The Miracle at St. Bruno's (25 page)

“There is still much that is good in life.”

“I see little at this time.”

“Well, it is a dark period through which we are passing. But it won’t always be so. The world we knew has gone. It is for us to build a new life.”

“You may well do that with your new farm. You will go away from here and forget us.”

“I shall never forget you. But my surroundings will be different. The problems of the present will, I know, impose themselves on the past.”

“It is easy for you.”

“I loved your father, Damask, and I love you.”

“I was his daughter. Do you think your love can be compared with mine?”

“Still it was love.”

I took his hand and pressed it. “I shall never forget what you risked to bring his head to me,” I said. The tears were on my cheeks and he drew me to him and kissed them gently.

Suddenly I knew that if I could not find the great ecstasy I had dreamed of with Rupert, at least I could find comfort. I could leave this house. It would mean a great deal to me not to see my mother and Simon Caseman together. To leave this house…I had never thought to do it. I had dreamed of myself growing old in it, my children playing in these gardens as I had done; my father delighting in his grandchildren. That dream could never become a reality. But Rupert was offering me consolation. He was telling me that although I should mourn my father forever, I could start to make a new life for myself.

He said: “The farm is not far from here. Between these lands and Remus’s estate—not far from Hampton. I shall be between you and Kate. We can meet often…if you decided not to come altogether. But I hope you will because I know, Damask, that I can look after you.”

“Rupert,” I answered emotionally, “you are a good man. How I wish that I could love you as a husband should be loved.”

“It would come, Damask. In time it would come.”

I shook my head. “And if it did not? You would be cheated, Rupert.”

“You could never cheat anyone.”

“Perhaps you do not know me, for I sometimes feel I do not know myself. To leave here….Oh, Rupert, I had never thought of it. I visit my father’s grave…frequently.”

“I know and I do not care for you to be wandering about the Abbey grounds alone.”

“You fear that there is some evil lurking there?”

“I fear desperate men might be lurking there.”

“Monks perhaps returning to their old home, or the spirits of murdered men?”

“I fear for you to go there. Damask, we could remove your father’s remains. We could take them with us. We could make a sanctuary in our new home and there you could have that precious box with you always. You could make a shrine to his memory.”

“Oh, Rupert,” I cried, “I think you understand me as no one ever did…since Father.”

“Then come with me, Damask. Come away from this house which is no longer your home, come away from a situation which has become distasteful to you.”

It seemed that I must. Yet I hesitated. It was not as I had always thought it should be. Was life always to be a compromise? I thought of Kate’s marrying Lord Remus for what he could give her. Should I be doing the same if I married Rupert? Lord Remus gave Kate jewels, riches, a place at Court, and I had despised her for her mercenary motives. But if I married Rupert because he could take me away from a situation which had become intolerable to me was I not in like case?

“I am so unsure,” I said. “I do not know what I should do. Be patient with me, Rupert.”

He pressed my hand gently. I could sense his elation. I knew he would always be patient.

“Think on it,” he said. “You know I would not wish you to do anything which was distasteful to you. Remember too that it was his wish.”

I did remember it and it weighed greatly with me.

And that night I lay in my room and thought that I would marry Rupert, and I was ashamed because at one time I had believed he would have married me for the fortune I could bring him.

Now I was without that fortune and he still wished to marry me. I had misjudged him.

This made me feel very tender toward him.

Yet I could still not make up my mind.

I was sitting in my mother’s walled rose garden thinking about the future when Simon Caseman came in.

He took the seat beside me.

“By my faith,” he said, “you are more beautiful with your hair half grown than you were when it reached past your waist.”

“As I was never very beautiful that need not be a great deal.”

“Your verbal darts ever amuse me.”

“I am pleased you can be so easily amused. It must be a blessing in this drab world.”

“Oh, come, stepdaughter, are you not unduly morbid?”

“Considering what has befallen me this last year, most certainly not.”

“I should like to see you happier.”

“The only thing that could make me happier would be to see my father walk into this garden alive and well, happy and secure from…traitors.”

“We are none of us secure from traitors, Damask. We have to remember that we live on the very edge of a volcano which can erupt and destroy us at any moment. If we are wise we take what we can get and do our best to enjoy it while we can.”

“I see you put your policy into action. You are enjoying what you have taken.”

“Most willingly would I have shared it with you.”

He moved closer to me and I drew away with some alarm.

“Foolish Damask,” he said. “I would have made you mistress of this place.”

“It was what my father intended—that I should in due course come into my own.”

“He would have wished to see you mistress of it, yes. You have been foolish. And one day you will see how foolish. I shall be a very rich man one day, Damask.”

“Do you see your way clear to acquiring more lands?”

He pretended not to see the significance of the question.

He went on as though talking to himself. “The Abbey is going to ruin. It cannot always be so. Imagine what could be done there. The lands are rich. They will not lie idle forever. It will be bestowed on someone who will cultivate it, possibly build a fine mansion. There are enough bricks there to build a castle.”

“Caseman Castle!” I mocked. “It sounds even grander than Caseman Court.”

“You have ideas, Damask. Caseman Castle!”

“And you have ambitions. Not content with a court you must have a castle as well.”

“There is no end to my ambitions, Damask.”

“But they are not always realized—even in your case.”

His eyes smoldered as they looked into mine.

“That can only be decided at the very end,” he said.

I was afraid of him in that moment. I thought: I must get away. It is unsafe here. I will marry Rupert. It is the only way.

Marry for security, for safety, for a hope of forgetting? I was as mercenary as Kate.

“You gained this house through some service in an influential quarter,” I said. “You are doubtless looking around to find means of doing a similar service, the reward of which would be the Abbey and all its lands.”

He looked at me, laughing; but I knew I had put into words the ideas fermenting in his head.

I stood up. “You are a very ambitious man,” I said.

“Ambitious men frequently get what they set their hearts on.”

“No one can ever achieve the impossible,” I retorted over my shoulder as I hurried away.

That night I had a great desire to see my father’s grave. I waited until the household was sleeping, then I crept quietly out of the house. The moon was shining brightly and how beautiful the country looked—vague, mysterious in that cool pale light.

I slipped through the ivy-covered door into the grounds. I sped across the grass and paused for a while to look at the gray walls of the Abbey. Suddenly I was startled by the hoot of an owl; I looked up at the roof—half open now to the sky—and I thought of this historic Abbey’s falling into Simon Caseman’s hands.

I went along to the burial ground and wending my way among the tombstones, I knelt by the grave in which lay my father’s head. The rosemary was flourishing. I took a little sprig of it and slipped it into my gown.

“As if I needed rosemary to remember you, dear Father,” I murmured. And I went on: “Give me courage to live without you. Show me what I must do.”

I looked about me almost expecting to see him materialize beside me, so sure was I that he was close.

It was hard to go on living in the house which now belonged to a man whom some instinct forced me to mistrust, and Kate would have delighted to have me with her. But she would try to find a husband for me, I was sure, and I did not wish for that. If I had wanted a husband I would marry Rupert of whom I was fond and whom I trusted. Then my thoughts went to Bruno as they constantly did, and I wondered afresh whether that confession of Keziah’s had been wrung from her and that she had dared not deny it. I thought of her tied to the bed and that evil man bending over her. Had she screamed words which he put into her mouth? And had the monk supported her story because torture impelled him to? How could one be sure what was truth when people were threatened with unendurable agony until they confessed what their tormentors asked of them? How many men at this moment were being racked in that grim gray fortress along the river? How many were suffering the torture of the thumbscrews, the rack and the scavenger’s daughter, that dread machine of which I had heard, shaped like a woman and covered with iron spikes which as a man was squeezed into an embrace, penetrated his body, puncturing heart and lungs.

The times were cruel. Simon Caseman was right in one way. We should enjoy what we could while we could.

I fancied that it was my father’s spirit which comforted me. And I rose from my knees and left the burial ground filled with that peace and lack of fear which always astonished me on these occasions.

I was on the edge of the burial ground and the Abbey was in sight when I saw the figure of a monk gliding across the grass. Was this the ghost of some departed monk who could not rest and had risen from the grave to haunt the scene of his tragedy?

I stood very still. Strangely enough I was not really frightened. Years ago Kate would invent gruesome tales of ghosts who rose from the tomb to come back to haunt those who had wronged them; and I would lie in my bed trembling with fear. Sometimes I had begged of her not to talk of ghosts when it grew dark—which of course always provoked her to do so. But now I was surprised by the calm within me. I was not so much frightened as curious.

The figure had crossed to the Abbey wall. I expected it to disappear through it but it did no such thing. It pushed open a door and passed into the Abbey.

All was silence. Then I heard the owl again. Something prompted me to cross the grass to go to the door through which the monk had passed. On this impulse I did so; I pushed the door which opened easily. The cold dankness of the Abbey rushed to greet me. I half stepped inside but for some reason which I could not understand my hair seemed to rise up from my head and I was afraid.

I believed in that moment that the special power which protected me in the burial ground and which came from my father’s spirit could not follow me beyond those gray walls.

I had an overwhelming desire to run away. I sped across the grass as fast as I could and let myself out through the ivy-covered door.

The fear left me then. I walked home.

I had corroborated the opinion of the farmer and his wife and those others who said they had seen a figure near the Abbey. So the Abbey was haunted.

My mother was now noticeably larger and happily making preparations for the birth of her child. She decorated the cradle which had been mine and which had been put away for eighteen years. She had polished it and cleaned it and I had seen her rocking it with a faraway look in her eyes as though she was already imagining the baby there.

We heard little news of the Court for we did not have visitors now; Kate did not write. She had never really been a letter writer. It was only when anything was wrong or she wanted something that it would have occurred to her to take up a pen.

I would have written to her but I did not wish to write of Caseman Court. And in any case there was little to say.

The King, it was said, was happy in his marriage and the Queen accompanied him everywhere. She was gay and good-natured and it was said that people only had to ask for a favor and she would be ready to grant it. Moreover she was not one to forget her old friends. She was kindhearted too and did her best to reconcile the King to the little Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, who had been the present Queen’s cousin.

I had no doubt that Kate would have plenty of scandal to relate about Court affairs, but Kate was far away and because the King was at last happy with a wife we were lulled into a sense of security.

There was a reminder of the terrible things that could overtake us when the Countess of Salisbury was executed. She had had no fair trial but she was suspected of being on the side of the rebels in the Northern uprising—at least this was said to be her crime. Her royal blood was doubtless the true reason. As the granddaughter of George Plantagenet, the Duke of Clarence, himself brother of Edward IV and therefore in closer line to the throne than the Tudors whose claim had never been very firm, she had always been considered to be a menace and this pretext to be rid of her was too good to be missed. The old lady—she was nearly seventy years of age—had suffered greatly from the cold of her prison cell and the young Queen, feeling great pity for her, had smuggled in warm clothing that at least she might know that comfort. But nothing could save her. Her royal blood must flow to keep the throne safe for our tyrant King.

I remember well the day she died. It was Maytime. Why did so many have to leave this earth when it was at its most beautiful? She walked out to the block but refused to lay her head on it for, she declared to the watching crowd, she was no traitor and if the headman would have her head he must win it.

We heard she was dragged by her hair to the block and there so butchered that the ax wounded her arms and shoulders several times before her head was struck off.