We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (33 page)

When she was partially assuaged, Dame Johanna leaned forward.

‘What of the court, then, mistress?’ she asked, showing little teeth.

‘’Twas in confusion, when I saw it last,’ I murmured. ‘And many, many—in dire peril.’ Grief, steam, candlelight mingled to choke me.

The Prioress looked at Juliana, who was eating as if it were her last meal.

‘So ’tis true, then,’ she said. ‘Her Grace’s henchman told me that Warwick was arming, but he’s a great liar, that man.’

‘While our sister here speaks only gospel,’ said the Sub-Prioress spitefully. Juliana did not like me, that was plain from her glance, yet I did not fear her. It was Bridget, or rather, something in her, that I feared. The Prioress looked hard at me.

‘Yea, I think she does,’ she said slowly. ‘What of Neville of York?’

‘The Archbishop is at London.’

She smiled. ‘That is well,’ she mused. ‘With his mind full of war, he will scarcely have time for us, I think.’

I could not follow her drift. I watched her downward smirk, her toying with a piece of bread; and the rainbow-changes on Juliana’s face, primness, sourness, unwilling gratification, all writ plain. But the next probing question chilled my blood.

‘How does her Grace of Bedford? I heard talk of witchcraft—some vile and slanderous charge? How say you to this?’

‘There was an arraignment,’ I whispered, bone-cold.

‘Foulness,’ said the Prioress. ‘Is my lady safe?’

I stared at my load of cooling partridge. ‘She is in Sanctuary,’ I said dully. But Johanna was not listening. Johanna, the Woodville-lover; her greedy eyes were fixed on the pantry door.

‘The sturgeon!’ she cried, as the odorous darkness yielded Edyth. Serve it not too hot, Edyth. Go carefully, with your cumbrous foot.

She had almost reached the dais when an ankle turned beneath her. Truth to tell, it looked well-nigh deliberate, but there was naught planned in the hurting way she fell, clutching at the hanging damask to save herself, letting go of the vast silver salver so that the succulent fish shot on to the rushes, spewing gravy and lemon-slices, all broken and steaming on the ground. The dog leaped yapping from its chair and rushed upon the wreckage, burnt its mouth, screamed and flew back under the table.

Johanna rose and came unhurriedly down the steps, and in one lightning moment I knew that she willingly sacrificed her meal to sate another lust. I looked once only as her open hand descended across Edyth’s face with the sound of a whiplash. I sat head in hands, fighting the rising demon in my belly, while the noise cracked out again and again. After what seemed a lapse in time, there was silence, and looking up with one eye to see if she had killed Edyth, I saw the Prioress, refreshed, back in her chair, drinking wine. There was no sign of her victim.

‘Now, mistress,’ she said to me. And of a sudden, I was wondrous calm. I was alive. In a world of strife and violence, I was alive. I sat erect. Dame Bridget was no longer there and I was calm.

‘You will be professed, of course,’ Johanna said, not looking at me.

‘I will not,’ I said out of my calmness.

This startled her and her eyes shot round. She drank more wine. I watched the movement of her thoughts.

‘I understood that you would be professed,’ she said again, and her fractional hesitancy gave me courage.

‘Her Grace of Bedford laid no injunction on that score,’ I said, gambling as hard as I had ever done.

She looked away swiftly. ‘Nay, neither did she.’

‘I brought a good corrody,’ I said boldly. All the money, in fact, that my father had entrusted to Sir Richard Woodville for my marriage or for my profession. I was not married. I would not be professed. Witless little fool that I was, I was learning. By sheer will I dragged her eyes back to mine and hung upon them, while she pondered, flickered, and shrugged suddenly.

‘’Tis naught to me,’ she finally said, and drank. And I drank, holding her over the cup with my eyes, and before I drank I pledged my sweet heart in sweet wine, for a safe passage of arms, a fair meal and a soft bed, and I was truly a little mad, that night.

They were waiting for me, at the foot of the curving frater stair. Dame Joan, weighed by a flagon of strong ale, gibbering with combined wrath and excitement, was anxious to know my thoughts on her skill as cellaress, her training of the cook. She strutted in the meagre warmth of a tallow dip; the others were only shadows, but their breathing rose hissing from the dark cloister.

‘Do not punish Edyth,’ I heard myself say. ‘She was cruelly beaten.’

Joan sucked in her cheeks. ‘
Pardieu
,
parbleu
!’ she exploded, then began to quiver, round and bird-like in mirth. ‘So Madame was cheated of her favourite dish! I trow our lady’s face was worth a mark, an she marked Edyth’s face, so I’ll reward the child.’ She jutted upon me in laughter.

‘You did not eat,’ she said accusingly.

‘’Twas all too splendid for my stomach,’ I replied.

‘Courtly manners!’ she said with approval.

‘The court!’ came whispered from the darkness. Yea, the court, the court. All around rose a hushed sea of pleading. ‘Tell us of the court.’

‘
I
was at court,’ quavered an old voice. ‘When Harry reigned, crazed as an owl. The Frenchwoman turned him, men said, with her bedsport... marry, he was holy.’

‘By St Loy!’ Joan cried suddenly. ‘We’ll pleasure ourselves, now. Will you take ale, lady, in the misericord?’

Sweeping with mockery, she led me, while the following shadows loomed behind, down a low passage with a dim, fanned roof and gilded bosses.

‘A shapely building, this,’ I murmured, looking about.

‘Baw! baw!’ answered Joan. ‘The place is falling about our heads. For all the wool she sells from one hundred sheep, not a groat does Madame spend on its upkeep. Wait you.’ She gripped my arm, riotously. ‘Wait till the next visitation by my lord Bishop’s bailiffs. Then will I settle old scores...’

Around the wall-angle a light guttered suddenly and burned up bright, to the most dreadful sobbing sound, and I thought: Edyth! Yet it was Dame Bridget who came slowly towards us, with tears falling like rain; great round drops dripping over the barbe at her chin, splashing darkly on the darker stuff of her habit. Blind she walked on, blind to us all, and when she had turned the corner, the noise of her sobs lingered on the dark air.

‘Jesu! what ails her?’ I cried.

Joan, turning, made a knowledgeable moue and winked at someone in the dark.

‘Again, so soon,’ she remarked, over my head. ‘They took her but a fortnight past, these fits. I fancy...’

‘Dame, what ails her?’ It was of great importance; I feared the weeping nun so much. Joan threw open the door to the misericord. Light streaked about her mischievous face.

‘’Tis a sickness,’ she said lightly. ‘Madame has a fanciful name for it; she calls it
l’accidie
.’

So we sat, fairly companionably in the misericord, while Joan sucked at bread-soppets in her beer. The ale, warring with the Prioress’s strong wines, set my head to spinning, and the line of black-garbed faces opposite to swinging in my view.

The nuns observed me, incurious, wistful, weary, uninterested. In one corner slept an old woman in secular dress. Tethered to a perch, a jaybird sat quietly, its head beneath its wing.

‘Good bread, eh?’ demanded Joan, waving a great black crust. ‘Dame Gertrude does our baking.’

A wizened little nun, her face crossed and ribboned with lines, half-rose, bowed to me doubtfully. In a voice like a breathy harp, she said, pointing to the bread and ale: ‘Wafers and hypocras.’ A jest at which only she smiled.

‘The King’s Grace takes such, before retiring.’ So spoke the nun who had known the court when Harry Six kept it.

‘Yea,’ I said.

Joan turned sharply on the aged nun. ‘Baw! How can you remember! And you were there only a month, if at all.’

‘Agatha was ever puffed up,’ said Dame Gertrude. Her spiteful little eye crept sideways amid the forest of wrinkles.

‘It was so!’ cried Agatha querulously. ‘’Twas so, is now, ever shall be.’ With surprising vigour, she picked up a roll of bread and threw it, smiting Joan in the chest. ‘And your bread chokes my gullet!’ she added to Dame Gertrude, whose face reddened with fury. The jay awoke, emitting a piercing shriek. A nun with skin pitted and pocked like an orange seized the bird off its perch and began stroking its feathers, calling it her hinny, her dear, in loud raucous tones. The old corrodian slept on, snoring through the din. I got up, sat down again. From above, faintly, then loud, came the plink of lute and the hollow note of tabor. A gay dance tune. As we listened, the door opened and a nun rushed in, harassed, angry, pointing at the ceiling with one hand, snatching up a pitcher with the other.

‘Give me ale, for mercy’s sake!’ she cried. ‘So! Madame sports aloft, while I sit in the gatehouse, starving!’ (Her looks belied this, she was stout as a cask.) ‘Dance, does she? They who dance have the Devil’s bell about their neck! And when he hears them jangle, he says, “Ho, ho, my cow is with me yet!”’

‘Our Sub-Prioress makes merry, too,’ said Dame Joan.

‘Yea, Juliana’s in favour this night,’ said the pock-marked nun, rolling up her eyes. ‘For how long, though?’

‘There’ll soon be strife again,’ muttered Gertrude, emerging from her sulk.

‘More for the reckoning, come my Lord’s visitation,’ said Dame Joan, with a suck and a gloat. ‘Her ways, her airs, her tongue.’

For some reason unknown, the stout nun became incensed.

‘Speaking of tongues,’ she said, glowering. ‘I know others ripe for chastisement. Even from the hostillaria I could hear. Blasphemer!’

‘Who, me?’ cried Joan. ‘In faith, you lie. Or you’re bewitched, or I’m besotted. I’ll feign deafness.’

‘I’m deaf, from your foul oaths,’ pursued the porteress. ‘Day in, day out. By St Jude, by St Anne, by the Holy Book, and Holy Church and by Our Blessed Lord Himself. As for Poor St Loy, you’ve worn his name to a thread. Come the visitation, they’ll cut you a piece of red cloth, shaped like a tongue, to wear beneath your godless chin.’

Joan drummed on the board.

‘By St Loy, you vex me, Dame,’ she cried. ‘Yet I’ll not answer, for I know you lust to fight.’

‘Certes, ask me out,’ said the fat nun grimly. They were like demons. I had never heard women quarrel so before, for such scant cause. Dame Agatha roused herself to observe that the cellaress should have been whipped more as a young maid; in her corner, the snoring parlour-boarder remained the sole element of peace. While Joan, to my surprise, bore insults with equanimity, gums folded round a sucket of bread. It seemed she was not averse to goad, but herself would not be drawn.

‘In faith, I mislike your countenance,’ persisted the stout one. She feinted at Dame Joan with the end of a crusty loaf. Frightened by the sudden movement, the jaybird lunged at the porteress with beak and claws, got tangled in her wimple, broke free screaming and circled the room like a clatter-winged fiend. I rose, unable to bear it, forgetful of my youth, my newness, my grief.

‘My ladies, for the love of God!’

They fell silent and looked at me wonderingly. I think they had forgotten my presence, all in their anger’s joy.

‘Yea, tell of the court,’ said Dame Gertrude, and they arranged themselves like children at lessons, bunched together with eagerness, waiting, and I was anxious again, not knowing how to begin, what to say, for the court, in truth, had been to me a place through which I walked unseeing, deaf and blind to its richness and its music, eyes fixed or searching a face, a name, a smile, senses tuned only to a voice, hands, a look, did he look sad today, or glad today, and did he take his meat with good appetite; was he walking in the pleasaunce—yea, he must be there among the swans and flowers, for the sun shone as it would ever shine, on him, fortunate sun.

Was he alive tonight, in peril this night, was his horse steady under him, was he backed up against a thicket with his men, was there blood upon his sword, blood on his mouth, blood on the Boar, the snowy Boar upon its azure field, and would he, would he think of me, if only fleetingly in a slack moment (if such moments there be)—a maid, there was a maid once—yea, perchance he’d think like that—a maid, who loved him more than life and sharp as death, who carried within her the child of his body—of which he knew naught.

‘...he is truly fair?’ came a voice, leagues distant.

‘Yea, fairer than truth,’ said my own voice, equally far.

‘They say he stands four handbreadths higher than other men—gold-headed; is’t so?’

‘Nay. He’s dark. Blue eyes, almost black, and of low stature.’

They digested this. They must have formed a passing false notion of King Edward. But I went on, no doubt a little foolishly, and as I talked, all my fears renewed themselves. Thus, after weaving a fine saga, like cloth of Arras, of jousts and revelry, I bit off its splendid thread and asked that which I could no longer withhold. I asked them: ‘What of the rebellion?’ Their barbed, dreaming eyes were suddenly keen.

Dame Gertrude said, waspishly: ‘How say you, Dame? What should we know of it?’ And the stout and warlike porteress cried out marry,
she
had never been in London, never in fact further than Middleham, and looked askance as if now she doubted all my words, thought me counterfeit. My own voice, uncaring in hope and dread, asked was Middleham far? She answered it was half a day’s journey years ago, the roads being foul and likely so remained, but as for Middleham Castle being far, why, as the crow flies, nay.

Each time she said the name it speared me like toothache, pain and pleasure in the pain. I had not thought to be so near his joy.

A bell clamoured, wild and dark, erratic in its vigour, arousing the aged dame in a fit of coughing. The nuns got up hurriedly, brushing off crumbs, swilling the dregs of ale.

‘I’ll hear Compline,’ Dame Joan announced. ‘For I could die this night.’

Was there a choice, I wondered? Or had mischief, this child of indiscipline, bred heresy in the women? Yet they went dutifully, folding their wimples tight about bowed heads, fingers clothed by their beads, and, admittedly, Joan did turn to me as we walked, saying with grinning gums: ‘Fear not! I always hear Compline!’