The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  While the waiting gentleman combed my Lord’s hair nothing was spoken of except of a horse which Sir George had just bought, and of that they spoke quietly because of my Lady, asleep in bed. ‘Luttrell has broken and half trained him already,’ said Sir George. ‘A right good stallion.’ My Lord agreed that Luttrell had a way with horses.

  ‘And in a week’s time I shall sell him for twice that I gave. Luttrell’s a fool at a bargain.’

  Darcy frowned at his son and tipped his head towards the gentleman, now beginning to slide the curtains softly apart along the cords of the bed.

  ‘Let the curtains be, James,’ said Darcy, while George tossed up his chin and shrugged his shoulders at the rebuke. But he was silent till the fat yellow Paris candle had been lit and set at the bed-head for the night, and the dogs and an old tom-cat that was a favourite of my Lord’s turned out. The gentleman paused at the door, bowed to my Lord and his son and went out. Darcy bade, ‘Good night to you, James,’ and George nodded. Then there was silence in the room.

  ‘You sent for me, Sir,’ says George at last.

  His father stretched out the iron-shod staff he walked with and struck roughly at a log that was out of reach of the flames.

  ‘Will you not learn,’ he said, ‘if you must cheat one of our own people, not to brag of it? James and all my other gentlemen hold together as they hold with me, and Luttrell is one of them. Moreover I think it a wretched thing that any man should be glad to trick one of his own folk, that look to him rather for help than for such ill-natured doings.’

  George ‘pished’ impatiently and muttered something about fools and their money, as if he did not care. Yet it was only a pretence; he took no account at all of his step-mother, disliked his half-sister, was jealous of his younger brother Arthur, because my Lord loved him; but my Lord he greatly admired, and almost as much hated.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, after another silence, ‘I sent for you. Here’s news of how the King’s matter speeds in Rome, and it speeds not at all. The Cardinal has sent out Master Stephen Gardiner, and he hath threatened His Holiness with most unseemly freedom. But threaten he never so, he’ll get no good, for the Pope fears the Emperor too nearly to sing but as he calls the tune,’ and my Lord chuckled and slapped his hand down on his thigh.

  George did not so much as smile. He said, with his eyes on the fire, that he thought no loyal subject should rejoice that his Prince was thwarted in a matter so near his heart as the breaking of this ill-made marriage of his.

  Darcy seized on one word. ‘Loyal? You say, or you think, I’m not loyal?’

  ‘And you chide me because I profit by a fool’s folly—’

  ‘Now by God’s Death, George,’ Darcy interrupted him, ‘I wonder sometimes that you are son of mine. My father taught me as I have taught you, that a man that is a lord stands by his friends and his men through flood and through fire.’

  ‘And not by his Prince?’

  Darcy turned and looked at him, and answered after a while in a different voice, thoughtfully.

  ‘You and some others have a new idea of a Prince. You think he must have his way, whatsoever it be, with the law or maugre the law. That was not the way of it in England when I was a lad.’

  ‘And a right merry England you made of it with wars and bickerings, and making and unmaking of kings.’ George got up and went over to the door and wrenched it open.

  ‘Give you good night, Sir,’ said he, and went out.

  ‘Is that you, Tom?’ my Lady called sleepily from the bed, and Darcy said it was, and got slowly to his feet and to bed. But it was a long time before he slept; thinking as he did of old days when there was war between two Kings in England, and of his son, and of matters at Court and in Rome.

  May 3

  ‘It’s ten o’clock, and my Lord Cardinal in bed this half-hour.’ The Cardinal’s gentleman fingered his chin doubtfully, looking Mr. Foxe up and down, and seeing, in the dust on the boots and shoulders of the King’s Almoner, evidence of his travels, and of his haste – and haste means always tidings of weight.

  Mr. Foxe had sat stiffly down on a bench. He had come from Sandwich this morning. For more than a fortnight, since he had left the Papal Court at Orvieto, he had not slept twice in the same bed. He yawned, and said behind his hand—

  ‘His Grace will be glad to see me.’

  The gentleman looked hard at him for another second, said, ‘I’ll tell him,’ and went away with the servant bearing a candle before him. Master Foxe dozed with his head back against the arras, and thought that he had fallen off his horse upon a stony road, and that the horse looked round at him with the Pope’s face instead of the face of a horse. When the Cardinal’s gentleman tapped him on the shoulder he sprang up all amazed.

  Two servants were lighting the candles in the Cardinal’s bedchamber, and as each new-lit flame spired up the light caught here a glow of colour from the arras, and there a gleam of gold from the damask cloth of gold of the bed curtains. Master Foxe blinked in the swimming, trembling light, then he looked into the shadow between the half-drawn curtains of the bed, and went down on one knee. He could see the Cardinal’s head in its lawn night-cap, embroidered with black silk and gold thread; the Cardinal’s face was turned towards the room, one heavy cheek with the pouch under the eye socket plumped up by the soft down of the pillow upon which it pressed; the Cardinal’s eyes were open and gleamed in the candlelight. Master Foxe kissed the warm, soft hand, which came from between the sheets and was held out to him. Then His Grace wallowed up from the bedclothes like a whale out of the sea, and sat up against the pillows. ‘Bring me a night-gown,’ he said, and they brought him one of crimson damask and white fur.

  When the gentleman and the servants had gone and Master Foxe sat on a stool by the bed, the Cardinal said, ‘Well?’

  Master Foxe had drawn out, and now laid on the bed, divers sealed letters. The Cardinal flicked them over. ‘And letters to the King’s Grace?’ he asked.

  ‘I have delivered them to His Highness.’ The Cardinal’s eyebrows went up. ‘I went at once to Greenwich,’ Master Foxe explained, ‘thinking to find Your Grace there, but you had been gone two hours.’

  Ah! – Well?’ the Cardinal asked sharply.

  ‘The Pope hath signed the dispensation without a word altered, and the commission; though that we strove for long, before they would consent. But at last, we, differing in two words only, demanded that omnem should be added to potestatem, and nolente to impedito, and so it was determined, Your Grace and Cardinal Campeggio being joined in the commission to try the cause of the King’s marriage.’

  The Cardinal stirred in bed and Master Foxe paused and then went on with his tale.

  ‘But here began a new tragedy, for now the night being far past, and the Pope sending to the Cardinals’ houses, they replied that they would look up their books to-morrow.

  ‘Then after much spoken hotly on our side, Master Gardiner saith that when this dealing of theirs should be known, the favour of that Prince, our King, who is their only friend, should be taken away, and that the Apostolic See should fall to pieces with the consent and applause of every man. At these words the Pope’s Holiness, casting his arms abroad so—’ and Master Foxe threw his arms wide and clapped them on his thighs, ‘bade us put in the words we varied for, and therewith walked up and down the chamber, casting now and then his arms abroad, we standing in a great silence. After a while—’

  He paused, stumbled, and lost the eloquence which was that of an overwearied man. The Cardinal had moved again. He leaned forward in the bed.

  ‘Master Foxe, tell me now this one thing. In this commission is it written that the Pope shall confirm the sentence, and may, if he will, revoke the cause to Rome?’

  Foxe said it was so written. ‘But except for those clauses we thought it as good as can be devised, though not in all so open as—’

  ‘Then,’ said the Cardinal, ‘it is nothing. Nothing.’

  ‘Sir, the King’s Grace and Mistres
s Anne are right well pleased. His Highness sent for her that I should tell her the news, saying again and again, “Here is that good news we have waited for.”’

  The Cardinal began to move his big head slowly from side to side, so that the heavy dewlap trembled a little.

  Master Foxe grew more eager to reassure him of success. ‘I told His Highness how strongly Your Grace’s letters had worked upon the Pope’s Holiness, yea, and that without them we could have done nothing, at which His Highness and Mistress Anne were marvellous thankful, she saying—’

  The Cardinal raised a hand.

  ‘Is the commission decretal or general?’

  ‘It is general. The Pope would in no wise—’

  ‘Then I tell you that it is nothing.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Master Foxe,’ the Cardinal leaned from the bed till his big face was close to Foxe’s face, ‘it is nothing. If Queen Katherine appeal and she will appeal – the cause will be revoked to Rome. Will the Pope then break the marriage, if now he dare not sign a decretal commission giving full and final power to the Commissioners to break it? No, by Christ’s Passion.’

  He drew back, and for a long time said nothing, except that Foxe heard him mutter to himself, ‘It is useless. It is what I feared,’ and now he bit his fingers and now he fiddled with the gold buttons of the pillow-beres.

  Foxe roused with a jerk to hear his own name, and realized that the Cardinal was talking to him. ‘We must press His Holiness,’ he was saying, ‘with all possible persuasions to grant the commission decretal. For indeed, Master Foxe, it is for the very sake of His Holiness and the stability of the Holy See that I should be of such authority and estimation with the King that whatever I advise His Grace should assent to. His Holiness doth not know how matters stand here, in how perilous a state, and how tottering. For on the one hand the King, if he think the Pope his enemy, may be wrought to some desperate course, and on the other the Church is so eaten into and inwardly devoured of heretics – yea, like maggots in cheese, Mr. Foxe – that I fear – I fear—’

  He bit his nails again, and began to devise arguments, one after another, to lay before the Pope, and questions to lay before the jurisconsults of the Papal Court, so that Master Foxe, in a confused way, as his eyes blinked and burned for sleep, heard ‘confirmation of the sentence per superiorem judicem... the parties may redire ad nova vota...’ and the like, as the Cardinal out of his deep and subtle wit spun a new thread which might at last draw the Pope to satisfy the King’s demands.

  May 16

  When Sim, who was clerk to Master Cheyne, got drunk, he would sit in the kitchen singing and beating time to his own singing with a wooden spoon or a rolling pin or anything handy. Mostly he sang merry songs, about young lovers or railing wives, but to-night he was in a melancholy mood—

  ‘The life of this world

  Is ruled with wind,

  Weeping, darkness

  And hurting:

  With wind we bloomen,

  With wind we lassen,

  With weeping we comen,

  With weeping we passen,

  With hurting we beginnen,

  With hurting we enden,

  With dread we dwellen,

  With dread we wenden.’

  He was so affected by the words and by his own voice, which was a plaintive tenor, that he put his head down on the table and cried.

  July was in the kitchen; she spent most of her time there those days; Master Cheyne thought it fittest for her, and she liked it better than those parts of the house to which he came more commonly.

  She was pounding spices in a mortar but she stopped to listen to the song, with her hands lying slack in the lap of her shabby brown gown, which was now much too short for her, both in the skirt and sleeves. The words and the tune she had never heard before, but they met something that had been in her mind, she could not tell how long – it seemed to her for as long as she could remember. The song met that something that had been below the surface of her mind, as a leaf spinning down from the tree in autumn calls up in the water its own reflection; they rush together, faster and faster, touch, and are one. That was how it was with Julian.

  Someone clapped Sim on the back, and they filled his cup. That cheered him and he soon was singing again; this time it was ‘The bailey beareth the bell away’.

  July pounded steadily away at the spices.

  ‘The lily, the lily, the rose I lay,’

  Sim sang, but she did not stop to listen to that song.

  June 5

  In the evening the rain took off, and after so many wet days the younger Ladies at least were glad to be able to go out into the garden. Heavy, purple clouds lay yet below the sun, but the air above was bright, and the blue of it lay in the pools which the rain had left. So they walked to and fro, lifting their gowns from the wet paths and the grass in the two little walled gardens, while the elders sat in the parlour with door and windows set wide.

  Dame Christabel walked with Dame Bet Singleton, and behind came Dame Bess Dalton and Dame Margery Conyers. The garden was small, but they regulated their pace with a nice care, so that each couple walked separate until Dame Margery stooped to tighten the lacing of her shoe, and the other two Nuns must either turn back or pause with her. They paused, and just then there came from within the Parlour the sound of a door slammed and a raised excited voice; Dame Anne Ladyman was crying out upon the serving-woman, Cecily a’ Wood, and now they caught the words, ‘A thief – a thief – a murrain on her! No, I will have justice. I’ll see her in the stocks. They shall whip her at a cart’s tail.’

  Someone answered. They could not hear the words, but the voice was Dame Margaret Lovechild’s, and the tone was soothing.

  It did not however soothe Dame Anne. ‘Why should I forbear?’ she cried more shrilly. ‘They are mine. The gold hand holding the pearl my mother gave me, and the other—’ She paused, and her voice dropped to a note they all knew well. ‘The other, the brooch with a heart and a ruby, it was a love-gage given me (ah! me!) before I entered religion.’

  Dame Margaret spoke again. ‘But, Madame, she has four or five children, little ones all—’

  ‘And bastards all,’ cried Dame Anne.

  ‘And who will tend them if the constables take her?’

  ‘Let them fend. One of them’s a big lass.’

  ‘Madame!’

  But Dame Anne stamped her foot and cried, ‘I’ll not forbear. A shameless hussy and a thief!’ and came flouncing out into the garden and saw the four Ladies standing there listening.

  ‘Christ’s Cross!’ she said, still very shrill, ‘and will you also bid me let this baggage, this light-fingered trull, go free?’ and she looked from one to another with her big black eyes snapping sparks.

  Margery Conyers grew crimson and tears came up into her eyes; that was how it was with her always when she grew angry, and she was angry now because Cecily a’ Wood was a Marske woman, and so it was the duty of any Conyers to defend her. For a few minutes she and Dame Anne raged at each other, then Dame Margery, whose position was weak seeing that she knew more of Cecily’s misdemeanours than Dame Anne had ever heard, burst utterly into tears and went away, sobbing that here was a pretty way of keeping St. Benet’s Rule, that talked always of holy poverty and Nuns who owned nothing, no not so much as a shift nor shoes nor a pen to write with.

  ‘St. Benet quotha!’ Dame Anne cried, looking from one to other of those that remained, challenging them also to battle.

  ‘Madame,’ said Christabel, ‘I hold you are right. A thief’s a thief, whether it’s a Nun’s goods she takes or another’s.’

  They all looked at her, quite taken aback, for not one of them but had expected that if she spoke at all it would be to thwart Dame Anne, for the sake of the old quarrel between them.

  ‘For,’ Christabel continued, too earnest even to be aware of their looks, ‘if she thieves here she’ll thieve there and everywhere. And how can any order be if the poor may idle, not car
ing to earn their honest living, but getting their bread by thieving from them that have, by God’s will or by the industry and providence of their own kin, goods, whether cattle or corn, gold, jewels or whatsoever may be?’

  ‘Mass!’ cried Dame Bet and Dame Bess breathlessly. ‘How she speaks like a book! Like a book!’ But it was not her eloquence that had taken away their breath.

  ‘Mass!’ cried Dame Anne too, ‘but it is sense she speaks, and the first I’ve heard. Then tell me, Madame,’ she addressed herself to Christabel as amongst paynims one Christian to another, ‘tell me what you think I shall do.’

  Dame Bet and Dame Bess stood still; the two others drew together and moved off down the path towards the bee-hives.

  ‘Holy Virgin!’ said Dame Bet to Dame Bess, and turned and went into the Parlour to tell anyone there, who did not know it, that Dame Christabel and Dame Anne Ladyman were walking together in the garden.

  They walked there for some time. Dame Anne told Christabel all her suspicions, the traps she had laid, and at last the certainty of Cecily’s guilt. She also told the whole story of the brooch with a heart and a ruby; this part of the discourse did not much interest Christabel. They did not go in till a drop of rain, heavy and chill, struck Christabel’s face. More drops began to rattle on the leaves and as they reached the parlour door the shower broke full.

  ‘After you, Madame!’

  ‘After you!’ each told the other with great courtesy, and all the Ladies within stopped talking to watch them enter.

  August 18

  Julian heard Master Cheyne ride out early, and some time later Meg went to Mass. Julian supposed that he would be out the whole day, and perhaps Meg too, but Meg came back quite soon with Sir John Bulmer and one or two other gentlemen, so Julian knew she must not go up to the parlour. As there was strife in the kitchen just now, on account of the cook’s pursuit of one of the young serving-women and the jealousy of his wife, she did not go to the kitchen. The Hall was neutral ground, so she stayed in the window there till they came in to set up the boards on the trestles for dinner. Then she went out into the yard, and tried to make friends with one of the lank stable cats. It would not come near, so she threw a stone at it and it fled. She was sorry then, because she knew that it never would be friends now, whatever she did. Yet there had been satisfaction in the hollow rap that the stone had made on the creature’s ribs.