King's Fool (3 page)

“You will need a new gown for Christmas, Madam.”

“Some of that new scarlet brocade I should like, all shot with gold threads. Master Purdy said when he was last here from Norwich that he could get me some from Florence—”

“And pins—”

“And a new basting spoon.”

“And shoes for us maids.”

“Yes, yes, I will buy you some. And we must not forget some strong wooden shoes for old Hodge when he has to go out in the snow.”

“You’re sure you’ve written down milady’s dress length, young fellow?” demanded Emotte.

“Scarlet and gold for Christmas,” repeated my lady, with a lilt in her voice.

The hour sped by and we were scarcely finished before the Master of the House came striding in through the open door, cloaked for riding, and briskly impatient. “Well, my sweeting, what commissions have you for me?” he asked. “I cannot wait long. They are bringing the horses round now.”

“Thanks to my new clerk we have finished in time for once,” said Mistress Joanna, with a prodigious sigh of relief. “Give the list to your master, Will.”

She might just as easily have handed it to him herself since it lay before her on the table, but she chose that moment to sink down on a chest of bed linen with a dramatic gesture of exhaustion so that the neat sheet of words and figures, as I handed it, seemed to be particularly of my own making. A satisfaction which that curmudgeon Jordan had never permitted me.

Master Fermor stood reading it through. “Six score hogshead of wine at eightpence a gallon. Do we keep the King’s bodyguard?” he grumbled, half humorously, as breadwinners will the world over. “Ah, well, I will see what I can do.” He folded the list and thrust it into the velvet travelling wallet which I had so much admired when I had first seen him in Shropshire, and turned to me with an approving grin. “Very well set out, young man,” he said. “I can see that I shall have to take you with me next time I go abroad on business.”

I stood tingling with pleasure while he bade farewell to his daughter and to Emotte, and almost before the door closed behind him Mistress Joanna was kneeling on the window-seat with her head thrust out in all the blustering rain and wind, waving to him as he mounted outside in the courtyard. “Be sure that you sleep in a well-aired bed tonight,” she called, much as her mother must have done, as his little cavalcade began to clatter off across the wet and slippery stones. “And I pray you do not forget my dress length.”

By the time she turned back into the room Emotte had hurried after the cook for some last-minute conference and, my little lady’s thoughts being still with the departing travellers, she seemed surprised to find me still waiting there.

“I stayed to thank you,” I said. “You called me in purposely—out of kindness—and then let me hand it to him.”

“But see how you helped us!” she protested laughingly, tucking a rain-glistening curl back beneath her demure headdress. “It was but a small thing to do,” she added more seriously. “I hate injustice.”

“If it was a small thing I am hugely grateful,” I said. And this time my voice did not go croaking and squeaking as it still did sometimes through nervousness, but sounded deep and true with a man’s emotion. “And if ever Life should grant me some service which I can render you, I shall remember.”

From that day I felt myself to be truly one of the household. Master Fermor must have left orders that I was to eat in hall. Oh, only at the end of a lower table, of course, between the head carpenter and the falconer’s assistant. But I no longer had need to peer round the screens, roundly cursed by the hurrying servants as they bore in the dishes. From where I sat I could see my lady, every meal time, sitting at the family table beside her father, talking to him or helping to entertain their guests. If I could not hear what she said at least I could watch her lively movements and sometimes catch the bright music of her laughter.

IT WAS THE FOLLOWING spring, in the throes of first love, that I began composing love songs. Mere snatches of song they were, that kept dancing through my brain as lightly as moonlight on swaying branches. But being begot of true emotion, they were not without some small, transient beauty. Although the composing of verse was all the fashion among the gallants at court and in great houses, I should have been laughed at for an affected ninny had my comrades in a plain, commercially minded household overheard me. So each evening when my compulsory archery practice was done, and the other young men were still competing at the butts or dancing to a fiddle in some barn, I would slip away to a deserted corner I had discovered and sit on an old bench beneath that very window of the store-room from which Mistress Joanna had looked out, waving goodbye to her father. It was sheltered on one side by an angle of the kitchen wall and on the other by the high box hedge of the herb garden, and where the land stretched away behind that western wing of the house there was an unimaginably lovely view. So there I would loiter, wallowing in the enjoyable melancholy of youth which a lovely sunset engenders, or, supposing myself to be alone save for sleepy birds, I would strum my lute and give voice to my love-sick vapours.

And it was there that my lady first came to me of her own free will. She must have been walking in the herb garden and heard me.

“You move in grace so far above

Such thoughts as I may dare,

So far beyond my humble love

You smile, all unaware,”

I sang, and it was only when my fingers had thrummed the last yearning chord that I looked down and saw the shadow of her gown against the dipping sun, and realised that she must have been standing there for some time.

“How amazingly sweetly you sing, Will!” she said. She was evidently surprised at hearing so trained a voice in the vicinity of the buttery windows, but mercifully did not ask me who composed the words.

I sprang up, pulling the fustian cap from my head. “My father taught me. He is choir-master at Wenlock Priory,” I told her with pardonable pride.

“So
that
is how you came by your gentle speech and your Latin,”she answered with a smile. “Why do you sit here all alone?”

“I did not know that you—that any of the family—ever walked here,” I apologised in confusion.

“Oh, I was not chiding you. You are free to come here whenever you like. I merely wondered why you prefer this place.”

I pointed to the little river shimmering through the valley and a distant farmstead half gathered into a fold of the darkening hills.“It is so peacefully beautiful in this evening light.”

Perhaps the fact that such an aesthetic consideration should concern me surprised her as much as my singing. She did not answer immediately but seated herself on the bench I had vacated, thoughtfully spreading her skirts around her. “Those are the very words my mother used. She often came here at this time of the day, although
she
had all the rose garden and terrace to choose from.”

I drew nearer, forgetting everything except that we were two young people with some similarity of thought drawing us together.“You loved her very much?” I asked gently.

“Yes.”

“I scarcely remember mine.”

“That is perhaps worse. It must do something to a child, having no memories of what you called a
real
home.”

“It makes one feel—different.”

“Have you no brothers or sisters?”

I shook my head. “At least you have an elder brother,” I said, having frequently heard people speak of the heir, Master John, who was abroad.

“And two married sisters, but I do not often see them. And a young brother with the same name as you who is being brought up in my Uncle William’s household right away in Somerset. The others died.”

“And that day by the chapel I spoke as if you knew nothing of grief!”

We had been talking quietly to match the evening hour and our mood, and she dismissed my former
bêtise
with a shrug. “My brother John will be coming home soon, and everything will be bustle and entertainment. You will have to make music for us sometimes when we have company. But tell me about your life in Shropshire and how you came to be driving our sheep home when you can write clerkly Latin,” she invited.

So I told her about our lovely priory, and the harvest suppers, and imitated our pompous beadle hauling a poacher before the Mayor, and my uncle arguing with Sir James Tyrrell about the boundaries of Frith Common, until she laughed aloud and the sun sank down below the rich fields in a blaze of splendour and we could hear Emotte’s shrill voice calling. “I must go. The dear old dragon is always terrified lest I catch a chill as my mother did,” she said. “But I shall have to ask my father if you can amuse us with some of your crazy mimicry in hall.”

It is easy enough to be amusing when one is happy. Because I was at ease, all the absurd antics with which I had entertained the folk at Wenlock came back to me. Rhyming couplets slipped involuntarily from my tongue, through sheer lightness of spirit. But now, because I was happy, there was no malice in them. Save for the rare occasions when I was stirred to anger and meant to leave my sting, I found that I could mock without giving offence. Almost affectionately I could mimic our beloved Father Thayne torn between making his theological point and watching the hour-glass, or even Master Fermor himself trying to avoid the determined efforts of local ladies who felt that it was high time he married again, and I teased that forbidding woman Emotte until, ceasing to fear her sharp tongue, I found her soft heart. Because people of all degrees love to laugh, I became popular in kitchen, stables or hall. If I heard Mistress Joanna laugh I was well rewarded, but I fed on the applause, too. And sometimes of an evening I was called into my master’s private room to sing my songs, and that often mended my conceit, because some of the French and Italian merchants, cultured by travel, knew far more about music than I. And I noticed how some of the titled gallants from neighbouring manors made languishing eyes at Joanna as they sang, which was something which I, poor loon, was not in a position to do.

I began to long to travel. To speak easily of foreign parts, and wear a modish doublet, as they did. And when I was trusted enough to be sent on some errand into Northampton I spent what time I dared looking covetously at the tailors’ wares.

Was I spoiled at Neston? Given too much liberty? Perhaps. But people have ever been kind to me.

I shall always hold in my memory an evening just before Master John came back from Florence, and was to stay at Neston before going home to his wife in London. All day the women had been in a turmoil of preparation, and as soon as my work for Jordan was done I had been pressed into helping them to unfold and hang the best set of arras for the walls of the guest chamber. When the last heavy length had been stretched and pegged in place, the great four-poster made ready and logs piled high in the fireplace, Emotte, outraged because moths had got at the bed-hangings, had sent me to tell Mistress Joanna that she and one of the maids would be staying to repair them before daylight gave out.

I found my lady in the family room sitting in rare idleness before the fire. “What it is to be the eldest son! A good thing perhaps that he does not come home every week or we should all be prostrate,” she exclaimed, half rueful and half laughing. “Oh, I am tired, Will! Are not you?”

“A little,” I confessed, for it was I who had been up and down the ladder stretching those tapestries from peg to peg because Emotte and her maids had declared that I climbed like a monkey.

“Then stay awhile and sing to me,” invited Mistress Joanna.

“Here?” I faltered, never having been with her alone in this luxurious room before.

“Yes, here,” she decreed. “It is lonely sometimes when my father is busy with his papers, and now Emotte will be darning till her eyes drop out. Sing that one I specially love about the May Queen and the miller’s son. Take my brother’s old lute from the shelf. He has bought himself a new one now.”

I went to the hearth first and carefully shook the wall dust from the plain, clerkly garments which my master had provided for me. Then, fetching the beribboned and ill-used instrument, I squatted cross-legged on a stool beyond the pool of firelight and sang as she bade me. She listened with her head resting against a cushion, and her eyes half closed. So when I ran out of her favourite songs, I went on improvising softly on the strings. I thought I had lulled her to sleep, but when I stopped she roused herself with a sigh. “That was very beautiful. How did I manage to pass the winter evenings before you came, Will Somers?”

Her words filled me with a rush of happiness. From my lowly seat in the shadows I allowed my eyes to devour her loveliness—a dangerous delight which I should have known better than to allow myself. “Your brother will be home tomorrow and then you will not need me,” I said, my voice sharpened by a pang of jealousy.

If she recognised the impertinence of my feelings she ignored it. “You will have to imitate Jordan paying the wages for him. We used to laugh so much when we were all at home together,” she said. As though suddenly rested, she clapped her hands and leaned forward, all childlike eagerness. “We must devise some special entertainment for his homecoming. We ought to be doing it now instead of idling. My father means to invite all our best friends to sup in a few days’ time. Why should we not perform a masque?”

“A masque?” I repeated stupidly. “Like they do at Court, you mean?”“Oh, not so
grand,
of course.”

“But—we have never been there,” I objected. “I do not know the first thing—”

“No, but I do. My brother’s wife has described them to me. She is sister to Lord Vaux, and she has been to Court and saw two masques performed last Christmas, and the little Princess Mary danced in one of them while the King and Queen watched. Maud—my sister-in-law—said it was the loveliest thing she had ever seen. The costumes were unbelievable, and they had a mountain built at one end of the hall to represent Olympus, with real sheep grazing on it.And when the three goddesses all in white samite came dancing down the side of the mountain poor Paris—the shepherd boy, you know—had to choose which one to give the apple to. Juno, the Goddess of Heaven, Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, or Venus, the Goddess of Beauty.”

I sprang up eagerly. “If I had been Paris—” I began, thinking that she had never looked more beautiful. But she was too full of her project to be interested in what I might or might not have done in ancient Greece.

“They performed something about the Virtues and the Vices, too, with all the good people dressed in white and all the bad ones dressed in black. And an ingenious wooden Hell that opened, and a Devil with tail and pitchfork. I don’t think I should like that so much, but we could do Persephone and Pluto, and her poor mother Ceres trying to prevent him from dragging her from Earth down to his Underworld, and then their arranging that she should live half the year in each place. There would have to be girls dressed as Spring, of course, and men as cruel Winter. And plenty of singing and dancing.
You
must make up the songs, Will.”

Her enthusiasm was catching. We both of us were of the temperament to be fired by some crazy idea. And besides wanting to please her I knew, quite suddenly and surely, that this was the sort of thing that I should be better at than clerking. That it would be something which I could take great joy in doing, apart from wanting all the approval and applause. “I doubt not I could make some sort of show with the words and tunes,” I boasted. “But never in my life have I had the chance to learn a proper dance step.”

“But you can
caper
,” she insisted. “You know, Will, how you made everyone in hall nearly choke over their wassail with your absurd capering last Christmas.” I remembered only too well, for had she not worn the new scarlet and gold gown and looked radiant? “And as for the Spirits of Spring,” she went on, “I can devise some measure and ask some of my friends to come and practise it. Something light-hearted and rustic.”

She lifted her skirts above her little ankles and began to try out a kind of morris dance, and her slender body was so full of verve and joyousness that soon she had passed from that to the role of Persephone. “Look! I am flying from the thought of living in the Underworld and crying out to Ceres to plead for me—my hair should be unbound and flying in the wind—and Pluto is chasing me!” she cried breathlessly, pulling off her headdress and throwing convincing glances of terror over her shoulder. “Come, come, Will, don’t stand there like a moonstruck dolt! Be Pluto, and give chase. Caper if you cannot dance.…”

Round and round the room she danced, and I after her, capering and leering like a devil because I had no other conception of how the Lord of the Underworld might have looked. Until, turning, she caught sight of me and missed her own steps for laughing. “Will, Will, you are the realest devil rather than a god!” she cried breathlessly. “I swear I can almost smell the brimstone.” She held her nose, and realistically, with raised arms and clawing fingers, I made a fantastic grab at her and caught her so that she shrieked in feigned, delighted terror. Breathless, laughing, she leaned against me. And I held her. Unplanned, frolic turned to passion. For a brief mad moment torn out of the sanity of time I held her warm, human fragrance in my arms, with her tumbled, golden hair against my cheek. God knows I tried to remember my place, to be respectful, not to let her feel how crazed I was at the touch of her. I believe that her innocent unawareness was not so much as singed by the brimstone. It was I who was burned. Burned to the realisation of manhood, to the depth of my being and for all time. Yet I shall ever draw self-respect from the fact that I had made myself release her before the door opened and my master came in.