We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (43 page)

From the far corner came a terrible stench. A man lay there, so skeletal and still I thought him dead. Suddenly the straw sleeping-pallet heaved, and disgorged a great rat, which ran, with an obscene slithering, into the wall. Bile rose unheralded into my mouth. The Mother closed the door carefully behind us. In the half-dark, the stink grew hotter and more vile. She touched the woman’s hand in greeting, she bent, O God! she actually
kissed
the scabrous face of one of the children before passing on to where the sick man lay.

‘
Domine vobiscum
,’ she said calmly. Emotionless, she stripped the solitary rag from his belly. From it, a growth the size of my own head rose like a strange purple fruit. The Mother laid salve on a cloth, and bent closer. At that moment a convulsion seized the patient; he vomited, while at the same time black blood spumed from his bowels, some of it splattering on the Mother’s habit. The odour of rotting entrails mingled with the already deathly stench in the room.

I had a bit of dried lavender, and thrust it into my nostrils, my own stomach a nauseous knot. The Mother turned and saw me, and there was something in her face that made me wish I had kept still. All she said, however, was:

‘If I had but known of him earlier! As it is, the poison has devoured his bowel. This is tincture of ragwort—the lime it contains is a boon against the canker. And I swear by goose-grass—the wondrous aparine. But both have failed. Nay, my dear,’ as he moaned and twisted. ‘Lie quiet.’

The woman’s turnip face dissolved in grief. ‘Lord, Lord!’ she blubbered. ‘What shall become of our children?’

The smallest had its filthy hand upon my shoe. Running sores ringed its mouth, it stank like plague.

‘I will take your eldest into our House,’ said the Mother, not looking up. She had a basin of rose-water and was sponging the dirt and vomit from the dying face.

‘In charity,’ she added, as the woman broke into a gobbling paean of gratitude. A pale boy of about ten was pushed forward, and stood staring blankly at the Mother.

‘In charity,’ she said again. She was looking at me, very hard. ‘Would it not be kindness to wash that little maid?’

The dirty child still clutched my foot. Its skin was like a toad’s, its head alive.

‘Did the court spoil you so?’ She threw a faggot at a peering rat. It fled into the straw. I leaned halfway to the child. I could not touch it.

‘Think!’ said the Mother, in a terrible voice. ‘If it were Katherine! Think! If it were Christ Jesus!’

I washed the child. I stripped her rags and scoured her with lye soap. The lice, frightened, leaped to find a richer host in me, and set to feasting. And I know now of course that the child was in truth Christ, as are all like her, yet I can also see how easy it is to turn one’s face away, as do many, and I nearly did. By the time I had finished, the Mother was praying silently over the sick man. I therefore sat with the others by the door, and washed the hands and face of the eldest boy, Giles, also, as he was to come with us. And from his incoherent, faltering whispers I knew that here we had another Edyth. Remembering Edyth, I was glad.

Later, I sat opposite the Mother in her private room. The parchment lay blank under my hand for half an hour. I put forward every argument that I knew, but when she spoke of Katherine’s birthright I felt myself weaken. It was not an easy thing to explain, none the less. I could never discourse with a living soul on what I felt, or my fears for his happiness with the Lady Anne. She asked me, did I want Kate to grow up poor and needy? I shuddered, remembering the hovel we had just left. Why should the Lady Anne be vexed, over something that was long finished and done? The parchment cracked sharply in my fingers. For it was far from finished to me. The Mother told me: like her name-Saint, Anne was a full gracious lady. Take John. Of him she was passing fond; she had him to stay with her at Middleham. As he was of Richard’s blood, so was he dear.

And who was John? She told me. Men were men; it had been a long exile. A woman of Flanders, they said. It was worse than hearing of his marriage from Patch. I had never known true jealousy. I welcomed the lice that writhed and itched in my flesh. I would have welcomed a burning brand thrust into my bosom. Anything, to divert this shaming, crippling stroke.

Had they been dancing? Or had he been in one of his sober, melancholy humours? Had she... comforted him right well, with Venus riding high? A Flemish doxy; they used them in the Southwark stews. How readily she ran to him! Yea, she would run to him, lecherous and black-eyed and bold; if she were not a woman of stone, she would run to him. I had no claim, no more than did this Flemish harlot. Yet it was a part of his life in which I had no sharing; there lay the fury, the sadness. Yet, strangest of all, my love renewed, redoubled.

‘He will honour John; he will see him well endowed.’

She dropped the pen between my fingers.

‘Men grow fond of their daughters,’ she said.

So, at last, I wrote to Richard, formally at the Mother’s dictation, and not as I had planned, and it was sealed with both my seal and the convent’s. And I did not dream that night, for I did not sleep.

It was not finished and done for me.

Is there, I wonder, a force which moulds our destiny? Something apart from the God of Truth, or the Lord of Evil, an entity less positive than either power; something which can throw a whim, like a dice, into the unwarned mind, then sit back, waiting? A whim? A hankering, to be assuaged in free will, or, as freely denied, and one which, if acted upon, will often profit least the actor; at least three times in my life it has come upon me. I need not have spoken to Elysande that far-off day, when the wind-blown hawks hung on blue haze. Yet I did, and gained for myself great trouble. I could have rested the night, without Newark: I struggled on, and Edyth died. And there was no real cause for me to go to Walsingham, in the spring of Kate’s fourth year. But go I did, and ran from joy, unknowing.

‘Pilgrimages cost money,’ the Mother said before I left, then closed up her lips tight, as if she wished the words back. For she had forgotten for an instant, as I often did myself, that now I had money, plenty of it, that Kate was dressed in warm murrey edged with miniver, that there were two new short-horns in our meadow, and that the food I took no longer choked me with kindness.

I do not know how she recovered part of my corrody from the Yorkshire House; all I know is that she brought it to me one day with as much of a smile of triumph as her meekness would permit; nor do I know by whose hand she transmitted my letter to Middleham. As always, I was content to suffer her good judgment. But I felt differently when the answer came from Richard. I wanted to know everything: the unseen bearer’s name, the date of carrying, and I could scarcely touch the parchment that had my name, and Kate’s, upon it; the letter, for the most foolish reason, brought grief. It was not written in his beloved, familiar hand. His secretary, Kendall, said the Mother, was a discreet, loyal man. It made no difference. No difference at all.

‘A reward’ the bill concerning me was called. There was unmeant irony in that term. The Mother had no need to tell me this was the usual designation for such favours. But I had loved him, loved him, and that love needed no reward. The grants to Kate were less impersonal. Here, he acknowledged her wholeheartedly; there were even the words ‘gladness’ and ‘affection’ in Kendall’s neat round hand. There was mention of a good marriage for her when the time was full. He wrote that she should stay at Leicester for the nonce. He acclaimed her as his daughter, a Plantagenet, niece of the King himself. He commended her to the Father of all.

And at no place in the letter, turn it this way and that as I would, did he speak of coming to see her. Of course, he would be very busy. Lord of the North. He would be far too busy for that.

I became a little embittered. Was that why I went to Walsingham? I chose Walsingham rather than Canterbury or any of the seventy other shrines in Norfolk because I remembered he had called there once, before he came to me at Fotheringhay. I would kneel where he had knelt. I went like a great lady, on a tall grey mare hired from the best stable in Leicester—dressed in satin lined with squirrel fur and a cloak of fine green wool caught with a silver brooch. The people turned to gawp at me. One of our ancient chaplains acted as my squire, poor Giles my page. He, who had never been more than half a league outside Leicester, hung midway ’twixt fear and excitement, a dribble of saliva running down a chin already rounder through the Mother’s cherishing.

I prayed full heartily at Walsingham. I spoke to Our Lady herself, asking her to intercede for Adelysia, to take her quickly from Purgatory, so that she should be young and fair once more in Paradise; and for Edyth, for whom there would surely be no Purgatory; for my mother, my father and for the cleansing of Giles’s mind. Giles had had a seizing on the road. As my chaplain held him in the hedge-bottom he jerked and foamed with the strength of seven devils. After, he was mild as ever. That did not make the chaplain love this show of heresy any the more.

The roads were flooded with travellers. And a great crowd at Walsingham; many nobles, mingling with the cheapjacks, the minstrels and the myriad, crawling beggars, lacking eyes, limbs, their faces festooned with suppuration, their wavering cries rising over the drone of prayer that wafted from the church. The taverns were bloated with the spring influx of pilgrims, and there was much drunkenness. In all the confusion I found what I wanted. I had longed to repay the Mother in some way for all her love and kindliness; two cows and my board were not enough. In one of the shrines I was shown a phial of the Virgin’s Milk; I touched it, knew it to be truth. Did I imagine the glow that rose from that little gourd? I have seen other lights, other stars. If so, the price of my fancy was not cheap. The chaplain hissed as I counted money out. Had he known I carried so much, he would not have come, for fear of being murdered on the road.

Thus was my state as I returned from Walsingham: lightened by prayer, and almost happy, and longing to see the Mother’s face when she received my gift. She would say little, I knew, but I would be able to mark her secret delight by perchance a movement of her hand; I only wished I could have brought her a vision of the Virgin, but I was plainly unworthy and I would not lie, though I knew that many did. Giles had a fit outside Leicester, at the North Gate, holding us up; I was impatient, I wanted to see Katherine, and I had two cards of French silk for Dame Ursula, my only real extravagance, for her use on the frontal at which she was working. Green satin it was, powdered with silver roses. So it was to Ursula that I first flew, bursting into the room where her work was spread out over her knees and falling on the floor, a swathe of shining green like grass where lovers lie. I ran and kissed her seared old face.

‘Dame, dame, it’s good to see you!’ I cried, as if I had been away for a twelvemonth. ‘And where’s my daughter? And how’s the Mother? Wait till you see what I have for her, something beyond price, yet I priced it,
and
bought it, and...’

She was shaking her bowed head, joy and exasperation mingled, striking a finger on her lips again and again. I laughed out loud, for once wishing that the lax law of the Yorkshire House obtained in Leicester. She could not speak; it was not yet the Hour. Her seamed eyes played and twinkled upon mine, she held both my hands hard in hers. Then I realized that she, too, had something to tell that was well-nigh killing her with its importance. At times I thought that she would burst. She sucked in her lips as if they were two demons to be crushed. She swelled with frustration; she ran up and down the room. She pointed at me, stabbing the air, she drew a figure on the table, the hour when she could speak. She patted the head of an invisible child, and my gladness ran away like a cold stream.

‘Katherine,’ I whispered. Something amiss had come to Kate. ‘Oh God, she’s sick!’ I cried, and Ursula went Nay, Nay, with her head. I caught her hands, hurting her, and she snatched away from me, parodying a horseman, held up three fingers, three times, in honour of the Trinity? Nay, nay, nine horsemen, she pointed to the ceiling—horsemen in Heaven? Speak, Ursula! This cursed waiting for the Hour!

The finger pointed skywards again. High, merciful Saints, how high! ‘You have flown exceeding high, and may God have mercy.’ Mercy on me, indeed, against those ancient words. Horsemen. Of high rank? And her head going yea, yea, wimple all askew, and the satin slithering plop! off the table, marsh-green beneath our feet.

‘Lords, Ursula?’

One finger raised. On it I could see the needle-marks, like holes in a pepper-pot.

‘One lord, Ursula? Here, in Leicester?’

The hands became birds in flight.

‘Gone?’

Yea, yea, yea. Say nay, Ursula, for if my mind has read your head and fingers aright, I cannot bear it. One lord, of high rank, with eight in his train. Who, Ursula? She was sewing frantically, at a little end of cloth. Though she had been at work on the frontal for years, none could sew faster than Ursula when she chose. Silver thread she used, with no heed of the waste. A great lord in truth. The needle caught fire. A silver shape grew, was burnt into the green, into my heart. After a moment or two she held it up, a perfect piece of threadwork, small and snarling and terrible, the emblem of my love and grief, the Boar.

‘Gloucester, my lord of Gloucester.’

And the wimple going yea, yea, and the stabbing finger at my breast, and the clever fingers miming: he was here, and you were not. He looked for you, and you were gone. He came to see you—he saw you not. Ah, how did he look, dumb Ursula? What colour his eyes this day? What colour his thought? Sad-coloured, like mine?