She went back into the garden, slamming the gate so that a branch of sweet briar above it, smelling like paradise after the rain, shook down on her cold drops that struck as sudden as little knives.
July 24
There was a posy of clove-scented pinks, white and fringed and each with a deep crimson eye, on the sill of the open window by which the King leaned. The Lady Mary, his daughter, standing before him with her hands clasped upon the velvet brocade petticoat of her gown, looked no higher than the stems of the flowers which showed, lean and jointed, through the Venice glass; little shining bubbles clung to the stems.
‘Therefore,’ the King said, ‘I charge you tell me if from your heart, and truly, you have submitted yourself.’ He paused, but not long enough for an answer. ‘I tell you,’ said he, ‘I hate nothing more than a dissembler. My Lord of Norfolk, or Master Cromwell – Lord Privy Seal—’ he corrected himself, for such was Cromwell now and Baron too, ‘either of those, and other of my Council, would often have me dissemble with Ambassadors of foreign Princes. But I’ll never do so. Now, good daughter, will you in this show yourself my daughter indeed?’
He laid his hand, warm and heavy, on her shoulder, and she knew she must meet his eyes.
She did it, curtseying to the ground, and taking his hand to kiss it. She said that most truly, most humbly, as his bounden subject and penitent, unworthy child, she submitted herself with unfeigned heart to his will, ‘such as has been and shall be declared unto me for my obedience to – to—’ She stumbled and the sentence trailed away, because his eyes were still on her. ‘Oh truly, truly, Sir,’ she cried.
He nodded then, and smiled before he turned away. But he said over his shoulder that she would want to write to her kinsman the Emperor, and to the Bishop of Rome, how freely and of a good conscience she renounced her mother’s marriage as incestuous, and took her father as Supreme Head of the Church in England.
She stood there for a long time after he had gone, looking again at the posy of pinks, and wondering whether, with practice, lying came more easily.
She gave a great jump as someone came up behind her. It was one of the King’s gentlemen.
He held out a little green silk purse. The King’s Grace had sent it to her for a token of his love and favour. There was a ring with a fine diamond inside the purse. She thought, ‘So I’m to be paid for lying.’ That made it worse.
August 23
July was glad not to find Jankin at the gate when she and little Ned, the Bulmers’ new page, came into the Priory. Neither she nor Ned had any good reason for coming here, and July had been trying all the way down the hill to think of a good excuse, but the wind and the rain seemed to make it impossible to think, so another moment or two was welcome. Once inside the gate she edged Ned quickly to the right, and when he asked, ‘Where are we going? What’s in here. Why do we go in here?’ she told him truly, ‘To look at the horses.’
But as they came to the door of the stable kept for the horses of guests, they found Malle, sitting on the ground with a great wet pile of rushes beside her, that ran water to meet the water that was blowing in from outside. The reeds had all been cut in summer, as time served, and had since then lain in the river, tied up into bundles, and each bundle moored to a big stone. Now Malle was peeling them for rushlights; all about her feet the curled peel lay green and sopping, and on one side there was a pile of thin lengths of white pith, each with its rib of green; these were the lights.
‘See,’ said July, ‘there are the horses.’
There was a sorrel horse, and beyond it a bay.
‘Is that all?’ Ned objected. ‘My father has far more. My father has ten horses, twenty horses. My father has forty horses.’
‘Has he?’ July laughed at the child’s brag because she was so happy. It was true, what they had said at the Manor last night. Master Aske had come to the Priory. The sorrel horse must be his, and the bay his servant’s. But still she had not thought what she should say to explain why she and Ned had come here. She could not say, ‘I had to know.’ Still less, ‘I thought I might see him.’
‘Come on,’ said Ned, and tried to drag her to the door. But when they had reached it, it was he who hung back to make a dive for one of the fine curls of green peel from the rushes. July let herself be checked, and stood in the doorway of the stable looking out into the rain that rushed down out of a lowering, sombre sky, filling the empty Great Court with noises of gurgling, splashing, dripping, all overlaid by the great steady swish of its fall.
As she stood there Master Aske came through the gate-house. He carried a straw basket, and a fishing-rod over his shoulder; as he tilted it up again, clear of the gateway arch, the thin end danced high above him. He came straight to the stable door, his head down against the rain. July slipped back, and he pulled up abruptly with an apology that he left unfinished.
‘Why,’ said he, peering into the dark stable, ‘it’s – it’s little Mistress July, grown big!’
He came in, laid down his basket, and set the rod against the wall.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘the fishes I left behind me in the Swale aren’t wetter than I,’ and he bent his head down to peel off his soaked hood, and wrung out his hair, and laughed at July, his face wet with rain and his eye very bright and gay.
‘Sir,’ Ned asked, not waiting for an introduction, ‘have you caught any?’
‘Would you see?’ Aske picked up the basket and opened it, and Ned and he stopped together, their heads close, but July drew back; she had no wish to look at the gasping, wretched things flapping about in the hay there.
‘Marry!’ Ned piped in his clear voice. ‘It’s a great catch – three big fellows and two three small ones.’
‘That’s no mastery,’ said Master Aske, ‘on such a day as this,’ but July could see he was pleased, and he took Ned and tossed him up on the back of the sorrel horse. When they came again to July, still standing beside the door, Ned had Master Aske by the hand and was wanting to know all about what Malle was doing.
‘Why does she peel them all wet?’
‘Because they won’t peel else.’
‘And what will she do next?’
‘Lay them out in the dew a few nights, then dry them in the sun.’
‘Then the Ladies will burn them to read their books by?’
‘They will – when cook has dipped them in the scum from the bacon pot.’
‘Oh,’ said Ned, and stood with his feet wide, staring at Malle, and putting away in his head all this information.
But Master Aske came over to July. He smiled at her, swinging his wet hood, and then she saw his thick straight brows knot together in a frown.
‘Mistress,’ he began, and then with a hesitation unusual for him, ‘I thought – You wore a novice’s habit when I was here last year.’
July nodded.
‘And now?’
‘I’m waiting gentlewoman to Dame Anne,’ and July nodded towards Marrick up the hill.
‘Did you choose so?’
She shook her head and he continued to look at her, very hard and intent. He had not seen till now that pinched, defensive, east-wind look, which others knew so well; but now he saw it.
She said, in a flat matter-of-fact voice, ‘Sir John would not pay my dower till I was professed, and that cannot be now, the Visitors said, till I should be twenty-two. So the Lady would not keep me.’
He turned away from her, biting his lips and frowning. This – an unhappy, frightened little wench – was one tiny fragment of the destruction that the King and Cromwell were making.
He said, continuing his thought aloud, ‘And there’s my kinswoman, Dame Eleanor.’ Those two, July and the old lady, were present and painful in his mind, and beyond them all the others, known or unknown, now turned out. ‘Some,’ he went on, arguing it out, ‘some will go to the greater Abbeys, but old folk – such as Dame Eleanor – that’s not for them. But you—’ He hesitated.
‘By the time I am old enough there’
ll be no Abbeys.’
‘God’s Cross!’ He turned to her. ‘Who told you? It’s not possible. Our King cannot change all that has been for a thousand years, and in all Christendom. Who said it to you?’
She said, ‘No one,’ and he rebuked her for putting about such a word, and went on to show her at length how impossible it was that such a thing should be. ‘I cannot think how you should suppose it,’ he said; and she, dumb because he was angry, could not tell him the reason, which was indeed no reason at all – but a conviction that just because the fragile peace of the little House at Marrick was the only peace she had known, therefore it would surely be destroyed.
‘If it should come to that—’ he said, ‘if it should come to that—’ She heard him grind his teeth together, and she clutched at his sleeve.
‘Oh! do not – Do not – What would you do?’
He put his hand on hers and lifted it from his arm, but gently, and for a second he held it in his. Yet she knew that if he was not angry with her neither was he thinking of her at all.
‘There’s nothing a man may do now,’ he muttered. ‘Not rightly do.’
Then he left her and went across the Court to the outer stairway up to the Guest House. She took Ned with her into the Parlour, for he had become clamourous to know why they had come to the Priory. She counted, and rightly, that so young and plump a small boy, with his comical parade of manhood, would wile sufficient sweetmeats out of the good Ladies to satisfy him as to why.
But she would not let him stay long, and the Ladies found her fidgety, inattentive and abrupt. They did not realize how she was looking at them with eyes which were almost, if not quite, hostile. But it was so, because now the King’s dealings with the Abbeys meant to her nothing more nor less than danger to Master Aske. If the quick, utter and unresisted suppression of every Abbey in the country could have been procured by July nodding her head she would have nodded, lest otherwise Master Aske should somehow be dragged into the quarrel. ‘There’s nothing a man could do,’ she told herself, repeating his words for comfort. Since, however, he was different from every other man in the world, the words, though so obviously true, did not comfort her much.
August 27
Will came unsteadily into the room, tripped over a stool and dropped the saddle-bag he had brought upstairs; this morning his master and he had come up from the Priory to the Manor, because Aske was to spend a few days there, being kinsman to Dame Nan, though distant.
‘Mass!’ Aske cried. ‘Already! Could you not wait even an hour before you must drink yourself sodden?’
Will stooped to grope for what he had dropped, but the floor was tipped too dangerously for him. He stood up again and laughed.
‘By Cock! but a temperate man’d be tempted, so many pretty trulls there are below stairs. There’s one called Cis, and another – called – called – Well, I can’t mind her name now, but there’s thy old trull here, Master; Mistress Meg No-better-than-she-should-be Bulmer.’
Aske got up then and struck Will a blow which knocked him flat, and the fellow turned tearful and penitent and would kiss Aske’s hand. He swore he’d never take such a word on his tongue again, nor never drink no more than he could carry. ‘And God knows I know you are as clean from sin for her as it’s sure I’m a sinful man and an evil-tongued, graceless servant.’
Aske left him, disgusted with himself, angry with Will, and put out too at the knowledge that Meg Bulmer was here. He’d not have come if he’d known, and now that he knew he thought of staying but one night, and then making an excuse to go. But he had met that little July in the gateway as they came in, and he had seen her face kindle as purely as the wick of a candle taking light. He had thought of her more than once, since they had talked in the stable, with compunction and great gentleness, wishing that there was something that he could do to amend what it seemed could not be amended. Now he thought, ‘Why! it is that she lacks friends in this strange place, and she takes me for an old friend. Poor little wench!’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll be as true friend to her as I may.’ So he could not have found it in his heart to go away at once, guessing just how the light in her face would be quenched if he were to tell her, ‘I’m for Aughton to-morrow.’
August 28
Sir John Bulmer came into the room while Margaret’s woman Bet was lacing her mistress into the leather corset, busked with wood, and with side pads at the waist to hold out the over-petticoat and the gown. Sir John had been out hawking early with some of the other guests, but rain had come on heavily when they were far up the valley, and had blown in their teeth all the way home. He was very wet and out of temper, and began at once casting off hood and coat and doublet, and pulling down his hosen. Margaret said he’d make Bet blush, and Bet pretended to hide her eyes, but peeped at him from behind her hand, laughing. He said if she was going to be married she’d best get used to the sight of a man. ‘Oh fie, Sir!’ cried Bet, but she went by him with a look that was anything but coy.
When she came back she had Margaret’s bodice and petticoats on her arm. She slipped on the bodice and tied the points, then the petticoats, and asked – which gown and sleeves? Margaret said, ‘The blue, and the damask sleeves.’
Sir John was sitting on the bed, rubbing his wet legs with a towel. He told Bet to fetch him a pair of hosen and a gown from the trussing coffer. Margaret nodded, so Bet left her mistress to get the things and tie his points for him. Then she came back to Margaret, and he lolled on the bed, warm and comfortable again, watching Margaret turn or stand still, raise her arms or thrust them into the wide sleeves that Bet laced up to the bodice. Whatever she did she was lovely, and once he came from the bed, pushed Bet away, and lifting Meg’s hair, kissed her neck.
Bet was fastening the last petticoat, which was of crane-coloured damask like the sleeves. Then Meg dived her head into the gown, and came out with her bright hair tumbled.
‘How much longer?’ he cried.
‘Not long,’ she told him. ‘Not long. Bet has to do my hair. Are you hungry?’
‘You’d be hungry if you’d ridden as I have through the rain.’
Margaret had sat down in front of the mirror and Bet began fastening up her hair; neither of them had any intention of being hurried, but Meg leaned forward so that she could keep an eye upon his face in the glass, in case he grew too impatient.
‘Who went with you?’ she said to him; and to Bet, ‘Draw out that pin again. There’s a hair pulls. That’s better.’
He was naming the other guests; Aske’s name came last, and Sir John chuckled, but sourly. ‘He’s lost his hawk. I told him he would. She’s not yet fully reclaimed though she’s a handsome enough eyas. He cast her off after a couple of mallard and she flew wild, and got into the trees at the top of Gill Beck. He’s riding a young mare too, that’s but half managed. I told him so, but he’s a man that thinks he knows better than any, though he was very sorry to lose his hawk, and acknowledged I had been right.’
Margaret had met her own eyes in the mirror at the mention of Aske’s name. Now she smiled and murmured, half aloud, ‘Poor Robin!’ and because she was smiling at herself did not see Sir John lift his head. She took a long look at her own lovely face thinking, ‘Jesu! no! It was because he loved me too much that he never came again. And that is why he remains a bachelor.’ Then she glanced at the reflection of Sir John. He was drumming with his fingers on his knee. He looked up suddenly and said to Bet, ‘You can go. Yes, go. No – leave that alone.’ Bet went hastily, but for a full minute he said nothing, and Margaret sat, with her hands in her lap and eyes lowered, in her pose as still and easy as a fish in a quiet pool, and as ready to flash into life.
‘I marvel,’ said Sir John, still frowning at his knuckles, ‘that Robin Aske has never married.’
That chimed so exactly with her thoughts that Meg turned about on the stool, to look at him with a new respect. Could it be that the slow ox had hid such perception behind his dull face all these years? At the thought that there might
be some smoulder of anger under his sluggish devotion she brightened visibly like a flame.
‘I have marvelled too,’ she said sweetly.
‘You have—?’ He looked up and was aware of the brilliance of her beauty. He stared at her, and she saw anger, pain and a hungry worship trouble the dullness of his inexpressive face. She said, on a sudden inspiration, ‘Shall we marry him to July?’ and watched him, all wifely submission outwardly, and with her spirit dancing and daring him within. Laughter bubbled up in her too as she saw him trying to work out how this might relate to that which he suspected.
He dropped his eyes and muttered that July was well enough here with Dame Nan.
‘This,’ she told him, ‘was but for a time. I’m her sister. I must see the child provided for. We cannot keep her dower for ever. Robin Aske – or another – but as she hath small looks, it were well soon rather than late.’
She stood up and moved to the door. Let him puzzle his head as to whether or no she cared whom Robin Aske married. He got up heavily and followed her. ‘I must think on it,’ he said.
August 29
Robert Aske was very pleased with himself when he marked his lost hawk rather high up in one of the trees near the top of Grinton Beck. ‘It’s well,’ he thought, ‘that I came.’ Sir John Bulmer had been positive he’d never find her.
He got down from the saddle and slipped the bridle over a low bough; the young mare was a joy to ride, footed like a fairy, and would soon lose her whimsies. ‘There, there, my sweeting!’ he said, smoothing his hand down her neck, before he started to climb the tree.
About two minutes later, with a great crack of a breaking bough, he came down, rushing through the leaves with a prodigious and startling commotion. When he had picked himself up he sat down again hastily, and began to assess the damage. He had torn his doublet; something was very wrong with one ankle; the mare, taking fright at his sudden and noisy descent, had dragged the bridle from the bough and was away; he could hear her go clattering down the beck, slipping and stumbling and churning through the water in one of the pools – he could only hope she would not break a leg.
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