by Norah Lofts
Outside the kitchen door Margaret and John were playing.
Resolutely Sybilla ignored the truth that now it was less a matter of Margaret looking after John than of John looking after Margaret. Almost as soon as he could stand steadily on his feet the little boy, as precocious as his brothers, had taken charge.
There was bread to make and a rabbit pie. Rabbits were at their best when the corn was being cut.
Thump, thump on the front door. Father Ambrose! He called almost every day. The only road out of Intake ran past his church and his house, he had indubitably seen Godfrey ride past and had come to say how glad he was to see such an improvement.
It took a certain amount of resolution not to regard Father Ambrose as a rather silly old man. One must remember that he had brought the black brew. But he had, since then, shown a lack of tact, telling Godfrey that he should come to church as soon as he could walk, even with support, saying what a pity it was that he did not read, a book could offer so much consolation.
Once Godfrey, the new Godfrey, had said, ‘Keep him away from me. Tell him I’m dead!’
However, when she opened the door it was not Father Ambrose who stood there. It was a Dominican friar. A black friar.
Lamarsh had been a Franciscan house and all Sybilla’s training there had been, despite an underlying personal strictness, liberal. After all, St. Francis had preached to the birds and called his donkey ‘Brother.’
The Dominicans were different, more concerned with organisation, with politics; and the very word “black”, when applied to them, had significance for their garb was in fact not wholly black; it was black over white; the blackness referred more to their general temper, their strictness, the assiduity in sniffing out and hounding down heretics.
In fact, when Sybilla first saw the Dominican her heart gave a little jolt and she thought—Walter! Not that Walter had ever been known to express any heretical sentiments but he had resolutely refused to go to church, even at Easter. Father Ambrose had tried persuasion, Sybilla had added her word. Walter had remained obdurate. It occurred to Sybilla that the priest might have sought some support from the Order known to be stern in principle and in argument unbeatable.
She made her curtsey and said, ‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning. I am Father Andreas. I wish to speak with Sir Godfrey Tallboys.’
‘He is away from home at the moment. He will not be back home until evening.’
She was aware of his giving her that remote, slightly disparaging look which most celibates turned upon women. In fact, he was wondering about her status. Sir Godfrey had been reported to him as being hard on forty. Daughter? Young sister?
Behind him in the space where the garden was yet to be stood a mouse-coloured mule, very sleek and lively looking.
‘If you would care to wait,’ she said and gritted her teeth a little. With Godfrey out for the day and everybody in the field she had planned to carry out a makeshift meal of bread and cheese. ‘I am Lady Tallboys,’ she added as though to confirm her right to invite him in.
If possible his scrutiny became even more impersonal and at the same time more intense. Men were uxorious. Would a man married to this very young, very comely little creature…?
He said, ‘I thank you, no. I have another errand. I will come back. At Vespers.’
He mounted the mule and rode away. She stood for a moment in the doorway, staring after him, and then turned back to busy herself with the bread and the rabbit pie.
In the field, handing Walter his portion and a cup of water, cold from the well, she said, ‘Walter, a Dominican, Father Andreas, came this morning and is coming back later. To see Sir Godfrey. It could be about your refusal to go to Mass.’
‘Could be,’ Walter agreed.
‘It worries me a little, Walter.’
‘It shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I know what you are thinking, my lady. About the church-going. So far as I know there’s no law about it. I’m no Lollard. I never said anything against the Church. I simply stay away.’
‘I know. But why Walter? I never understood why.’
‘Too much of it when I was young.’ For the first time he lifted the curtain and gave her a glimpse into the past. ‘My old granny,’ he said; ‘very religious. Church every day; she was past being useful and I was too young to be. So she’d haul me along … Once—it was a dry year—she prayed for rain. So did I; little boy doing what I was told. Not a drop fell.’
Sybilla knew all the arguments about unanswered prayers; but this was not the time or place for them. She knew about Lollardry, too, a movement fully as much political as religious. Lollards had been persecuted years ago, less because they had protested against certain Church practices—such as selling beforehand a pardon for an offence one intended to commit—than because they had advocated freedom to all serfs.
Sir Godfrey had had what should have been a happy day. James and Emma welcomed him warmly and James, in the middle of his summer gout which this year had encroached into his eyelids, was pitiable, even by the standards of a knight with a weak knee. Emma had most graciously taken Sybilla’s request for a few of Richard’s outgrown clothes for Moyidan’s Richard had grown, too; upwards, not outwards. Weedy. And why did one use that word, weeds being the toughest thing on Earth?
He rode back through the rather hazy sunlight of a late August afternoon He rode slowly, for a heavy warhorse like Arcol was not bred for speed. Arcol and all like him were made for short charges—the length of a tourney ground, the length of the distance between two opposing forces. Arcol had two speeds, full charge and idle along.
On one side of Sir Godfrey’s saddle, as he rode home through the lingering sunset, was a bag of dark red apples which Sybilla had asked for and on the other a bag of Richard’s outgrown clothes. A successful errand. I have mounted again, I have ridden. I am healed. Not enough; the inner wound still bled, quietly leaching away, day by day, all confidence and joy.
In the stable at Knight’s Acre, with everything done that a good squire would do, Sir Godfrey leaned for a moment against the great amber-gleaming shoulder. ‘Arcol, old boy, we’re done for, you and I.’
Carrying the bags, he limped in by the kitchen door and Sybilla, nodding towards the hall said, ‘There is a Dominican friar, Farther Andreas, waiting to see you.’
No Christian denied the possibility of miracles; the blind man healed, the dead man restored to life; but unlike Walter’s granny, few reasonable people expected to see a miracle performed under their very eyes, except perhaps at shrines like Walsingham and such places. Yet one seemed to have happened here.
When Godfrey entered the kitchen he was limping badly and his shoulders sagged in the new way they had, his face was gloom and his voice flat. ‘Emma sent what you wanted,’ he said, putting the two bags on the table and Sybilla thought—alas the outing has done him no good! When she told him about the caller waiting within he had shown no interest, simply limped on wearily towards the door of the hall.
She waited. She could hear the voices but not the words. It was supper time, the children, Bessie and Walter came in, waiting to be fed.
She cut the pie, sparingly, aware of the obligations of hospitality towards a stranger under her roof at meal time. Soon she must go in and extend the invitation to supper. She chose the three less battered of the ill-matched platters, three of the least shabby of the horn cups and then, as an afterthought, went into the larder and drew a jug of wine from the small cask which she had asked Walter to buy in Baildon so that she could offer sops-in-wine to an invalid with no appetite.
That done she straightened her headdress and went towards the door into the hall.
‘I shall be there!’ Godfrey’s ordinary voice, strong and ringing.
The outer door thudded as she opened the inner one. Godfrey turned from it and came the length of the hall to meet her. He hardly limped at all. He greeted her as he was accustomed to after any absence, lifting her from her feet. ‘Darling, I have such news!’
And in fact it was as though he had been away for three months and had now returned. Over her shoulder he saw the cups and the jug ready and said, in his own voice, ‘How did you know?’
‘Know what?’
‘That we had cause for celebration.’
‘Tell me.’
He told her. One must not question or carp at a thing which had, in an hour, restored him. And Dominicans, whatever else they were, were no liars, in fact they dealt with the truth even when it was unpalatable. Yet it was a fantastic story.
As usual he told it badly and had be helped out with questions but soon she had a gist of it.
In the south of Spain, a part known as Andalucia, there was a nobleman, the Count of Escalona, vastly, vastly rich, who wished to give a tournament of the utmost magnificence with such prizes as had never been heard of; the first, the equivalent of a thousand English pounds. (Disloyal to think—But you were unhorsed at Winchester!) And not prizes only; pay of a kind, five hundred pounds to every man who presented himself; and all expenses paid.
Surely too good to be true. Was that why, secretly, her heart doubted and her mind resisted and, aloud, her tongue questioned? Why English knights; had he none of his own, so great and rich a lord? A simple answer; English knights were known to be the best in the world.
Why a Dominican as his errand boy? Another simple answer; the Count of Escalona was a patron; the Order owed him much and wished to make some return; besides he needed somebody who knew England and spoke English.
And that emphasised the foreignness of the whole affair. It entailed a voyage on the sea! Is that what I fear?
William’s abode at Bywater, called a palace because a Bishop lived there, though it was far from palatial, stood little above the port of Bywater and Sybilla remembered the sea—her first glimpse of it—so huge and the ships so tiny. Yes, that might lie at the back of her resistance to this thing.
She asked, ‘When?’
‘We sail on St. Michael’s Day. An omen for good.’
‘It leaves only a short time to prepare.’
‘If I exercise Arcol every day…’ He looked at the armour on the wall. ‘That needs a good going-over, too…’
As from a distance she observed that he was no more really aware of this change than he had been of the other. He would not deliberately have become surly, melancholy, bad-tempered and despairing, unloving. In the same way he seemed to be unaware of this change for the better, lameness ignored, appetite restored, cheerfulness in the ascendant.
A weathercock nature? No! No! Simply a man as trained and conditioned as Arcol—and for that I should be thankful. A less single-minded man would never have married me! He’d have listened and been dissuaded—and I should now be at Lamarsh! Now—and here was the irony—she had regained him, only to lose him again.
It was being wanted that had worked the cure. If he told her once he told her a dozen times about the little book which Father Andreas carried, a book in which were written the names of those worthy of invitation. Again and again he said, ‘And I thought I was done for. Arcol too.’
He was confident—as he always had been—of coming home safe and sound; and this time with certain money. Knight’s Acre would be transformed; there would be proper servants; proper beds; there would be new gowns for Sybilla, a dowry for Margaret, now his ‘pretty little dear.’ And when Henry went off to Beauclaire he would go not as a poor relation. Richard, too, in time. And John. He no longer minded their noise, thought their quarrels amusing.
Sybilla kept her head. Could they, she asked, hope to get Eustace back?
No, he said, gaily, it would be unfair to the boy. A knighthood bestowed by a Spanish Count, however rich and proud, might not be valid in England.
‘And I need no squire. I have not forgotten the tricks.’
Happily, happily, he hauled down his armour and polished it, whistling as he worked. And she stitched away, repairing the faded or frayed work on the emblem, the hare at bay, on his blue mantle.
There were so few days and each one shorter than the one before. But they were happy days, followed by happy nights for, remanned, he was again her lover.
Exercising Arcol, he rode to Moyidan and she had the slight hope that James might call this a wild-goose chase and suggest life at home with little affrays at Baildon, Bury St. Edmund’s, Thetford and such places. And James, very level-headed and clear-sighted, might even spot the flaw—she was sure it existed, though she could not put her finger on it. But James regarded the whole thing as wonderful; five hundred pounds win or lose with possibility of double that amount.
And what about William, so unworldly. Would he not speak out about being too much involved with money, of a man’s first duty being to his wife and children and how dangerous the sea was; William, of all people, knew how dangerous…
But William failed her, too. He had—as she had—seen a man soured and prepared to sit down and rot, and now restored, eager and happy. Godfrey, not far from the brink of despair, that ultimate sin, had been snatched back just in time; and although the sea did claim some victims, roughly four out of five ships that put out from Bywater did come back.
No support anywhere.
The old Abbess had said, ‘In the end, you must be prepared to be alone with God.’
She prayed often—not for some direct intervention but for the courage, the strength and the cunning that would enable her to deter him from this venture without casting him back into gloom. When he spoke of what he would do with his money she said that they had all they needed. That people could be happy without curtained beds and silver drinking cups. ‘After all, darling, we have always been poor and we have always been happy.’
‘Not always. Not lately. Not until Father Andreas came. I used to sit and think … thinking was something I’d never had time for.’ He gave her his old, sweet smile but then added, with sudden violence, ‘You cannot know how I hated being poor and useless.’
Although the physical signs of age had disappeared, he was older in himself, his prolonged boyhood outgrown at last.
She fell back on feminine wiles, how lonely she would be, how helpless she sometimes felt when the boys were unmanageable. His reception of such remarks was sensible but all wrong; how about asking one of Eustace’s sisters to come and live with her; how about buying a palfrey and riding over to visit Emma sometimes. As for the boys, he would speak to Walter and give him leave to chastise them when necessary. In any case Henry would be going to Beauclaire.
On the verge of tears she said sharply, ‘I don’t mean that kind of loneliness! I mean being without you.’
‘But, sweetheart, you have been without me often. This is unlike you. Why are you against this?’
‘I don’t know. I only know that I am. Now the time had come to speak frankly, ‘I know that you are happy about it but I am not. I never have been from the start… From the very start when I opened the door to that black friar. There must be a trick. No man could be so rich and so crazy. Godfrey, don’t go. I beg and beseech you, don’t go.’
He ended all that with a simple statement. ‘I gave my word.’
‘There is one thing, my lady,’ said Walter—the only one who seemed to understand, ‘Sir Godfrey won’t drown.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I got him a caul. That Bessie knew where to lay hands on one.’
It was an old and prevalent superstition. A baby born with a caul—a bit of membrane over its head—would never drown; what’s more the caul in itself could convey its protective powers to anyone who possessed it.
Bessie, so anxious to please Walter, had dragged up this tale and offered to procure this emblem of magic and Walter, insufficiently impressed, had said that he supposed it could do no harm. In a place like Bywater there was a ready sale for such things and even in Baildon a caul was easily disposed of. This one had been; but Granny Wade was equal to the occasion: a pigs bladder, shrivelled and darkened by exposure to smoke and torn about
a bit, would deceive anybody.
‘That was kind of you, Walter. But—there are other dangers.’
Like Sir Godfrey, Walter thought that this was unlike the lady; in all the time he had known her she had been as brave, in her own way, as Sir Godfrey in his, never fretting, never crying.
‘Is it foreigners you’re thinking about? Can’t speak of Spain, never having been there, but the French. Well, this’d surprise you but they are just people. We were led to believe they have tales and they thought the same thing about us… First prisoner we ever took, we stripped him, just to make sure…’
Maybe that wasn’t quite the thing to say. He fell back on safe ground. ‘As for the danger, my Lady; after all you could stay at home and choke to death on a fishbone.’
So the last precious days ran away. The last Mass together; the last meal; the last night. Early morning of St. Michael’s Eve. Misty, everything swimming in a blue haze. He had to make an early start because Arcol, with brief charges and longer amblings, would take almost all day to cover the twenty miles to Bywater; and everything, men, horses and gear, was supposed to be on the quayside at Bywater by late afternoon, so that the ship could sail on the morning’s outgoing tide.
He had no send-off from the village which was not a manor. From all that he represented, Intake had long ago broken away; the old feudal sense of belonging severed when Sir Godfrey’s great-grandfather had said to their great-grandfathers, ‘Go make what you can of it,’ and trees had been felled, the first acres turned by the plough. Not one of them had ever seen a tournament, which was a practice for war; they had never been threatened by any enemy worse than those that threatened any rural community, a bad harvest, animal sickening, drought when rain was needed and rain when dry weather was essential. So Godfrey meant nothing to them; a landlord who could not even—And God be thanked—even raise their rents.