Green Darkness (23 page)

“Yes, yes—I’m
sure
now that I’ve heard you speak,” cried Ursula. “You taught me some astrology, you were kind, you also physicked my poor husband, Robert Southwell, knight—and you made me a good-health amulet.”

Julian did vaguely remember, amongst Kenninghall’s myriad guests in those days, a feeble old knight and his alert youngish wife who had pestered him with astrological questions. And though her face and voice were pleasant, he did not understand why she was accosting him, nor did he welcome her indiscreet speech. “I believe you are mistaken,” he began, but Ursula shook her head. She glanced at the hovering gateward whose itch to do his duty showed by a tapping foot and a clutching of his shoulderpike.

“You’ve no place to go, have you?” whispered Ursula. “They’ll not permit you in Cowdray. Come along!”

She put her hand under Julian’s elbow and hustled him past the gateward and out to the mounting blocks. It was then that Julian noticed Celia, who was as startled as he but tagged along with her aunt.

There was a bonfire outside, built by the folk who had gathered around at Cowdray hoping for a glimpse of the King. Sir Anthony’s guard and the King’s own guard were busily keeping order, while the castle servants lugged out tubfuls of broken meats left over from the banquet.

“Here—” said Ursula, shoving Julian to the shadowy side of a large oak. “We can talk freely here.”

“What about, madam—?” He was increasingly suspicious, and her hurryings and bustling added to his humiliation.

“We saw it all, did we not, Celia?” said the lady, putting her arm around the girl whose big wondering eyes he saw fixed on him with sympathy.

“There’ll not be a bed in Midhurst tonight,” went on Ursula, “nor are you one to sleep i’ the dew-wet grass like a rustic. But you
should
stay over, the King may alter his mind on the morrow; lads fly into fits of passion, then forget them. And you cannot trudge back to London—a man of your position. ’Twould be shameful. You’ll not find a horse in Midhurst, either, at any price.”

Julian sighed. He had only a little loose silver in his purse. His hostile dismay lessened, for Ursula spoke the simple truth. He was wearied by the journey, though he had ridden to Cowdray on one of the King’s own horses, commandeered by John Cheke. It was, of course, no longer available. Moreover, he had had neither food nor drink since the eleven o’clock dinner at Horsham. The King’s messenger had set a grueling pace, and though it was dry near Cowdray, most of the lanes they traversed had mire up to the horses’ hocks.

“It is so, Lady,” said Julian, “I know not where to go.”

“You can have my garret at the Spread Eagle,” said Celia suddenly. “I may sleep in your bed here, my Lady Aunt, mayn’t I?”

Celia’s impulsive offer was precisely what Ursula had in mind, but she loved her niece all the better for it.

As for Julian, his heritage and experience instilled renewed suspicion. What had this pair to gain by kindness, though after all an attic room in an inn was hardly commensurate with his hopes, which had envisioned dignified acceptance inside Cowdray castle.

“You are both most courteous,” he said warily. “Madam,” he frowned towards Ursula, “may I ask of you one thing? Will you forbear to speak of our earlier meeting at Kenninghall?—which I do remember. Those years are better effaced. For
both
of us. My former patrons are one of them beheaded, the other still imprisoned in the Tower. You are quite able to see that such a bygone association is perilous in these times.”

“Aye . . .” said Ursula after a moment. “I see. And will respect your wishes. But,” she added in a rush, “I pray you to cast Celia’s horoscope. I feel that I’ve made errors. It is so difficult, I’ve scant aptitude at figuring.”

Julian bowed. “
Nihil esse grate animo honestius,
” he murmured with an ironic intonation.

“Is that Latin, sir?” asked Celia, thereby astonishing Julian who had been talking to himself. He looked at the girl—abundant fair hair, lovely little face, a trifle square in the jaw for an Italian’s taste, very young, and the voice though low and sweet had a rustic tinge.

“It is Latin, my dear,” he said. “Seneca—who has a fit saying for every occasion, and it means, ‘Naught more honorable than a grateful heart,’ and was my answer to your lady aunt’s request.”

“It grows very dark,” said Ursula. “We must hasten, and we dare not take the highway—robbers, beggars . . .” She frowned, then caught sight of a boy in Cowdray livery scuttling by with a lantern. “Simkin!” she called. “Come here!”

The boy came reluctantly, but he knew Lady Southwell as one of Cowdray’s inhabitants, who must therefore be obeyed. He accompanied them with his lantern as they took the short cut to town, across the footbridge over the River Rother, and up St. Ann’s Hill.

When they got to the top, and the crumbling walls, Celia stumbled and made a queer sound, half gasp, half moan.

“Are you hurt?” asked Julian; he could see that she had put her hands to her eyes. “Did you twist your ankle?”

“No,” whispered Celia, choking. This hill top . . . so dark and desolate. She had never been to see Stephen at night, but she had several times crept up in secret to watch the yellow candlelight flickering inside the hut, and sometimes glimpsed his handsome profile bent in prayer. The emptiness now pierced her chest. While she had forgotten him, had been laughing and bantering with the Dacre family, fascinated by the King, absorbed in Master Julian’s predicament, Stephen was shut up like a foul beast in a cage. And from the conversations she had overheard, today she had begun to realize the risks for Stephen. A local squire had jestingly told a tale at dinner about a house priest caught hiding in a cupboard not ten miles from Midhurst. And how the sheriff had spitted “the scurrilous papist knave” through the belly with his sword, and so carried him through the village streets, howling out “Misereres” and convulsing the spectators by his blood-spurting contortions and gurgling screams.

Celia had scarcely listened to the tale, but the force of it struck her now, and she ran down the hill ahead of the others. Her heart had scarcely stopped thumping when they all arrived at the courtyard of the Spread Eagle Inn.

The courtyard, the parlors, the taproom were jammed with roisterers. There was a constant banging of tankards, the roar of lewd songs, the squeal of whistles and recorders and the monotonous shouts of the extra servitors hired for the occasion responding to the bawling of thirsty customers. “Anon,” “Anon, your worship!” “Anon, sir!”—”Ye shall be filled, anon!” All the while the brown ale splashed from the taps into a continuous file of tankards.

It sounded like Bedlam, Julian thought grimly. He had often visited the new hospital for lunatics in London, out of desire to try his own concoction of soothing hellbore on the inmates.

A dull familiar pain had come on in his cheekbone, and a hollow ache in his midriff, both exacerbated by the futility of this venture. But he had no alternative. “Where do I go, maiden?” he said to the girl.

Ursula and Celia were about to guide him through a covered alley to the outside backstairs which gave access to Celia’s garret when there was an outcry and fresh confusion near a parlor door. “Where’s barber?” someone yelled. “Where’s the leech? He’s wanted. Quick!”

A harassed little gentleman also dashed out of the door crying, “A leech! A leech!” in a high frightened way. The gentleman caught sight of Julian, who had drawn back against the wall to escape the jostling but whose long sleeves, lappetted cap, staff and bag were unmistakable.

“Are you a doctor, sir?” cried the little man wringing his hands. “My wife is taken bad, she must be bled.”

Julian nodded distastefully. “I am a physician. What’s amiss?”

“M’wife. Mistress Allen. She’s taken a fit. Pray come, sir!”

Julian tightened his lips but followed the agitated husband into the small parlor where Ursula had first met Celia.

A stout woman lay twitching on the rushes which were fouled with her vomit. Her face was purple as a plum, she made angry gobbling noises. Someone had unhooked her bodice and the heavy breasts sagged out sideways. The landlady was fanning her with a pewter trencher. Julian waved the landlady aside, and felt the patient’s pounding pulse. He pushed up her eyelids and smelled her sour breath.

“Bring me a basin,” he said, and opening his bag extracted a sharp iron lancet. He nicked the woman’s arm vein thinking that he had sunk low indeed. Bloodletting was barber’s work, and the woman was drunk. Those of an obviously choleric humor were prone to fits when they were drunk. “Put a compress of fresh horsepiss on her brow,” he said to the landlady, and to the husband he added, “Get her to bed, no need for concern.”

The little man still looked frightened. He put his hand to his mouth and whispered in Julian’s ear, “’Tis not the plague, sir? God and His Holy Mother save us, we came here through Tunbridge where there was plague.”

“It is
not,
” answered Julian with certainty. He had seen all forms of plague, and knew every symptom, he knew the look of a plague victim whether he were infected with the suppurating black boils, or the sweating sickness he had cured John Cheke of.

“God gi’ ye grace, sir,” said the skinny little man whose eyes watered with gratitude. “Take this, if it be enough!” He held out a half-crown. “Christopher Allen, Esquire, of Ightham Mote in Kent will ever be friend to ye.”

Julian accepted the coin with a nod, and said, “I give you good night, Squire.”

Now that the little drama had ended, the goggling spectators and the landlady all vanished into the boisterous taproom. Ursula and Celia had watched from the doorway, and Julian saw them waiting patiently to show him to his garret room. He felt a quick glow of content, of warmth towards these two women whom he had never set eyes on before this evening. It was a peculiar sensation.

He had known many women; during his youth at the Medici Court he had satisfied his rampant lusts with any willing female. He had enjoyed an infatuation with a contessa, and followed through the requisite procedure of love poems, clandestine fondlings, delicious fears of discovery by a jealous husband. And moved by the example of many of his fellow courtiers and also of Leonardo da Vinci, whom he greatly admired, he had even embarked on a love affair with another young page, a silken-haired lad from Siena.

This affair had been briefly piquant, and then so dull and demanding—the boy wept like a girl, he pleaded and made scenes like a girl, yet was not a girl—that Julian realized now that the decision to become a student at Padua had been partly influenced by a desire to break with the dissolute Florentine life.

The passing years and his increasing pleasure in his profession had lessened carnal desires. Such occasional urges as he had were amply satisfied by a stupid young woman, the plump daughter of the barber whose upper story he rented. Her name was Alison and she was a widow. Last year she had borne a son she said was his. Julian had accordingly made her an allowance, and had permitted the baby to be christened Julian. But lately, since he had known John Cheke, and dormant ambitions were awakened, he had begun to think in terms of the advantageous marriages which he saw constantly taking place in all layers of society. His thoughts had gone no further than this. He had counted on his introduction to the King.

Bitter disappointment, a pain in his face and a bellyache were the only result, yet he now felt for the kindly elder lady and the kindly young girl that surge of grateful warmth. It was like opening a shuttered window onto a sunlit garden—bright-spangled with flowerets amidst the welcoming green, a sensation as sweet as it was inexplicable.

Julian slept well that night on Celia’s lumpy straw pallet. Ursula slept well next to her niece in the great testered bed at Cowdray. The other castle inhabitants, including the King, slept heavily from surfeit and exhaustion, or in the cases of Sir Anthony and Geraldine, from the assurance that their projects were going nicely, hopes were maturing, dangers had been avoided.

Only two were sleepless. Stephen in his noisome cubicle under the south wing and Celia, who loved him and felt his suffering in her own body, yet found her restless mind returning again and again to a scene which had nothing to do with Stephen. A monstrous compulsion reproduced the twitching fat empurpled woman who had lain on the filthy rushes of the Spread Eagle parlor. At the time she had felt only the fascination inspired by any shocking curiosity—like the two-headed babe exhibited at the Midhurst Fair—but in recurrent memory there was a growing fear which reason would not allay.

So uncomfortably fearful did she become that she finally slipped from bed, and kneeling below Ursula’s crucifix said an imploring
Pater Noster
in the melodious Latin which Stephen had taught her.

“
Libera nos a malo,
” she whispered, over and over, until the words lost meaning. Presently she ceased to implore or even to feel.

She sluiced her face in Ursula’s pewter basin, combed her hair, and put on yesterday’s peacock brocade gown. The room was stuffy. She opened the casement window and sniffed at the dawn-bright air. It smelled of damask roses, of gillyflowers and stock from the pleasaunce. It smelled of the distant Downs, a mixture of dewy grasses and sheep dung.

Celia inhaled deeply and glided out of the room. She ran down the little privy stairs and out of a side door into the gardens, intent only upon freedom.

T
HE REMAINDER OF THE
King’s visit to Cowdray held nothing discomfortable. Edward awakened in high spirits, and Sir Anthony provided the amusements which Edward enjoyed.

There was jousting embellished by an allegory—a contest between the champions of “Youth” and “Riches” respectively. Six on each side, thundering up and down the tilting green in their gilded armor, with the plumes waving on their helmets, breaking lances, unhorsing each other, and receiving applause from the King who keenly watched the maneuvers. Once, Edward took a lance himself on the side of “Youth,” and challenged his host. Anthony was so expert at tilting that he managed to break his lance and fall from his saddle without Edward quite knowing how it happened. The boy crowed with glee.