The Town House (31 page)

We rode home and that evening at supper there was a new face halfway down the first trestle table; and because Mother was staying with us and sat at my usual place, I had a good view of the newcomer.

It is hard for me to describe this man, Denys the Routier, or Denys Rootyer as he came to be called. The most immediately noticeable thing about him was that he had only one eye; over the empty socket on the other side he wore a black leather patch, kept in position by a black string tied at the back of his head. His hair, roughly cut and inclined to be curly, was a pale sandy colour, many shades lighter than his weather-beaten skin; his one eye was brightly blue.

I was looking at him with interest because he was a stranger, and because of the black patch, when he turned his glance on me and immediately something happened inside me, as though something had given
way and all my vitals had slipped. It was not unlike the first onset of sickness and I pressed my hand to my mouth and thought – Holy Mother! The miracle has happened and I have quickened. I looked at my plate, and although the dish was to my liking, specially made in honour of Mother, I knew that I could not take another mouthful.

Richard said, ‘The journey was too much for you. Come to bed. When you are rested I will bring you your supper.’

‘Fetch some wine; that will revive both our travellers,’ Master Reed said. So the wine came and I sat there holding the cup in my hands and turning it about, not daring to drink until my inside settled.

Mother answered questions about the journey.

Presently I said, ‘I see we have a new man.’

‘Ah yes.’ Master Reed turned to Mother and said, ‘Please tell Sir Godfrey that I am grateful and obliged to him for his good offices in finding so suitable a man.’

‘Oh, did Blanchefleur remember? He grows more and more forgetful these days.’ She smiled as though describing a child’s vagary. ‘Still, he would remember a thing like that better than any simple errand I set him. Which is the new man?’ She craned her neck.

‘The one with the patch over his eye,’ Richard said. ‘A good stout fellow, is he not?’

I looked again and saw that everyone else at the board was suddenly diminished. The weavers were always somewhat pale, inclined to fleshiness – that was a mark of their trade, but they were not all weavers at the table. I glanced, to right and left; Master Reed looked thick and shapeless, Richard too fine drawn, a pretty boy.

I told myself that it was because the new man wore no collar, his dark, creased neck rose out of a collarless leather jerkin which fitted close to his wide flat shoulders, and so he looked all of a piece, stripped of all non-essentials, ready for action.

Mother was rippling on about routiers; their high reputation for loyalty and courage, despite being mercenaries.

‘But that is why,’ she explained. ‘Nobles and knights are for ever changing their causes for this reason and that, routiers fight for pay and stick with the man who pays them.’ She lowered her voice a little. ‘You must look to your maids, Master Reed; these old soldiers have a way with women.’

‘Not old soldiers only,’ he said drily. ‘I always choose old serving wenches.’

‘Very wise.’

I said, ‘I think I shall go to bed now.’

When I had been there a little while Richard came softly in, bringing more wine and some food.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No.’

‘Could you eat now?’

‘No. I thank you all the same.’

He put the things down and came and sat on the side of the bed.

‘What really happened today?’

‘Nothing really. …’ I told him a little more about the way I had felt by the bare, humble little shrine. Then I put my hands on either side of his face and said,

‘I love you, I love you, I love. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Could I ever doubt it? I love you too.’

Words, true words; but I needed something more.

‘Come in the bed with me, now.’

He came to me eagerly, tenderly. He gave me all that he had. But afterwards, in the dark, I lay alone again and a voice, within my head, yet distant as a star, asked, ‘Is this all?’ I closed my mind to it, pushing against it, as one might push a door against an intruder. But it tried again; it asked ‘How would this be, if done with the man with one eye?’

Madness, we know takes many forms; and this was mine. I never for one instant ceased to love Richard. There never was a moment, mad as I was, when to have saved Richard a pang of toothache I would not gladly have seen Denys the Routier hanged, drawn and quartered. By all that is holy, I swear that that is true. The lust I felt for him was like a poison, swallowed unwittingly, doing its damage, taking possession of the whole sound body.

With Mother gone home I was back at my old place at the table and could see him clearly only when he leaned forward or the man sitting next him leaned back. And after the first few days he was never there for the mid-day dinner and not to be counted upon at supper time. In no time at all, talking to the Flemings in their own tongue, he had put the fear of God into them, and Master Reed, never one to waste anything, had begun to send him with the pack ponies as a kind of guard. So I never knew, when I entered the dining hall whether his place would be filled or
empty and every evening, every evening for weeks I vowed that this time I would not look. But I always did, sooner or later; and if his place was empty a kind of greyness would come over everything, my food would be tasteless. … Tomorrow, how many hours? Or perhaps, a long journey, the day after tomorrow.… It was like walking down a dark stone passage with a light at the far end. No, not a light, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp. For when the moment came and I looked and there he was, what then?

Oh, then, at some moment during the meal that one blue eye would look at me, and my inside would turn its now pleasurable somersault; the candlelight would brighten, the fire behind me throw out more heat and I would know a moment of what I can only call timelessness. In that moment all kinds of things would rush together reminding me of small pleasures I had known in the past and promising me a great pleasure to come – there’d be the cool scent of primroses, the warm scent of roses, the sound of trumpets, the feel of my Aunt Astallon’s silk gown, the taste of strawberries, the colours of a sunset – all mixed up in one mad moment, meaning nothing, meaning everything. How can I explain it? It was as though every pleasant thing that I had ever felt in the past was a separate string to a lute, and his glance was the running of a hand over those strings, so that they all cried out together, in no tuneable pattern.

I never spoke to him, never had occasion to go near him until one morning in the spring. It was March, I remember seeing the daffodils breaking yellow in the garden close, under the apple trees. Richard was riding out to Minsham and I said I would go too. St. Petronella had failed me yet again and I had spent the whole winter cooped in the house.

Martin’s horse and my palfrey stood awaiting us, and near by a string of pack-ponies, laden with the new Baildon cloth, were lining up for the first stage of their journey to London. Denys stood with them. He came forward – one of Martin Reed’s servants, civil, obliging, and helped me to mount. When he touched me my bones melted. In the two seconds before I was in the saddle it was all said. ‘I am yours, take me,’ my flesh said to his; and his said, ‘Would that I could.’

‘You look so pale,’ Martin said, turning his horse beside me. ‘Are you sure you should ride?’

‘You know that it is only when I am pale with such good reason that I dare face my mother,’ I said, crossly. And all the way to Minsham I thought about Denys. We would make a child, I thought, the moment we came together. We could defy the moon, the pale moon with its fluxes.…

After that I suppose it was merely a question of awaiting an opportunity.

April passed and May. I had grown thin, which was not becoming to me. One day, looking in the glass I was horrified to see that after all I had inherited the Blanchefleur nose and would one day look exactly like an aunt I detested. Richard and his father put down my lack of appetite and uncertain temper to disappointment and were kinder than ever to me which, because it made me feel ashamed, made matters worse.

June was always a busy month, with the new cut fleeces pouring in from miles around, and often Richard would rise early, leaving me to slug abed. One morning he did so, and when I did go down I looked into the office, but he wasn’t there, which was nothing unusual. Dinner time came and the oak table was set with two places only.

‘Where’s Richard?’ I asked.

‘Gone to Bywater. We had word early this morning that
Sea Maid
had run into another ship and was damaged. He rode down to see what the damage was. He’ll be back tomorrow.’

Martin set about his meal and then stopped. ‘I’m off myself to Kelvedon this minute. You’ll be alone in the new part. Would you like Nancy or Meg to move over?’

‘For fear of what?’

‘Whatever it is women fear. Ghosties and goblins?’ He gave me his painful, rare smile.

‘Anything a kitchen wench could save me from I do not fear,’ I said.

Yet I had no intention of taking Denys into Richard’s bed. I had no intention of doing anything. I did not even go into the hall for supper, to sit there alone, displaying my solitariness I stayed close in the solar, thinking that he would think that I also had gone away. From the solar I went into the garden.

Every rose had its heart wide open; the langour of a summer evening weighed heavy on every leaf. I walked, lingered walked on, unable to draw a full breath, my heart was so shaken.

Presently, between the rose bushes old Nancy came hobbling on her flat feet.

‘Mistress,’ she began as soon as she saw me, ‘there’s that Denys Rootyer at the back door. He say Master went off and never give him his orders for tomorrow. He say he ought to talk to you.’

‘Oh’, I said, and struggled with my breath. Surely she must notice and wonder. ‘No orders were left with me. I know nothing.’

‘He seem to hev something in his mind. He just want somebody to say go ahead like. There ain’t nobody else but you.’

‘I’ll see him.’

‘Out here? Then you should hev a shawl. The dew’s falling.’

‘Give him the shawl. That will save you a few steps.’

‘T’ain’t everybody’d be thoughtful of an owd woman’s feet,’ she said, pleased. ‘I give you good night, Mistress.’

Thinking no evil, thinking only of her bed she plodded away. And presently, with his light, firm, soldier’s tread, carrying my shawl over his arm, Denys came through the roses.

There followed some days during which, with a sense of bewilderment I thought of Mother’s words. I’d sit at the table and look at Richard, whom I loved and then at Denys, whom I did not love, and I knew which of them gave me that feeling of triumph, of pride that had sounded in Mother’s voice when she spoke of Father, How I envied her – and any other woman who could have that feeling lawfully, together
with
love. Those were days when I had only to see his great brown hand close on a piece of bread in the trencher to feel its touch on me again and wonder how, through all the years of my life, I could manage with what I had.

Those days were soon over. The July moon was a horned crescent, was a silver-gilt plate, grew gibbous and copper coloured. It drew no response from my blood. To myself I said – I was right; I knew this would happen. To the others I said nothing. I waited until one morning towards the end of August, when as soon as I set foot to the floor, I was deathly sick. Then I said to Richard,

‘I think I am with child.’ And presently I was sure enough to send a message to my mother.

There was, naturally, great rejoicing. Even Master Reed threw off his melancholy air, and Richard’s pride and pleasure cut me to the heart. I had other troubles too. One was shame and one was fear.

Now that the work was done and my womb was filling, all the lust went out of me, and all the madness, and I could see Denys for what he was – a great hunk of man flesh, a common hired soldier to whom I, Anne Blanchefleur, had submitted! There was the shame!

The fear lay in the thought that children tended to look like their parents. Suppose my child were born with that pale sandy hair and only one eye. How could I ever have been so crazy as not to have thought of that?

I studied Richard and his father. At a first glance they were unlike. Richard was much darker, much more lightly built, but the way the hair grew off their foreheads was the same, and they both had crooked little fingers on their left hands. True, Master Reed was lame and Richard had two good straight legs, but there were two schools of thought about such things. Some people held that anything that had happened to a man or woman by accident during his or her lifetime was not passed on to the offspring; other people claimed that anything that happened, even to having been frightened by a mouse, could leave a mark upon the child.

Mother rode in to see me and we had a long talk, all about such mysteries; I encouraged her and then wished I had not. She had a story of a pregnant woman who had longed for strawberries in December and who bore a child with a red strawberry mark on its left cheek.

‘Whatever you long for, no matter how silly it sounds, speak out, Anne. Make them get it for you if possible.’

I thought – I wonder how you would look if I told you that the one thing I long for is the assurance that a one-eyed man’s child will not be born with one eye.

All this uneasiness of mind took its toll of my body. I think I suffered everything a pregnant woman can. They say that if you are sick at six weeks at six months you’ll be lively. They say that cramps beforehand are a sign of easy labour, you’ve had so much of your grue. They say that if your legs swell your face does not. I broke every one of the rules. I was sick at six weeks, and even sicker at six months; I had cramp; my face swelled to the size of a bladder and my legs swelled till they were as big as my waist ordinarily was; and in the end I was in labour for two days and three nights.

Before the end I had my story ready. If I gave birth to a child with one eye I was going to say that on the night when Richard and his father were both away, Denys made an excuse to come to me in the garden, and there raped me. Old Nancy would bear me out about the excuse, I was in the garden, innocent as a lamb, and he did make that opportunity to seek me out. Richard and his father would ask one dangerous question – Why had I not complained? To that I had a silly sentimental answer, silly enough to sound true. My father had found Denys for Master Reed and I didn’t want him to think that Father had sent him a rogue.