(November 1357–May 1360)
This was in 1357. Bishop William Adlam, an unostentatious figure, went home to die, and Sir Ralph remained at Oby. His brief fillip of alarm was over. He did not think there was any further likelihood that an enquiry would rout him out from his place as nun’s priest. He had exchanged the insecurity of being a man for the security of being a function; it was a sound bargain, though he sometimes regretted it.
The cassock in which he had fought Thomas de Foley was now rounded like a grapeskin, even when hanging on its peg it kept a flaccid rotundity like a grapeskin which has been sucked. But he said that it would last him out till the great day when the spire was finished and consecrated. The work on the spire was still going on – for economy’s sake in the most wasteful manner possible: with one man and a boy.
‘I begin to think there must be a curse on my building,’ said the prioress, voicing to Sir Ralph what her nuns had felt for a long time already. ‘Ever since I began it we have met with one disaster after another: the pestilence, the loss of that relic, Dame Isabel’s death and those floods, and the vile behaviour of Etchingdon about the Methley tithe, and Pernelle Bastable’s robberies, and those two novices being diverted to Culvercombe, and the cost of the repairs at Tunwold . . . ’
Her voice died away. She was tired of hearing herself complain and of hearing Sir Ralph’s perfunctory consolations. Her laments rang false, because they always stopped short of the truth: the truth was Thomas. Since Steven Ludcott’s visit there had been no news of Thomas de Foley. Thomas was lost and gone, his career ended, his light put out. She would never see him again, he would die and she would not know it. Her spire might be completed, but he would never come to praise it. And here am I, she thought, fixed in the religious life like a candle on a spike. I consume, I burn away, always lighting the same corner, always beleaguered by the same shadows; and in the end I shall burn out and another candle will be fixed in my stead.
She knew, too, who the next candle would be. Dame Matilda would succeed her as prioress, just as certainly as William Holly would follow Jesse Figg as the next bailiff.
In the spring of 1358 Sir Ralph found that he was tired of fishing, and wanted to go hawking instead. A strong horse would be needed to carry him, and since Jackie had gone off with the roan, horses were a painful subject. Rather stiffly – he had no talent for asking favours – he consulted Jesse Figg. Having said that it was useless to consult him about a horse, he had neither time nor heart for such frivolities, the bailiff met him a week later with the news that everything was arranged. The horse would be Peter Noot’s dun horse, a raw-boned animal, but with feeding it would come into better shape and last for years; a horse taken from field-work is so grateful that it will give you another ten years’ service. Peter Noot was due to die at any moment. When he died the convent would claim a heriot, its due of his best beast. The dun horse was not really his best beast; his young ox was better value. ‘But do I say it is,’ said Jesse, ‘old Matilda will believe it. And Widow Noot, she wouldn’t complain at losing a horse and keeping an ox, an ox is work now and meat later. My cousin at Dudham has a hawk that will suit you. It’s a sparrow-hawk. A sparrow-hawk for a priest.’ Sir Ralph had looked forward to choosing his hawk; but he saw that he must take both or neither, and a hawk without a horse would be no use to him in this bare country. Peter Noot died, the heriot was claimed and curried, the hawk and her trappings arrived. When he felt her hard feet fidget on his hand Sir Ralph experienced an authentic happiness. At last he had something of his own.
The Oby people were pleased to see him ride out on Noot’s horse. They had always liked him pretty well, giving him the meed of approval which an idle man who minds his own business is pretty sure to receive from the working Englishman. Now that he had a hawk they liked him better. It put her in mind of the old days, said Grannie Scole (pretending she could remember them), when the manor had a proper lord on it instead of a parcel of nuns. Those were the days: always something going on, hunting or hawking, hanging or whipping, always something to keep life stirring. Oby had never prospered since the nuns came to it.
Riding out with his hawk Sir Ralph began to have a hawk’s eye view of his world. The river ceased to be a fisherman’s river, a rosary of pools and shallows; from the back of the dun horse he saw it as a progress, winding like some wasteful history, with here and there the record of a forsaken channel, such as a row of alders sulking in a hollow, or a long ribbon of rushes. He began to see the shape of the hamlet, too, and how cunningly the hovels had been plastered to any shelter against the prevailing wind. Round and about them ran a network of footpaths, tending towards the common field and the common waste. Along one track went the Hollys, along another the Noots, and the girl driving a lame cow past the thorn thicket must be a Scole, for that was the way the Scoles went. The masons’ settlement had added new tracks to the tracks of the village, tracks somehow different: one could see that they were made by strangers. Out of this network of footpaths, purposeful and well-trodden, ravelled the three tracks from Oby to the outer world. The southward one led to Wivelham, a wretched place, and to Dudham beyond it. Westward, past Oby Fen, a track went over the rising ground to Lintoft, and later joined the old road which brought you in the end to London, and was called King Street; and to the north-east the Hog Trail and the river twisted on towards Waxelby and the pale seaward sky. The Black Death had dealt hard with Waxelby, and still lingered on there like a dog worrying a carcass. The wharfs were rotting, the export trade of salted herrings had dwindled, the great church built by the friars was botched up and would never be properly finished. In twenty years’ time there would be little left of Waxelby, so men said, but a byword.
Waxelby wealthy,
Wivelham wet,
Lintoft plenty,
Dudham sharp-set.
The dun horse and the Dudham hawk had drawn Sir Ralph into the company of the bailiff and his nephew, William Holly. He discovered that Jesse and William knew much more about the nuns than he did, and discussed them and their doings with dispassionate familiarity, always referring to them as Old So-and-So, regardless of whether they were actually old, middle-aged, or young. They might, in fact, have been discussing the peculiarities of the Oby cows – with no more reverence, and equally, with no more intention of disrespect After the first slight discomfort of adapting himself to this outlook on religious ladies Sir Ralph enjoyed sitting in Jesse Figg’s orchard, drinking cider and slapping away midges while the dews fell and the blackbirds sang through the dusk. His appearance was always greeted with the same remark: he must sit down and tell them about his travels. That was as far as his travels took them. Jesse and William then resumed their sober untiring arguments; sometimes about affairs on the manor or in the convent, sometimes about events that had happened during the time of the Danes. It was an everlasting dispute how far the Danes had travelled up the Waxle Stream. As far as Kitt’s Bend, asserted William. Further by a mile, Jesse maintained; for at that time the Waxle Stream flowed in a straighter course, cutting down through Old Wivelham Fen where the ghost of Red Thane’s daughter walked to this day through the osier-beds. Wrangling about the place of the landing, both men agreed as to what happened next. Whether at Kitt’s Bend or further upstream, the Danes were welcomed by an old woman who gave them poisoned beer; half of them died forthwith and the rest were so weakened by sicking-up that the old woman’s sons came out of the reeds and finished them off. Their boat was all that was left of them, and some of its timber was built into the roof of Lintoft church. If you licked on a wet day you could still taste the salt water in it.
Sometimes Sir Ralph tried to persuade them that they might be descended from these same Danish invaders. Swearing by Saint Olave they said they were English, nothing but English, and that no Danes had settled hereabouts, for the English had driven them off, as they would have driven off Duke William and his crew if Duke William had not been cunning enough to land in the south where men don’t know how to fight. Then Jesse would call for more drink, and his wife would waddle out with it, and stand easing her bare feet in the orchard grass, staring round her with mud-coloured eyes. She was a Wivelham woman, born in the mud, she said. One shapeless garment covered her from neck to knee and her head was muffled in a dirty green hood. She had no air of being a bailiff’s wife, even on saints’ days she wore the same dingy clothes and the same dumb looks. For all that, she was a valuable woman to Jesse, the best of his three wives; she had an infallible gift of foretelling the weather. One evening as she stood there listening to the disputes about the Danes with her usual waterlogged expression the fancy came to Sir Ralph that she might have waddled towards them out of those same times, that with the same dull stare she had watched the beaked prow of the warship rearing above the osiers, and that if anyone could say how far the Danish ship had got, she could. The thought was so compelling that he half turned to ask her. But at the same moment she began to sidle away, clumsy and majestic as a goose.
Another drinker in Jesse’s orchard was John Ragge, who fifteen years earlier had been one of the three men provided by the manor for the wars in France. An arrow had put out his eye, and though a one-eyed archer is still good for something, when the other eye began to fail he was turned off. There were many disabled men like him, going through the country in gangs, and he joined such a gang. One winter’s night when he and his mates were busy in a dovecote a pair of great dogs came bounding out and attacked them. John Ragge, mistaking a frozen horse-pond for solid ground, crashed through the ice into icy water. There he remained; for the dogs sat watching him, he could hear them growl whenever he stirred; and in the morning the servants came out, noosed him, dragged him through the crackling ice to the bank, and thrashed him. To hear him tell this adventure one would think it was the most triumphant moment in his travels. It had taken him over a twelvemonth to beg and cozen his way back to Oby where, of all the tribe of Ragges, time and the pestilence had left only his sister-in-law and her two daughters, skinny muscular women who worked as thatchers. They had not much welcome for a blind man who spoke like a foreigner and was too lazy to trim gads or carry bundles of reed; but having once heard the story of the night in the pond William Holly could not hear it too often, and brought him to the orchard as a minstrel. Sir Ralph gave him an old cloak, and once a day he stumped up to the convent for an alms of bread and leavings.
It was through him that the novices began to practise levitation.
Dame Agnes died early in 1358. The new novice-mistress was Dame Susanna. She had neither the learning or the deportment of Dame Agnes, but her manners were particularly elegant, she was the cleanest eater in the convent, and her temper was so equable that even singing-lessons went by without ill-feeling. Noticing that the plain-chant was no longer urged on with thumps and stamps, and that no cries of ‘Fool!’ and ‘Blockhead!’, no yelps of pain, broke the flow of the melodies, the older nuns were inclined to say that Dame Susanna was no disciplinarian. But no one could dispute that she was a good musician, and that the novices’ singing showed it. Another subject which every novice must master is the art of alms-giving: how to serve out doles at the wicket, whom to encourage, and whom to snub. Under Dame Agnes, who hated the poor, this had been chiefly a matter of snubbing. Dame Susanna, herself relishing a little gossip, enjoined politeness as part of the performance. Nothing loath, the novices chattered at the wicket like a troop of birds, practising, so they said, their French on John Ragge. Long after he had finished his victuals and turned his cup upside-down he lingered on, talking French and gibberish, and assuring them that the nuns in France were all very haughty and undersized. But it was in plain English (for really he knew very little French beyond the usual salutations and bawdry) that he told them how girls in Brittany have a game called Flying Saint Katharine, and how, if they sing long and earnestly enough, and are pure virgins, the girl sitting on the clasped hands of her four play-mates will rise and hover in the air.
‘Fly, good Saint Katharine,’ he sang in his weather-beaten voice. ‘Fly up to your tower! And up she goes like a feather. But it can only be done in Brittany, I think,’ he added, his quick ears catching a little cough from Dame Susanna.
A few days later Dame Matilda, on her way back from inspecting some repairs to the brewhouse, heard giggles and a breathless singing coming from under the great walnut tree, and paused to ask the novices what wickedness they had hit on now.
Lilias le Bailey answered, rubbing her elbow: ‘We are learning to fly, Madam Treasuress.’
She was thirteen – a tall girl, with burning hazel eyes, and the beauty among them. But they were all fine young women, Dame Matilda thought, straight and well-bred and likely to be a credit to the community.
‘And where did you learn all this nonsense?’
‘From Blind John. But there are not enough of us, only three. Sweet Madam Treasuress, buy us two more little novices, very little ones would do.’
It was one of those fine ripening days which come in mid-July. The air was pungent with the wild peppermint that grew along the ditches, and glancing up into the tree Dame Matilda noticed that there would be a fine crop of walnuts. Relaxed with heat and satisfaction she looked benevolently on the three girls and forgot to remember that games of this kind lead to torn clothes and sprained ankles.
‘Romping and sprawling,’ she said. ‘Well, make the most of your time. No more of this when you are nuns, remember.’
Only as she walked on did it come into her mind to wonder where Dame Susanna might be. By rights, Dame Susanna should have been with her novices.
Dame Susanna was on her knees among some shallots which had been laid to dry. Her mouth was open, and she was staring upwards. Seized with foreboding Dame Matilda hurried towards her, though when she spoke it was to say rather casually: ‘I’m sure you would be more comfortable in the shade.’
Dame Susanna scrambled to her feet. Dame Matilda’s forebodings intensified themselves: only a visionary could look so distraught and so defensive.
‘What are you looking at so earnestly?’
‘I was watching the hawk – Sir Ralph’s hawk.’
‘And praying it may bring you down a snipe for supper, I suppose. Well, no doubt we shall all be in the air soon. I left your novices trying to fly. Perhaps you might go to them before they all take wing.’
As a rule Dame Susanna winced like an aspen under the slightest rebuke. Now she went off with only a surface apology, like a person answering out of a dream. Dame Matilda thrust aside her coif and scratched her head. All her pleasure in the brewhouse repairs, the fine ripening weather, the promise of the walnuts and the promise of the novices, was dissipated. A taint of the supernatural had mixed itself with the healthy odour of the drying shallots. Of all menaces to peace and quiet a visionary nun is the worst, and when that nun is the novice-mistress the worst is ten times worsened.
What had the woman been staring about for? More than Sir Ralph’s hawk. How could she be brought back to earth? Dame Matilda scratched and pondered and walked out of the sun and into it again, wishing she could ask someone for advice, and knowing that there was no one whose advice she valued – for in this matter she could not consult Jesse Figg. That is the drawback of being so very sensible: one cannot take counsel because it is against common sense to seek it. The metal of common sense is so lonely and unfusable that for people like Dame Matilda there is no career except to be a tyrant or a superlative drudge. In the end she was reduced to the usual expedient of the despairingly practical: she would try what a chance augury might suggest, consulting the first person she met. The first person she met was Ursula, squatting in a doorway and rubbing a censer. Knowing all the household footsteps by heart Ursula did not look up, but asked if the censer were sufficiently burnished.
‘Yes, you’ve put a good polish on it. Poor Ursula, you are almost blind now, are you not? How much can you see?’
‘I can see light, and darkness. Sometimes, if I look at the sky, I can see a bird pass.’
‘Can you see our faces?’
Ursula shook her head.
‘I was going to ask you if you had noticed anything about Dame Susanna. She looks changed and sickly, to me.’
The blind countenance, attentive as an animal’s, looked wise for a moment, and then became blank.
‘She is busier now, being novice-mistress, perhaps.’
‘Not so busy that she need sicken.’
‘Oh, no, no! But you see her among young ladies. That would make her look older, would it not?’
Ursula kissed the censer, rubbed it where she had kissed it, and shuffled indoors. Dame Matilda knew that she had been put off a scent. She despised Dame Susanna for choosing such a confidante.
Meanwhile Dame Susanna had returned to her novices, and now they were practising an antiphon. The voices extended the tune like a silk canopy, and under that canopy one was safe from hearing the little bells fastened to the hawk’s feet, which sounded so much like the little bell at mass. The antiphon was Quinque prudentes, from the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins. And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps, and the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.
Presently the sound of the hawk’s bells began to pierce the singing like pins pricking through a piece of silk. It was Sir Ralph’s hawk. Nine years ago she had stood at Sir Ralph’s bedside, watching his hand clench into a fist and strike the wall till the blood spurted. A black stubble bristled from the spotted purple face, the air that steamed from him was foul with fever, and in the voice of someone infuriated by a long argument he asserted that he was damned, damned, damned, no priest and therefore damned. Ursula, who was with her, thrust a cup against his mouth. He whined and quarrelled with it like a child, and then, like a child, frowned and sighed and fell asleep. But later on he had cried out again, maintaining that he was no priest, and damned; and that time she had been by him alone. She had really been alone ever since, excommunicated by this fear she dared not express.
Once she had forced herself to speak of it to Ursula. Ursula had flown into a rage, saying that Dame Susanna should know better than to believe the witness of fever against a good man and a priest. Ursula did not believe it. But then, what is belief? A thought lodges in the mind, will not out, preserves its freshness and colour and flexibility like the corpse of a saint: is this belief, or is it heresy? Many times she had made ready to disburden herself in confession: to harbour such a suspicion was an offence against charity, and should be confessed, repented, absolved. But something always intervened: was this intervention diabolical, or angelical? Afterwards, looking at her fellow-nuns, seeing the small, familiar mannerisms which each one carried like a coat-of-arms, she had been appalled to think how she might have ruined them by suggesting that for all these years they had been served by a priest who was no priest. Even if it were disproved, and she for ever disgraced for having spoken it, how could Oby recover from such a scandal?
‘Exite obviam Christo Domino-o-o. Shall we do it again, or is that enough?’ asked the novice Philippa.
‘Once more, I think. And this time try to be rather less noisy at clamor factus est.’
The hawk had missed her prey, and was mounting for another hover. But those bells only rang for the death of a little bird. One must not give way to accepting omens. One must stop one’s ears, like the prudent adder. One must be silent. The sweat broke out on her face as she thought how easily she could ruin Oby. Who would bequeath manors or send novices to a house where such a suspicion could be breathed? The lamp must have oil, or it goes out. A convent must have money. And Oby was now a poor house: for the last ten years there had been talk of poverty, poverty and debt; the words had struck her the harder because she herself had brought a very little dowry, so little that if it had not been for her musicianship they would not have been able to admit her. She had impoverished them, was she to ruin them too? And for nothing more substantial than a fancy based on words spoken in a fever? It could not be true. It could not be possible. Heaven would not allow such a thing, and certainly not for so many years. There would have been a sign. A dream would be sent, a toad would jump from the chalice, the spire would fall. The spire! She turned and looked at it. It was tall now, pure as a lily-stalk in its cage of scaffolding. One could see how long it had taken to grow, this lily, for already the lower stages had begun to weather. It would soon be completed. Then it would be consecrated. The Virgin would accept the lily.
‘Exite obviam Christo Domino-o-o-o.’ The singers prolonged the last syllable till their breaths gave out. They did not want to go through Quinque prudentes again. They waited for Dame Susanna to tell them what to do next. But she seemed to have forgotten all about them. She had turned away, and was staring at the spire as though she had fastened her very soul to it. The novice Philippa tapped lightly on her white forehead with her white forefinger, and gave a condoling nod.
A few evenings later as the elder nuns sat in the prioress’s chamber Dame Matilda loosed her arrow.
‘By the way, I find our novices are learning to fly.’
The prioress frowned, for the arrow had twanged too sharply in Dame Matilda’s voice. She made a languid enquiry, and was told that Dame Susanna could best answer it. Dame Susanna explained that it was a game.
‘There is a song,’ Dame Matilda pursued. ‘I don’t know how it goes. I have no ear for music. But no doubt Dame Susanna can sing it.’
In a timid voice, invincibly in tune, Dame Susanna began to sing. Instantly Dame Salome, not usually very musical, joined in at the top of her voice, and sang the tune through several times.
Since it really was not possible to praise such singing, the prioress praised the tune, and said that it sounded as if it were a very ancient one. Dame Beatrix remarked that much the same game was played by little girls in Cornwall, and added that as a child she had played it herself, and that if you were the girl in the middle you felt sick.
‘Did you fly?’ Dame Salome’s voice was so solemn and suspicious that the others were abashed by her silliness. Dame Beatrix began to laugh, and answered that she had not been so fortunate. Instead, she had tumbled, bruising herself badly, and had been beaten for dirtying her clothes. The prioress remarked that children lived in pain as in an element, so much so that beating was probably no real change to them. Dame Helen said that she had been a very well-thumped child, and told a story. Conversation had moved elsewhere when Dame Salome harked back, and said: ‘You know, there are certainly some who can fly. At least they remain in the air quite a little while. And was not Saint Katharine herself carried all the way to Alexandria by angels?’
‘There are so many stories of flying,’ said Dame Beatrix, ‘that no doubt some of them are true. But I think one would need to be extremely young or extremely saintly.’
‘Not at all,’ said Dame Salome. ‘It can happen with quite an ordinary person – a good person, of course. But one need not be anything so very out-of-the-ordinary. Cleverness is not everything.’
Dame Helen agreed that cleverness was not everything. Many saints were simple enough. The prioress remarked that it was not till christian times that simplicity became a virtue; the good characters of the Old Testament were ingenious as well as virtuous.
‘That was because they were Jews,’ said Dame Beatrix.
Once more the conversation was turned away from flying. But Dame Salome continued flushed and thoughtful. Dame Matilda watched her. Though well aware that she had made a false step in her attack on Dame Susanna, Dame Matilda saw no reason why she should not follow up the false step with a better one. A dog-day demon had entered into her. She was determined to pull down her quarry, no matter who suffered by it. So she waited till there was a pause in the small-talk, and then remarked on the scarcity of miracles nowadays. As she had intended, Dame Salome instantly remarked on the scarcity of faith. After a couple of sentences Dame Salome was induced to say that faith could remove mountains.
‘Come, come . . . You are not as heavy as all that,’ said Dame Matilda, and rose, putting back her sleeves. This was the difficult moment. But by exerting all her geniality, her air of good-fellowship and affable tolerance, she conjured Dame Helen, Dame Beatrix, and at last Dame Susanna, into her circle.
‘Now then! Fly, good Saint Katharine!’
Amusement turned to embarrassment, embarrassment to a communal frenzy. ‘FLY, good Saint Kathar-ine! Fly UP to your Tow-er!’ They sang at the tops of their voices, riotous as vintagers. Each felt another’s gripping hand-clasp, their wrists ached, their fingers grew slippery with sweat. Thinking of the difficult moment when they must at last let go they went on and on; and Dame Salome jigged up and down on the swaying net of their hands, her features resolutely composed in a prim smile, like some enormously weighty doll.
‘Oh! O holy Virgin!’
Someone had let go. Dame Salome sat on the floor and wept bitterly.
She wept unheeded because the others were looking nervously towards the prioress. The prioress sat with her eyes cast down, and her fingers closed so sharply on her little dog that it yelped and bared its teeth. Out of the past came Thomas de Foley’s voice telling of the absurdities of the Gilbertine nuns, the cabbage soup with two and a half radishes for each monk. Out of the present came Dame Salome’s sobs, which burst from her like hic-cups because she was so much out of breath. At last Dame Beatrix took pity on her, wiping her face and thumping her shoulders.
‘Is that better? Shall I get you some dill-cordial?’
Dame Salome looked up and said sullenly, ‘I flew. I know you won’t believe it, but I flew.’
Dame Matilda looked at Dame Susanna, and slowly shrugged her shoulders. That night she fell asleep thanking her prudent saints for a good evening’s work. She did not suppose that Dame Susanna would cultivate visions for some time to come.
When, after a decent interval, the question of John Ragge’s deservingness was somehow raised in chapter there was a general sense of relief at the decision to feed him no longer. When there are so many cases of real need and genuine desert it was an abuse of alms-giving to nourish such idle roysterers. Throughout the convent there was a noticeable air of decorum and spring-cleaning. The incident in the prioress’s chamber had a wholesome after-effect, bracing as doses of wormwood. Everyone felt with relief a tightened bond of discipline and convention, the sturdy tradition of the ordinary which had controlled for centuries and all over Christendom the cloistered life. In that life there was no place for aberrations of individuality. One monastic must resemble another, and all go the same way, a flock soberly ascending to a heavenly pasture, a flock counterfeiting as best it could under difficult circumstances the superlative regimentation of heaven. Even Dame Salome was subdued; and in Jesse Figg’s orchard Sir Ralph was told how Old Matilda and Old Susanna had had another set-to, and now it was patched up again.
John Ragge’s chatter at the wicket was regretted for a while and then forgotten. By the end of August the game of Flying Saint Katharine was forgotten too. There were the apples to gather, and the damsons and the elderberries and the blackberries. The fine weather lasted on into October, with frosts sharpening at night and dissolving in golden mornings. Quantities of wild geese flew over. Sir Ralph said that in all his years at Oby he had not seen a greater flocking of birds. It was a sign of a hard winter, and by such signs God warns his creatures to prepare against it. God’s creatures were busy preparing as best they could. A great deal of firing was stolen from Saint Leonard’s wood, several geese disappeared, and Joan Holly’s wadded coat vanished from the thornbush where she had hung it to air. She said plainly that Elizabeth and Margery Ragge had stolen it to wrap their worthless uncle in. Now that Blind John was no longer fed by the convent he was less popular with his gossips.
On the eve of All Saints the masons began to take down the scaffolding – for at last the spire was finished; miraculously, one might say, considering all the mischances which had delayed it and, more potent than any mischance, the prioress’s creative vacillations. But, just as at the end of a labour the child asserts itself and comes forth, it seemed that the spire had at last escaped from her whimsical control.
Walking in the cloisters Dame Beatrix and Dame Helen paused to watch the timbers being lowered.
‘Who could have believed it? For all these years we have been expecting it. And yet, now that it has come, I feel quite astonished, quite taken aback.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Dame Helen more tranquilly.
‘It makes me feel very old.’
It made Dame Helen feel very old too.
‘Another wonderful thing is that we still have the same prioress. When you think of all the changes’ – Dame Beatrix began to count on her fingers – ‘and all the deaths . . . Dame Agnes, Dame Isabel, Dame Blanch. And Pernelle Bastable going away with our horse. And Bishop William. Well, God rest their souls! They were all very good people.’
‘We must not forget those who died at the time of the pestilence. The spire was begun before that, you remember.’
‘So it was. Dame Helen Aslack, Dame Emily—’
‘Dame Alice Guillemard—’
‘That poor little novice – what was she called? She was a hunchback.’
‘Wait a minute. She was one of the Isabels. Isabel de Stoke.’
‘No, Isabel de Stoke was taken away and died at home. She was tall and straight. No, I mean the novice who was to bring us the relic. Don’t you remember, the tooth we were to have, the tooth of the Holy Innocent?’
‘Quite true! The tooth of a Holy Innocent. That was a bad piece of work and I never perfectly understood how it all happened. I can’t recollect the novice’s name, though. She died first of all, just before Dame Emily. Isabel . . . Isabel . . . Isabel de Fanal.’
‘Marie de Fanal. Not Isabel at all. The other Isabel was Isabel Goffin who was taken away by her parents and compelled to break her vocation and marry.’
‘I suppose one can’t count her in with the others. Now I am out.’
They began to reckon again, and had brought the count to eight when Dame Beatrix recollected old Dame Roesia who died before the pestilence and Dame Helen recollected Dame Joan.
‘Though she was almost blind even then, you remember. Even if she had lived she would not have seen the spire. I hope that scaffolding will be split into firewood. It grows colder every day, it is as cold as mid-winter already. Here comes Dame Johanna.’
Dame Johanna was coming to fetch Dame Beatrix. Ursula had fallen downstairs again and cut her head.
She gave the message in a detached well-mannered tone of voice which conveyed a readiness to overlook. As the infirmaress hurried indoors Dame Johanna paused beside Dame Helen, huddling her hands in her sleeves, and remarked graciously: ‘How delighted you must be to see your spire finished at last! And how fortunate you are to have the means to build it! At Dilworth we only saw things falling down.’
‘We have been counting up all the ladies who have died here while it was a-building.’
‘Indeed. Are they many?’
‘Yes, a great many. But of course it cannot interest you, since you have known none of them.’
‘I imagine that a great many of them must have died of cold,’ retorted the newcomer. ‘At Dilworth, even in mid-winter, it was not as cold as it is here.’
Dame Helen began stumping towards the house. Dame Johanna, keeping up with her, imparted a few details about the state of poor Ursula’s head.
During these last few months Ursula had aged very fast and simultaneously she had grown tiresome and intractable. Though she was unwieldy with dropsy and crippled by a sore in her leg she would not stay quiet on her pallet, but roamed about the house listening at doorways, mumbling and crossing herself. She had a delusion that some danger threatened Sir Ralph, and this made her bent on sleeping outside his door – crawling up the stairs, bumping her blind head, losing her balance and falling, and making her way up again, uncontrollable as water. He would wake, and hear her snoring and praying in her sleep, and if he were not too sleepy himself he would lead her down again to the nuns; but in an hour or two she would be back. One morning she was picked up dead at the stair-foot. It was a deplorable death – the death of an animal rather than of a christian; but everything to do with Ursula was deplorable, except the kindness she had received: a rather negligent kindness, no doubt, but more than her deserts, since for many years no one had reproached her or forced her to labour beyond her strength.
Perhaps such kindness was a mistaken kindness. Praying for Ursula’s soul (about whose welfare Dame Johanna expressed a deal of unsolicited concern) the prioress asked herself if she had acted improperly in remitting Ursula’s penance. Another twenty or thirty scourgings might have made a great difference. She submitted these doubts to Sir Ralph, and speaking in his dry professional voice he assured her that she was being over-conscientious. Her part in the business was merely instrumental, for since no penance is sacramentally efficacious unless it is accompanied by contrition it depended on Ursula and not on her whether the stripes were salutary. She hastened to agree, and did not add that in beating Ursula she had felt no more sacramental than if she were a laundress thumping dirty linen.
For all men are alike; if one asks a direct question they reply with a treatise. Edmund Gurney the mason had been just the same, wrapping himself in long discourses about the natures of different kinds of stone. That is how men are made, and that is what they expect women to put up with. Yet if she had failed to supply Sir Ralph with a dinner, replying to his hunger with a discourse on the breeding of cattle and the difference betwixt beef and mutton, he would scarcely be contented. Beef and mutton, clothing and firing, that is the life-work for a prioress. Not souls. Not even spires.
She did not try to hide from herself the sense of anticlimax which accompanied the completion of her spire. It was beautiful, but it was not as beautiful as she had meant, and her inability to carry out the extension of the nave left it awkwardly placed. It was finished; but ‘over and done with’ was the truer word. The exaltation she had looked for had not kept its tryst; even her nuns, who had never cared for it, and who now went about saying how pretty it was, how neat, and what an embellishment, had more pleasure from it than she. It was her life-work; but her life persisted, a life filled with beef and mutton, clothing and firing, cavils and quarrels. Life as prioress, however, would soon be over, for after the consecration of her spire she would resign her office. They were expecting it. Probably they were looking forward to it. It was impossible that anyone could look forward to it with such longing as she. To be freed from beef and mutton and misunderstandings; to sit silent in chapter; never again to be pursued with those account-books; never again to hear those accursed syllables, Dear Mother, I am sorry to trouble you, but ... Cost what it might – and this present bishop, Giles de Furness, was rumoured to be a much sterner stickler for fees than the kind old Bishop William – there should be an election, and Prioress Matilda should replace Prioress Alicia.
Two dates suggested themselves as suitable for the ceremony of consecration: the patronal feast of Saint Leonard, or Candlemas. Saint Leonard’s Day was the favourite choice until Dame Johanna took it on herself to point out all its advantages: this was enough to convince everyone that a late November festivity was out of the question, one could not ask people to wade through the mud. When Dame Johanna said that the mud would be just as much of an impediment in early February she was reminded that she had yet to spend a winter at Oby, and could not know what she was talking about.
Dame Johanna was a transferred nun, who had come to Oby from the house of The Holy Trinity at Dilworth. For years Dilworth had been notorious for its debts and confusions, and though Bishop William had been patient with it Bishop Giles had ordered its dissolution and the dispersal of its seven remaining nuns into other establishments. These unfortunate creatures carried no dowry with them, for their portions had been devoured in the Dilworth quicksand. Nevertheless, Oby had undertaken to receive two of them, Dame Matilda pointing out that to gratify a new bishop is always a good pennyworth. The bishop, returning kindness for kindness, had sent them his most advantageous pair. Dame Johanna Pyke was sickly, and not likely to cumber them for more than a year or so, and Dame Alice Sutton, though young and sturdy, was a skilled confectioner – so skilled that the little revenue left to Dilworth had been brought in by her exceptional marzipan.
Dame Alice’s sweetmeats bore out the bishop’s words. It was to be hoped that time would prove him as accurate about Dame Johanna. For Dame Johanna was disliked by everyone, and the more she tried to ingratiate herself the more she was felt to be an interloper, a meddler, and a bore. ‘It would be better,’ said the prioress to Dame Beatrix, ‘if the poor scarecrow would not force herself to take such an interest in us and our doings. Surely it is quite unsuitable for a woman who is going to die in a year or so to attach herself to a mere temporary lodging-house!’ – to which Dame Beatrix gloomily replied that being a bishop does not make one a doctor, and that there might be a long step between looking like a death’s-head and dying.
‘If I hear that woman utter another word of praise I really think I shall strangle her!’ exclaimed Dame Margaret. ‘She praises everything and doesn’t mean a word of it.’ Even Dame Helen was driven into a spirit of contradiction, and when Dame Johanna happened to mention that Dilworth owned no more than five books assured her that this could not be so, quite the contrary, the Dilworth library was cited by everybody as excellent.
Having discredited Saint Leonard Dame Johanna proceeded, all unwittingly, to compromise the coming election. Dame Matilda, she understood, would be elected unanimously: how very nice that would be! Unanimous elections are creditable to all concerned, they demonstrate to the world the favour of God, who makes men to be of one mind in a house. The Oby nuns were fortunate to have been spared such electoral squabbles as had taken place at Dilworth, where the sacrist had got herself elected in the very teeth of the bishop.
‘It is so wonderfully peaceful here!’ exclaimed Dame Johanna.
She meant it as a commendation, but her unfortunate manner made it sound more like a taunt. At Dilworth it was nothing to have half the ladies absent, one on a pilgrimage, one visiting a sick mother, another cheering a lying-in, a fourth searching for a little dog. The homecomings after such absences were as disrupting as the absences themselves: amid talk of heresies, fashions, family disputes, kid served with almonds, law-suits, adulteries, harp-players, and heraldic bearings, the offices were neglected, discipline was thrown to the winds, God was forgotten, and meals were late. Only those who had experienced such a state of things, she concluded, could realise what a comfort it was to find oneself in a house like Oby, where everything went on so quietly, month after month, and the bull Periculoso was so honestly observed.
As a result, Dame Johanna’s hearers burned to flout the bull Periculoso as soon as possible; and when the prioress was invited to stand as godmother to a baby of a cadet branch of the de Rettevilles the indigenous Oby nuns insisted that she must go to the christening, and pointed out, as though it were something scandalous, that she had not slept a single night away from her convent since the August of 1351. The prioress, too, had smarted under Dame Johanna’s commendations. She was admitting the various advantages of going to the christening – founder’s kin, making new friends, picking up new novices perhaps, and making sure of that long-promised never-secured little Adela de Retteville, whom with any luck she could bring back with her – when Dame Beatrix happened to suppose that on this journey Sir Ralph might as well be left behind, he was really too shabby for visiting. Unquenchably shameful, the recollection of the scene in the nave overwhelmed the prioress: Sir Ralph lungeing and bellowing, Thomas skipping aside, his face bleached with fury. She exclaimed that going to the christening was out of the question. She was too old to ride through the winter weather, and the litter, a relic of Dame Isabella’s days, lay mouldering past repair in the cart-shed, where the hens laid eggs in it.
But she was forced to give way when a grizzled squire brought a letter from Marie de Blakeborn. She too was going to the christening, and it would be only a day more in her journey to turn aside to Oby. ‘Unless you have grown as fat as I have,’ she wrote, ‘the litter will hold us both, and it will be pleasant to talk of old times as we travel.’
Marie de Blakeborn arrived soon after sundown with a small retinue of elderly servants. She had grown unbelievably fat. Tottering forward in the January dusk, swathed in furs, she looked like a performing bear. She had also grown very deaf, and deafness had deformed her voice into a stately roar. The nuns found it hard to conceal their amusement. As soon as she had been taken to the guest-chamber they began to mimic her, mouthing hushed imitations of her roars, and Dame Cecily drew a sketch of Saint Michael weighing Marie and Sir Ralph against each other in his scales and staggering under their combined weight.
It did not seem to the prioress that there would be much talk of old times. Marie was absorbed in the present, bellowing about the latest shaping of gold hair-nets, a new sort of little woolly dog, and the progress of her law-suits and her grandchildren. Well, so much the better! Ten years had passed since their last meeting, and now she shrank from the prospect of any intimacy with this noisy, affable stranger. They set out immediately after mass. It was a dark morning, the sky was covered with smoky vapour, all the pigs were screaming in their sties. Deafened by the pigs, the shrill goodbyes of her nuns, Marie’s torrential directions to her retinue, the prioress sat with closed eyes, cursing the moment she had consented to this expedition. As well drag a corpse out of its grave, she told herself, prop it up with cushions and send it off to stand godmother! Who wants a larva mundi at a christening feast?
She was aroused by an exclamation.
‘Why, there’s your spire! You never told me it was finished. Stop, stop, Denis! Stop the horses! We want to look at the spire.’
From the rise of ground they looked back across Oby Fen, darker than ever under the smoky sky. White and sharp-cut, the only thing with a definite outline in all the shaggy formless sad-coloured landscape, the spire seemed to be sinking, to be sucked down into the mud.
‘Charming!’ roared Marie. ‘I should have known it was yours anywhere. You always had such good taste.’
The prioress was thinking: This is the first time I have seen it from a distance, seen it as others will see it; and it needed Marie’s litter and the birth of a child to get me here. I had the enterprise, once, to begin it, and now I have not the enterprise to come out and look at it.
‘Tell me, is Thomas dead?’
‘Dead, my dear? Our Thomas dead? Very much alive, I assure you, and a great man again. Why, didn’t you hear how he outwitted them all?’
She gave the order to ride on, and settled down to relate how Thomas had emerged from his spell of penitence as merry as a marmot and as vindictive as a hornet; how he had stayed at Etchingdon long enough to pay off all old scores, had got himself offered the priorship again for the satisfaction of refusing it, and now was in Lombardy, negotiating a loan for the King.
‘They think the world of him at Westminster. And you really supposed him dead? Well, your convent is a most exemplary convent if you know so little of what’s going on outside as to think Thomas was dead.’
To the deaf ears, to the sighing breeze, Alicia de Foley allowed herself to say: ‘I see how wrong I was. I see now that it is I who am dead.’
Only good breeding enabled her to endure the christening festivities, the feasting, the display of gifts, the women exchanging childbed stories in one corner of the hall, the men getting drunk in a devil-may-care, no-business-of-mine fashion in another. Like a ghost she listened to the singing in Saint John’s church, like a ghost she fingered the embroideries on bed and baby, half expecting to see her fingers leave a blight on what they had touched. The only thing like real life was the incessant tipping. Wherever she turned someone started up expecting a gratuity from a godmother, and by the third day she was compelled to borrow from Marie de Blakeborn. She saw her new novice, Adela de Retteville. The girl was very pretty, so pretty that it was a wonder that her parents had finally consented to part with her; but no doubt there was some sufficient reason why she should be given to God. Laying her finger – that blighting finger – under the warm chin and staring at the parted crimson lips, the prioress said: ‘You will be very happy with us, my child. There is more contentment in the cloister than in the world.’
‘And that there is!’ said the child’s mother, with a bitter expression on her discouraged face. ‘And I hope you will be grateful to us, Adela, and pray well for our souls. It’s time you did something more than romping and spoiling. When will you be going back to Oby?’ she added.
‘On the Tuesday.’
On the evening of the christening a band of musicians was hired, and the young ones of the party danced. Relieved of their company the elders had the supper table set close to the hearth and sat there quietly, drinking and eating nuts. Conversation turned on the infirmities of the flesh. Marie spoke of the encumbrance of her fat, describing her struggles on the close-stool, the terrific purges that were needed to drive a way through her bowels. Adam de Retteville replied that fat would be a comfort to him. His teeth had rotted in his gums, he could bite nothing without anguish, he was forced to live on broths and decoctions and no spices, no peppercorns, could mask the taste of corruption that haunted every mouthful he swallowed. But that, said his brother Steven, was better than a fistula. A man with a fistula could not be easy on a horse or on a cushion, and must wait, for all his pride and all his prowess, on the good pleasure of a body servant. Yes, but a flux of the lungs, imagine that! cried his neighbour: to spit, to stifle, to have, not only food and exercise, but the more common air denied you. An old de Retteville widow, yellow as saffron, continued to assert that the pains in her head would astonish anyone who could experience them, for sometimes it was as though the devil were stirring up her brains with a red-hot spoon and at other times as though three worms, bred in the nose, were eating their ways towards eyebrow and ear and jaw.
Since people will boast of anything and be glad to have the wherewithal, conversation in the ingle was happily competitive. The prioress took no part in it. She sat eating nuts with her eyes cast down.
‘And you, my dear gossip?’ enquired Adam de Retteville in a burst of cordiality. ‘You too must have something to tell us, some hardening in the breast, some twinge in those white knees that are bent for us sinners on the cold stone?’
Marie answered for her.
‘Not she! Look at her! Look at her colour, look at her smooth chin, smooth as a page’s. Look how she sits there, stuffing herself with nuts, and not so much as a belch.’
Raising her eyes the prioress looked round on her contemporaries: on cheeks veined with purple or pinched and sallow, on rheumy eyes, grey hairs, brown teeth, knotted joints. How fat they were, or how thin! How hot, or how cold! How they belied their grand clothes and their grand manners! – a crop of toad-stools could not look more garishly death-like.
‘I must thank Our Lady,’ she said correctly, ‘for my good health.’ And just as though she were running over her beads she felt herself reckoning up sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, all perfect, her limbs wholesome, her blood pure.
‘Look at her teeth,’ continued Marie. ‘The whole set of them, white as wolf’s teeth.’
‘One of them is chipped.’
She could hear the affected modesty of the words. Parting her lips she pointed to an eye-tooth that was minutely flawed.
‘It’s the same with all you de Foleys,’ said Marie. ‘There’s Thomas, as brisk as a young hound. Not a grey hair in his head – nor in yours, I daresay.’
‘We nuns are supposed to last out well, you know. There were two ladies in our house, both were near four-score, and except that one of them grew a little forgetful . . . ’ Growing a little forgetful herself the prioress gave a coy description of Dame Agnes and Dame Roesia. Her companions listened with delight, melting with sentiment, nudging each other, rolling their bleared eyes, and saying that there was nothing so pleasant as the religious life, and that they wished they had given themselves to God instead of remaining in the world to be battered to pieces with care and sickness.
‘Well, then, you must give me my god-daughter.’
Adam de Retteville pinched her arm.
‘Nothing would please me better. But you must settle it with her father, you know, the dowry and all that. The girl is founder’s kin, you ought to take her for nothing. You agree to take her for nothing – you can always get a double dowry from some scrivener – and she’s yours.’
‘But vocation . . . One must not forget vocation.’
Adam de Retteville looked across the table at the group of dancers at the other end of the room. ‘What you eat’s vocation,’ he pronounced.
Marie de Blakeborn had planned to carry the prioress and little Adela back to Oby and make a short visit there. It had been raining heavily, the floods were rising, and Marie’s horoscope declared that she would die by water. When Tuesday came she refused to set out. If the prioress were bent on swimming back to her nuns, she said – who no doubt were doing very comfortably without her – the litter was at her service, and one of Marie’s waiting-women, a big hook-nosed Fleming, could go with her and look after the child. Painfully aware that she was disobliging a number of people the prioress paid the last gratuities and departed, farewelled by assurances that she would soon regret being so dutiful, and scowled on by Marie’s retinue. It was a relief to look into Adela’s beaming daisy-face, so very pink, so very white, so gaily turned towards the future. The floods were wide and turbulent. Clots of foam and swans speckled the water, and in the half-light of the January day the child amused herself by her inability to distinguish between them until a swan melted or a clot of foam rose into the air. The Fleming stitched on at a piece of embroidery, growling under her breath when a jolt or a stumble jerked the needle from its aim. The litter creaked and swayed and the prioress drowsed as if in a roughly-rocked cradle. Awakening she would find in herself a sensation like a wound, a sensation of being exhausted with bitter weeping; and then she would wake a little further and remember Thomas de Foley, who was alive and flourishing, and careless whether she died or lived on. Careless? No, it was more likely that he had deliberately put her out of his mind, she, and her spire, and her crazy priest, all detestably associated with his reverse at Etchingdon. But perhaps careless. She stroked one edge of the sword and then the other against her heart and it was impossible to decide which was sharpest.
On the second day they made better speed. The wind had got into the north, it had begun to freeze and the ways were harder. On the third morning it seemed likely that they would reach Oby before vespers, but flakes of snow began to glitter in the air, then the sun went in and the snow fell in earnest. The Fleming put by her embroidery and took the child into her arms, holding her close to warm her. Twice, bemused by the snow, the horsemen lost their way. At last they reached Lintoft, where the priest’s housekeeper came out with a drink of hot beer. The floods had not been so bad, she said, no worse than any other winter; but the wind had been terrible, a biting north wind. During the night it had risen to a tempest screaming down on them like a troop of horses. Her master was sick of a fever, stifling, and black in the face. He would die tonight, she fancied . . . would the prioress and her nuns pray an easy death for him?
‘I will, I will!’ exclaimed Adela, dancing up and down.
The prioress asked if he had been shriven. Yes, said the housekeeper; by a lucky chance Sir Ralph had ridden over yesterday, enquiring about his lost hawk, and had shriven him. He will be desperate if he has lost his hawk, she thought. He should never have loosed her in a north wind, hawks lose heart in a north wind. Thinking of a distracted Sir Ralph and of the prayers she must order for the Lintoft priest she felt herself suddenly reknit to her convent and interested to be returning. It always looked pretty in snow, a white landscape was a grateful change after the sallow monotony of the moors. Tomorrow they would throw out crumbs for the birds and she would ask the cellaress to provide some little extra delicacy for a dinner to celebrate her home-coming with one de Retteville novice in her hand and the prospect of another. If it continued to snow the litter could not be sent back to Marie for some days. Possibly the Fleming, so skilful with her needle, might be beguiled into mending the Trinity Cope.
‘The sacrist must show you our vestments. We have one or two fine old pieces. But just now we are poorly off for needle-women, none of our novices seems able . . . ’
The litter canted over as the front horse swung aside. The beasts were halted with kicking and shouting. A voice said: ‘There’s something here across the track. One can see nothing for the snow, but I can see something there.’
The hinder horseman replied: ‘You see and you can’t see. I was nearly off.’
‘It’s a great heap of thatch. What a place to leave it! Now how are we to go on? The track is so narrow that we can’t edge past it, and there seems to be a ditch here and a ditch there.’
‘Well, we don’t need to go on, do we? Here we are at Oby, in my opinion, for I can see a building in front of us, and people are coming out with lights.’
A moment later he added: ‘Here comes such a nun! By God, she’s fatter than our mistress!’
It was Sir Ralph. ‘Which roof? . . . ’ she began. Grunting out something about the depth of the snow, he carried her indoors and set her down in the parlour. All the nuns were there, looking oddly formal, she thought; but of course nuns would look formal to an eye which had been studying the de Retteville christening party. She glanced round for the de Retteville novice. The Fleming had just carried her in and was unwinding her from her mufflers.
‘See who I have brought.’
Dame Matilda came forward, kissed her ring, and drew her towards the fire.
‘Dear Mother, you are very welcome to your poor daughters.’
‘How solemn you all look! You must have been getting into some scrape.’
Up came Dame Beatrix with a bowl of mead. ‘Drink this, dear Mother. Such . . . such a cold night!’
She sipped and looked round on them. After all, there was one missing.
‘Where is Dame Susanna? I have brought her a novice. Half-frozen, but a novice for all that.’
Something was wrong. Not one of them could look her in the face. Now here was Dame Salome standing before her, crimson, opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. The instant I am back, she thought, this sort of thing begins. I suppose they have been flying again.
‘Somebody must give the girl her supper, and put her to bed.’
Dame Salome flapped out of the circle, looking as pleased as a fish that slips out through the net, and beckoned Adela and the Fleming away.
The prioress finished her mead and then turned to her treasuress.
‘Well? What has gone wrong now?’
‘During your absence God has sent us a great sorrow. Dame Susanna is dead.’
Released by these words, the nuns now began to cross themselves flutteringly, to sigh, and to commend Dame Susanna’s soul.
‘How? When?’
‘She died last night.’
‘But how? How did she die?’
‘She died suddenly. By an accident.’
‘Unshriven!’ The word was screeched out in Dame Johanna’s most calamitous hoot.
‘Where was that fat beast, then? Out hawking, I suppose?’
‘No, he was in bed.’
‘It was in the middle of the night.’
‘He came at once, but it was too late. She was dead already.’
‘She was buried!’
Together they could do what no one had the courage to do singly. Interrupting each other, contradicting, referring, harking back to make something clear, having theories as to how it happened and other theories as to how it might have been prevented, they pieced out the story of Dame Susanna’s death.
They were in quire for the night office, scarcely able to hear themselves chant for the force of the gale. Then, following on a strong gust of wind, there came a noise of rending, and a crash. They looked round, they could see nothing to account for it; but at the same moment several candles were blown out and the air became icy cold. They went on with the office, and finished it, and were just about to leave the quire when the rending noises began again and this time, because the wind was not blowing so violently, they heard them more plainly and realised that they were close at hand. Dame Matilda opened the screen door and peered into the nave, supposing that a window had been blown in. The nave was flooded with moonlight, and overhead through a hole in the roof they saw the bleached clouds hurrying, the frosty stars, the outburst of the full moon. The nave floor was heaped with timber and rubble and blocks of stone. While they stood gazing there was a sharp patter, and fragments of mortar showered down, and then tiles and pieces of stone-work. Then came a terrible noise, like a lion’s roar – no, said Dame Beatrix, like the noise a wave makes as it rears up against the shore and sucks back the shingle – and then, answering it from among them, a shriek that made the blood run cold, a shriek that was more horrible than anything else in all that horrible night, just such a shriek as a soul must utter when plunged astonished into hell-fire; and with the strength of a madwoman Dame Susanna forced her way through them and ran into the nave. Whether she fell on her knees or whether the falling masonry caught her and felled her it was impossible to say, but in that instant she had disappeared, lost in a cloud of dust, crushed under the falling spire.
The story was told but not finished. Dame Margaret had to recount all that was done afterwards, how comfortable Sir Ralph had been, how well Dame Matilda had kept her courage, how all the manor folk had heard the crash of the falling spire but not one had come near to help. Dame Johanna had to say how remarkable it was that within a minute or two of the calamity the wind had gone down, though bits of stone kept falling at intervals for some hours after. Having begun to talk, they were afraid to leave off. No one wished to bring on the silence into which their prioress must speak. Flustered, compassionate, embarrassed, they chattered on, eking out their stock of narrative, remembering to add that the thatch had been blown off the gate-house, that a roof-tile had been blown as far as the walnut tree.
The prioress sat by the hearth, turning the empty bowl in her hands. When at last she spoke it was to say: ‘Where is Sir Ralph? Why is he not here? I must see him at once.’
When he came, entering the room with a wary animal composure, she began to discuss with him the arrangements for Dame Susanna’s burial and the masses that must be said for the repose of her soul. Such arrangements were ordinary enough, a commonplace to both of them, and scarcely needed discussion; but she spoke as though she were a commander issuing directions in the heat of battle. For the last eighteen hours he had been sweating with anxiety as to how she would take the news that her spire was in ruins and her novice-mistress dead with every appearance of self-slaughter. He had allowed for fury, dejection, misery, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and even for fortitude and magnanimity – since he knew her to be capable of almost anything. The one thing he had not expected was what she presented: this front of trivial authority, like a plaster representation of a carving in stone. It threw him out, and he resented it, and felt for the first time in their mutual relations that she was a thoroughly disagreeable woman.
He was not alone in feeling so. If the prioress had shown a sociable grief her nuns would have been very willing to grieve with her; but she wrapped herself in a mood of cold sulks, and left them to turn their compassion on themselves – the victims of a calamity which her ambition had provoked. Not only had the spire fallen, and killed Dame Susanna; but it had fallen piecemeal, and so incompetently that it would be cheaper to rebuild than to pull down, which meant a further expense and all the dust and clamour of building to be endured over again. The masons were aggrieved at being fetched back, and a quarrel arose between the convent and the master-mason, for naturally the nuns blamed him for the fall of the spire. He for his part asserted that the fault lay with the convent; if the ladies had been able to make up their minds so that he could have gone ahead with the job the mortar would have dried out evenly, the weight of the stone-work would have settled. But ladies never can make up their minds.
Then one of his boys, clumsy with cold, tripped, fell off the scaffolding, and broke his thigh. The masons left the work and stood about saying that there was a curse on the spire and that it would be against God’s will to finish it. The Oby people who worked with the builders, carting stone and loading and carrying the hods, now added their witness. Floods, pestilence, murrain, scarcity: there had been one misfortune on the heels of another since the spire was begun. If the nuns were so wealthy they should spend their money on succouring the poor, as Christ bid. Succouring the poor, indeed! – why, they had even turned away blind John Ragge, poor soul, and as a result no one in Oby could call his hen his own, for since the convent had turned him away he had fallen back on the tricks he had learned in the wars; even a blind man must live. Of course there was a curse on the spire. Who could wonder that God had toppled it over, for what right had nuns to be building spires? – keeping men from their work by extortion of cartage and labour dues, and wasting the manor in order to heap stone on stone and feed a pack of strangers. From abuse of the nuns they turned to abusing the masons. Young Scole swore that if he saw another mason perched in the scaffolding like a crow in a winter tree he’d send an arrow through him. That night the men of Oby mobbed the masons’ settlement, kicking down their huts and scattering their gear. After that they marched round the convent singing at the tops of their voices, and in the midst of the procession was John Ragge, twanging an old viol and lovingly supported – for he was popular for the nonce. Next morning the masons took down the scaffolding. By that same evening they were gone, William Holly taking it on himself to arrange transport for them and their stuff as far as Dudham, where his cousin’s homestead was soon the better for several repairs and innovations.
While the people of the neighbourhood were saying how chop-fallen the nuns must look, the nuns were warming themselves over the possibility of a law-suit. Oby had not had a law-suit since the stirring days of Prioress Isabella, but most of its ladies had hearsay experience of the law: family litigations about dues, dowries, maimings and slayings, neglect of flood-gates, encroachments on land, abduction of heiresses, poaching of deer, and contested legacies. Law, they all knew, is tricky and costly, and much depends on knowing the right people; but this was no sooner admitted than it appeared that a great number of the right people were known: a cousin, an uncle, a talented and rising nephew, a prodigiously hoary and crafty kinsman by bastardy, a step-niece at court; and both Dame Margaret and the novice Philippa came of legal families. ‘And we must not forget the Stapledons,’ put in Dame Salome, turning courteously to Dame Matilda, who acknowledged this tribute with an uneasy shifting of her bottom. It seemed to her that there was little hope of averting a popular form of ruin.
For the moment there was too much to say for anything to be agreed, for each nun had her own view as to what ground the action should lie on. Dame Margaret was for breach of contract. What could be plainer? There stood the unfinished spire to prove it. Dame Beatrix objected that Edmund Gurney might plead that the spire had been finished, and that the wind which threw it down was an act of God and no fault of the builders; surely it would be better to catch him on an accusation of scamped work; an honest piece of building would not have been overthrown by a mere winter’s gale. Dame Helen was all for manslaughter. How else had Dame Susanna died? What a loss to the community! Something must be due to them for that, surely? They had never had such a novice-mistress, and who could tell what novices might not be lost to them by losing her. Her fame was spreading far and wide, such a good musician, such delicate manners, and such piety! In old days such a nun would have been canonised, if only for her piteous death. There she had knelt, her hands stretched to heaven as if to ward off the disaster, praying aloud that the convent might be preserved. And sure enough, a minute later the wind fell, the air was as still as midsummer. Dame Johanna had remarked on it at the time. If they were to lose such a nun and not get exemplary damages, there was no justice in England. And another thing . . . what about those repairs at Dudham, that new roof on the Hollys’ granary? As plain a theft as ever finger pointed at! At times they even remembered to put in a word of regret for the spire, which had been so beautiful and their cherished ambition for the last twenty years. It was useless for Dame Matilda to remind them that they had constantly grumbled about the spire. It was useless for Dame Johanna to explain that she had never said or supposed that the wind fell because of Dame Susanna’s prayers. They were united in longing for a law-suit, and only waited for the prioress to lead them to it.
But the prioress seemed to have lost all interest in life. She lay in bed, or sat in her chamber listlessly teaching her bullfinch to pipe the de Profundis. Loyal, though fraying with impatience, they maintained that she was stunned by the shock.
On Holy Thursday a pittance was distributed among the old people of the hamlet, and since John Ragge could not be kept out and might make trouble Dame Matilda had asked Sir Ralph to be present. Afterwards he and she stood for a while dawdling in the sun, before the gate-house. Spears of young grass were poking up through the winter mud-banks. The clump of wormwood that grew by the threshold had put out its sharp new green.
Feeling the sun warm on his back Sir Ralph remarked that it had been a wonderfully peaceful Lent.
‘Peaceful?’ said she, stopping short and staring at him.
‘The peacefullest Lent I have ever experienced. I have never confessed such a sequence of untroubled consciences, souls so free from wrath and agitation.’
‘It is the peace before the storm, then,’ she said, ‘for they are all set on a law-suit.’
‘Ah, that accounts for it! I thought there must be some reason. Lent is usually acrimonious. Ladies, I think, find it particularly trying. It really is extraordinary,’ he continued, ‘quite extraordinary, to reflect on the means employed by God’s providence to...’
Tough and evasive as a snake, he was sliding away from any share in the convent’s temporal concerns.
‘I find man’s improvidence quite as much as I can reflect on,’ she said. ‘What if we are all ruined by this law-suit?’ Her voice, escaping from its usual control, was harsh and tremulous, like the chirp of a fledgeling bird.
He turned, and looked at her. She was almost as tall as he, and she looked back at him steadily, though her cheeks were flushed with resentment and angry tears brightened her small eyes.
‘It will not happen,’ he said. ‘I assure you, it will not happen. The things which one dreads never come to pass.’
She had never heard him speak with such authority. It might have been a stranger who spoke. Abashed, and yet comforted, she hurried away, making off before this astonishing being should decompose into their familiar, shabby, bulky, running-to-seed Sir Ralph.
Left to himself he continued to walk about in the sun, feeling the gay air, admiring the sharp tint of the wormwood, and reflecting on the means employed by God’s providence. Here, for instance, was another springtime. At any moment now he might hear the cuckoo. At any moment, too, he might hear some little rattle inside him, or some twang in his brain, and know that death was after him. As you are when you hear the first cuckoo, whether busy or idle, merry or sorrowful, so you will be the year through; so Magdalen Figg had said, standing mud-coloured under the apple trees in bloom. He asked no better from the first cuckoo than to be found here, walking and thinking before the gate-house at Oby. For life on every springtime confirmation of it was sweet, and would be sweeter still with Dame Matilda as prioress. Life was durably sweet, it improved like a keeping-apple. If he could live to be old, live tranquilly and keep his health, he might yet get such enjoyment out of life as would astonish the devils when they came to unpick him. He gathered a spray of wormwood and rubbed it between finger and thumb. It was an old acquaintance. These sproutings were the tenth generation that he had seen put forth since that morning when he first stood here so lean and fretful. Not damned then, and yet so fretful. Damnation had taught him tranquillity and resignation to God’s will. Not damned then; and yet, God being timeless, as much damned before God then as now, damned before his birth, damned before his begetting, native to hell-fire as a salamander. What would Dame Matilda say, that sensible prudent woman, could she know that with the prioress-ship of Oby she would inherit the services of a damned man? And yet he had been within an inch of telling her.
Dame Matilda was so powerfully impressed by Sir Ralph’s assurance that the things which one dreads do not come to pass that she preserved her equanimity even when Dame Johanna, speaking in chapter, said she wished to say a few words about the proposed law-suit.
It was plain that Dame Johanna had learned her few words by heart, and her hearers resigned themselves to a sermon. Pitching her voice too high she was checked by a coughing-fit before she finished with her views on submission tempered with zeal; then she had to clear her throat; then she went on to her Imprimis. Imprimis was that nuns should not go to law, it being their part to live in the world as though the world were not. Distinguo, the world may so press upon nuns that law-suits must be undertaken; but if so undertaken, the nuns must go to law in a spirit of charity – which some present yet lacked. Secundo, it is forbidden to covet. She had nevertheless overheard the nuns of Oby talking about the damages they hoped to gain. Such hopes were both wrong and fallacious, for at Dilworth it had been shown – then followed several anecdotes from Dilworth. Tertio.
The prioress had been sitting hunched up, listlessly turning her ring. Now she raised her hand as though to brush away a fly, and said, speaking in a faint voice, brittle with exasperation, that she for one was already convinced by Dame Johanna’s eloquence, and begged there might be no more talk of the law-suit. There was a murmur, if not of agreement, at any rate of sympathy and understanding. Was it possible, Dame Matilda asked herself; could Sir Ralph have been right? But at that same moment Dame Johanna began to talk again. Now she was congratulating the prioress on so wise a decision.
‘For as I was about to say, dear Mother, tertio . . . ’
The prioress sunk her head in her hands.
‘. . . Tertio, it is forbidden to bear false witness. Yet with my own ears, dear sisters, I have heard you say that we are certain of our suit because the stones fell and killed Dame Susanna, and no court of law can remain unmoved by a dead nun. But this is not true. I saw, and so did you all, how Dame Susanna sought her own death. If she had stayed quietly with the rest of us she would be alive now, as we are. Furthermore . . . ’
A clamour of disagreement arose, most of it quite sincere, for by now Dame Susanna’s exemplary death was canonical.
‘Furthermore . . . ’
The prioress leaped to her feet and boxed Dame Johanna’s ears. Her first blow loosened Dame Johanna’s coif, the second dislodged it. Fastening one hand in the short grizzled locks the prioress began to scratch Dame Johanna’s face. Dame Johanna screamed, moaned, called on the saints, and choked. With no expression beyond a sort of sleepwalking attentiveness the prioress clawed on in silence. Her silence was more alarming than anything else; it was as though she had forgotten speech, or felt no need for it, and had become an animal, killing without malice and almost without thought. No one knew what to do. The hopeful confidence that Dame Matilda would deal with it died away. Dame Matilda sat biting her finger; her eyes were shut, her face was livid. They remembered that Dame Matilda always felt sick at the sight of blood, and at the regular blood-lettings was as regularly sick. It was Dame Alice, the other nun from Dilworth, who, with an ‘Excuse me, dear Mother,’ seized the prioress in her sturdy arms and carried her back to her seat. Dame Beatrix and Dame Helen approached to mop and tidy the victim. The prioress looked on approvingly, and advised them to carry her away, adding in a voice airily resigned: ‘We shall never have any peace while she is with us.’
From that day onward the prioress, awakened from her trance, persecuted Dame Johanna with remorseless artistry, inventing one derision after another as gleefully as a stone-carver inventing a set of gargoyles. She decided to enforce the rule of a good book being read aloud during dinner, and appointed Dame Johanna to be reader because, she said, of her scholarship. Perched in the reading-desk Dame Johanna coughed and stifled, while her appetite – she had a punctual appetite – proclaimed itself in unseemly rumbles. Dame Johanna, too, was peculiarly unhandy, one of those women doomed to drop, fumble, tear, dishevel, crumple, and soil. But because of her piety, her particular piety, Dame Johanna, said the prioress, must have the post of sacrist. Candles fell from their sticks, vestments caught on nails, incense spluttered, stains spread on the altar linen. Worst of all, there were the altar breads to make. Sweating with anxiety and desperately praying, Dame Johanna thumped and rolled an intractable lump of greying dough, scattered flour everywhere, and burned herself on the oven-tray. Finally she was set to repair the Trinity Cope. The Trinity Cope was one of the few treasures of Oby, and the nuns plucked up courage to defend it from Dame Johanna’s puckers and gobble-stitches.
‘Look how she is ruining it! And it is so beautiful.’
The prioress looked at it. Indeed, it was very beautiful. All her life she had loved beauty. Her spire was broken; since Dame Susanna’s death the singing had become screeching; her nuns were ugly; Adela, the de Retteville novice, was a half-wit. In everything she attempted she was mocked and frustrated, and she could make nothing out of her despair but an exhibition of spite and vulgar malice. Biting back her sobs she said:
‘Very well. No one shall repair it. Since you wish, it can go to ruin, like everything else. I have been thinking about the lawsuit, too, and I have come to the conclusion that it would be useless to go on with it. I cannot carry it through alone, I have neither the health nor the spirits for such an undertaking. And I know by experience that I cannot count on any of you to help me. We will get the spire botched up somehow – sufficiently to prevent the draughts blowing down on you, that is all that matters. And everything shall go on as usual.’