Towers in the Mist

  Nicolas, less deeply drowned than Joyeuce, recovered first. Coming to the surface again, trembling, astonished and rather alarmed, he looked down and blinked at the girl in his arms as though she were some strange sort of wild creature that had fallen there from the heavens quite unaccountably.

  “Joyeuce?” he said, speaking her name in a bewilderment that seemed begging her to explain this peculiar thing that had happened to them both.

  But Joyeuce, though his question made her move in his arms and raise her face to look at him, only shook her head, for she could explain no more than he could.

  “I’m still rather dirty,” said Nicolas suddenly. “I ought not to touch you. I forgot.”

  He took his arms away from her very gently and took her hand ceremoniously to lead her into the street. Out in the sunshine, and away from the centuries-old darkness of the church, the world returned to normal again. They were a young man and a girl walking down the main thoroughfare of a modern city with the eyes of the world upon them, not two lone souls lost in a primeval darkness. They peeped at each other under their eyelashes with interest, even with amusement, appraising each other’s good points and congratulating themselves upon their taste.

  There was no man in the world so gallant or so fine as Nicolas, Joyeuce thought. It was true that he was distinctly grubby, and his clothes were torn from last night’s fight, but he wore his gallantry with so fine an air that these things were hardly noticeable, and her red rose was stuck in his doublet.

  “I ought to be in Bocardo till tomorrow,” he told her as they walked down Cornmarket, “but I bribed the old jailer to let me out tonight. I’d just one angel left in my pocket.”

  “And the others?” asked Joyeuce.

  “They’re still there. The old curmudgeon would only let one go. Had I had four angels he would have let four go, he said. The others were pleased for me to go because of my nose.”

  “Your nose?” queried Joyeuce.

  “It needs attending to,” said Nicholas, feeling the injured member cautiously. “I think I may have broken it.”

  Joyeuce did not know where he was taking her, and neither did she care. She had forgotten everything in the world but Nicolas and at that moment he could have done what he liked with her. She was in reality the stronger in character of the two of them, and their relationship when from below the window of Bocardo she had looked protectively up at him had been the true relationship, but now it was he who was outwardly all protection. She clung to his arm as they picked their way through the refuse of Cornmarket, for though she was tall he was yet taller and her head only reached his shoulder. The slight blow to his pride that she had dealt him by the first look was healed by her clinging hands. . . . He stuck out his chest, smiled benignly down upon her, and strutted, singing softly to himself,

  Greensleeves was all my joy,

  Greensleeves was my delight;

  Greensleeves was my heart of gold,

  And who but Lady Greensleeves.

  “We’re going to Tattleton’s Tavern,” he told her. “Tattleton’s a friend of mine. He’ll give me clean clothes to change into, and some money to go on with, and you shall sit in the painted room and play the clavicytherium while you are waiting for me, and then we’ll have supper in the garden where the eglantine grows.”

  Joyeuce bowed her head in silent assent, for the modest program filled her with an excitement too deep for words.

  Tattleton’s was a most respectable Tavern and Master and Mistress Tattleton people of refinement. Between the Inns and the Taverns of Oxford there was a great gulf fixed. The Inn was for the common people and the Tavern for the quality. Travelers could find food and lodging for themselves and stabling for their horses at an Inn but at a Tavern accommodation was given only to those who were personal friends of the host and hostess. It was more of a club than an hotel; gentlemen sat there of an evening to drink wines of an exquisite bouquet and flavor and to discuss the gossip of the town with their friends.

  Master Tattleton owned both the Tavern and the Crosse Inn next door, and made a good thing out of them. They were on the east side of Cornmarket and were both of them fine houses. Joyeuce and Nicolas passed the Crosse Inn first, with its great archway leading into the galleried inn yard, and its painted sign, the red cross of Saint George on a white ground, swaying gently in the wind. The pillory stood just outside the Crosse Inn, serving a double purpose, for anyone who misbehaved himself inside the Inn could easily be run outside and put in it, and also it was a source of entertainment for guests drinking their beer at the windows.

  But the Tavern was even more beautiful. It was a timber-framed house with overhanging timber gables and beautiful tall stone and brick chimneys, and it had the dignity of its long history. It had originally been an almost ecclesiastical building, a lodging house for scholars who would one day be priests, and religious signs and symbols were still to be found carved or painted over its fireplaces and around its cornices. When its scholars deserted it it had become the Salutation Tavern, but this lovely name smacked too much of popery for Elizabethan taste and now it was just Tattleton’s.

  Both Master and Mistress Tattleton came running when Nicolas, with Joyeuce on his arm, stood in the beautiful paneled entrance hall and shouted. They were comely, roundabout people, enslaved to the undeserving Nicolas by the spell of his charms. He presented Joyeuce to them, she blushing a little under the amused scrutiny of their twin­k­ling eyes, and made his requests known in a lordly manner. Then he was carried off by Master Tattleton to get washed and changed and have his nose ministered to, and Mistress Tattleton led Joyeuce upstairs. The business of the Tavern was conducted on the ground floor, the private rooms of the family were on the first floor and the guest rooms were on the second floor.

  They toiled up and up the circular oak staircase that wound round a massive octagonal oak newel, Joyeuce panting a little as she followed behind Mistress Tattleton’s broad back, holding up her beautiful farthingale on either side.

  “Never mind, dearie,” consoled Mistress Tattleton. “You’ll think it well worth the trouble when you get there.”

  With a final pant they got there and Mistress Tattleton paused outside the door, her head on one side and a tear in her eye. She was a kindly soul, and a sentimental, and Joyeuce in her green gown had taken her fancy.

  “There’s not many I let use this room,” she said portentously, “they might do it an injury; but so sweet and fair a lady should wait for her lover in a fair room.”

  Then she abruptly strained Joyeuce to her bosom, flung open the door, paused a moment to hear Joyeuce’s cry of pleasure, and went off down the stairs, lowering her bulk cautiously from step to step and chuckling to herself in fat delight. . . . So fair a poppet. . . . So handsome a couple. . . . So merciful a thing that she had strawberries to give them for their supper. Young love should always be fed on strawberries. Eat strawberries while you can, Mistress Tattleton was wont to say, for when you are older they may not agree with you.

  5.

  Joyeuce let her cloak drop to the floor and stood in the center of the room, gazing delightedly. It was sparsely furnished with a carved settle, a clavicytherium and a couple of stools with bowls of flowers upon them, one on each side of the beautiful herringbone brick fireplace; but it did not need more, for too many things in it would only have detracted from the beauty of its painted walls. Tempera painting on plaster was coming into fashion as wall decoration, and in many houses taking the place of tapestry hangings. But this happened to be the first example of the new art that Joyeuce had seen.

  The craftsman who had painted these walls was an artist, and he had enjoyed himself; indeed his enjoyment cried out to the beholder from each of the four walls. The background of the painting was a rich vermilion-orange ocher, from the pits worked at Headington, the very color of delight, and on it was traced a trellis-work pattern in old gold, outlined in black
and white. Within each of the linked compartments were painted lively posies of English flowers; canterbury bells, windflowers, passion flowers, wild roses and bunches of white grapes. They were not gaudily colored, for bright colors would have clashed with that glorious background, but painted softly in brown-pink, purple, green and gray. Words ran round the top of the walls in a painted frieze, and Joyeuce spelled them out under her breath.

  First of thy rising

  And last of thy rest be thou

  God’s servant, for that hold is best.

  In the morning early serve God devoutly.

  Fear God above everything.

  Love the brotherhood. Honor the king.

  The windows of the room were fast shut against the noise of Cornmarket, but in any case it was quiet now because people had gone to their suppers. The silence was complete and cool and fragrant, and Joyeuce sat down on the settle, with her hands folded on the yellow embroidered poppies in her lap, and seemed to herself to be listening to it. Moments of beautiful leisure like this did not come her way very often and she was utterly and completely happy, even though she felt rather bewildered as to who she was, for she did not seem to be the same tormented Joyeuce that she had been half an hour ago. She felt very old and wise, as though Nicolas’s kiss had taken her right back to the beginning of the world and she had had to live through all the intervening centuries between then and now in a few minutes, and yet at the same time she felt gloriously young, as though she had begun life all over again as a little child. She felt, too, very strong and very secure, for this new beginning had brought with it a welling up of new life, and it was with an assurance and gaiety that were not usually hers that she nodded at the lovely painted flowers around her. They made a sort of protective arbor for her, she felt, and her sense of security deepened. If love for the one person in the world could be like this, a cool fragrant hiding place built round the well of life into which one could creep and be refreshed when the storms of this world became more than one could put up with, then she understood why it was a treasure of such price that men and women were willing to die for it. She herself, she thought, would be willing to die again and again if this glorious renewal might come to her after every death.

  The sudden and rather boisterous entry of Nicolas, washed and brushed and clothed in the crimson doublet of Jo Tattleton, Mistress Tattleton’s eldest, seemed almost to do violence to her arbor; until she remembered that it was he who had built it up around her. She got up and curtseyed to him, as though he were the king whom the verse upon the wall told her to honor, then swept before him out of the door and down the stairs with so superb a pride and dignity that for the moment the volatile Nicolas was deprived of the power of speech.

  6.

  A pathway, walled on both sides, led from the back of the Tavern to the small walled garden. It was a very private, very charming little place. Square flower beds, filled now with blue canterbury bells and bushes of eglantine, starred all over with small pink blossoms, lay very demurely in green grass. The high walls were covered with woodbine and yellow climbing roses and there was a little trelliswork arbor roofed and walled with a green vine.

  “Look,” said Joyeuce, “there is another arbor.”

  “Another?” asked Nicolas.

  “It is like the one upstairs,” said Joyeuce. “Trelliswork and a vine. It was this garden, Nicolas, that told the artist what to paint on the walls upstairs.”

  She paused, smiling, picturing that unknown artist, when imagination failed him for a moment, running down the stairs, his paint brush stuck behind his ear, to have another look at the garden. It must have been a long way up and down, each time inspiration slackened, but then judging by his spirited designs he was a young man who had determined that Tattleton’s garden, made as it was for lovers, should flower even in midwinter.

  Mistress Tattleton had set two stools very close together inside the arbor, with a table covered with a linen cloth before them, and she had excelled herself in the matter of food. By the mercy of Providence, it being Tattleton’s birthday tomorrow, she had that very morning concocted and baked one of her famous lark pies for the good man, and she set it upon the table in the arbor. Tattleton, of course, would now have to go without, but lark pie never really agreed with him and she could knock him up a nice little rabbit pasty that would be all he needed at his age. The lark pie had quite a mountain of pastry on top of it and was ornamented with two little sugar cupids with wings made from the larks’ feathers. . . . Mistress Tattleton was an artist, and no mistake. . . . Joyeuce and Nicolas, sitting very close together on the two stools, said so over and over again and Mistress Tattleton herself, standing with arms akimbo at the entrance to the arbor and looking down at her handiwork with tears in her eyes—the cupids had reference to the first meeting of herself and Tattleton thirty years ago, when they had both gone to see a hanging at the Castle mound, had sat next to each other on the raised seats before the gibbet and fallen in love at first sight—entirely agreed with them.

  There were other things to eat besides the pie, for Mistress Tattleton had six sons, and they had all been in Bocardo at one time or another, so she knew with what kind of appetite the released prisoner is restored to his friends. There were bowls of strawberries floating in milk, there was a dish of cherries, there were manchets of bread and a dish of comfits and last but not least there was the canary wine, for which the Tavern was famous, in exquisite glasses.

  Mistress Tattleton helped them to pie, lingered a moment to give herself the pleasure of watching Nicolas’s strong white teeth bite deep into her pastry, and Joyeuce’s pink tongue daintily exploring the head of a sugar cupid that seemed to her too pretty to eat, and then took herself off. . . . The pretty dears! . . . She applied the corner of her gown to her eye, shut the door of the walled pathway firmly and informed her household at the top of her voice that no one, not even my lord of Leicester himself, was to be let into the garden till she gave them leave.

  Joyeuce always had a scruple about eating lark. The brutalities of the age that other people took entirely for granted, the cock fighting, the lark eating, the bear baitings, the beheadings and the hangings, made her miserable. To each generation its own horrors, to which the ma­jority are blunted by custom, but Joyeuce was one of those who in any age are cruelly awake to cruelty. She was in the minority, of course, and she knew it, so she thought no worse of Nicolas that he ate her share of lark as well as his own. . . . And he gave her his sugar cupid, so it was quite fair. . . . She did not eat either of them; she had only gently licked one to please Mistress Tattleton; she wrapped them both in her kerchief and put them in her wallet to take back to the twins.

  It is to Nicolas’s credit that in spite of his hunger, which had been no more than blunted by the dainties brought to Bocardo, he was very attentive to Joyeuce. She was too happy and excited to eat very much but he carefully fished out the spiders that had dropped into her straw­berries and milk—the only drawbacks to the beautiful arbor were the things that dropped from above—and he hung cherries over her ears under her fair hair, and he said the sweetest things to her between each mouthful.

  Nicolas was used to making love to pretty ladies, he had a flair for it and believed in using one’s gifts, but this evening he actually meant what he said. Joyeuce in her green gown, with the shadows of the vine leaves trembling over the embroidered yellow poppies on her kirtle, like frightened fingers that wooed with an airy touch but dared not lift or handle, was certainly a sight for sore eyes. Her hair was the color of the woodbine on the walls, and the cherries he had hung over her ears seemed to call out an unwonted red in her cheeks and lips. Other maidens who had given Nicolas the opportunity of using his gifts had been more beautiful, more witty, more aristocratic, but none of them had had such a demure dignity as Joyeuce, or had been such a touching mixture of childishness and maturity. This girl was a woman who had worked hard and suffered much, and borne on her
shoulders responsibilities that would have crushed Nicolas to pulp had they been laid upon him, and yet at the same time she was a child who could be transported into the seventh heaven of delight by a sugar cupid or a red cherry or a butterfly kiss upon her cheek. As Nicolas petted her she seemed to get fatter and rosier under his very eyes. Had she never been petted before, he wondered, that such a very little of it could cause such a flowering of beauty in her? His power over her gave him a self-confidence that was like balm to his new manhood, while at the same time her maturity gave him a most unusual feeling of humility. . . . He did not know whether he liked the effect she had on him or whether he didn’t, but at any rate it was something quite different. . . . His feeling for Joyeuce seemed, now and for the rest of his life, to be a thing apart, something locked for safety in a casket of cool green leaves.

  Joyeuce had not known that one could be so aware of anyone as she was aware of Nicolas. Her capacity for love was large and she had known, of course, long ago, how almost painfully the personality of the person loved can impinge upon one’s own. In the time of grief after her mother’s death her father’s misery, that gave no sign to the world at large and was hidden, he thought, even from Joyeuce, had been like an actual physical illness in her own body. It had seemed round her like a black coat of mail, pressing in on her, choking her breathing and clutching at her heart so that she thought it would stop. The personalities of the little boys and of the twins seemed mingled with hers, and as for Diccon, it was difficult to realize that he was not her very own child, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Had she carried his body within her own, as she now seemed to herself to carry his wicked little spirit within hers, he could not have been more completely a part of her.