The Town House (58 page)

This year Nicholas intended to keep the festival and, because Maude’s birthday had fallen during the days of mourning for her grandfather and gone unmarked, it could be a celebration of her birthday too. He had ridden into Colchester and bought her a present from the goldsmith’s there. It was a reliquary pendant, hung on a thin gold chain. The pendant was a flat, slim oblong of gold which, upon pressure on a spring, opened into a triptych of pictures, beautifully worked in enamel, the centre picture showing the Crucifixion, the one to the left the Annunciation and the one on the right Christ’s Ascension. When closed it measured an inch and a half by two, and was a masterpiece of delicate workmanship. It had cost every penny of his filchings and three pounds of his cash legacy.

He planned it all to the last detail Mistress Reed could go to bed and eat – in the disgustingly slovenly way she had lately developed – her dish of asparagus there. He and Maude would sit in the solar, at a table with a good linen cloth, set near the window to catch the evening light. There would certainly be, to start with at least, the sadness inseparable from any family anniversary after a bereavement, and he would exert himself to talk as entertainingly as possible. The servant would serve the asparagus, and then the fish, and go, leaving the sweetmeats on the cupboard. When they were alone he would remind Maude of her forgotten birthday and produce his gift. After it had been admired he would fix the chain about her neck, drop his hands to her shoulders, turn her towards him and kiss her.

All this planning gave him the same half-incredulous pleasure as he had felt through the waiting time. He, Nick Freeman, whose approach to women had always been so forthright, setting a scene, preparing the very words he would say. It was amazing, but it was wonderful; he loved her, never having loved any woman before, therefore it must all be as different as he could make it.

The very day was exactly as he would have had it could he have ordered it as he had ordered the clothes he intended to wear that evening; a warm, fair day, full of the first scents of summer. The little pink monthly rose, always the first to come into bloom, was covered with half-open buds; the lilacs were in heavy flower. A bowl of the roses, he thought, closely massed together in the centre of the table, between the silver candlesticks. Giving this order to the maid whom he had taken into his confidence, an odd thought occurred to him – it was almost as though he were a priest, arranging an altar! The thought provoked a smile, which still lingered in the corners of his mouth and in his eyes as he went on to have a word with Phyllis. Mistress Reed to be out of the solar and into bed by six o’clock.

Then, so that the whole thing might be a surprise to Maude he sought her out with the suggestion that in the afternoon they should ride together. There was a clip of wool he wanted to inspect at Marly.

‘I’ve never been there,’ Maude said.

‘You turn off at Flaxham and ride alongside the river. It is a pretty ride, especially now, with the hawthorns coming into bud.’

Before they left he took out his new clothes and laid them on the bed. Never in all his life had he had such clothes because always every garment he had bought, even for best, had ahead of it years of servile office wear. His new tunic and hose were garments for a young, prosperous merchant, garments that Maude’s own father might have worn, a tawny-yellow, slashed with buff, colours carefully chosen to enhance his dark good looks and the easy cut of the tunic calculated to conceal the hint of threatening stoutness. He laid the pendant beside the clothes, ready to slip into his pouch when he changed.

They exchanged casual, unimportant remarks as they rode, until, in the distance they could see the double arch of the ancient stone bridge, with its image perfectly reflected in the water below. On either bank of the river were the hawthorns covered with bright green leaves, just uncurling and clusters of buds a little less white than the flowers into which presently they would break. Somewhere on the other side of the river a cuckoo called, and another answered.

Maude gave a great sigh which called her grandfather to Nicholas’s mind.

‘Beautiful!’ she said. ‘So beautiful. And when I think how nearly I missed it all.’ The ecstatic note in her voice gave way to a kind of grating impatience. ‘Oh, I know that the summer will pass and the bloom will fade and the leaves will fall, whereas the spiritual things, the devotion and the duties and the joys go on, unchanging whatever the season … and when one is old. I know that. In my mind. But my heart was never convinced. It would not be. I prayed and prayed for some sign, for some proof that what I knew I should do was the thing that was right for me. And nothing happened. Then, when the sign came it pointed the other way.’

They had halted their horses who after nuzzling one another dropped their heads and strained towards the green grass.

‘I warned you,’ he said. And she took that, not as a reproach but as proof that he knew what she was talking about. That was what made him so delightful a companion; he did not need everything explained and underlined.

‘I know. But when you are young what do you know about yourself? I mean … a dim-witted person might, for the best of reasons, wish to be a scholar, and try and try, and he would learn something; then one day he might be sent to feed pigs and realize that feeding pigs was what God meant him to do. You know why I went to Clevely; I told you. And for a long time it seemed right. Being cold and tired and hungry, salting the butter away in casks with the salt getting into the cracks of my hands was all helping, I thought. I offered my little sufferings so that Melusine … And then, all at once it was no good for me any more. Nothing I did was a gift; it was a tax, wrenched from me.’

‘I could see that,’ he said.

‘There was one time when I was afraid I might go mad. Shall I tell you what I thought? I thought that if this went on much longer I should begin to hate Melusine. I thought she should never have done … never have got herself into such a situation in the first place; or, having let it happen, she should have married one of those silly young men who were always following her around. Wasn’t that shocking? The one person who had been kind to me. The person who had taught me to read and write. To think such shameful things.’

‘Thoughts walk in uninvited,’ he said.

She turned to him with a look of bright relief.

‘That
is
true, isn’t it? I was in the chapel, at the end of a twenty-four hour fast. I was making a Novena. And that thought, as you say, walked in. And after that it all seemed such a waste. But I went on praying, and in the end there was a sign – the Bull Periculoso!’

‘May Heaven reward Pope Boniface the Eighth,’ he said lightly. But one day, or rather one night, one night very soon, when they lay spent with loving, breathless with loving, when she had tasted to the full all the joy she had so nearly missed, he would tell her to whom she owed it. The story of how the long dead Pope had had a little help from a humble living clerk would be worth telling.

The thought of being in bed with her, of her hair spread loose on the pillow, of the way he would handle and teach that virgin innocence moved him so much that once again he was astonished. He might have been a boy again, virgin himself, excited by the prospect of his first experience in the art of love.

‘I think we should move on,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t be late for supper. I have a surprise for you.’

They rode towards the bridge, she trying to extract from him some details about the surprise, he refusing to tell her and both finding cause for laughter in this simple business because they were happy and it was a day for laughter.

How well, he thought, he had chosen his time. Her return to the world had combined with the natural resiliency of youth to enable her to throw off her sorrows. She was whole now, and happy, and his for the taking.

Presently he had another notion, as far-fetched as the earlier comparison of a supper table with an altar. They were already, he thought, like a married couple. The proposal, the acceptance, the ceremony would be nothing but formalities. The real bonds of affection and common interest and good companionship were already forged.

He looked back upon how he had come to Baildon, having been thrown out of the leather-merchant’s house in disgrace; upon how, before ever he had set eyes upon her he had decided that to marry his master’s grand-daughter would be a desirable thing to do. How seldom, in this life did one’s desires and one’s material advantages run alongside. How profoundly, how miraculously lucky he had been.

He fell silent and rode for some time indulging in these gloating, self-congratulatory thoughts which ignorant heathen everywhere and at all times have regarded as dangerous, likely to provoke the gods to jealousy and wrath.

The road by which he and Maude, at the end of their ride, approached the Old Vine, ran steeply down hill, and the road itself had been made, immemorial years ago, by heavily laden horses who, to ease the incline, had struggled not straight forward but from left to right and then from right to left. It had three sharp bends; and three times, riding downhill one could catch, and then lose again, the sight of the house, the weaving sheds and stables, lying at the bottom of the slope, with, just beyond, the wall and South Gate of Baildon.

On this afternoon, as the view came first into sight, they could see two horsemen ride through the gateway; both men, one riding a tall horse, the other a heavier animal which bore, beside its rider, a sizeable bundle behind the saddle. They saw so much, and then the road turned and a clump of elms blocked out the view.

When they could next look down the riders had almost reached the house and were visible in some detail. The one on the tall horse was young, his tanned face dark against his straw-coloured hair; the other man was older, and the bundle behind him, by its awkward angular
shapes and the fact that it was enclosed in a soft, yellowish bag of goatskin, could be identified as a suit of armour packed for transit. Two squires on their way to join their master. The view was obscured again.

The road ran out on to the level and made its last turn. The two riders had halted by the great door of the Old Vine. The younger was studying the house, looking it over, up and down, from side to side. Perhaps because he was conscious of the new clothes lying spread upon his bed, Nicholas observed, between one blink of the eyelid and the next, the shabbiness of the scuffed, rubbed greasy leather jerkin worn by this young man. At the same time, not to be missed, was some indefinable hint of quality; in the way he sat in his saddle, in the turn of his head, as he looked the house over. This quality was oddly reflected in his mount, raw-boned and rough-coated it yet bore the stamp of breeding.

Nicholas looked at Maude and was about to say – It seems we have visitors; for the young man, making a sign with his hand which his companion interpreted as an order to wait where he was, turned his horse and rode into the great door of the house. There was no time to make the remark, for Maude brought her hand down in a slap on her horse’s rump and it shot forward. Nicholas caught one glimpse of a face he had never seen before, transformed, almost idiotic with joyful surprise.

His own horse, without urging, hurried after its companion and they clattered into the yard nose to tail.

The young man was in the act of dismounting, his eyes fixed on the back of the house in the same keen earnest scrutiny to which he had subjected the front.

He reached the ground and then, hearing the clatter of hoofs, turned about. Maude threw herself out of the saddle and cried,

‘Henry!’ Her face was red as a rose from chin to brow and his turned even darker. He said in a gruff, embarrassed way,

‘I told you I should come.’

It was not what he had intended to say, nor the tone in which he had intended to speak. And just behind Maude a man, too old to be her twin brother, a neat good-looking man, was just dismounting.

Too full of sudden fear to mind his manners he seized Maude’s hands and pulled off both her gloves. Only one ring, and that the one which he had pushed on to that finger more than four years ago.

‘You’ve worn it … all this time?’

She nodded, and laughed, and said,‘It’s still too big.’

Satisfied, he remembered what, through four hard years he had kept in mind, as part of his goal. Still holding her hand he went on one knee and lifted her fingers to his lips.

‘Sir Henry Rancon,’ he said, so thickly that he seemed about to choke, ‘now and for ever at your service, demoiselle.’

‘Last time,’ she said,‘it was the other way round. You remember? Stand up, Sir Henry, and let me look at you.’

He had changed very little, except to grow; the shabby old jerkin was much too small. An old scar ran from one eyebrow to the edge of his badly cropped, dusty hair, and a newer one, hardly healed showed just below the line of his jaw. She rememered the surprising softness of his lips and wondered…. And was then aware that Nicholas had come to stand beside her. She turned to him, and with a smile that haunted him to the end of his life, dealt him his mortal wound.

‘This was the surprise! Oh, Master Freeman, how did you guess?’

They had been on Christian name terms for at least a month.

Sometimes, during his almost meteoric rise to the upper ranks in the clerical hierarchy – for with money behind him, celibacy willingly embraced, and ruthless ambition as his motive power, nothing could stop him – he would ponder the irony or it all. Occasionally such musings ended with disconcerting thoughts about puppets and the strings they danced on, thoughts unsuitable in a churchman, tacitly dedicated to the theory of man’s free will.

He suffered one such moment when, thirty years later, he was presented with his Cardinal’s hat. He recalled then, as though it had been something he had dreamed, Maude’s story of the Rune Stone at Beauclaire. That was easily to be dismissed as girlish fancy. Less easy to ignore was the memory of old Martin Reed saying mildly, out of his garnered experience,‘People do what they must.’