We Speak No Treason Vol 2 (32 page)

‘Wet,’ she said. ‘By my faith, ’tis wet.’

She turned again to survey the rippling damp, and, dumb, I watched for a long moment the workings of her intelligence. Sudden energy seized her. She pulled the thickest sheaf of rushes into the corner, packed them tightly, and bending, so spare, so under-cherished, dammed the flow. Then she rose and hesitatingly came to me and laid a hand upon my arm, the first soft touch I had felt for many days. She began to stroke the silk of my sleeve. Now, I felt anger at myself for having feared her; she was no more than eleven years old, stroking, stroking, face bent, the pallid, bumpy brow close to my chin.

‘’Tis fair, this,’ she murmured, rubbing the stuff between two fingers. Together we stood, our foolish silence broken only by the bird’s claw hand chafing on silk. Our conversation, as it ran its course, was like the sighing of two branches in the wind, separate, alien one to the other.

‘A fine gown had I, once,’ she said.

‘What is this place? Your name?’

‘Madame sold it. Madame sold my gown. She said ’twas not fitting for such as I.’

Is Madame the Prioress? I thought, but did not ask. I would that the shocks came stealthily, on tiptoe one by one, for I felt as a bowstring must feel, drawn to the last aching limit.

‘Are you from York, lady?’ She looked up, frail-faced.

‘Nay, London,’ I said.

‘Sister Adelysia is of York.’ Her eyes studied mine. ‘She wept again today, and would not have my comfort.’

Jesu, what place is this, I thought. This crippled child, midway ’twixt death and life, herself assuaging sorrow. Yet more sorrow?

‘Where’s London?’

‘Child, what ails your foot?’

Raising the hem of her gown, she looked at the misshapen member as if for the first time, and blew a little puffing breath.

‘’Tis larger than its fellow,’ she said, then looked full at me, the dull eyes suddenly lit with remembrance. ‘For when my mother bore me in her womb, she was wont to sleep o’ nights with legs crossed, left over right. So were the evil humours bred, and I lamed.’ She smiled. ‘They cry me idiot to the same purpose. But I am wise, really.’

I twitched my sleeve from her clinging fingers and went to the window. For until this night, I had forgot much, all the wise women’s tales, the ladies’ solar-gossip, the vital knowledge of what one should and should not do. I had not yet thought of myself in this connection. Toads, spiders, serpents. How many had crossed my unseeing path? Even a hare! ah God! to ruin, running, my baby’s mouth with sidelong stare! And the journey north, so rough, so rude, despite my entreaties. Enough to drive the life from this royal child, this cherished thing.

‘I must have medicines,’ I whispered.

I swung round to ask in desperation, if there was a leech, a good infirmaress, who might aid me to avert disaster, and stopped myself. Another moment and I would have betrayed my secret. I had seen the steel of my enemies, and trusted none. I had become a pawn in the privy policy of the court. Friendless and in great peril, mayhap, I was held in unknown hands. Let the child wax weak or strong in silence. For if they knew, might they not, for reasons of their own, do it harm? I felt the cold sweat on my brow, imagining the child being drawn from me by some alchemy before its time. Better to treat myself. I would be my own leech, my own counsellor.

‘Where is the knot-garden?’ I peered anxiously out at the reddening dusk. She understood. She came and pointed towards the far corner of the cloister-garth. I could see only a straggling mass of thistle and dandelion choking a tangle of herbs weakened by their own overgrowth. I spied a fennel, a celandine, a trail of white stitchwort, the bell-flowers of Venus’s navel. There were others, in a desolate moil of crowded life, like an army in confusion. There was the herb of grace, of sorrow, of repentance.

‘I see there’s rue aplenty,’ I murmured. Tall yellow tansy battled with a savage cluster of nettles. The Sun in Splendour, cut down by Warwick’s Ragged Staff? I turned away. I would think no more on that, or die, and the royal child with me. I must guard myself.

‘I’ll bind both my legs to the bedstead of a night,’ I whispered. Edyth did not hear me. She was looking again at her own bewitched foot.

‘But then, Dame Bridget says,’ she murmured, ‘that it was a judgment, for my mother was but leman to her lord.’

Ah God, she was, after all, a creature of Hell, some demon come to torment me! I clutched and shook her with all my strength. I had not known that I could be so cruel. She stood, unresisting, head lolling. She, whose last words were like hot iron in a wound. She, who smiled even as I punished her.

‘Yea, shake me, dear lady!’ she cried, with joking speech. ‘Shake sense into me, as the others do! For I would fain be sensible!’

My hands fell away to a great uprising of shame. With face averted, I asked her pardon. The next moment I felt her hand, her cold, rough claw, moving on my cheek, which she stroked as she had my sleeve.

She was still ill-pleased with the room, for she glanced round and said again: ‘’Tis wet.’ Then I asked her where the Prioress lay and she clapped a hand over her mouth, having forgotten the main purpose of her visit, which was to summon me to Dame Johanna’s supper table; a privilege, I learned after, enjoyed by all corrodians on their first evening. I was a little surprised. I had thought all would eat in the refectory, as they had done at Leicester. Leicester, still recalled by me with the love of a child grown up.

‘Come, lady,’ said Edyth.

She went ahead, out into the chill, vaulted passage, carrying the light. Without looking back, she put out her hand and gripped mine, to anchor me through the dark ways.

And the last remaining tears stung my throat, for that instant she was Harry, little Harry, leading me again to the chamber of love.

It was a court, and Dame Johanna Queen. She sat at her own high table, beautifully caparisoned with damask and gold thread, a flower-strewn board upon which, up and down, a sleek little dog ramped freely. It was the dog I noticed first, and her hands caressing it. She would sweep it up at times to kiss its slavering face, pinch it in her lap and lose interest, so that its black nose soon peeped again over the table top, its white paws appeared on the board, and its body gambolled once more under her lustrous, uncaring eyes.

A short nun, robin-round, opening the door to reveal this sight, wished me good evening and resumed a low gabble which I thought at first to be prayer; then, listening harder, knew as grumbling, an eternal flow of little words, French and Latin and English mixed up together. She swept me with her glance, dismissed me from it to encompass Edyth with a mingling of pity and scorn.

‘You’re late, child,’ she said in a heavy accent.

A brisk, hard trembling shook Edyth. She seemed literally to melt backward into the arching shadows. ‘Yes, Dame Joan,’ she murmured.

Joan smiled at her; I was caught by the tail of that gat-toothed smile. She had one tooth east and west, and none between.

‘Be chary,
enfant
,’ she told Edyth. ‘Madame is proud tonight. Serve not the sturgeon too hot.’

With that, she gathered a mouthful of phlegm, and shot it into the dark, where it dripped down a stone column, like a snail-trail. A little of it fouled my sleeve.

‘Pardon, pardon,’ she said blandly. Seeing my distaste, she laughed. ‘What ails you? Don’t they spit at court?’

So she knew my origin, already.

‘Yea, they do. But their aim is better,’ I said, stiff with misery.

‘I should not spit,’ she said mockingly. ‘I have defied a rule,’ gave a yelp of laughter and took my arm in a hard, clumsy grip.

‘Enter, enter,’ she said. ‘And
bon appetit
!’ She stared up towards the Prioress, with an uncompromising look of hate. ‘Good victuals, I trow! Better,
pardieu
, than any that touches our throats!’

The heat of an hundred candles washed me like a warm wind. I walked, foolish, alone, towards the dais, on the steps at either side of which stood a habited form. The nun on the right was reading aloud; I recognized the work instantly—Thomas à Kempis,
Imitatio Christi
, in the Latin. And as I went hesitantly in I felt my heart move suddenly, with an older longing and sorrow than that of the past months. All faded for an instant and I saw only my mother’s face, and the face of my spiritual mother, the gentle dame of Leicester. For, in the old days we three were wont to read that same book together, and I would oft-times fall asleep, to be jounced awake by some sonorous phrase and catch the mild eye upon me not without tenderness, under the proud grey wimple so recently assumed. Thereafter would come my mother’s shame. ‘Forgive her, Mother,’ she would say. And the douce answer... ‘She’s but a little maid, let her slumber. There’s time aplenty...’

‘She’s but a child. She would not withstand an inquisition...’ Queen Elizabeth’s cold eyes, with death, and death’s fear, shifting in their depths.

I knelt before the Queen, the Prioress. Rays of fire smoked off a great ruby and emerald cluster on the lifted white hand, and the dog leaped from her lap to sniff around my skirts. I had to crane upward to observe Dame Johanna properly, and for the second time was amazed, for between this Prioress and the ladies of court there was but a hair’s-breadth of difference; indeed, her habit was of stuff far richer than worn by, say, Anne Haute, a frugal soul. Brows had she none, they had been plucked out fine and fashionable, and the breadth of forehead above was like a wide white river. Certes, she was beautiful, with glass-green eyes sharply halved by lids of cream, and a full, small mouth. No princess would have scorned her jewels. She was mayhap ten years older than I, no more. Bemusedly I stared at her. Was there some little pleading in my gaze, for what I know not: for charity, or understanding, perchance? In any event, my glance disaffected hers and she looked away, snapping her white fingers to the dog, while the drone of Thomas à Kempis’s writings went on above my head.

‘
Soyez la bienvenue
,’ said Dame Johanna, still looking away. I moved nearer, kissed the icy jewel extended to me, whispered ‘Gramercy,’ and took my seat at a side table two steps down from the Prioress’s dais, ill-ease and wild of mind, wondering to hear the courtly tongue in a House of God, looking at the fair table appointments, the heavy silver salt inlaid with beryl, the fat gold goblet at Dame Johanna’s elbow, and glancing up covertly to study the two nuns on the dais steps.

The one reading had a visage saffron yellow and long as a ram’s. She clipped each word with close, rat teeth. Black hairs prickled coarsely on her upper lip. She followed each line in the book with a tall curved nail, so that now and again her eyes could safely stray from the text and rest on Dame Johanna’s face in a curious glance both servile and truculent. It was, I decided, an envious, cunning face and heavy with secrets, and I turned quickly from it to have my own gaze caught up in that of the other, silent nun, who stared, and continued to stare, at me.

Although the eyes, half-closed, looked as if they had wept for years, a thread of dark intelligence struck at me from between the slits. A strange, wavering light that glowed and flattened and was extinguished even as I gazed. The rest of the face was commonplace. Pale, puffed cheeks and fleshy, dough-coloured chin surrounded a soft mouth oddly childish, hanging a little open to reveal blackened teeth, while deep lines stretched upward to the nostrils. An ordinary enough, face, as faces go, save for the look about the eyes. That woman looked at me as if she knew my very soul and all its secrets, as perchance she did. There was madness in those eyes; two demons straining at a chafed thread, and sorrow, and murder, and yet, despite these evil things, a cry for help, a desperate yearning for succour which those eyes knew would be ever late in coming. And all manner of dolorousness: the courier ambushed on the road, the poison drunk before the bridegroom’s arrival, the last standard falling beneath a field of spears... Within a few breaths’ space, I knew that those eyes could infect me with whatever sickness had their owner in thrall. So I looked down, smoothing the cloth with trembling fingers, picked up my trencherknife and replaced it, while the heat of the candles and Dame Bridget’s stare shrivelled my senses.

The Prioress said grace, liltingly, stumbling on one phrase, winding up in a rush with a slurred ‘Amen’. She laughed merrily, clapped her hands, and the dog shrilled a yap. I sat, feeling Dame Bridget still watching me.

‘Bring meat!’ cried the Prioress. ‘By my hand, I’ve an appetite! Juliana, close that book! Those dull writings turn my stomach. Read something other. Read Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tale of Merlin and Arthur. Bridget, the wine!’

Bridget went smoothly to the flagon, poured a red stream into the shining goblet upheld. Juliana laid down her book, shook back her wimple, long face set.

‘Madame,
we
have not yet eaten,’ she said peevishly.

The Prioress laughed again. ‘Fie!’ she cried. ‘Leave reading, then! Sit down, and sup with me! Let us be entertained this night; we have a guest from court!’

All three looked at me. There was a small lightening of Juliana’s horse-face. At Bridget I did not look.

‘Shall we continue to speak French?’ asked the Prioress, sweetly enough.

I sat dumb. This was not how I recalled the life in cloister. At Leicester, meals were taken in silence. There were the signs, of course; the hands wagged sideways, rippling (for one who desired fish)—the pinching of thumb and forefinger (for salt)—the nose-rubbing (for mustard) all overlaid by the companionable Lives of the Saints, the click of knife on platter. There was no question of what language we should use; our hands said all that was necessary.

‘English then, mistress,’ said the Prioress, a trifle sharper. Then, suddenly alert: ‘Ah, here comes our supper!’

Although the room was not large, it seemed to take Edyth an hour to traverse it, laden and limping. Spiced steam rose from the great trencher she carried. She carved well as I watched her, as well as any of the King’s henchmen. Dame Johanna spied every morsel on to the plate, choosing a slice of baked venison, the breast of a partridge dripping with Burgundy juice, carrots like tiny golden daggers, lord’s bread white as snow. She served her dog at table; it slobbered from silver, paws on the cloth. And so stealthily did Edyth go with her ladle and platter that I failed to notice how high she piled my plate also. Chunks of meat, its rich rankness disguised by basil and cinnamon. I felt my bowels twist within me, and, hands clenched under the cloth, prayed that I would not vomit, as I was wont to do of late.