjoyed at Mape. Mildred and Béatrice could go there. They would not starve; they would not be cold. Genteel poverty was the worst that would befall them.
Earlier, in this very room, wearing an old cloak and dressed for the road, Godric had spoken of the sixth chapter of St Matthew’s gospel. “And why do you take thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
Gervase thought of the last time he had seen Bishop William, at Pellegrini’s reception. How drab, how polluted and verminous were his garments, compared with Godric’s! They were fit only to be thrust with poles into the heart of the Hallowmas fire.
A father never stopped worrying about his children, but Gervase’s other sons, too, were big enough to make their own way. Both were young and strong. A little impecuniosity might do them good.
All that remained to be settled was the question of Eloise. On this point only did he still feel unduly anxious and helpless. He had no dowry to give her. Unless she could find a groom who was prosperous as well as kind, or unless she could make a love-match with a young man of prospects, she might remain a moneyless spinster like dear Mildred. The bloom of youth was fleeting. Whatever Matthew might think, a rich father greatly improved even a pretty girl’s chances of happiness.
“Ah, my daughter,” Gervase sighed, cleared a space, and began writing his letter for Hubert.
Anno Domini 1321
On a frosty January afternoon, an elderly, distinguished-looking man dismounted from his warmly caparisoned horse and left it browsing near the lich-gate of the churchyard at Mape.
Entering the empty, sunlit church, he made the sign of the cross, approached the altar and, with great difficulty, knelt to pray before the rood. Then, having spent a minute examining the interior of the building and the image in its stained-glass window, he paused by the porch to drop ten gold coins into the poor-box, took one last look at the altar, and went outside.
It was hard to find the graves of his grandparents and sister, but find them he did.
Some of the lime-trees in the churchyard had been cut down and the others pollarded. The old yew was still there, one of its limbs supported on a crutch. A split in the trunk had been filled with mortar.
He latched the first gate behind him.
The middle of the path was of hard-frozen mud but, from the bruised footprints in the hoary grass to either side, he could see that people had traversed it today. He was hoping to have the dike to himself.
In keeping with the other improvements he had noticed, the stock-gate had been replaced with a better one and a new fence had been erected along the southern side of the churchyard. Other than that, he thought, the feel of the place was little changed. To his left lay exposed saltings and the harbour. Far ahead, at the end of the dike, rose the greyness of the beach. To his right spread the marsh, though the reedbeds were less extensive. More drainage ditches had been cut and the area of grazing enlarged.
The grinding pain in his chest had grown much worse. His journey here had not helped. Last night, at the inn, he had feared that he would be left with too little strength to cover the last few miles.
But he was here. After sixty years’ absence, he had come back.
His progress along the dike was necessarily slow. He made frequent stops to catch his breath and to wait for the pain to subside.
During one of these stops he heard a distant roar of wings. To the west, against the extravagance of the sunset, the sky had blackened with a host of birds which he knew to be geese, wigeon, pintail, shoveler, teal, lapwings, golden plover, starlings, and whatever else had been put up by the appearance of a fox or peregrine, something big enough to flush the whole marsh. The swirling, chaotic flocks towered, trying to redistribute themselves. Some landed. Others, anxious not to be too soon, did not. A skein of seventy brent geese swept over the dike, directly above his head, so low that he could hear the rush of their pinions and their conversational calls. They continued out across the saltings and in the gathering gloom settled on the dark waters of the harbour channel.
He thought again, as he had while kneeling, of Godric, of whom, some thirty years before, they had been given word. He had died among the lepers of Padua.
The birds were quieter now. He had nearly reached the end of the dike. As the sun disappeared, a biting breeze got up, and as the breeze got up the reed-rustle increased: vitreous, chattering, the kind that sets in just after Christmas and stays unchanged till February.
Almost exhausted, he climbed the shingle bank in the afterglow. Subdued, calm, and devoid of colour, the sea was breaking in skewed crescents, far down the shore. He still knew how the currents ran.
He stiffly turned. No one could be seen on the dike. He descended past the strip of sand and struggled from his clothes.
The air, intensely cold on his skin, smelled and tasted salt, like the brine he now angrily wiped from his eyes. There was no longer cause for it. Having been four years without her, he had written his letters, left his instructions, and remade his will to help their son and three daughters, their grandchildren, and the others who in turn would come to bless the world. For the past year of his bereavement he had been given warning, in the growth of this pain, of how his body too would fail; warning, and with it grace.
Leaving his garments in a pile, he first sat and then reclined, shivering, arms wide, on the freezing shingle. He was wearing only his wedding-ring and a length of ribbon, wound round his right wrist. Once deep-red, it had faded and rotted now. To it he had attached a tiny silver crucifix.
As his warmth seeped away, as the replacing cold penetrated his substance ever more thoroughly, the shivering stopped. His hands and feet became numb. The cold crept along his arms and legs, proceeding towards his trunk, his heart.
The first stars of Leo had appeared. To the south-east, a slip of moon lay above the sea.
He closed his eyes. Just as he had wanted, just as he had planned, he could hear the incoming surge, and with the faintest, sweetest smile realized he had not even glanced towards the mill. Perhaps it was no longer even there.
The smile remaining, this Ralf Grigg slipped ever nearer to his end.
In the church, kneeling before the rood, his troubled request for forgiveness had been answered not with silence, but benign intimation – of four souls still separate, four lives yet unfulfilled.
Gently, peacefully, leaving sorrow and the flesh behind, now at last it began, ascending, accelerating: the rapid, longed-for return, to Eloise, Godric, Imogen, and the light.
The Tide Mill Page 39