Green Darkness (26 page)

Anthony dismissed quickly the contrast with his sickly little wife, moaning in their bedchamber. Then he caught sight of Celia.

The girl was sitting on a stool beside her aunt, and looking out the casement window. There was
beauty!
Innocent springtime, primrose beauty, enhanced by wistfulness. The large sad eyes were the color of the sea when sunlight caught it in a rocky pool.

Her brows and lashes were as brown as seaweed, her rich tumbling hair could match the color of the antique gold chain he had not yet taken off after the King’s visit. She was like the dreamlike virgins who caressed the unicorn in his new tapestry.

Magdalen looked around, suddenly feeling a watcher at the door.

“Ho! Sir Anthony!” she cried, laughing, while she put a warning hand on Leonard’s shoulder. “Have ye coom to chide the gamesters? Ye maun do so, for I vow they cheat!”

Leonard and Gerald sprang to their feet. So did Ursula and Celia. Anthony felt constraint. The men were of his own age, but they made him feel old, that he was the powerful host—the intruder.

“Nay,” he said smiling, “I’ve no wish to stop the gaming, nor to judge it. I passed by on an errand.” He waved them to sit down.

“’Tis snug here,” he said pleasantly to Ursula. “I trust you’ve all you need, my lady?”

“Indeed, so—sir.” She was much startled by his appearance. He had never honored her with a visit before, and for days during and after the King’s visit, she had seen him only from a distance. “Lady Jane is better, I trust?” Ursula had heard whisperings and dark surmises from the servants.

“No worse . . .” said Anthony curtly, reminded of his errand. He looked at the men—Dacre and Fitzgerald. Especially Fitzgerald, Geraldine’s brother, hand in glove with Geraldine.

Well, one could but find out. He was tired of dissembling and nearly ashamed of the role he had played before the King. He looked up at Lady Ursula’s crucifix, he looked at it so long that they all grew puzzled, then Anthony crossed himself.

“This is a Catholic house,” said Anthony harshly. “We will go to Mass, all those who are
in
and
of
my house, tomorrow morn at six.”

Leonard and Gerald were puzzled by the note of defiance in their host’s voice. And that he was staring so hard at Gerald.

“Why, to be sure, sir,” said Gerald, his eyebrows quirking like his sister’s. “Why not? We’re all Catholics—though one must sway a bit wi’ the breeze, now and then . . . eh, Sir Anthony?”

Magdalen gave her hearty laugh. “’Twill do us good! I’ve heard no Mass since we left Coomberland, an’ the gobblin’ prayers we’ve been duling, morn an’ night, they’re mortal tedious. Where will ye hold Mass, sir—ye’re chapel’s empty as a turn.”

“It will be refurnished tonight,” said Anthony.

Celia’s heart was beating fast. The King had been gone over two days, but Stephen had not reappeared. She had been imagining all sorts of disasters—that the King’s men had found Stephen and spitted him on a sword or, more likely, that Sir Anthony had in fact turned Protestant and never meant to release his priest, or that Stephen had escaped and fled back to France. She had asked a friendly page; he knew nothing. She finally asked Ursula, but her aunt was unwontedly sharp and indicated that such concern for the house priest was unseemly. At once she began to talk of Leonard Dacre, saying that he was a fine upstanding young lord, that Celia should not be so indifferent to his attentions. Celia had been hurt. She did not comprehend that Ursula’s anxious love produced the sharpness, she only knew that the world had grown shadowy and unmolded. She had no real place at Cowdray with Ursula—inquiry had divulged that the foreign physician still occupied her attic at the Spread Eagle. She had been mutely forlorn.

Anthony’s speech aroused her. She could not be carelessly bold, like Magdalen. She had, however, her own strengths, allied to the recent, tentatively discovered power over men.

She went up to Anthony and said in a low, firm voice, “For the Mass, sir, will you not need your priest—Brother Stephen?”

Anthony was taken aback. The wistful little beauty, who was after all only some relation to the bastard Bohuns, spoke to him as though there were no difference in their rank. There was even accusation in the clear gaze.

Anthony smiled slowly. “You are right, child. We need Brother Stephen for the Mass. Would you like to come with me when I release him?”

“Aye,” Celia said. She heard Ursula’s indrawn breath, she felt the mild astonishment in the Dacres and Gerald. These did not touch her.

“Well, then—” said Anthony, amused and titillated; he motioned her through the door. She went, and he followed.

The young men shrugged and returned to their gaming. Magdalen resumed her teasing comments. Ursula frowned, glanced at her astrolabe, then she, too, looked up at her crucifix. There was no help there to allay foreboding.
Ave Maria
—Holy Mother of God—she thought, as women did when assailed by maternal fears, yet what could the Immaculate Virgin really know of sensual threats or the need to protect a girl from her own waywardness.

Anthony and Celia circled down the old stone staircase to the cellars. They were dank, and dimly lit by small rough slits hewn at intervals between the foundation stones. The stench of the latrine pit was sickening. Anthony led the way amongst ale casks, kegs of salted pork, rotting wooden coffers filled with rusty ironware from the kitchen, old broken pikes and other disused weapons.

In the darkest corner, Anthony paused at a niche and raised his hand to a heavy iron bolt which was hidden by a jutting of masonry.

Celia gasped. “He’s in
there?
” she cried. “You’ve bolted him in. Oh, could you not
trust
him?”

Anthony’s hand stayed a moment. “Aye,” he said with some compunction. “I gave no order for bolting, must be the steward’s carefulness, he’s the only one knows the priest is here.” Anthony slid back the bolt, and swung open a little door scarce three feet high. They peered in together and though one of the foundation slits gave scanty light, at first they could see nobody. “Brother Stephen!” Anthony said.

There was a stirring on the floor, where they saw a long dark figure lying on a pile of straw. “I want no food, only water—” muttered a voice from the darkness.

Celia, pushing past Anthony, squeezed herself through the door and ran to kneel by the figure. “’Tis not the steward!” she cried. “’Tis
me,
Celia, and Sir Anthony himself. You’re free, sir,
free!
”

Through fevered mists, where he saw sometimes grinning red demons, sometimes the anxious faces of his fellow monks at Marmoutier, Stephen heard the girl’s beseeching frightened voice.

“Begone . . . Celia . . .” he whispered. “In your hair are golden snakes, perchance a golden rat hides in the snakes . . .”

His hand raised to cross himself, then fell limp.

“Oh, what ails him!” Celia cried, she snatched the burning hand and held it against her cool cheek.

“Delirium,” said Anthony grimly. “Wait here.”

She obeyed, crouching beside Stephen, fondling his hand and wetting it with tears.

Anthony returned at once with two stout kitchen varlets. They lifted Stephen and eased him through the door. Celia, in backing off so as not to impede them, stumbled over something soft and squashy. She felt of it. Only a dead rat. She had seen hundreds of those, and this one’s stink was hardly noticeable amongst the stinks of human ordure seeping through the wall.

Yet it was the rat which caused Stephen’s present danger. They found the bite on Stephen’s right thigh when they laid the monk on a long counter in the scullery. The men had forgotten Celia as they stripped off the black habit, and exposed the young man naked. She shrank against the serving hatch and stared.

She had not known how well-made Stephen’s body was, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, the muscles rounded, the flushed skin as smooth and without blemishes as her own. Her shocked gaze flickered over the mat of curly black hair on his chest, the black hair further down which nestled around the large reddish objects which she had vaguely known men to possess and had seen tiny pale replicas of on boy babies. Her cheeks grew hot, she felt the heat into her scalp, and she looked away troubled, fascinated. Then she heard what Sir Anthony was saying.

“God’s nails—Look at that!” Anthony poked a finger around a puffy mass of proud flesh from which yellow-green pus trickled.

Red streaks ran down Stephen’s swollen leg; he winced when Anthony touched it and resumed the incoherent mutters, twitching his head from side to side and shivering with a violent chill.

Anthony had seen few wounds in his twenty-five years, and never serious ones since he had never been to war, but he knew that rat bites could be most dangerous. “I doubt he’ll live . . .” said Anthony sadly.

The two scullions shook their heads. They liked the house priest, who never chided them unduly, nor gave long exhortations in the confessional.

“We should send for the barber,” continued Anthony, frowning, “or the wise-woman—Old Molly o’ Whiphill, my lady Jane has faith in her potions.”

“Sir Anthony!” Celia choked—she cleared her voice, which was hoarse as a raven’s. “Sir Anthony! There’s a physician at the inn. Master Julian Ridolfi. The one was sent to the King who would have none of him. Get him.”

Anthony stared at the girl. So many events had followed on the brief scene some days ago in the courtyard, and so anguished was her pretty face, that he thought her to be babbling.

“The Italian doctor!” Celia cried shaking Anthony’s arm. “Came from Master Cheke . . . Oh . . . I’ll fetch him myself!” She darted out from the scullery and through the kitchen courtyard.

Thus it was that Julian was installed at Cowdray, though not in the manner in which he had expected and hoped.

During the week of his struggle for life, Stephen lay in one of the small chambers near Ursula’s. That lady did most of the nursing, inspired by true goodness of heart, respect for Master Julian and pity for the young monk who was certainly, in this condition, no threat to Celia or anyone else. She did not, however, permit Celia access to the sickroom, though she was not so unkind as to send the girl back to the attic room in the inn, which the August heat rendered stifling.

Celia wandered about Cowdray, as mutely unhappy as she had been before Stephen’s release but with the added pain of certain anxiety.

Julian used all his skill to save the patient, though he began without hope or anything more than scientific interest. Treating a house priest who had been kept hidden from the King, skulking in some bolt-hole, was, if the thing were known, hardly the way to preferment should there still be any hope of such. Even his friend John Cheke would not have considered
this
life worth saving, would indeed have said that the effort was even blasphemous, since Almighty God obviously intended to rid the country of an idolatrous, scheming papist, one of the creeping worms sent by the Scarlet Woman to bore corruptions through the sound apple of Protestant England.

Nonetheless, Julian applied fomentations of balsam and vinegar to the wound, after he had cleaned and cauterized it carefully. He refused to let blood—to Anthony’s great astonishment—and he forced on the young monk great quantities of a febrifuge.

He searched Stephen meticulously twice a day, knowing that the rat’s poisoned saliva might reappear in some fresh place as a boil. How such a thing could be, he did not know, but he had seen it happen. No boil appeared. The fever mounted for three days, then suddenly departed, leaving Stephen very weak but rational. The wound’s angry red diminished. The swelling lessened.

On a morning when Julian entered the sickroom, he saw great improvement. He felt Stephen’s forehead and armpits, they were cool. The pulse was slowed. He looked at the leg, which was far less swollen, and the wound was beginning to heal.

“
Benissimo
. . .” said Julian aloud.

Stephen opened his eyes. “Who are
you?
” he whispered. “I’ve thought you to be my abbot, yet he had no beard!”

Julian chuckled. “No abbot I! I’m a physician, and you’ll recover, my fine young monk. There
was
grave doubt.”

“Our Lord hath shown infinite mercy, then,” whispered Stephen, after a moment of wonder. He remembered nothing clearly after the first horrible night in his cell, when the rat had bitten him. “The Holy Blessed Virgin be praised.”

Julian shrugged. “Praise Her by all means, if you like, yet I think earthly gratitude is also fitting.”

Stephen’s wan stubbled face looked a question, and Julian proceeded dryly, “To little Celia Bohun who summoned
me
—and to my own ministrations. Though, ’tis true I was aided by your youthful strength.”

“Celia . . .?” Stephen could not grasp this. His thoughts were wooly and aimless as sheep.

“Also Lady Ursula, who has nursed you devotedly. No matter, rest now.”

Stephen drifted off while Julian changed the dressing on his leg. Lady Ursula came hurrying in with a new-cleansed urinal and Julian nodded approvingly. He demanded a fastidiousness which she secretly thought foolish. Fresh sheets daily, the immediate extermination of the usual lice and fleas, a bare swept floor. It was a lot of work, but Julian had explained to her—in one of the serious talks she so much enjoyed—that though disease might spring from stagnant, evil air, or by the sudden putrefaction of the body’s humors—bile, phlegm, blood as most people thought—Fracastorius, his master at Padua, had been convinced there was another cause. He felt that diseases were transmitted by moving atoms, particles so tiny the eye could not see them, tinier than motes in a sunbeam, and that these particles might be carried on the legs of vermin, and also lived in filth of any kind.

On August 13, two days before the Feast of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, Stephen had begun to chafe at his confinement. He was able to walk around his room without wobbling, and to savor the good meals sent him from the kitchens. He greeted Julian’s morning visit with a warm but determined smile.

“Good day, Doctor, you see I’m nearly well. I must return to my duties. I intend to celebrate Our Blessed Lady’s Mass in the chapel for all my Cowdray flock. It grieves me to’ve deserted them so long.”