The Town House (43 page)

One day in June – I remember that the garlands and banners from our Tournament were still up – there was a bear-baiting. We children took our places, at the back of the Ladies’ Stand. I saw Helen Beaufort sit with the grown-ups, and reminded myself that I had not yet written that letter to Walter. It again seemed unfair, and unnecessary, that next year I should go to Clevely, and should have borne all Dame Margery’s training, for nothing.

I’d watched bear-baiting before and never been squeamish about it, but on this evening something happened to me. I stopped being Maude Reed, a spectator up in the stands, and entered into the feelings of the bear. I may be wrong, but I think learning to read had had an effect on me. When you read you must get out of your own skin and into the skin of the people you are reading about, that is the only way to enjoy it.

They’d cut the bear’s nose, both to make him savage and to let the dogs smell blood to make them savage, and I began by having a pain in my nose; then, as the fight went on pains went all over me, particularly low down in my body, where I had never had a pain before, and between my thighs. I sighed and shifted about on the seat and Dame Margery looked at me reprovingly.

It was a remarkably good bear; dog after dog it dealt with. Now and again, when a dog was clawed or crushed or bitten my feelings went that way for a moment or two, but in the main I was with the bear, I was the bear.

Everybody became excited. The ladies, who must, in all circumstances remain well-behaved, smiled and clapped their hands and made little murmuring or squeaking sounds; the gentlemen were more noisy, wagering money on whether a dog would ‘score’ or not, a ‘score’ meaning a bite which held while one could count up to five; they shouted, and laughed, and yelled the counts aloud and groaned when a dog they had backed was shaken off too soon.

Presently, even from where we sat we could smell the blood.

Then somebody called,

‘Try two dogs at once.’ So they did and the bear dealt with them gallantly and cleverly.

The dogs – some were strays that had been collected and kept for such an occasion, or young hounds which had something wrong with them which made them of no value to their proper sphere – were let loose from one end of the tourney ground, and presently, from that end there was a cry, ‘Only one dog left, my Lords and Ladies.’

Then it’ll soon be over, I thought; and despite all his wounds the bear will have won.

But somebody shouted, ‘Blind the bear!’ and somebody else called for pepper.

After all that, to have pepper thrown in his eyes.

I knew then that I was going to be sick. I was surprised. The pain in my body hadn’t been anything like the belly-ache which often ends in sickness. Nevertheless, I was going to be sick. I pressed my hands over my mouth and made for the stairs which led down from the stand. I was near them, and did not have to push past Dame Margery. I just blundered down and to the back of the stand and then I was sick.

I couldn’t go back. Never willingly would I watch a bear-baiting again. I didn’t much want to go into the house, either. It would be deserted. Some other entertainment was to follow the baiting, tumblers or mummers were to perform by torchlight. I’d walk about for a little while, I thought, and then, when the poor wretched bear had been taken away, and sand spread over the blood patches, creep back into my place.

From the tourney ground the nearest pleasant place for walking was the old Low Garden, so I went there, not minding being alone there, partly because being alone out of doors was never quite so uncomfortable to me as being alone within walls, and partly because somewhere, at the far end of the Low Garden there was the Maze and near-by, keeping his watch, would be one of the old men. I didn’t go near the Maze,
though, I stayed on a path edged by ancient rose bushes, so long unclipped that they were almost wild again, but covered with a profusion of flowers, pale pink, striped with deeper colour, and very fragrant. In the mild evening air they shed their scent and I breathed it in gladly after the reek of blood and terror in the tourney ground.

I walked up and down the path, and every time I turned I could see, at the other side of the over-grown garden, the tall blackish-green hedge which walled in the Maze; and one time, as I turned and looked that way I saw two figures standing just inside the entry of it. At first my only feeling was of surprise because I had imagined that everybody was at the bear-baiting. As I looked, wondering who they were, and wondering also why they had avoided the entertainment, whether they had at one time been sickened, too, they moved together and so stood in a long embrace.

By this time, from my reading, from talks with Melusine, from gossiping with Helen and from merely being alive and not stone deaf, I had picked up all there was to know about the relationship between men and women. I knew exactly why this pair had been in the Maze rather than at the baiting and I wondered whether they knew about the constant guard. Then I remembered that the old man had asked me to call out so that he could know my whereabouts, and thought with some relief that that showed that he could not see clear into the Maze, he could only watch the entry.

The man of this pair, whom I did not recognize, broke from the woman’s arms and walked briskly away in a direction which would take him to the stable yard. The woman stood still for a moment or two and then took a path which would eventually meet, in a corner, the one upon which I stood. She had hardly taken four steps before I recognized her; it was Melusine. I knew by the way she walked. Recognition had been slow because she was wearing a new dress, scarlet, a colour she never wore, and a narrow, steeple head-dress instead of a wide, horned one.

My first impulse was to run and meet her, then I thought better of it. This had been a secret rendezvous, she might be displeased to know that it had been – at the end – overlooked. So instead of running to meet her where the paths joined, I drew back, and then, when she had passed, followed her. If she went into the house then I could go into the house too. A little time in her company would be far more delightful to me than the best entertainment in the world.

At the end of the path she turned towards the house, not towards the tourney ground, and I followed her, keeping my distance all the time. I
reached the Well Yard and was inside the deep porch when my Uncle Godfrey’s voice hailed me.

‘The baiting – is it over?’

I told him no, I had come in because I felt slightly unwell. He laid one of his hard hands against my neck, just under the ear, held it there a moment and said,

‘No fever.’ He smiled and said he hoped I should feel better soon. That emboldened me to ask why he was not at the tourney ground and he said that he had been watching poultices applied to the leg of his destrier, Tristram, which had suffered a slight injury in the Tournament.

‘Will he be better in time for the Dover Meeting?’

‘It’s to be hoped so,’ he said, and we parted. I was inside the Well Yard room before my mind took notice of the fact that the man who had stood with Melusine just inside the Maze had worn a yellow doublet, and that my uncle was wearing that colour.

I knew by this time that my uncle was a knight without any land or other source of income and that this was an unenviable thing to be. He had, more than once, tried to marry an heiress whose parents or guardians, in their turn, were looking out for a husband with money, and his efforts in this direction were now so bruited abroad that parents or guardians of heiresses looked at him a bit askance. That is what I mean when I say that the whole society of which Beauclaire was a sample was too much concerned with money. My Uncle Godfrey was handsome, kind, good-humoured, and acknowledged to be one of the best knights – some said the very best – in all the South of England. He was a man whom any girl could have been pleased and proud to marry, but he had no money, he could not be seriously considered. On the other hand he was extremely popular with the ladies. In a strange, entirely false, stilted way it was the fashion, just then, for any married woman who was not positively repulsive in appearance, to have a string of adorers who pretended to be in love with her. Perhaps pretended is a harsh word, some of them did, perhaps cherish a hopeless passion; now and again perhaps a lady would slip from virtue, but it was rare; as a general rule the ladies wore their lovers and flaunted them as they wore and flaunted their jewels. Before a Tournament, for example, there was a competition amongst the ladies to count how many knights begged the honour of wearing their favours, just as fierce as the competition presently to be waged in the lists. There was a secret and very subtle game to be played with colours. A knight might ask a lady for a favour, a glove, a scarf, a
sleeve to wear in the next event; he might be refused because her favour was already given; he would find out from her body servant what colour of gown she intended to wear, and then he would ride out on the day wearing somewhere about him, that same colour. In this custom lay the origin of the ladies’ hatred for having a gown the same colour as another’s. There was another variation of the game, too. The ladies would go to great lengths and show much ingenuity in showing their preferences; my uncle’s name being Blanchefleur their task was easy, and at many a Meeting I have seen a dozen women wearing a white flower as a sign that they wished him well and had faith in his prowess. Officially my Uncle Godfrey ‘belonged’ to my Lady Astallon, he was her kin by marriage, he was part of her husband’s household, and she was very beautiful in the manner most admired just then, unreal, inhuman, with her shaved eyebrows and her hair plucked out all about her forehead to make her brow look high and the hair line as even as though it had been painted.

I thought of all this as I went into the Well Yard Room, and found it empty. I went on to the Stool Room, Melusine was not there, but she had been, just before me, I could smell her gilly-flower water fragrance through the faint, stored-up, stink of the place. As I rang the bell I wondered had she gone into the Book Room. But when I reached the door it was locked. I turned back and at the place where two passages joined saw two old women; one had the bucket and jug of her occupation, the other carried a mug wrapped in a piece of flannel.

‘Traipse, traipse, traipse,’ said the stool-emptier, bitterly, ‘all day long. And my feet as tender as the bird of your eye.’

‘But on the level,’ said the other. ‘Them stairs are my undoing. And I’ll swear there’s such a call for ginger, some of ‘em must come round twice a month.’

‘Who is it this time?’

‘The Lady Melusine. It ain’t so long since ladies kept quiet about it, and danced the higher and laughed the louder so nobody should know, but
now
! No, we must lay abed and cosset our bellies with hot ginger twice a day.’

‘I’d swop with you.’

‘And after a week of the stairs you’d be glad to swop back.’

I was close to them now, and I said,

‘I’m going up. Shall I take it?’

‘Young ladies ain’t allowed in the Ladies’ Dorter.’

‘No one would know. I’d just put it in.’

She looked at me with the suspicion of her kind; nobody ever did anything for nothing.

‘Don’t you go sipping at it. It’s medicine, turn you black in the face if you drunk it without needing it.’

But she handed it over.

I went upstairs slowly and carefully, pondering over why Melusine and my uncle must meet in secret. So far as I could see – quite apart from the fact that they were my two favourite people – they were well matched. Melusine was not a great heiress, she had a very modest dower, the freeholds of some properties in London, the rent of which was paid punctually four times a year and as punctually expended on new dresses or pieces of finery. Neither she nor my uncle was married, or betrothed to anyone else; her income, added to that he won in prize money would keep them; she certainly wouldn’t need a new dress if she lived to be a hundred.

I had reached the Ladies’ Dorter, a room I had never, in all my time at Beauclaire, entered before. It was very large; the walls were painted and all the beds had hangings, some of plain silk, some embroidered with the family emblems of the owner. Great chests stood by the side and at the foot of each bed, and in the centre of the room was a table with several looking-glasses on it. The room smelt of women, of musk, and violet and gillyflower and lavender, of linen fresh from the washing, of velvet, and under all of human flesh. My not-yet-settled stomach moved uneasily.

Melusine’s bed was on the far side of the door; it had plain blue hangings. She had undressed and was lying flat with her bare arms exposed, her hands linked behind her head. She raised herself a little when I entered, and then, seeing me, sat up straight.

‘Maude! What are you doing here? You know it is forbidden.’

‘Except for two old women we are alone in the house. So I brought your ginger.’

‘Why aren’t you at the baiting?’

‘I was sick.’

‘Poor sweet,’ she said, instantly sympathetic. ‘Look, you drink that posset. There’s nothing more comforting to the stomach.’

‘I’m better now. It’s for you.’

The ends of her lips curved upwards in what was almost, but not quite a smile; it was a look I knew and generally accompanied some words of gentle mockery.

‘It would be wasted on me. Drink it quickly and then run along. If you are found here…’

‘Nobody will come yet. There is an entertainment by torchlight and it isn’t nearly dark.’

‘Sit here and drink it then. Sit on the bed.’ She patted the place and then lay back, linking her hands behind her head again.

‘Arc you sure you don’t want it?’

‘That is one thing I am sure of.’ So I sat down and began to unwrap the flannel from the mug, saying, ‘The servant said that one sip would turn me black in the face.’

‘Why did she send you with it?’ I explained that I had not been sent, I had offered to carry it.

She accepted – as I realized afterwards – this evidence of my devotion, plumbing its depths by the simple question,

‘How did you know it was for me?’