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Authors: Emma Darwin

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BOOK: A Secret Alchemy
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“It’s lovely,” I say, closing it and putting it down on the table.

Instantly Lionel picks it up, pulls open a drawer, and extracts a folded duster. He polishes the book and, holding it in the duster as a doctor might use surgical gloves, rewraps it in its sterile dressing and slips it back into its place. Only then does he say, “So, what do you think of it?”

“It really is a very good example,” I say. “It’s out of my period, of course, but I could tell you who to ask about it, if you wanted to know more.”

“I’m not planning to sell it on, but that would be interesting nonetheless. A collector friend of mine has one, but it’s not in nearly such good condition.” He grins. “Worth much less.”

“My big address book’s in Narrow Street. I’ll look some names up when I get back and phone you. Talking of business, what do we have to do, if this auction’s got to go ahead?”

“Well, it’s not quite as straightforward as you might imagine. The Chantry’s not simply Gareth’s to dispose of.”

“I know I’m on the deeds.”

“Yes, and Izzy too. Under Grandpapa’s will…He had to do it all over again when Kay…But it was done properly.” He smiles. “I remember the grown-ups having a huge conference about it, and Gareth insisting that you had Kay’s full share. I’d been listening at the door, and I looked out of the window and saw you sitting on the swing, and I thought how you’d no idea.”

“Did you mind?” I say, surprising myself. “I suppose you might have got more, if he hadn’t insisted.”

“No, not at all. It was purely intellectual.” He smiles. “Besides, I knew Grandpapa was immortal. I’d just gone to the grammar, so I suppose you were about eight. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we have to sign that we agree to the sale. And what you may not know is that I’ve made my share over to Fergus. A tax-avoidance measure. So as well as Gareth, you, and Izzy, he has to agree. But there’s no problem there: he’s already agreed, in principle. He’s living in York, and I’ve posted him the paperwork. It’s easy, when it’s all in the family.”

“Yes, of course,” I say, and don’t add that once or twice in the last few years I’ve wondered what would have happened if my father hadn’t died; if he’d come home to the Chantry, not to look after me, as my childhood fantasies ran, but to take his place as the oldest son, the first-born, the fine artist and adored older brother. Who knows? God might know, Anthony would say, but we can’t.

But there’s so much before that. Brothers, yes, but uncles too.
There’s something beating in my mind as Lionel tells me about a scrap between the abbey and the town over a car park and a right of way.

England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself;

The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood,

The father rashly slaughter’d his own son,

The son, compell’d, been butcher to the sire.

Yes, it’s the end of
Richard III
, when all in the kingdom—for a Tudor playwright—is set to rights. One of the things I’ll be fighting against is our Shakespeare-shaped vision of the times, though he was so much nearer those times than I am. For him the War of the Cousins was a not-so-distant past that he was refashioning; old men could tell the tales, as Grandpapa told us of his father’s Crimea. If you take the plays as history, then they’re wrong. They lie, if you like, in the cause of a story that grips us still. So how did it look to their grandfathers themselves, not a gripping tale or a propaganda lie, but a life, as it was lived, day after month after year? That’s what I want to know, the history I want to write. My refashioning is another kind of tale, I hope and believe, though my historian’s training will always be the ruler of my storyteller’s desires.

It sounds so dry, so puritanical. So dead. How can I bring them alive, yet have a clear scholarly conscience? How can I make Elizabeth and Anthony breathe? Did the stubble scratch her ankles after the Grafton harvest? How did he live through the months as a prisoner of war in Calais? When Edward seized the throne from Henry, what did they feel? Their mother, Jacquetta, was Henry’s aunt by marriage, Lancastrian to the core, Queen Margaret her great friend, both French noblewomen and new,
bewildered brides in this damp and chilly land. What did Jacquetta feel—do—say—when her husband announced the battle was lost, Henry and Margaret were fugitives, and the family were changing sides? And it
was
a family matter, the business of the kingdom. Family, affinity, allegiance…These things shaped everybody’s life.

I look at Lionel, who’s talking about the distribution of assets, the assignment of income, and the implications for Fergus’s and Fay’s children, if there ever are any. “If Elaine ever has a son, the problem might yet be compounded, or indeed resolved—who knows?” my grandfather wrote, years before Lionel and Izzy were born. What of my father’s allegiance to “nothing but art”? What would that have done to the Solmani Press? Craft is art made possible, I think suddenly: possible and functional. Art that feeds and clothes and houses. Would Kay and Gareth have fought over what should be done, and what could be done? At least now we’re not fighting, but these things still shaped our lives. I came back to England to sign off my long-dead English life, but creeping over me is the thought that they still do shape it.

 

When Lionel escorts me to the station next day, we’re told there’s some trouble on the Saint Albans line. No, I assure him, it’s fine, I’ll just use the alternative bus they’ve arranged—might as well—he’s not to trouble himself. We say good-bye for now, though we’ll talk again soon, because there’s a lot to do still about the auction; he’ll let me know.

And then I clamber onto the Rail Replacement Ser vice bus, with the other grumbling travelers, and crawl down the Great North Road toward London. Once there would have been long strings of packhorses laden with cloth, salt cod, or towering bundles of flax;
messengers and merchants, journeymen and prentices; a chapman with ribbons, trinkets, and ballads for sale; a friar muttering a parable ready for the next market cross; a pilgrim making for Walsingham, and another with his hat cockle-shelled from Compostela; a man-at-arms and a woman with a baby on her back; beef cattle for East Cheap and geese for Poultry; a tinker’s donkey festooned with pots and pans; a beggar wounded—so he says—in the late wars with France, and for a groat he’ll tell of the burning of the witch Joan that was of Arc. This road’s a nerve that joins London to the kingdom; where we sit in the panting, clotted traffic is a synapse, a gateway that must be guarded, or stormed, to the city that must be held, or taken. Once, twice, so many times, all these ordinary, necessary things scattered and hid at the shriek of trumpets and drums, banners slashing through the air, “Owre kynge went forth to Normandy / With grace and myyt of chivalry” sung to the beat of hoofs and marching feet. Only they weren’t going forth to Normandy but to fight their own kin.

Something aches inside my belly and it’s not quite for Adam. These things are further beyond me even than he is; they inhabit me, but I’ve no hope of touching them.

But there are ways of dulling old wounds as well as new ones: human company is one of them, though sleep, work, and alcohol are others, I think. It’s not too late to phone round my English friends and fill some evenings before I leave. I remember learning how to dull wounds in my first term at the university. I had to or I would have gone mad, because the old wound that I thought I was used to, that I’d hoped would skin over now I’d left home, was suddenly reopened, as raw as ever, a new wound indeed. I busied myself in libraries, archives and pubs, with historical societies and debating clubs, digging myself deeper and deeper into my work, badgering
librarians, looking up references, wrestling with sentences, pouncing on ideas, following clues, and knowing always that it was better not to think of the Chantry, not to know where Mark was, not to wonder what he was doing—thinking—touching, whether he was smiling or frowning, or just concentrating absolutely on something, with that tiny whistle between his teeth.

Elysabeth—the 1st yr of the reign of King Edward the Fourth

It was in the cold of the weeks after Candlemas that I heard of
John’s death in the second fight at Saint Albans. It was like hearing of an ill prophecy fulfilled: long dreaded, yet impossible to believe. King Henry had been rescued from the Yorkist rebels, but the Earl of Warwick had escaped with no small part of his army; there would be more battles, not a doubt of it.

And John was dead. The shock gripped my bowels for hours, then the old dread in my heart chilled into fear of what might now befall the boys and me. For a day and a night I could do no more than lie abed. Grief seemed to be a sickness that had overtaken my body. I had never thought to love John as a lady would in a high romance, or in a ballad sung by a minstrel, and I had not. But we had worked together well at Astley, and lived together comfortably, and I had been fond of him as I would be of a friend or a brother. To think that I would no more know his sturdiness, his delight in the boys, the pleasures of his body…

Then on the third day since the news, I arose and set everything at Astley in order. I had decided I would go home to Grafton.

We met with no trouble on the road. Even when we reached Grafton I had little leisure—if you could call it that—to grieve for my husband, so heavy were the times with fear for what was hap
pening in the West Country, in the Welsh Marches, in the north, and what might happen here because of it. Richard, Duke of York, had been killed, but his son Edward, the boy John had spoken of now grown a man with Warwick as his guide and champion, was cried king in his place. More than that, it was difficult to discover. Grafton was on the London road, but such news as we could come by left us little the wiser. One day a master cutler on the road from Oxford would stop by to tell how he had heard that Queen Marguerite had taken London again. The price he must pay for steel was risen, and the price he could get for his goods was fallen because of it. The next day a prioress warming her white hands at our fire, on her pilgrimage to Walsingham, would say that, no, the gates of London were barred against King Henry’s army, and Edward of York proclaimed King within. In Coventry I had heard soldiers from Cornwall and Cumbria speaking their strange Welsh tongue. Now in the Northampton ale-shops you could see Kentish men and dark-faced veterans of the Calais garrison. And most damaging of all to Queen Marguerite’s cause were tales of her Scots army, starving and savage since she could not pay them, ravaging barns and byres and women everywhere they went.

There were more battles. And then came the news of the fight at Towton.

Even by those first reports, it was clear that the slaughter had been like no battle before. My father was thought to have fled north with King Henry and the Queen, and Antony was most certainly dead.

My mother’s grief for the loss of her firstborn son was no less for being silent, or for the news being still uncertain. My own, coming so hard upon the loss of my husband, seemed more than my flesh might bear. And still we could not be sure. It might be a
false report, I told myself, but if it were, would a true one not have come by now?

It was a week before a messenger from my father brought news: he and Antony were both safe at York, and the King and Queen were fled to the Scottish king.

Our joy that Antony lived was the sharper for having thought him lost. But if it had not been one of our own men who told of my father’s going to Edward of York, kneeling first in surrender and then in fealty, and Antony with him, I would not have believed it.

It was my mother who was most troubled by the news. “
Mon Dieu!
I cannot think it to be right. Your father’s ser vice to the King, all for nothing. Are we just to submit to this—this
pirate
Edward, who thinks that because he has defeated the royal army he may do as he chooses with the kingdom? Everything we have worked for, gone,
pouf
! If
we
are not to stay loyal to Lancaster, who is? What would the great Duke John say? Henry was like a son to him for—for want of his own…And
ma pauvre
Marguerite. I wonder how they do, hiding in the north?”

“But, madam, if my father thinks there’s no hope of peace by any other means, how can he do otherwise? And it is not mere piracy. Edward of York’s claim in blood is good. My noble father has not done this lightly, you may be sure.”

“That may be true,” she said, “but I hold still that he ought not to have done it at all.”

Outside in the yard the children were shrieking. The deep cold that had gripped us through Holy Week and Eastertide had lifted, and the sun was out. “But—” I was saying when there was a scramble of feet on the steps, and Dickon came running into the hall.

“Mamma, Mamma! Tom took my—” He caught his toe on a flagstone and fell sprawling.

He did little but bruise his knees. When he had stopped howling, I made him bow to his grandmother and bid her good day. “Now, what’s amiss?”

“Tom took my hobby and—”

“Which Tom?”

“Tom Wydvil, Mamma,” he said, wiping his fat little hand under his nose and then on his skirts, leaving green smears of snot down one flank. “Not my brother.”

“Well, can you not get it back?”

“He bigger than me! He say he my uncle and I can’t have it because we’re poor, and poor people can’t have horses, just walking everywhere. Are we poor, madam?”

“Come here.” I sat in my father’s chair by the fire and pulled him onto my lap. His gown was more darn than stuff, and not even Mal’s careful stitches could make linen new when it was worn thin from neck to hem. “Son, it is true we are not rich, but that’s no business of Tom Wydvil’s, were he three times your uncle.”

“Why we not rich?”

“Because I cannot get Tom’s lands—our Tom, Tom Grey—I cannot get his lands back from Grandmother Ferrars. I write and send messages, and she does not answer, just takes the rents before Adam Marchant can get them as our bailiff. That gold is none of hers; she has her own lands. The Astley manors are Tom’s in law, given to your honored father, rest his soul. If…”

BOOK: A Secret Alchemy
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