The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘Because of my holy religion? I was …’

  ‘Distorted?’ I suggested.

  That is the word that Anne Cathcart used to describe Eleanor.

  ‘Yes. I was distorted. But that is over now. Though I will still and always pray.’

  ‘As will I. I would be a feather in the wind if I did not.’

  Away from the Abbey we will have no discipline in our lives. Just one day after another.

  Where will we be? What will we do? It will not be so frightening now there are two of us, looking out for each other. What can I do, what can Eleanor do? I do not suggest that we should earn our livings by laying out the dead, which I would find easy. We do not have to do that. We can cook and clean for rich people. She grimaces. She does not want to do that. Very well. We have our pensions. She raises the stakes. We can start an enterprise. We can do anything. For the first time the word ‘opportunity’ sounds sweetly in my ears.

  And what if we fall out? Neither of us has an easy character. Eleanor’s entrepreneurial instincts make me uneasy. She is more forceful than I. She is labile. She is unpredictable. You could say, I smell a rat, an old dead rat.

  But then, so am I labile and unpredictable. I might want a contemplative life of reading and writing. In a convent abroad, I say to her, I might, as a lay sister, sit at a desk with a bunch of quills and copy old manuscripts. It would be peaceful.

  Eleanor mocks me:

  ‘Keep up, Agnes. Everything will be printed now, in hundreds of copies. And perfect. Copying and recopying by hand is a thing of the past.’

  Ah. She is right. New thoughts, I must think new thoughts. Nothing remains the same, not even the same remains the same.

  But what if we do discover that we want different ways of life?

  Then we will part without recrimination, she says:

  ‘Better to part than for one to become a log tied to the leg of the other.’

  We may have slept a little.

  A silvery sky, and antiphonal birdsong. So many, many birds. If there were still a roof over the dorter, we would not be hearing them in this way. And there are hundred of thousands more birds beyond our hearing, in the Abbey orchard and down in the Abbey Park and in all the gardens of Shaftesbury and out in the fields and woods and forests outside and beyond the town and, far away, the larks soaring high with their songs over the Borough Field in Bruton.

  Not all birdsong is so beautiful. Some of it is raucous.

  The swallows and swifts and house-martins will soon be back. They will make new nests in the abandoned Abbey in the crevices of fallen walls, as they will in all the wrecked remains of cloisters and chancels and naves in our West Country and throughout our England. It is the hour for Prime though no bell rings. The birds are singing the Holy Office for us.

  No, they are not, they are staking out their territories and seeking mates. Spring is on the way.

  There will be butterflies.

  We had talked ourselves into sobriety.

  I pick up my bundle. I am taking the roll of my writings, tied with a string, the lion tile, Mary Amor’s piece of silk which rolls up into a sliver, a spare shift, a grey gown even shabbier than my brown one, a spare pair of sandals, and the apples. And my knife, my little sharpie. I am wearing my novice’s cloak because it is made of thick felted wool and has a hood. I draw it around myself.

  Eleanor pulls up her hood too and picks up her bundle. She stands for a moment and looks at me.

  ‘I am sorry about the dolphin.’

  I have nothing to say. It happened. I nod my head.

  We turn towards the stairs. We leave the ruined dorter.

  Already our life in the Abbey belongs to the past. We are going now. There is no one about. It is chilly. Puffs of smoke rise from the embers of yesterday’s fires as we pick our way through the desolation and reach the unguarded gatehouse.

  We are going.

  We have gone.

  6

  SHERBORNE

  I was persuaded by Eleanor to go with her to Sherborne where she said she had family. When we arrived she asked everywhere after her mother, but was told that she had left the town. So we were on our own now.

  Those first days were desperate. We slept in the fields – not in the open fields, but in hedged closes, which gave some shelter. By asking around, we found an attic room at the top of that house which stands on the corner of Trendle Street and Acreman Street, a stone’s throw from the Abbey. We had it free, on condition that we kept an eye on the old gentleman on the ground floor.

  His name was Master Anthony Palmer. I never learned what he had done to earn his living, because he himself did not remember. Maybe he never did anything, there are such people and they get by.

  I was impressed by Sherborne. It is at least three times larger than Bruton, and there are always people sitting about, and walking about, in between the houses and up and down the roads. I do not know where they are going or what they are doing but they are friendly and ready to talk, which is how we found out what was going on. In Bruton, if it were not a market, or a fair day, there was often no one out of doors at all. Just, at daylight end, the men coming home from the fields and boys let out from the Abbey school behaving as schoolboys do.

  *

  The deserted Abbey squats in the centre of the town like a great holy toad. It is built of dark golden stone. The bells of the Abbey Church still ring and punctuate our days and nights. One bell was a gift from Cardinal Wolsey; I would like his daughter Dorothy to know that. Sir John Horsey did a great service in transferring the church – for a reasonable sum – to the people of Sherborne. The townspeople do not seem exactly grateful. They believe it is their right. As a mere parish church, it is of an extraordinary size and magnificence. The roof is criss-crossed with stone patterning of a delicacy to take the sight out of your eyes. (That is an expression I learnt from Mother Onion.)

  I attempted to convey my impressions to Master Palmer as we sat with him slurping our soup, he propped up on his pallet, Eleanor and I cross-legged on the floor.

  ‘Rubble,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘Sherborne is built of rubble. Most of it just faced with stone. Rubble. Just like myself. Rubble.’

  ‘Even the Abbey?’

  ‘Even the Abbey. Rubble.’

  Master Palmer was long and bony and unable to look after himself, in that he had lost the use of his legs and his mind wandered. One day when Eleanor and I came home, he looked at us in wonderment and asked:

  ‘Do you two know one another?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I said.

  ‘We do and we do not,’ said Eleanor.

  Another day, he asked us:

  ‘Are you angels?’

  ‘We do not believe that we are,’ said Eleanor, ‘but you never can tell. We may be. Or we may be devils.’

  He sprawled all day on his pallet, only rising to relieve himself into the bucket. We emptied his slops into the culvert. We went every day to the woods beneath the old castle to pick up firewood. We found a sharp little axe propped behind a tree, forgotten, and took it away with us. Eleanor, because I asked her, showed me the spot where she had given birth, and the place in the river where she had disposed of her dead baby. When she first told me this story, that last night in Shaftesbury Abbey, I had believed her.

  This time I was not so sure. What she had told me did not quite tally with the place where we were. Eleanor was a such story-teller. I understood her because there is a twitch of fabulation in me too. Perhaps the tale of her harsh treatment at the hands of her mother was not true either. Just true for her. To deceive other people you must first deceive yourself. Or is it the other way around?

  I knew in my heart that Eleanor was not be relied upon, for anything.

  Master Palmer’s widowed sister, almost as decrepit as he, sells old clothes from her tenement in Cheap Street. She would appear at day’s end bringing roots and cabbage for the soup, for him and for us. The vegetables were as weary
as she, left over from the previous season and discarded by whoever grew them. And goodness knows where she picked up the shreds of rabbit-flesh which she brought us, wrapped in screws of dirty paper. Better not to know. Our old Vow of Poverty was not hard to keep. We were not too proud to pick out of the gutter a carrot or a fowl’s carcass or a heel of rock-hard bread to throw into the pot.

  Looking back I can see that those were hard times. Harder times than I have known before or since.

  But the cold spring of 1539 became a delicious summer. We harvested fresh leaves from the meadows. There were butterflies.

  We had to make a plan. How were we to live?

  Eleanor Wilmer and I had interesting times. We shared a bed. After our first sleep each night we awoke, and played and pleasured like the young creatures we were. These were the best times, because the shocking delight of what we could do to each other made us laugh and we fell asleep again smiling. With men, laughing at such things is not always acceptable.

  Yet when she wound her arms tightly around my neck in the darkness and whispered, ‘You will never escape me,’ a whiff of fear made me recoil. I remembered at those moments that she had killed a man and thought rather little of it. If indeed she had killed a man. Maybe that too was a story she told to herself, and to me. I cannot be sure.

  Thinking of Eleanor, I would be the first to say that women are women’s best supporters, for few men will help a young woman when she is down unless they wish to shove their hands up under her gown. I have met men who are sincere in their kindness, but it is the sincerity of a cat playing with a mouse. If you do not fancy taking the risk for a short period of pleasure and maybe some material advantage, it is wiser to run away before they pounce. Woman with woman on the other hand is self with self and we are each of us our best friends and our worst enemies.

  Eleanor and I went to Mass on Sundays but no longer made any attempt to observe the hours of Holy Office, or even to be aware of them. Sometimes I went into the Abbey Church by myself. There is a side-chapel off the south transept, entered through a narrow low door, easy to miss, and it is always deserted. It must have been a chantry chapel when the monks were still here. I would sit alone there for half a morning. I did not pray. I just remained perfectly still, shutting out my worries, and just before I left the chapel I would pray for grace.

  For I was missing something, I was uneasy. I saw a dog running wild, thither and up and down Cheap Street, out of its mind. It had a chain round its neck, dragging in the dust. It had lost its master.

  I was a dog on a leash with no one holding the leash.

  I knew what would happen to that dog. Before daylight end the chain would become trapped between two stones, or tangled in the branches of a thorn bush, and the dog would be unable to move. It could not bite through the chain. The dog would remain until someone found it, and if no one passed that way it would within a few days be dead.

  Mustn’t let that happen to me.

  Sometimes I sang a snatch of a psalm, the familiar words and line of chant creeping into my head unsought, and Eleanor would pick it up, and twine harmonies with her voice around my voice, transforming the rhythms into ditties. She said:

  ‘The psalms and were our love-songs to God. We need to learn new love-songs.’

  So we lingered around the market and listened to the travelling musicians, memorising the airs and the words, and then singing them for ourselves. Some days the music-maker was one solitary man in a leather hat with his tuneless piping instrument, singing, if that is the word, for small coins to buy bread. Other days there would be a troupe passing through, working the markets from town to town. They sang about lost love, or lost home-places, and sometimes jaunty melodies for dancing, with saucy verses. We learnt all those, too, and at the end of the day snatched up the broadsheets and printed ballads fallen on the ground and took them home.

  That way, we learnt news of events in the great world. By far the most momentous, in the late summer, was the arrest and execution of Master Thomas Cromwell, the Chief Minister, the author of all our woes and the reason why Eleanor and I were vagabonding in Sherborne market to no particular purpose.

  We heard it from a London tailor travelling in the West Country to buy cloth. He was gathering a crowd. We pushed our way to the front to hear what he was saying. The tailor was a dwarfish man and he was lifted up on a cart so that everyone could see him. We could hardly believe our ears. The tailor had been present among hundreds of others on Tower Hill.

  Cromwell, he said, spoke soberly from the scaffold. A crazed nobleman, who was to be executed after him, kept up a frenzied wailing and railing throughout, a macabre accompaniment.

  ‘Cromwell spoke directly to certain gentlemen in the crowd whom he knew, telling them to take his plight as a warning. I cannot remember all his words. He said that he had been a poor man who had risen in the King’s service to be a great gentleman. He told how he had never been content with all he had gained, but presumed to rise higher and ever higher. “My pride has brought its punishment.”’

  Those few words the tailor did remember and he repeated them. ‘My pride has brought its punishment.’

  The tailor said: ‘All his properties and belongings were stripped from him when he was in the Tower. He had enriched himself, my friends, beyond our imagining. Thousands of pounds in cash in his house, they say, and chestfuls of gold and silver plate and church vessels set with precious jewels, stolen from the monks and nuns and withheld from the royal coffers by his Commissioners on his orders. The King has got it all back now. Or almost all. Sticky fingers.’

  I thought of the gold box from Bruton Abbey containing Our Lady’s Girdle. An item hardly to be noticed among the phantasmagorical jumble of pilfered treasure.

  The market place buzzed with questions. For what was Cromwell arraigned? What was the crime that brought him down?

  ‘Treason,’ said the tailor. ‘That covers anything and everything these days. He had enemies. Princes of the Church and certain great lords who resented a scheming low-born cur being preferred above them all. The King was persuaded by the plotters that Cromwell was too far gone in his passion for what he calls reform, that he was a follower of Luther, a filthy black Protestant. And Cromwell had urged the German princess on him, too. That’s what they are saying in London, anyway.’

  We waited. Was there no more?

  ‘I could tell you good people about the execution,’ said the tailor, ‘but I have a terrible thirst upon me.’

  Someone passed him up a jug of ale. He drank it all down, wiped his lips, and began again. What he said is burned into my mind. I feel as if I too had been there so that is how I will tell it.

  Cromwell knelt in the straw on the flooring of the scaffold and prayed. He looked up at the executioner and begged him to cut off his head with a single blow, to spare his suffering. But the executioner was no master of his trade, a ‘butcherly’ man, said the tailor.

  I bristled at that. A butcher would well know where and how to let the axe fall.

  This man’s first stroke missed the neck altogether and gashed the back of Cromwell’s head. His second attempt did not sever the head, nor did his third. An assistant came to his aid. They slashed and chopped, between them taking many minutes – it seemed like an eternity, said the tailor – to achieve what should have been accomplished in seconds.

  The crazed nobleman was then dispatched with no trouble at all. The two bodies were taken back to the Tower and buried in the church within its walls. The heads were boiled and stuck up on pikes on London Bridge. Cromwell’s head was unrecognisable, being so horribly mangled.

  The tailor was helped down from the cart. Night was falling. Most people straggled away home, heads bowed, muttering to one another. Others, in a state of excitement, trailed behind the tailor and his cronies all the way up Cheap Street to the George Inn, and Eleanor and I went along too. I should be ashamed that we did, but I am not. Curiosity is not a sin.

  The inn was hot. The tailor downe
d more ale. His face was flushed and he was all too ready to tell more. Now he was talking about the marriage of the King and the German Princess Anne.

  ‘She was nothing like her portrait. She was coarse and ugly and pockmarked and the King took against her the moment he saw her. This is no secret,’ said the tailor.

  The King confides in his gentlemen and the gentlemen confide in their friends. The tailor makes coats for several of these friends.

  ‘Everyone prattles to his tailor,’ he said, waving his hands, drunk on his own little self as well as on the ale.

  So. The King let it be known that he did not tamper with the woman, even though for some months they shared a bed – a special, high-built, new-made bridal bed.

  ‘She smelt foul. The King touched her fat breasts and belly and could not bring himself to perform.’

  He made the non-consummation known because he wanted the marriage annulled, and it already has been. The King no longer has to bother with the Pope’s permission. He annuls his own marriages through his own courts of law.

  ‘There are,’ said the tailor, pulling at his nose, ‘those who say the King has become incapable of sexual congress. He is near fifty years old, and corpulent, with ulcers on his legs. He is now infatuated with a young girl, fifteen years old, placed in his path by her ambitious family. Her uncle is the Duke of Norfolk. The King thinks with her to recover his manhood and sire a second son. He married her on the very day of Cromwell’s execution.’

  By my reckoning this is his fifth wife.

  ‘The King’, said the tailor, ‘still believes in true love.’

  Ha ha ha! I could not help laughing.

  The young girl’s name is Catherine Howard.

  ‘She may be high-born but she is no maid,’ said the tailor, ‘she has long been abused and huffed and puffed over by gentlemen thrice her age.’

  I stop laughing, feeling pity for this distracted girl, suddenly the Queen of England and sharing a bed with an old monster. She should have behaved like St Agnes, and refused. St Agnes was put to death as a result. The same thing will probably happen to Catherine Howard even though she complied. Because this marriage will not last, said the tailor. His customers, in the know, were giving it two years at most, gossiping as they vacillated over the depth of a pocket or the turn-back of a cuff.