The Abbey clock was striking eight as he knelt down on the kindly spread cloak, and all the clocks of London taking up the chime one from another. Bess heard it, standing at her window with her drained face towards Westminster, and felt Carew start and shiver in the protecting curve of her arm. But it was only the clocks striking, nothing more, nothing more as yet. ‘When he goes, I shall know it.’
The Dean, who had been murmuring to Ralegh from time to time, was bending over him, bidding him lie with his face turned towards the East.
‘What matter which way the head lie, so that the heart be right?’ Ralegh said. Then, quietly putting aside the headsman’s offer of a kerchief for his eyes, ‘Blindfold? Nay, man, think you I fear the shadow of the axe when I fear not the axe itself?’
He laid his head on the block, settled himself as comfortably as might be, and so remained for a few moments, praying, then stretched out his hands in the pre-arranged signal. But the headsman, thoroughly unnerved, hesitated to obey. There was a long moment of tortured silence, and then Ralegh spoke once more, with a flash of his old imperiousness. ‘What dost thou fear? Strike man, strike!’
The axe crashed down, once, twice. Ralegh’s body jerked at the first blow, not at the second.
The last of Elizabeth’s Round Table had made his triumphal exit, and Bess, at her window on the other side of London, felt him go; and knew that he was away on his long journey.
High on the scaffold in Palace Yard, the executioner was holding aloft Sir Walter Ralegh’s severed head, showing it, according to custom, to the motionless crowd; and a voice, topping the ragged and furious tumult that arose as they looked upon it, cried out: ‘We have not such another head to be cut off!’
On the other side of London, the wind through the dark branches of the ilex tree made a soft sea-hushing, and the whitethroat from the churchyard of Allhallows-by-the-Wall, who should have flown south by now, sat singing his thin and shining under-song in its topmost spray; and a prentice lad came whistling Greensleeves up the alley beside the little house in Broad Street, and Bess was back in the lime avenue at Sherborne on any of a hundred summer evenings, with Ralegh coming whistling to join her across the grass. She was beside the river at Richmond, and the Queen’s Captain with her. ‘Why have I never seen you before? ... I have danced with all the Queen’s Ladies.’ She was sitting in the ditch at the foot of Lady Sidney’s garden, beside a young soldier newly back from Flanders, listening spellbound as he declared unto her a Far Country; and there was a Jenny-whitethroat singing in the damson tree, hidden by the white tide of blossom, so that it was as though the tree itself were singing.
If you enjoyed Lady in Waiting you might be interested in The Rider of the White Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from The Rider of the White Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff
Chapter 1 - A Gathering of Friends
It had been one of those days when, with more than half the winter still to come, the year quickens, and suddenly, faint but unmistakable as the sound of distant trumpets, the promise of the far-off spring is in the air. In the sheltered angle of the terrace steps the first chilly snowdrops were in flower, though it still wanted almost a fortnight to Candlemas. But the snowdrops were always early at Nun Appleton.
In the wide stable yard behind the house, a little warmth seemed still to linger, though the sun was already low, and the pigeons strutted around the feet of the three men who stood watching a young, half Andalusian, chestnut mare being walked to and fro by the head groom.
‘Yes, I commend your choice. She is a beauty.’ The speaker was Sir Henry Slingsby, older than the other two; a thickset man with a weather beaten Saxon face and a pair of level, very blue eyes. ‘But I wonder to find you buying horses again already. It is scarcely a year since your grandfather left you his whole stud and stables to add to your own, which God knoweth was no mean one already!’
The owner of the chestnut mare smiled, a swift, leaping smile that lit his dark face with unexpected sweetness. ‘Grand old Grandfather Tom. His stud was magnificent; but I’ve a mind to choose my own horses, even so.’
‘And a reputation for owning the best stud in Europe that must be kept up, if only as a duty,’ said the third man.
Sir Thomas Fairfax glanced at his cousin with the easy camaraderie of affection so deep and so accustomed that it has at no time any need to be expressed. ‘There are worse reputations a man might earn, William.’ Then to the groom, ‘Well enough, Midgely, take her in now.’
Several beautiful heads came over half doors to greet and be greeted by the Master of Nun Appleton as he passed with his kinsman and his friend, and at the last stall of all he stopped to fondle a superb head on a long arched neck that came out to him with grave dignity and hopefully working lips. ‘So, so, old lad. Yes, I know; an apple, that is what you’re wanting.’ He brought out from somewhere about him a small, shrivelled, yellow apple left from last year’s harvest, and the great white stallion took it from his palm with the dignity of a Spanish hidalgo. Fairfax drew his hand again and again down the broad nose whose dark shadowing round the flared nostrils told of Arab blood, while the pricked ears swivelled to catch the tones of his voice.
‘I don’t envy you the rest of Grandfather’s stud over much,’ said his cousin, putting up his own hand to caress the creamy neck. ‘But if it was anyone other than you, Tom, I’d be jealous that he left you White Surrey.’
Sir Henry Slingsby leaned a broad shoulder against the stable doorpost. ‘White Surrey — why that name, I wonder.’
‘My Grandfather was always a little King Richard’s man. He always had a White Surrey in his stables.’
‘We are all a little King Richard’s men, here in his own land,’ said Sir William Fairfax. ‘Bacon hit the mark well enough when he wrote that here in the north the memory of Richard III lay like lees at the bottom of a wine cup so that one only had to stir the wine for it to rise up again and permeate the whole. We have long memories, we of the north, and we are loyal to our own.’
‘Aye, we’re loyal to our own,’ said Slingsby, who was to testify to his own unswerving loyalty to another king on a scaffold on Tower Hill, on a summer morning that was as yet six years away.
The last of the sun was off the stable yard now, and Tom Fairfax, who felt the cold as only a man with Low Countries fever in his bones could feel it, huddled his loose cloak about him as they turned once more towards the side door, but checked an instant, to watch where a flight of pigeons that had exploded up from before their feet wheeled across the corner of the house, turning all together, with the last of the sunlight caught in their wings.
Two women sitting together in the high oriel window of the Great Parlour turned their heads to watch as the pigeons beat by. The dark one leaned sideways to watch them out of sight. ‘Pigeons,’ she said. ‘When you watch them paddling about and crooning on the warm cobbles they are like little plump, prosperous merchants’ wives, and then — they burst up and sweep between you and the sun, and their wings are tipped with fire!’
The brown one said nothing, but turned again to her embroidery. Her shadow, falling across the work in her lap, dimmed the curling formal maze of branches with their berries and fantastic flowers and prancing heraldic leaves. There were small birds among the branches, and a squirrel — she had worked him all in silk in an effort to catch the blown-flame texture of a squirrel in the sunlight — and two stiff deer on the green mounds on either side of the woollen raised-work trunk. Anne Fairfax looked at the deer with dissatisfaction. She had tried to make them like the dappled roe deer in the home park, but they were stiff. She glanced at Frances, who still made her think of a dark lily, even now that her body was beginning to thicken again with William’s second child, seeing her thin tense hands on the lute that she had allowed to fall silent in her lap. Frances had her means of capturing beauty, and Anne Fairfax envied her sharply. She envied so many people so many things.
Frances brought her ea
ger gaze back out of the sunset, and sat forward. ‘That is pretty. I like that streak of incarnation against the green.’
‘That is some wool that my mother sent me from London,’ Anne said. ‘It isn’t easy to get the more fragile colours in York.’
‘London! It sounds like another world. Do you still miss the south?’
‘Not really.’ Anne dabbed at a stitch that was refusing to set properly. ‘I never truly had time to fix my heart in any one place, north or south. One’s growing-up years spent in following a father on campaign about the Low Countries make one adaptable. I was not very happy at first — not up at Denton.’ She stitched for a few moments in silence, remembering those first months of her married life, in the great family house far up Wharfedale, with Thomas’s father and the terrible old white lion of a grandfather. The incessant scenes when she rebelled against his attempts to rule her as he ruled everyone else, with poor Thomas torn between his loyalty to his wife and his habit of obedience to the family tyrant; until at last, she had told him, ‘You must take me away, Thomas. I will not bear a child in this house with your horrible grandfather decreeing what I shall eat and not eat, what I shall do and not do.’ And so Thomas had brought her down here to Nun Appleton when the snowdrops were in flower, just as they were now. ‘It was so bleak and lonely up at Denton,’ she said. ‘I am happy — I have always been happy — here at Nun Appleton.’ The lingering reflection of the sunset brought her out of the shadows that had held her the moment before. Lady Fairfax of Nun Appleton, a stocky young woman, brown of skin and hair, and with a small plain face in which the strong level brows and big nose seemed meant for a much larger and more commanding owner. Only her eyes under those too-heavy brows were beautiful; large and brilliant, hazel or grey by turn. Her eyes and her slim hands folded into each other like a bird’s wings, against the lustrous darkness of her gown.
‘Oh Anne, I do envy you!’ Frances laid the lute aside and straightened herself, her face alight with her own vehemence. ‘To be Lord Vere’s daughter and follow him on campaign, it makes my heart beat faster even to think of it!’
Anne Fairfax smiled, the small inward-turning smile that means memory. ‘It was not very romantic. Sometimes it was very uncomfortable. It meant damp inn beds, and quarters in half-ruined châteaux. Sometimes I feel sorry for Mary and the baby, that they will have such an ordinary upbringing and never know any of the things that I and my sisters knew. But at most times I have enough wisdom to be glad.’
‘But don’t you find it dull?’
Anne was silent a moment, ‘No, not dull. Beautifully quiet,’ she said at last.
‘Sometimes I wonder at Tom sitting here like — like a cabbage!’ Frances said impatiently. ‘If I were a man I wouldn’t have just stayed in my own kale garth all this while, with so much happening in the world outside!’
Anne glanced round, swift in defence of her husband. ‘It depends on what you mean by “all this while”. He followed the King in both his unlucky campaigns against the Scots, remember.’ (Odd to be using that particular defence, when at the time she, with her hard Presbyterian upbringing, had given all her sympathies to the Scots, and done her utmost to keep Thomas from marching with the King’s Army.)
‘Yes, but that is all ancient history now. Think of this past year and a half —’
Anne thought. In the past year and a half so much had happened in the world outside, as relations worsened between the King and his Parliament: only a few weeks since, Parliament had drawn up and presented to the King their Grand Remonstrance, stating their complaints against him; complaints of tyranny, of illegal taxation, of the forcing of episcopacy on an unwilling people. They all rendered down to one thing: the King’s physical inability to see any point of view but his own, his passionate belief in his own Divine Right... And all the while, the ordinary business of living was becoming more difficult for ordinary people as trade suffered from the nation’s growing uncertainty; for the folk of the woollen towns, here in the north, even for the great landowners...
‘Thomas is not a politician. One Member for York is enough in one family, and he leaves that to his father. He is a one-time soldier who breeds horses and grows the best roses in Yorkshire.’ She rose, shaking out her skirts. ‘I think I hear them coming; and it grows cold here in the window. Let us go to the fire before we lose all sight of it behind our menfolk.’
Tramping feet were coming up the stairs even as she spoke, and a few moments later the door opened and the three men came into the room.
‘Ah now, Gentlemen. Did the mare find favour in your eyes?’ Anne greeted them as they came to the fire. ‘I have no knowledge of horseflesh, but is she not the bonniest thing?’
She had many faults and failings, but disloyalty was not one of them. She told Thomas plainly, sometimes too plainly, when she disapproved of what he did; she never told anyone else. Across the group, now, his eyes met hers with gentle amusement as the memory of her outspoken disapproval when he bought the mare hovered between them. And Anne, as always at such moments, was warmed by the gentleness and hurt afresh because it was nothing more.
The other men were voicing their approval of the mare, as they gathered closer holding out chilled hands to the blaze.
Anne put out her hand to the embroidered bell pull, saying half against her will, ‘I will ring for candles.’
But Sir Henry Slingsby stayed her. ‘Ah, not yet; it would be a crime to shut out that silken afterglow behind the trees.’
And so she abandoned the bell pull, and gradually, with the lovely ease of old familiarity, the little company of friends settled about the fire. Slingsby had taken up the abandoned lute from the window seat, and now sat fingering the strings almost silently, his ruddy face content and listening in the firelight. Thomas and William remained standing before the massive overmantel, the carved lion’s head of the Fairfax crest between them as though emphasizing their cousinship. Anne looked up from one to the other, so alike in some ways, so contrasted in others. She saw Thomas, her dark faintly scarecrow Thomas, with the bony, sensitive sallow face, the sombre eyes and vulnerable mouth. She saw William, come home at last from his years of soldiering to settle down, taller even than Thomas, and with a raking strength of build that made the other seem slight — Thomas cast in a blunter and a harder mould.
The intimacy of the winter twilight gathered about them, folding them close, the firelight painting tawny roses on the lustrous stuff of the women’s wide skirts. Anne had a more than physical sense of warmth and shelter — shelter, and yes, safety. Thomas and William were still talking horses; Thomas was relaxed and at ease, the stutter that at most times needed such careful control seeming scarcely to trouble him.
Sir Henry Slingsby’s straying fingers on the lute had wandered into a tune they all knew, and Frances joined him, singing half under her breath.
‘Hey Nonny No!
Men are fools that wish to die!
Is’t not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?
Is’t not fine to swim in wine,
And turn upon the toe
And sing hey nonny no,
When the winds blow and the seas flow?
Hey Nonny
Hey Nonny No!’
A footfall came up the stairs, and Slingsby’s hand fell silent as a knock sounded upon the door. With a sudden sense of the safety being over, Anne called ‘Enter.’
The door opened and a little bent old serving man appeared against the light of a six-branched candlestick held by a maid behind him. ‘Young Relf’s back from York, Sir Thomas, and he’s brought t’news letter.’
Fairfax always had his weekly news letter and the London Post brought to him as soon as they arrived. He stretched out his hand for the folded packet, as the girl came forward to set the candles on the table.
With a breathless instinct to stave off something — Anne said rather sharply, ‘I have not yet rung for candles, Sibby.’
As the girl hesitated, th
e old man answered for her. ‘If Sir Thomas must have t’news letter, happen Sir Thomas had better have some light to read it by, Mi Lady.’ Ben Midgely, uncle of Midgely in the stables, was no respecter of persons.
Fairfax’s thumb was already under the wafer. ‘By your leave, my friends. Shall we see what is the latest noise from London?’
‘Thomas, there isn’t time, there really isn’t time for that letter now,’ Anne said. ‘It is almost supper time. Let it lie until afterwards.’
Fairfax glanced at the little lacquered clock on the wall, then back to his wife’s suddenly strained face. ‘We have the best part of an hour before supper. It will not take so long to see what Mr Peebles has to say, Nan.’ He broke the wafer and opened out the thin crackling sheet. The other men bent closer to see.
The silence that followed seemed to drag on interminably. And then Anne, watching one of Thomas’s hands spread-fingered on the table, saw it contract slowly into a fist.
‘My God!’ Fairfax said, very quietly.
Slingsby set down the lute with meticulous care. Tall William straightened himself from the table with the air of one who has seen enough. And the three of them looked at each other. Then Frances cried out, ‘What is it? Oh, for God’s sake tell us! Don’t just stand there staring at each other!’
‘Now surely the last hope of peace is gone,’ William said.
And then they were all about the table. Mr Peebles’ sloping Italian hand stared up at Anne from the white page. ‘May it please you, Sir Thomas: events of great import there have taken place since last I writ to you of the passing of the Militia Bill. It appears that His Majesty has been mightily wrath at the passing of the said Bill, and of the Grand Remonstrance (albeit by only eleven votes after a sitting of much storm and stress); and relying on the support of the King’s Party in the House, lately determined upon attack as the surest means of defence, and so prepared to impeach him that had been foremost against him among the Lords — to wit, My Lord Kimbolton — and also five of the Commons: John Pym, John Hampton, Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, Denzil Holles, and William Strode on a charge of treason. On Wednesday last, His Majesty accompanied by a party of those of his own affection, went down to the House to arrest these men. But they, being forewarned, escaped by river to the City of London, whence they are now returned, escorted for their safety and in the King’s despite, by several companies of the City Trained Bands, and by four thousand freeholders of Buckinghamshire, who follow John Hampton to a man. What course the King will next follow —’