(June 1360)
On Holy Thursday Sir Ralph had walked in the sun thinking of the peacefulness of Oby. By midsummer he wondered if he would ever know peace and quiet again. Just as when two dogs fight to the death all the dogs within earshot fly at each other, the affair between the prioress and Dame Johanna set everyone by the ears. Through the bland spring weather the nuns bickered, the servants fought, and his new hawk was unmanageable. He could not even find repose in Jesse Figg’s orchard. Jesse and William had fallen out, too, about the repairs at Dudham. Though the quarrel had not parted them, for they were as inseparable as ever, they were now inseparably locked in reproaches and recriminations. Beyond bringing them out cider in a larger jug – for quarrelling is thirsty work – Magdalen Figg took no part in their wrangles. She flowed on like the Waxle Stream, slow, calm, impenetrably muddy, foretelling the weather as indifferently as a river reflects the sky. Sometimes Sir Ralph found himself thinking that carnal pleasure with Magdalen might be very pleasurable, and that one would come away from it feeling refreshed and suppled like a washed shirt But the fancy remained fancy; he knew that he would not be thinking of her at all if he had not failed to make William Holly more attentive to his troubles with the hawk.
He would have to find another hawk unaided. Unaided, too, he must somehow fit the convent with a new prioress. Things could not go on like this: sooner or later the prioress would kill Dame Johanna; and that would be a great pity, for the prioress was an exceptional woman and Dame Johanna invincibly a nonentity. So he must procure a hawk, a prioress, and the bishop; for the three novices were clamouring to make their final vows, and though a bishop was not really necessary for this, parents prefer a bishop.
It was Brother Baltazar, one of a pair of friars who lodged for a night at Oby, who told him of the hawks at Brocton.
Sir Ralph knew Brocton by hearsay. It was a small manor lying westward of Lintoft. The Lord of Brocton, though a young man, was blind. He had inadvertently ridden into a Corpus Christi procession, and his horse, alarmed by the singing and the banners, had taken fright and trampled down the priest carrying the pyx. Thus involved in sacrilege and already head over ears in debt, the Lord of Brocton had despaired and hanged himself – as if, said Brother Baltazar, that would make things any better. His goods, of course, had been seized; but friends can always find a way round the law. Sir Ralph had only to ride to Brocton, offer his ghostly comfort to the widow, turn the conversation to falconry, and the hawk would be his. Brother Baltazar added that he should not delay. The widow, it seemed, was being difficult, and there was talk of an excommunication pending to bring her to reason.
A few days away from Oby was such a heavenly prospect that as Sir Ralph on the dun horse looked westward from Lintoft and saw before him the oak woods through which he would ride so pleasantly all day he almost forgot about the hawk. It was enough to be on a holiday. The smell of the fern, the squirrels, the hares leaping about the glades, the buzzing of flies, the screams of the woodpecker, everything delighted him. He seemed to himself to be a hundred miles away from Oby, and restored to the days of his youth. Nightfall found him still wandering in and out of woods. A woman in a forester’s hut to whom he described his route assured him that he must twice have been within a stone’s throw of Brocton. Now he was a good five miles away from it. But in the morning, she said, her little boy should sit on the saddlebow and guide him.
The next day’s sunrise waxed into a day of burning heat. The little boy was not so good a guide as he had been promised to be, and the sun was high before they came to the manor house. Seeing himself reflected in the moat Sir Ralph realised how fat he had grown. He had often seen his image in the pools of the Waxle Stream but the Brocton moat, reflecting him among sharp details of architecture, was more revealing of his shapelessness than the Cow Pool or Kitt’s Bend. Here comes such a nun! Among all the unpleasantness of that night when the prioress returned to her broken spire he had not failed to notice this mortifying exclamation; and watching the porter lead away the dun horse he could imagine the comments that would be made on its rider. The Dame of Brocton, the porter told him, would see neither priest nor friar. He wondered if this was a pretext to conceal that a sentence of excommunication was already in force; but having got so far he asked if he could see the hawks.
‘I will not go beyond a sparrow-hawk.’ He had been saying this to himself ever since the conversation with Brother Baltazar, but handling the birds, seeing the love-lorn way they tilted their heads and poked with their wings, he forgot all prudence. Come what might, cost what it might, he must have a tiercel. While he gazed at them he heard a quick step and a rustle of skirts behind him. The falconer bowed and fell silent. Sir Ralph had to hoist himself from his contemplations to salute the Dame of Brocton. Though he was dazzled by the beauty of the birds he saw that she was young, and very handsome, though her face was deformed by weeping and her lip swollen with the bites she had given it to stop her tears. She greeted him frankly and began to question him. Why she had changed her mind about seeing neither priest nor friar she did not explain, but it did not appear that she had sought him out for any religious reason. When she bade him come into the house and dine astonishment spread over the falconer’s broad face. The house was furnished with great elegance, and so clean that he could not believe himself in England. It was no wonder these people were in debt. She led him into the solar where an elderly woman, some sort of aunt, made the third at table. A little while after they had begun to eat a fourth member of the party came in – a boy about thirteen, a brother to the Dame of Brocton. His countenance showed how beautiful hers would have been if grief had not marred it.
With the same arrogant directness as when she had questioned him about himself and his journey the Dame of Brocton now began to question him about poetry. Many of the poets she mentioned he had never heard of, and to defend himself, and also because it was truly his opinion, he replied that the poets of the present age were of little account in comparison with the great men of the past.
‘That is because you do not know them,’ she replied.
‘That may be true. It is many years since I have been amongst poets.’ The admission cost him something, but he hoped a hawk would come of it.
She continued:
‘And why do you only mention such old poets? All poetry is not in Latin.’
‘No. But it might be better if it were. Since God and man between them have given us the Latin tongue and the Latin mode for poetry, it is waste of time to turn aside and scribble in the vernacular. That sort of thing can be left to old nurses, and jugglers at wakes and fairs, and those who cannot think how to go on unless a rhyme prompts them to their next thought.’
‘Do you call the great Dante an old nurse? He wrote in the vernacular, and used rhymes.’
There was a sauce flavoured with ginger that he would have liked to give his whole attention to; but he thought of the hawk. Italian, he said, French, too, for that matter, being dialects of the Latin tongue, were more musical and better suited for poetry. The fallacy of the vernacular was exposed as soon as the tutelage of Latin was lost. In Norway he had heard a man declaiming parts of an epic in the dialect of that country, and it had sounded like the snuffling and growling of bears.
At this the boy looked up, and laughed.
‘Yet some poet wrote it,’ she said. ‘And perhaps he was as great as Virgil.’
‘If he were – which I cannot believe, for language is a great part of poetry, where the language is imperfect the poem must be imperfect, too – if he were, none but his own countrymen will know it.’
The Dame of Brocton frowned and fell silent. His mind was returning to the sauce when the elder lady asked him if he were skilled in music. She had been told that the ladies of Oby were renowned for their singing of the plain-chant.
‘There again!’ he exclaimed. ‘Another example of what I maintain. These vernacular tunes, sung and forgotten in the space of a lifetime, and these descanters with their flourishes – how trivial they are by comparison with the classical modes of the church!’
The aunt now enquired about the nuns’ needlework. It seemed that she was trying to divert the conversation from the question of poetry in the vernacular. He replied that the nuns embroidered very prettily, and that the convent had also possessed a fine illuminator. Unfortunately the house was damp and much of her work was already impaired by mildew. She asked if there was a moat. A moat was the only hope for a dry house. He explained that Oby stood on a rise of ground where no moat was feasible.
Meanwhile the Dame of Brocton sat biting her lip. Presently she began again, constraining her voice into amiability.
‘I cannot help thinking that you might change your mind about poetry in English if you heard more of it. My husband . . . ’
The boy looked at the aunt and folded his hands as if to say: ‘The same old story!’ Sir Ralph found that he was to spend the afternoon listening to a reading of the dead man’s verses. There was a long poem, the widow explained, long, but unfinished, which her husband had considered to be his finest work. He had brooded over it for many years, sometimes coming home with a score of stanzas, sometimes with a line or two: for he found his invention worked most freely when he was on horseback, and he would ride hour-long over the waste, a groom going with him to pull the horse away from the thickets or out of the quagmires. On his return he would repeat his day’s work and she would write it down. Before their marriage he had used a secretary; but the secretary had thought himself a poet also, his copies were not reliable, and at other times he was drunk when he wrote and his script could not be deciphered.
‘And is it all in English? – and all in rhyme?’
‘Of course. It is an English epic.’
He resigned himself. A hawk might have been purchased elsewhere at a less exorbitant price. But he was at Brocton, his adventure had mastered him, and till it released him there was nothing for it but to submit.
Yet the afternoon was not entirely unpleasant, for his seat by the window was cushioned and he could look out and see the dragon-flies darting over the moat, or the aspen quiver of the reflected sunlight on the mossed wall, or a water-rat swimming across and dragging its wheat-ear pattern of ripples after it. It sharpened his appreciation to remember that all this was in the hands of the law, and that at any moment the summoner might ride across the drawbridge. His adventure had brought him here just in time. A few weeks later and there might be no hawks, no cup of wine, nothing but sunlight and water-rats and dragon-flies. As though no calamity had befallen or ever would befall she sat reading aloud, her voice persisting through the flies buzzing and the haymakers calling for drinks. Though the poem was unfinished there was a great deal of it, he could tell that from the bulk of the manuscript. Its chief character was someone called Mamillion, a giant, it seemed, or perhaps an enchanter; but a gentle giant, for his power was of small use to him and he did little but ride from one place to another, often pausing to hold long conversations with birds, or to wash his hair and beard in enchanted fountains. The poem was full of bird-songs and voices of water. No doubt the author’s blindness had sharpened his other senses, so that the tweedle of a wren or the taste of a bilberry meant more to him than to the sighted.
‘I wonder that your lord did not write a poem about Samson,’ he remarked at the close of a section. She answered that Samson was a person with no attributes of chivalry and quite unsuited to be the subject of a poem. To the best of Sir Ralph’s remembrance Samson was well-born, at any rate Samson’s parents were people of substance, but not being sure of it he did not care to commit himself. He thought too that Samson, if not a good christian, was at any rate nearer to christianity and more deserving of an epic than Mamillion. Whoever Mamillion might be he was certainly a heathen. Though the Lord of Brocton’s verses referred from time to time to the Virgin or the saints it was obvious that this was merely because the poet himself chose to do so. Even when Mamillion came on Christ in the depth of a yew forest, bewailing, and hiding his face in the bitter yew boughs, no conversion or judgement came of it; Mamillion only gazed, and pitied, and rode on.
The sunlight quitted the water, the reflected light danced no longer on the wall of the moat A swarm of midges rose and fell, a minute chaff fanned by some mysterious breath of living. Somewhere overhead a thin wailing arose. After a while he realised that it was a baby crying. So there was a child in the house. This was natural enough, yet for some reason it surprised him. When next Mamillion fell asleep under a thorn tree, or came to a castle, or found a boat of stretched skins and paddled off in it among the reeds, so putting a colon to his unadventurous adventures, he would speak to the Dame of Brocton about her child. Possibly she would then go off and see to it, leaving him free to look again at the hawks. He had lost hope of getting away before nightfall.
Yet in such a house there would be a good bed. Though he itched to be gone he was also pleased to be staying. All his life he had wondered how it would feel to live as the rich do. Now he was in a way to find out. God in heaven, what happiness to be rich!
Mamillion’s wanderings halted where they would for ever halt, on the brink of a blood-stained river and a blank page, but Sir Ralph remained at Brocton. By force of acquaintance he had come to like the poem and even to find pleasure in the sound of English rhymed verse. The sharp consonants, the rebellious false quantities, put him in mind of a wide mere bristling with reeds and flawed with a choppy wind. Taking the manuscript he began to read aloud to himself, experimenting with the scansion, trying to find some reason in it. One might as well try to scan the paces of a hare. Sometimes it loped, sometimes it ran: all one could say of it was that it had its own ways of moving.
‘And what became of Mamillion? Did he find a kingdom, did he marry, was he slain?’
‘It was to end with a piece of mistletoe,’ she replied. ‘He was to find the mistletoe growing on an oak tree and lop it off with a golden sword.’
‘An imitation of the golden bough in Virgil, no doubt.’
‘I do not know.’
Though she had a child (true, it was only a girl-child) all her maternal feeling seemed to be fastened upon this unfinished poem. Having compelled him to listen to it, having persuaded him into liking it, she led him on to her main purpose, which was to make the poem known. Would the fact that it was unfinished make the world reject it? He answered soothingly that there was a great deal of it already: an unfinished epic would have a better chance than a few lyrics. If it had been in Latin, he muttered to himself; but there was no object in going through all that again. He pointed out that thanks to her scholarship and her wifely devotion the story of Mamillion was already in writing, the first step towards being known. She said that being written down was not the same thing as being read. A happy thought struck him. Very earnestly he advised her to make a second copy. The boy and the aunt also asked him what he thought of the poem. The boy mocked gracefully, the aunt seemed to be consulting him as though he were a physician and the poem something he might prescribe a cure for. She thanked him too effusively for his interest and was sure that the Virgin had sent him to Brocton. It was evident that unless he were careful he would find himself saddled with the obligation of introducing Mamillion to the world of letters. In their different ways, the boy with his derision, the aunt with her hypocrisy, the widow with her sincerity, they were easing their burden on to his shoulders. It was very silly of them, for of course he could do nothing about it. How was he to go among the writers and poets saying: Here is an unfinished English epic which you must admire? Perhaps he had misled them, mentioning during that first meal the countries he had visited, the notabilities he had seen; yet even the nuns at Oby, those simple ladies, had known such talk to be the ordinary brag of the penniless travelling student, and took it for no more than it was worth. Brocton swallowed it whole. He marvelled at the unworldliness of these worldlings, till he remembered that far away in the past he had seen the same thing. Apparently if one were sufficiently rich and sufficiently well-born one need have no worldly cunning, it was enough to exist – in which case the lilies commended by Jesus were several degrees higher in the social scale than King Solomon. Even these Brocton people, and Brocton was not a great manor, were too sophisticated to distinguish between a poor priest on the lookout for a hawk and a fashionable scholar: all they knew of the world was that it could and would support them, as kings and dukes travel from one estate to another, eating up a year’s food in a month and, when everything is eaten, travelling on. Yet the poem of Mamillion stayed in his mind, and he began to wonder about the character of the poet, that lord as attentive as any shepherd to wild berries and signs of rain, who had so haughtily and unpractically hanged himself. There was a parish priest, a red-faced sharp-eyed little Welshman to whom he had been introduced after mass on Sunday (the ban of the church had not fallen on Brocton after all), and Sir Ralph began to question him. Indeed, yes, it was very sad, a great pity, said the little man, his black eyes dancing in his red face. He was very sorry for them, the poor women, the poor servants who would so soon be trotting. His lamenting singsong was belied by an undertone that it was no great loss after all. Presently he said that the Lord of Brocton was a bad young man: proud, harsh, luxurious, an unkind lord to his people.
‘Yet the serfs look thriving,’ said Sir Ralph, thinking of Oby.
‘No wonder, indeed! He granted them whatever they asked. That is one reason why his debts were so many. He was a bad lord, and much hated. He had no consideration, and people like to be considered. It makes a serf feel silly to be given whatever he asks.’
He marched Sir Ralph off to the parsonage and showed him his geese, his pigs, his bees, his little cow. Everything told of neatness and management – the beds heaped with goosefeather pillows, the flitches drying in the chimney, the bee-skeps smoking among the bean-rows, the loom, taking up half the room, where Sir Jankin sat weaving blankets on rainy days. Learning that Sir Ralph was only a nun’s priest, Sir Jankin condoled with him. No glebe, no goods of his own, no occupation: life on such terms must drag heavily.
Learning that Oby lay among reeds and osiers he urged Sir Ralph to take up basket-making.
As busy as the Georgics, thought Sir Ralph, walking back through the silent Sunday landscape, hushed with Sunday and dinner-time. One might be very happy in such a life, jostled through the sameness of the days by a hundred small thrifts and contrivances. In spring one sows, in autumn one garners, there are nuts to pick and little pigs to geld, and morning and evening one milks the cow and looks about for eggs. There is no time of year when one cannot bring home something profitable, and that is how nature would have one live, as attentive as a lover.
Sir Jankin proposed basket-making. The Dame of Brocton proposed Mamillion. Everyone had a plan for him, he only had no plan. ‘What ails me?’ he said, stopping under an oak tree as though the question must be answered there and then. ‘What ails me that I can never have a plan for myself?’ Was it lack of ambition, was it lack of desire? In his youth he had been ambitious. Desire had not failed him even now. Desire for a hawk had brought him to Brocton, and certainly his faculty of desire had not perished, for he was capable as ever of disgust, and disgust is the inversion of desire. He had as much ability as other men, as much endurance, more health and strength than many. If he could get rid of his fat he would be in excellent condition. But his life had been aimless as an idiot’s, in his youth running from place to place with an idiot’s delight in motion, and now, like an idiot, set down in the chimney-corner. He was a bastard and penniless? Other penniless bastards had done well enough for themselves, so why not he? But he was damned – and can a man who despairs of salvation in the next world frame desires in this? A bird hopped in the tree, and before it had settled, his mind had tossed away this answer as worthless. Long before he had come to Oby and damned himself he had lacked whatever it is that holds a man to his purpose.
What impulse, what little puff of wind, had sent him towards Oby? The thought of a breakfast. Clear as in a dream he saw the track rising to a knoll with trees on it and the colour of the moonlight as the dawn began to tarnish it, and felt once more the physical desolation which had preceded his vomiting. ‘I am stricken,’ he had thought. ‘I shall die here, alone and unfriended. And nobody will know or care.’
Perhaps that was the answer: his stubborn lifelong loneliness, a celibacy costing no effort and earning no approbation, cold as the devil’s loins when he genders with a witch. And suppose he were indeed begotten by Satanas, and came into the world inheriting damnation as all others inherit original sin? The devil might have come stamping into the brothel as the rest of them did, someone must have fathered him, so why not Satanas? Here was a thought to run mad with. He stood snorting under the tree, waiting to feel the blood climb into his neck and the hairs bristle on his scalp. A brilliant hope flashed before him. If he ran mad at Brocton as he had run mad at Oby he might wander away in his madness; and when his wits came back to him he would be far away with no one knowing who he was, far away and free to begin another life.
He wrung his hands in an agony of hope. But nothing happened. At last he began to walk on, for there was no sense in staying.
That same afternoon he saw that the days of his popularity at Brocton were over. Though his hostess continued to thank him for all he would do to make known the poem of Mamillion she thanked him without conviction, and though the aunt continued to heap his platter and fill his cup he saw her exchanging glances with the boy, and imagined her slow furry voice saying: ‘One might as well fodder that great beast Leviathan.’ But melancholy now made him as stupid as a baby; it took the news that the summoner and his officers were within a day’s journey of Brocton to dislodge him. Nothing like damnation to disgrace a man, he thought, hearing himself say that his absence would now be more comfortable to them than his presence.
‘You must not go without your hawk,’ she answered. Stumbling over her long-tailed gown he followed her to the falconry, and while he was biting his knuckles she chose out a couple of falcons.
‘Can you carry them both, or shall I send a man along with you?’
One such bird would cost a fortune, a pair of them was out of the question. He must avail himself of the excuse of priestly orders and get off with a sparrow-hawk. Then the thought of his inadequacy, his disgraceful departure, smote him, and he resolved not to flinch before any price she asked. The money must be raised somehow. He could sell his books. He could make baskets as the Welshman had advised.
Her voice cut through his expostulations. The falcons were a gift.
He rode away, a clumsy candelabra for the two birds. The dun horse neighed and looked back towards the manor of Brocton as though he were riding it out of Eden. The poor brute also had a taste for high living, for clean water and sweet hay. There was actually a gloss on its coat. I am riding like Mamillion, he thought, riding through woods and past little woodland meres. But it was not possible to conceive Mamillion riding to Oby, to that epitome of humdrum, a provincial nunnery. Topping the rise of ground between Lintoft and Oby he looked down on his bishopric. The corn was ten days yellower, the beans were ten days rustier. The Hollys’ dwelling was being re-thatched, and bristled like a boy’s head. There was the Waxle Stream, winding in its green sleeve. There was the convent, with the spire cased in scaffolding – so the masons must have come back. Within it were his ladies, all at sixes and sevens, no doubt, just as he had left them.
He spoke to his two falcons.
‘Now you are going to live in a convent and become two holy nuns.’
Their demeanour was so composed, they were so gentle and dignified, that he was constrained to add: ‘God forbid it!’
But something had resolved the sixes and sevens. Voices were low, brows were smooth, and the prioress had resigned. Seemingly this had been achieved without a struggle, for she told him the news with a satisfaction only triflingly enhanced by her natural art.
‘You know how often I have said that my one wish was to be relieved of my office. Only the thought of the expense held me back. Now our good treasuress tells me we can perfectly well afford an election. You cannot imagine how thankful I feel! Saint Leonard has never freed a more delighted prisoner.’
What was more, she meant it. Her eyes were clear, she had the washed girlish look of a convalescent.
What had effected this miracle? There was a new cook, a good one. A good cook can do much, but surely this was beyond the mediation of cookery? Dame Salome had fallen and broken her leg, and at her age and with her bulk it was unlikely that she would survive it; but Dame Salome had never been a nun of any importance, the prospect of losing her could not have brought about this mysterious millennium. During his absence the convent had been served by the new priest at Lintoft, whose name was John Idburn. But there was nothing to suggest that John Idburn’s ministrations had spoken peace to Oby. Questioned, the nuns reported that he was a very quiet young man, that he looked weakly, and stammered.
At Brocton Sir Ralph had congratulated himself on being out of earshot of his ghostly daughters. Now, racked with curiosity, he wooed them to converse with him, but wooed in vain. To Dame Matilda he remarked that it must be a relief to her to have the election fixed at last and that there could be no doubt as to the succession. She answered that whoever was chosen could at best only hope to be a poor copy of such a distinguished prioress. When he grinned she gave him a look so austere that he began to revise his cheerful anticipations of her term of office. When he condoled with Dame Margaret on the headaches which the renewal of work on the spire must be causing her she asked him if he had seen the revised design? – it had several notable improvements on the other. Nothing came of a visit to Dame Salome, who lay in the infirmary, mildly delirious, and mistaking him for Prior Thomas. Even Dame Johanna, with whom he cautiously strolled in the cloister, said no more than how much she was looking forward to meeting the bishop. They had some secret; but as she-cattle put the calves in their midst and confront the wolf with a ring of lowered horns and trampling hoofs, his nuns kept him at bay with primmed-up lips and lowered eyelids. He would never know.
He had never learned, either, how a game of Flying Saint Katharine had ended so awkwardly. So how was he to guess that Dame Salome, increasingly put about by the quarrels of the convent, quarrels in which she was quite unfitted to play a distinguished part, had been re-creating that incident in a shape more favourable to her self-esteem? She might be a fat old woman, and of no account. Yet if the truth were known, the truth which envy tried to conceal . . . The nuns were in chapter and only gave half an ear to Dame Salome’s grumbles. They went on with their interchange of more topical accusations while Dame Salome worked herself up with complaints of how she had always been slighted, her opinions disregarded, her age un -honoured, her plate constantly heaped with bones when it was well known that she had not the teeth to deal with them. Then came some quotations from the Magnificat and an allusion to stones which the builders rejected, and developing from stones and builders a reminder that she had always said the spire was too tall to be safe. The prioress, who remained sensitive about the spire, bade her hold her tongue. Dame Salome then harked back to envy and conspiracy, saying that if a man should rise from the dead the nuns of Oby would not be convinced. No, they would declare that nothing had happened, that he had been mistaken and had better drink a little soup and forget about it. The nuns failed to see the import of this hypothetical man who rose from the dead and was given soup. It was not till Dame Salome cried out from the head of the steps that they should see for themselves whether or no there was a flying saint among them that they grasped her intention. By then it was too late. Flapping her arms and screaming, she launched herself off the topmost step, rolled to the bottom, and lay stunned, one leg projecting at an unnatural angle from her dusty petticoats.
This shocked them out of their quarrels. If they had been rooks they would have migrated. Being nuns, they revolted. After compline Dame Matilda, Dame Beatrix, Dame Helen, and Dame Margaret followed the prioress to her chamber and said, speaking one after another as if it were a liturgy: ‘Dear Mother, we ask you to resign.’ The prioress with a gasp of relief replied that that was exactly what she wished to do. Then and there the letters of resignation were written, one to the bishop, the other to Adam de Retteville, the secular patron of the house, and Sir John Idburn rode with them to Waxelby, whence they would be carried on by the friars.