We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (38 page)

Adelysia had said it: ‘Juliana loves and hates; she plans to be on the winning side, come the reckoning.’ I had not seen Adelysia for days. Her stall in choir was empty. Yet once I thought I glimpsed her wandering sadly, a slim dark figure, near the porteress’s lodge. And Bridget was in thrall to one of her fits again, weeping and roaring.

‘I was thinking,’ said Dame Joan craftily, ‘that with God’s help, and a little word from me, my cousin from the Founder House might fill Johanna’s stall. Now, there’s a saint! If she were to eat roast sturgeon, then should we all; were there gems on her finger, ours would not go bare. The Queen is dead! Long live the Queen!’

Her fanaticism frightened me. Kate was coughing. I lost head and temper and slapped Dame Joan hard, thinking instantly: Is this the beginning? She stopped midspeech and looked at me, the turning worm.

‘What ails
you
?’ she demanded.

‘My babe’s sick,’ I said, shaken with rage. ‘Do something, for Jesu’s love.’

She shook her head mazedly. ‘Yes,’ she said, quieter. ‘Edyth, fetch the brown jar from my shelf. And a gallon of well-water. I’ll make an infusion.’

Edyth kissed Katherine tenderly. ‘Stay quiet, honey sweet,’ she said. Only when she spoke to Kate did all the knots in her tongue come loose. Her leg dragging, she went out.

‘Don’t you want the Prioress shamed?’ Joan asked curiously. ‘She took your dower and misused it, like she did to that old fool Brygge. It’s just that she should be punished.’

‘If that were all...’ I began, and Joan threw back her head, braying.

‘All! By St Loy, let me list her crimes.’ She hooked thumbs into her wimple, aping a lawyer. ‘Madame is guilty of: using the nuns like beasts of toil; simony in its direst form; selling the holy plate and the wool to pay for her own sports; luting and dancing after Compline; letting the house and all its demesne fall into disrepair.’

I was thinking of the rooks and their parliament. Black and ugly, waddling towards the lone infidel, a vast, vengeful crowd, the one against many. Yet Johanna was a Woodville lover. Bless them that curse you.

Joan was still recounting the Prioress’s shortcomings: ‘Not setting a good example to her sisters; neglecting to go to Confession; ill-temper—’

‘Ill-temper!’ I cried. ‘Why, you have the illest temper of all!’

She ceased, and glared at me. Her eye rolled red.

‘Would you then be her advocate?’ she asked with menace. At that moment the door opened and Edyth came back. Joan pointed, crying: ‘You saw her strike that child! Can you love her, after that?’

And I was about to say, Nay, a thousand times, Joan, when I saw Edyth’s face. She could go no paler, but her eyes were sunken as if she had sustained an hundred fresh blows.

‘Where’s the water?’ Joan asked.

Edyth’s lips trembled on a hoarse sound.

‘The well...’ Her words dragged out. ‘I saw. Drowning. Deep.’

So at last, Bridget has made an end, I thought, as we hurried across the cloister-garth. And as she seemed to lust for death and was so unhappy, I was glad.

But I was not glad a moment later, when James Mustarde, who had brought hooks and a rope, leaned with his lantern over the well’s black mouth, or when the swinging light picked out a shape that bobbed beneath the slime. Slime clung to the face, a trail of weed made blind the staring eyes, and one hand, lapped like a lily by the water, clung on the crucifix at its breast.

What’s that on her cross?’ asked James Mustarde, fishing brutally with his hooks.

Even the depths could not darken the flaming glory of a wisp of hair twined shockingly around the dead Christ.

Ah, Adelysia, Adelysia. Was it
l’accidie
that ruined you, or was it love?

‘Sweet mistress,’ said Patch rapturously. ‘Sweet mistress. I never knew you were to buy a corrody.’

Because for several moments I could not own him anything but a ghost, I held the guttering dip high over my head so that its light filled the upper air and ringed him round. Demons love only the darkness.

He did not vanish; he was real. Fog filmed his cloak and dew shone in the creases of his cheeks. A rude diamond sat on the end of his nose. He looked hearty and roguish and robust as ever, and he was glad to see me. Round a waist grown mayhap a trifle stouter he wore a broad leather belt in which was tucked his knife and his jester’s bauble, the one with the full-moon face, the same, I vow, with which he had tormented the lords at court. He took my hand and held it tight in broad calloused palm. I had held my hand out for his once, and he not there to take it, but another, and three years fled away...

Take my hand, and say you have not forgotten!

And turn your face about, sweet, silly, shivering country maid, and see what God has sent you under cover of a song. A royal Duke, no less!

I wondered instantly whether he knew. Gossip was his second trade. Worse than a woman for whispering tales, he was the sort that kings employ. Sow the seed where it can fruit the most. Out of the past he came; I loved and hated him. I let my hand lie still in his. I remembered a bad moment, a moment that could have been direst humiliation for my lord, and how Patch had averted it, merely by handing him a cup of wine. My thanks for that, Patch. I began to jest with him, my heart warming a little. He would make a fine monk, I said, or some such heathen banter, I can’t recall.

We talked first of the Prioress, and I was moved by poor Adelysia’s death to make some gibe about her clothes, for in a more disciplined house Adelysia might have lived happy, grown old and saintly and attained Paradise; had Johanna spent less time at board and hawk and lute, that is. They had not let Adelysia lie within the cloister. James Mustarde had buried her, and worse, had sworn he had seen her walking through the rowans one night since, when he was feeding the swine, so that none now went near that place, save I. It was sad, among the shady rowans, but I was not afraid of poor sweet Adelysia, and I made the Intercession at that shallow grave, little dreaming, as I shaped my tools of prayer, that I would use them to cut a far more bitter grief.

I told Patch none of this. He would not have got my drift. I spoke only of apostasy, and love, and my changing colour may have shown kinship with Adelysia’s trial. Either that, or Patch was acute beyond my understanding. He began at once to speak fully of the court, all that I could ask no stranger, and I did not even need to probe him. I heard the story of their exile. I knew that Warwick was dead, slain outside London, at the place called Barnet, where King Edward sought the aid of a White Witch, Friar Bungay, who conjured fog to blind the enemy.

Nobly stern looked Earl Warwick, lying in stately death. Young Dickon (no need for him to tell me this) took it hard. Then he went down to Kent, and, returning, found they had executed Daft King Harry, or that Harry had pined and died from sheer melancholy. Men said he took this harder still. Why did he call him young Dickon? Sheer habit, a nickname, for he was twenty—a man in truth, Constable and Admiral of England, wounded at Barnet—Lord of the North, and dwelling at Middleham. And Patch was his servant, bound to entertain him on the morrow, with song and caper.

I could not say a word. He was again at Middleham, and I ignorant of it till now. He would have passed again along our road, coming up through the Fosse Way and on to York and into Galtres Forest, to Wensleydale, with its harsh cleansing gales and haunted mists, while I was—what? praying, eating, tending Katherine, sleeping, weeping, over Adelysia, or myself—or him.

Ah, holy God!
He
could not have been driven by fog into our cloister, nay, not he, only Patch, who stood there gibbering courtly silliness at me before launching into yet another tale.

And a fanciful one indeed, all about cookshops, and a fire, with himself playing the hero’s part, and Lady Anne Neville, she that was Princess of Wales, greasy as a penny pie and nicely restored into the arms of her loving cousin, Sir Richard of Gloucester, the same. I wondered if Patch heard my heart thumping in the quiet room. If he did, it was not apparent.

Edyth came timidly to listen, and I sent her away. Now Patch brought in George of Clarence, laughing so much over some private victory that some of his words were lost. And how George forbade the match. What match? Why, Richard to Anne, of course.

Though I knew it to be, on my part, arrant foolishness, for I had always known he must marry somebody, this did not make it any less a mortal blow. I stood in front of Patch, while he shook his bauble, parading it up and down his arm to demonstrate how George addressed the Bench. ‘He—shall—not—have—her!’ he shouted, while I stood there alive, but dying, all the blood in my heart draining away and my spirit flickering up and down, like the rushlight. Had he tried to be cruel, he could not have laboured to greater effect, for even then he gave me a reprieve, led me to think that George had utterly, irrevocably forbidden the marriage, so that I, like one in the last moments before the axe falls, half in death, half in life, seized parchment and pen.

‘Will you bear a letter?’

Patch was for Middleham, to his service. I would have changed places with Patch, envying not only his destiny but his light, unloving heart. Patch would see him tomorrow, could pass my letter into his hands. Patch had been sent by heaven. He watched me write; I turned the roll away from his eyes.

And I knew not how to begin, for the usual greeting—Right Worshipful and well beloved—used by all, meant naught, even if I wrote it in my blood. So after thinking, I began ‘Your Grace’, for he was indeed gracious, and lovely beyond belief, and I wrote it somehow, telling him of Katherine. Even now, I wonder, would he have smiled had that letter ever reached him? It was a piteous, wanton, desperate bill.

‘All that I told my lord when last we met is changed. Then, it was meant only with my whole heart. Since then my heart has grown ten thousand times. Today the bell struck nine: I thought of him. It struck again, nine times, my thoughts had never left him, and a day was gone. This, then, the pattern of my days.’

The saints whose blessing I invoked upon him filled half of the page. Without planning it, I ended with St Jude, the patron of lost causes. Only now do I know that this was hindsight.

Patch was a skilled executioner. He watched me roll and seal the letter, and then he let fall the axe. My voice was marvellously gay as I replied: ‘So they were married after all,’ while part of me rolled bloody in the dust. It was only when he went onto tell me, casual as ever, that the Duchess of Bedford was dead, and letting me think they had burned her for necromancy, that dreadful fears overcame me: I wept and cried aloud. A good torturer, Patch; again, in his next breath, she had died in her bed. I saw his shocked eyes as I raved of love-sorcery; then, before him, I burned the letter. Jude’s name was the last to go.

I kissed him when we parted; he was for Middleham, and the Duke of Gloucester. There was a Duchess of Gloucester too, so I kissed Patch farewell, nevermore to meet. That was the sum of it, a little like Joan’s counterfeit household book; plain and black on the face, yet rife with hidden reason. I could never go to Middleham.

Not for hours did I see the one blessing in Patch’s dreadful visit. The Duchess of Bedford was dead. My chains were off.

I did not lie down all that night, but stood at the window. Just before Matins, the heavy fog that had lain on us for days lifted, and I strained my sight through the grim grey arch, trying to push back the long distance to where he lay. I saw only dark trees, their branches raised like weapons against the sullen moor. Then arose one of the sudden sharp winds peculiar to those parts. There was a verse that I had to remember, from the foolish song that kept me sane.

Though in the wood I understood

Ye had a paramour,

All this may nought remove my thought,

But that I will be your.

And she shall find me soft and kind

And courteous every hour;

Glad to fulfil all that she will

Command me, to my power:

For had ye, lo, an hundred mo’,

Yet would I be that one:

For in my mind, of all mankind

I love but you alone.

I listened vainly for his voice in the wind’s howling. The curlew’s shriek blew back my cry, and the night-owl, bird of heresy, joined in our lament.