(March 1380–June 1381)
The people on the manor heard considerably more of Dame Adela’s fate than the convent did; as was natural, since they enjoyed all the tale-bearing resources of cousins at Waxelby, aunts in Wivelham, and Brother Bartlemy dropping in so comfortably with talk of this world and the next. They knew, for instance, how Dame Adela had attempted to enter the quire of the Friary Church by force and had only been prevented by the resolution of old Emme Sampson, who was born a Holly of Dudham. They knew that Katharine Trump, one of the Waxelby whores, had a pearl bracelet which was not honestly come by. They knew that the Barbara had left port with a cargo of virgins, all destined for the King of Hungary. They knew that within an hour of the Barbara leaving port Jack the Latiner had tried to strangle the dumb woman who kept the alehouse and that in the fight which ensued five men had been injured and a whole cask of beer wasted because no one had time to turn the tap off. They knew that Dame Adela had spent most of the day shut up in an inner room at the alehouse where she had sung as sweetly as a captive bird and eaten inordinately of black-pudding. They knew that when she was dragged on board a vessel which was not the Barbara at all but the Boy of Whitby, she was speechless with exhaustion and had three dogs with her. They knew that Annis was wearing the altar-hanging as a petticoat. They also knew that it was hidden in a dry well somewhere beyond Wivelham, that Jackie had given it to Katharine Trump, and that it had never left Oby where the nuns, in one of their quarrels, had torn it to shreds among them. Finally they knew, on the assurance of the old night-watchman who lodged by day at the alehouse, that Annis, contrary to appearances, was no woman but a short thick-set man with a red beard; but this was known rather later, and by the report of Sir John Idburn, who had encountered the old fellow crutching himself along to Walsingham in pursuance of a vow.
Meanwhile, the prioress, palsied and senseless, lived on. Her mere survival was a kind of support to her nuns; for while she lived they could defer the problem of an election and as she might die at any moment it was not worthwhile to choose a deputy. Throughout Lent the choice of the next prioress was endlessly and languidly canvassed, and by twos and threes they made up and unmade their minds. Dame Lovisa, long accepted as inevitable, was out of the question, since it was she who had let the enemy in among them, and Dame Eleanor, her natural rival, was now felt to be out of the question also; for if you choose the lesser of two rivals you create a schism, and though under some circumstances a schism can be enlivening it is a fair-weather luxury; one cannot afford it in times of misfortune. Dame Margaret was too old. Dame Dorothy was in her middle forties and healthy, but she was totally without initiative, she would be no better than an image carted about by one party and then another. Dame Philippa was neutral, discreet, and well-connected; but she flatly refused to have anything to do with it and said that if they elected her she would certainly resign. This left Dame Cecily who was blind, Dame Lilias who was unwanted, and Dame Sibilla. Dame Sibilla was too young, and she was not an Oby nun, and she was a busybody and her piety was like no one else’s piety, and a house ruled by anyone so nearly related to Bishop Walter would not know an easy moment; besides, all her relations were in religion, which would make her an unprofitable prioress, since everyone throws his herring-guts to his own dog. Yet from the variety of reasons alleged why Dame Sibilla would not do it was obvious that she was generally and seriously considered. If one did not consult expense, the best plan would be to elect Dame Margaret, endure her ill-humour like a Lent and when she died choose – who? – Dame Lovisa with her talent for business, or Dame Eleanor who was the senior of the two and extremely personable. They were back where they had started from.
Never had an election been contemplated with so little spirit. Never had Dame Cecily heard so many sentences left unfinished, so many dubious sighs, so many desolate yawns, and such a general consent that it was too much for them, that it must be left for God to decide. She knew just what they must be looking like: sallow, sluttish, dispirited. Who would have thought a mere apple should undo the world? Who would have supposed that Dame Adela, that negligible being, should have created this cavernous absence? But that was because she had taken the altar-hanging with her – at any rate their disappearances had coincided. The loss of the altar-hanging was beyond the loss of money expended to no purpose, beyond the frustration of their hope of making a good impression on the new bishop. During the months they had worked on it together the nuns of Oby had become a community. Though in its early stages the needlework had been an instrument in the usual convent factions, a de Retteville banner waved against de Stapledons, as time went on it had become everyone’s interest and everyone’s purpose; and the satisfaction which Dame Lovisa had found in her lonely black and white psalters, and which the old prioress had felt with the second Trinity Cope, and which she herself (but how long ago!) had known with her paint-brushes, her cobalt and vermilion, had been felt by all, whether they worked or watched the workers. Something was being made, they had a reason for living together, the blue satin roofed them like a tabernacle.
It was gone. They were at sixes and sevens again, idle, dejected, and afraid; and years would pass before they would entertain such another project, for they had been bubbled, and once bit is twice shy.
Prioress Matilda lasted out for another twelvemonth. The permit to elect came on Shrove Tuesday, and the election gave the prioress-ship to Dame Margaret by a majority of three voices. Even those who had voted for her felt considerable qualms when they heard the result, and pitying glances were turned towards Dame Lilias, who would now have the liveliest reasons to wish she had got safely away into her anchoress’s cell before this turn of events. Yet though the election chilled most hearts it expressed the general mind. Dame Margaret, so old, so cut and dried, with nothing to offer but her formalism, her shallow-moulded perspective of convention, was the only co-ordinating element in the community. They could believe in her because she was so incapable of suggesting anything they did not know already.
On his springtime visit to Oby Henry Yellowlees hurried up the stairs to Sir Ralph’s chamber, and bemoaned himself to his friend.
‘It is ruin! It is lunacy! Whatever possessed them to choose that withered thistle? And then to let her appoint that block-head Dame Dorothy as treasuress! They neither of them know a rent from the grace of God, and the books are in such a state already – I shall tell the bishop that I cannot go on.’
For Henry Yellowlees was now a very different person from the hungry clerk whom Bishop Walter had made custos of Oby.
Bishop de Craye had come to his see resolved not to be scrambled over by a troop of disorderly English clerics, and resolved, above all, to winnow away the retinue of his predecessor. Among his earliest discards were the secretaries, the chaplain, and the doctor. When he had cleared his immediate surrounding he had a list drawn up of all the late bishop’s nominations. In it he found the name of Master Henry Yellowlees, custos of Oby and teacher of mathematics at the school of the Holy Innocents. With his winnowing-fan in his hand Perkin de Craye came in due course to this particular threshing-floor, where he found Henry Yellowlees in one of his worst tempers, damning all bishops and in especial this new bishop who had dismissed his crony Humphrey Flagg. Being confident that his own dismissal would follow, Henry Yellowlees began to criticise the cathedral music in a very liberated spirit. As it happened, Perkin de Craye was a considerable musician; and though the two men almost immediately fell into a violent wrangle about Machault (whom Perkin de Craye thought to be too mellifluous and lacking in technical ambition), his opponent disagreed with him so intelligently that Perkin de Craye found himself saying that what Master Yellowlees needed was to hear some of the compositions of Landini, and promising in the next sentence that he should hear them as soon as he could get the parts copied and the quire thrashed into performance. As this could not be unless the winnowing were postponed, Henry Yellowlees remained in his post at the Holy Innocents until the bishop decided that it would be better if he were fanned into a personal secretaryship.
‘Tell the bishop? – Oh, yes, this bishop. H’m, certainly! Yes, I should tell him if I were you.’
Sir Ralph was lying on his bed with a rug over him. Though the spring air puffed into the room he looked wintry, he looked like the snow-banks which lie on the north side of a baulk and will not melt.
‘This is my seventh year as custos of Oby,’ said Henry, beginning to excuse himself. ‘It’s a long time. At least it is a long time in which to have got nothing done. Really, I have no talents for management.’
‘The patriarch Jacob served seven years for Leah and another seven years for Rachael. And I don’t know that he got much out of it,’ remarked Sir Ralph.
‘I suppose seven years seems no time at all to you?’
‘No time at all,’ said the old man airily. ‘Some deaths, of course. Some births. Lambs, and so forth.’
Though prosperity had set him up Henry was not altogether ruined by it. There was concern as well as patronage in his heart when he suggested that Sir Ralph himself might well think of retiring, that a word to the bishop, who appreciated scholarship, would translate him to some pleasant sinecure. Without affectation he added that he thought Sir Ralph would like the bishop.
Sir Ralph looked at him with affectionate inattention, and said: ‘So you’ll be leaving us? Well, I’m thinking of going away myself.’
Reflecting that the new prioress must be even worse than he supposed if she had loosened Sir Ralph from his red-arrased nutshell, Henry asked where he thought of going.
‘To London, to London,’ replied Sir Ralph as though it were the most natural reply in the world.
‘To London? But that is a long journey.’
‘The only place for my purpose. I want to make sure of finding intelligent men, men of culture. I should only waste my time if I trudged about to the lesser places, Oxford and Cambridge and what not. And I can’t afford to waste time. I have let too much time go by as it is.’
Whatever he was raving about, he raved in a new manner. Henry had never heard him speak with such decision nor in such a magistral tone of voice.
‘Now in London they understand such matters.’
What matters, Henry enquired, and Sir Ralph replied, poetry. He raised himself on his bed, took a manuscript, and began to read aloud. His reading voice was strong and pompous, he read with old-fashioned gusto, twanging off the words like a jongleur. Who or what he was reading about was hard to say, except that there was a yew tree and a weeping man whose tears dripped through its dark boughs. It was a poem in English, and apparently it was intended to rhyme, though the rhymes observed no obvious pattern. Henry’s attention soon slid away from the reading and fastened upon this surprising new aspect of the reader, roaring like a schoolmaster, with his black eyebrows sitting astonished among his dishevelled white locks. What had changed him? Was it the approach of death which had kindled this vigour of mind in the old man? If only he had known him when he was young! The young Ralph Kello must surely have been like this, thought Henry Yellowlees, for the first time realising that Sir Ralph had once and authentically been a young man.
‘What do you think of that, Henry?’
‘I – I’m not quite sure. I should have to hear more of it before I could form an opinion.’
‘Exactly! That is why I am going to London.’
Henry said meekly that if Sir Ralph would read on, or if he could borrow the manuscript and study it . . . His meekness was of no avail. Sir Ralph replaced the manuscript under his bolster and dismissed him as though he were a schoolboy – a dull one at that.
Riding into Lintoft that same evening, his mind still occupied with Sir Ralph, Henry Yellowlees heard the same words: To London. It might have been his fancy repeating Sir Ralph’s words; but the voice was nothing like Sir Ralph’s, and the words had come from beyond his thoughts, as though they had been thrown like a stone and hit him. A moment later he heard another voice reply to the first voice: ‘Aye, to London. That’s where we must go.’
A group of labourers was standing under an ash tree. His horse carried him on and he could hear no more of what they were saying.
That night at supper the rector of Lintoft was full of stories about Oby, the extortions of the bailiff, the meanness displayed at the funeral of the late prioress and the haughtiness of the new one. Another thing which was causing a lot of talk, continued Sir John, was the fact that the two novices sent to Oby eight years before were still waiting to be given their veils. No fault of theirs; but they were both of mean birth and the Oby nuns were too proud to admit them. Such behaviour alienated the common people, and no wonder. Henry Yellowlees replied that both novices had been nuns for the past four years. He marvelled that Sir John’s parishioners, who were so well-informed, did not know of it. Sir John muttered that there had been no feast for them, at any rate. He hastened on to suppose that there was no news of that unfortunate imbecile nun who had been kidnapped by the red-bearded man who had been seen by old Eustace the watchman; and before Henry Yellowlees could answer he went on to say that there could be little doubt as to what had become of her: people could stand so much and no more, and the new poll-tax had broken their patience. Kings should pay for their own wars, it was too much to ask the poor man both to fight in the king’s armies and pay for them. What a war, too! Why must the English war again with the French for no purpose but to be beaten by them when our fathers had beaten them once for all thirty years before? Henry Yellowlees was unable to see what the French war had to do with the disappearance of Dame Adela, for surely not even the rector of Lintoft could suppose that she had been carried off to fight for the king? Raising his voice – John Idburn had grown somewhat hard of hearing – he asked if the woman who turned into a red-bearded man had been by any chance a soldier.
No, of course not, why should he be? – replied Sir John wonderingly. If a soldier wanted a nun and an altar-hanging he could find them in France. No doubt who he was: one of a band, and the band one of the many bands of the workless and dispossessed who were going through the country to sack and pillage. No doubt either that they had intended more that night than God had allowed them to do; but on the afternoon before Dame Adela was kidnapped a woman, a pious pilgrim, had forced her way into the nunnery and warned the nuns that they would be burned in their beds. Simon Maggs’s daughter, who worked in the Oby kitchen, had heard her warning them. So they were prepared and had their doors and windows barred, and all the kidnappers could find when they came was Dame Adela coming from the necessary house. Henry Yellowlees asked how it was that Dame Adela should have the altar-hanging with her at such a time, but he omitted to raise his voice, and Sir John had rushed on to say that he, for one, did not wonder at this state of things. Look at Lintoft, for instance. It was twelve years since the Dambers had visited their manor house, for twelve years he had not preached to an educated hearer: they lived at court, they fought in the wars, they skinned the place and put nothing back into it; now they were felling their woods for sale, and soon there would not be as much as an acorn left for the swine to fatten on. Then on top of all this, the taxes, and on top of the taxes, this last poll-tax. He did not wonder that his parishioners were full of resentment. Starve a dog and it will grow wolf’s teeth, was an old saying and a true one. He, for one, would wish them Godspeed when they set out for London.
‘God’s bones! Is everyone going to London?’ cried Henry.
‘No, not everyone. Some are not strong enough, and some must stay behind for the beans and the hay and to look after the cattle. You cannot expect they should all go. But the stoutest are going.’
‘But why? What are they going to London for?’
‘To tell the king. Why else should they go?’
‘But what will they tell the king?’
‘That nobody else will listen to them,’ replied Sir John.
If it had not been for those men under the tree Henry would have discounted this as another piece of the Lintoft priest’s nonsense. As it was, he thought enough of it to send a letter to Sir Ralph begging him not to set off for London until he could arrange to go with him. I would fain go to London where I have never been, yet I fear to go to so great a city alone and untutored lest I be cozened there, he wrote artfully. It alarmed him to think that the old man might really set out with his manuscript and fall into the hands of such travellers as he had seen scowling under the ash tree. If Sir Ralph persisted in going he would milk the bishop for a conveyance and a couple of men for an escort. Possibly the bishop on his next journey south . . . but on second thoughts Henry had to admit that his old friend and his new friend would have little in common; though Perkin de Craye would make nothing of taking an old nun’s priest along with him, for his highly intellectual form of christianity regarded no social distinction save the distinction between the church and the world.
Sir Ralph put the letter carefully away in his Aquinas – a handsome volume which he used mainly as a repository. He need not answer it There would not be time for that. Lately he had been subject to singular lapses of memory: not just ordinary forgetfulness, for in recollecting names, verses, dates, his memory served him as well as ever – indeed, it even seemed to be improving, for it was quite surprising how sharply he could remember every detail of events happening forty and fifty years ago. But with an odd inconsistency this good willing serviceable memory constantly failed him over things of the present. He had quite forgotten, for instance, till Henry’s letter came to remind him, that he must go to London with the poem of Mamillion. Yes, Mamillion must set out on a new series of wanderings, taking the track to Lintoft and westward till it crossed King Street, there turning southward and on through Peterborough and Cambridge and Saint Albans – a long journey; but no longer than pilgrims go, or troops of jugglers and tumblers; and no doubt he would fall in with many lifts in carts and waggons, for people are kind to an old man, an old priest travelling on a good errand. He would meet scholars too, going fastidiously from place to place in search of newer teaching, as he had done in his day; and to them he could speak of the poem of Mamillion, and of his obligation, so long ago incurred, to make it known among the poets and scholars of the world. It had taken him a long time to come to a full appreciation of the poem: a course of time during which the poem’s poet, that unfortunate Lord of Brocton, had almost faded from his mind. But while the poet waned the poem waxed, and now he knew it for what it was – one of the great epic poems of mankind, a poem that would wander through one generation to another, sometimes pausing, like Mamillion himself, in a deep wood or at some welcoming castle, but never abiding there, for its destiny was to wander everlastingly through the hearts of men. Yet the delay was not such a bad thing, after all. By so many desultory readings he knew it through and through. There was, for instance, that passage about the wild man, who capered up to Mamillion and smote him with a flowering branch, filling his nose and eyes with pollen-dust; and before Mamillion could clear his eyes and leave off sneezing the wild man had capered away again, uttering a loud booming Halloo. How many times he must have sauntered through it without seeing its quality! – and at last came a reading which became a first reading, and he had been as much astounded as if he too had been smitten over the nose with a flowering branch.
He took up the manuscript and found the wild man once more. The poets and scholars in London would be quick to admire such imagination. He looked out of his window: the screen was down, the sweet air and the light came fully in. Why should he not start tomorrow? Yes, and make sure of his purpose! Otherwise, his memory might play him another trick; and he could not expect to have a second letter from Henry Yellowlees to remind him that he meant to go to London. It was very obliging of Henry Yellowlees: an excellent, kind-hearted fellow, if for the moment rather too much taken up with his bishop.
If he started tomorrow, what must be done first? He must of course explain to Dame Margaret that he was obliged to go to London. There was always a Wivelham curate whom she could call on. Dame Margaret was so deaf that it would be fatiguing to explain for any length of explanation. He would have to bellow in her ear; and without being a voluptuary he very much disliked Dame Margaret’s ear from which the short coarse hairs bristled out so hungrily. Why should he not explain to her by means of an intermediary? He would send her a message by one of the nuns: by Dame Lilias, who was always very kind to him. There was something about Dame Lilias, too, which he knew he ought to remember, but just now it slipped his memory. One cannot remember everything and at present he must concentrate on carrying Mamillion to London. What else? A good staff was essential, and he would see about it at once.
He thrust the manuscript into the pocket of his gown and left his chamber. As the door closed behind him a brimstone butterfly fluttered in at the open window.
An ash-plant was best. He set off for the copse in the eastern corner of the common field, there were ash-stools there, and there in the old days he had often cut himself a staff. As good fortune would have it Thomas Scole was at work in the copse. They searched together, trampling the bluebells, until the right ash-plant was found, and the staff cut there and then and its handle shaped and smoothed. Young Scole was an excellent workman. It was a pleasure to watch him, though as the last slow touches were given to the staff Sir Ralph could barely contain his impatience. At length it was in his hands, and with thanks and a blessing he turned away.
If they were all as civil as he, thought Thomas Scole, there would be less to complain of. He watched the old man walking over the furrows and getting along very nimbly considering his age and his bulk. A rabbit ran out of its burrow. Turning his attention to the rabbit, which is meat and clothing both, Thomas Scole failed to notice that Sir Ralph had turned westward along the track to Lintoft. Even had he noticed it, it would not have made any particular impression on him. An old man with a green staff likes to ramble about with it.
For a long time Dame Amy had been summoning up her courage. Seeing the priest’s luncheon of bread and beer on the buttery shelf it seemed to her that this was the moment the Virgin had sent. So she said she would carry it up to his chamber. At the head of the stairs she knocked and waited. At last she pulled the latch and looked in. The chamber was empty. She set down the meal on the stool, and was turning away when a light sound caught her hearing, and she saw a yellow butterfly struggling in a cobweb. She freed it, and watched it fly out of the window, and was about to go when it struck her that there were a great many cobwebs about the room, and since she was alone in it and no one needed her she might pull some of them away. So she wandered about the room collecting cobwebs in her hand till she came to the opened cupboard where Sir Ralph kept his books. Here temptation overcame her. She took one down and opened it at random, mouthing the Latin which she could pronounce but could not understand. It was this which had brought her here. She longed to read the Latin authors, and she had brought up the bread and beer meaning to ask Sir Ralph if it were wrong for a nun to learn Latin. For some nuns it was certainly permissible. Dame Lilias could read Latin as easily as she could read French or English, Dame Philippa also, and the elder Frampton novice had been writing Latin exercises before she sickened with measles and died. But these were all nuns of good family, who had had books put into their hands as early as she herself had been taught to hold a distaff or the thumper of a churn. She was afraid to speak of her desire to Dame Lilias, whom everyone said was proud; still less could she speak of it to Dame Philippa, who could with such good reason raise her fine eyebrows and say: ‘You should have thought of this while you were a novice.’ Through her novitiate Amy had been idle and inattentive, for at first she could think of nothing but the pleasure of eating such delicate food and the discomfort of always feeling hungry, and afterwards she was so constantly sickly and sleepy that even with a new will to learn she could not profit by her lessons. Dame Philippa had said that it was useless to waste any more time on such a dunce, she knew enough to scrape through the office with the lead of the others, and that must suffice. Yet it was just in that last year when she was dismissed to run errands and be useful that she began to know herself clear-witted and to long for learning, and at the same time to be overcome with shyness.
She waited, but Sir Ralph did not come. At last, still clutching the cobwebs in her hot young hand and with the Latin murmuring in her head like a charm of bees, she went away.
At that time Sir Ralph was mounting the ridge whence he had so often looked back to admire the spire. But now he walked with his eyes to the ground, warily; for he had all but stepped upon an adder. This had frightened him, his heart still felt bruised by the leap of blood which had assaulted it, and when he poked the ground with his staff the staff wavered with his wavering hand. Turning at last for his look at the spire he found that it was already out of sight, sunk below the watershed. No matter! What was one spire more or less to a man who was going to see so many, and at his journey’s end, among the ships and spires of London, the spire of Saint Paul’s?
Most old women are somnolent, but the new prioress of Oby was as wakeful as an aspen. On this hot afternoon when the common wish was to sit still and be shaded she had been taken with a desire for exercise. Accordingly, the nuns were playing at battledore and shuttlecock. It was years since anyone at Oby had played this game, and it seemed that they might yet be saved by Dame Philippa’s statement that it was so long since any of her novices had played at it that she fancied the bats and the cocks had been mislaid.
‘Mislaid? I suppose you mean thrown away? And who gave you leave to throw away our property? Mislaid, indeed. There is no such thing as mislaying. Either they are here or they are not here. I suppose I must look for myself.’
Before anyone could intervene she had looked for herself and found – an easy matter, since they were lying where they had lain for the last ten years. Remarking that it was bad enough to have Dame Cecily cumbering the establishment, but that was nothing, every nun in her house was blind as a bat, and none so blind as those who wouldn’t see, the prioress added that they would now spend a pleasant recreation together.
In her youth when battledore and shuttlecock had been fashionable the prioress had excelled in it. Even now she played with grisly agility; the more grisly because her style of playing preserved all the bygone graces of the early century – the upright carriage with the head a little on one side, the arched wrist and the alert expression. She pranced to and fro like a shuttlecock impelled by some invisible bat. Dame Eleanor incautiously remarked to Dame Lovisa that the prioress looked like an old shuttlecock herself. Dame Lovisa incautiously smiled. Immediately they were bidden to play a match. As Dame Eleanor was tall and stout and Dame Lovisa short, crooked, and narrow-chested, their match gave opportunities for a great deal of mortifying comment. Like many deaf people the prioress spoke her thoughts aloud, and scattered disparagement and insult with no intention to be wounding. As the air grew hotter, and even she began to be jaded and dizzy from so much exercise, she quite genuinely felt that she was suffering to forward the general good, and that they were all having a pleasant recreation together, or should be; and if they disliked it, it was no fault of hers. Speaking her thoughts aloud she remarked that it was a pity that nowadays no one enjoyed simple pleasures or knew how to move gracefully; really there was nothing to choose between the clumsiness of Dame Philippa and the clumsiness of Dame Amy, whose build and breeding would make her clumsy anyhow.
‘Now then, now then!’ she cried out ‘Why do you all stand puffing and sweating, my daughters? This is the hour of recreation. We must play.’
In the latest re-shuffle of posts Dame Lilias had been appointed infirmaress. Nailing herself to her office she now came forward and bellowed politely that doubtless their dear Mother remembered that the spring blood-letting had recently taken place. Many of the nuns were still feeling its effect and found it painful to play games.
‘We do not come into nunneries to pamper the flesh,’ said the old woman, drawing herself up. Raising her voice she said that they must do without Dame Lilias, who rather than play at battledore and shuttlecock preferred to sit in the shade and await another message from Saint Leonard.
Sir Ralph had told himself that when he got to Lintoft he would stop at the priest’s house and rest for an hour or so. Then it would be pleasant to walk on through the cooling evening. Though at the moment he could not remember the priest’s name he remembered the man well enough – a lanky young man, fretful and impulsive, who was inclined to pity himself and to think he was the only scholar set down among the barbarians since Ovid. But as Sir Ralph approached the parsonage he saw a strange priest in the garden engaged in taking a swarm of bees: a middle-aged man with pursed lips and a waddling gait, a man who was a stranger to him and yet somehow called up the recollection of some distant mishap. So avoiding him and the bees, Sir Ralph went on till he met a boy herding a flock of geese, and asked him where he could buy a drink. The boy said that his mother sold cider, and directed him to a hut near by. It was a tumbledown dwelling, and so stinking that Sir Ralph preferred to sit on a bench outside. Bringing him the cider the woman of the house greeted him by name and asked him where he was going.
‘To London,’ he told her.
‘To London?’ she said. Her voice was heavy with stupidity and stupid surprise. Presently she called to another woman and said: ‘Look, he’s going to London. But what would take him thither?’
‘There are some priests of our way of thinking,’ the second woman answered. ‘And what a great staff he has! – if he’s strong enough to use it.’ Together they came over and stared at him, and the second woman asked him why he had not set out before – with the others, she said. But the westering sun shone full in his face and the cider was heavy, so he blessed them and hoped they would go away; and presently they did so.
He woke with a start, feeling bemused and stiff. But his staff was to hand and the track lay before him. After he had walked for a while he began to recollect the talk in the alehouse. It had been about Death. Death was travelling through England, faster than those who travelled to escape it. Whichever road you took, said one man, Death went by you on that road and sat grinning to await you at your journey’s end. There was no outwitting such a Death. This Death, said another, was an old woman; for it killed more men than women, and more men in their strength than children or the aged: only an old woman would have such a degree of malice. A third said that Death had come into England by a port in the south called Mamillion Regis, and travelled by the old grass-roads, the roads which had been before the time of the Romans. ‘You frighten yourselves with this nonsense,’ he had said, striking his hand on the board. ‘Do you suppose Death wears boots?’ Yet this much was true, the Black Death had come; and that was why they were all going to London. He too was going to London; and yet it seemed to him he had another errand.
This much he certainly knew: that he had been this way before. Presently he would cross a small brook and after that he would be sick. Then he would be lightened of the pain in his head, a pain that beat against his temples and hung an obstacle of darkness between him and the growing light in the east. He had only to traverse this last belt of woodland where the flies buzzed among the trampled fern; then he would come to the brook; then he would see the sun.
He saw it: a scarlet disk in a black sky. He tried to lift it from the paten but somehow it eluded his grasp and sank below the horizon. Uttering a heavy sigh he pitched forward and lay still.
Sir John was in his first sleep and taking swarms of mild gigantic bees when he was disturbed by blockings and shoutings which presently turned into a voice bidding him to come at once to the Oby priest, who was dying. ‘Saddle my beast!’ he shouted; but the voice replied that he would get there as quickly on foot for the dying man was at Mary Kettle’s house. Another voice chimed in, saying that they could carry the man no further because of his great weight. The voices were unknown to him though they were voices of the locality and when he hurried from the chancel door carrying the oil and the holy elements his first question (for he was a man of methodical curiosity) was, who were they? Thomas Scole from Oby and his cousin Sylvester Scole, they replied. They had found the priest lying across the trackway a matter of a mile beyond Lintoft. He lay like a dead man, and a weasel was sporting around him, but as they turned him over and stared at his round pale face in the moonlight he had begun to groan. They had dashed him with water from the brook to revive him, but he only groaned the more, and so terribly that they decided he was beyond all ministrations save those of a woman and a priest. Staggering under the load of his bulk they had carried him back as far as Mary Kettle’s house, and there he lay.
‘I wonder how he came to be going that way,’ mused Sir John. ‘For that matter, how did you come to be there, and after sundown, since you are both Oby men?’
‘He must have had some journey in mind,’ said one of them evasively, ‘for I cut him a staff this very forenoon.’ The other man added that many were travelling at this time, both young and old.
‘But some started later than others,’ Sir John replied meaningfully. Though neither answered he could feel their confidence warming the silence, and he went on to speak of the Lintoft men who had already set out for London, and of the common distress and the common hope that the king might take pity on the plight of poor labourers.
‘If it were not for William Holly we might have gone along with the Lintoft men,’ said the one called Sylvester. ‘One thinks twice and thrice of leaving wife and children behind at the mercy of that old extortioner.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said the one called Thomas. ‘To speak for myself, it’s the thought of William Holly that brings me here. To hear the way he overrules all in the court of the manor you’d think he was judge and accuser, king and council, god and the devil. That’s not justice!’
‘They say he cheats the nuns beyond all measure,’ said Sir John.
‘He cheats us worse,’ Thomas said, and his cousin added that they were skinned by both alike. Thus talking cheerfully of the wrongs of the poor they came to Mary Kettle’s house.
Though it was so mean a hovel she welcomed them with composure. The homes which are too poor for any other entertainment are always prepared to give hospitality to death. Mary Kettle had brought out her stumps of candle, her Palm Sunday cross, her cup of holy water and the sprig of box to sprinkle with. There was a sheaf of clean straw under Sir Ralph’s head. As the priest entered she fell on her knees with as much air of leisured dignity as if she had been a countess in her castle.
Something of the same grand manner had fallen on the dying man. It was as though Mary Kettle’s conviction that everything was taking place exactly as it must and should take place had extended itself to him. He was the wax which she had modelled into its final form before it cooled and set. The mad priest of Oby was dying as decorously as a prince of the church, giving a tenuous assenting consciousness to the ceremonies of his departure. He made only one request and that was really more a suggestion than anything else. There was a nun of Oby, he said, to whom he wished to say something; what, he could not remember; but if he could see her, her presence might prompt him.
Mary Kettle’s neighbour had come in to bear a hand, and after Sir John had finished and gone the two women sat down to watch out the night. They talked of deaths gone by and deaths to come, of storms and snowfalls, miraculous cures, charms to aid cows and children, which woods to burn green and which to burn dry, taxes and tithes and the cost of living, the signs of a hard winter, and how to foretell the sex of the unborn child. They remembered old times, and the people who had gone from the manor either by death or departure, they unravelled cousinships and marriages and traced the long story of the blue cloak which Anne Hamlet who had been Sir John’s first housekeeper, had won by a wager from the miller’s wife. They talked of the men who had gone from Lintoft to join in the peasants’ march, and of John Ball, the poor man’s priest and of the wickedness of London and the wickedness of Waxelby. Sometimes a groan or a mumble from the man they watched would intervene in their conversation and they broke off, and said a Hail Mary. Then their talk began again, and they laughed from time to time, not because what they spoke of was particularly merry, but because of the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind.
The room lightened, the lark began to sing, then the wood-dove, then all the birds together. Where one had seen a star through a hole in the roof one now saw the blue of day. Mary Kettle bent over Sir Ralph, and smoothed his hair and considered him. He would last many hours yet, she said, perhaps even to another morning. Her neighbour said that however long he lasted she would stay within call to give a hand at the last. She had noticed it before, said Mary Kettle: just as a child will be born and then be a long time before it will take the nipple, there are dying folk who are in a manner of speaking already dead and yet it is a long time before the soul knows what it wants and leaves them. Looking more attentively at Sir Ralph she exclaimed: ‘Why, it is the same man who drank the cider and gave us his blessing!’
‘Well, of course it is. Who else should he be?’
‘I never thought to ask. It was dark, he was dying . . . that’s all I thought of. What a numskull I am!’ And she laughed at her own oddity.