The Man On a Donkey

by H. F. M. Prescott

  He sat down by her on the bank, leaving his hand in hers, and hoping that she would become calm; but she did not seem able to stop crying, now that she had begun. At last it distressed him too much to be borne longer.

  ‘Sweeting,’ he said, ‘let’s be merry a little. Will you for my sake?’

  She gave a great gulp, and sat still, and apparently without breathing, for a long instant. Then she released his hand, and in silence wiped her eyes, not making any attempt to turn away, but doing it simply, carefully, openly.

  The sun had gone down, and a half-moon looked into the garden from a sky that was still bright but whose colour was chilling away. With a sudden flurry of wings a blackbird alighted in the mulberry-tree, bowed, swung up his tail, and began his song.

  ‘How sweet he sings,’ said July, not in the low voice of one who is near to tears, but in a high, clear tone, that brought startlingly to Aske’s mind the wild beauty of her sister. ‘But whether he thinks on the moon or upon worms,’ said July, ‘none knoweth.’ And she laughed.

  When Laurence came into the garden, the moon, instead of a thin white flake with the blue showing through, was a well of purest cold light. As he came through the passage he heard voices; at the farther end he stood looking at them.

  Aske, stooping down, was playing idly with a pebble, dandling and jumping it in his cupped palm. July sat gazing at him with a little smile and a look of inly bleeding tenderness. This was not that look which a woman bends upon her lover; to Laurence it was something worse than that. It was the look, at last on July’s face, of a woman, not of a child; of a woman gazing on her child.

  Laurence knew too well in himself the kind of love of which that look came, to mistake it in another. But to see her pour it over the bent head of this man was worse, he thought, than to find them breast to breast.

  April 7

  Aske heard them driving the nails into his coffin. He braced himself, straining to heave off the lid. He tried to shout, and wakened himself by a groan. It was a dream. He was awake now, but the knocking went on, and someone below shouted, ‘In the King’s name!’

  He was out of bed, with his hand on Will’s shoulder, shaking him. But Will only rolled over in bed with a snore, and Aske remembered that a few hours ago he had come back to the Cardinal’s Hat dead drunk. So there was no help in him.

  There was no help anywhere, nor anything to do but dress and be ready. He could hear them opening the doors below. His knees were shaking, and in the dark he could find only shirt, drawers and shoes. By the time he had these on a light shone on the ceiling and slid to the floor, as they came clattering upstairs.

  They burst in, half a dozen of them, armed archers of the Guard, and he could hear more outside. They said they had come to apprehend him for new treasons lately discovered, and laid hold of his wrists. Will wakened just at that moment, yawned, stared, and lurched out of bed.

  ‘Will! Stop!’ Aske cried, but Will went at the men, clawing and screaming like a maniac, to be knocked down as clean as a skittle-pin. Those two who held Aske drove him to the door. He could do nothing, but as they dragged him downstairs he shouted, ‘Don’t hurt the fellow. He’s drunk. He means no harm.’

  Out in the inn-yard, where the sharp night air met him, he remembered that he was not half dressed, and tried to hang back, asking that one would fetch his clothes, or give him time to get them on. They said they were not his body servants, nor his nurse neither, to put on his hosen, and tie his points, and wipe his breach for him.

  As they thrust him into the street he experienced for the first time, with rage and fear, the impotence of a prisoner.

  April 8

  The litter halted, and Lord Darcy in its black interior heard someone beat with the butt end of a pike upon a gate. As the bars rumbled into their sockets, and the gates clattered back upon the walls, the litter moved on, swinging the leather curtains for a second aside, so that a little trickle of the swaying torchlight dodged in, and was blotted again. The litter stopped once more, and just then, from high up above, came the strokes of a great bell, telling the hour. It was ten of the clock, and the great bell of the King’s Tower of London had struck it out.

  Darcy pulled the curtain aside, and got his foot over the edge of the litter. He was not going to show these fellows any unwillingness to arrive. But for a moment, dazzled by the crowded torches, he could only blink, unable to make out any of the surrounding faces clearly. Then he saw Mr. Lieutenant, Sir William Kingston, lean and tawny brown as a Berkshire hog.

  ‘Good Master Lieutenant,’ said he, ‘you give me a kindly welcome,

  ‘Sorry I am, my Lord,’ replied Kingston stiffly, ‘to give you any welcome to this place.’

  ‘Nor should you,’ said Darcy, ‘if honest men were up, and rogues down. Well, show me the way.’

  They showed him the way to the Beauchamp Tower, and there he found, sitting about the remains of a very meagre fire – but in the Tower that small handful of fuel cost as much as a bushel of sea-coal anywhere else – Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram Percy, strangely pale after their weeks of captivity; and Sir Robert Constable. They had heard of his coming from the guard, and so had saved some of their supper, and made him welcome to it, prizing him not only as a comrade but, also for this night at least, as a novelty, and an event.

  So when he had eaten they sat a long while talking, till the two Percys, having wearied themselves out with railing against Cromwell, began to yawn, and lay down under their cloaks. Soon they slept, Thomas with sudden starts, and now and again a sharp cry, and a hand flung out; Ingram with the blank look of death upon his upturned face.

  The older men lay down too, but did not sleep. Instead they murmured together of the apparent dangers of their case, or of such slight hopes as they might discern.

  Darcy himself had none of these hopes, saying roundly, ‘Cromwell is set to pull down all nobles. So I shall go, and those two, yet you may escape.’

  Sir Robert argued a bit against him; yet was brought to confess that indeed, as a distant kinsman of the Queen, he might, at the worst, find one with power to procure his pardon.

  ‘Yet—’ he cried, ‘Yet – “pardon”! For us who have done no treason since that pardon we were freely given!’ Darcy heard him grind his teeth in the darkness, and then mutter, ‘I do not wonder to hear those two curse and swear.’

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, speaking slowly after a silence, ‘I shall not hope but for one thing. Shall I tell you what?’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘That God in His mercy will take my death as if I had died fighting for His Cross.’

  ‘Say you so?’ muttered Constable, startled and solemnized.

  ‘And may be, in His good time, He will rise up to defend His honour, and Holy Church, and to tumble down,’ said Darcy, ‘these heretics and Privy Seals,’ and he laughed, sharply and angrily.

  April 9

  Laurence Machyn heard his wife sigh. It was a very small breath, and she was unconscious of it, but to him it was as dreadful as the sound of the passing bell. And again she sat very still, yet with her eyes roving, as though she listened and waited. Laurence groaned within himself, thinking, ‘She sighs for him.’

  He laid down his knife beside the ham-bone he was picking and said abruptly:

  ‘They took him to the Tower on Saturday. One told me of it this morning.’

  He had not meant that there should be the least note of triumph in his voice, and he was ashamed to detect it. Yet it did not matter, since July missed it. The news itself was all she cared for.

  She turned her face towards him, and he saw horror quicken it; then, before his eyes it seemed to die, so white and empty did it grow. She said nothing, and her eyes looked past him. After a minute she laid her hands on the table and stood up.

  ‘I have finished,’ she said, and went out. He heard her climb the stairs, and thought he would hear her footsteps in the room above, which was theirs. But no – she went on to the attics. He knew that she went there so
that he should not come in upon her, and he felt as if something had laid a hand upon his heart, squeezing it cruelly.

  Upstairs Julian stood in the little closet under the roof, leaning a hand against one of the beams, and looking down without seeing it at the old cow-hide trussing coffer. Her thought was not, as yet, precisely of Robert Aske, but rather – ‘It has come.’ All her life she had been expecting the worst, and now the worst had come.

  April 16

  Quite a score of mounted archers, riding close, surrounded the litter in which Lord Darcy was brought from the Tower for examination by the Lords of the Council in Lord Chancellor Audeley’s house. They rode into the courtyard, and then the sergeant of them, dismounting, unlaced the leather curtains, and said to my Lord, ‘Sir, you are to follow me.’

  The fine new staircase which the Lord Chancellor had lately had built was of an easy and broad tread, but when a gentleman usher opened a door at the top, and beckoned my Lord in, he paused, leaning heavily on his staff. Then he lifted his head and went into the room.

  It was a sunny place, and the windows were open upon the tops of the apple-trees which showed, among their fresh leaves, round bright pink buds. A small company of gentlemen stood talking together in the pleasant air and sunshine. There was Fitzwilliam, broad and black; Paulet with his smooth look; Edward Seymour, the Queen’s brother, now Lord Beauchamp, looking, as always, like one who knows himself to be better than his company; Suffolk, who liked to ape the King when he was not by, stood with his fine legs straddled wide, swinging from his fingers a jewel that hung about his neck. At the board’s head, apart from all these, sat Cromwell, with a heap of papers before him, licking his thumb and flicking them over as calmly as if they were bills of lading, instead of Articles framed against the King’s enemies; as if he were once more a merchant among the merchants of Amsterdam, instead of Lord Privy Seal, presiding over the King’s Most Honourable Council.

  Darcy stopped inside the door, his eyes snapping bright, and seeming, for all that in these days his great height was bowed, to look down on the whole company. Some of them avoided his glance, some gave him look for look, as they came back from the windows, and settled themselves in the chairs set about the table. Mr. Pollard, the King’s Remembrancer, who sat in place of any common clerk at a further small table, dipped his pen in the ink, and held it poised.

  ‘Well,’ said Darcy, speaking to them all but looking only at Cromwell, ‘I am here now at your pleasure. Ye may do your pleasure with me. Yet I have read of men that have been in such favour with their Princes as ye be now, that have come at last to the same end that ye would now bring me to. And so may ye come to the same.’

  ‘Keep that door!’ cried Cromwell, and the gentleman usher, who was one of Norfolk’s gentlemen, namely Perce Creswell, hastily slammed the door and set his shoulders against it, as though that would prevent Lord Darcy’s voice, strong still, and still with a sound of youth in it, penetrating the oak of the panelling.

  ‘Outside!’ said Cromwell. ‘Fool!’ So Perce went out.

  There was an Interrogatory of over a hundred questions, and time wore on as Cromwell put them to Darcy, Darcy answered, and Mr. Pollard wrote his answers down. Now and again one of the other Lords would break in, for Darcy spared none, hitting here and there in his replies, and that was easy for one with such a long memory as his, which could range back, through things done and said in Court or camp, for twenty, thirty, forty years.

  ‘You,’ said he, mocking at them all, ‘you that think you can pull down the walls and leave the thatch standing! His Ribalds and his scribblers,’ and he pointed his staff right at Cromwell’s face, ‘they go about to teach the commons to grudge and murmur and scoff at Holy Church. Take ye heed that they come not to grudge at us noblemen, and when they have pulled down the Church, pull down also the whole nobles of the realm, and so rule all, tag-rag.’

  Cromwell let him finish, and then he smiled, a small thin smile.

  ‘You say the nobility shall be pulled down. God’s Bread! but it is you yourself and your fellows who pull it down by treasons against your Prince. Mr. Pollard,’ he said, turning to the little table at the wall, ‘put to him that question as to...’ He ran his finger down the paper, ‘The one hundred and twentieth,’ he said.

  Mr. Pollard read it out.

  ‘“If all things had succeeded according to your intention, what would ye have done, first touching the King’s person, and then touching every man of his Council...?”’

  ‘Enough!’ said Cromwell. ‘Let him answer so far first.’

  ‘Shall I answer?’

  ‘You shall.’

  Darcy straightened his back. His face was flushed and his eyes a bright frosty blue, so that for all the chills of the Tower, and his age and weakness, for a moment he looked the quick and dangerous fighter he had been.

  ‘For the King,’ he said, ‘not a hair of his head should have been touched. For the ancient and noble blood upon the Council, our intent was to preserve it. But the villein blood that is there, that should have been taken and judged.’

  ‘Meaning—?’ Cromwell asked. Now he was not smiling.

  ‘Thee, Master Cromwell.’ Darcy’s look as much as the curt words stripped an upstart of his Privy Seal, and of all his importance.

  ‘For it is thou,’ he went on, ‘that art the chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief, and art likewise causer of the apprehension of us that be noblemen, and dost daily earnestly travail to bring us to our end, and to strike off our heads. And I trust, before thou die, though thou wouldst procure all the noblemen’s heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head.’

  Cromwell got out of his chair, and began to beat with his fist on the table. ‘Strike him on the mouth,’ he cried, but there was no one there would do it for him.

  April 20

  Lord Privy Seal was among the crowd which waited upon the King as he came out from Chapel. The King waved his hand to put away from him all the others, and went with Cromwell to a window looking upon the gardens.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘From my Lord Darcy,’ says Cromwell, ‘nothing but saucy words and high cracks.’

  ‘And from Aske?’

  ‘Nothing of moment. Though plenty to hang the man himself,’ he added.

  ‘You sent to him?’

  ‘I went to him myself. First I told him that his own brother had given information of his treasonous proceedings.’

  ‘And he said—?’

  ‘Nothing to the purpose. Yet I think it touched him nearly. For he said, “God help me!” and then, “Which brother?” I said, “Your second brother, Christopher Aske.”’

  ‘And then—?’

  ‘No more on that head. But I said that he should have pardon for speaking the truth; that if when he comes to trial he should chance to be condemned I should be his intercessor; that no harm was meant to them all, but only to preserve the honour of Your Grace, which would be much touched if rebels should not be judged by law; but that once judged all those shall have mercy that have not offended since the pardon, “as,” said I, “His Grace knoweth that you have not. So you may speak freely.”’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘That for his own part he would always be ready to declare such things as come to his remembrance. But that if he bought his life by condemning other, he would be a thing to be abhorred of all good men, and his life worth naught.’

  Cromwell dared only to give a slinking glance at the King’s face, but it was enough to show him how it had grown red and bloated as Henry stood silent, throttling down his rage. Just then the horns blew for supper, and Cromwell caught a glimpse, beyond the King’s shoulder, of the pages and gentlemen of the Chamber, waiting with towel, ewer and basin for the King to wash his hands.

  ‘Tcha!’ said the King at last. ‘He’ll speak before long. You shall see. He hath an ill conscience before God for his treasons. He’ll not endure.’

 
; Cromwell thought of the man he had seen this morning, whose teeth chattered with the cold, but whose look was resolved far beyond defiance. He shook his head. ‘He answers still very stoutly. And they say at the Tower that though he has had the colic and has moreover a sore cough, yet he will most often be merry when they bring his porridge.’

  ‘Merry!’ cried the King. ‘Who sends him help then?’

  Cromwell said no one could have sent him anything. ‘At the foot of his last writing he asks the Lords of the Council for the love of God that he may send for money and clothes, “for I am not able to live,” says he, “seeing none of my friends will do nothing for me.”’

  ‘And yet,’ said the King, ‘he will not speak! Vile villain!’ he said, and there was a kind of incredulity in his anger. ‘Has he no care for his soul?’ he asked.

  Cromwell did not undertake to answer that. He said, reflectively, that the fellow might be put down into a straiter place, and a worse. ‘Or there is the rack.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’ The King brooded. A pleasant strain of music reached them from the Presence Chamber, and a pleasant smell also, of roasted and spiced meat.

  ‘No,’ said the King again. ‘Try this.’ He spread out his hands, and looked down at them, half drew off a sapphire ring, slipped it back into place, and held out to Cromwell a circle of twisted gold, with white enamel and green interlacing tiny pearls.

  ‘If he does not trust you, me he will trust. Say to him – “There is his Prince’s token to ensure him of pardon, if he will speak the truth.”’

  ‘Sir,’ said Cromwell after some hesitation, looking down at the ring upon his palm – ‘Should you pardon this man?’

  ‘He must by some means be induced to tell the names of those others,’ the King answered in a gentle voice. ‘But as for pardon—’ He turned away, and beckoned for the ewer and basin.

  May 12

  As July was buying mackerel at the door a man came by who hesitated, turned, and then stood as if uncertain of his way. He was a stranger and yet to July there was that about him which reminded her of someone. She caught his eye and looked hastily down at the fish in the huckster’s basket, barred with black ripple marks of the sea, and gleaming with the sea’s blue green. She bought half a dozen, had the man lay them on the stone paving of the screens’ passage, and was about to shut the door. But as the huckster moved away, that other, who had loitered near, came to her. He had the appearance of a harmless worthy man, and yet there was something in the way he glanced about that made her fear him, though he himself had a look of fright.