The Town House

  ‘I thank you,’ Martin Reed said, but he looked at me as he spoke, and one of his eyebrows lifted as I had seen it do when Mistress Reed spoke with extra haughtiness, or Walter made some unusually extravagant statement. And I thought to myself – This is not the way he would have willed it on the afternoon when he came back from Clevely. I put the quill into the inkhorn and tipped it a little, so that a thin black stream ran from corner to corner of the written sheet.

  ‘Now look what I have done,’ I said. ‘I am very sorry. The chest is awkward to write at. Shall I now make a fair copy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sir Andrew firmly. ‘And in the re-writing make a proper beginning. Write, “In the name of Almighty God Amen”. And then go on, “I, Martin Reed, being of good mind and memory, make my testament in this wise”. Can you bear that in mind? And first mention the gift to Flaxham Church, it will look better there than tagged on at the end.’

  I looked again at my master. Save for two small dusky red patches over the cheek-bones his face was the colour of a candle; is eyes were half closed.

  ‘In all else, sir, this is as you wish?’

  ‘Make a fair copy, Nicholas; while I make my peace with God.’

  I bent down and lifted one of his big, work-worn hands and put my lips to it. I fumbled in my mind for some words – not my own – with which to refute the priest’s attitude, and found them, spoke them haltingly. “‘What more can a man do than love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly before his God?” That you have always done, and God will know His own, sir.’

  I picked up the writing things and went from the room as the priest settled his stole.

  Downstairs in the office I re-wrote the will in a neat clear script, setting it down as I had been bidden, until I came to the point where, leaving Maude’s name hanging in the air, Master Reed had paused. There I wrote in what I genuinely believed he would himself have added at any other time; ‘on condition that she abandon all intention of becoming a nun.’ He had wanted Maude to come home and marry and have children; those few added words would give her the chance to do so at least.

  Then I thought, nobody would make such a condition without providing against its non-acceptance. So I added that if Maude insisted upon becoming a professed religious all her portion was to go to Flaxham Church. It hurt me to dispose so lightly of such a fortune but the priest had just shown that like many people who do not rely upon the written word, he had an excellent memory. That final sentence would blur his memory and stop his mouth. It also, in a curious way, cleared my conscience.

  Two witnesses who had no interest in the will were needed. I fetched two men who were waiting in the forge. They made their crosses and I wrote their names below.

  By mid-day Martin Reed was peacefully unconscious, and in that state he died, just before dawn on the following morning.

  Interval

  What he found so hard to stomach was that in the end he brought about his own undoing; was punished for behaving well; sustained a hurt which would last a life-time simply because he had shown a delicate consideration for another person’s feelings and exercised self-restraint.

  That he had, perhaps, challenged Fate by being too certain, somewhat arrogant, a trifle smug, never once occurred to him.

  He had been right, surely, not to make an instant proposal of marriage when Maude, at last, came back to the Old Vine. She had suffered enough emotional strain, returning to Clevely, after three days of hard travel, to learn that her grandfather was dead and buried, and while that grief was still raw, coming home to learn of Walter’s death and to be confronted by her idiot mother.

  At Clevely the Prioress had lost no time in producing an aged copy of the Bull Periculoso of Pope Boniface the Eighth.

  ‘Here it is, clearly set down in black and white, in the vulgar tongue for the benefit of the unlearned,’ she said. ‘A rule made one hundred and fifty years ago, which has been disregarded by the heads of many Houses with consequent disorder and ruin. Read it.’

  It was a piece of stiff parchment which had been kept tightly rolled for many years. Under the Prioress’s white, well-kept hands it opened a little and then tried to spring back into its roll.

  ‘Take hold of it. It has no teeth. There …’

  Maude read a sentence about forbidding, on pain of excommunication any nun or sister to go outside the bounds of a monastery. She looked up with a puzzled frown. She and Dame Lucy had been sent to Ramsey.

  ‘There,’ said the Prioress, and the finger jabbed down upon the next sentence. ‘Read it aloud.’

  ‘Item,’ Maude read, ‘let no one be received as nun or sister until we have inquired more fully into the resources of the House.’

  ‘It could hardly be clearer,’ the cool voice said. ‘A convent is not, as so many people suppose, a refuge for the indigent. The terms of your grandfather’s will ensure that if you stay here you will have nothing. Not even the miserable five pounds a year that has hitherto been paid, and which he as good as promised me should be increased. Old men in their dotage’, she said savagely, ‘change their minds with every wind. And the Flaxham priest, naturally, had an eye to his own advantage.’

  Maude took her hands from the document, folded them in front of her in the approved manner and stood silent. There was nothing to say. She knew, in her heart, that her grandfather, although he had allowed her to live at Clevely, had done so against his will, and that had she become a nun it would have been with his disapproval. She had often wondered, during the last year whether he had not known her better than she knew herself; and since the installation of the new Prioress her uncertainty and lack of contentment had grown daily. Now, after the long and wearing indecision the choice had been made for her.

  ‘There is no need to tell you’, the Prioress said, ‘that this is a House virtually without resources. What I brought to it is already spent and not half of what is needful is yet done. If, in the circumstances, I allowed you to stay here, I should act in direct disobedience to this Papal Bull, and should myself deserve to be removed.’

  She spoke as though she were repudiating some plea, refuting an argument. Maude wondered how often this scene would be re-enacted; upon how many women who were sure of their vocation, and who perhaps had no resources, even sequestrated ones like her own, this Papal Bull would be used like an axe. For herself it did not matter. She drew a long breath, lifted her head and said clearly,

  ‘Madam, I am not asking you to keep me.’

  She never guessed that a little humility at this point, a few tears, some pleading words would have persuaded the Prioress to disregard Boniface the VIII’s express command. She never guessed that she had been sent to Ramsey to make a study of the music, not because she had a better ear than most of the others but because the Prioress hoped that the idea of improving the Clevely singing would forge another link, give her an aim and a purpose. Maude had taken less kindly than anyone except Dame Cecily, who was so old that she counted for little, to the new regime at Clevely and Maude was, in fact, exactly the type of woman whom the Prioress wished to rule; educated, well-connected on one side at least, sensible and rich.

  Rich no longer. The Prioress’s disappointment was commensurate with her hopes, which had ridden high after her interview with old Martin Reed; and since he was beyond her reproaches, she expended her anger upon Maude.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Maude told Nicholas in one of their many talks. ‘I wasn’t sure; I don’t think I ever was sure, and Grandfather knew it. I think that is why he made that condition. As a test. All the same,’ she frowned, and on her smooth white forehead the ghost of Martin’s double horse-shoe cicatrice appeared, ‘I was shocked. In the old days money never mattered at Clevely.’

  ‘Then it was’, he said lightly,‘the only place on earth where it did not; and now there is none. Money always matters.’

  ‘Not to Walter. He was the one person who never minded about it.’

  He was tempted to retort sharply that even so it was money, some infini
tesimally small sum of it, that had led to Walter’s premature death. But he had seen that same darkening of the eyes as had once accompanied any mention of Melusine, and as on for meroccasions, all his impulse was to comfort and console. So he took her hand and told her gently that she must not grieve for Walter; Walter’s life, short as it was, had held as much happiness as most people know in sixty years; he had always done exactly what he wanted, and nothing that he did not; he had loved nothing and nobody but his music, and that love had never failed him.

  He could, even thus early, have gone on to speak of other forms of love, confessed his own. But he refrained.

  Opportunities to step smoothly from the impersonal to the intimate abounded, seemed indeed to thrust themselves upon him. She spoke once, in an astonished way, of the fact that her grandfather had named no guardian.

  ‘I expected to be somebody’s ward, like poor Madge Fitz-Herbert,’ she said. ‘And when I left Clevely I made up my mind that nobody was going to marry me for my possessions.’

  He realized that the omission had been an oversight, in his hasty re-writing of the will the matter of Maude’s age had never entered his mind. He could not now say what was true, that Martin, in the making of his will had visualized her under the guardianship and management of the Prioress of Clevely.

  ‘Your mother is still living,’ he pointed out, ‘and I am here to look after everything for you. You need no guardian. And the notion of being married for your money is an absurdity. You are no Madge FitzHerbert. You are beautiful.’

  Her face coloured and the pace of his heart-beat quickened. Now? Why not? So easy. You are beautiful and lovable and I love you; to marry you has been my one desire since the moment I saw you almost four years ago.

  But he left it where it was. A compliment, accepted with a blush.

  There had always been, at the core of his feeling for her, an element of the worshipful, novel to him in his experience of women, and therefore oddly enjoyable. There was also in his attitude something resembling that of the gourmet who, before setting about some particularly succulent dish, eyes it with pleasure, sniffs its savour with gloating. Some part of his restraint was also not far removed from fear. She was so innocently friendly; a word spoken too soon, some betraying gesture made before he had succeeded in endearing himself to her, might ruin all. He had come so far, waited so long, worked so cunningly, that in the end nothing but perfection would suffice.

  He behaved – as he saw, looking back – in lunatic fashion. Not content with a dumb wooing, fetching and carrying, acting in all but the ultimate assertion of rights, like an elderly man with a lovely and capricious mistress, he went to other lengths. He broke with Clemence, promising her a pension of five pounds a year and bearing, first her reproachful tears and then her vituperative anger with the utmost detachment, as though suddenly a wall of glass had reared itself between her and him. He rode home from Minsham whistling, and on the next day took himself into the confessional at St. Mary’s Church, and for some moderate penance and a contribution to the Poor Box, was absolved from all his sins of fornication.

  Young men, on the eve of knighthood made similar confessions, and washed themselves thoroughly and then kept vigil in churches all through the night. That thought occurred to him as he left the church, raising his eyes to the carved angels in the roof, the angels of whom Maude, at the age of twelve, had reminded him. A carving, once made, he thought, was finished, could never grow or change. His angel, while losing nothing that could deserve reverence, had developed all the qualities which would enable a man to say truly ‘With my body I thee worship.’ It occurred to him that on the night before his marriage he would keep vigil in this church, under the angel roof.

  So he stepped out into the greenish April dusk at almost the same moment as a young man, thoroughly washed, confessed and absolved, went into the chapel of the Knights Hospitallers, at Dunwich, to keep his pre-knighting vigil.

  The days lengthened; the trees shook out their young green; daisies and cowslips and lady’s smocks gemmed the meadows. There had never been so sweet a spring as this one through which they rode, on her business, on his, or something which concerned them both. It was a matter for laughter that his pack-ponies on their comings and goings must use her front door and trot through the very heart of her house. And his certainty that he had done right, that he had carried out both Martin’s wish and Maude’s was proved beyond all doubt on the day when Sir Andrew, riding a bony mule, came into the Old Vine and with the air of doing Maude a favour, said that if she cared to return to Clevely and take the vows she could: Flaxham Church, out of what would then fall into its hands, would endow her handsomely. The Prioress, upon whom he had called, was very anxious, he said, to have Maude back, providing her return was in accord with the Bull Periculoso. If she saw his real purpose Maude gave no sign of such awareness, but thanked him heartily and said she had no wish to return to Clevely.

  ‘There are other houses,’ he suggested.

  ‘None where I am needed as I am here. I look after my mother.’

  He argued at some length, and then finding her immovable, made a peevish complaint about the wording of the will.

  ‘It was made hastily and badly.’

  ‘You were present at its making, Sir Andrew,’ Maude said mildly.

  ‘Yes; and I said at the time that it was such a will as a heathen might make. And I had my mind set upon persuading your grandfather on another point, so that that condition slipped in without my noticing. Also I had a cold in my head and at such times I am a little hard of hearing. Of one thing I am sure, and that is that it was never Grandfather’s intention to so make his will that you should renounce your vocation.’

  ‘I think it was his intention to prove to me that I had no vocation.’

  ‘Then why did you contemplate the religious life?’

  She frowned thoughtfully.

  ‘I was trying to run away from certain things in this world that I was unwilling to face.’

  ‘And have they changed?’

  It was impossible to explain how the balance had been adjusted, Clevely under the new régime another lost illusion, and the Old Vine, free of her mother’s dislike no longer a place to flee from. She said simply,

  ‘The change has been in me.’

  Some hot and hasty words about the uncertainty of purpose, the halting faith, the self-indulgence of this new generation, formed in his mind, but stopped short behind his teeth. She was his parishioner, and a wealthy one; it would serve him ill to alienate her. He had already ordered the new bell: there was that much gained; and now, to test her attitude he said,

  ‘I find that I made your grandfather a rash promise. I also was hasty that morning. The bell will cost more than I thought and I shall not be able to afford the engraving which was to remind all those who heard its voice to pray for his soul.’

  She said eagerly that she would pay for that.

  When he left, disappointed in his main objective, he looked forward to a future rich in little extortions. She had not taken advantage of his offer, but he was sure that in her heart she had appreciated it. She was convent-schooled and would be amenable. He remembered a proverb, current amongst the homely members of his flock – There were more ways of catching a coney than by chasing it, shouting.

  Nicholas Freeman decided to declare himself on May the third, which at the Old Vine had always been the date of a humble, rather curious little family festival, known as ‘Sparrowgrass Day’.

  At the end of the garden, beyond the rose bushes and the apple trees and the herb plot was a bed of asparagus, twenty years old. Richard had brought the first crowns back from one of his trips to Flanders; they had spread and flourished to such an extent that each year, at the height of its bearing the bed gave at least two cuttings of such plenty that every man and boy in the dining hall could have ten or twelve green spikes as a vegetable with his supper dish. Martin Reed had convinced himself that the plant had medicinal qualities, it cleansed th
e blood. Earlier in the season, when the first shoots were ready for cutting but not in such number that they would ‘go round’, the asparagus presented a problem to a master of Martin Reed’s nature; the square family table in the hall was always served with exactly the same food as any other. Luxuries were enjoyed later, in privacy. A cooked vegetable, however, could not be served after supper, casually from the livery cupboard; nor could the first, succulent green growth be wasted. So, for some years, in the last days of April, or the early ones of May, Martin and Richard, and later Anne and then the children, had observed Sparrowgrass Day, and had supper served at the table in the solar. Then someone had observed that it was on May the third that Martin had first approached Anne’s father about her marrying Richard, and so the little feast day was fixed. Other delicacies, such as fresh fish hurried up from Bywater, were added to the table, and always jugs of good wine.

  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.