(February 1380)
A wolf dead is half-way to being a lamb. Bishop Walter Dunford dead was emerging as the mild admirer of Oby, the more easily since a new bishop had taken his place, a complete novelty, and so to be dreaded. The new bishop was Perkin de Craye, a Fleming of a great moneylending family, who was said to be a fat, smooth, proud man with a stammer, caring only for Our Lady, works of art, ritual, and foreign cheeses. Such a bishop would look with little favour on Dame Lovisa’s magpie psalters. He would be more efficaciously wooed with an embroidery. When next Henry Yellowlees came on a custodianly visit he was questioned about Bishop de Craye’s views on gold thread and opus anglicum. As for Bishop de Craye’s views on anchoresses, that subject was put by for more immediate considerations.
In a convent any long-term strategy is at the mercy of the present. In the excitement of blue satin, white sarsenet, silks and fine needles, gold thread and spangles, Dame Sibilla forgot to hear the owl, and Dame Lilias, who was always admitted to have very good taste whatever her failings might be, was suddenly gathered into the life of the community to animate the party which favoured a design of white ostrich plumes, naturalistically treated, rather than the gold and white lilies advocated by the traditionalists. It was many years since the convent had undertaken a large needlework. The prioress possessed no skill as a needlewoman, Dame Lovisa’s broken nails made it out of the question that she should handle an embroidery: needlework had become involved in the politics of the community, and its laying-by was a sign of the de Stapledon ascendancy. Now the enthusiasm for the proposed altar-hanging nursed up an opposition party, brought Dame Lilias into popularity, and kindled a revival of admiration for the Trinity Cope embroidered by the old prioress, Dame Alicia de Foley the spire-builder.
Unnoticed for years, this was now brought out and studied in all its details. One stitch used by Dame Alicia baffled every needlewoman of the current generation; there was some trick in it, some manipulation of the thread, which they could not reproduce; and then came a dramatic turn when Dame Adela paused by the group of nuns puzzling over this stitch and said that she knew just how it was done, for she had often watched the old prioress doing it. Give her a needle, she said. Unbelievingly they gave her a scrap of canvas and some cheap green thread; and before their eyes she performed the old prioress’s stitch, so exactly that only by the materials could you tell the new from the old. Dame Adela being a de Retteville this discovery strengthened the anti-de Stapledon party. It was agreed that the way Dame Adela was neglected and allowed to wander hooting about the grounds was part and parcel of the de Stapledon usurpation of power, and Dame Adela was made miserable by finding herself kept at needlework instead of being left to her own out-of-door devices.
When William Holly took to his bed only the prioress was sufficiently detached from the politics of the altar-hanging to think that Oby might lose an invaluable servant. The peril of her contemporary roused up her faculties, she wept and fretted and lay awake at night fingering her beads and reckoning incomings and outgoings much as she had used to do in her treasuress days and often confusing the calculations of those days with the calculations of the present. But now she saw all with the despondency of the aged: the interest on the Methley tithe, the debt on the Methley repairs and the interest on the loan which had been raised to pay part of that debt, the rise in the cost of living, the expenses of the next Visitation (God be thanked Bishop de Craye made no move so far to come to them but sooner or later come he must), the expenses of her own funeral and the cost of installing Dame Lovisa as her successor (but who could say? – there might yet be a schism, an Eleanor prioress debating with a Lovisa prioress, elections and counter elections), the repairs needed at Tunwold, the deadlock over the Esselby rent, the diminishing returns from the river-dues at Scurleham, caused by the silting up of the estuary and the lessening value of the water-borne trade, the burden of Henry Yellowlees (he was not so bad as he might have been, but every custos is economically bad, for he authorises expenditures too easily and corrupts the community he is put in charge of by lifting the sense of responsibility from the nuns in chapter themselves, this or that is granted, agreed, neglected, because the custos wills it or because the custos will see to it), the burden (another legacy laid on them by Bishop Walter, might he burn in hellfire, God rest his soul!) of those two healthy eating gawks, Amy Hodds and Joan Cossey (who both had lived through the measles which had killed Lucy Frampton) and an undowered Dame Sibilla, the fact that these three nominees took up room that might otherwise be given to advantageous novices, the difficulty, though, of getting a good novice nowadays, the alarming increase in convent servants, nuns and servants alike now grew so luxurious that more servants were needed to wait on the nuns, and more servants to serve the servants, the cost of a new priest, for Sir Ralph was so senile that really he was a scandal and something must be done about him and in any case he would die, the blindness of Dame Cecily and the cost of the opiates that must be given her for mere pity’s sake – and now all this expenditure on blue satin. And nothing to put against it but William Holly’s heriot if William Holly died. And a new bailiff to choose and train who would never be a patch on William Holly.
So the old woman lay awake, grunting and grieving. There was another thing on her mind too, though she managed to keep it from getting into the inventory. Dame Alice had drowned Magdalen Figg in the fish-pond. It was all long ago, Magdalen had drowned in water and now was decaying in earth, and Sir Ralph was out of his wits and remembered nothing; but earth and water are but two elements, there are also fire and air to reckon with, and air can body a story and fire can burn the soul. The nuns heard their prioress grunting and sighing, and the bedstead creaking and the dry rattle of the beads, and since they heard such sounds every night thought nothing of them.
Having twice been anointed for death William Holly recovered. Soon he was snapping round the manor again, boasting of how he had squelched his toad with a great blow he had given himself in the belly. His sickness had left no mark on him except that he was rather thinner and considerably more fault-finding. Everything had gone to rack and ruin, he said, during his illness; the prioress herself could not persuade him to admit that many of the deficiencies he complained of were long standing and had been complained of by him for years. The vivacity of his complaints compelled them to face the fact that nowadays a manor was not what it used to be, and little more than a rather tiresome way of supplying oneself with milk and poultry, bread and firing. More tiresomely, a manor in these days was a camp of malcontents, and one must be on good terms with one’s people, and not press them too much, lest they should take part in the rebellions which were jumping up, here, there, and everywhere, like a fire in the stubble. Anything is better than being burned out or murdered in one’s bed.
‘But should we not aim,’ said Dame Lovisa, ‘to do something more than please William Holly? That will soothe no one, since they all detest him for his prosperity and his extortions. We should find some means of seeming to serve them all.’
‘Then we must first make a fortune,’ answered Dame Eleanor. ‘Food, clothing, new thatching, the gleaning bell rung an hour earlier, a remission of dues – there is no way of pleasing people that is not costly.’
‘There is one way. We can teach their children. That would cost very little except time and trouble. People like you to make a fuss of their children, nothing pleases them so surely.’
‘Teach them? Teach them what?’
‘Really, as little as you wish. A few hymn tunes, the names of the patriarchs, a little hearsay Latin, how to wipe their noses . . . it is the attention that pleases, the learning is no matter.’
She could read a non-placet in their looks even before they began to make objections. ‘Where should the children be put? – in the nave? Their fleas won’t stay in the nave, Dame Lovisa, their fleas will come leaping into the quire.’ – ‘And who is to teach them, are the novices to be neglected on their behalf when heaven sends us novices?’ – ‘And if we have them here, how are we to get rid of them? They will stay all day, we shall never be free of them.’ – ‘And if we teach them they will all go off the manor to become friars and clerks, nuns and jugglers, they will never stay at work once they begin to think themselves scholars. Besides, how are we to teach children when our hands are full of the altar-hanging?’ Such were the answers, and Dame Margaret lifted up her ancient croak and recalled how Oby had once educated a boy, who had gone off with their best horse and a quantity of spices.
Dame Lovisa’s project got no further. Thinking of her own project Dame Sibilla sighed with relief. The anchoressing of Dame Lilias, the appeasing of the owl (it was still there, for owls are constant in their haunts, and in the dusky vapours of a November forenoon its tranquil disembodied note was quite as sinister as in high summer) were not proceeding as fast as she had hoped, and another distraction might be ruinous. It was now almost two years since Walter Dunford’s death. But the great needlework would soon be completed: then would come a pause, an idle interim when she could command their attention.
And then everything was overturned by the affair of Dame Adela. Twenty years before it had been axiomatic that Adela would need to be watched; and her profession had been postponed for some time, since a seduced novice is less scandalous than a seduced nun. But a short watchfulness sufficed. Her apple-blossom beauty had not been substantiated by the slightest carnal intellect, she was as chaste as a parsnip; and now, nearing thirty, she was faded, awkward, gap-toothed. It was strange to reflect that the wonderful de Retteville novice, procured with such triumph by the old prioress and fought for as briskly as though she were Helen of Troy, should have turned into this harmless incubus, rather greedy, terrified of thunderstorms, who tamed mice and could hoot like an owl. Nobody reflected on it, however, for nobody gave Dame Adela a thought – except Dame Lovisa, who had never lost the protectiveness which she, the ugly novice, had so oddly displayed for her lovely contemporary. Her concern showed itself by harshness where the unconcern of the others was indulgent. She scolded her, tidied her, hunted her out of the kitchen court, discouraged the fellowship with toads, kites, and spiders. When it came to light that Dame Adela remembered the old prioress’s trick stitch Dame Lovisa rejoiced in this opportunity to put Dame Adela on a level with the other nuns, though, as she knew, every stitch copied from the second Trinity Cope strengthened the de Retteville faction and injured her own prospects of becoming the next prioress.
In carefulness, in anxiety, in unpopularity, she was already almost a prioress, and it was strange that having so real a fore-taste of the wormwood of office she should be so determined to drink it out of the official cup. Throughout that second winter the work on the altar-hanging was carried forward, and everyone who could thread a needle was engaged on some part of it. Since needlework cannot be done with cold hands all available fuel went to keep up a good fire in the parlour. The prioress sat there, and Dame Cecily was led in, to enjoy the warmth and the conversation and the sense of something in the making. Though Dame Lovisa could not take part in the embroidering because of her broken nails and her chilblains there was no reason why she should not sit there with the rest and be warm and sociable, and to do so would have been politic. But she was no sooner settled among them than an uneasy austerity drove her out. There was always a pretext to leave them: a message to the kitchen, a beggar to be relieved, a traveller to be interviewed. There was always a reason to go and never a voice to bid her stay. There was not even an open antagonism to challenge by remaining. Hers was a cold unpopularity. So she left the fireside: sometimes to stand at the wicket handing out food and drink, listening to the stamp or shuffle of feet, gulpings and whisperings and fragmentary news of another world; sometimes to hear long-winded complaints and give good advice which would never be heeded; sometimes to check account-books, sometimes to roll pills, sometimes to pray in the chapel – where she would no sooner be settled on her knees than she would notice something amiss and get up to right it. Coming and going she would hear the voices flowing from the parlour, or the thump of the flails from the granary, or from Sir Ralph’s chamber a sudden gusty bellow as the old man, lying a-bed for warmth, would recall a tavern song of his student days, or from the kitchen a clatter of dishes and a steady rattle of narrative. Everyone had a voice and a will to use it except her. She could only think, unconversational as a snake.
And yet it was Dame Lilias who wished to become an anchoress and Dame Lovisa who willed to become a prioress.
Peering out through a crack in the window screen she stared at the thin-lipped landscape, foggy with long frost and sought in herself the reason. In her heart were two wishes: to become prioress and to make another psalter. The copying of those psalters had been the only pleasure she had known; to be prioress was the only ambition she could conceive.
Among the voices in the parlour she could hear Dame Adela’s – a querulous note, interrupted by a yawn. Adela might weary of the needlework, but she must be kept to it. Every stitch she dragged through the blue satin fastened her a little more into the life of the community, and buttressed Dame Lovisa’s fantastic resolve that when she became prioress Adela should be treated with more respect, should even be given some office. But what office? – since she had neither discretion, demeanour, industry, nor common wit. Nunneries, unfortunately, have no call for a verderer. The voices grew louder, someone had opened the parlour door; and at the same moment a figure came into her narrow view of the world, and by its coming, its dark shuffling approach, made that world twice as cold, twice as sombre. Man or woman she could not say; but certainly a beggar. Today it was Dame Eleanor’s turn at the wicket, but she was a poor hand with beggars, alternately scorning and scornfully indulging them; besides, she would not wish to leave the fireside. Dame Lovisa went to the wicket herself and waited for the beggar to knock. She heard the footsteps pause, and the sound of a spit. The beggar knocked.
Disconcerted by being so instantly opened to, the woman stared at the nun with a look of antagonism. Then she began her complaint. She was penniless, she said, and hungry, she had been poisoned by eating bad fish, and was seven months gone with child. In the austere air her stink was almost intolerable.
But hungry she certainly was not, thought Dame Lovisa, watching her inattentive mouthing. More likely she had come to the wicket from loneliness. Loneliness is often the beggar’s worst affliction, and thinking of this Dame Lovisa now opened the door to her. Sprawling on a bench with her hands over the brazier the woman began to tell of her rambles from shrine to shrine, misfortune to misfortune. It was at the shrine of Saint Cuthbert, at Durham in the north, that she had been got with the child she carried, a cruel thing to befall a virtuous woman, and certainly it must have grieved the saint. But if it proved a boy she would name it Cuthbert. As ill luck would have it Dame Adela now joined them, yawning and stretching and complaining of the fatigue of needlework; and took upon her to remark that it was a pity the child could not be born a monkey, for a monkey would be diversion and better able to fend for itself. The virtuous pilgrim gave her a displeased look. Dame Lovisa said hastily that she knew something of the north country, since she had been born there.
‘Ah well, you’re out of it now,’ said the woman, ‘and snug in the Virgin’s lap. You convent ladies do not know how lucky you are.’
Dame Adela exclaimed that a nun’s life was not so easy. There was the night office, the lenten fast, all day you were kept at needlework and the gold thread was sharp and cut the fingers. The woman replied that there was nothing she loved better than to see holy needleworks, whether on the priest’s back or on the altar it did you good to see so much richness in a poor world, and every stitch of it put in by pure virgins, she daresayed. She began to describe copes and hangings she had seen, the white and the gold and the scarlet, the bullion standing out in lumps as big as your fist, the pearls like drops of mutton fat. Meanwhile her lice, enlivened by the warmth, crawled out over her neck and forehead and at intervals she caught one with a practised hand and inattentively bit it.
This altar-hanging now, she asked, what colour was it? Was it crimson? Blue, said Dame Adela. Our dear Lady’s own colour, said the woman knowledgeably. Instantly Dame Adela offered to fetch it.
‘Don’t be a fool!’ exclaimed Dame Lovisa. Dame Adela giggled and moved towards the door. Dame Lovisa boxed her ears, and Dame Adela began to weep.
The woman put on a discreet expression and busied herself with her lice.
A box on the ears is not much in a convent, yet Dame Lovisa sickened with a feeling of guilt. Alone at Oby she was conscious of Dame Adela as an immortal soul, a thing in which God’s intention, however hooded by imbecility, stirred and chirped and was refreshed by the sacraments. Because of this she was harsh and irritable while the rest were tolerant. Now Dame Adela wept with her uncontrollable half-wit’s weeping. Her laments would be heard, and some hearer would say: ‘Listen to the poor wretch! Really, it’s a shame,’ and the shrieks of a pig-killing would not mean less to them.
Pulling herself together she turned to the woman, who met her glance with a grimace of understanding and tapped lightly on her forehead. With so much knowledge of the world and of needlework, thought Dame Lovisa, this unpleasant pilgrim must be some cast-off bower-woman.
‘And to what shrine are you travelling now?’ she asked.
‘We are going to Waxelby.’
There was no shrine at Waxelby, but she went on smoothly to say that she was in hopes that from Waxelby some ship’s captain would be charitable enough to give her a passage southward, so that she could visit the shrine of Saint Osyth.
‘Then you do not make this pilgrimage alone?’
The thought of other pilgrims straying about the hen-roosts, plunging their hands into corn-bins, made Dame Lovisa’s voice sharp.
‘How dare one travel alone in these bad days?’ said the woman defensively. ‘The others have already gone on. It was my sickness that kept me lagging behind.’
‘You had better make haste after them.’
Seating herself more squarely on the bench the woman said that among the pilgrims there was one brought up in these parts – nearer home, may be, than it would be convenient to say. After pausing aggressively, she added: ‘His mother was a nun in this very house.’
Dame Adela looked up, all eyes, and said roundly that it could not be true.
‘Ah, my poor lady!’ said the woman with condescension. ‘You sit embroidering, you do not know all that passes.’
‘As if I should not know if a child were born! No such thing, I tell you. It is true our priest used to fondle Magdalen Figg, for I have seen him at it. But she was no nun, and had no baby, she was too old for that.’
‘I know who you mean,’ Dame Lovisa said. ‘He was called Jackie or some such name. He went off on a stolen horse with other goods he had stolen. I have heard the older ladies talk of it. He is well advised to go on towards Waxelby. I do not wonder he made such haste.’
She stood over the woman, willing her to depart. The woman rose. In her bosom, tucked into her dirty wrappings, was the bowl from which she had eaten.
‘I have a message for that same priest,’ said the woman, rolling her eyes, ‘whom some say is no priest at all. Jackie bid me say . . . ’
‘And our bowl?’ Dame Lovisa enquired.
The woman handed it over with a kind of dignity. Then loyalty to her Jackie (from Pernelle Bastable onward many women had been too loyal to Jackie for their own profit) overcame her. She began to rant and scream, saying that such hospitality would choke her, and that the nuns of Oby were no better than their priest, shams all of them, cheats, wantons, greedy-guts, oppressors of the poor. The noise brought Dame Eleanor. Instead of being grateful that another should have borne the stress of entertaining this visitor she turned on Dame Lovisa and reproached her for usurping everybody’s business: ‘Though why you should be so anxious to poke your face out of the wicket, I do not know. Unless it be to scare people from our door. That would be thrifty, of course. That would appeal to you.’
‘More thrifty still to leave them knocking with never an answer! But you were gabbling by the fire, forgetful of everything except your own ease. If I had not heard her and gone at last to receive her she would be knocking still.’
‘And a pretty piece of work you seem to have let in.’
While the two nuns quarrelled in an undertone the woman had worked herself into a frenzy – the worse since she could get no attention but Adela’s – and now she was beating on the walls and crying to be let out of this place, worse than a prison, worse than a brothel, worse than hell itself since every soul in it was black-damned. What else but damned could they be? – idle, devouring caterpillars listening to a mass that was no mass since a priest that was no priest performed it.
‘How much longer do you propose to entertain this trull?’ enquired Dame Eleanor.
‘Now that you are here I will not trespass on your office. I am waiting for you to turn her away,’ replied Dame Lovisa.
Dame Eleanor advanced on the woman, who instantly turned on her.
‘Trull, do you say? True enough, true enough, I am no lady, so any word is good enough for me. I do not sit all day by a fire embroidering in gold thread upon satin. Yes, and deny the very sight of it to a poor woman,’ she added, turning upon Dame Lovisa. ‘You will stir your white fingers for God’s altar, but when did you ever prick your fingers for God’s poor? We go in rags. And you waste on one yard of your fancywork as much gold as would clothe and feed ten of us for a year’s length. Where are the words of Christ, when he said, Clothe the naked? When do you sit down and spin for us? Spin! You cannot as much as spin for yourselves, you are not worth as much as spiders.
‘But you won’t laugh for ever,’ she continued, having noticed Dame Adela’s countenance brighten at the mention of spiders. ‘You may laugh now, but you will weep sooner than you look for. You will have a fine fire to warm yourselves by one night, the red hen will scrabble in your thatch. Mark my words! I know what I know, I know what I’ve heard, and I tell you, it won’t be long before they come to smoke you out. We have been eaten up long enough with lewd monks and idle nuns, we have lost patience with you. You have worn out the patience of the poor!’
On the threshold she turned back for a last look. By now half the convent had gathered, flustering, questioning, threatening. She spat, and marched away holding forth her belly as if it were a shield.
The substance of her words was really nothing new. For many years the nuns had been accustomed to the hearsay of such talk, and could refer to themselves as ‘we idlers,’ and ‘us worthless nuns.’ Threats of destruction were no novelty either; the more romantically minded would sometimes discuss where they would go, what they would do, when the Lollards came and set fire to the convent. None of them had any distinct ideas as to their plans, and certainly their relations would not welcome them home; but that did not spoil the conversation. The more sophisticated among them, such as Dame Philippa and Dame Cecily, at times contemplated a more gradual kind of destruction, a day – beyond their own day, of course, but within reach of speculation – when well-dowered novices would be so few and expenses so heavy that convents would perish for lack of means. But there is a difference between hearsay and hearing with one’s own ears; the woman’s fury and insolence had genuinely fluttered those who heard her, so very naturally they fell into a violent squabble among themselves, some blaming Dame Lovisa for letting the woman in, others blaming Dame Eleanor for not being there to keep her out. Thanks to one or other of them the nuns of Oby might well find themselves murdered in their beds. Fortunately the prioress, asleep in her chair, knew nothing of it.
As they broke off their altercation to go in to vespers Dame Eleanor paired with her adversary and said in a low voice:
‘Why did she say that about Sir Ralph?’
Dame Lovisa shrugged. ‘It is one of the things they say – I suppose because when he first came here he was a stranger and spoke with an accent; and then there was that business with Figg’s widow, and heaven only knows what he may have said himself, for he is quite irresponsible in what he says.’
‘But do you suppose there is any truth in it?’
‘No, no!’
‘But it would be fearful. He has been here since the great pestilence.’
‘Yes, he is older than the prioress. I wonder which of them will go first. Sir Ralph, I imagine. He is failing fast.’
Even so Dame Eleanor said: ‘I think we ought to look into it.’ She meant what she said. For one thing, she was a proud woman; and at the thought that for years she had been fooled with a spurious sacrament all her pride was up in arms; for another, she was aware that as the router-out of so frightful an imposture she would become a leading figure, the only nun at Oby acceptable as prioress – unless, of course, they chose to jump in someone from elsewhere: that very real danger must be borne in mind.
‘We must talk this over, you and I,’ she said, ‘I thank my saints that I have you to consult with, one responsible person among this pack of feather-pates.’
Full of dejection and foreboding Dame Lovisa temperately agreed.
But all this was blown away when it was discovered that Dame Adela was gone, and the altar-hanging gone with her. Then it was remembered that Dame Adela had excused herself half-way through supper, had been absent from compline, absent from the midnight office. No one had noticed it, and the dormitory was so ill-lit by its one rushlight that her unoccupied pallet was not noticed either. Then, too, it was remembered that in their flurry over the quarrel at the wicket they had forgotten to put away the needlework.
Not till midday did they dare tell the prioress. They feared that the shock might be the last blow to her faculties. She flared up into her old competence, genial and cold-hearted, wasting little time in reproaches and none in lamentations, and at once sent out searchers and messengers and had the house protected against thieves.
Thieves seemed the likeliest hypothesis. The woman was the spy for the gang and after she had made sure that the altar-hanging was worth stealing (had she not fished to see it?) her companions had broken in under cover of the winter darkness and stolen it. How and why they had also stolen Dame Adela was less apparent; but possibly she, alone absent from quire, had found them breaking in, and they had gagged her and carried her away before she could raise an alarm. Why they should carry rather than kill seemed unaccountable; but no one could find her body, or any bloodstains or signs of a struggle.
Much was said of the ingratitude of Ursula’s Jackie, plundering for the second time the house which had reared him – for he, no doubt, was at the bottom of this theft. Dame Margaret, crackling like a holly fire, recalled what a dirty, spoiling, impudent, thievish, froward and ugly child he had been. Sir Ralph, peering into the past, remembered him as a sullen and unimprovable pupil. Dame Cecily dwelt on him as a distasteful hobbledehoy who used to draw obscene pictures on the walls and torment Dame Salome. The prioress said less, but nursed a deeper resentment. Four days later, when news came that a vagrant man called Jack Nonesuch, also Jack the Latiner, also Jackie Pad, had been seized in Waxelby and cast into jail, her satisfaction was terrible to witness. She guffawed, she cracked jokes, she scratched herself, she suggested having a Te Deum sung for the occasion: it was as if all her de Stapledon forebears, so pious over property, so ruthless over flesh and blood, had come wassailing into the convent. That night at supper she ate and drank inordinately, and went to bed singing. A few hours later she was stricken by an apoplexy. Too tough to die, she lay motionless, a vast senseless ruin, a sounding-board for her stertorous groans.
But questioned and threatened and eventually maimed of his right hand as a known thief, Ursula’s Jackie vouchsafed nothing about Dame Adela and the altar-hanging – only that in Waxelby he had met his leman who had a woman with her whom he had taken to be such another as she, and that he had quarrelled with her and had not seen her or heard of her since. As it would have been to his advantage to help towards the finding of a strayed nun there seemed no reason to disbelieve him.
All this had come about because Dame Lovisa in her self-importance must needs run to the wicket when it was no business of hers. Cowed by so much calamity she agreed with the common sentence. It was all her doing, her wretched doing. Her misery was so abject that she did not even forecast the consequences of the event, the loss in money, the loss in reputation with its contingent loss of more money, the death of the prioress, the impossibility that she should now succeed her. Among all these losses she brooded over yet another loss, in the common estimation the loss of least account, the lost Adela. The wind had changed, it blew from the south-west, and brought a rainy thaw. A white mist like steam from a cauldron billowed round the house. Out of this uncertain daylight the daylight owl hooted: hearing it she was transfixed with a hope as agonising as if a sword had been thrust between her ribs. Adela had come back! But it was only the owl. Adela was gone, in her last hours cuffed and abused and overlooked. Reduced to foolishness by her grief Dame Lovisa told herself that Adela had run away because of wounded feelings.
The fears of the half-witted drive them towards what they dread. As the rabbit runs towards the weasel, and the mouse presses itself to the cat’s flank, Dame Adela’s first impulse had been to follow the beggar-woman and hear again and again those threats of a burning roof and the angered poor. But she had not spent her life in a convent for nothing, some shreds of policy had been compelled into her mind; and while the nuns were quarrelling she sat down in her corner to think how best to purloin the altar-hanging. If she took it along with her the woman would receive her with more favour; and then it could be sold and with the money ten of those dreadful poor could be clothed and fed, and so for a whole year (the woman had said ten could be clothed and fed for a year) the roof of Oby would not burn, the poor would go elsewhere, Sir Ralph would be the same Sir Ralph as ever and no blood start from the wafer as he handled it.
She went into supper with the rest, and made her excuse halfway through it. But instead of going to the necessary house she went to the parlour and collected the gold thread, the silks, the pearls, and parcelled them in the altar-hanging, and wrapped it all in a towel. There was an old furred cloak, it had belonged to Dame Alicia de Foley, which had long lain as an extra wadding under the cushions of the present prioress. She pulled it out; and out with it came a complicated smell, compounded of wildcat, old spices, and fleabane. As she put on the cloak it seemed to her that she was creeping for warmth and shelter into the skirts of the old prioress as she had done when she was a child. She saw the old woman’s hand, dry and waxen-white, with the ring that fitted so loosely that it was always slipping round, the light of its jewel shining inward on the palm, and felt herself dutifully turning it right way about again. It was there, it was gone. A brand broke on the hearth, the shadows of the room were re-made with a new shape, peaked and wolfish. It was her own hooded shadow she saw but she did not stay to recognise it. While the voices sounded and the spoons clattered beyond the partition she pulled the cloak over her bundle and went lightly to the little side-door and out across the orchard to the gap in the reed fence. Beyond was a stretch of marshy meadow. The cat-iced puddles glittered in the moonlight, and crackled under her tread. Beyond the meadow was the Hog Trail, the causeway to Waxelby.
She began to run.
The bundle was heavy, it slipped and sidled under her arm. Her running settled into a dog-trot.
Two horses were standing at the side of the causeway, nose to tail, pressed together for warmth. As she ran by one of them pricked its ears and neighed, and a moment later they both came trotting after her. For a quarter-mile or so they kept up with her. Then they stopped, their curiosity at an end, and she ran on alone. The moonlit sky seemed to be made of blue ice. Ice glittered in the crotches of the old willow trees that grew on the banks of the causeway. Their shadows laced the ground before her. She had no fear of the night and no sense that she was doing anything surprising. To be running along the Waxelby causeway was natural, the only thing she could be doing. The bundle under her arm was a nuisance, that was all. But her trot had fallen into a walk and the shadows of the willow boughs had lengthened with the dropping moon before she saw a figure going along the causeway ahead of her. She began to run again. The figure also began to run.
The quarry was heavy with child, it would not be hard for Adela to outstrip her. But some obscure hunting inheritance set her differently to work. She left the causeway, pulled off her sandals, and ran on under the cover of the willows till her ears told her she had drawn level with the woman. Then she steadied her breath and cried: ‘Cuckoo!’
She heard the woman stop and say bewilderedly: ‘The Saints have mercy!’
‘Cuckoo!’ repeated Adela.
‘You fool, Annis,’ the woman remonstrated with herself. ‘Whenever was there a Candlemas cuckoo?’
It was certainly the beggar-woman’s voice. Adela scrambled up the bank and came out on the causeway beside her. Now all her sureness and invention left her, and all she could do was to hold out the bundle and look at Annis with a smile.
Annis stared her up and down, from the round simpering face to the bare feet. The feet were so white, white beyond any bleach of moonlight, the face was so wild and vacant . . . Annis crossed herself and said softly: ‘Is it you in your flesh and blood?’
Adela nodded, and smiled wider than before.
‘And your feet as bare as meadow saffron,’ Annis continued, feeling her way between flesh and ghost. ‘It’s pitiful! But why are you here?’
‘I’ve brought it,’ said Adela. ‘I’ve brought it for you, and all the silks, and the pearls. It’s nearly finished, you know. We can soon finish it between us. I’ll teach you the stitch.’
The woman did not answer.
‘Aren’t you glad? Look!’
Before Annis could stop her she unrolled the bundle and the altar-hanging was spread on the ground. Annis recoiled, crossing herself. Loosened by the journey the little bag holding the pearls gaped open. Some pearls rolled out. Annis threw herself down with a hoarse cry, and began to scoop them up. Still on her knees she held one up in the moonlight, scanned it closely, put it to her lips.
‘They are not real pearls,’ she said.
The shapes of the hungry and naked poor started up threateningly on every side. Once more the familiar sensation of having made a fool of herself descended on Adela, and she reacted with fear and fury.
‘May your teeth drop out, ungrateful beast! How dare you say my pearls are not real pearls? I brought it because you are poor and I was sorry for you. I ran all this way. after you, and now you say they are not real pearls. I’ll take it all back!’
She crumpled up the altar-hanging. With a cry of compassion Annis thrust her aside and began to smooth the ill-used satin.
‘What a way to treat it! I marvel you don’t dance on it. There, so – that’s better. What a way to use you!’
The consolations addressed to the altar-hanging had their effect on Adela. She picked up a few pearls and handed them to Annis. The two women crawled about on their hands and knees peering into the ruts and hoof-prints. Annis was still half under the spell of this dreamlike encounter. A Candlemas cuckoo had turned into a ghost, the ghost into a half-wit, the half-wit into a furious child; and lying at the side of the track was the Oby needlework, which might mean a great sum of money and equally might mean a hanging. If this were not enough for her wits to contend with, there was also this mad nun.
The lesser risk would be to take them both back where they belonged. But after her outburst the nuns would not be likely to receive her with much favour, at the best she would come off with some old rags, a clipped shilling, and some more of that soup. And once more the causeway to Waxelby would stretch before her and at Waxelby Jackie would be growing tired of waiting as he was growing tired of her – for he tired easily. Some other woman might get him, or he might give her the slip, for a man can always get himself on to a boat whereas only a very drunken captain will welcome a woman far gone with child. Yet if she went forward to Jackie taking the altar-hanging, she must needs take the nun too.
In the end she decided to go on, with the hope of getting rid of her companion between now and daybreak. Let her get tired out, thought the hopeful Annis. Let her fall asleep, nicely tucked up in her cloak a little aside from the causeway, and leave her. Nuns would rather sleep than walk.
But the virgin capered along beside her, singing and showing off her bird-calls. It was Annis who flagged, it was Annis who could go no further, it was Annis who fell into a heavy slumber, lying with Adela under Dame Alicia de Foley’s cloak. When she woke it was broad daylight and Adela was tickling her nose with a rush. And there, little more than a mile away, was the town of Waxelby, with the great Friar’s Church standing up like a ship above the reeds and the waterways and the round tower of Waxelby Old Church seeming no more than a net-stake beside it.
After one glance Annis lay down again and shut her eyes. The daylight reality of the night’s crazy dream appalled her. She wanted to scream, to scratch out those blue eyes, to scream again and again. She prayed with intensity that the pains of her labour might take hold of her here and now, and by their majestic anguish release her from having to think about anything else.
The prayer was vain. She sat up and began to comb her hair with her fingers and to smarten up her garments. Then she pulled a little pot out of her wallet, and reddened her cheeks and her lips. Adela watched with interest
‘You must trim yourself up a little,’ said Annis. ‘We cannot go into Waxelby looking like scarecrows.’
But Adela had nothing to trim herself up with. By degrees, by lending a kerchief, by stripping off her petticoat and her ornaments and putting them on the nun, and by reddening her cheeks, she made Adela into a passable imitation of a whore. By adapting some of Adela’s clothes to her own use she made of herself a more convincing representation of a bawd. All this touch-and-go exchange she carried through with admirable tact and wariness, though she was dizzy with exhaustion. But when it was done, even as she was congratulating herself on having done it so well, the thought of what would happen next almost broke her courage. There would be so many nexts! – to get Adela into Waxelby, to hear a mass, to find a breakfast, to find Jackie, to put him into a good humour and yet not into too good a humour – for dressed as a whore the mad nun had developed a sort of mad beauty, a tattered faded crumpled beauty as if beauty were a garment that had been left hanging for years on a hedge and now were put on again. But Jackie would relieve her of the altar-hanging, and that would be one care off her mind. There should be no difficulty there, for the nun still prated about how it was to be sold for the relief of the poor.
Annis’s thoughts considered the poor as they walked on to Waxelby. Her overnight’s rant was nothing but beggar’s rhetoric, as she knew well, the noise one hears in every alehouse, every jail, every ditch. It is not hunger and nakedness that worst afflict the poor, for a very little thieving or a small alms can remedy that. No, the wretchedness of the poor lies below hunger and nakedness. It consists in their incessant incertitude and fear, the drudging succession of shift and scheme and subterfuge, the labouring in the quicksand where every step that takes hold of the firm ground is also a step into the danger of condemnation. Not cold and hunger but Law and Justice are the bitterest affliction of the poor.
Entering Waxelby she hurried her companion to the Friary Church, and fell on her knees, thankful for the sense of respite that came with the rows of pillars so strong and upright, the reiteration of mouldings in triforium and clerestory, the echo that sanctified every common sound. Adela knelt beside her, staring about her, but momentarily quiet. Then she rose and began to walk up the nave. When Annis went after her she said placidly that she was going to take her place in quire. Hearing this astonishing statement an old woman looked round, and was the more astonished when she saw the tattered appearance of the owner of that imperious voice.
‘Do you think yourself a friar, then?’ she asked.
‘I am a nun,’ Adela replied. While Annis sickened, some obscure whim of grandeur impelled Adela to continue: ‘We are both nuns.’
‘Friar’s nuns, I daresay,’ said the old woman, ‘the pair of you. Whipping’s what you need.’
The echo could not do much for this. Abashed at having injured the friars in their own church the old woman turned around and addressed herself to Saint Blaize. Before Adela could get into any more mischief a mass began. Her readiness with the responses made more heads turn towards them, and Annis could think of no better expedient than to exaggerate her own devotion and hope they might be taken for pilgrims. But as they left the church some stones were thrown and the phrase of ‘Friar’s nuns’ was hooted after them.
Adela’s dread of the terrible poor returned. She clung to Annis. Annis was in no mood to be clung to. Her short cross answers completed Adela’s dejection, and though the ships at the quayside interposed themselves between her and her alarm she was not allowed to gape at them but found herself shoved through a doorway into a narrow room full of men and men’s loud voices.
A few looked up, one or two spoke; no one moved to make room for her. Here were the poor again, more and poorer and more intimidating. But the woman who kept the alehouse had already exchanged glances with Annis and now without a word she pushed the two women into a sort of lean-to chamber beyond. It had a couple of trestles in it, some cobwebbed fishing-gear and rags in bunches hung on the walls, it smelt fusty and sleepy; and indeed there was someone sleeping in it even now, an old man with a bald head covered with warts and scabs, who slept fretfully, grunting, and burrowing in his straw for the warmth that had left his limbs. Annis pulled away some of his straw and sat down composedly with the straw round her feet. Then she pointed to her mouth and rubbed her stomach. The alehouse woman nodded and went off, and came back with some bread and beer and two hunks of black-pudding. The beer was stale and the bread sour, but the black-pudding, violently flavoured, seemed to Adela the most delicious and appetising food she had ever tasted. After her first impetuous gulps she set herself to make it last out as long as possible. Absorbed in this she did not observe all the dumbshow proceeding between the other two (which was as well for her vanity, for it began with Annis making it plain that her companion was a half-wit, and negligible). But she looked up in time to see the dumb woman straddle her legs and set her arms akimbo. Annis nodded delightedly, and fetched her arm about in a wide gathering gesture and finally pointed to her bosom; and the woman, falling back into herself, hurried away.
They were in Waxelby, they had heard a mass and had breakfast; and Jackie was still in the town. Feeling that matters were not so bad after all, Annis turned to Adela and said they would undo the bundle and look at the embroidery by daylight. There was not much daylight in the room, only what came in through cracks in the walls and by the chinks of an outer door, which seemed to open into a yard or garden since no footsteps went by it; and the space was so limited that they could only unroll part of the altar-hanging at one time. But neither at Oby where it began nor in any of its later wanderings was the needlework so truly admired. Dame Lovisa had guessed too high: Annis was never in such comfortable circumstances as to be a bower-woman; but she had a natural bent for works of art which she had cultivated during a long course of visiting churches – sometimes for pleasure and devotion, at other times for more practical reasons of sanctuary. The Oby hanging was beyond all she had ever set eyes on. It was new. No incense smoke had tarnished it, no sacristans had torn it, no candle-grease had spotted it. The blue of the satin was as pure as the blue of heaven, the ostrich feathers were so freshly stitched that they seemed to wave and billow upon the ground-colour, the gold was unfrayed, the tinsel was bright as dew. And she could see it intimately, she could stare into every detail of its workmanship. When they unrolled the corner that was still unfinished she groaned and looked at Adela as though she would strike her.
There was a needle quilted into the stuff and Adela as a matter of course re-threaded it and wiped the grime off her hands and went on embroidering. Annis watched sharply, having a suspicion that she might begin to gobble-stitch some nonsense of her own devising. But the nun worked as dutifully as though she were in her cloister, and yawned and complained as though a task-mistress were over her.
More than an hour went by. When Annis pulled the needle from her hand and parcelled up the hanging it seemed to Adela that it must now be time to go into quire. Instead, the dumb woman reappeared, pushed in a man, and went out again. Annis scrambled to her feet.
‘Jackie, my good Jackie! How have things been with you, Jackie?’ Her voice was the voice she had used when she first spoke to Adela on the causeway. He stood with his legs apart in the centre of the floor, so bulky that he seemed to fill the room, and surveyed them with a broad dull grin. There was no doubt that this was the man the dumb woman had mimicked. The mimicry had frightened Adela, the original was worse. She shrank into the corner where the old man lay drowsing and clutching at his straw.
Annis was half-way through her story before Jackie troubled himself to speak, and then it was only to ask her where in the devil’s name she had been and why she had not come to Waxelby till now. She began her story over again, and this time she got it as far as the meeting on the Hog Trail, and the stranger who had started up before her like a ghost and given her the altar-hanging from Oby for pity of God’s poor.
‘Aha! And where is it now?’ he asked scornfully.
‘Here!’ said Annis. ‘Here!’ echoed Adela.
Then the hanging was again spread out. He looked at it hard and appraisingly. His face showed no animation till the unfinished corner was displayed, and then he rounded on Annis and said that only a fool would steal a half-licked piece of work. Did she think she could finish it?
‘No, but here is one who can and will. This . . . this damsel here. We have the silks and the pearls and all we need, and she can work as fast as a spider. And while she works, Jackie, you must think how best we can sell it, and where. I have heard say that this sort of work fetches a high price among the French and the Flemings. If we all went to France together she could sit at her work while the ship carried it to market. But you must decide, Jackie, you must decide.’
Groping around for more straw the old man took hold of Adela’s hand, and feeling its warmth he pulled it savagely towards him and held it on his breast. But she did not struggle, for all the sense she had was concentrated on this conversation between Annis and Jackie. After a glance at her, Jackie turned back to Annis and asked her what he would do in foreign parts with two women tagged to his heels and neither of them worth a penny-piece; and by that token there would be a brat too by then. Yet it seemed as though he were making objections more for the pleasure of making them and to keep himself in practice than for any real purpose; for it was plain that the altar-hanging pleased him and was accepted in his mind as a thing he could dispose of. Annis said they could sell the needlework in England, anywhere out of earshot of the bell of Oby would do. Yes, and be hanged for it, he replied thoughtfully. Annis went on to say that a fair might not serve their turn, for what you sell at a fair is every fair-goer’s business; but wherever there is a prosperous shrine you can find a dealer in the neighbourhood who will buy anything he can sell again as an offering, and not bargain too much over it either, since he can be sure of making his price from some customer newly healed or full of a recent gratitude for a grace or a miracle. There was Walsingham, Bromholm, the great shrine of Saint Edmund; going further south there was Waltham Holy Cross in the forest or the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett itself, and by taking a passage in a boat going to London . . . She was rambling on, her mean worn face lighting up with a gadabout’s pleasure, when he interrupted her with the same animation as he had shown when he found the embroidery was not complete.
‘And what is to warrant me that she can finish the work? I do not see her working, all she does is to sit fondling that old carcass in the corner there. Let me see you work!’ he said, addressing Adela for the first time.
‘Yes, dear, show Jackie how cleverly you do it,’ said Annis.
Once more Adela wiped her hands and took up the needlework. But she was flustered and the silk slipped from the needle.
‘She an embroideress, she finish it! She will be a year at it and make a bungle of it when all’s told. She knows no more of embroidery than you do.’
‘That’s all you know about it!’ exclaimed Adela, nettled. ‘I was the only one among us who knew the secret of this stitch. They all had to learn it from me, Dame Lilias and Dame Eleanor and Dame Philippa and Dame Sibilla and . . . ’
‘Dame Meg and Dame Peg,’ he said scornfully. ‘And where did all you fine dames sit stitching?’
‘In the parlour at Oby of course.’
He stared at her, at her foolish face and her smooth white hands. Satisfied that she had put him down Adela smiled primly and went on embroidering. Annis sidled up to him and began to stroke his cheek and whisper.
‘I wouldn’t hide it from you, Jackie. How could I? You’re so clever, you nose out everything. But I dressed her up pretty well, don’t you think? No one but you would guess it.’
‘I’ll have nothing to do with her. Since you brought her, you can take her away.’
‘But I had to bring her, she was bent on coming with me. Besides, she can finish the embroidery, you see, something I could never learn.’
‘I’ll have no nuns,’ he said.
‘No, no! But just let her finish the work. I’ll keep her at it, she’ll be no trouble to you. The poor creature, she’s as harmless as a sheep.’
Pulling at his lower lip he turned for another look. His swagger had evaporated, a mottle of fear overspread his face. He crossed himself.
Annis chuckled.
‘I thought it would be another game with you, Jackie. You to be afraid of a nun? – I was looking for something different.’
‘I’ll touch no nun!’ he burst out, so loudly that the old man sat up and stared at them, and the clash of voices in the next room seemed to be stayed.
‘Hush, hush!’
There was no need for Annis to hush him. That exemplary sentiment if overheard might be construed very differently and to his disadvantage. He leaned trembling against the wall, and his eyes rolled dismally in their sockets as he looked from the embroidery to Adela, from Adela to the embroidery.
‘Cold, cold,’ said the old man, lying down again. Adela, pleased to assert herself further after having quelled this rough man of Annis’s, took an armful of the altar-hanging and lapped it round him. Annis and Jackie cried out together that she was to do no such thing.
‘I’ll do what I please,’ she replied. ‘It’s mine, it’s my work. I brought it away to clothe Christ’s poor. This old man is poor and needs a garment. When he’s asleep perhaps I’ll take it away again, but while he’s cold he shall have it, poor old man!’
She spoke with the simple arrogance inherited from her fore-bears, and Annis turned to Jackie with more confidence and said: ‘She’s quite crazy, you see. Just listen to her!’
‘She’s none the better for being crazy,’ he answered. ‘If a woman’s in her senses you can beat her. But that one—’
‘And who’s to know she’s a nun unless you go shouting it? Once we’re at sea—’
‘No, no!’ He crossed himself vehemently, and began to sweat. ‘Nuns bring ill luck, nuns out of their cloister. I won’t set foot on a ship with her for company.’
‘Well, what are we to do? Stay here?’
‘Yes, that’s it! You stay here, you and she, and you keep her at it till the work’s done. And then send Mum Margaret after me as you did this morning.’
‘And where will she find you?’
He hesitated.
‘No, that’s not so good. Wait! I tell you, when it’s finished, have Margaret put a fresh bough in the sign, a bough of yew. I’ll watch for that.’
‘And the three of us stay here in Waxelby, where every man will be looking for us? Because you are afraid to go to sea with a nun? What is there to fear, what is a nun when all’s said? What was your mother but a nun?’
‘The devil flay her!’ he said. ‘She reared me in a kitchen to be everyone’s kick and flout. Do you wonder I sicken at nuns?’
‘If you sicken at nuns the devil will flay you,’ remarked Adela tranquilly.
‘Once we’re done with her we’ll rub her off,’ whispered Annis.
Jackie saw the problem otherwise: he would rub them both off if he could. Yet to do so with any satisfaction he must keep the altar-hanging, and to have it at its best it must be finished by the one and the other must be kept as his overseer. And every hour in Waxelby was dangerous. And yet he did not want to go to sea, and least of all with a nun. Any fool of a woman can stitch, he supposed. And if he could rid himself of these two, and find a third...
He sat chewing and sweating in a cage of considerations. At last he said he would go and see what could be done about a passage for the three of them. But the captain would need a sweetener, Annis must hand over her crown-piece, and he would take a few of those pearls.
‘And take the hanging off that old dotard,’ he said, ‘and roll it up in the towel. For if we can get on the Barbara, there will be no time to waste. She’s loaded already.’
‘Don’t tell the others,’ said Annis. He put a good deal of feeling into the exasperated kick he delivered in reply, and as Annis picked herself up she admitted to herself that the advice had been foolish and uncalled-for.
The old man cursed and grumbled when they removed the altar-hanging, and Adela protested that she wanted to go on embroidering. Annis spent no words on either. She made up the bundle and sat down on it. They waited for a long time. The shafts of light shifted from midday to afternoon and sloped in by the door which gave into the yard. A thrush was singing there very sweetly. At intervals Adela complained of being bored and demanded to have the bundle undone so that she could go on with her embroidery. A day with no offices to break it seemed interminably tedious. She began to say some Hail Maries, and fell asleep. The old man rustled in his straw, the thrush sang. Annis sat in a prick-eared anxiety, feeling the child lumber against her backbone, biting her lip as she went over the things she had said to Jackie and saw how she could have mended them.
She started up when the door flew open. Jackie was on the threshold.
‘They’re after me! And the Barbara is weighing anchor. But if you slip out by the yard . . . ’
‘And leave her?’
‘You think of nothing but your nun! No, bring her too.’
She shook Adela and got her to her feet. Then she stooped for the bundle.
‘I’ll see to that. Get along with your nun. Turn to the left, then by the alley towards the quay. On the quay you’ll see a sailor with one ear. Follow him, and when you are on board, go straight below and stay there and speak to no one till I come.’
‘But you will come, Jackie? You will come?’
‘Will I stay here to be hanged? But I must wait till I know they have gone past.’
It was not easy to get Adela to stir, she seemed unable to comprehend the notion of danger and she had none of the uncloistered woman’s instinct to obey the male. It took all of Annis’s powers to move her and keep her moving.
Jackie followed them to the foot of the yard, cursing and encouraging. When he had watched them out of sight he relaxed, leant against a paling, and began very quietly to whistle. The thrush answered him, or seemed to. He answered the thrush back. For now, with both women off his hands, he had time for a little fancy and poetry. It was one of those February dusks that seem to leap forward into spring, that melt and are complaisant and full of promise and even have a few midges.
Meanwhile, the old man had come nimbly out of his corner. He undid the bundle and took the altar-hanging and buried it under his straw. Then he collected all the rags that were hanging on the walls and made up the bundle again, reproducing its shape and knotting with great accuracy. Then he returned to his corner. After a while Jackie strolled in, picked up the bundle, laughed, spat, strewed a curse or two on the sleeper, and went away. The straw rustled as the old man shook with senile laughter. Not all his difficulties were over, of course. There was still his hostess to overcome, whose eyes were all the sharper because she had not the use of her tongue. But the altar-hanging lay safe beneath him, and he reckoned – rightly, as it turned out – to be able to make a pretty penny by it.
Below decks in the Barbara Adela was experiencing her first qualms of sea-sickness and Annis, listening to her moans and groans, began to know herself made a fool of, with a child kicking in her belly, a mad nun on her hands and a sea voyage before her. As one puffs a green fire her invention patiently breathed on the circumstances before her, and she wondered to whom and for how much or how little she could dispose of this foolish virgin who was now her only asset in a harsh world, and her only friend.