The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  As he came to the corner of the church-yard wall something that stirred and rustled made him glance aside, and he saw Malle’s face bob up. It was as easy to see from her look that she spied out for someone, as that Gib was not that one she spied for. At once she ducked down again, and when he came close tried to hide behind the big holly bush that grew in the corner.

  ‘What are you at? Come out!’ he told her, and when she came, rueful and dumb, ‘What are you at?’ he asked again.

  She mumbled that she wanted – she thought – she hoped – ‘Lest He should come again this way,’ she said.

  He frowned his harshest at her. She had not even youth as excuse for wantonness, yet she was woman enough, with her large, sagging breasts, and broad haunches, to throw him into a fury of disgust.

  ‘Off you go!’ he cried. ‘Off to your work, or the Lady shall know, and you shall be soundly beat.’

  He watched her as she went, ungainly and slow, and with many backward glances towards the wood, till she turned in under the Priory gate-house.

  April 8

  To-morrow was Palm Sunday, but the weather had turned back to bitter cold. Every one of the Ladies at Marrick Priory had a cough, and not one would take any remedy more efficient and less agreeable than honey. Some indeed talked of lemon juice mixed with honey as being very sovereign, but since there were no lemons nearer, at the best, than York, their eagerness to undergo such a cure was of little immediate use. The Prioress therefore, having endured the combined, indeed, she fancied, the competitive, coughing of the House for three days in Church and in Chapter, descended this morning to the still-room, carrying with her a rushlight, because the shelf where the simples were kept was in a dark corner.

  And there, as so often happened, she found that where her eye had not been, old chaos reigned. For one thing none of the jars were labelled; for another, when she laboriously began to take off the bladders that covered the jars, she found things that ought never to have been on this shelf at all – that is to say distilled water of primroses, and the dried violets which would be made into sugar comfits at Christmas.

  So, revolving in her mind just what she would say to Dame Margery, she set to work to look through jar after jar. First came the dried lime flowers; then the coltsfoot, grey-green and soft, which rustled as she stirred it with her fingers; next two jars full of the light brown chips of the bark of wild cherry. And here – she lifted first one and then another down and set them by the rushlight on the table – here were the wrinkled black stems of comfrey, and here the faded pins of juniper. These, efficacious if unpalatable, should be the lot of every Lady who was heard even to clear her throat.

  It was just then that she heard the clack of pattens and recognized Dame Margery’s quick, scuttering walk.

  The Prioress had been minded to call her by name, to receive the prepared rebuke, but there was no need. The door opened and in burst the Chambress, and came hastily over to the table where the rushlight, shaken by the sudden draught, streamed aside with a lazy tail of fume. She had come in as though on some urgent errand, yet now she stood still, staring at the Prioress; the flame of the rush, steadying, swam brightly in her eyes, and shining from below threw strange, distorted shadows upon her face.

  ‘Madame,’ she began, and again, ‘Madame.’

  ‘What is it?’ In the old days the Prioress would have been proof against the infection of her excitement, but the times were too precarious now for her to remain unshaken. She blenched, but managed to preserve her calm.

  ‘Madame, the Mermaid – she hath seen a vision.’

  So it was not that the King had sent to drive them all from Marrick out of hand. The Prioress found herself extremely angry, the more so because her hand shook on the jar of comfrey it held. Worse than that, she felt her mouth also shake.

  ‘I thought,’ she cried furiously, ‘I thought—’ and she turned away, but not quite in time.

  ‘Madame!’ Dame Margery was quite at a loss.

  ‘It is,’ said the Prioress, away in the darkest corner, and rummaging among the jars so that they clashed together, ‘it is,’ she said on a high, unnatural note, ‘my many fears for the House.’

  Dame Margery knew those fears too. All the Ladies knew them. But she and some others differed from the Prioress as to the means that should be taken to save Marrick. Up till now they had only muttered together in corners of ‘the arm of flesh which shall not help us’, or of ‘God and His Saints to our warranty’, lacking courage both to brave the Lady by protest, and, should she yield to their protest, to shoulder responsibility for the consequences.

  But now, crimson and tearful, and caught in a strong flow of emotion, Dame Margery cried,—

  ‘But if, Madame, if this be a sign that God is on our side – If this be a showing of God—’

  The Prioress stood, turned away, silent and wooden. Dame Margery’s eloquence died.

  ‘Peccavi! Peccavi!’ said the Prioress, and knocked on her chest with her fist.

  But she meant, ‘I have been a fool! A fool!’ That first vision – O that she had trusted her instinct and put her eggs into that basket! Instead she had taken Cromwell for her saviour, and he had failed her. Now it was too late to turn back. No, not too late, for of course God was merciful. And perhaps it would work; at least it was worth trying. ‘Miserere mei Domine,’ she cried, meaning, ‘God! God! Do Thou what the King’s Vicar-General will not. Save the House of Marrick!’ She turned back to Dame Margery.

  ‘What – what was the showing?’

  The Chambress told her, tumbling it out as if spilling dried peas from a jar.

  ‘The pear tree on the cloister wall, that storm two nights ago – there’s a big branch broke loose. She – Malle – went to Grinton to buy nails, Cook sent her, for he says there’ll be no pears if that branch goes on thrashing at the wall like it has—’

  ‘Tchk!’ said the Prioress.

  ‘And there was the Pedlar’s donkey, she saw it, tied to the door of the wool store by Master Blackburn’s house.’ Dame Margery gulped. ‘Just as it says in the Office book, where two roads meet. And they came and fetched it away, and Malle went after them and she saw Him ride—’

  ‘Well?’

  Dame Margery whispered the rest.

  ‘And she saw Him ride on it across Grinton Bridge.’

  The Prioress kept her eyes upon the candle flame for so long that when she looked up she could see nothing for the floating light that still dazzled them.

  ‘Where is the woman?’

  Dame Margery began to explain how Malle had been along the river bank gathering pussy-willow for the Palm Cross to-morrow, but the Prioress cut her short.

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Up the Daleside after primroses.’ Dame Margery pointed up towards the hill behind the Priory, and found herself alone in the still room.

  The Prioress came out of the gate-house, and looked upwards. At the top of the open steep slope, under the edge of the woods, a woman in a brown gown moved and stooped; a little lad was with her. That was Malle, and the lad was the Priest’s bastard.

  Only when she began to climb the hill did the Prioress remember that she had not asked why Dame Margery was so sure that it was a vision sent from heaven. ‘But that,’ she thought, ‘I’ll find out better for myself.’

  When she had gone some way up she stopped for breath. As soon as she had it she called Malle by name. The two above turned and looked down; then the lad slipped away into the woods. The Prioress beckoned with her hand and waited for Malle to come down to her. She did not watch her as she came, but instead looked down to where the whole Priory lay spread out below her, the Great Court, the Nuns’ Court, the orchard, all the farm buildings, and the Church – like the picture of a priory. The servants were busy in the Great Court; a woman came out with buckets swinging on a yoke, and went into the Nuns’ Court where the well was. Behind the stables a man in a red hood was carting dung.

  She knew that Malle stood beside her, a
nd turned. She looked, stared, then lowered her eyes from the creature’s face. Never had she supposed that such a look could be. It was not a smile. It was not a light.

  ‘What...?’ the Prioress began, and must stop to clear her throat. It came to her with a shock that now she feared to be told what the woman had seen. She would have been glad to go away without another word said. But she drove off the fear; what else but good should God, Our Lady and Saint Andrew intend to their servants? Yet she knew that of that good she was as much afraid as if God were her enemy.

  ‘Come,’ she said, and heard her own voice harsh, weak and strange. ‘What is this thing I hear? What have you seen?’

  With a wrench, as it were, she took her eyes from Malle’s face. When she did that, and looked down again at the Priory, her mind steadied.

  ‘Mad as a goose,’ she thought. ‘That look is of her folly. I shall say to her, “Fie! fool, hold your tongue of these things!”’

  But when she looked at Malle she could not say it. Malle said:

  ‘There was a great wind of light blowing, and sore pain.’

  The Prioress shivered. A tide of air, snow-cold, steady and strong, rushed by them. The morning’s blue was now threatened by a cloud that rose and darkened across half the sky. With her eyes on Malle’s face the Prioress began, fumbling her words in a way that the Convent did not know—

  ‘If it is—? If you saw—? If it was shown – I pray you,’ she got it out at last, ‘what in your mind is God’s meaning to us in this showing?’

  While she waited the wind shifted and rustled among the grass at their feet. Against the deepening darkness of the whelming cloud the frail green mist on the elm trees was visible as it had not been against the bright sky, and far away along the fringes of the wood the bare ash branches showed white like clean bone. Suddenly the cloud broke in a snowy shower, so that looking up the Prioress saw a thousand thousand flakes spinning down, sharp white against the looming grey above, and so hard frozen that they rattled among the oak leaves in the grass.

  ‘Marrick?’ the Prioress cried, coming to the heart of the matter. ‘Was it shown to you of our House? Shall it fall? Not our House, and the Church that’s hallowed to God and His Mother and Saint Andrew? Not Grinton Church?’ she pleaded, though she cared not a button for Grinton Church.

  But Malle did not answer and at last the Prioress turned away and went slowly down the hill.

  By the time she came back to the Great Court the sky was clear again, and the clouds sailing in it light and bright as suds. The tower of the Nuns’ Church took the sun bravely. It was of stone, and built upon stone, but as the Prioress looked at it, it seemed to totter, and her heart failed. ‘Jesu!’ she cried under her breath. Then she realized that only the fast-driven cloud behind it moved; the tower stood firm.

  ‘And shall stand,’ she muttered, and ground her teeth together, while her fists clenched at her sides in the folds of her gown.

  April 12

  The roof of Master Cromwell’s new house beside the Church of the Augustines in Broad Street was not yet tiled, though the rafters were all in place, and threw down sharp bars of shade upon the sawdust and butt ends of wood, upon the carpenter’s benches and tools that were below.

  Master Cromwell stood with his backside hitched on to the edge of one of these benches as he talked to my Lord Darcy in the empty, bright skeleton of his house. The carpenters were at work laying battens for the roof tiles; they whistled, sang or shouted to one another up against the blue, where fat white clouds sailed. Now and again someone would drop the end of a plank with a clanging noise and a hollow bursting echo.

  ‘The horse,’ said my Lord Darcy, ‘is a good horse. He hath a fair pace and easy, and the harness will be worth a hundred marks.’

  He did not know if Cromwell was attending to him, or to the workmen; for the Chief Secretary’s eyes went sharply about, watching what the men did on the springing ladders, or flat on their stomachs upon the roof timbers.

  ‘But,’ my Lord said, ‘if I may have leave of the King to go home I shall have no need of the horse, and would beg you take him for the sake of friendship and in token of kindness. And,’ he added, ‘in Yorkshire I could be of service to the King’s Grace upon the Commission of Peace that is appointed.’

  ‘So you could,’ said Cromwell, not as though it were a new idea, but merely confirming Darcy’s words. Then he said it again, fingering a palmful of sawdust as though there might be something hidden in it. After a pause he said, ‘And I thank you for your gift, my Lord, and your good will to me.’

  Darcy said that the gift was naught compared to the love he bore to Master Cromwell. ‘And shall I have the King’s leave in writing?’

  ‘You shall.’ Cromwell reached up and clapped him on the shoulder, and kept his hand there as he led him about the house, showing him where the kitchens would be, and where the great hearth, and how choice a prospect there would be of a little privy garden from the window of a closet behind the Hall.

  In that closet they stood a while at the empty window-frame looking into the garden. Nearby there were piles of slates, and nails dropped about in the grass so that there was nothing but disorder, but beyond, a pear-tree, loaded with its snow, stood remote in beauty as a ship far off at sea. Perhaps because the door had swung to behind them the two gentlemen, leaning at the window in the sunshine, began to talk of matters of greater moment, and calling for greater privacy than the plans of the new house.

  They spoke of the Queen’s late miscarriage, and the sorrow of His Grace at the loss of this hope of male issue.

  Then Cromwell said, with his eyes on the heap of tiles under the window, ‘His Grace takes comfort from going down to Greenwich.’

  ‘It’s a fair palace.’ Darcy’s face was decorously grave, but Cromwell hid a small glinting smile by again lowering his eyelids, and covering his mouth with his hand.

  ‘And a fair flower grows there of late,’ said Master Secretary.

  ‘You mean Mistress Jane Seymour.’

  Cromwell laughed out and called Darcy a right North Countryman with his free tongue.

  Then he said, rubbing his back up and down upon the window – frame – ‘A fair flower, but discreet too as any grey-beard. Did you hear how His Grace sent her a crimson velvet purse full of sovereigns, with a letter begging her to spend them for her disport, and calling her – well, no matter.’

  ‘I’ve heard the like before,’ Darcy said.

  Cromwell caught him by the shoulder again, laughing and as if much pleased.

  ‘Yet this is not Mistress Anne,’ said he. ‘I told you this lady was discreet. Down she goes on her knees, kisses the letter, and then gives that and the pretty, plump purse back into the hands of the messenger, begging him to pray the King consider that she was a gentlewoman of good and honourable parents, who had no greater treasure in the world than her honour, and that if he would give her such a costly gift it might not be till her parents had made for her some honourable match.’

  Darcy shrugged, and muttered something about women knowing how to hold a man off so as to keep him on.

  ‘You think it’s her own wit devised the answer?’ Cromwell asked quickly, and Darcy met that quick stabbing glance, and began to have an inkling of what Master Secretary was angling for. So he only shrugged, and let the other go on.

  ‘So,’ said Cromwell, ‘the King’s love waxes at the sight of so delicate a virtue, wherefore that she should know he loved her honourably, he sent to her a promise that he would never try to speak with her except in the presence of one or other of her kin. And,’ he laughed ruefully, ‘to that end was I bundled out of my chambers at Greenwich, and Sir Edward Seymour there planted in my stead, because there’s a privy way thither from the King’s apartments.’

  He moved from the window, and taking Darcy by the arm, led him to the door, but stayed before he opened it.

  ‘You think it’s but a maid’s modesty? Yet it would not be strange if she were instructed by her friend
s, so as to bring His Grace hookwise crookwise to marriage. As indeed I think she hath been instructed by some, perhaps not so much her friends, to persuade the King against his present marriage, because these same friends, or sinister back friends let’s call ’em, want to bring back the old ways, and the power of the Bishop of Rome.’

  He had his hand on the door and turned so that the two looked at each other. Now Darcy was sure of what he was after, and according to his custom he replied with a something that was as much true as it was beside the point. He said that in his fantasy the King would not, for any woman, easily give up that power which he had taken into his hand.

  ‘I think as you. I think as you,’ Cromwell said, but still held Darcy a second longer, trying to read his face before he opened the door and led my Lord out, and to his litter, parting with him with the greatest pleasantness and courtesy.

  In the litter Darcy let himself smile. He did not think that the Chief Secretary was any the wiser for that talk of theirs in the little closet looking on the garden. Cromwell might guess that my Lord knew from M. Eustache Chapuys how carefully and earnestly certain persons had advised Mistress Jane Seymour to speak to the King. He might guess that my Lord was one of those who liked the new ways little. But of neither of these suppositions was he any more sure than he had been before.

  As my Lord smiled – a sharp smile with his handsome old head high – he was dusting his shoulder and his arm where Cromwell’s hand had rested. ‘The place is full of sawdust,’ he said, catching the eye of one of his gentlemen who went alongside; but there had been no sawdust to be seen upon his coat.

  April 20

  My Lord Darcy’s company came from under the arch of St. Mary’s Gate and on over the five-arched bridge. When the way no longer rang hollow under the hoofs they had left Doncaster behind, had crossed the Don and were, at last, in their own country.

  Darcy dragged the leather curtains of the litter aside and leaned out. ‘Hi! lads! Halt at the first ale-house. There’s one a mile or so beyond. We’ll drink there to the North Country and home-coming.’