The Town House

  As the days went by she came to think of her daughter as a more fortunate version of herself, just as pretty and graceful, but well shod, elegantly clothed, moving against the background of the Long Gallery, the Great Hall, the Low Garden. One day, she assured herself, when she had persuaded Martin into the provision of a dowry, the elegant, eligible young man of good family for whom she herself had waited in vain, would pay his court to Maude and all would be well.

  Never once did she suspect that her attitude towards the child was that which most people, after the first burst of grief, held towards the dead. Gone away. In safe keeping. Happy now. Anne had never felt that way about her dead, and could not know that she had watched a little girl ride away on a brown pony with the finality with which other people see a coffin lowered into the earth. Anne’s dead, Denys, her mother, Richard, were all her victims, to be thought of as little as possible, subjects of the occasional nightmare from which refuge must be sought in the wine-cup.

  She had Walter, whom she loved extravagantly, both for himself and for what she could see of Richard in him. Richard’s dark hair and eyes, his delicate look, his skill with the lute. Even when, at an early age, Walter declared that he was never going to be a wool merchant, he was going to take his lute and wander the roads and play to admiring crowds, the statement roused in his mother much delight and little concern. Richard had cherished that dream, too. Walter was Richard’s son. Upon that certainty she could rest, much of her guilt absolved. As a statement it was not to be taken seriously; he would know better when he was older. Martin had found him a good tutor, a young man called Nicholas Freeman, who had been trained in the monks’ school at Norwich and come very near taking his priest’s orders, changed his mind and worked for a time in the office of a leather merchant in Norwich.

  At first Anne had attached little importance to him, minding only that he should teach Walter thoroughly and as gently as possible. Walter learned swiftly.

  ‘It will help if I am a scrivener as well,’ he explained gravely. ‘I can play to please the people and myself, and then if any one wants a letter written or a copyright made, I can do it and so make sure of my bread.’

  To count he refused, absolutely; and when pressed twice ran away. He was soon recovered, a small boy carrying a lute was not difficult to trace and Martin’s men knew the roads and were well mounted. He was beaten, sobbed tearlessly, worked himself into a fever and was cosseted, but still refused to learn to count.

  ‘I know all I need to know. I am not going to be a wool merchant.’

  Nicholas Freeman, with time on his hands, began to take an active part in the business. Martin’s lame leg grew stiffer as he aged and sometimes he found difficulty in mounting his horse. One morning Nicholas asked,

  ‘Would you like me to go for you, sir?’

  ‘You think there is no skill in fleece-buying? They’d sell you anything.’

  ‘My father has a sheep run. I helped him until I was nine. I know all the tricks.’

  ‘Go then. But bring back any maggotty polls and I’ll knock their price off your wages.’

  The young man laughed,

  ‘With the price of wool as it is, and my wages what they are, that would be to take a quart from a pint pot.’

  Anne thought that an impudent answer, but Martin laughed and said,

  ‘I’ve been doing that all my life, boy.’

  Little by little the young man worked his way into Martin’s confidence, was allowed more responsibility, was moving, Anne felt, into the place that should be Walter’s. On that eagerly-awaited day when Walter should, as she termed it, ‘come to his senses’, there would be Nicholas Freeman standing between him and his grandfather. Martin seemed to find him easy to talk to, and sometimes as they sat at table she would study them both. The young man wore, for a clerk, a very healthy look, as though his farmyard tan had survived the years in cloister and counting house; in a slightly saturnine way, he was handsome, with bright hazel eyes, brown hair and excellent teeth. Beside him Martin’s lined face looked old. Old, she would think, and he never spares himself. Suppose he died, before Walter settled and knew anything of the business; we should depend upon this stranger, and he might cheat us, we are so ignorant.

  Spurred by the fear of material loss she began to take interest in the business, listening, asking questions, sometimes venturing a suggestion. Martin, after the initial surprise, took refuge behind the immemorial barrier, ‘Nothing for you to bother about, my dear’, ‘You wouldn’t understand if I did explain,’ and ‘Leave all that to us.’

  With Nicholas she had no better luck; he was a vain young man and had from the first resented her manner towards him; he rebuffed her gleefully, saying, ‘Why not discuss this with Master Reed?’ and once, ‘Master Reed engaged me and it is to him that I render account of my doings.’

  The years went by. The twins’ twelfth birthday came. Walter showed no sign of change of heart, but so long as he was allowed to go his own way he was amiable and inoffensive. When she thought of Maude, Anne imagined her moving from the Children’s Dorter into the Well Yard Room at Beauclaire and taking her place with the young ladies. Upon that thought Anne braced herself for the tussle with Martin concerning the dowry. If he remained obdurate she had one other hope. Godfrey, now married to the FitzHerbert heiress, was extremely wealthy; he might do something for Maude; he should do, out of gratitude for what Anne had done for him, long ago.

  She had entirely forgotten that she had ever intended to send Maude to the nunnery at Clevely. That had been a move in a secret game, won at the moment when a little girl rode through the archway on a brown pony.

  But Maude had remembered that she was to leave Beauclaire when she was twelve; Dame Margery remembered it too, and so did Lady Astallon. And one lovely April morning, on that same brown pony, now too small for her, Maude came riding home.

  II

  On a sunny morning, about a fortnight after Maude’s return, Martin Reed came down to breakfast with some of the pain lines eased from his face. He flexed his lame leg two or three times as he sat in his chair and said, with satisfaction,

  ‘This weather suits me. I shall ride out to the Minsham run today.’

  Two years before, the whole of Suffolk had been ravaged by sheep tick fever, and in replenishing his flocks Martin had tried an experiment. He had brought – with great expense and labour – sheep from the Cotswolds, where, in the greater cold of the high hillsides the animals which flourished were the ones with particularly thick fleeces. He had been resigned to the possibility of the sheep growing lighter wool once they were on pastures less exposed; but that had not happened in their first year. He was anxious now to see for himself what difference a second winter had made.

  ‘Like to come with me, Maude?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes, I would,’ she said, eagerly. Then doubt and uncertainty clouded her face. Since the moment when the Chaplain at Beauclaire had given her a new aim in life she had made some advances of her own. Self-denial was good, as well as prayer; a thousand small sacrifices of comfort or pleasure might ‘count’, if offered in the proper spirit against the pains which Melusine was suffering in Purgatory.

  Perhaps, she thought, imagining the pleasure of riding out in the sunshine, she should retract that acceptance and go instead to church, kneel until she was dizzy, pray until she was tired. That would ‘count’.

  But her grandfather’s face had brightened and he was already considering which horse she should ride. She hadn’t the heart to withdraw. Presently, at Clevely, there would be time and opportunity to make everything right.

  So they rode out together and for some time spoke little and of trivial things. He explained about the sheep from the hills. He said, in a disgruntled way that he had last year asked Walter to ride out and see them and that Walter had said a sheep was a sheep and no more. Cuckoos were calling from every thicket and he described to her how, as a boy, birds-nesting at Rede on a precious Good Friday holiday, he had seen a cuckoo th
row a blackbird’s egg from a nest and settle down to lay her own.

  It was talk to interest any child, and over Maude’s response there was the patina of Dame Margery’s training – not enough to listen and be interested, one must look interested, give signs of pleasure, encourage the talker to go on. Unaware of this Martin simply found his granddaughter most pleasingly responsive; he found himself telling her things that he had never told anyone, things he had once, long, long ago, planned to tell Stephen and Robin when they were old enough to listen to his tales.

  Thinking of them, which he seldom did nowadays, made him feel very old. Sixty-six this year. Forty long years had sped since the priest at Rede had told a stalwart young man of twenty that half his life was already sped. A long life, and superficially dull, work and work and work again. Two great sorrows, some success, several disappointments. And now, towards the end of it, here he was, riding alongside his granddaughter and feeling, under natural affection something more lively stir.

  He broke the silence by saying abruptly,

  ‘You didn’t mean what you said the other day about going to live with the nuns, did you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, without any hesitation, ‘I meant it. I have to.’

  ‘What does that mean? Your mother? That was all some silly idea she got into her head when there was talk of sending Walter to school. She said it would be unfair to send him from home and keep you. But the nuns wouldn’t have you then. So she wheedled me into letting you go to Beauclaire. Against my will I may tell you. And now you’re home and if I have any say in the matter, there you’ll stay.’

  ‘I can’t go without your permission. They ask five pounds a year for my keep. And I must take a bed and blankets, linen. But I should cost as much at home.’

  ‘Cost!’ he said. ‘Cost. That is nothing to me. You stay home, Maude, and I’ll show how little cost matters. I’ll buy a grey mare. I know where to go – a fellow at Flaxham breeds them and trains them to paces that suit a lady. They have manes and tails like floss silk. You shall have a grey mare, Maude, and silk dresses, and a gold ring, a ring with a blue stone to match your eyes.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment and prayed one of the simple, unorthodox prayers which had become almost a habit.

  ‘All this, God! You alone know how badly, at Beauclaire, I wanted a proper mount. The dresses too, and a ring with a sapphire. I’ll sacrifice them all for one hour of Melusine’s sojourn in Purgatory. Please take it, God. It is mine to give. I could have it, and I refuse it.’

  She opened her eyes and said,

  ‘You are very kind. You help me more than you know. But I must go to Clevely.’

  ‘Why?’

  It is his five pounds, she thought; his money pays for the bed, the blanket and the linen. He has the right to know.

  ‘It is all so sad. I’m afraid that if I speak of it, I shall cry.’

  ‘Your mother,’ he said, trying to be helpful. ‘You must mind this. Mothers tend to like their sons better than their daughters and when the pair are twins it shows more. You mustn’t mind her, Maude. Let her have Walter. You’re my girl.’

  All this, God, too! Please count my grandfather’s favour which I am about to forgo, against one hour of Melusine’s torment.

  She said, ‘It has nothing to do with Mother. I know how she feels about me; and it must be very hard for a woman not to like her own daughter.’

  Dear God, that is tolerance. I learned that very hard, could that count too? Just a minute. Because it was so hard to learn. Please, of Thy mercy, just a minute.

  ‘Then why?’ Martin asked in a grating and impatient voice. ‘Why do you say you must go and shut yourself away there, when I want you home?’

  A long and horrible story. Something which in its entirety she had never had to tell. The Chaplain had known the details.

  ‘When I first arrived at Beauclaire,’ she began, and Martin tilted his head sideways, the better to listen She told him everything. The story ran smoothly at first and then was broken, like a stream which in its course runs over rocks. When she came to the recountal of Melusine’s body being taken from the water she leaned forward over the pommel of her saddle and wept and Martin, speaking for the first time since the story started, said,

  ‘There, there, say no more, I understand.’ And he saw himself with his head pressed against the cold, smoke-blackened stone of the buttress of the Abbey wall, and then, falling prone, nursed in the lap of Old Agnes. To love hard, he thought, that is in our blood. For that reason I struck through the red mist and hit my master; for the same reason I cherished that mountebank, Pert Tom, and Old Agnes. I paid it tribute when I brushed aside, as though it were a cobweb, the almost certain proof that Magda had witchcraft in her; and years later I pandered to Richard over the matter of his love for Anne Blanchefleur.

  ‘But I must say more,’ Maude said, wiping her gloved hand across her face, ‘because how otherwise can you understand? The Chaplain…’

  She told him of the interview with the Chaplain, of her restoration to life and hope, of the task which he had laid upon her.

  Martin listened attentively, thinking at first, with deep irritation that this was all the result of her going to Beauclaire, but presently his mood changed. He realized that when she spoke of Melusine she did so as one would speak of the living, that she had achieved what all Christians should, but rarely do do, the power to look upon death as an incident, not as the end. He compared this with his own feeling in similar circumstances. Kate, Stephen, Robin, and then Richard, all, to him, irrevocably dead. And God non-existent. Brought face to face with a faith so simple and unquestioning, so urgent that this child was plainly prepared to govern her whole life according to its requirements, he felt a thrill of almost superstitious awe. Not for him to oppose her decision. At the same time something in him rose in protest. When he spoke he did so slowly and carefully.

  ‘You don’t feel that you could pray, and be self-denying and all the rest of it, equally well at home? Nobody would interfere.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You see that would be doing what I want. All the end of time at Beauclaire I did want to go to Clevely. But since I have been back …. Days like this,’ she said, looking around at the fresh young green of trees and meadows, all a-glimmer in sunshine. ‘No, I know what I should do; and I hope that you will give me permission.’

  ‘I’m sorry you stumbled upon heart-break so young,’ he said. ‘I was older when the blow fell on me. And I had no faith. You have that comfort. And if you’re set on Clevely, you must go. Promise me one thing though. Don’t think that going there means that you must be a nun.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not nearly good enough for that.’

  He ignored that. ‘It’ll be some time before you have to make such a decision; I may be dead by that time, so I’ll say my say now. It means having no husband, Maude. That may not matter; in most cases I think wanting a husband is something that wears off after a time. But it means no child and that’s a different thing. Women, unless there’s something very queer about them’ – he remembered Magda – ‘need children, live through them. I’ve seen a woman, aye and she was hungry too, give her share of a poor meal to a child who had gobbled down his own. There’s all kinds of love, my dear, but none to touch that. I wouldn’t wish you to forgo it. That poor drowned girl was friend to you, and if you feel she’s in Purgatory and your praying and fasting for a couple of years’ll help, I’ve nothing against that. You mustn’t make a life job of it.’

  I’m a clumsy old fool, he told himself. Maybe I’ve gone and put the idea into her head. With a return to his gruff manner he said,

  ‘There’s Minsham Old Hall. You want to see your Grandfather Blanchefleur?’

  ‘Not today,’ she said, averting her eyes, so that she should not see the place about which she and Melusine had held those long, happy conversations, made so many plans. The memory revived her revulsion for money, money and the greed for it which had brought about the
whole tragedy. And even her grandfather’s kind offer of a grey mare with a mane like silk, of fine dresses and a gold ring – all to do with money. I will have none of it, she thought. Once again she thought kindly of Clevely, where she would be free of it all.

  PART FIVE

  Nicholas Freeman’s Tale

  I

  When Maude Reed came home to her grandfather’s house in the April of 1447, she was just twelve years old, and I was twenty-three: a full quarter century too young, one would have supposed, to be attracted by a girl of her age. And age was not my only safeguard; I am by nature unsentimental and cynical; I was at the time happily provided with a mistress who suited me; and I had already, in the most practical and cold-blooded manner, made up my mind to marry Maude in about four years’ time whatever she was like, even if she were the spitting image of her mother, whom I disliked.

  Martin Reed himself put the idea into my mind. He was one of the least communicative people I ever had to do with, but even he, when in particularly low spirits, or provoked, would seek some relief in talk. Several times, when Walter had annoyed him, he would speak of Maude, saying that twins were tricky things and the girl had been born with all the sense: saying that since Walter refused to have anything to do with the business, the one hope for it was for Maude to marry some decent steady man, capable of running it.

  Why should not I be that man? I was already, in addition to teaching Walter all he would consent to learn, keeping the accounts, and being trusted, day by day, with more of the practical side. As far as Master Reed could know I was as steady as Baildon Tower; decent, too, for I had learned by experience; my new mistress lived some distance away, and was safely married. Her husband was a game warden whose duties, most conveniently, took him abroad at a time when I was free of mine. In four years’ time, I thought, I should be twenty-seven and ready to settle down; Maude would be sixteen, and unless her grandfather and her mother changed their ways, she would have had little contact with men. The Reeds were singularly friendless people. In Baildon indeed Master Reed was hated, though farther afield he was held in respect as an honest man and just.