Green Darkness

  “Ah . . . I see . . .” Celia frowned. She had not realized that Stephen might be in danger again now Queen Elizabeth reigned, that there might be a repetition of the situation at Cowdray when King Edward came.

  “Can you not just filch from the strongbox?” she asked in so casual a tone that Dickon was completely fooled. He thought the new scullery wench receptive, and had just discovered that she was pretty. He was proud of his wits, and enjoyed boasting to so agreeable a listener.

  He chuckled. “I see ye’re a girl after m’ own heart. The coffer’s too strong for me, and she keeps the key around her neck. Besides, she’s building a wall cupboard for it i’ the Hall. That’ll be bolted and double locked, ye may be sure. Nay, there be easier ways to get at the gold.”

  He trotted off whistling, towards the buttery.

  That evening just before dusk, after the kitchen supper of pease porridge and small beer, Celia violated the manor rules and left the servants’ wing.

  First she went out to the garden and searched amongst the roses and lilies until she found a clump of gillyflowers. She picked two of the fragrant pinks. Then she crept up the back stairs and into a room called the “Solar,” which had been the fourteenth-century withdrawing room. It had a squint, or window, into the old chapel so that invalids might see the altar. The Solar also had another small interior window which looked down into the Hall below. Celia pressed close to the grille and stared.

  Emma and Christopher Allen sat side by side in two armchairs at the head of the table; little Charles was next to his father; Stephen sat on a stool beside Emma, while Larkin, the steward, ate in isolation below the silver saltcellar.

  Though Stephen had not noticed her in chapel, when his every thought was on the celebration of the Mass, this time Celia’s concentrated yearning gaze disquieted him. She heard him say to Emma, “I’ve the odd feeling that someone’s watching us.”

  “What nonsense,” cried Emma with her grating laugh. “I’d never think you one for fancies, Brother Stephen,” she prodded him playfully in the ribs and bestowed on him a look which could only be called languishing.

  Stephen drew away and changed the subject. “I see the mason’s making progress with the niche for your new safe.” He pointed to a spot below the upstairs grille where Celia stood.

  “Aye,” said Emma, “but the old wall’s three-foot thick, and he’s a mortal slow worker. Moreover, he’s stupid as a sheep. Ye’ll have to find better than a journeyman, Larkin.” Emma suddenly addressed the steward who choked, and said, “To be sure, lady, I’ll seek a master mason on Monday.”

  Then Charles, as black-haired and florid as his mother, gave vent to his desire for more sugarplums, having finished the last of those his indulgent father had brought from London. There was no means of gratifying him, and his frustrated roars were earsplitting.

  “He wants a good caning, sir,” said Stephen. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

  But the Allens shook their heads. Disparate in most other ways, they were yet united in spoiling their heir.

  Celia left the grille and wandered through to a chamber with an oriel window. At the end of it her anxious surveys of the Mote’s topography were rewarded. She opened two doors and went into what was certainly Stephen’s room. There was a wooden cot made up with unbleached linen. There was a chest and his missal lying on it. There was his picture of the Virgin, so pretty, so calm, and a candle burning beneath Her in a sconce.

  Celia paused beside the image. “What do you know of love?” she said. The vapid passionless face looked back at her with a faint superior smile. “I’ll win him yet . . .” said Celia, “and be damned to you!” She heard her own angry voice with a prick of fear. Gross blasphemy—and the Devil lay in wait for blasphemers. She had the two gillyflowers clutched in her hand, their clovelike scent pervaded the priest’s little room.

  Celia plucked a dozen golden hairs from her head and entwined them around the gillyflowers. She tied the ends in a bowknot, and put the offering on Stephen’s flat pillow. She slipped away, and regained the kitchen quarters. Would he guess? She wasn’t sure, but she felt peace, a great lifting of the spirits. She had begun the needful measures.

  She was not even disturbed later when Emma Allen entered the kitchen like a whirlwind and whacked the cook with an iron ladle because he had burned the Banbury tarts. She was further incensed when she realized that Alice had been sitting on the cook’s lap.

  “Whoremonger!” Emma shouted. “Fornicator! And you, ye little trollop—Get out o’ here. I’ll put ye i’ th’ stocks come morning.”

  Celia, from a corner, observed that Emma was almost white with rage; her face was grotesque; she lurched and swayed as she delivered her tongue-lashing. She was obviously drunk, and her antics affected Celia no nearer than a mummers’ show would have.

  Stephen found the gillyflowers tied with golden hair on his pillow that night and was perturbed. He could think of nobody who might have put them there, though the first suspicion was Emma Allen, and induced loathing. He had unwillingly come to realize that the woman was infatuated with him. She touched him often. In the confessional she leaned against his knee, and confessed transgressions so minor he had trouble not smiling. She seemed unaware of her graver sins, and his tactful injunctions resulted only in smiling nods and the slanting look of desire in her black eyes. He wished he had gone to Spain with Anthony, yet at the time only drudgery and obedience seemed the proper penance for that night of dreadful guilt on St. Ann’s Hill. Stephen took up the gillyflowers and their bow of golden hair and stared at them again. There was no one with hair that color at Ightham Mote. Burnished gold. It isn’t possible . . . he thought. She’s married to Edwin Ratcliffe and has forgot me as she must. He looked up at the Virgin and said with great feeling, “Salve Regine, mater misericordiae, vita dulcido, et spes nostra.”

  The picture retained its calm remote look. Stephen went to bed, but before he did so he removed the hair shirt. The skin of his belly and back was an angry red and dotted with little pustules. The Abbot, his confessor, had only commanded the hair shirt for three months. Now four had passed, and Stephen had also been scourging himself, every day with his knotted girdle. Worse than these penances had been Abbot Feckenham’s weary disappointment. “I never expected this of you, my son, not lewd sins of the flesh, you have seemed to me so chaste, so upright a monk that I thought you immune to that Devil’s bait.”

  “Aye, Father . . . I’m not as strong as I thought.” Thus he had answered, and suppressed the memory of that night, though it returned in shameful dreams.

  His hand trembled as it held the gillyflowers. He wanted to throw them out the window into the moat, and yet could not. The scent troubled him, and he put them inside his coffer. There were mysteries surrounding him and the sensation of rushing towards a precipice which simply could not be there.

  He sat down on his cot and thought determinedly of pleasant things. The week he had spent at Medfield with Tom and his family. They had made him very welcome, and Stephen had rejoiced to see his brother so prosperous. Tom had risen to be virtually the squire of Medfield, while Nan kept pace with him, wore velvet on Sundays, and had silver dishes on her table. Nan resembled her sister Emma in coloring only; she was a sweet placid woman. She had given Tom two more babies after little Tom, a bright sensitive five-year-old who was a trifle shy with his black-robed uncle. Tom Marsdon, the father, had grown proud of his lineage as he grew to be an important landowner, and one recent evening had showed Stephen a large vellum-bound book in which he wanted his learned brother to write down all the Marsdon names, births and deaths, that the two of them could remember.

  “Ye know, Stephen,” said Tom laughing a little, “we’ve got a crest, us Marsdons, leastways there’s a thing like a winged snake and some words on the old siller goblet belonged to our great granf’er.”

  Stephen was interested in anything which kept his thoughts from straying back to the poisonously sweet night on St. Ann’s Hill. He exam
ined the great cup carefully, though in his childhood he had seen it a score of times when it appeared for Christmas and other ceremonial occasions.

  “Sure enough, Tom,” he said, “that bit of carving is a cockatrice and the words beneath”—he squinted at the rubbed letters—“I believe they’re French—‘En garde,’ that is to say, ‘Beware.’ Aye, Tom, that’s not a bad motto, we must ever beware of temptation—and of pride,” he added suddenly, smiling at his brother.

  “Well, I be proud,” said Tom grinning, “proud o’ the Marsdon stock what’s been at Medfield hunnerds o’ years, an’ never a word o’ blame against ’em, proud that liddle Tom’ll own greater lands, more livestock an’ a finer manor house than m’father left me. But will ye write down i’ the chronicle?”

  Stephen complied. Between them, even after inspection of the tombs in Medfield Church, they could go no further back than their great-grandfather, who had been born in 1430. Stephen entered his dates, then continued the chronicle up to the birth of little Tom and his sisters.

  Nan watched his labors and the elegant calligraphy in awed silence. She blushed with pleasure when she saw her own name—Thomas Marsdon married Anne Saxby, Martinmas A.D. 1550.

  “And that’ll be the last marriage in the book, Nan,” he said, smiling at her, “until your children grow up.”

  Nan looked at him with troubled eyes. “Oh, I wish ye weren’t a monk, Brother,” she said sadly. “I know that’s wicked o’ me, but I warrant ye’d be a fine husband and father and now everyone’s leavin’ the old religion agen.”

  “Which is no reason for me to, or you,” said Stephen sternly.

  Nan sighed. “Nay, o’ course you’re right. The times are so confusing. When I was a girl we had Mass one way, then come King Edward we couldn’t have it at all. Then we went back, under Queen Mary, and I liked it, I knew what I was doing. But now under Queen Bess there’s no telling what to believe. Medfield Church is stripped agen. Bare as an eggshell, and no candles or chanting neither.”

  “I know, Nan—” Stephen echoed her sigh. “But God will prevail. The True Faith will prevail.”

  “Aye . . .” she said dubiously, “but I wish ye weren’t going as house priest to Emma . . .”

  “Why so . . .?” asked Stephen.

  Nan frowned, she picked thoughtfully at a loose thread on the Turkey carpet which covered the table. “Emma’s m’own sister . . . an’ I shouldn’t . . . but there was allus something odd about her, something . . . awry. I was afraid o’ her—w’en she was sent back from Easebourne Priory after the Dissolution, I was a little girl. . . . She used to snare birds—thrushes, larks—wi’ bird lime, then she’d twist their necks, and keep the corpses a long time in her chamber, never minding the stench. Still . . . These be foolish words she’s well married to old Kit—Sir Christopher—and I know she’s devout, she cleaves to the True Faith.”

  Stephen had thought very little of this confidence of Nan’s, but since his arrival at the Mote he had been aware of unpleasant incidents—the cruel beating of the scullery maid, the killing of the puppy. He had expected some remorse, some mention of these during confession. There was none, and his tentative questions produced puzzled blankness. Stephen at last concluded that Emma Allen remembered nothing of her drunken lapses. The situation was new to him. He had often heard confessions from tipplers and tosspots, but in a society where everyone drank fermented liquors—even his fellow Benedictines—occasional drunkenness was no mortal sin.

  Stephen resolved to increase his efforts to regulate the spiritual behavior of the household in his charge, and after saying the usual prayers climbed into his narrow bed. His thoughts were agreeable since the penances were completed and he might hope for divine forgiveness. His disciplined mind forbade wonder about the mysterious gillyflowers tied with golden hair, yet the knowledge that they were in his coffer pleased him.

  Celia awoke anxiously on the next morning and jumped out of the bed she shared with the other maids. She ran to the tiny latticed window.

  “Wot’s ado?” asked Alice yawning, though the chambermaid snored on.

  “Naught,” said Celia. “There’s a fine golden sunrise poking through the mist.”

  “Wot’s that to thee, maidy?” asked Alice, shaking her tousled brown head, “stuck all day i’ the scullery.”

  “I’m going a-walk,” said Celia. “After Mass. I don’t want it to rain. Alice, will my lady put you in the stocks today?”

  The girl snorted. “No fear. Master Charles’s fond o’ me. Besides, she’ll have forgot wot happened last night.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Celia smiling.

  She had lugged a tub of rainwater up to the attic, and Alice watched with growing interest as Celia washed her hair. “It do come pretty,” she said. “Yellow as buttercups, and so long. I didn’t guess—allus a kerchief hiding it.”

  Celia washed the rest of herself and then rubbed gillyflower essence on her skin. She put on a clean shift and her other skirt, which was of fine green wool and had been shortened from one of the Lincolnshire gowns. She laced her black bodice, hoping that Alice’s sharp gaze would not notice that the ribbon was spread wider than usual at the waist.

  Alice suddenly giggled. “Who is he, Cissy, m’dear?” she asked. “I hopes him worthy o’ all this pother.”

  “Oh, but aye . . . that he be,” Celia laughed gaily. “’Tis a stout lad, merry as a cricket, a plowboy in Ivy Hatch, we plan to wed come winter.”

  “Fancy that, ye sly puss,” Alice laughed. “I thought ye a stranger to these parts, where’d ye meet him? Must’ve been some months back since I believe ye’re breedin’!”

  Celia reddened. “Nay!” she cried with convincing indignation. “My belly’s ever been plump since childhood, my mother used to lament it.”

  Alice was dubious, but she said no more except, “Have a care, Cissy, ye know what she did to th’ last scullery maid.”

  “I know,” said Celia. “Pray tell Cook that I’ve the gripes, but I’ll be down to scullery i’ time for the breakfast dishes.”

  Alice nodded good-naturedly and buried her head in the pillow.

  Celia had in the last days learned Stephen’s daily routine. After the brief early Mass for the servants, he always went out to walk up the hill behind the Mote, towards a copse of beautiful beeches. Celia today skipped the Mass, and hurried in the direction she had seen him go as she watched from the scullery window. She had no idea how far he went, so she waited in the first mossy glade, leaning against one of the smooth gray trunks, listening to the rustling leaves and a tapping woodpecker, watching little blue butterflies and then a red admiral.

  When she saw Stephen’s tall figure come up a grassy slope her palms began to sweat. She ran and hid behind a more distant beech to watch him. His face looked young, vibrant, thoughtful.

  She watched as he suddenly leaned down and picked a purple mallow, holding it in his hand, touching the petals with his finger.

  Celia took a deep breath and came around the tree. “May I have the mallow, Stephen,” she asked softly, “in return for the gillyflowers?”

  His head jerked up. He stood as though turned to black marble, staring at Celia, at her face framed by loose curtains of golden hair.

  “May I have the flower, my dearest?” she said, and coming near, took it from his hand. “Now we’ve exchanged love tokens there should be another exchange.”

  She lifted her face to his. He grabbed her to him with an inarticulate cry . . . and they kissed.

  He had no preparation, no defense. He melted in the fire she kindled—nothing could now quell their avid desire for union.

  On the moss, beneath the murmurous beeches, they lay together in mindless joy—until a shepherd’s horn blew from a pasture down the hill.

  Stephen stirred. “How can it be—how is it that you are here?” he asked in a dreaming voice. “You were to wed Edwin Ratcliffe.”

  “Could you possibly think so?” She showered little kisses on his f
ace, then nestled again on his shoulder. “I’ve never loved any man but thee, Stephen.”

  “Nor I any woman . . .” he said, and in the saying came the first realization. “How came you here?” he whispered.

  She told him.

  “You left all, you left Cowdray and your marriage—for me?”

  “Aye, Stephen, for thee. And there is more . . .” She pushed up her skirts and put his hand on her belly. “In there is your babe.”

  He gasped, he pulled his hand away. “God forgive me,” he whispered. “God forgive us both.”

  His eyes, which had been full of love, began to harden. He stood up. “Holy Blessed Virgin . . .” he said. “What can we do?”

  She said quietly, “You may take me—and the babe to the Continent. Mayhap Germany? We could be . . .” she faltered afraid of his expression. “Priests can be married in Germany—Stephen—Martin Luther was once a monk . . . a priest.”

  “Martin Luther! And would you damn me to heresy like that!”

  “I don’t ask it . . .” she said in a sad small voice, “but if you love me . . .”

  “I love thee . . .” he said slowly, “above all human beings, but that matters not—”

  She sat very quiet on the moss, looking at him with heavy eyes.

  “I must think . . . I must pray . . .” said Stephen. “I’ll make a Rosary to Our Lady. And Celia, be patient . . . God will grant us an answer.”

  “Will he?” said Celia. “Or your Blessed Virgin? I doubt they exist. Or if they do, that they concern themselves with our kind of trouble. You and I must decide this, never mind them.”

  Stephen opened his mouth and shut it. He looked at her with horrified pity. And new guilt.

  “So to my conscience I must add your loss of faith. Oh, my poor child. At least do this for me, Celia, pray to Our Lady in the chapel. Pray every day, as I will. I taught you the Ave, you have your beads still? Use them.”

  Celia bowed her head. Suddenly she looked up at him. “I’m afeared—frightened—something terrible is going to happen. I feel it. Can’t we leave here together now. Today?”