King's Fool (2 page)

It was usual enough for lads of sixteen or so who were not destined to help in the forge or follow the plough to be placed in some gentleman’s household. I know now that my father acted wisely in taking the sudden chance, and for me it proved a gateway to the world. To a world of loves and cruelties and ambitions beyond my adolescent understanding, to rare experiences which could not fail to teach even a fool some sort of wisdom, and to success in a guise which neither he nor I nor any of the good people of Wenlock could possibly have foreseen.

HELPING TO DRIVE SHEEP across two counties tried my strength to the uttermost, as my inexpert efforts must have tried even old Hodge’s patience. Mercifully the spring sun shone and the ruts in the road were not too full of water. And weary as I was I felt keenly interested in the journey, never having been so far from home before. I marvelled at the pink and white froth of fruit blossom in the Worcestershire orchards, and stared at the stateliness of Warwick Castle dominating the town through which we dodged laden carts and pack-horses.Even when trudging in a cloud of dust behind an incessantly bleating flock I could not help noticing how farms and towns and manors gradually took on a more prosperous appearance as we travelled in the direction of the trading wealth of East Anglia.Hodge and I moved perforce as slowly as our sheep, and once we were in Northamptonshire our master and his bailiff rode ahead, so by the time we arrived the village people of Easton Neston, by Towcester, were on the look out for us, and many of them left their weaving and came running out from neatly timbered cottages to welcome the well-loved old shepherd and to enquire after the lad whose place I had taken. “There be master’s manor at last,” Hodge told me as we turned aside towards the large farm buildings, and looking through the main gateway I saw that delectable house with its stonework and latticed windows bathed in the pink light of sunset.

I remember little of that first evening save that I was treated kindly and given food, and that almost before swallowing the last mouthful I must have thrown myself down thankfully to sleep beside the embers of the stockman’s kitchen fire.

It was a good life, a bustling kind of life, at Neston, lived among people too fully occupied by the numerous branches of their master’s business to have time for petty meannesses. In the employ of a prosperous merchant farmer who is as zealous about the quality of the wheat and wool he trades to Flanders as he is about the rich silks and spices which his ships bring back from Venice there are a dozen ways in which a young man who is not work-shy can make himself useful and get on. Particularly if he has sufficient enthusiasm and imagination to see his own small piece of work as something that will help to enlarge his world. Even counting sheep as they were passed through the shearing dip, which was all I was called upon to do at first, I felt remotely connected with the foreign ports to which the woollen cloth would ultimately go. Later in the summer, making out bills of lading at some quiet desk from which I could see the strings of pack-horses being laden, I could almost hear the wind in the rigging of the ship to whose hold the bales of merchandise would be lowered at some East Anglian port. Coming from a sleepy village, I found each day exciting, and experienced a new sense of elation because almost anything might happen on the morrow.

At first I had been shy and often homesick, and tired out with farm work too heavy for my frame. It was then that Father Thayne, the village priest, was so good to me. More than once he invited me into his house where, finding that I could read Latin, he allowed me to browse among his meagre store of books. I think it must have been he who reminded Jordan that a more clerkly occupation had been promised me. And once, when he must have seen the tears in my eyes, he took me up to the Manor because he had remembered—or invented—a bit of carpentry that was needed to the bracket of the chapel hour-glass. He left me there, and while I was struggling with it—perhaps by his invention, too—a girl of about my own age came in, carrying a bowl of fragrant buds from the rose garden. I guessed that she must be Master Fermor’s only unmarried daughter Joanna whom I had heard my work-mates speak of as “the young mistress.” She paused, surprised at finding me there, so that I saw her that first time standing framed in the archway of the open door with the morning sunlight making a radiance about her head.I thought her more beautiful than any stained-glass angel in the windows of Wenlock Priory, and I think so still.

“Are you the young man my father brought back from Shrop-shire in poor Cob Woodman’s place?” she asked, coming into the cool shadow of the chapel.

I stepped down from the bench I had been standing on and stood before her, hammer in hand and very conscious of my wind-tousled hair and stained farm clothes. “Yes, milady,” I said, not knowing how else to address her.

“Then you must be a long way from home. I trust you are settling into our busy ways?” she said, with an air of responsibility which sat oddly upon her slender youth.

“Everyone has been very kind,” I answered stiffly.

She tilted her golden head a little on one side as though catching some unexpected gentleness in my speech, just as the priest had done. “Father Thayne spoke to me about you yesterday,” she said, regarding me with less conventional concern and more personal interest. “He thought you were homesick. Are you wishing very much that you could leave us and go back there?”

I was sure then that the good man, knowing her to be young and kind, had manoeuvred our meeting, and blessed him for it.And surprised myself by saying vehemently, “I have no real home, and would not leave here for anything!”

She laughed at my unexpected vehemence, her carefully assumed role of chatelaine broken up by merriment. Then, as though suddenly remembering the consecrated place in which we stood, she turned to the small carved statue of our Lady and set down her flowers at its foot. Crossing herself, she knelt in prayer, and, thinking she had forgotten my existence, I laid down my tools for later use and tip-toed to the door so as not to disturb her. Coming out from dimness into the sunny manor courtyard, I almost tripped over her deerhound bitch, and sat down on the chapel steps to fondle the lovely, cream-coloured creature while I waited. To my surprise, when her mistress joined us, she had not forgotten our brief conversation. “What did you mean just now when you said you had no real home?” she asked.

I scrambled to my feet while Blanchette, the hound, gathered up her graceful limbs more leisurely.

I felt the shamed blood burn my face for so angling for her feminine sympathy. “I lied,” I said, almost sullenly. “I have always had a home with good food and books and music, and a father who kept me far better fettled than I deserved. It is only that—none of these benefits seem to make a real home if one has no mother.” Half smiling, I raised my eyes to hers. “But that must sound foolishness to you.”

“To
me
?” The words were full of reproach and pained surprise; and suddenly I remembered Jordan telling me the very first evening I arrived that Master Fermor was but recently widowed, and how the stockman’s wife had complained that the maidservants were growing pert and out-of-hand because there was no chatelaine. No one but Mistress Joanna and a spinster relative who had always lived with them. But I must have been too sleepy to take in what they said. “Forgive me,” I stammered foolishly. “I have thought of you only as the daughter of a fine house.…”

“And do you imagine that griefs are not felt in fine houses?” she asked angrily. She had been trying to take her mother’s place, to show a kindly interest in her father’s servants, and I had behaved like a clumsy, heartless dolt. I had thrown away the comfort of her sweet kindness which Father Thayne had wished for me. What mattered far more, I must have hurt her. But before I slunk away she turned and laid a hand, light as a petal, on my bare brown arm. “Do not be unhappy,” she said softly. “I know what it is to be lonely. I offered a prayer for you just now, to our Lady.”

She had prayed for me, though she did not even know my name. After that there was no more homesickness. Lying in the attic which I now shared with some of the house servants, long after their bawdy gossip had turned into healthy snores, I felt the cool touch of her fingers on my flesh. During the day-time I watched for a glimpse of her, walking on the terrace or riding out of the gates, and instead of finishing up my food with the farm-workers in the great kitchen I would hover by the opening of the serving screens to catch a glimpse of her at board. Because she had seemed to care I felt myself bound to Neston Manor and challenged to do well in her father’s service.I often worked on by candle-light at dull account books as if on me alone, an insignificant clerk, depended the weal of the Fermor family, even discovering a fault or two in my dishonest predecessor’s untidy reckoning. Although Jordan grudged me the intimacy of estate affairs which such work entailed, he was no scholar himself, and had the good sense to realise that by relying on me more and more he was left freer for the over-seeing of more important business. When our master came home from a visit to his other property in East Anglia I secretly hoped that he would commend me, but beyond a kindly word in passing and an enquiry as to whether Jordan found me satisfactory he took no particular notice of me. And, as I have often confessed to Father Thayne, I am one of those miserable sinners who hunger to be noticed. I need to bolster up my inadequacy with applause, as stronger men need breath.

Although I was now living in the Manor itself it was, quite naturally, the bailiff who took the books to his master’s room and the bailiff who discussed profits and prices, and it was not long before I suspected that he must have passed off all those hardly-laboured- over columns of figures as his own. But, fume as I might, I dared say nothing.

Always careful for others, Mistress Joanna must have sensed my depression. “Is my father pleased with you?” she asked, one sunny morning, as I forestalled her groom at the mounting block to hold her stirrup.

“How should I know when he has scarcely spoken to me since he employed me?” I answered ungraciously, without raising my head.

“If you employed as many people as he does or had as many important concerns on your mind you might understand,” she said sharply, and beckoning to her tardy groom she wheeled her mare so that the mud from her fresh heels splashed me in the face.

The well-merited rebuke kept me in gloom all morning but next day I learned from Jordan that a ship was in from Venice bringing some of our merchandise and Master Fermor was off to Norwich almost immediately. And scarcely had I sat down to my work next morning before Mistress Emotte, the stern, middle-aged aunt who had been nurse to all the Fermor children and who was now in some sort housekeeper, poked her horse-like face in at the window where we worked. “Master Jordan,” she called, “the young mistress wants you to spare her that new young clerk who works for you. She has all the household lists to make out for her father’s ordering while in Norwich, and as usual all laid on inexperienced young shoulders on the spur of the moment.”

“You mean young Somers here?” temporised Jordan, loath to let me go on a busy morning.

The woman’s hawk eyes swivelled round upon me, obviously disapproving of what they saw. “I have no notion what his name is,” she said tartly, “nor what sort of use he is likely to be to her. But my mistress has taken the fancy to employ him.”

So I gathered up pen and paper and followed the gaunt, straight-backed old lady to a kind of store-room between the buttery and the kitchen. Sun shone through a small, open casement and outside in the herb garden thrushes were singing, and there was Mistress Joanna, looking very young and rather flushed and harassed, with an assortment of food-stuffs laid out on a great table before her and the head cook at her side. “Scarcely enough honey to last the winter, do you think, Diggory?” she was saying, in business-like tones ridiculously like her father’s. “We had better order some of that sugar from one of the Italian merchants. How much do you use in a week?”

“Brown sugar for the wassail bowl at Christmas,” Mistress Emotte reminded her.

They began earnestly discussing first this commodity and then that, and Mistress Joanna waved a hand in my direction without looking round. “Write down the quantities as I say them,” she directed. “And when you have a moment count those jars of mulberry preserve on that shelf.”

I had thought her to be lily-handed, never realising the responsibilities that the chatelaine of a large manor has to shoulder. A household of twenty or so to be fed, not counting the farmhands, the visitors, the merchants and their clerks who came on business, our own pack-horse drivers, the grooms and the village poor. And the unspeakable, inhospitable shame of running out of anything not grown on the estate which could not be replenished without sending to Northampton, or Norwich perhaps, or even London.

“Some more of those spices with which the Master likes me to dress his meat,” Diggory was suggesting.

“Pepper, cinnamon, and ginger root for a good caudle if anyone should fall sick,” enumerated Mistress Joanna.

“Dates, and those oranges that you love, Madam—”

“We can get all the tallow candles we need from the chandler here,” decided Mistress Joanna, peering into a deep cupboard. “But Father Thayne was saying we shall soon need some tall wax ones for the altar. Write down two score, Will. And now for the cellar.Where is Simon? How much red wine do we need, Simon? I hear there will be a ship in from Bordeaux—”

Two of the maidservants were called in to go hastily through boxes where silks and needles were kept, and so the animated conversation went on while I tried to keep account of the quantities.