This much I took in within twenty-four hours of my arrival. On my first morning the place looked different. Empty, quiet, waiting. I wandered around. Behind the hall room was the kitchen, where Anne’s man Luke was chopping mutton into collops for the next batch of pies. He turned startlingly blue eyes on me for a moment and returned to his chopping. Stacks of wood stood against the walls to feed the fires in the two brick ovens. A servant was rinsing the trenchers and the drinking vessels at a pump in the back yard. Another was sweeping out the hall room.
Anne had a parlour of her own, into which no one ventured without an invitation. She beckoned me in. Two cushioned chairs, a heavy oak table on which stood ledgers and account books and a money-box. Anne patted her waist to show me where she kept the key to the money-box, beneath her gown. There were cupboards and presses, a chest and a pair of silver candlesticks. Beyond, a curtained arch opened into an alcove where stood her bed with a carved tester and red curtains.
She and I gazed upon one another in wonderment and laughed, remembering whence we came.
‘The Abbess of Hay Hill, no less,’ I said. ‘But why do they call you Mistress Arundell?’
She grimaced.
‘The person who leased this house before – and for the same purposes as I – was a Mistress Arundell. I do not know whether it was her true name. So from the beginning I called myself Mistress Arundell. It made for continuity. And I am happy to mortify Sir Thomas Arundell, if ever he was to learn who I really am … Did you not know? Sir Thomas abused me in those last days at the Abbey. I was such a fool. This way I have a revenge. I like to imagine him teased by enquiries about his connection with this house.’
Rippling with laughter at her own malice, she looked well, contented and prosperous. In the course of that first morning I gathered – Anne says little directly – that Master Perceval facilitated the renovation of the establishment and maintained his support.
‘I never even had to sell the diamond ring.’
In return he made certain assumptions and asserted certain rights. I was often to see him sneaking from the hall room into Anne’s parlour and remaining there with her for some time.
I find Master Perceval unattractive. He is a slithery man with too-small hands. There were newts in the Bruton ponds which revolted me when I was a child. Newts have spotted bellies. It would not surprise me if Master Perceval did too.
‘And his lady wife?’
Anne threw up her hands. ‘She knows nothing about it, nothing at all. She thinks he goes out to political meetings or to his dining-clubs in the city taverns.’
‘If she knew, she could destroy you.’
‘Why should she ever know?’
I explored the rest of the place, and learned its customs and unspoken rules. Anne – or Master Perceval – had built on to this ancient farmhouse a large barn with stables, where carts too were kept, and fodder. Visiting gentlemen left their horses there under the care of blue-eyed Luke. Anne had her own horse, a bay gelding called Minstrel. Luke loved Minstrel and treated him like a prince. Gentlemen whose inclinations lay that way came under the care of Luke as well, slipping out through the hall door and into to the barn to lie with him in the hay.
There was another new-thatched wing on the opposite side, divided up into small chambers, each with a pallet bed piled with coverings of patterned silk and fine wool. The kind of stuffs that it is a pleasure to finger. There was a doorway from the hall room into this part of the house, through which a gentleman with a lady could pass for an hour’s privacy. These transactions were not covert, but they were discreet. Money changed hands – from gentlemen’s hands to Anne’s – as they paid for their food and drink. It was a rule of the house that nothing said or done at Mistress Arundell’s ever went any further than her hall door.
I have to say it was a very harmonious little society.
Anne and I came to an arrangement. She urged me to remain for as long as I wished – ‘I am in want of a confidential female friend’ – in return for some help in the kitchen and in serving, not as a menial but in the role of her deputy, sitting with the customers, keeping the mood light and tempers sweet. She herself could not always be overseeing everything.
‘I am to be your Prioress, then.’
Anne was generous. She had grown stouter, and took from her closet an armful of light gowns which no longer fitted her – yellow, green, tawny, her favoured colours. They were better than anything I had, and I liked wearing them. I let my hair grow long. I enjoyed myself, by which I mean that I enjoyed the experience of being myself, and finding myself gracious and graceful and admired. This was new to me.
After a morning’s tuition, I found I had a light hand with making the crust for the mutton pies, and this became a regular duty. The vagaries of the ovens were too hard for me to master, so Luke retained charge of the baking.
*
I can no longer tell how many summers and winters I spent in Sherborne with Eleanor, nor how many summers and winters I spent on Hay Hill with Anne. I kept no tally. I know I was still in Sherborne in the January when the King died. He had been the King for longer than Eleanor and I had been alive. It seemed to everyone in the town to be momentous, as if the world would never be the same again, and indeed it was not, although as a matter of fact nothing had been ‘the same’ for years. Certainly not for the monks and nuns. The new King, Edward, was only nine years old – about the age my Peterkin would have been.
I do not know how or where all that time has gone. I was at Hay Hill Farm for some years before I met Thomas, my Tom. I met him soon after I saw Dame Elizabeth Zouche for the last time.
I have been reading over all that I wrote before I left Shaftesbury Abbey and am dismayed. How green I was then. How little I understood about anything at all. I think that I am at least thirty years old now. Many women die at my age. Our Abbess lived on.
I guess it was in 1552 or 1553 that she sent to every one of us who had been in the Abbey in those last days, requiring us to attend her at Place Farm in Tisbury. She addressed her messages, not written in her own hand but signed by her, to the parish church of our home towns or villages. Mine had gone to Bruton, I presume, long after I left for the last time. Another undelivered letter shredded by vestry mice. I only knew about the general summons at all because Anne Cathcart received hers. Anne did not care to go.
There had been much respectful talk of Place Farm in the old days and I was curious to see it. I found a carrier to take me as far as Salisbury, and continued on foot. That was like my former life – the solitary walking, the unease about the direction, the barking dogs in the farms that I passed.
Place Farm was, as I expected, spacious, and outside the encircling wall a massive barn. I entered through the open gatehouse and a second, smaller gatehouse. There was no one about. I crossed the yard to what must be the dwelling-house, walked straight in, and found myself in a large hall of the old-fashioned kind. The rush mats were frayed and whiskery. The shutters were splintery, their edges ragged, darkened by damp. I climbed the stair, feeling like an intruder and, too suddenly, came upon the Abbess herself – only I must no longer think of her as the Abbess – seated in the farthest corner of a long upper room. The light was dim, the air stale and cold.
‘Madam,’ I said, ‘I have come to see you, as you desired.’
She had aged greatly in appearance. She was shrunken. Her front hair had lost all trace of the Zouche blondeness, and was thin and dry. Her face was a mass of wrinkles. There was no dish of mushrooms in cream on her table, no white manchet bread. A stick was propped against the arm of her chair.
She peered in my direction.
‘Are you one of my daughters in God? Which one of you is this? I have a list here somewhere of those who have come, and those who have not yet come.’
I said, ‘I am Agnes Peppin, Madam.’
She seemed not to hear. ‘Maybe they are all no longer living. Where is the list, where is it?’ She fluttered her hand over a mess of papers
on the table.
‘Maybe it was too far for some of the sisters to come, Madam. Maybe some moved away from their home places and never received your message. Has Mother Catherine come? Has Mother Onion come? Perhaps she managed to get home to Ireland, over the sea.’
‘The Prioress and the Infirmaress came. Agatha Cracknell and Alice Doble.’
Those names from the past.
‘They were overfed and noisy,’ said Dame Elizabeth, ‘and thought no doubt to raise my spirits with their prattle. They came with a pack of yapping little dogs which soiled my floor and they came only in order to collect what I will give to each of you. Mother Onion has not come. Sister Catherine has not come. Nor Dame Philippa and Dame Joanna. And what happened to my bed-curtains? I demand – demand – that they be returned to me.’
She banged her fists on the table.
‘I cannot say, Madam.’
I repressed the memory of the dolphin bed-curtains smouldering in the dirt.
‘Sister Philippa and Sister Joanna have died, Madam. They were old already. They are in Heaven now.’
‘It is well for them. I have heard that some of our oldest sisters, from the very day that they left the Abbey, lost their wits and became as children or animals. And yet up until then they had been in possession of all their faculties.’
‘Perhaps, Madam, it was the Rule that preserved their minds. They were like climbing plants which collapse when their support fails. They will be in Heaven by now.’
‘Would that I too were in Heaven. And when I go, this house and the farm and all its lands will belong to Sir Thomas Arundell, as I promised. He has already taken out of it everything that made it beautiful. I live in the shell of a house that was once everything to me. You never saw it in the old days. I have been a fool.’
‘But perhaps, Madam, it is better to be here in the house you have known for so long, than …’
I could not frame an alternative. She had entreated Sir Thomas to let her retain Place Farm. I well remembered Sir Thomas negotiating the agreement. I had thought even at the time that it was a mixture of ruthlessness and sentiment on his part, characteristic of that unsatisfactory gentleman.
‘Arundell is a spider, waiting. He put in a bailiff and he sends in his man of business twice a year to make sure the property is well maintained. Arundell has got Wardour Castle now, yet another of his rich pickings. He rides over to see me from there and tells me all his plans for this house, once I am gone.’
‘But he has built himself a fine house in Shaftesbury, Madam.’
‘He will not live there for long and he will never make his home here, either. Place Farm is for him a speculation. It will not answer. It is not a gentleman’s residence, it is the home of the Abbess of Shaftesbury and when I die no one will ever be able breathe life into my Place Farm … And which one are you? Did you say? Did I know you?’
‘I think you knew us all, Madam.’ I told her again:
‘I am Agnes Peppin.’
I seemed, ever since I left Shaftesbury Abbey, to be continually telling my name. I began to think it might not be my name; it became strange to me from much repeating.
She sighed and coughed and held out a ringless hand, and I kissed it.
‘Of course. Agnes. My Agnes. You are alive and you have come. I can see your shape but not your face. There is darkness where your face is. Move into the light and let me look at you, my child.’
I went to stand at the window.
‘Not like that, with your back to the light. Useless. Come closer.’
I did so. She made no comment. Perhaps she still could not see my face.
‘And Sister Onora?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard anything of Sister Onora?’
‘The last I heard was that she had joined the gypsies and was telling fortunes and selling charms outside the cathedral at Exeter.’
This was true. Eleanor’s Jack Chapman told us.
‘Ah.’
‘Do you remember, Madam, that one of those last nights Sister Onora saw the three nuns from Cannington flying away? The ones I called the Melancholies?’
Dame Elizabeth raised her head and turned her eyes upwards, smiling, ageless, transfigured.
‘Of course she did! Of course she did!’
And the three Melancholies fly and again and for ever, arms outstretched like swimmers across the face of the moon on that night of no moon, their veils streaming behind them.
‘Of course she did,’ I said.
Dame Elizabeth lowered her head, a defeated old woman.
‘I see with an inner eye. I find my garments and open and close my bags and boxes by touch. I can no longer read at all. I cannot write because I cannot see what I am writing. I sign my name, if it is pointed out to me where I should write it. I am dependent on others. I become ill-tempered. There is no one in whom I can trust. There are only servants now, and they are never here when I require them. I need assistance.’
‘Your family, Madam?’
‘I have no one of my own. My family do not know me.’
She grasped the stick propped against her chair and banged it on the floor, one, two, thee times.
‘The worst thing that can happen to parents is the loss of a child. The worst thing that can happen to a child is the loss of parents. An unwanted child is a terrible thing.’ She banged her stick again, one, two, three.
‘Yes, Madam.’
I thought of Peterkin, who seemingly was doing well enough without me. People do manage to make their way in the world in spite of Dame Elizabeth’s tragic simplicities.
She turned away from me, brooding on I know not what, and said no more about family, or her family. The mystery of her birth remains, to me at least, a mystery. Elizabeth Zouche, so patently a Zouche and as Abbess of Shaftesbury the richest and most powerful woman in the kingdom, ends up unacknowledged and alone, her history unshared.
She turned back to me and told how Sister Isobel had remained with her, from when they first fled to Place Farm until her death the previous summer from a wasting illness. ‘It is an irreplaceable loss.’
‘I have always wished that I had known Sister Isobel better.’
‘It would have been well for you had you known Sister Isobel better. But it is not too late for you to understand the something beyond everything, which she knew. I have missed you, Agnes. By the way, what happened to your black dog?’
‘She was run over by a wagon.’
‘Just as well. I could not endure having a dog around my feet now.’
At that instant I apprehended that Dame Elizabeth Zouche had it in mind to ask me to be to her what Sister Isobel had been, and to remain at Place Farm with her.
It was a possible path for me to take. In the space of a few seconds I foresaw how it would be. I would be her scribe and companion and nurse until she died. I would be fed and housed. I would be safe in this world, and my pathway to Heaven unobstructed.
It was not what I wanted. I said nothing. The Abbess attended closely to my silence. I would say, she attended humbly to my silence, were that not presumptuous on my part.
The silence between us went on and on. Finally she said, ‘Very well.’
Then, gesturing towards an oak chest against the wall:
‘Open it.’
I lifted the lid and thought at first the chest was empty. But at the bottom lay some round dark objects. Dead mice? They were small leather bags.
‘Take one of the bags,’ she said, turning her head away, overcome by a fit of coughing, covering her mouth with a rag.
I stretched down my arm to take one up, and stood before her again. She said that the money inside the bags was her personal legacy to each one of us who came to her. ‘Each bag contains the same amount.’
That amount was generous enough to make all the difference to me. I could go on my way and I could pay my way.
‘You are one that never did consent,’ said Dame Elizabeth.
‘Consent, Madam? To the Rule, do you mean? I do believe
that I did.’
‘Not just to the Rule. That is not so hard. You did not give your soul’s consent to what lies beyond the Rule. Not like Sister Isobel.’
‘I was young, Madam. I did not understand in those days that such a consent was necessary. Nor did I understand to what one might consent.’
‘And now?’
‘I was never fitted for the religious life. I want to be outside, not inside. I suppose I have wanted the world.’
‘I knew the world. But the position as Abbess is – difficult. And much good the world has done to me. I failed.’
‘It was not you that failed, Madam. It was the times …’
‘Shaftesbury Abbey. That great and ancient – thing. Arundell made me a little chapel here. It is the only kind act he has made, though is cold in there. I spend much time in the chapel, repenting my failure. I should have fought harder. Longer. I should have saved the Abbey. All over, all gone. All gone. All gone.’
I kissed her hand. As I left her, I heard her saying to herself, ‘I am so tired.’
That was the last thing I ever heard her say. It was also the first thing I ever heard her say, the night I first set eyes upon her, in her prime, when she returned from Place Farm wearing her fur-lined cloak, supported by solicitous sisters. Who now were her attendants?
I opened a door out of the hall into a passage and called out. No one came. I opened another and there was a great kitchen, with a wide fireplace set in the wall, littered with cold wood-ash. An elderly woman stood at a window scouring a pot. I greeted her uncertainly and explained my presence.
‘Is it you, if I may ask, who cares for Dame Elizabeth now?’
‘You could say that. I make her soup, I empty her slops, I wash her linen. She has not long to go now.’
The woman turned back to her pot.
I breathed the fresh air on the track outside Farm Place with relief. Only then did I realise that Dame Elizabeth never asked me about the bones of St Edward the Martyr, our holy relics, entrusted to my care. Perhaps she had forgotten all about them.
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