The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  ‘I hear nothing. The matter lieth not now in my hand.’

  She was at the door before the Prioress of St. Helen’s mumbled, ‘Yet they are of your people. You are... you...’

  ‘I,’ said Christabel Cowper, ‘am a loyal subject of the King’s Grace,’ and on that she opened the door and went out.

  March 21

  The old lame tailor had come to the Castle at Pomfret to try on Lord Darcy’s new gown; black velvet it was, trimmed and lined with black sarcenet. He stood now, reaching up and breathing hard through his nose as he untied the laces at the neck of my Lord’s doublet. Darcy, his head turned aside, could see where the gown lay across the coverlet of the great bed, on which an embroidery of swans and cocks, cunningly disposed, made a trelliswise pattern of white, black and tawny.

  The tailor got the laces undone, and the buttons, and Darcy turned, slipping the doublet from his arms, just as one of his gentlemen came in with a look startled and discomposed.

  ‘What now, George?’ Darcy hailed him. George Nevill had been in my Lord’s Household since his boyhood.

  ‘A letter, Sir.’

  Darcy took it. When he saw the mark of the King’s signet he understood Nevill’s look, and moved a few steps away while he opened and read it.

  Nevill watched him, though covertly, and when he could discover on my Lord’s face no alteration of expression he let out a small sigh. Darcy heard it, turned, caught his eye, and with a lift of the shoulders and a shake of the head gave him a close, hard smile. Meanwhile the tailor, unconscious of all but his craft, stooped over the gown as it lay on the bed, contentedly touching the stuff of the sleeve with the back of his knotted deft fingers.

  Darcy dropped the letter down on a stool and came back to where the old man waited; he caught with his fingers the cuffs of his shirt, and so holding them, stretched his arms behind him, while the tailor slipped on the gown. ‘Ah!’ the old man breathed, as it went on, and when he had fastened it at the breast with pins, he stepped back a few paces, and stood, his head slanted, regarding my Lord. Nevill’s eyes were on my Lord too, but he was not thinking of the set of the gown.

  ‘Forsooth!’ said the tailor, ‘it fits well. A good gown! A fair gown. But the sleeve there—’ He ran forward and began to pull and ease the stuff on one shoulder.

  ‘It is a fair gown,’ said Darcy, looking down at the tailor’s bent head with its thin greying hair. ‘But you must have it ready for me soon, lest I go up to the King’s Grace at Easter time.’

  Nevill said, ‘Sir—’ and stopped at Darcy’s glance. But the tailor lamented aloud.

  ‘Alas! my Lord. If the gown be for a Court gown – Alas, had I known, it should have never been sarcenet but satin at least, or damask. Your Lordship was never wont to wear sarcenet for your gowns at Court. Alas! it will shame me. Suffer me to—’

  Darcy interrupted him. ‘It will serve. It will serve. And’ – he spoke now over the little man’s head to George Nevill at the door – ‘it may be the King’s Grace will be gracious Lord to me, giving me, in consideration of my infirmities, licence to remain in the North parts.’

  The tailor, his mouth full of pins, made a little, indefinite humming noise, and then mumbled that in no time he could put satin in place of the sarcenet. ‘Some say,’ he added, ‘that a man may journey more easily by sea than by land.’

  ‘Surely,’ said Darcy, ‘I should journey more easily by sea,’ and he laughed, but as if angrily. Then he touched the tailor lightly on the shoulder. ‘I can see that you would have me go to Court.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said the old man simply.

  When the tailor had finished and gone away with the gown over his arm, still bemoaning the unsuitability of a lining of sarcenet for one of my Lord’s station, George Nevill said:

  ‘Sir, have I leave to ask?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Will you go to Court by sea?’

  ‘By sea,’ said Darcy, ‘I shall not go. For neither will the King give me leave so to come to him, nor if I could get myself a ship should I go to his Court, but rather to that of the Emperor in Flanders.’

  ‘Then...?’

  ‘I shall wait,’ said Darcy, ‘till I am sent for and fetched. And it may be, George, that I shall yet die in my bed.’ And he laughed and gave George Nevill a buffet on the shoulder.

  But when Nevill had gone away he sat long looking through his letter books, weighing in his mind which, out of all those copied there, might be twisted into meaning treason. He read with a very grim face, and afterwards brooded a long time before he took up the pen and wrote—

  ‘For I peremptor feel my broken heart, and great diseases without remedy, to the death of my body, which God not offended I most desire after his pleasure and my soul’s health; and he be my judge never lost the King truer servant and subject without any cause but lack of furniture and by false reports of pick-thanks. God save the King; though I be without recover.’

  What would they make of that? He did not know. But it could do no harm and was as near the truth as he could, or dared, to go.

  *

  The old serving-woman who had taken the Prioress’s money let her into the parlour of Thomas Cromwell’s house and slipped away again, furtive as a mouse, behind the carved and gilt screen that stood across the doorway. The Prioress heard the lightest click of the latch, and knew that she was alone, and that now, if her luck held, she would need none other to speak for her, but herself would speak to my Lord Privy Seal.

  There was an oriel window at the far end of the room where she would not be seen at once by anyone coming in; so she went and sat down there upon a little gilt stool; sunshine came coloured through the tall window, and brighter and cleaner through a casement which stood open upon a little inner garden.

  From the stool the Prioress set herself systematically to observe the furnishings of the noble chamber; she did it partly to calm her breathing, but partly also for genuine curiosity.

  There was a tapestry carpet on the floor in the oriel. A greater carpet lay on the floor of the parlour, a very costly thing and such as the Prioress had never seen before, but at once she began to picture her chamber at Marrick with another like it, though of course far smaller. Round the walls there were hangings of red and green say, and on the two carved settles which stood one on either side of the hearth there were cushions of green velvet embroidered each with a rose, the single wild rose which was the King’s.

  As she sat there waiting, and listening, she could hear not only the noises of the street, dulled by distance, but also the closer, smaller noises of the house; someone in a room above was playing a recorder, and in the kitchen a servant chopped herbs. She heard a bustle begin outside; dogs barked, there were voices, and the sound of footsteps. Then the door opened and from behind the screen came a rather portly gentleman in a well-worn coat of russet faced with black lamb. He had a broad, fleshy face, small eyes and a mouth that pouted out full in the middle, but which narrowed to a thin line at each corner, and there turned up, like the mouth of a cat. He was pulling off a hawking glove and now he threw it down on the table; the bell that had been jangling as he tugged at the glove rattled once on the board and then was silent.

  ‘You’ve lost your wager,’ said this gentleman to one among those others who followed him. ‘There’s no tercel this side the sea can match my Archangel.’ Then he saw the Prioress.

  ‘Who is this?’ he said, very sharp and quick, to the gentleman behind him; and to the Prioress, ‘How did you come here?’

  She was the first to answer, but not before she had made a reverence of the deepest and humblest that she knew. She said:

  ‘By paying.’

  ‘Ho! And paying whom?’

  ‘My Lord, if I told you that, I might not find him – or her – so able or so willing to help me to your presence another time.’

  ‘No,’ said Cromwell. ‘You might not.’ He looked at her hard, but before he had made up his mind to call the servants and
tell them to take her away, she spoke again.

  ‘But it’s alone that I should see you.’

  Her effrontery amused him, and besides he thought she looked too sensible a woman to have come empty-handed.

  ‘Did you pay for that too?’ he asked.

  She said no; only my Lord himself had that to sell.

  ‘To sell!’ Cromwell laughed, and said to the others, ‘Leave us.’

  As they went out he came to the window and took the Flanders chair of painted leather that stood there. The Prioress sat down again upon the stool.

  ‘Do you not know,’ said he, ‘that a Religious should not be forth of the Cloister? And if she must so, she is bound by her Rule to have two of the Nuns with her.’

  The Prioress said she knew it well. ‘Yet when there is sore need—’ she said; and then, ‘As for the Ladies, they would have been afraid to leave our House.’

  He laughed again. Though her words were of the simplest this woman’s tone gave them salt.

  ‘And where is your House?’

  ‘At Marrick on Swale in the County of Yorkshire.’

  ‘Marrick,’ he repeated, and was silent for a minute, sucking with his tongue at a hollow tooth. ‘St. Ambrose – no – St. Andrew of Marrick had licence to continue – last autumn – September.’ He seemed to reflect again, and then told her the amount they had sent to him as a gift, and reminded her that half their year’s rents had also been promised. ‘And there are other matters,’ he said, stabbing into her face with his sharp eyes. ‘Other matters which make me to well remember the name of your House. Is it to speak of these that you have – paid?’ and he smiled, but acidly.

  She held out the buckskin bag that she had carried clasped in both hands.

  ‘My Lord, there are the rents.’

  He took the bag, weighing it in his hand before he untied the thongs, and let the gold run out into his palm. ‘Correct,’ he said, when he had counted it. ‘But for those other matters—’

  She did not pretend to be ignorant of what he meant, but affirmed, briefly yet categorically, that those men of the Western dales who had raised insurrection had broken into the Priory by force, and by force taken from the Nuns’ table and the Nuns’ store: she told him precisely what they had taken, even to the red cock and the firkin of sprats, seeing that she could not regard these things as unimportant, and he, listening attentively, seemed to agree with her in that.

  ‘But,’ he said, when she had finished, ‘there is, besides all, this woman, your servant, who—’

  ‘Whom I myself, my Lord,’ she urged, ‘brought hither, that if there were in her sayings any treason it should be bolted out.’

  ‘True.’ He nodded. ‘Well, it shall be bolted out.’ He sat silent, his hands on his knees, his small sharp eyes looking out into the garden. Except for something taut in his stillness he might have been meditating; but she knew that he listened and waited. She knew also that here was her cue.

  ‘My Lord,’ she said, ‘I have no fear that you shall find treason, for the woman’s but a poor fool.’

  ‘I shall know that, when she hath been examined on these matters. If she is innocent she shall be set free.’

  ‘As to that,’ said the Prioress, ‘I care not, whether or no. But,’ she got up from her stool now, and did him a reverence; when he turned to look at her, he saw that she held out to him a small thing wrapped in leather.

  ‘What is this?’ He took it from her hand and unwrapped it. It was the little pyx, which, as he held it, caught the sun with the pure lustre of gold and the sharper refraction of light from the faceted jewels.

  ‘What we ask,’ said the Prioress, standing meek and empty-handed before him, ‘is that the King’s Grace and you should know our loyalty. And that we may have and retain your gracious favour, to whom we look as to our second founder, to preserve our House in these unquiet, scrambling times.’

  He was examining the pyx, turning it round in his fat, strong hands. As she watched it she felt a sharp pang of loss, for the precious pretty thing.

  ‘Madame, why are you so resolved that even at a great price your House shall continue? Is it because you are one of those false papist Religious who tender more the rags of their outworn corrupt superstitions than the new light of the true Gospel? Come, why is it?’

  If he thought, by the sharpness of his look and tone, to abash the Prioress, he had misread her. She paused for a moment before she answered, but it was for calculation, and not confusion, that she needed time.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I shall tell you. As you would be loth to see this realm invaded by the King of France, or to see the Turk, or any other, triumph here, being yourself not only a member of the Commonwealth, but also, under the King’s Grace, the chief ruler of it – so I.’

  Cromwell did not laugh aloud, but she saw his big body shake as he chuckled. ‘So you,’ he said, ‘being under God, the chief ruler of Marrick—’

  He stood up. ‘Well, Madame, if I find that your wench is, as you say, nothing but a poor crazed thing, your House shall take no hurt.’ He laid the little golden pyx to his cheek, as though it were a thing he loved, and he nodded to dismiss her.

  March 22

  Aske sat in the Cross and Martlets Inn at York. He had a book on his knee because if he seemed to read it was easier to keep out of the talk. There were close on a dozen other gentlemen sitting about the room, everyone being indoors this wild evening, and the talk was lively, for now that the Duke’s progress of justice was completed, except for the trials and hangings to be done at York, most of these gentlemen expected to have license to return home; they spoke therefore of their stewards, their farms and household affairs.

  But a few of them, close to where Aske sat, left such matters for a moment to talk instead of the trial of Master Levening of Acklam, which would be to-morrow.

  ‘He will be hanged,’ said the most elderly of the three. ‘No jury dare acquit.’ He added quickly, ‘And that is well.’ But yet he hung his head down and spoke with a harassed look.

  ‘Ellerker will see that he is cast,’ said another. ‘The King has granted Ellerker a parcel of Levening’s lands.’

  ‘Fie!’ the elderly man rebuked him. ‘The King will grant no man’s land before he be attainted.’

  ‘It’s common knowledge Ellerker is promised it.’

  ‘Well,’ said the elderly man, ‘whether that be so or no, they’ll cast him in an hour.’

  ‘No,’ said an elegant young man with a most assured manner, and a lisp in his speech. ‘I think otherwise. For they say that Sir Robert Constable has said he would not for a hundred pounds have Levening hung.’

  ‘Sir Robert Constable!’ someone scoffed. ‘And how long shall his will weigh with a jury? Know you not that he is sent for, and my Lord Darcy also sent for by the King?’

  They began to argue then whether that were true. Some said yes, others no, others that Sir Robert but not my Lord Darcy had been summoned to the King.

  ‘And if it be so,’ lisped the young man again, ‘what then?’

  ‘Then let them go, and they shall find that they lie in the Tower,’ someone answered promptly, ‘along with Tom Percy and his brother.’

  ‘Sh!’ said another; and Aske knew, though his eye was on his book, that they looked at him. They began then to talk of other things.

  After a few minutes Aske got up and went out. He had thought he needed quiet in which to make up his mind, but when he came on young Ned Acroyd in the way to the kitchens, he found that it was already made.

  ‘Take this book,’ said he, ‘and fetch my coat and your own. I’m going out.’

  While he waited for the boy Aske stood in the covered way that led from the street to the inn yard. The lantern that hung just over his head sent shadows sliding over the roof timbers as it swung in the gusty wind that fluttered the heavy cobwebs there, and tapped the hanging rope of a bell against the plaster wall. The rain spattered in, and down the gutter outside ran a thin wreathed line of dark wate
r caught here and there by the gleam of the lantern. Now, as he waited, Aske felt his heart knock because of that to which he had, by a simple word to Ned, committed himself.

  Ned came back with his coat and a lantern.

  ‘Whither, Master?’ he asked.

  ‘To the Duke.’

  ‘Then I hope,’ said Ned, and laughed, ‘that it’s to take leave. They say it’s all finished now and that we shall go home. But I would you should take me with you to London, Master, when you go back to Gray’s Inn.’

  Aske told him sharply that he talked too much, so after that Ned held his tongue and Aske was sorry.

  The Duke had supped, said Master Appleyard, his gentleman usher, and he would receive Master Aske. Aske went up the stair, and into the room where he had sat with the Duke in February, and where he had sat alone last October. The only difference seemed to be that to-night there was a posy of daffodils set upon the table.

  Aske had had it in mind to move his business at once, but the Duke gave him no time, calling to him in the most friendly way to come in. ‘Come in, Master Aske, I want your counsel.’ When he had made Aske sit, and Master Appleyard had been told to send up wine and wafers, the Duke began to talk about the late pacification of the wild lands of Tynedale and Redesdale, and from that slid off to mention Levening and to-morrow’s trial, and then began to question Aske straitly – ‘What think you of this – or this – or that?’ Aske gave him the answers, in a mechanical sort of way, since all this was to go over old ground. Not only had they spoken together of these things, but Aske had written down particulars of certain matters at the Duke’s request.

  And then the Duke said: ‘It would be well if the King had many servants as honest as you, Master Aske.’

  ‘Now!’ thought Aske, and again felt his heart knock in his chest. But instead of saying what he had come here to say – ‘Would His Grace listen?’ he asked.

  The Duke leaned forward. ‘I do think he would, did he know one he could entirely trust. For me – I put my life in your hands, Master Aske – for such as me, who am of the great nobles, he has a jealousy (why should I fear to say what all have known, both of himself and of the King his father before him?) – so he will never trust us. And for the base-born servants he has – Well, I’ll speak no ill of them. Every man must have his beginning, as my Lord Darcy saith. But it is to you, and gentlemen like you, that the King would listen, if there were one of you that dared to speak the truth.’