The Town House (46 page)

He said, in a grudging aggrieved way.

‘I didn’t know that you were leaving until just now, after dinner.’

He spoke as though he should have been informed and I almost said – What is that to you? But I remembered my manners and said,

‘I leave tomorrow.’

‘Back to Baildon?’

‘Fancy you remembering that! Yes, Baildon, but not to stay. I’m going to the nuns at Clevely.’

‘To a nunnery?’

‘Yes. I should have gone there in the first place but they wouldn’t have me until I was twelve.’

‘You’re not going to be a nun?’

I said, and it was true, ‘I don’t even know that myself. I should like to, but–’

‘Don’t,’ he said. He looked over to where Dame Margery had seated herself in the window, and scowled fiercely. He tried to speak softly but his voice had just broken and he had no note between a gruff growl and a squeak. ‘Soon I’ll be a squire. With any sort of arms I do well, none better. I’ll be a squire, and very soon a knight. Maude, don’t, I beg you, decide on being a nun until I’m a knight.’ He said all this in a squeak and
then suddenly dropped to a deep manly voice. ‘You can’t be a nun yet, and in four years I swear I’ll have my spurs if I have to break my neck to get them. And ever since we used to play together I’ve always thought…’ He broke off and glared at Dame Margery again, his face going a dark, unbecoming crimson. ‘When I’m a knight, I want you for my lady, and you can’t be that if you’re a nun.’

I laughed, for the first time since Melusine’s death.

‘If I decide not to be a nun, Henry, somebody else might have the same notion.’

He said furiously, ‘But I asked you first!’ He tugged at one of his dirty fingers and pulled off a ring; it was of some base metal – lead I should think, from the weight of it – with a zigzag pattern in blue enamel running round it. Even to make it fit his own finger he had been obliged to wad it with a twist of thread, now worn black and greasy.

‘Here you are,’ he said, groping for my hand and pushing the ring on to my finger, ‘I’ve spoken for you and done it properly, ring and all. You can bear witness to that, Dame.’

Dame Margery laughed.

‘It’s a bit one-sided, but it’ll do for now. Unless Maude cares to say something.’ I could tell from the way she spoke that she thought it silly child’s play, as I did myself. And then all at once it seemed pathetic that the awkward, blushing boy should be the only one to be serious; and I remembered that it was Henry who had offered to learn to read, so that I could have lessons. I said gently,

‘I can’t promise anything, Henry. But if you like I’ll keep the ring to remember you by.’

‘Do that,’ he said. ‘So then, good-bye, Maude.’

He pushed his head forward and kissed me. Most surprisingly the lips in his rough battered face were as smooth and soft as silk.

Interval

The gifts which Anne Reed had, in most cases, fashioned with her own hands and despatched to Maude at Beauclaire, and which had been passed on to Madge FitzHerbert, were not, in fact, such perfunctory and
deceptive offerings as the girl imagined. Once Maude was out of sight, the pangs of memory and conscience eased and Anne could think of, could speak of ‘my daughter’ as any woman might.

When Maude’s first letter arrived Anne said, with complacency to Martin,

‘Things have improved since my day; nobody bothered to teach us to write. And you will admit that she sounds happy.’

(The letter had been written in the Book Room, with Melusine sitting near by.)

It was presently possible for Anne to look back upon her own youth, and with that selective memory common to all whom the years have damaged, to see those early days golden with sunshine, brightened by hope, lively with appreciation of any occasional joy. She was convinced that she too could have been happy at Beauclaire or any other of the places where she had sojourned so miserably, had she not been so wretchedly poor.

As the days went by she came to think of her daughter as a more fortunate version of herself, just as pretty and graceful, but well shod, elegantly clothed, moving against the background of the Long Gallery, the Great Hall, the Low Garden. One day, she assured herself, when she had persuaded Martin into the provision of a dowry, the elegant, eligible young man of good family for whom she herself had waited in vain, would pay his court to Maude and all would be well.

Never once did she suspect that her attitude towards the child was that which most people, after the first burst of grief, held towards the dead. Gone away. In safe keeping. Happy now. Anne had never felt that way about her dead, and could not know that she had watched a little girl ride away on a brown pony with the finality with which other people see a coffin lowered into the earth. Anne’s dead, Denys, her mother, Richard, were all her victims, to be thought of as little as possible, subjects of the occasional nightmare from which refuge must be sought in the wine-cup.

She had Walter, whom she loved extravagantly, both for himself and for what she could see of Richard in him. Richard’s dark hair and eyes, his delicate look, his skill with the lute. Even when, at an early age, Walter declared that he was never going to be a wool merchant, he was going to take his lute and wander the roads and play to admiring crowds, the statement roused in his mother much delight and little concern. Richard had cherished that dream, too. Walter was Richard’s son. Upon that certainty she could rest, much of her guilt absolved. As a statement it was not to be taken seriously; he would know better when he was older.
Martin had found him a good tutor, a young man called Nicholas Freeman, who had been trained in the monks’ school at Norwich and come very near taking his priest’s orders, changed his mind and worked for a time in the office of a leather merchant in Norwich.

At first Anne had attached little importance to him, minding only that he should teach Walter thoroughly and as gently as possible. Walter learned swiftly.

‘It will help if I am a scrivener as well,’ he explained gravely. ‘I can play to please the people and myself, and then if any one wants a letter written or a copyright made, I can do it and so make sure of my bread.’

To count he refused, absolutely; and when pressed twice ran away. He was soon recovered, a small boy carrying a lute was not difficult to trace and Martin’s men knew the roads and were well mounted. He was beaten, sobbed tearlessly, worked himself into a fever and was cosseted, but still refused to learn to count.

‘I know all I need to know. I am not going to be a wool merchant.’

Nicholas Freeman, with time on his hands, began to take an active part in the business. Martin’s lame leg grew stiffer as he aged and sometimes he found difficulty in mounting his horse. One morning Nicholas asked,

‘Would you like me to go for you, sir?’

‘You think there is no skill in fleece-buying? They’d sell you anything.’

‘My father has a sheep run. I helped him until I was nine. I know all the tricks.’

‘Go then. But bring back any maggotty polls and I’ll knock their price off your wages.’

The young man laughed,

‘With the price of wool as it is, and my wages what they are, that would be to take a quart from a pint pot.’

Anne thought that an impudent answer, but Martin laughed and said,

‘I’ve been doing that all my life, boy.’

Little by little the young man worked his way into Martin’s confidence, was allowed more responsibility, was moving, Anne felt, into the place that should be Walter’s. On that eagerly-awaited day when Walter should, as she termed it, ‘come to his senses’, there would be Nicholas Freeman standing between him and his grandfather. Martin seemed to find him easy to talk to, and sometimes as they sat at table she would study them both. The young man wore, for a clerk, a very healthy look, as though his farmyard tan had survived the years in cloister and counting house; in a slightly
saturnine way, he was handsome, with bright hazel eyes, brown hair and excellent teeth. Beside him Martin’s lined face looked old. Old, she would think, and he never spares himself. Suppose he died, before Walter settled and knew anything of the business; we should depend upon this stranger, and he might cheat us, we are so ignorant.

Spurred by the fear of material loss she began to take interest in the business, listening, asking questions, sometimes venturing a suggestion. Martin, after the initial surprise, took refuge behind the immemorial barrier, ‘Nothing for you to bother about, my dear’, ‘You wouldn’t understand if I did explain,’ and ‘Leave all that to us.’

With Nicholas she had no better luck; he was a vain young man and had from the first resented her manner towards him; he rebuffed her gleefully, saying, ‘Why not discuss this with Master Reed?’ and once, ‘Master Reed engaged me and it is to him that I render account of my doings.’

The years went by. The twins’ twelfth birthday came. Walter showed no sign of change of heart, but so long as he was allowed to go his own way he was amiable and inoffensive. When she thought of Maude, Anne imagined her moving from the Children’s Dorter into the Well Yard Room at Beauclaire and taking her place with the young ladies. Upon that thought Anne braced herself for the tussle with Martin concerning the dowry. If he remained obdurate she had one other hope. Godfrey, now married to the FitzHerbert heiress, was extremely wealthy; he might do something for Maude; he should do, out of gratitude for what Anne had done for him, long ago.

She had entirely forgotten that she had ever intended to send Maude to the nunnery at Clevely. That had been a move in a secret game, won at the moment when a little girl rode through the archway on a brown pony.

But Maude had remembered that she was to leave Beauclaire when she was twelve; Dame Margery remembered it too, and so did Lady Astallon. And one lovely April morning, on that same brown pony, now too small for her, Maude came riding home.

On a sunny morning, about a fortnight after Maude’s return, Martin Reed came down to breakfast with some of the pain lines eased from his face. He flexed his lame leg two or three times as he sat in his chair and said, with satisfaction,

‘This weather suits me. I shall ride out to the Minsham run today.’

Two years before, the whole of Suffolk had been ravaged by sheep tick fever, and in replenishing his flocks Martin had tried an experiment. He had brought – with great expense and labour – sheep from the Cotswolds, where, in the greater cold of the high hillsides the animals which flourished were the ones with particularly thick fleeces. He had been resigned to the possibility of the sheep growing lighter wool once they were on pastures less exposed; but that had not happened in their first year. He was anxious now to see for himself what difference a second winter had made.

‘Like to come with me, Maude?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes, I would,’ she said, eagerly. Then doubt and uncertainty clouded her face. Since the moment when the Chaplain at Beauclaire had given her a new aim in life she had made some advances of her own. Self-denial was good, as well as prayer; a thousand small sacrifices of comfort or pleasure might ‘count’, if offered in the proper spirit against the pains which Melusine was suffering in Purgatory.

Perhaps, she thought, imagining the pleasure of riding out in the sunshine, she should retract that acceptance and go instead to church, kneel until she was dizzy, pray until she was tired. That would ‘count’.

But her grandfather’s face had brightened and he was already considering which horse she should ride. She hadn’t the heart to withdraw. Presently, at Clevely, there would be time and opportunity to make everything right.

So they rode out together and for some time spoke little and of trivial things. He explained about the sheep from the hills. He said, in a disgruntled way that he had last year asked Walter to ride out and see them and that Walter had said a sheep was a sheep and no more. Cuckoos were calling from every thicket and he described to her how, as a boy, birds-nesting at Rede on a precious Good Friday holiday, he had seen a cuckoo throw a blackbird’s egg from a nest and settle down to lay her own.

It was talk to interest any child, and over Maude’s response there was the patina of Dame Margery’s training – not enough to listen and be interested, one must
look
interested, give signs of pleasure, encourage the talker to go on. Unaware of this Martin simply found his granddaughter most pleasingly responsive; he found himself telling her things that he had never told anyone, things he had once, long, long ago, planned to tell Stephen and Robin when they were old enough to listen to his tales.