We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (31 page)

I shall not read those books, but they cannot lie. His honour and his fame they cannot touch. They would need to invent a devil in human shape, so great was his glory. I shall never know.

Pray Jesu Brampton had a fair crossing...

They are coming for us. They laugh; and outside, I hear the growl of people, ready to enjoy our torment.

I am afraid. Jesu, Jesu receive my soul.

O Richard! Is there a place for me beside you, above the stars?

HERE THE MAN’S TALE IS ENDED

*
Author’s Note
: Although most churches were by canon law sanctuaries, Tewkesbury had neither royal charter nor papal bull to this effect.

*
Author’s Note: This bill is extant.

Whatever befall, I never shall

Of this thing be upbraid:

But if ye go, and leave me so,

Then have ye me betrayed.

Remember you wele, how that ye dele;

For if ye, as ye said,

Be so unkind to leave behind

Your love, the Nut-Brown Maid,

Trust me truly that I shall die

Soon after ye be gone:

For in my mind, of all mankind

I love but you alone.

The Nut-Brown Maid

T
here is a malady peculiar to such as we. I have known this mingling of boredom and melancholia; Dame Johanna, who was scornful and cruel, called it ‘
l’accidie
’. She misused me but once and thereafter deemed I had power and became afraid. Power! pitiful that, pitiful me, who never realized the strength in a word, a name. A name of riches. A rich name, unspoken.

I broke my vow of self-counsel, though, in Yorkshire, shocked out of vigilance by Patch, come dripping rain and folly, off the moor and out of the past, and I, loving and hating him for that reason, saw his loonish eye flicker, felt his wide lips upon my hand and longed to scream: ‘What of my lord, Sir Fool? What, what of my love?’

I did not ask straightway. Instead, we talked of apostasy; it was meet that I could do so, not being professed myself...

They came and took me, and they were silent men but kindly for all that they wore the livery of Jacquetta of Bedford, and they rode hard with me through the night, day, night, and I kept my own arms clipped tight beneath my cloak to guard that which I held most dear...

Apostasy we talked of, the apostasy of love, while Patch mocked with his eye and feigned a tear.

...North they brought me, and so I vanished as though I had never been. And I think Dame Johanna was passing glad of me for she took the hand-to-hand gold purse from the man who had ridden at the head of our company and looked me over, saying right loving: ‘I would not have priced her so high,’ and one of those who stood with us peered just as hard at that douce and sinful face under the rich wimple and fingered his hose, breathing little ugly words. She was a knight’s daughter and I remember her but vaguely. For as life has taken me, shaken and slain me and restored me to a half-life which in itself is peace, the middle years are less clear than youth and childhood; mercifully even these are something veiled. I say mercifully, for if all that were to come again so sharp and clear I could not support the remembrance of what followed after.

I have descended into the depths of Hell. I have tasted the grave’s earth. I have died, yet I live: a witless old nun with words half-listened to, and always, always forgotten. Truly, I have known death, and am risen, not to glory but to a plain of calm shadows. Folk are passing kind to me, I have my daily bread and ale; I have my herbs and my garden and the everliving consolation of Him who died on Tree, whose agony I am well-purveyed to share. I know the tormenting ache of His Side, the fierce pain of His Wounds; I know the colours of death, the flavour of grief, as surely as if I had sat beneath that long sundown shadow, with Mary and the Harlot.

Merry Patch, do you live yet? I spared him the full tale of the one who cast herself into the well, for he would not have got my drift. I did but touch on it and he cocked his head, interested, for I spoke of love which was ever his prerogative (in a silly mocking way to speak, making fair foul and what was bright, unclean).

...They took me, those strong men who lusted for a comely nun, to a wild place, a cold cloistered realm of bells and secrets. There were never such vigorous bells as in that house in Yorkshire; they frightened me. It was as though their clangour would shroud all that took place within, unseemly for the sight of God. Their wildness struck at the flourishing elms, sent the pigeons clapping high around the taut vibrating tower, shivered the reeds crowding the stream that ran northerly through the cloister-garth. Constant were those bells, like the heart of a true maid, and the only loyal entity in that corrupt house; sweet Edyth tolled them, doubtless that was why. Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline. My heart hung heavy on each stroke.

I was not put to sleep in the dorter. An abject of the Queen’s will, I had a cell in the guest house, with a low pallet, a deep window at which I stood that summer evening, staring at the dark trees and the night-greying sprawl of the frater and chapel buildings. There were no stars, nor were there tears left in me. I had three gowns: a journey-splashed blue silk, a black dress of muster-develers and God! O God! Jacquetta’s orange satin, which the flames had scorched.

I remember casting wildly about me, to divert my mind. A small figure of Our Lady hung over the bed and I flung myself before her; I caught up my beads and began, feverishly, to tell them, but with the first touch of the coral I became heretic for I cried not on the Virgin’s name but on another, one of such richness that the cell seemed to throb and glow from its sound and the walls to weep in concert with my cry, for there was water trickling somewhere near, the spring which fed the troutstream and the lake, though this I did not know. Right outside my window it ran and, low down in one corner of the room, where a stone had been plucked out by storm, moisture lapped sadly through, like a little, flickering tongue. A patina of damp lay on the floor, and mould grew up the feet of the bed. How long since I shared a silken bed? How long since I nestled in sleep by Elysande? Hot and secret and trusting, sharing with her the most precious of my heart’s estate; a slack and loving fool, dreaming while she schemed.

I thought on Elysande with sadness, marvelling at her treachery, and heard once more her soft voice, while she was still my friend... ‘But, sweet, you do but kiss, and where’s the harm?’ and my own silly trembling answer, and the hawks flying high over Fotheringhay. She, in our small privacy, clipping me close and murmuring that she too had lost her maidenhead when twelve years old and none the worse... gripping the bedstead with its sheen of tomb-rouge, I prayed that she had not watched me too closely through those final days, that she knew naught of the pledge he had left within me; so thinking, I rose quickly from the stone to honour a silent voice that said guard yourself.

My whole heart enveloped the child full lovingly.

The child. Am I to finish the tale, then? It will give me a plenteousness of woe. Ah, now it comes, clearer than I would wish. Child. Pray for me.

My eyes, when I touched them, were swollen and burning, and my mass of hair seemed to drag at me, sapping my strength; I thought—now I suppose they will cut it off. My hair, my only beauty! for I knew not the limits of their power, nor indeed, in whose power I was. I knew only that here was the end to dreaming and to glory, that this severance from my own heart’s liking, my own true knightly love, was sharp as the knife they would need to shear away my hair (for that, in all its nut-brown show, could have no place in cloister). And I thought to save them the labour, turning and turning again in the cell, spying for any glint that might betoken a blade, or a mirror. There again: no mirrors in cloister! though to reflect the past, ghosts aplenty. Each thought conjured them from the shadows. Images, and words...

As, cut your hair up by your ear,

Your kirtle by the knee;

With bow in hand for to withstand

Your enemies, if need be...

I had not withstood my enemies. The Duchess of Bedford’s great burnished glass shone in my mind. Her face, too, set in it like a toad, unwinking, raddled beauty, while behind it, mine, white and attenuated, with plum-blue bruising round the eyes from the worry, worry, that she might rob me of a minute, a second in
his
arms. Even in my own mind I would not name him. He was he, and I was utterly his, and I would never again give his name a voice, I held it too dear. I would not dishonour it.

Great black bats began their sweeping dance between earth and heaven. Framed by the pointed grey arch of my window, they flew, silent as treachery. A bell tolled, heavy, urgent, the metal of the soul. I sat on the bed, and felt its dew soak through my gown. Motionless, I thought: my love has entombed me. Old thoughts and new flittered like the bats. The Duchess would have rushed into Sanctuary with her mirror and the Jerusalem Tapestry—that cloth of Arras for which Sir Thomas Cook had paid so dear. And Elizabeth, Elizabeth! who had flown so high and to good purpose—was her glory, too, crumbling like mine? Did she weep, and did she love? For the King was taken. The King was taken, and his brother, and the dampness of the chamber made me shake as I saw my love, fighting that moment to the death, against proud Warwick.

He would fight bravely, on his first campaign, striving to shield the worshipped King. Were he taken hostage, he would not cringe or seek the sanctuary of defeat, would give no fair words to sneering Warwick. Even his voice, crying his challenge against terrible odds, for St George and Plantagenet, would wear an edge. And if they took his sword, it would be in their own flesh. Would to God I were fighting for him, my hair cut off, the child asleep within me. Would the tears stand in his eyes, I wondered, when he saw his foe, the friend turned enemy? ‘Yea, the people love Warwick. All love him, as I did.’ Would his colour come and go, like the firelight, when he saw the cruel Bear and Ragged Staff? And I decided yea, and yea again, hearing through my fear’s torment the hammer of his steel. This, then, would be his mien. For I knew him as I knew myself.

Warwick, maddened by a usurping woman, would show him no quarter. Warwick, forgetting past love, would sanction his death.

Night fell, and I laid a curse upon Elizabeth. Laid it, and lifted it. For if Elizabeth loved, as I, and would have her love, to lie beside him all night and wake warm with him at day’s beginning, we were truly sisters, and cursing her, I cursed myself. Yet Elizabeth had done many things which I could not. There were Desmond’s boys, and Desmond himself, who still plagued me. Patch had told me: ‘Foully murdered, for their father’s affront to the vanity of her Grace.’ That is, if Patch could be believed, with his loose and dangerous wit.

Long after, hearing how matters really went, and how Warwick was outwitted, I could have mocked at my own thoughts, but perchance that evening saw the beginnings of my madness. For in those first few hours, I deemed myself truly mad. Made mad by love, and a cruel parting. Others in that house shared my longing, knew well the colour of my thought, but I had yet to learn of this.

There came a scratching at the door, and I kept silence trembling, for I still thought that there were those who sought my death, and I marvelled that none unlocked the chamber door and entered. I sat watching that broad piece of oak, like a cat—God save us! like Gyb spying on a mouse!—and wondering what lay without. Thus, with my growing dread, all the monsters I had ever seen, in books and dreams, scratched on the door; I reckoned the Duchess in her mercy could have sent a headsman, a hangman, to slay me for my crimes—what crimes? And the scratching grew more insistent, past bearing, so that I cried, in what was almost a scream: ‘Enter! in Our Lady’s Name!’ then called thrice upon the Trinity, and well that I did, for the door, that was not locked, crept open and there entered a spirit, a creature unearthly, from which I shrank in terror. Dear Edyth, how you affrighted me! You who would not harm the smallest thing alive, whom I have seen shed your cloak rather than jolt a slumbering butterfly, you little know how close I was to death that instant!

For the being that came silently in was green, green as a water-nixie, possessing a drowned, dead look, the flesh of its face made a more ghastly green by the quavering light it carried, and the arms, twig-thin, loaded with sour greenness, a great slithering mass that rustled and shook—a green pillow to smother me.

I beat out my hands to ward it off. But it came on, this apparition, steadily, flashing me one glance from great hollow eyes in a twilight face. And dropped its bundle on the ground, so that its true form in a gown greenish-grey was revealed to be thinner even than mine. The light it held up to my face, and the dropping gleam lit up its own, so that I shuddered this time with relief to see the countenance of a child. A child, spare to gauntness, a pale sad mouth, a body clothed in shrunken grey, wisps of hair lying like river-reeds upon its neck. A maid, with naught but duty in her face. Sweat ran down my sides in a sudden gush of warmth. I started to laugh, and the laughter shook me with its wanton witlessness. You looked puzzled, Edyth, then my laughter pleased you, for you too peered closely for the jest, saw it not and joined me, none the less, with a high tittering sound like the cry of some sad bird. When I had done, you also ceased, composed your little face into its old apathy and bent to your bundle, untying the bonds from its lush greenness and spreading it with your feet all round the chamber.

‘Rushes,’ she said. ‘Rushes fair and green.’

Kick, kick. Then, the ridged, bending spine, the hands flying like pale fish in a dark-green river, patting, smoothing, a meticulous procedure. I saw that one of the trampling feet was twice the other’s size; all but one thong of the sandal shoe had been severed to accommodate a clumped malformed mass. Now and then she stopped, peeped back over her bowed shoulder to give me the quarter of a smile. When she came to the corner where the wet seeped through, she thrust two fingers into her mouth and stood, considering deeply. She looked back at me.