The Christmas Wassail (5 page)

With that, the knight, his face contorted with fury, mounted his horse and moved her about preparatory to riding off along Redcliffe Back to one of the tall, three-storied houses that lined the southern bank of the River Avon and which had so lately become the Marvell family home.

But he found his path blocked by the arrival of authority in the shape of Richard Manifold, followed by his two henchmen, Jack Gload and Peter Littleman.

‘What's going on here?' demanded Richard. ‘I've information that there's a breach of the peace. A couple of ruffians brawling, I was told. Where are they? Let's be having them.'

‘Get out of my way, you dolt!' Sir George exclaimed furiously. ‘There's no breach of the peace. Just my son and grandson having a disagreement, that's all. I suppose honest citizens can have a bit of a turn-up without bringing the law down around their heads.'

Richard Manifold looked startled. He had not immediately perceived that the man on horseback was Sir George and for a moment or two was unsure how to proceed. But he was not easily intimidated and, although he had a natural deference for anyone with a title, he was not prepared to overlook any misdemeanour which contravened the laws laid down in Bristol's Great Red Book.

‘I'm sorry, Sir George,' he said respectfully, yet firmly, ‘but fighting in the city streets is not allowed. You can see for yourself what crowds it attracts. All these fools blocking the king's highway.' He indicated the rest of us with a dramatic sweep of his arm. ‘I'm afraid I'll have to take the culprits into custody, although I'm sure they'll be released on the payment of a fine. Are these the two lads here?'

James Marvell grinned at the other man. ‘Looks like we're due for a spell in the Bridewell cells, Uncle,' he remarked good-naturedly.

‘I won't! I won't!' The younger man seemed appalled at the thought of such an indignity. ‘Mother!' He turned imploringly towards Lady Marvell. ‘Don't let them arrest me.'

Patience Marvell caught at her husband's bridle. ‘George, do something! You can't allow your son to be taken into custody like a common criminal!'

The knight wheeled his horse about with such violence that she was almost thrown to the ground.

‘I wash my hands of the pack of you,' he snarled. ‘If my son and grandson behave like common louts, then they must take the consequences.' He addressed Richard Manifold. ‘Tell the sheriff that I'll be along to bail them out later. Much later!' And with that, he rode off along the wharf without a backward glance.

Richard Manifold, plainly relieved that Sir George had seen reason and bowed to the authority of the law, and with the assistance of Jack Gload and Peter Littleman, marched his two prisoners away, having first permitted them to gather up their hats and cloaks, swords and daggers from where they had left them. Lady Marvell, her stepson and the second woman, who was presumably the stepson's wife, were left staring uncomfortably at one another, suddenly aware of the interested crowd around them. Cyprian Marvell cleared his throat awkwardly.

‘Come, Joanna! We'd better go home and – er – face the storm.' He offered her the support of his right arm, then held out his left to his stepmother. ‘Patience?'

But she was staring after her departed husband, her face contorted with anger.

‘I'll never forgive George for this,' she said. ‘Letting Bart be carted off like a criminal by that officious sergeant and those two horrid, common little men.'

Whilst treasuring up this description of Jack and Pete for use at some future date, I couldn't help feeling a certain admiration for Cyprian Marvell. I knew nothing about the man, or his family if it came to that, apart from what I had seen during the recent unsavoury spectacle, but of them all he seemed the most reasonable. The two women had started hurling invectives at one another again concerning their respective sons – each blamed the other's for the recent brawl – and with the greatest good humour he placed himself between them, admonishing them gently, and urged them in the direction the knight had taken.

As they disappeared from view around a slight bend in the river bank, the crowd began slowly to disperse, suddenly remembering what we were all really there for; the distribution and collection of Yule logs.

‘Well, I did enjoy that,' said a voice in my ear as Nicholas and I descended from our perch.

It was Burl Hodge, grinning all over his round, freckled face.

‘Did you get a good look at Lady Marvell?' I asked. ‘Do you still think she's the same woman we saw last night?'

‘Stake my life on it,' Burl responded cheerfully. ‘Oh, yes! It was the same woman all right.'

‘I don't see how you can be so certain. The light was too dim.'

‘I wasn't three parts drunk like you,' Burl said outrageously, depriving me temporarily of speech. ‘I use my eyes.' He nudged me. ‘Here! If you're on the same errand as me, we'd better line up for our logs before all the best ones get taken. I don't know about your Adela, but my Jenny's given me strict instructions what to look for. And if she don't get what she wants she can be a right Tartar.'

‘Oh, my Adela's reasonable enough,' I answered smugly, but conscious of a sharp look of surprise from Nicholas. ‘All the same, perhaps you're right – we need to be able to pick and choose.'

I set Hercules down on the ground, handed his rope to my stepson with instructions to hang on to it tightly – there were always a number of stray cats along the wharves looking for rats – and pushed my way to the front of the crowd now forming about the dispensing official. A short time later, we were on our way home.

I congratulated myself that I had managed to grab just the right log, not too dry but not too damp either; one which, when lit the day after tomorrow, St Stephen's Day, would slowly burn and smoulder throughout the twelve days of Christmas. Adela should be pleased, I told Nicholas. I had taken a length of rope to tie around the log so that it could be dragged behind us to Small Street, but in the event was forced to carry it, Hercules taking instant exception to my having anything on a lead apart from himself. The weight of it nearly broke my arms and I staggered indoors, letting the log drop on to the hearth in the hall with a thud that shook the painted overmantel.

My wife, daughter and son came running to investigate the crash, while the dog, anticipating trouble, escaped to the kitchen as soon as Nicholas released him. Adela, however, was so delighted with the size and condition of our Yule log that she forbore to mention the flakes of red and green paint that had been shaken loose and lay scattered on the hearthstones. And later, during dinner, when I recounted the scene at Redcliffe Wharf, she was even more forgiving, filling my plate, unasked, with a second large helping of pottage.

‘Sir George must have been mortified,' she murmured. ‘And the two women quarrelling, as well! It'll be the talk of Bristol for weeks.'

I nodded. ‘The only one who came out of the affair with any credit was Cyprian Marvell.'

‘Cyprian! That's a stupid name,' Elizabeth opined scornfully.

‘It's a saint's name,' Adela reproved her.

‘Saint Cyprian,' I added, never one to hide the light of my knowledge under a bushel, ‘was Bishop of Carthage during the third century. A scholar and an orator. As a Christian, he was beheaded on the orders of the Emperor Valerian, which makes him one of the Church's martyrs.'

My daughter was unimpressed. It worried me sometimes – whenever I had the time to think about it – that she had inherited a little of my ambiguous attitude towards religion. Moreover, her maternal grandparents, Margaret Walker and her dead husband, Adam, had dabbled in Lollardism. My former mother-in-law had, at one time, even possessed a Lollard Bible.

Elizabeth said now, in a flat little voice, ‘Being a martyr's silly. You might just as well pretend to agree with people and then go your own way afterwards.'

I could see by the horrified expression on Adela's face that a storm of protest was about to burst around my daughter's head – not to mention my own for being too lax a father in these matters – so I said quickly, ‘Who wants to see the mummers' arrival at the castle this afternoon?'

Immediately four hands shot into the air, including that of the baby, who simply copied his foster siblings' actions. As the other three clamoured and shouted their acquiescence, he gave us all a beaming smile, which made Elizabeth swoop to pick him up and give him a stifling cuddle, which only seemed to make him smile the more.

‘You'll come, too?' I asked my wife.

‘If Luke is to go, I shall have to. I wouldn't trust him with any of you.'

She gave me a little half-smile, indicating that she knew she had, for the present, been outmanoeuvred, but also letting me understand that the subject of my daughter's irreligious attitude had merely been postponed, not forgotten.

‘At what hour are they expected?' she asked.

I shrugged. ‘No one knows. But if we want a good view we'd best be at the castle as soon as we can. There's bound to be a crowd waiting to see them.'

I was right. News of the mummers' arrival for the Christmas season had attracted not only hundreds from within the city itself, but also many from beyond its walls, from the surrounding villages and hamlets. With four children and a dog, and even arriving well before midday, I had my work cut out to force a passage across the barbican bridge and, once in the castle's outer ward, to find a place where we could all see comfortably and without being too badly jostled by the smellier and more scrofulous riff-raff of the city streets. Adela and I shared the burden of Luke's weight between us and Elizabeth, Nicholas and Adam took it in turns to be responsible for Hercules.

While waiting, I took the opportunity to look about me, not having been inside the castle for some little time and, although I knew from general report that it had fallen into a bad state of disrepair, I was nevertheless surprised by how swiftly it had deteriorated since my previous visit. One building, a guardhouse, was practically roofless, while the chimney of yet another – the castle bakery – had tumbled to the ground, leaving merely a hole in the tiles. Loose bricks and stones lay scattered everywhere to trip up the unwary, while huge cracks were opening in the walls of various other outhouses and even in the great keep itself.

I had learned something of its history from Alderman Foster who also lived in Small Street and who, unlike many of the other residents, had never resented my family's presence there. I knew, for instance, that the castle's construction had been started only a year or so after the Conquest under the auspices of Geoffrey de Mowbray, the warlike Bishop of Coutances (and later, for services rendered, of Exeter). The keep, however, with its six-foot-thick walls, had been built at the instigation of Earl Robert of Gloucester, bastard half-brother of the Empress Matilda, with stone brought from his birthplace of Caen, in Normandy. Every tenth stone had been set aside for the glory of God and the building of St James's Priory.

Two kings had lain within its walls. Stephen, fighting his cousin Matilda for the English throne, had been its prisoner for some little time after his capture at the Battle of Lincoln. And, later, the future Henry II, Matilda's son and half-nephew of Robert of Gloucester, had spent much of his boyhood, from the ages of about nine to thirteen, there; carefree, happy years which he acknowledged in later life by the granting of Bristol's first Great Charter, exempting its citizens from certain taxes and tolls. He had married the wealthy heiress and former Queen of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had given him what she had been unable to give Louis VII: four healthy sons. But Henry quarrelled with them all, just as he quarrelled with Thomas Becket, his Archbishop of Canterbury. He was, nevertheless, one of England's greatest kings, the Law Giver, and I liked to think that, as he lay dying at Chinon, surrounded by his enemies, he perhaps took comfort from memories of happy, childhood days in Bristol, fishing in the Rivers Frome and Avon and riding his pony through its cobbled streets or out into the surrounding countryside as far as Clifton and the gorge …

Adela nudged me painfully in the ribs. (She has a very sharp elbow when she likes.) ‘Wake up, Roger! You're daydreaming again. What's more, if I hadn't managed to catch him in time, you would have dropped Luke. And I think the mummers must be coming. I can hear people cheering out in the streets.'

‘Sorry,' I muttered, uncomfortably aware of my failings as a father and husband. I ruffled Luke's curls by way of an apology and was rewarded with a beaming smile and the flash of a new tooth. I did not deserve it.

The shouting and cheering was growing louder as the mummers approached the castle, but I thought the tone of their reception was rather muted. And when, finally, they rattled across the barbican bridge and into the outer ward, I realized why.

This was no King's Troupe which had been hired for our Christmas entertainment. Typically – and indeed what one should have expected knowing the city fathers' obsession with saving money and doing everything on the cheap – it was a company of only five, two of them more than a little advanced in years. But they had made as brave a showing as they could with what they had, coloured ribbons and evergreens decking the first cart, which obviously also served as their stage. The second, smaller cart which rumbled behind was piled with chests of clothes, from which the occasional stray sleeve or leg of hose had escaped, and with rolls of painted canvas – the backdrops to their plays.

In spite of our general disappointment, we all raised a cheer as the carts came to a standstill in our midst. The young man driving the first one clambered from the box seat on to the ‘stage' and raised his arms for silence. He was a tall, slim youth of about nineteen, with a ruddy face, ready smile and a generally pleasing appearance. I guessed that the young woman seated beside him, obviously pregnant, was his wife.