The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘You live too much in your head. How can you possibly know what she feels anyway, when you leave her in there alone in the cold?’

  ‘This does not come from inside my head. I know because she is me and I am she.’

  I remembered how I had been with Peterkin. Dorothy had taken a strange turning. But for a split second, I did understand.

  ‘Her name is Esther,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘We will find somebody to help you to look after Esther.’

  ‘I cannot,’ said Dorothy. ‘I cannot look after Esther.’

  For a few days I went in to her whenever I could spare the time and helped her with Esther.

  ‘Was it Robert Parker?’ I asked.

  She shot me a look and lowered her eyes to Esther on her lap.

  ‘It was only the once. It was – an error.’

  ‘Did he force you?’

  ‘He did and then he did not. You could say it was a rape, and then you could say it was not a rape. He never came to see me again. He has not spoken to me since then. I would like to kill him.’

  She meant it. There was nothing to say.

  I spoke next morning to Sister Mary Amor, as the most sensible and able woman around, about what might be done. I told her the story so far as I understood it. She made no judgment.

  ‘You could do worse,’ she said, ‘than to ask the Winterbournes to take the child in. The money would be a help to them.’

  I could not believe my ears. The only time I was in the Winterbournes’ hovel was the day I went there with Weasel and Dick and we rescued Finbarr.

  ‘It is different now. There is a young woman there, with an infant. She is a country girl from Devonshire. Emilia. I do not know whether her child’s father is the dumb John or the speaking John. It may be that they do not know either. Let us go and see them.’

  We went out through the small door in the gatehouse and made our way to the row of tenements. We knocked on the Winterbournes’ half-open door and went in, leaving the door open.

  There stood a plump, smiling young woman, with fair curls tumbling from her head-cloth, wearing a man’s shirt and a brown kirtle, neither of them clean but not filthy either. The same could be said of the floor. The room was ordered, with trenchers on a shelf, and an iron pot on the fire. There were three stools, and pallets stacked against one wall, and stacks of willow wands, and baskets hanging from the rafters. It looked like a home. Emilia was holding in her arms an infant of about five months old, as plump as herself.

  Unalarmed, assuming we had come on some Abbey business, she sat us down on stools and took the third for herself and her child. It began to grizzle. She pulled down the opening of the shirt and put the child to a breast. Her Devonshire way of speaking was such that I could not catch her every word. Her Johns were out, by chance in the Abbey, repairing wattle fencing round the dwellings of chantry priests beside the graveyard. The foxes had been at it.

  I let Mary Amor do the talking. When she had finished, Emilia cocked her head on one side, smiled, and simply said, ‘Yes.’

  This little one, she said, was a boy. She called him Little John. It would be pleasant for him to have a sister. She had milk enough for two. And if more came along – well, they would be a proper family.

  I asked, ‘But what will the Johns say?’

  Emilia laughed.

  ‘They are happy if I am happy.’

  Emilia was no fool. She questioned Mary Amor about how and when the money for Esther would be paid. Monthly, said Mary. Emilia would apply to the Treasurer’s office at the Abbey on a set day every month.

  *

  I know the Abbey is full of secrets. I had not realised how the secrets leak as from a cracked bowl. I do not know how Sister Eleanor Wilmer found everything out, but she did.

  ‘Your Dorothy Clausey,’ she muttered to me, behind her hand, stopping beside my stool in the parlour and bending over me. ‘I knew a woman who murdered her new-born baby. There is a word for it. Infanticide.’

  ‘Dorothy has not done that. Dorothy would never do that.’

  Even as I whispered the words I was not so sure.

  But that danger has now passed.

  ‘She will not do that,’ I said.

  Eleanor pursed her lips and looked skyward.

  ‘It happens. I shall pray for her.’

  I locked my hands together in my lap so as not to slap her about the chops.

  ‘As do I, Sister Eleanor. As do I.’

  Mary Amor and Emilia went together to take Esther from Dorothy’s apartment. I had no part in it. I would have found it painful. I felt deep sympathy for Dorothy. But under the sympathy was tamped-down anger. I struggled with it. She had this beautiful little daughter whom she could not, would not, care for. My Peterkin, whom I still loved with all my heart, had been taken from me.

  I went to see Dorothy after Compline when I knew the deed was done. Crossing the precinct, I came upon a pair of foxes trotting along towards the kitchens. They changed their plan when they saw me and loped away across the graveyard towards the chantry priests’ tenements, beyond which are hen-coops.

  I found Dorothy calm, and working at a translation by the light of a candle. I think she had no regrets. She had herself back to herself. She said she was well but tired and a little chilled. It was a frosty night.

  ‘Stay with me,’ she said.

  She spread out her bed and we lay entwined together in the dark all through the early part of the night until the bell rang for Matins and I had to run from her to be in time.

  Tenderness, acceptance, abandon – and amazement, afterwards, just thinking about it. My anger was assuaged by that night. We never lay together again, nor I think wanted to, and we never spoke of how or what it had been.

  Dorothy resumed her visits to the Library, though Father Robert Parker no longer came and helped her with her Latin. She did not pick at her skin any more, or not so much.

  During the first week of April, the Abbess greeted me with a grim face.

  ‘Master Tregonwell has bad news – for you, in particular.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Bruton Abbey has gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Fallen. Surrendered. Master Tregonwell is delighted with himself.’

  There was no time to hear more because suddenly Tregonwell was in the room, stamping his feet, rubbing his hands at the fire, complaining about the cold outside, spouting platitudes. I retreated to my corner.

  In my mind’s eye I was home again, seeing St Mary’s Church, and hard against it the Abbey gatehouse and the high Abbey wall running the length of the roadway, curling round at the end of the town, around the Abbey Park with its fishponds, bordering Dropping Lane, winding all the way back to enclose the church and the Abbey buildings. The Abbey is Bruton. Everything in Bruton belongs to the Abbey. How can Bruton continue to be, without the Abbey? I was finding it hard to breathe, but I pulled myself together. I must listen.

  ‘And Abbot Eley?’ the Abbess was asking.

  ‘Ho ho,’ said Master Tregonwell. ‘He signed the surrender all right. Along with fourteen of his canons. But Abbot Eley still presents a problem. Possibly disloyal. Possibly not. He is taken to the Tower to be examined.’

  I was too distressed to take notes but I do remember that this is what he said.

  Sir Thomas Arundell, who came to the Abbess later in the day, told more. Bruton Abbey was not to be demolished, or not right away. Sir Thomas had official permission to grant possession of it to a good friend of his, a merchant from Bristol. No doubt he had good pecuniary reason for effecting this. But then Master Cromwell commanded him to dispossess the Bristol merchant and replace him with one Master Maurice Berkeley, to whom the Abbey was already promised.

  ‘But who is Maurice Berkeley?’

  ‘A youth in Cromwell’s household,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘A young man on his way up. His step-father is Sir John FitzJames of Redlynch in the parish of Bruton. Cromwell himself wrote to Sir John FitzJames requesting –
which meant demanding – local support for Maurice Berkeley in the matter of Bruton Abbey. His pretty mother also played a part. She wants her son living close to her.’

  I pricked up my ears at the mention of the FitzJames family of Redlynch. However my own connection had no relevance at all to the matter under discussion. I kept quiet.

  Since Master Cromwell had chosen to further this young man’s interests, there could be no argument.

  ‘I complied. What else could I do?’

  Arundell was agitated and in a bad humour. He had never appeared before us so stripped of confidence and urbanity.

  ‘Master Cromwell is getting above himself. He goes too far. He believes himself to be above the law, he believes himself is the law. He thinks that he can do no wrong in the eyes of God or of the King and that he can trample all over the rest of us.’

  It was a measure of his anger and humiliation that he was so candid with the Abbess. He could not contain himself. He was ruining his hat as he talked, brushing the blue feathers the wrong way and smoothing them out again, over and over, until they would no longer lie smooth at all. The shafts of the feathers were bent and broken.

  ‘Master Cromwell should remember the fall of the Cardinal, a greater man even than he. Already there are rumours.’

  The Abbess smiled her thin smile.

  ‘I would wager all I hope to gain,’ said Sir Thomas, ‘that two years from now Master Cromwell’s head will no longer be on his shoulders.’

  The Abbess said, still smiling: ‘Nothing is for ever, as I have so often been reminded. That must apply to all who rise in the world, and even to you yourself, Sir Thomas.’

  From my corner, I quoted the first line of the Wyatt poem. The words hung in the air:

  ‘They fly from me that sometime did me seek.’

  I was out of order. He turned and glared at me. A look of fury passed over his face. He spat in my direction, the gob of phlegm falling at my feet, and turned back to the Abbess.

  ‘Of course, Madam, of course. God’s will be done. But meanwhile …’

  ‘Indeed. Meanwhile. You will find the spittoon beside the door, Sir Thomas.’

  5

  THE END OF DAYS

  The week before Easter, 1539. The Abbess, wearing the simple habit, broke it to the community in Chapter that we were doomed. The night before, I had seen a piece of paper in the Abbess’s bedroom on which she had written in a spidery hand:

  ‘We are torn apart by the teeth of time and (which is more dangerous) mistaken zeal.’ And her signature.

  All fifty-odd of us attended Chapter. We knew already and at the same time we did not know. The wall between ‘before’ and ‘after’ is higher than any Abbey wall. But when the disaster does happen, the wall collapses like a rotten hurdle. As Tregonwell had said to the Abbess, you cannot send time running backwards. It seems to me that ‘now’ has very little meaning.

  But it was ‘now’ when the Abbess sat very straight in the Chapter House and spoke to us in a calm voice.

  ‘I have sad news.’

  We were after all to be treated no differently, the Abbess said, in an even tone, from all the other monasteries and convents, the priories and abbeys, of whose dissolution and destruction we had been hearing over many months. The unthinkable was going to happen. To us. We stared at her.

  ‘As your Mother in God, I must command you to join me in a willing and voluntary surrender of our Abbey to his anointed Majesty the King.’

  If I had not been present, I would have imagined how my sisters must rise from their benches, cry out, tear their garments. Instead, there was dead silence. No one made a sound or moved except to scratch their flea-bites, and except that Dame Philippa and Dame Joanna clutched at one another’s hands, and Sister Mary Amor’s face was white.

  ‘We will be leaving the Abbey. All of us. Not today nor yet tomorrow, but soon. We will not be permitted to re-establish our community elsewhere. Each of us, perhaps in companionship with a sister, must make her own way. Some of you have families to whom you may return, or relatives who will give you shelter and a home. Those with the strength of spirit and body to travel may seek out Houses of our Order in France, Spain, Italy. The Chambress will return to those of you who are not yet professed the clothes in which you arrived at this place. I will help you so far as it is in my power to do so. You will not be destitute.’

  Silence, again.

  ‘In the coming few days, I shall be much occupied. After the departure of the Commissioners, I will meet in private with any of you who may require my counsel and advice.’

  She stood up. Her voice was cracking.

  ‘My daughters. My dear daughters. I have fought for more than two years to avoid this outcome. I always believed by the grace of God that I, your Abbess, and the ancient power and dignity of Shaftesbury Abbey, would prevail. But now I must ask you to understand that any further attempt at an alternative course, any refusal on our part to comply, would result in punishments and misfortunes more dreadful than anything that might have befallen any of us had we remained living in the cruel outside world. Meanwhile we shall perform our Holy Office, and observe our Rule, for as long as we can.’

  With that she left, the Prioress and the other Obedientiaries hurrying after her, hands hidden in their sleeves, heads bowed.

  I felt sorry for the Abbess. Yet it did enter my devilish head that if she did not sign the Deed of Surrender, any ‘punishments’ would fall on her personally, rather than on the lowly nuns for whom no one in the great world cared one way or another. She knew, and I knew, what happened to those Heads of Houses who did not comply. She was saving herself. The others she could not save, from whatever fates awaited us.

  The solemn signing, the pitiful signing, took place in the Chapter House. I saw and heard it all, sitting in my corner of the bench against the wall. Tregonwell brought with him as his witnesses two officials, two young crows in black from head to foot, named by Tregonwell as William Peters and John Smyth. They sat to one side, at desks with stools, and did not look at us. I do not know which was which. One of them jiggled his foot continuously. The other picked his nose. They had been through all this before in other places. They were bored.

  The whole previous day, Tregonwell and the two crows sat with the Abbess in her house, finalising the list of pensions for the sisters. Tregonwell left the Deed of Surrender with the Abbess for her to peruse overnight. It is an unworthy document. Shameful. The entirety is written on a mean piece of parchment, I would guess only about eleven inches by seven. There is no dignity in it, only an insulting parsimony.

  There are a lot of ceremonious words on that parchment, the lines cramped, the words abbreviated, the writing minuscule. The Abbess with her dim eyes could not begin to read it, even by the light of three candles. I read it aloud to her.

  Apart from the necessary particularities as to names and places, I surmise that it was copied from a template, the same legal formula for the surrender of every monastic House. I made two copies that night, in a clear large hand, sitting up late in the little chamber off Dame Elizabeth’s bedroom, one for her and an extra one which I retained:

  ‘To all Christ’s faithful people to whom our present writing may come, Elizabeth Souch’ – Tregonwell’s scribe did not even know how to write her name correctly – ‘Abbess of the Monastery of the Blessed Mary, the Virgin, and St Edward, King and Martyr, of Shaftesbury on the County of Dorset, and the Convent there, greeting in the Lord. Know ye that we the afore said Abbess and Convent, with one consent and assent considered in our minds, by our sure knowledge and mere motion of various good and reasonable causes specially moving our hearts and minds, moreover willingly and voluntarily have given and granted and by these presents to give and grant, surrender deliver and confirm to the most Illustrious and Victorious Prince and Lord in Christ, the Lord Henry the eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and Supreme Head on earth of the Church in England, all our mona
steries …’

  ‘Willingly and voluntarily’ – oh no. But there was no question of the Abbess being able to alter the wording.

  There follows the catalogue of all that we are surrendering – our lands, manors, mills, ferries, courts, leets, hundreds, fairs, markets, parks, warrens, stew-ponds, waters, fisheries, rights of way, nominations, presentations, donations of churches, vicarages, chantries, hospitals – and a deal more. All our temporalities and spiritualities. All our charters and records, all our deeds and leases, and the Seal itself.

  We are surrendering it all, ‘to have, hold and enjoy by our Lord the King and to his heirs and assigns, for ever, to whom we surrender and submit the said Monastery and all rights; with all authority and power to dispose of ourselves and the said Monastery.

  ‘And we the said Abbess and Convent and our successors will warrant our said Monastery, the precincts, site, dwelling house and church to our Lord the King and his heirs and assigns against all men in perpetuity.’

  In perpetuity. The Abbey of Shaftesbury has been destroyed by the teeth of time and the hands of mistaken zeal. Our Easter Mass was joyless, our voices in choir tremulous, the early flowers on the altar a mockery. But then life went on. No choice.

  Master Thomas Cromwell, we hear, is still much occupied with negotiations for King’s marriage to that Anne, who speaks only German. I do not know what German sounds like. Cromwell is greatly in favour of the match. The King is less sure.

  They say too that the King has regrets and doubts about the excesses of the destruction and dissolution of the monastic Houses all over the country. But what do we care now about His Majesty’s finer feelings? The Commissioners are acting autonomously and without supervision. They have got the bit between their teeth.

  A strange occurrence. I discover that Father Louis Pomfret is not altogether a monster. He is an unhappy man.

  Since we are still trying to maintain our customary routines, and it was my day for doling out the soup at noon at the Broad Hall in the town, I made my way there with Sister Eleanor Wilmer. She was, unfortunately for us both, my allotted companion. She did not throw me a word or a glance.