Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “How happy is the man who has his quiver full,” quoted the Dean.

  He made this remark to Canon Leigh rather frequently; and though on some days Canon Leigh whole-heartedly agreed with him there were other days when a few doubts made themselves felt. Today, however, his family looked so charming in the June sunshine that he bowed his head in delighted assent.

  2.

  There was the usual trouble at the Fair Gate between Satan and the Leigh dogs. Satan naturally thought that if it was a College rule that only the porter should keep a dog that rule should be kept. Exceptions to rules should not be allowed in well run institutions. He expressed himself upon this point very frequently, and had it not been for Heather­thwayte’s firm grip upon his tail he would have wiped out the Leigh dogs long ago. The children loved Heather­thwayte dearly, and he them, but owing to the presence of the dogs they could do no more today than smile hurriedly as they dragged their yowling animals past the enraged Satan.

  “Where to?” asked Grace, as Joyeuce paused, considering her shopping list with a wrinkled forehead.

  “The apothecary’s first,” said Joyeuce. “I want some century and wormwood.”

  The children groaned. Joyeuce concocted a particularly nauseous medicine out of camomile, century and wormwood, and now and then administered it to her family to clear the blood.

  “It’s all right,” comforted Joyeuce. “This time it’s only for Father.”

  They cheered up and marched on towards Carfax, the little girls keeping their noses buried in their nosegays of roses and lavender and Joyeuce keeping a firm hold of Diccon lest he should escape and get up to some of his evil tricks.

  At Carfax they turned to their right and went down High Street. It was an exciting place, full of strange smells. It contained, besides the pig market in front of All Saint’s Church, the butchery and the poultry, and also really beautiful shops like the aurifabray, the mercery, the spicer’s and the glover’s. There were no multiple shops, where you could buy all sorts of different things under one roof, for Parliament had decreed that “artificers and handicraft people hold them everyone to his own mystery,” and the Oxford Town Council enforced this law very vigorously.

  The apothecary of Joyeuce’s choice lived just by Saint Mary’s Church, in a dark little shop that made one feel indisposed simply to smell it, and the children stayed outside when she went in, holding each other’s hands as she bade them, for there were always lots of people hurrying by in High Street and small persons were liable to be knocked flying if they did not hold together and stand foursquare to the bustle.

  But they all went inside at the spicer’s because it smelled good. You could buy cinnamon at the spicer’s, and nutmeg and ginger, and all the wonderful new spices that the Merchant Adventurers were bringing home from foreign parts, and that new-fangled thing, pepper, that made one sneeze and ruined one’s inside but was very smart and fashionable. Joyeuce bought some saffron to color the warden’s pies and also a very little pepper as a treat for her father, and before anyone could stop him Diccon had thrust his inquisitive nose inside the packet and was sneezing his green fairy cap off his curls and his head almost off his shoulders. Then he roared, of course, and the spicer’s wife came hurrying out from the back premises with a prune in her fingers to comfort him. Prunes were a delicacy that Diccon had not tasted before. He abruptly stopped roaring, ate it, spit out the stone and asked for more. But he did not get it, for Joyeuce, ashamed of him, hastily bade the spicer and his kind lady good day and removed him.

  Outside in the High Street he roared again and they had to stop at the aurifabray to distract his thoughts from his woes. Behind the small, iron-barred window one could glimpse wonderful things; cups and platters all made of gold, gold chains, billements, brooches to pin gentlemen’s plumes into their caps, rings for the fingers and ears of fair ladies and little gold bells to be tied to the cradles of wealthy babies. Great-Aunt was the only member of the Leigh family who could afford to be jeweled so that the girls and Diccon gaped at these glories with round eyes of amazement.

  “I wish I had a pearl billement,” whispered Grace.

  “I should like a diamond ring,” said Meg.

  “I should like a big gold chain like the Mayor,” said Joan.

  ‘“I shall have that ruby brooch,” said Diccon, pointing a fat finger, “to pin my peacock’s feather. . . . I shall have it now.”

  “You will not,” said Joyeuce. “Your days of foppery are not yet set in. When you are big you shall have it.”

  “How big?” asked Diccon. “When I am twelve?”

  “You shall have it,” said Joyeuce, “when you are as tall as Giles and as good as Master Philip Sidney.”

  The corners of Diccon’s mouth went down and his little feathered head drooped like the head of a wilting poppy. He was yet so near the ground that it seemed impossible he could ever be as near the sky as Giles. And as for being as good as Master Philip Sidney, well, he knew he could never be that. He knew that the sun would turn to marchpane and the moon fall out of the sky and bowl like a hoop down the High Street before Diccon Leigh would be as good as Philip Sidney. He felt utterly stricken, for he wanted that ruby more than anything else in life. Two great tears filled his green eyes to the brim and running away from the window he felt blindly for Joyeuce’s hand. The pointed toes of his little green shoes caught in the cobbles as he walked, so that he stumbled, and the tears rolled down his face and dripped off the end of his chin; but he made no sound, not even the ghost of a whimper.

  Joyeuce and the little girls felt that a blight was cast over their day. Diccon, as a general rule so noisy in his grief, was occasionally smitten with this sorrow too deep for words, and the silent reproach of his woe always made everyone feel most dreadfully uncomfortable. Why, his silence seemed to ask, was I born into this cruel world? Whose fault was it that earthly life was given to me? Why was I dragged from the realms of celestial glory, where the angels gave me the comets to play with, to this earth where I stretch out my empty hands in vain for my heart’s desire?

  The answer to these questions not being forthcoming they turned the corner into Cornmarket in a gloomy silence.

  But once past the tannery and the cordwainer’s they brightened. Excitement lit gleams in their eyes and deepened the color in their cheeks, for unknown to authority they were bound on an errand of mercy to the opposite sex; and if anything thrills a woman more than being a ministering angel to a man it is being it forbiddenly.

  Not that Canon Leigh had actually forbidden them to carry comforts to the prisoners at Bocardo, but knowing that he invariably refused to interfere with the course of justice they knew that he would have if they had asked him; so they had not asked him.

  Joyeuce quieted her slightly restive conscience by telling herself that her father was wrong in this. She was sure there was a place in the Bible where it told one to visit prisoners in their affliction. She couldn’t put her finger on chapter or verse at the moment, but she was sure there was, and she peeped under the recent purchases in her basket to see if the little packages she had brought from home were still safely there.

  But, alas, when they reached Bocardo there were no signs of life at the barred window over the gateway. The five stood in a row, gazing upwards, uncertain what to do. To shout was unladylike, and to throw up stones at the window was also unladylike, and the gaze of the town was upon them.

  “They’re sleeping off last night,” said Grace.

  “Still?” queried Joyeuce sadly. This disappointment, coming on top of Diccon’s exhibition of grief, was too much for her never very volatile spirits. . . . She felt utterly miserable. . . . Like Diccon she felt that living was nothing but a stretching of empty hands to an aching void.

  But as she fell into her slough of despond Diccon suddenly arose out of his and their spirits passed each other, ascending and descending, a voiceless message passing be
tween them.

  “Giles!” shouted Diccon at the top of his voice. “Giles! I have a feather in my cap!”

  His voice was clear as a bell, and as penetrating. The window of Bocardo, half-closed against the noise and smells of Cornmarket, opened wide and Giles was seen behind the bars.

  “See my feather!” called Diccon, holding up his new treasure. “Diccon has a feather in his cap!”

  Giles smiled in kindly patronage and his eyes fastened greedily on the basket. “Have any of you girls had the intelligence to bring my books?” he demanded.

  “No,” they chorused weakly.

  “Idiots!” said Giles, and gazed down upon them with the stare of a gorgon.

  “We have warden’s pies,” said Joyeuce stoutly. “Cinnamon cakes and comfits, and some soap, and you ought to be grateful to us instead of lowering like a thunderstorm. . . . Is Master de Worde there?”

  She felt Giles’ scorn less than usual because it wasn’t really he whom she had considered in the stocking of her basket.

  The catalogue of viands must have penetrated beyond Giles, for he was suddenly seized from behind and forcibly removed, while the expectant faces of Nicolas, Faithful, Philip Sidney, and Master Walter Raleigh of Oriel fitted themselves into a sort of pattern at the window. Philip and Faithful looked much as usual, though pale after yesterday, but Nicolas was a pitiful sight, with swollen nose and blackened eyes. The beauty of the face that had looked up at Joyeuce from below her window had momentarily departed, but as she in her turn stood below and looked up there was a new quality in her riveted, compassionate gaze, something enveloping and protective, that his vanished comeliness had not called out. For a moment his pride recoiled from it and his face hardened; then the frightened child in him leaped up in sudden gladness and his eyes as they met hers accepted what she gave.

  But Philip, Faithful and Walter Raleigh were not at the window to watch an exhibition of sentiment, however touching, and the leather bag shot out of the window and landed neatly at Joyeuce’s feet. . . . She started, and remembered what she was there for.

  The bag made three descents and ascents and the ministering angels below basked in yet broader and broader smiles from those above. When it went up for the last time it had in it, beside a final pie and cake of soap, the little nosegay of crimson roses that Joyeuce had been carrying.

  “Wait!” cried Nicolas, as the four heads disappeared from view with cheeks that were already bulging.

  Joyeuce waited for what seemed to her a very long time, the children pulling impatiently at her skirts, and then the nosegay, with one crimson rose missing and something else in its place, came out of the window like a bird and alighted straight in the cupped hands she held up for it. . . . A moment ago she had felt the hands were empty, held out to a void, but now they were full to the brim. . . . Her spirit was mounting up now, into the very skies, and with a sudden passionate movement she knelt down and flung her arms round Diccon, who had set it mounting with his cry of “Diccon has a feather in his cap!” A feather, had he, the little love? Why, he had a hundred feathers; he was winged with them. He was love himself, little Cupid.

  But Diccon was not feeling affectionate at the moment and bending low his curly head he bit her hard.

  “Why did Master de Worde throw back the flowers?” asked Meg, as they journeyed homewards. “I think,” she added, shaking her fair head more in sorrow than in anger, “that it was very rude of Master de Worde.”

  Joan also shook her head, and squeaked reprehensively.

  “He kept one rose,” said Joyeuce, and smiled secretly, for in the place in the nosegay where the stalk of the rose had been Nicolas had pushed a tightly folded note.

  3.

  It was twenty minutes to seven when Joyeuce stood trembling in the porch of Saint Michael’s at the North Gate. “Meet me in the porch of Saint Michael’s at seven o’clock,” Nicolas had written on a bit of paper pulled from a corner of one of Raleigh’s charts, and here she was, twenty minutes too early because this was her first meeting with her first lover.

  She was trembling because of the frightful state her conscience was in. She felt as though it were inside her, rushing round and round like a squirrel in a cage, and also outside her, surrounding her with a scorching ball of fire. She knew now what the damned feel like when they are plunged into the lake of torment, and her heart ached for them, because she felt most uncomfortable. She pressed the palms of her hands against her hot cheeks and she wasn’t at all sure she wasn’t going to be sick.

  The Devil had made it all most easy for her, had almost, you might say, strewn her path with roses. For it was a Thursday and it was her custom on Thursday to have supper with an old friend of her mother’s, a Mistress Flowerdew, who lived by the East Gate, and to spend the hours from supper till bed with her. Mistress Flowerdew’s serving man always saw her home in safety, so her family never bothered about her on Thursday evenings. . . . It had been easy, fatally easy, to send a note by Wynkyn Heather­thwayte, Heather­thwayte’s little son who, evidently at the special instigation of the Devil, was paying a visit to his father at the Fair Gate, to tell Mistress Flowerdew she could not come that night. . . . Then she had put on her very best clothes, a pale green farthingale and a cream colored kirtle embroidered with yellow poppies, with a lace coif on her head and a dark blue cloak lined with yellow over all, and walked quietly out of the house, across Carfax and down Cornmarket to North Gate.

  She had not actually had to tell a single lie, and she had every intention of spending the most respectable evening, but she had staged a deliberate hoax and she knew she was a wicked sinner. It struck her, as she stood there trembling, that this terrible deception had grown out of the smaller one of carrying comforts to the prisoners in Bocardo unknown to her father. One thing leads to another, she thought, and we gather speed and impetus as we roll on down the downward path.

  The strange thing was that while she wrote that note to Mistress Flowerdew, while she put on her pretty clothes, brushed out her fair hair and coiled it up to lie like a crown beneath her coif, she had not felt wicked at all, she had only felt gloriously happy. It was not until she stood waiting in the porch that her conscience had started kicking up such a fuss.

  It was the inaction, she thought, that made her feel so bad, and to give herself something to do she went into the church. After the warmth and brightness of the June sun outside it seemed cold as the grave and as dimly lit as a cavern in the cliff. The noises of the street seemed to come from very far away, like the beat of waves on the sea shore, and there was in the church that mingled scent of must and damp and mice and candle grease that is by association such a very holy smell.

  Joyeuce sat down on one of the seats and looked about her. It was very old, this Saint Michael’s at the North Gate, and very dark, for the daylight filtered in through stained glass windows that were one of the glories of Oxford. There was one strange window that Joyeuce loved particularly: out of a golden pot sprang a lily plant with five stems bearing five lilies, and among the lilies hung Christ crucified. In another window Saint Michael himself, with magnificent green wings, was trampling strong-mindedly on the dragon, and in yet another were two small fair-haired seraphs, each with six wings, standing on wheels as in the vision of Isaiah. They wore skimpy little white nightgowns and were exactly like the twins.

  It was the sight of these little seraphs that steadied Joyeuce. The turmoil of her feelings suddenly subsided and she found herself thinking coldly and quietly. Her mother had left the children, Grace, the twins and Diccon, in her care, and if she married Nicolas she would be deserting them. . . . Somehow it did not occur to her that he might not love her; she took for granted that what she gave to him he would be able to give to her; she did not know yet that out of the depth of her own nature she made demands upon others that could not be satisfied unless their depth equaled her own. . . . To be happy. To be satisfied. To be fulfille
d. . . . She looked at her longing, seeing it opposed to her duty, and tried to see it steadily for what it was. Those two worlds, the actual and the ideal, were before her again. The children stood for one and Nicolas for the other. One was a known love that had not satisfied and the other an unknown love that seemed to promise fulfillment but that might, too, disappoint when she moved onward to it and the ideal became in its turn the actual. Yet every instinct in her drove her forward and she had to remind herself that instincts are animal things and not to be trusted. . . . Instinct is not intuition. . . . She had no right to push forward for her own sake; she could not go on to new things unless the path was clear before her, and it was not, it was blocked by the figures of the children.

  Suddenly she saw them clearly in all their dearness: the people who had until now made up her whole world. Why should she desert them for a stranger? Of what worth was her love for them if she could not suffer for their sake? From the beginning of the world lovers had died daily and no love had ever been true love till the stamp of death had been set upon its beauty, as the cross was set upon those lilies in the window. Emotion swept over her again, setting this time in the contrary direction, and jumping up she turned blindly towards the door. . . . She would go home. . . . She would not wait for Nicolas. Never would she desert her darling twins, and never would she marry and leave them and Diccon to the tender mercies of Great-Aunt. This new and selfish love was not for her. She would stamp on the devil like the green-winged Saint Michael in the window. She would confess her hoax to her father and be forgiven. She had made her decision and it was irrevocable. She would never turn back from it. . . . Dry-eyed and composed she pushed open the heavy door and walked straight into the arms of Nicolas.

  4.

  The Elizabethan kiss of greeting was a useful thing, for it could so easily develop into something more and yet be still nominally the kiss of greeting. Handled skillfully, as by Romeo when he gave to Juliet and took back again the sin of his presumption, it could go on a long time, and it went on a long time in the porch of Saint Michael at the North Gate. With Nicolas’s cheek against hers and his arms straining so tightly round her that she could hardly breathe Joyeuce felt as though she were drowning. Locked together the two of them seemed sinking down into the depths of some strange changeless element that they had not known before. They felt aeons and fathoms removed from time and place, living so intensely that they did not recognize as life this strange thing into whose depths they had fallen. The struggle Joyeuce had just passed through was as though it had never been, and as for her irrevocable decision she had forgotten that she had ever made it.