The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  THE

  BUTCHER’S

  DAUGHTER

  a novel

  VICTORIA GLENDINNING

  In 1535, England is hardly a wellspring of gender equality; it is a grim and oppressive age where women—even the privileged few who can read and write—have little independence. In The Butcher’s Daughter, it is this milieu that mandates Agnes Peppin, daughter of a simple country butcher, to leave her family home in disgrace and live out her days cloistered behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. But with her great intellect, she becomes the assistant to the Abbess and as a result integrates herself into the unstable royal landscape of King Henry VIII.

  As Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of her new life, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the Church. Religious houses are being formally subjugated and monasteries dissolved, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. The cosseted world in which Agnes has carved out for herself a sliver of liberty is shattered. Now, free at last to be the master of her own fate, she descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary …

  The Butcher’s Daughter is the riveting story of a young woman facing head-on the obstacles carefully constructed against her sex. This dark and affecting novel by award-winning author Victoria Glendinning intricately depicts the lives of women during the Tudor era in a world dominated by men, perfect for fans of Wolf Hall and Philippa Gregory.

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2018

  by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2018 Victoria Glendinning

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1634-6

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 Bruton

  2 Shaftesbury Abbey

  3 Tregonwell and Arundell

  4 Unthinkable

  5 The End of Days

  6 Sherborne

  7 Chance and Choice

  8 Hay Hill

  9 The Great World

  10 Seeing the Sea

  End Note

  About the Author

  For my three granddaughters

  Teddy, Sasha, Ursula

  ‘With the dissolution of the monasteries,

  the nuns were cast adrift’

  CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA,

  1913 EDITION

  1

  BRUTON

  The destroyers straggled in through the gatehouse of Shaftesbury Abbey around noon on Passion Sunday. About twenty-five of them, stocky, short-legged and short-armed, with heavy boots and leather gloves, their caps pulled down over their ears and eyes. I and those of us who still remained fluttered around, unable to keep away. The men did not look at us and I did not recognise any of them. They were not local.

  Master Thomas Tregonwell was there to receive them. Of course he was, he would be. He directed them to the stacks of tools and equipment which had been dumped in the yard yesterday – ladders, axes, shovels, mallets, hammers, pickaxes, iron bars, coils of rope, pulleys, a treadmill.

  ‘Start with the church, as usual,’ he barked at the foreman, a thick-set oaf of a man. ‘Not the first one you come to, forget that, go for the big one, the Abbey Church. Take the roof down. Preserve the lead. Same with the windows. If you can save some of the painted glass, so much the better. That will probably be enough for one day. Keep the men in order, no looting.’

  After that, he said, they could start on the cloister.

  Then came the first of the shoutings and thuds, the crashings and clangings which filled our ears for the next weeks. We were instructed by the foreman to keep our distance. Stones and timbers would be falling all over the place.

  The simple-minded sister who scoured the pots, scuttling past on her way to the kitchens as she did every morning of her life, humming to herself, was struck on the head by a gargoyle and fell down dead. We crossed ourselves. Perhaps it was God’s mercy. What would have become of her, otherwise? We could not help laughing, just a little. We laughed at anything we could, we laughed at all the wrong things.

  Dorothy Clausey and I walked together round the cloister. It was the first perfect spring day after the extreme cold we had suffered up until now. The cloister garden was thick with primroses. The snowdrops were almost finished, except for those in the shade of the rose bushes. The snowdrops had been magnificent this year, their drooped white heads lolling. At the Abbess’s command, I had been weeding the cracks between the flagstones. The cloister, in the eternal moments before its destruction, has looked as peaceful and as lovely as it can ever have looked in all its hundreds of years.

  Afterwards, we two walked to the edge of the ridge and looked down over the Abbey Park. The low sun shone in our eyes. In the Park the whitethorn had sprung into bloom overnight, scattering snowflakes over bare branches. We watched spotted deer stepping between the copses. A loaded cart was struggling up the curving track from the village below. It was the cart with the wobbling wheel, so the going was hard. The wheelwright and his apprentice had already left. No one now would be mending that wheel.

  I wanted to give Dorothy something to remember me by. Not my emerald dolphin, oh no. I pulled off my green hood and gave it to her. It was part of my girlhood. I like to think of her wearing it. She put it on over her headcloth, smiled at me and thanked me.

  The destroyers quit their labours at daylight end. By then the precinct was littered with sawn-off roof-beams, loose piles of hands and heads of saints. We picked our way among them as darkness fell. Some of the workmen left the Abbey, I suppose to lodgings in the town. Others slept in the open, rolled up in blankets close to the fires onto which they had thrown broken-up pews from the choir. They must have been cold, but I felt no pity.

  And yet they have mothers, and maybe wives whom they love, and little children, and they had to earn a living. Who is to blame? Who is to blame?

  I spoke to one of them, who was standing on the edge of the circle round the fire scratching his crotch. I could not help myself.

  ‘Do you understand, just a little, that this is a holy place?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  When it was properly dark, I went alone into the Abbey Church. I saw jagged broken walls, the painted surfaces in shreds and fragments. I saw stars and a half-moon where the vaulted roof had been. I saw fallen stones and lumps of masonry everywhere, and was half-choked by dust. That heap of splintered woodwork in the nave was the rood-screen. The Virgin Mary still stood on her plinth, but her face and the Holy Child’s were smashed in. I hoped the two ancient nuns who stood together, day after day, in mute adoration of her, had not seen this.

  The bulky figure of Fathe
r Pomfret loomed beside me. I turned and saw that we were not alone. Half a dozen of my sisters were behind us, standing motionless and apart as if no one else were there, black figures between pillars which supported nothing.

  The falling masonry had unseated and cracked most of the floor tiles in the nave. I picked up an unbroken one and carried it away. The fired earth of my tile is painted with a yellow lion, at least I believe him to be a lion, with his tufted tail curled high over his back. I still have my lion.

  Later I lay on my back on my bed in the dorter. Tomorrow, or the day after, the dorter would have no roof. It was almost deserted, so many of my sisters had already gone.

  I did not sleep. The unthinkable was happening. In the times to come this ‘unthinkable’ of ours will be unthinkable in a different way. Because it will be not much thought about at all. There will always be new horrors and new calamities, and new opportunities. For my great-grandchildren, should I have any, this will be history. That is, if they have any knowledge of why the land in which they live is as it is.

  It might not have happened at all, There might have been a voice in some great chamber as darkness fell crying out ‘No!’, and all heads turning, and a candle lit, and wine poured, and a different outcome. Who is to blame? Spin the coin.

  But in the eternal moment it was happening to us, it was the End of Days. History is now and England. And it will always be happening, over and over and over again for always and ever. For you to understand the enormity, the desecration, the grief, I have to go back, to before the bitter spring of 1539.

  ‘Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.’

  ‘In what ways, my child?’

  ‘I have been impure.’

  ‘You have been impure.’

  My eyes were closed. I did not want to look at Father Pomfret. I heard him shifting his rump in the chair. I pulled my veil across my face even though the light was dim in this corner of the Abbey Church. I knelt facing him and wished there were something, a desk or a prie-dieu, between us.

  ‘Impure – in thought, word or deed?’

  ‘In thought.’

  ‘And what are your thoughts, my child?’ His hot hoarse voice.

  ‘I think about a young man I used to know at home.’

  ‘And what exactly do you think?’

  ‘I cannot explain, Father.’

  How could I tell this priest, who was too interested, that I permitted myself no carnal thoughts about Peter Mompesson, but that I saw him in my mind’s eye and imagined in the night when I could not sleep that we were running to meet one another with gladness and open arms. Just that, over and over and over, and the gladness made me weep. I thought about the child too. Sadness like a stone.

  ‘You are aware that to obtain absolution, you must make a full confession.’

  ‘Maybe I am mistaken, Father, and there is nothing to confess. It is but a scruple.’

  To change the subject, I confessed that I had taken bread from the kitchen to give to the little boys, and that I entertained uncharitable thoughts about the Novice Mistress and one of my sisters, whom I did not name, but it was Eleanor Wilmer. Father Pomfret gave me absolution and a penance of multiple Hail Marys, disproportionate to the sins I confessed. I knelt in the chancel and said the Hail Marys, feeling angry with myself and with him. And afraid of God.

  I will set down what happened to us after that calamitous Passion Sunday in Shaftesbury. The same horrors happened in all the abbeys and convents and priories and monasteries, all over England, and everything is recorded in formal words and in high places. But no one has understood what it felt like to be us, the ones cast adrift, or how we felt ashamed, even though we had no reason to be ashamed. My own shame, and the reason why I was a novice in Shaftesbury Abbey, came about earlier, when I was fifteen.

  I wanted to be with him. I cannot pretend I did not. I had noticed him before. He had been in the town all that particular market day, up and down the High Street, poking at pigs and cattle with his stick, hanging about at the new market cross just down the road from our shop in the shambles. He was lounging around on the stone blocks and bits of carving which were waiting for the masons to top it out. The market cross was a gift to the town from Abbot Eley, for market-people to shelter from the weather. It was nearly finished. The base with steps was there, and the six arches, but no canopy. The steps, and the loose cut-stones lying around, were handy for sitting on.

  Dark curly hair sprouting under his cap. Skinny legs. A cocky way of looking around him. I was serving customers with cuts of meat all day and was bloodied all over.

  It was dusk before he came and stood in front of our shop. My father had put up the shutters and gone inside. I had cleaned myself. It was June, the light fading slowly. I listened to Bruton emptying out, men and boys hollering as they drove beasts out of the town, carts rumbling away up the hills.

  ‘Agnes Peppin, will you walk with me?’ he said.

  We went down by the river. On the other side, St Mary’s Church loomed huge and dark. The lantern on the gatehouse of the Abbey was already lit. The bell for Compline had rung two hours ago. The grass along the river bank was trampled and fouled by beasts coming down to drink during the day. When we came to a clean patch under the plum trees he put his arms round me and pushed me down on the ground. I have said I wanted to be with him, but truly I did not want what happened. He was quite rough.

  Afterwards he was soft with me, and we whispered together in the dusk. He asked me to be his sweetheart and go only with him and I said yes. It felt natural to say yes. It was what I wanted, then.

  Then he had to leave me. There was no moon and he might miss the path back to Brewham once the night came down. He ran off back towards the bridge. I rolled over and buried my face in the long grass. It was cool and smelled good. I didn’t want to move. Which was just as well, because I heard voices, and people approaching. It was Abbot Eley and one of the canons, I could not tell who, taking an evening walk. They were deep in conversation and did not see me huddled under the trees.

  ‘My dear, this has been going on since I was a young man, since the great Cardinal’s time. There is nothing new. There was agitation about what they called a reformation of the Church back in King Stephen’s day. Nowadays it is a faction, got up by heretics from Europe. And by our King’s lust and avarice, though I would never say that in public, and neither for Christ’s sake and ours must you.’

  ‘So there is nothing to worry about?’

  ‘There is always something to worry about. They tell me now that Stavordale Priory is to be placed under authority.’

  ‘Stavordale – half a dozen sickly canons who do nothing.’

  ‘Correct. But Stavordale is only a short hour’s ride away. We are under scrutiny. It may become as dangerous to be prosperous as to be failing. His anointed Majesty has designs on what we have. However, I am perfectly confident that we will come through.’

  When I could no longer hear their voices I sat up. I knew more or less what they were talking about, though I did not know who the great Cardinal was. It had been announced in St Mary’s that King Henry, and not the Pope in Rome, was head of the Church in England. What difference did that make to ordinary people like my family? None.

  If the Abbey had something to worry about, so now did I. The weight of worry is the same whatever the issue. I was sore and sticky between my legs, and wiped myself on dock-leaves.

  ‘Peter Mompesson,’ said my mother, sitting on her stool, stiff as a rod. ‘I’ve been watching him. An uppish lad. A difficult family. They have come down in the world. Over in Brewham. A pity it has to be him.’

  ‘That young man’s granddad did me wrong before you were born,’ said my father. ‘Landed me with a dozen diseased cattle. I had the stinking carcasses loaded on a wagon and drove up to his place in the night and tipped the lot on his yard. Then he slandered me over what he said was an ill-cured side of bacon, which I swear was as sweet as honey. He lost me custom. We don’t do business with anyon
e in that family. We don’t ever speak to them.’

  ‘What are we going to do with you now?’ said my mother. ‘You have disgraced us.’

  My mother does not help with the butchering, or wash clothes. Our shifts and shirts are scoured from time to time by a little maid from a big family who is glad enough to be paid with a dinner. My father sees to it that we eat well. When he works on the couple of strips he has up on the Borough Field for our peas and beans, he brings back a handful of green stuff and throws it all into the pottage to soften along with scraps of meat from the shop. It is much better than anything the little laundress would have at home.

  My mother had not looked after me when I was little. I looked after myself. She is pale and fleshless, and beautiful. I can see that. There was something wrong with her, my father said.

  ‘She is not like other people.’

  That was all he would say. He cared for her as if she were a holy thing. I am their only child. I know some people in the town who have no children, but I know no other couple who have only one. She wound her head-cloth round her nose and mouth. She could not endure the smell of blood.

  Yet she had given me to myself by telling me what I was like. When I was younger, I asked her, ‘What colour are my eyes?’

  ‘Blue, like your father’s.’

  That pleased me.

  ‘And you are well-made.’

  I knew that. I did not have one leg shorter than the other, or a bent spine, or a birth-mark or a scabby skin, or one eye which did not open, like some girls in Bruton. I knew my hair was brown because it was long enough for me to pull forwards and chew the ends. My mother said that if I swallowed my hair it would wind itself into a ball round my heart and I would die.

  ‘You have an agreeable appearance, more agreeable than your nature. You have a good intelligence but you are pert, wilful and impatient.’

  So be it. That is what I am like.

  The one important thing my mother does is to lay out the dead. They knock on our door at any hour of the day or night: ‘Mistress Dorothy! Mistress Dorothy!’ Ever since I was about ten years old she has taken me with her. I carry her basket. I watch her cleaning up whatever nastiness has to be cleaned up, and arranging the corpse, and stuffing sweet herbs in the mouth and nose and up the backside. We always have with us in the basket a needle and thread and a piece of new cloth for a shroud. My mother buys the cloth cheap in the market when there is some fault in the weave. If the family cannot pay her for the cloth, my mother stitches something together from their own raggy shirts. She is deft. While she prepares the bodies for their burial, she sings to them – and to herself – the birdy little songs she learned as a child, always the same ones. She never sang them to me, never just for me. l learned them anyway.