(August 1351–October 1357)
In his lifetime the Black Death, a sorcerer travelling from China, had shifted the balance of Christendom and killed half the folk in England. But to Ursula’s Jackie it seemed that nothing new ever happened or ever would. The bell rang and the nuns went into quire. The bell rang and the serfs in the great field paused in their labour and crossed themselves, and then scratched themselves, and then went on working. The little bell rang and Christ was made flesh. One day the thought had risen up in him: Suppose I don’t ring my bell – what then? This thought had come on a summer afternoon when the noise of the grasshoppers was everywhere. For an instant the sun had seemed to smite him with a tenfold heat, he felt himself dissolving like wax, and the butts of the mown grass where he lay pricked him like a thousand daggers. What then? The end of the world, perhaps. The bell silent, Christ not made, the world snapped like a bubble. Perhaps. But also a beating. Sitting up he shook the hair out of his eyes and saw a grasshopper and tore it apart and felt better. The sun was no stronger than before and all round him it was a summer afternoon and the grasshoppers were chirping and the dun horse feeding and everything was as usual.
The willows and alders cast their leaves, the clouds gathered, the earth darkened, the autumn rains began. One morning there would be a great bellowing of beasts. It was Martinmas, when the pigs and cattle were driven to the shed and slaughtered for winter meat. After that it seemed to grow dark very quickly, as though darkness steamed out of the great cauldrons where they made the black-puddings. A frosty day coming in December scratched one’s eyes, the sunlight was so suddenly brilliant. Through Christmas and Epiphany there were sweet dishes, pastes of eggs and figs and ground-almonds that encrusted the spoon and the mixing-bowls. A pittance of unmixed wine made the nuns a little tipsy, they walked more swimmingly and were unwontedly polite, and when they spoke their voices were pitched as though they were just about to sing. This amiability made it difficult to tell them apart. But each face resumed its particular expression, and through February and March he was glad to stay in the kitchen, watching the wind ruffle the pool of rainwater that spread from under the woodhouse door, and eating the chips of dried cod that flew from under the mallet. Round and round went the days like a mill-wheel, and because it was Lent when penances are remembered, on Fridays his mother went barefooted to the cloisters to repeat the penitential psalms and be scourged by the prioress. No one much pitied her, neither did he; and hearing Mabel say that the bishop’s sentence had ordained that the scourgings should continue throughout the year and that only the prioress’s laziness restricted them to Lent he felt defrauded, as though his significance as a nun’s child were belittled.
Being a nun’s child distinguished him from the other children about the place, and even when they taunted him he knew he was more interesting than they, and that whatever future awaited him he would not, like them, live tethered to the sour soil of the manor. In spring, when all young animals play together, he played with them and was their ringleader, but when the days grew hot he left them and went to lie among the rushes, hidden, as he liked to lie. And so it would be full summer again, and he would be a year older, and this summer, surely, he would be old enough to go to Waxelby Fair.
But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster. Jackie was old enough to work now, and Jesse Figg the bailiff set him to weave hurdles or spread dung or keep the cows from straying into the young crops, and Mabel added that a cowherd has time on his hands, time enough to gather the tufts of wool that the sheep leave on brambles. Now, too, there was this new woman, this Pernelle. Sometimes she was a pleasure, for her clothes were coloured, and she could tell stories, and with a fine comb she would scratch the lice out of his head when they became troublesome. But at other times she was hateful, bustling after him and saying: ‘Jackie, do this! Jackie, do that! Jackie, Jackie! Where’s my little page?’ Then he would have to help her set up her loom or pound ginger or pick over feathers for pillows, or she would send him out to collect dew for a facewash; for being a townswoman she was full of such notions. And her stories, after all, were not worth much. Though they were of different places they were all about herself; and wherever she had gone she had always been the same Pernelle, cleverer and more meritorious than anyone else. If she spoke of anyone else, it was always her three nephews, who were such fine brisk boys, no bookworms. You would never see them with their eyes reddened by crying over grammar.
‘Grammar, grammar! Who’s the better for grammar? The Apostles had none.’
‘Saint Paul was a scholar,’ said Ursula.
‘So they say. But he was never Pope. That was for Saint Peter who was only a fisherman. Saint Paul’s grammar never hoisted him so far.’
She plunged her smooth hand into the belly of a goose.
‘If you had seen as much of the world as I have you wouldn’t care to have the priest stuffing your boy with grammar. All this hickorum-hackorum never filled a belly yet. Look at my brother-in-law the armourer. He can neither read nor write but he can afford to pay two clerks to keep his accounts for him, and in his house there are three beds, one of green serge, one of russet, and one of a most beautiful blue. The abbess of Shaftesbury hasn’t finer beds. But plenty of poor honest souls lie on rotten straw while these abbots and abbesses loll on goose-down, thinking over their Latin. Let them work, I say! Let them earn a living as other people do! Many’s the day my brother-in-law has worked twelve hours at a stretch, forging link after link till the eyes stood out of his head. Quite right, too! We are put into the world to labour. Let them labour like the blessed Apostles, that’s what I say. And if your Jackie were my Jackie I’d take him from those books and send him off with the masons.’
Jackie’s heart assented to these last words. As learning went on it became less agreeable. There were fewer discoveries in it, it lengthened out like a midday road. Sir Ralph had ceased to teach him what he could repeat to the astonishment of others. There were no more anecdotes of the basilisk, the swallow curing her blindness, the virtues of precious stones. Instead, it was all proportions and properties, things impossible to remember. And there sat Sir Ralph, plucking at his lower lip, brooding some thought of his own, or endlessly, scornfully patient.
‘The Proportion of Diapente, I said. What is the Proportion of Diapente? Pooh, you will never learn! And why should you?’
Among the masons it was different They were kind jolly men, they always had a welcome for him and the fish they caught and roasted in coffins of river-clay tasted better than any food cooked by his mother, or Mabel, or the widow Bastable even. It was in the spring of 1352 that the masons came, and put up their booths in the shelter of Saint Leonard’s wood – which had that name because the timber sold from it paid for the candles which burned before the figure of the patron saint. The convent supplied their main victuals, but they eked out the supply with what they poached from pool or thicket. In the convent it was all women living together, and in the masons’ settlement it was all men. He liked the men better. For one thing, they made more of him. There was always something to eat and a knee to lean against, and the rough hands that stroked his head stroked unenquiringly, never pausing to ferret after vermin or tweak out tangles. They told stories, too, stories of wonder-working shrines and clever animals and the bands of wolves that came down from the Welsh mountains. They made the more of him because he was the only child who visited them. The manor people cold-shouldered the masons. They were thieves and strangers; worse, they were building the new spire with money which should have been spent in repairing houses and supplying ointment for plague-sores. Even now many of those who had recovered from the Black Death were limping about with open sores, though it was two years since the plague had left the manor; or where sores had healed rheumatism had followed, and cramps that disabled a man when he had worked for no more than a couple of hours. Straightening up from their toil in the field the labourers would see the stonework, white as bleached linen, new as nothing else about the place was new. To cart those stones they had been obliged to spend their days and the strength of their oxen tugging loads across the heath. All for nothing, all for display and vanity! If the prioress must spend her money away from the manor let her buy some relic, something that would cure agues or avert cattle murrain or help a childing woman.
But those proud nuns knew neither the curse of Adam nor the curse of Eve.
Since the Black Death the relations between convent and its manor had been getting steadily worse. The work was still done, the dues were still paid – but with delays, cheats, interminable English arguments. The bailiff became more and more like an ambassador carrying terms from one camp to another.
The older nuns, whose lives had accustomed them to broils within the convent but only compliance from the dun landscape without, were troubled at these changes. It was not christian, they said, to have the sulks and grumbles of the working-classes so continually thrust before their noses. How could a nun contemplate when within earshot there was a dispute about whether or no William Scole would yield his ox on the Thursday to bring in a load of firing, whether or no the family of Noot should pay a fine for the loss of their son to the manor? – Mabel, who knew everything, and Jesse Figg both asserted that the boy had gone to find paid work elsewhere, though his family continued to declare that he had been drowned in the flood on Saint Luke’s day. It was not seemly. It was not christian. The prioress was to blame for allowing it. It should be reported to the bishop.
But when the bishop next came for a Visitation he took it for granted that Oby should be experiencing labour troubles. Instead of condoling with them he said they were fortunate to have serfs who would still remain on their manor, and congratulated the prioress on being wise enough to know when to give way a little. Dame Margaret, a nun who was transferred to them about this time, bore out what the bishop had said with her story of the nunnery whence she had come. There, the serfs were so unruly that one day they had gone off in a body, leaving only the old and the infirm behind them. The abbess had been forced to hire labour, and this at such an exorbitant rate that the finances of the house had given way and some of the nuns had had to be redistributed, Dame Margaret being one of them. Her reading of the times, however, was opposed to the bishop’s. There must be a firmer rule, she said, more penalties and more punishments, or society would fall to pieces and Christendom be the prey of heathen invaders.
The younger nuns disregarded these croakings. They said that things had never gone so well as now. There was the spire going up, a pleasure to watch, the exciting visits from the prior of Etchingdon, the revenues that were coming from Methley. Their prioress was really a fine woman of business. Instead of scraping like a hen in the manor acres, scratching up a grain here and a grain there, she had spread her wings in a longer flight and had come back from York with a whole new spirituality in her mouth – as it might be Noah’s dove. That was how one should manage: with bold strokes, with a policy that fitted the times. In these days a convent could not afford to turn its back on the world, spin its own wool and wear it, live on eggs and salad through the summer, sleep through the winter like a dormouse, and never receive a novice who had not three aunts and a cousin among the nuns.
‘Yet we are told to renounce the world,’ said Dame Susanna.
‘That is not to say that the world is to renounce us,’ replied Dame Isabel. ‘Besides, we are also told not to hide our light under a bushel. We cannot for ever go on in the old way, booming in our swamp like so many bitterns.’
Though she was young, Dame Isabel de Scottow was already a personage, and talked in chapter with as much weight as if she had been a nun for twenty years. She would argue her point so reasonably, so gracefully, that no one felt herself humbled by being talked round. Here, in embryo, was a most eminent prioress – if her fevers and shivering fits did not carry her away first. The prioress had already contemplated resigning in her favour, and was only kept from it by the assurances of some of her elder ladies that a prioress who spent half the year in bed would be worse than no prioress at all. Instead, a new post was created for her – the post of guest-mistress. Now that Oby was seeing so much company a guest-mistress was really quite necessary.
It was a pity that no post could be found for Dame Matilda, who was also of the stuff from which prioresses are made, though she had no outward graces and had come to the convent late, and under a cloud: a novice of eighteen who had been bedded with a husband, and only scrambled out of bed on a plea of nullity, causing Dame Agnes to mutter about fish, flesh, and red herrings. But Dame Matilda was still young and so healthy that she would certainly survive till a death or a resignation freed a post for her. If only Dame Salome would resign! She had proved a wretched treasuress. But people like Dame Salome never resign. Each time she exclaimed: ‘If it were not for love of Our Lady and Saint Leonard I could not keep on!’ one knew that only death would detach her from her burden.
Divided on a moral issue – the old nuns so naturally saying that one must be faithful to old ideas, and the younger nuns saying that one must live in the date where God has set one – the convent was preserved from lesser bickerings. Pernelle Bastable with her considerable experience of convents declared that she had never known such peacefulness, that one might be among holy images rather than among holy ladies. At other times she admitted that such tranquillity made life a little dull and that she felt herself growing old before her time – since without some small dissensions the blood grows thick, as in oxen, who age before bulls do. Fortunately she felt a great benevolence towards the masons, and was out on every sunny morning, warning them to be careful not to fall off the scaffolding. Pernelle’s slope of mind towards kitchen and brewhouse made her a convenient boarder. From Pernelle being in the kitchen to oversee the cooking of some particular mess for herself it was a short step to Pernelle being in the kitchen filling sausages for them all. A good useful sort of woman, the prioress thought; suppressing the thought that followed it: that Pernelle among the masons was almost intolerable. It would have astonished the prioress to learn from some incontrovertible source, an angel, say, that next to herself it was Pernelle Bastable who felt the keenest enthusiasm about the spire: muddied, certainly, by pleasure in the masons, excitement to have something going forward, hopes of a day when the completed spire would bring company to admire it; but for all that springing from a true pleasure in fine building.
It was in 1351 that the prioress made her visit to York – where she took a lawyer’s opinion on the disputed dowries but went no further. In the following year the prior of Etchingdon made the first of his three visits to Oby. Luckily he came at Martinmas, so there was plenty of fresh meat and stubble geese in good condition; and the darkening weather was really an advantage, for with a spirited fire rooms do not show their shabbiness as they do in summer. But even in a November dusk Sir Ralph’s cassock could not pass muster; and among all her other preparations Dame Isabel found time to measure him for a new one, which the novices made up under Dame Agnes’s supervision. After so much sweeping and garnishing it was a surprise that the great prior of Etchingdon, a man known throughout England, could be such an approachable figure, talking to everyone, speaking English like any peasant, smiling if he as much as caught your eye, sneezing without dissimulation and apologising to everyone for having such a frightful cold. At their first sight of this extraordinary prior the simpler nuns could not believe that this was indeed the man. It must be one of the others: the stout one, or the one in a furred hood who looked so very scholarly and ascetic. But, no! The stout one was the secretary and he of the furred hood was the Etchingdon clerk of the works, who had been brought because he was such a good man of business, delighting in costings and estimates. Further inspection of Prior Thomas convinced them that thus, and no otherwise, should a great cleric look, talk, and behave. His eccentricities were the sign of good breeding; his extravagances betokened a heavenly unacquaintance with ordinary cares. One forgot that the house was shabby, that one’s skirts were narrow, that one’s company manners were rusty, that the noises from the kitchen were too plainly audible in quire, that Dame Salome was again singing much too loud and had lapsed into her old habit of et in saeclula saeclulolum. Even his cold was gracious, and yielded to Dame Susanna’s horehound with poppy seeds.
Listening to the subsequent praises Dame Isabel thought: And not one of you suspects that all this simplicity and spontaneity, and all those sneezes, represent the height of arrogance. She was wrong. Sir Ralph, travelling by a coarser route, had arrived at the same conclusion.
Perhaps being put into a new cassock had sharpened his insight. To be put into a new cassock in order to appear with decency before a great man who insists on treating you as an equal can be a mortifying experience. A prior of Etchingdon should not straddle the gulf fixed between him and the priest of an unimportant nunnery like a boy leaping back and forth across a ditch. What call has he to be so ingratiating? grumbled the lesser man. Questioning me about Toledo, envying me my travels – he knows well enough that all I saw in Toledo is what a poor man sees anywhere: a glimpse through a doorway, a garden behind a grating, and on a saint’s day, six inches of a bishop going in procession. So he growled to himself, devouring the fine food which was served because of the visitor and which his resentment distracted him from enjoying.
His third winter at Oby was closing about him. He was lonely, uncomfortable, bored, and damned. For a quiet anteroom to hell he had engaged himself to Oby: a bargain with a weasel, a bad bargain. True, he no longer had to wonder how he should earn, beg, or steal the price of a breakfast; but instead of his own money troubles he listened to the money troubles of the convent. True, he had escaped from the company of rogues, pilgrims, and prostitutes to the company of good women; but he had as little in common with the one as with the other. As for his future, it was no more certain than before; for it seemed to him that he could not endure another year of his present life, and his thoughts trudged in a round of speculation as to how he should live next, whether he should go to a town and hope to pick up a livelihood as a copyist, or follow the plough (there was a demand now for any man who would work on the land), or load a pack with bones and beads and set up as a relic-pedlar, or go to sea, or become a soldier. He must do one or the other, one day or another he must set about it. Meanwhile he was still bewintered at Oby, and thinking: Tomorrow is Saturday, so we shall have beans and bacon. I hope there will be more bacon in my portion this Saturday.
The new cassock had a wider girth than the old one. He had put on flesh, he was broad now as well as long. All the more to frizzle, he had said, answering Dame Isabel’s jokes as she measured him. He could talk so, and feel no more than a numb appreciation of the jest. Not that he doubted of damnation. He was as sure about hell-fire as any good simple old woman watching her pot boil. But having gone into his sickness in a frenzy of terror he had somehow come out again with only the formula of fear. From time to time he felt horribly afraid; but what he feared was not the ultimate hell-fire, but that nearer day, sure to come, when terror would rouse up again and take hold of him. Then he would go mad.
The Martinmas visit was a time of plans and talk, and one of the plans was that Prior Thomas and the clerk of the works should come back in the spring to see how the work was going on. Before Easter the nuns were talking of how they should receive their guests. Prior Thomas did not come till August – he had been busy in Westminster. When he came there was not much for him to see. At an offer of higher pay the chief mason had gone off with most of his men to another job. Such things happened now, the pestilence had made wage-earners freer than those who hired them. But what did it matter to Prior Thomas? He was affable as ever, affable as an immortal, telling diverting stories of how projects of his own had been frustrated by such petty accidents as death or disease. And so he was gone again, leaving a strew of gifts and largesse behind him.
‘I shall come early next year.’ The words rang in Sir Ralph’s head, reminding him of King Tarquin’s Sibyl, coming back with her diminishing offer, her rising fee. In the quick of his reason Sir Ralph knew that the prior of Etchingdon was his last chance. To such a man, insatiably curious in the oddities of human misfortune, he could tell his story. If he could once humble himself and get it out, Thomas de Foley was the man to hear him and help him. He might be quit of his sin yet: confession, contrition, penance . . . it could be done. In the end even he might be made what he was damned by feigning to be: a priest. Prior Thomas was very much his cousin’s cousin: he would exert himself to cover up the scandal that for four years Alicia de Foley and her nuns had been without the body of Christ.
For they were like that, all calling each other cousin and sharing England among them. Even in their feuds they were united. They quarrelled among themselves and saw to it that no one should quarrel with them. He had listened to Thomas de Foley explaining to the prioress how deftly things were managed at Westminster, how by statutes and ordinances both wages and prices would be held down, how, though there should be but one labourer left, man and loaf should be as cheap as before.
During the third visit the quarrel blazed up between them. It was April. The party had been walking in the grounds to see how the spire looked from different aspects when the sharpening east wind brought a pelt of rain and they went into the nave for shelter: the prioress, Dame Agnes, Dame Margaret, Dame Salome, Dame Isabel. Thomas de Foley had a new secretary with him, a red-lipped smiling young man, and the clerk of the works. Sir Ralph was also of the party, half unwillingly, for he had been invited to join it by Prior Thomas; and yet it pleased him to be talking about painted windows and discussing the French cathedrals with the clerk of the works. The nave seemed very small and cramped with such a number of people walking about in it, the more so since the masons were using it as their storeroom and had blocked the western end with timber and bits of ready-made carving.
Prior Thomas continued to urge his cousin to lengthen the nave.
‘There is nothing here you can want to keep. Your western arch – it is like some country sermon where the priest mumbles out: Good people, I will now begin. And then there is a long pause while he pulls up his hood.’
Dame Agnes expressed a hope that new doors would be better-fitting. The screen between nave and quire was no protection against draughts. Dame Isabel and Dame Salome took up the theme, describing the painfulness of mattins in winter, the wind howling, the nuns scarcely able to repeat the office because their teeth chattered so.
‘The novices stamping their feet and rubbing their chilblains!’ Dame Agnes cried.
‘The candles wasting!’ Dame Salome mourned.
Thomas de Foley glanced from one wrinkled face to another, thinking how much uglier they must look at two o’clock on a winter’s morning. Every force of art was strained to beautify God’s house and worship, but nothing was done to improve the appearance of his votaries. A religious order where everyone was young and beautiful . . . there would be no place for him in it. A new expedient for the nave sprang into his mind, and he turned to the prioress. Let them abolish that west door, since there would be a south porch in the remodelled nave. Instead, a simple arcading, balancing the screen, and above it a small rose window with modern glass.
‘My vow was a spire. The spire brings a south porch, a lengthened nave, a window. All this must be paid for; and we are not Etchingdon.’
She spoke lightly, as good breeding demanded.
‘Surely you are not worrying about money? If the Methley tithes are not enough . . . ’
Dame Salome had begun to pant in a very strange way, and was turning purple. She rolled her eyes imploringly towards her prioress. The prioress shook her head.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Prior Thomas.
‘It’s nothing.’
Her tone of voice made nothing as good as a great deal. ‘I believe,’ said the secretary, ‘at least I understood our treasurer to mention, that though it is perfectly understood that the Methley tithe is earmarked for Oby there are still a few formalities . . . ’ He paused, and added with a pout: ‘People are such sticklers.’
Prior Thomas beat his forehead with his small fist. ‘My fault, my fault! My mind was so taken up with your design that I forgot these accursed formalities. But nothing gets done unless I see to it myself. Steven! Make a note of this. Because of the great love we bear to Our Blessed Lady and Saint Leonard, and that the vow of my cousin the prioress of Oby may not be hindered, and so forth: half of the great tithe of Methley and all of the little tithe; for ten years, no, twenty. No, no! That’s paltry. In perpetuity.’
The faces of Dame Agnes and Dame Margaret expressed at once their admiration of a man who could dispose so easily of a spirituality and their reprobation of such flippancy in money matters. Though they had suspected that the money was not coming in – otherwise, why should Dame Salome have sighed with such portentous secrecy whenever they referred to it? – no one had supposed that its payment had not even been secured. Sweet Trinity, he might have died meanwhile, and we should have been left with the cost of all this! At the thought of the peril they had been in Dame Margaret sat down and crossed herself with a trembling forefinger.
Embarrassed by feeling herself so much relieved the prioress began to veil the crudity of her sensations by a return of scruples about the lesser tithe.
‘I do not like to think of those poor creatures without a priest.’
‘I assure you the poor creatures wouldn’t know what to do with him. When they had one the only use they could make of him was to pay him for charms to hang about the necks of their cattle.’
‘It seems a shocking state of things in a christian country.’
‘So it is,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘But one must look facts in the face. Say we send a priest to Methley. If he is a good man they will murder him. If not, they will do as they did before: turn him into a sorcerer, a water-diviner, and a weather-witch. I will waste no priests on Methley.’
‘This is a very stewardly outlook on salvation. One can see that Etchingdon is a great priory, to have so economical a prior.’
Everyone looked at Sir Ralph, the speaker. He was leaning against a stack of timber, turning a little piece of carved work in his hands.
Prior Thomas flushed.
‘As for salvation, I am modest enough to suppose that salvation comes from the Lord. But that is disputable, and if you please you may say it is heretical. As for Methley, you must allow me to know more about it than you do. And I do not intend to cast any more pearls before its swine. I have too great a respect for the priesthood.’
‘A fine respect for the priesthood! You place a priest here, you withhold him there. What do you suppose you are doing? Playing at checkers?’
The secretary closed his notebook and returned it to his pocket.
‘A very striking metaphor,’ said Prior Thomas. ‘I think you have mistaken your calling. You should have been a preaching friar. Metaphors are a great comfort to simple congregations.’
‘And to talk of casting pearls . . . that’s not a metaphor, I suppose?’
‘Not my own. I content myself with quotations from the scripture. In fact I am, as you imply, merely a humble administrator of the church’s goods. A steward.’
He spoke with contemptuous good humour, and gave a little bow.
‘Perhaps you would like to go to Methley yourself?’ he added. He had meant to annoy; but he had not foreseen such a glare of resentment. He hastened to add that he hoped that Sir Ralph would think of no such thing, that Oby would be badly off without him. The nuns exclaimed that they could not do without Sir Ralph and the prioress told of how providentially he had come to them in their hour of need. Swept by the general impulse to make talk over an awkward interval the clerk of the works stirred himself to reply with an anecdote of how a cousin of his had seen, had seen quite plainly, a skeleton hand appear and scrawl Hic on the door of a house in Shrewsbury; and the next day plague broke out among the people of the house.
Sir Ralph stared at the floor. His face was of a uniform dull red except for the bridge of his hooked nose, which showed with a sallow whiteness. Even then all might have gone well if Dame Margaret had not taken it on herself to remark profoundly: ‘Without a priest there can be no mass.’
Sir Ralph looked up. The prioress said hastily that no doubt there were masses within reach of the Methley folk. Plenty, said the secretary, and it would do them no harm to walk for the good of their souls. In the old days when masses were not to be found in every corner there was much more true devotion.
Praises of olden days seemed about to tide them to safety when Sir Ralph exclaimed in a loud tone that fury rendered doting: ‘Feed my sheep!’
Losing his self-control the prior answered testily; ‘Oh, very well, very well! Go and feed them yourself.’
The little piece of carved stone fell from Sir Ralph’s hand.
‘Why should I stuff up the holes you make?’
‘You seem to make a practice of it. You stuffed up a hole here, did you not? By the way, what hole were you shot out off to be so conveniently ready to pop into this one?’
Another hailstorm was coming up. The wind howled, the sunlight was wiped off the window as though a cloth had mopped it. Sunlit no longer, they all seemed to dwindle and sink lower – like blown-out candles, Dame Isabel thought, pulling her veil closer about her face and peering out through the chink. Men fight like so many stags, and to live with them perpetually would be intolerable; but from time to time a male quarrel is refreshing, like hartshorn or catnip.
‘No cloister, at any rate,’ Sir Ralph bellowed. ‘I did not sit caressing my belly in a cloister, robbing the poor and slighting the body of Christ because I was not able to make it.’
‘They all talk like this nowadays.’ Thomas de Foley turned to the secretary with a paternal air. ‘Every boy, every beggar, can talk like this. It is the growth of learning and the spread of piety.’
Sir Ralph detached himself from the heap of timber and lumbered towards the prior. He walked stooping forward, his hands dangled, his mouth hung open. His face was blank of any expression except an intense animal attentiveness.
‘A fit! He’s going to have a fit!’ exclaimed the secretary.
At this moment the bell began to ring for vespers. Beyond the screen could be heard the orderly steps and rustling skirts of the other nuns going in to take their places. With a sudden roar Sir Ralph launched himself on Prior Thomas. The prior stepped nimbly to one side, and simultaneously the clerk of the works and the secretary joined in the fray. The nuns clustered round their prioress, scandalised, excited, and inclined to giggle. It was ludicrous to see Sir Ralph charging to and fro, dragging the clerk and the secretary after him, and the prior so coolly whisking his skirts from under their feet. Then Dame Agnes asserted herself, pointing her lean forefinger to the door in the screen and signing to Dame Isabel, the youngest among them, to open it. There she stood, her snub nose in the air, her face rigidly composed, and marshalled them in their order through the doorway. One by one they went sedately into quire, and the door closed behind them. Just as it fell to the noise of scuffling ceased and was followed by a pitiable bellowing, the outcry of a beast struck down in the shambles; then that too died away and there was no more to be heard but the chant of the nuns in quire and outside the cry of the first cuckoo calling through a downpour of rain.
Two days later, riding through the flashing landscape, Thomas de Foley said to his secretary how glad he was that the priest had gone mad just then, enabling him to witness this performance: a perfect demonstration, he added, in proof of how women, despite all their weaknesses, perhaps, indeed, because of them, are best fitted to live under Rule. The Rule is a kind of dance to them, he exclaimed, a lifelong dance. The bell chimes, the music strikes up; and with the whole force of their sense of drama, their wilfulness, their terrific vanity, they give themselves over to a formal pattern of obedience.
‘Don’t doubt it, Steven! Those women going in to their vespers were experiencing a far greater excitement by doing what they were pledged to do every day of their lives than ever they could have procured from watching their maniac trying to strangle me.’
The secretary remarked that just as God had called Mary to be the vehicle of the incarnation, he called women to the religious life, choosing the frailest objects and the most unlikely to convey his intentions and to illustrate Our Lady’s words about exalting the humble. His head was still throbbing from the blow Sir Ralph had given it, and he could not look back on the visit to Oby with any pleasure. Thomas de Foley’s observations struck him as hyperbolical. Everyone knew that nunneries made hay of their Rule and needed constant supervision and rebuke. The house they had left behind was no exception, with incompetent finances, no proper servants, a prioress thinking of nothing but building, and a mad priest.
Sir Ralph had run mad, no doubt of it. What was equally disconcerting was that Dame Susanna chose this moment to run mad too. Instead of welcoming an opportunity to show her skill as infirmaress she refused to go near him, and to give any reason for her refusal, saying she could do nothing but pray. Prayer was all very well; but more than prayer was needed. Fortunately Dame Beatrix came forward, saying with decision that what was needed was a black cock. The message went into the kitchen, and Jackie had laughed till he cried, thinking how funny the priest would look with a black cock crowing in his ear like another Saint Peter. That would rouse him! – for Sir Ralph’s madness was of the stupid kind, his bellowings and blubberings had ended as abruptly as though a key had been turned on them, and nothing remained but a heavy doting melancholy. The black cock, however, was killed, and bound to Sir Ralph’s head. A black cock tied to the head was, of course, an old and sanctioned remedy, and no sooner had Dame Beatrix prescribed it than others remembered it too. But Dame Beatrix had remembered it instantly. There was a general satisfaction when Dame Susanna resigned her post and Dame Beatrix became infirmaress in her stead.
Till past midsummer Sir Ralph was mad. It was a remarkably fine season and every morning he was led out to enjoy the sun. There he would trudge up and down, blinking behind his feathers, and sometimes he would stoop and very carefully remove a twig or a pebble from the path before him. Sometimes he just sat still, a waterlogged bulk; or he would stare at a bush and tremble all over, and then utter a long thrilling howl like the howl of a dog which smells the approach of death. At other times he would chuckle and rub his hands together and then trot off to find a hearer, anyone patient enough to listen to him, and very earnestly recount some joke or funny story that had visited his mind. At meal-times he came in of his own accord, clambered to his room over the gate and sat there polishing his spoon and waiting for his dish to be brought him. Seeing how well he remembered his old habits they feared he might attempt to say mass, and on Dame Susanna’s suggestion the quire door and the door of the sacristy were kept locked. But he never attempted this.
Several cocks had corrupted and been removed, and still there was no change in his condition. A mad priest became part of the routine of the house, an accustomed nuisance, like the wash-house door which for so long had been warped and would not close properly. Dame Helen and Pernelle and the novices were busy all through this fine weather with airing and cleansing the rugs and the furred winter hoods and mantles. Shaking them and beating them, and pouncing on the fleas that skipped out, they laughed and frolicked, and the madman was nothing more to them than his shadow passing and repassing.
When he had his fits of howling the nuns drew together and whispered that it was indeed an approaching death he smelled: the death of Dame Isabel. Throughout her short sickly life she had accepted the idea of an early death; but now she thought that, after all, she would be sorry to exchange the ambiguity of this world for the certitude of the next. There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a mill-race, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam. Yes, and the accumulations of human reason, she thought, the proofs we all assent to, the truths established beyond shadow of doubt, these are like the stale crusts of foam that lie along the river-bank and look solid enough, till a cloudburst further up the valley sends down a force of water that breaks them up and sweeps them away.
Recently the prioress had made many references to the desirability of death, the comfort of being released from worldly cares and disappointments. Part of this, Dame Isabel knew, was on account of the convent’s money troubles, the prioress’s scruples about that lesser tithe of Methley, her uneasy conviction that the spire, somehow, would be the worse for it; but another part was meant for consolation. Studying the prioress’s face, a round moon-face clouded with uncertainties as the moon’s disk is tarnished with cloud-rack, the young nun assented to the consolations; but under her assent she reckoned the years she must forfeit, the events which would happen and which she would not see, the many thoughts she might have had – and no one else would think them. The world was deeply interesting and a convent the ideal place in which to meditate on the world. She was twenty-three. If she should live to forty, to sixty, her love of thinking would not be satiated. And yet Dame Agnes, who could remember the Jews in England and the Te Deums that had been sung at their expulsion, and Dame Blanch who was older still, so old that she remembered nothing, had never spent an hour of their lives in speculation.
Meanwhile, she also had to think about her money. The de Scottows had property in Guienne and though since the war and the increase of pirates in the Narrow Seas the wine trade was not so profitable as it had been the family was still wealthy, and Dame Isabel had not only brought a great dowry with her, but also received a yearly income from a vineyard of her own. ‘To pay for a few little comforts,’ her mother said, semi-apologetically, ‘since the poor child is so sickly.’ This was the sheepishness of the lay mind, still nursing an illusion that nuns lived on dew and a little porridge. The convent was less squeamish. Dame Isabel’s private property shocked no one there, it was only the state of her health which made alluding to it a little delicate, since to enquire about its disposal was tantamount to talking about her death. Hints and enquiries observed a sideways decorum, as when Dame Agnes and Dame Helen spoke so regretfully of the draughts in the chapter-house which had, they felt sure, undermined her health. That she should bequeath her vineyard for the purpose of building a new chapter-house was the design of the majority. Dame Susanna, however, a chilly woman, attributed Dame Isabel’s sickness to the fact that the convent burned so much peat. The smoke had made her cough, and coughing had worn out her lungs. It was peat-smoke, too, which was spoiling Dame Beatrix’s eyesight. Was it not distressing to watch her measuring out medicines? She could be sure of nothing unless she held it an inch from her nose, and often the wrong ingredients must have gone into a potion. A little money laid on on improving the convent’s woodland . . . Dame Matilda said bluntly that what the convent needed was better housing for the labourers, and a new bull. ‘Our own roofs are bad enough, heaven knows, but good or bad we have to stay under them. But nowadays a discontented serf just walks away from us.’
One other speaker matched Dame Matilda in frankness. This was Dame Salome, who urged the dying nun to devote the whole of her vineyard to masses, since of all sins spiritual pride takes longest to expiate.
‘And now that Sir Ralph has recovered it can be managed so nicely, the masses said in your own convent where you can be sure nothing will be scamped, for we shall keep our eyes on that. The day he came back to his senses and went off to spear eels I said to the others, Now our poor Dame Isabel can die in comfort! It was my first thought.’
A different thought had come to Dame Isabel when they told her how Sir Ralph had suddenly come out of his madness, rosy and blinking like an infant awakening. Though she had never found him a congenial confessor her curiosity started up at the prospect of meeting someone newly returned from madness. Madness was a whole new world, and surely he would have some interesting news of it? Her hopes were dashed. The simile of the waking infant was only too true; he sat smiling at her bedside saying how wonderfully well he felt, and that in spite of the drought he had never seen the harvest so promising.
A nun has no property, she cannot make a will; but there is nothing to prevent her setting down her dying wishes. Dame Isabel’s dying wishes were expressed in a letter to her father, and a signed copy of the letter was retained by the convent. It seemed to her, as it usually does to the dying, that her intentions would inevitably be misunderstood or disregarded. Still holding the copy of her letter she repeated what was in it. She had asked her father to grant to Oby the income from her vineyard for ten years after her death. For these ten years no penny of that income, beyond the charge of a decency minimum of masses, was to be spent. It was to be put out to usury, and the interest as it accumulated was to be put out to usury also.
‘And when we get it, what then?’ asked the prioress, flustered by all these directions. Sometimes it seemed to her that everyone was in league to talk of nothing but money.
Dame Isabel made a gesture of impatience. Another coughing-fit began to shake her, and Dame Beatrix handed her the spitting-bowl.
‘Pay . . . off debts,’ she gasped. A surge of blood swept away anything else she might have been minded to say.
She had a long agony. The weather was intensely sultry. Thunderstorms rattled overhead but did not break the drought. The little rain they wrenched out of the clouds had scarcely touched the earth before it rose up in a steaming mist. The nuns, exhausted by kneeling round Dame Isabel and repeating the prayers for the dying on behalf of a woman who seemingly could not die, found it hard to conceal their weariness and their disillusionment (for it is disillusioning to discover that compassion, stretched out too long, materialises into nothing more than a feat of endurance). The flies made everything worse. The smell of blood and sweat brought them in swarms, house-flies and blue-bottles and horse-flies. The lulling of prayers and the buzzing of insects were broken by shooings, scratchings, and slaps at the flies which settled on cheeks and foreheads. There lay Dame Isabel, mute as a candle, visibly consuming away and still not extinguished. Every time she opened her eyes they were more appallingly brilliant. It was an exemplary end, but not a consolatory one. Even her patience seemed to take on a quality of deceit and abstraction, it was as though she were calculating the hours that must pass before they would leave her alone. When at length she was dead the reflection that they had done everything they could for her was confused by a feeling that they and not she had stayed too long. To crown all, the drought broke in such torrents of rain that the ready-dug grave filled with water and it was impossible to bury Dame Isabel till it left off raining and the floods drained away.
For many years the death of Dame Isabel, so young, so unusually gifted, was remembered because it coincided with the flood at the Assumption. Crops were spoiled, cattle were drowned, the river broke its banks and settled in a new channel, so that the mill was left high and dry, and finally fell into ruin. After the floods went down there was an epidemic among the masons, and several of them died. All these disasters enforced the disagreeable impression of Dame Isabel’s death, and later on a legend grew up of a nun who was so wicked that death himself refused to take her and earth would not give her burial. Her wickedness was an excessive learning: all day she sat reading forbidden books, and sometimes barking like a dog, for such was her knowledge of grammar that she could change herself into animal shape. Naturally, all this was known in Lintoft and Wivelham and Waxelby before it was heard of in Oby, and the convent only learned of it through Pernelle’s bringing it back from a lying-in, where, as she remarked, people will say anything to help pass the time. Dame Salome felt herself grow hot and uncomfortable. Once again, she realised, she had been guided by an angel when she had modestly supposed she was only following her own nose.
For the unbelievable had happened. Dame Salome’s devotion to Our Lady and Saint Leonard had given out, and she had resigned her office as treasuress the day after Dame Isabel’s death, alleging that she had scruples about usury and could not undertake sums per centum. Dame Matilda was appointed in her place.
It was high time for a change. At the last Visitation mild Bishop Adlam had observed that even conscientiousness can be carried too far and that Dame Salome’s habit of glossing every entry in her books with a recital of how painstaking she had been to make it thus and not otherwise was, in the long run, tedious. He had also been obliged to point out several faults in arithmetic. Besides the relief of getting rid of Dame Salome the prioress was relieved to have Dame Matilda at last among the obedientaries. She was a Stapledon, a family not to be slighted.
Just as the Scottows were eminently rich the Stapledons were eminently well-to-do. They had the name of being prudent, self-providing, strong-minded, and full of family affection. That was one version. The other version of the Stapledons described them as miserly, obstinate to the point of pig-headedness, and tribal as the Jews. The mother of Prioress Isabella had been a de Stapledon. To the convent groaning under her rule the arrival of a full-grown de Stapledon, and one who had already got the better of a husband, seemed a menace of the worst kind, and there were many allusions to that text in holy writ which promised that Rehoboam’s little finger should be thicker than his father’s loins. In the course of time she had plodded down most of the prejudice that met her; but the old nuns who still remembered Prioress Isabella continued to assert that Dame Matilda was only biding her time till she could leap into authority and become as frightful a tyrant as her aunt had been.
In 1354 when she became treasuress Dame Matilda was thirty-six, a tall, heavily-built woman, slow of speech and sparing of glance. When she raised her eyelids it was to look: a steady observing glance, wielded like a weapon or a kitchen implement, and, its purpose fulfilled, put by again. Oddly enough, she was extremely popular with the young.
This might be the reason why the prioress, constantly praising her, and supporting her in her new-broom measures, so plainly did not like her and had kept her so long without an office. Dame Agnes, explaining the convent politics to Dame Margaret, had another theory. The prioress was so absurdly fastidious and finicking that she could not stomach Dame Matilda’s loud voice and cart-horse tread. The real explanation was so obscure that the prioress was the only person who could have given an account of it, though she would have been abashed to do so. In 1345, when she first vowed her spire, Dame Matilda was a raw-boned stockish creature, very shy, and looking much younger than her real age. Time went on, and she became self-possessed, massive, even stately, all without appearing to make any especial effort and with no one taking any pains on her behalf. The spire was still unfinished. Why should the most prosaic of her nuns have grown as smoothly as Solomon’s temple while the spire lagged and pined like a rickety child? Because of this unfortunate association of ideas the prioress felt that somehow the one had grown at the expense of the other, that Dame Matilda was the spire’s rival, and her indifference to it charged with ill-will where the indifference of the other nuns was merely due to stupidity. She had been used to console herself with the thought of Dame Isabel. Dame Isabel would recover her health – at any rate she would grow no sicklier; Dame Isabel would be the next prioress. It was probably God’s design that what had begun because of an Isabella an Isabel should complete. While there was a Dame Isabel, Dame Matilda could never amount to much, her common sense could never be more than a foil for the other’s brilliance. But Dame Isabel had died, Dame Salome (whom she had only tolerated as treasuress because she was an obliging stopgap) had resigned, and immediately the prioress had found she must submit to depend on Dame Matilda.
Yet the new treasuress showed no enmity towards the spire. It figured in her account-books along with butter and prunes and tallow and cattle-drenches. She made one or two very sensible suggestions about it, and she kept the men at their work, intervening whenever she could do so discreetly in the incessant quarrels that sprang up between the prioress and the head-mason.
‘Why was Dame Matilda talking for so long with Edmund Gurney? I wonder she does not climb up on the scaffolding and spend the afternoon with him. What with Dame Matilda and Pernelle Bastable it is a marvel that any work at all gets done on the spire.’
‘Talking of Pernelle reminds me that . . . ’ But Dame Beatrix got no further in her tactful diversion.
‘You were there, too, for part of the time. What was she gossiping about?’
‘She was reasoning with him about the price of this new load of stone.’
‘I might have known it. That is all it means to her – whether it can be done more cheaply.’
‘She is reserved. You know she has always been reserved. And naturally she would not try to compete with you in matters of taste. But it is not true that she is uninterested. Only the other day I heard her say to Dame Susanna how much she was looking forward to seeing it finished.’
The prioress walked away, red with mortification. Plainly, Dame Matilda was not only indifferent to the spire: she made game of it, and rejoiced in its laggard growth. Nowhere could she find a sympathetic hearer for her ambitions, her agonising doubts. If she consulted the nuns, they agreed with whatever she said. If she consulted the master-mason, he disagreed. Just now she was ravaged with indecision about a crocket. If only Thomas would come!
But he did not come.
In 1356 the work on the spire was suspended, and the masons told to prepare foundations for the extension of the nave. Digging was none of their business. They sat about, chewing grasses, while old Richard Noot, lame ever since the pestilence, and Mary Ragge and Mary Scole spaded and carried earth in baskets. It was impossible, Jesse Figg said, to spare anyone else from the manor, and hired labour could not be had. Inwardly he was resolved that no man of his should waste his strength while those great idle masons lolled in the shade. Though strangers might cheat the prioress they would not get round the prioress’s bailiff. Presently the master-mason took his men away, saying that they would do a small job at Waxelby and be back by Michaelmas, he did not suppose the digging would be finished till then. As it was now harvest the diggers also went away. The nuns said among themselves that the prioress would spin out the work till her dying day rather than lose the self-importance and sense of power it gave her. Fortunately there was the Methley money to pay for it, and Dame Isabel’s money to come later.
She had now been prioress for almost twelve years – a long time to hold that office. If she had been a really good prioress, good by orthodox standards, she would scarcely have been endured for so long; but her faults made her tolerable: being self-absorbed she seldom interfered, and except where her spire was involved she was quite remarkably free from suspicions. The arrears of the Methley money had been paid, the tithes now came in punctually. Life had become very comfortable, in spite of the rising cost of living – or perhaps because of it. The rise in the cost of living brought a rise in the standard of living. When difficulties with the manor resulted in less home-grown produce the deficiency was made up by buying more at fairs and markets. What is produced for sale is naturally more luxurious than what is produced for home consumption. The nuns ate more delicate foods, wore finer wool, drank wine and cider when their home-brew ran out. The bad times, too, had increased the number of pedlars, and the competition among the pedlars had improved the quality of their wares. Pins were bought freely, gone were the days when a nun searched on all-fours through the floor-strewn rushes, saying: Where is my pin? Fur-lined slippers were bought, little cushions to slip behind the loins, comfits to sweeten the breath, and new spoons that did not stretch one’s mouth till one looked like a gargoyle. New furnishings were bought, the walls had hangings, the tables had napery. About this time the book of hours, projected so long ago, was carried out by the young Dame Cecily Bovill, and found a purchaser (the de Retteville who had commissioned it had died of the Black Death). With the money that this brought in Saint Leonard’s altar was done up in the latest style.
Pernelle Bastable had a say in many of these improvements. She knew where such and such things could best be bought, she travelled to fairs and came back with bargains and novelties. Jackie saw fairs in plenty now, fairs which made Waxelby Fair very small beer. Pernelle needed a strong boy to carry bundles and scare off dogs, and Jackie was just what she needed.
He was now in his teens and by way of working for the masons, a big comely lout, fresh as a new painting with his crimson lips and green eyes. Pernelle had supplanted Ursula with her son just as she had supplanted her in the kitchen. For now, among the many servants which the convent’s improved style of living called for, Ursula was a nobody. Almost blind and very rheumatic she had drifted back towards the cloister and lived pretty much as a nun, spending most of her days before the redecorated Saint Leonard whose lips were as bright as Jackie’s. Her carnality had burned out at last, love had no more power over her than fire has over a clinker. And in the Lent of 1357 when Ursula limped into the cloister and knelt down for her penance the prioress, looking at her with embarrassment, said: ‘The time is past . . . there is no sense in it now. Go in peace, my daughter.’
It was notorious that the prioress disliked scourging Ursula; and to Ursula it could have been no pleasure. Yet for some days after both women looked cast down, and the prioress began to speak of herself as an old woman. Only a week or so earlier Pernelle, riding home from Waxelby with the lenten provisions of dried fish and figs, had been lifted from her pony by Jackie and laid on the grass. She had yielded with little ado, for she recognised a talent. Afterwards, resettling her headgear, she studied his indeterminate English profile against the pure green sky of twilight. Watching him stand there in an isolation of bodily contentment she felt an almost virginal gratitude and humility.
This humility was followed by the reflection that a mature woman has great charms for a boy. What was more natural than that poor little Jackie should make love to her? She in return would bestow her stores of experience, treasures of amorous learning now immensely ripened and subtilised by keeping; for a woman, she said to herself that night, always keeps the best wine till the last. And she had always been kind to Jackie. Later that night she woke again. She heard a shuffling of feet, quiet yawns. The nuns, poor ladies, were coming back from their mattins. They knew no pleasure, their lives never quickened into real life. Taking it all in all they would have to expiate as many sins as secular women, being greedy, slothful, angry, and proud; and yet have nothing to show for it. Here lay she, still reverberating the pleasure long laid aside and never forgotten. Too long: she was old. Her body was wrinkled, hairs grew from her chin. Very soon Jackie would not want to set his teeth in this old keeping pear. He would quit her and go off after something of his own age. For two wisdoms never can keep company, and a boy is no sooner made wise in love than he wants to impart his wisdom to some ignoramus of a girl. There are girls everywhere, and here there were the nuns. The conviction seized her that she must certainly lose Jackie to one or other of them. They were ladies, their skins were smooth with idleness, they were virgins. At any moment Jackie might feel the desire for a virgin; and having neither shame nor modesty there would be nothing to restrain him. Neither would the nuns be likely to hold back. Think of Ursula . . . all nuns are the same.
The convent noticed that Pernelle had suddenly lost her looks and was always losing her temper. They also noticed that Ursula wept a great deal, as though the scourgings had been doubled instead of remitted. As for Jackie, they noticed nothing: he was outside their world, the subject of an occasional remark that he was old enough to work as a man, and that Sir Ralph’s lessons had been wasted on him. At mid-Lent Pernelle announced that she would have to go to Waxelby to buy provisions for Easter, and that she would take Jackie with her. They were absent for a week.
It was the fifth day of their absence, the nuns, walking in the orchard, were talking about robbers and Dame Beatrix was recounting her dream in which she had seen Pernelle’s horse rush out from a thicket, its eye-balls glaring, carrying, not Pernelle but a tall hairy man in a torn jerkin, when Dame Susanna exclaimed that a man was riding towards the convent. They pressed their faces to the gap in the reed fence. Sure enough, there was horse and rider. The horse was not Pernelle’s horse, neither was it rushing, neither was its rider particularly tall or dishevelled. But Dame Beatrix talked of signs and portents and they listened, half-persuaded, till Dame Susanna spoke again, to say that the rider was Prior Thomas’s secretary. They hurried indoors to wipe their faces and set their veils and clean the dirt from under their nails. A breath of festivities was in the air. What a pity Pernelle was not there to whip up one of her custards!
There was no sign of festivities about Steven Ludcott. His manner was cold and hurried, his voice had an edge on it. When they enquired after Prior Thomas he replied that Thomas was prior of Etchingdon no longer. He had resigned his office in order to devote himself to contemplation.
There has been some quarrel, the prioress thought, or some scandal. The partisanship of her girlhood boiled up in her, she felt herself throbbing with protective anger, and ready to exclaim that the whole world was in league to flout poor Tom just because he was cleverer than other people. She said:
‘My cousin Thomas has always been deeply religious. His retirement will be a great loss to Etchingdon, but Christendom will be the gainer, for no doubt he will enrich it with some treatise of inestimable value.’
What’s more, her thoughts continued, this fellow has had a hand in Tom’s downfall. Tom never had any discretion in his choice of favourites.
‘Our new prior, Prior Gilbert Botley,’ he said, ‘has sent me to you with this letter. He chose me to carry it since I have been here before and know something of the circumstances.’
Prior Gilbert greeted his well-beloved sister in Christ, and while deploring the inroads of Mammon upon the religious life yet found it his duty to remind her that the interest on the Methley tithe since 1351 had not been paid. Some very exact and impressive calculations followed, and the letter closed with an allusion to the merit of the serving-man who converted his single talent into ten.
The prioress turned to Dame Margaret, who was present at the interview as a chaperone, and asked her to go and fetch Dame Matilda de Stapledon.
The dreaded name of Stapledon shook Steven Ludcott’s reserve. No sooner had Dame Margaret left them than he said: ‘Actually, the whole of this trouble was brought to a head by the Methley tithes. It was all so unbusinesslike, a family deal between Prior Thomas and yourself. The community objected.’
‘The community,’ she said, ‘has been slow to anger.’
‘Exactly! The community felt that it was time the whole matter was looked into and regularised. We could not have the late prior disposing of the community’s goods as though they were his private property, handing over a considerable part of the Etchingdon income without consultation, without contract. Nothing at all, nothing beyond a mere note that the Methley tithes were to be paid to Oby.’
‘Which you, I think, drew up? I recollect my cousin asking you to do so. We were all very unbusinesslike, that is true. For instance, I think we omitted any mention of the rate of interest, any mention of interest at all.’
‘Very probably. We were interrupted, were we not? By the way, what became of your mad priest?’
‘Thanks to Our Lady and Saint Leonard he is perfectly recovered.’
Entering, Dame Matilda received a meaning glance of comradeship from her prioress. It was as with one mind and soul that the prioress and treasuress of Oby conversed with Steven Ludcott. For the cloistered life develops in women infinite resources both of resentment and of intuition; or perhaps it merely develops their sensibility, from which arise both understanding and a delight in being misunderstood. Dame Matilda and the prioress might have been rehearsing their strategy for months. Though Steven Ludcott left Oby with every jot of his errand completed, the interest agreed on and his spleen vented, he rode away with the sensation of having been horribly mauled between the pair of them.
He was no sooner out of the house than a spirited defensive action became a defeat. The prioress had hysterics, Dame Matilda cursed like a crusader, and Dame Margaret, who had sat reading her psalter during the interview, sped off to tell the convent that Oby was certainly ruined and would most likely be dissolved by the bishop.
It was to the aftermath of all this that Pernelle Bastable returned, explaining that the Waxelby merchants were asking such exorbitant prices that she had thought it best to go on to Lambsholme, where she had bought such raisins as had never before been eaten at Oby. The price of the raisins was the only thing in her story that made an impression. Dame Matilda said it was much too high. The convent, she added, had to face an unexpected liability, and for some years to come must practise economy.
To Pernelle this meant one thing only: her Jackie would not be so well fed. There would be fewer little marginal pies and pittances to hand through the buttery wicket. Feeding Jackie had become a precious duty – rather more than a duty, indeed; for she knew that to a young man the elderly woman he loves is sufficiently like his mother for nourishment to be part of the transaction. These virgins might economise if they pleased. They had nothing to lose but their suppers. She would lose Jackie. Reckless with agitation she began to huff and expostulate, saying that if, after all she had done for them, the ladies of Oby questioned her honesty there could be only one ending; go she must and go she would. Dame Matilda blandly agreed. Even so, Pernelle might have stayed (for travelling is costly, and ruin to a woman’s looks, and there seemed little chance that another convent or her brother-in-law at Beverley would welcome her with a Jackie under her wing) if a Lent lily had not appeared behind Jackie’s ear. A young man does not wear a Lent lily for nothing – unless he is a poet. It was during Holy Week, when the convent was busy commemorating Christ’s death and passion, that Pernelle arranged her departure. While Dame Matilda was nailed down in quire Pernelle could do much as she pleased in the storeroom, explaining to the servants that she was getting ready for the great festival of Easter. On Holy Saturday she staged a quarrel, declared she would live no longer where she was not trusted, and rode off, her saddle-bags swinging, while the bells of Lintoft, Oby, and Wivelham stammered out their haec, haec, haec dies, assuring each other across the moor that Christ was risen. ‘As for my bedding,’ she cried over her shoulder, ‘I will not wait for it. Jackie can ride over with it later to the inn at Waxelby.’
By the time Oby realised that Jackie was gone for good and had taken the roan horse with him it was too late to do anything. Several people had seen the woman and the boy riding southward, but supposing they went on yet another marketing expedition for those spendthrift nuns had taken no special note of it. Ursula wept. Jesse Figg cursed over the loss of the beast. Dame Salome, with one of those flashes of worldly wisdom which at times emerge from very stupid well-meaning people, said: ‘Now we can expect a crop of slanders. For when people do you an injury they always slander you afterwards.’
No one can economise without arousing suspicion and dislike, and an economising community offends even more than an economising individual. Presently even the beggars and pilgrims who came for alms went on through the countryside proclaiming that Oby had grown so miserly that it provided nothing but sour beer and barley meal. Such news travels far. The parents of two prospective novices wrote to say that they found their daughters’ vocations would be better suited under the Cistercian Rule. The convent’s vicar at Tunwold complained to the bishop that Oby, while building fast enough for itself, had allowed the Tunwold parsonage to fall into shameful disrepair.
Tunwold parsonage came up at the next Visitation. The diocesan surveyor, sent to verify the vicar’s complaints, had returned with the news that the roof was not only in tatters but sheltered, such as it was, a concubine and five small children. Though the nuns could not be held directly responsible for the concubine, such a state of things bore out the truth of what the prioress had said, half-laughing and in better days, to Thomas de Foley: That God does not wish his nuns to hold spiritualities. The bishop spared them this platitude, and went on to tell them how, when admonished, John Cuckow had pleaded that his house was infested by water-spirits, which was why he had taken a woman to live with him, it being better to go astray after ordinary flesh than after dracs and melusines. Smoothing his cheeks the bishop suggested that as well as having the roof mended the prioress might be well-advised to have the place thoroughly exorcised. Dame Beatrix broke in with some hair-raising stories of phantom hounds galloping through Cornwall. Feeling that Dame Beatrix was displaying herself to be quite as silly as John Cuckow, the prioress put in a word to her credit, saying what a skilled doctoress she was, and how she had cured Sir Ralph with a black cock.
This jogged the bishop’s memory. He had come intending to find out more about Sir Ralph, whom he had met and taken as a matter of course in an earlier Visitation. The scandal at Etchingdon had been a major one, and Steven Ludcott had felt himself sufficiently implicated in Prior Thomas’s vagaries (they had gone as far as necromancy and raising the ghost of Avicenna) to avail himself of any red herrings handy. At the Etchingdon enquiry he had testified that Thomas de Foley had been seriously scratched by a mad priest at Oby, an alteration in his demeanour had been perceptible to the anxious Steven from that day onward: it was his opinion that Sir Ralph slavering at the jaws, howling like a wolf, and obviously under the dominion of Satan, had infected the prior. As a tailpiece he had added that nobody knew where Sir Ralph had come from. All this had come to the bishop’s hearing. He discounted the dominion of Satan (the Black Death had roused up every superstition in England), but a priest from nowhere needed investigation. He questioned the prioress and some of the elder ladies. From all of them he got the same story. Sir Ralph was a man of sober life, a careful counsellor, a comfortable preacher. He had only been mad once, and then quite harmlessly. He was fond of reading and of fishing. Where did he come from? Dame Agnes said roundly: ‘From God.’
She was now of a great age, leaning on a staff and quite bald. No amount of pinning could secure her coif, which sidled on her polished skull with every shake of her palsy.
‘From God,’ she repeated.
‘Do you remember seeing his letters of ordination?’
‘Dame Blanch de Fanal (God rest her soul!) saw them. She saw to it all. It was a terrible time, nothing but fluster and dying, and our priest had run away. If I live to a hundred I shall not forget it. Dame Blanch looked out of a window, and there he stood, and at the same moment there appeared a rainbow. He cured my squirrel, too, when she was scalded and all her fur came off.’
She hobbled away.
I may get more sense from a younger nun, he thought. Presently Dame Susanna Piers came in for her interview. She had been trying to nerve herself to speak of how Sir Ralph had raved in his sickness and had declared himself no priest. Her demeanour convinced the bishop that she was going to be full of scruples, and as he disliked scrupulous nuns and was feeling very tired he questioned her as briefly as possible, said nothing of Sir Ralph, and dismissed her before she could begin any confidences. The Virgin, thought Dame Susanna, smote my lips in the very moment when I was going to speak a slander. She went to the chapel and began to pray forgiveness for harbouring wicked thoughts. Meanwhile the bishop was back in the guest-chamber, still puzzling a little about this dull-looking man who had had the heroism to enter a house where the pestilence had entered before him and who an hour before, it seemed, had been wandering about at a loose end. No doubt there was some perfectly satisfactory explanation. The de Foleys were traditionally proud, Alicia de Foley was not reputed lacking in that family grace, she would scarcely engage a priest – even when priests were at a premium – without making sure of his credentials. And though there was no record of the transaction in the episcopal roll of appointments the Black Death had caused many such hiatuses. Perhaps they had neglected to apply to the late bishop for his approval. They were very unbusinesslike, that was obvious.
I will ask the man himself, he thought sleepily, while his chaplain sat at his bedside reading aloud from the Lives of the Hermits. That would be best, it would spare the prioress’s feelings and save time. How pleasant to be in Egypt, sitting under a palm tree, plaiting a garment of palm fibre and speaking to nobody. Yes, he would speak to Sir Ralph tomorrow. But during the night his sore throat grew worse, and by the morning his larynx was so much inflamed that it was impossible to speak more than a word or two. All the voice he could muster had to be expended in thanks, in replies to condolences, in assurances that his cold had not been caught at Oby, in reiterated thanks for all the provisions being made to ease his journey. Dame Beatrix, hurrying forward with a linctus, dragged the priest after her. ‘My Lord, pray take a sip of this every hour. Sir Ralph will tell you I am a good doctoress.’
‘Yes, indeed, Dame Beatrix has much skill in medicine.’ He looked round, saw Dame Susanna, and added: ‘Dame Susanna, too, is most skilful. I should have died of the pestilence if it had not been for her care of me.’
‘No, no! I did nothing, it was not I! It is Ursula you should thank.’
A modest nun, shrinking from praise, the bishop noted. A kindly tactful priest The man had a loud roystering voice, yet he spoke with a certain crispness, an accent of scholarship. Speech, carriage, demeanour – everything was priestly, and he seemed, too, perfectly sane. A very worthy fellow, no doubt; running to seed a little, growing fat and forgetting his scholarship among all these women, possibly more inclined to follow Peter with a net than with a crook; but a good sort of man, and just where he was needed, and so providentially free from ambition that he might be counted on to remain at Oby.
A healthy man, too. One would need to be extremely healthy to withstand such a cold lodging, such draughts playing over the altar, such a melancholy marish climate. No wonder if from time to time he went a little mad. There is no sin in madness, only God’s wrath, and God’s wrath often falls on the most estimable characters, as on, for instance, the prophet Daniel. Daniel’s statements, so inconsecutive, so inconsistent – one must attribute them to God’s wrath. When did order and reason slide into the world? – with Christ, lux mundi? Perhaps one might say a little earlier, a cool silvery intimation of the light to come glimmering through the heathen philosophers. So the bishop mused, shepherding his thoughts, trying to put off a recognition of an oncoming toothache. The litter creaked and swayed, presently the bishop began to fall asleep – a light sleep of old age in which he could distinctly hear himself snoring. Squeezed uncomfortably into a corner the chaplain looked at him with a malevolence so habitual that it was almost indifference.