A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury Page 6

  “I will come there after dark. Tell me how to find the place.”

  “It is a house in a court behind St. Chad’s church. You may come there by the alley from the town wall, and leave the church on your right. There is a sign over the gateway, the Fleece. Or if you will, I will come to the abbey gate, and bring you there by the least frequented way.”

  “I would not so burden you. No, I will come, and alone. You and your house shall take no risk by me. Oh, I know,” he said, “the pains of being Welsh, and too close neighbour to the English, when the standards are out.” He took her hand, not to kiss, but as he might have taken a man’s hand who had met him fair and done him honour. “I am ashamed that I have kept you from your rest, after so troublous a day. Go now and sleep, and have no fear for tomorrow. I will take care that you shall not be persecuted further.”

  * * *

  She crossed the chill, moonlit parclose of the abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, the faint smoke of frost from her breath going before her. The great church was mute and dark, for compline was long over, since the routine of the house clung as yet to its winter timetable, and the monks were in their beds until midnight should rouse them for matins. She walked alone in the silence, hearing her own muted footfalls like echoes of past or future, she could not distinguish one from the other. Faithful to his orders, she had no fears for the morrow. There was no man but one who could trouble her rest ever again, and whatever disorder or ordeal he cast into her path she knew she would go gladly, and gather like flowers.

  She entered the warmth of the hospice as Lady Percy was leaving the hall to go to her own apartment, attended by a single demure damosel. Elizabeth saw her, and stretched out a generous hand:

  “Mistress Hussey, I missed you! Margaret has orders for your comfort. Sleep well, and be sure they will see right done to you. Good-night!”

  Julian looked after her, the high, exultant step, the reared head under its coronal of brown hair, the lofty joy in every movement. And she thought: What must it be like to go to one’s marital bed with delight, instead of disgust? And to such a man, instead of an old fool with the shakes, and sweating like a pig in an ague?

  And how strange, she thought, that I have come from him, and you are but now going to him, and yet I do not envy even you, the most enviable of women! For God’s sake, what is it I have got from him, that it sets me so high?

  2

  She suffered one paroxysm of doubt, the first and the last, and a matter of shame to her as often as she remembered it after, when the hour of noon came and passed, and no one sent for her to go into the town and fetch her father to the audience; and when she ventured to enquire, she was told that one of his Grace’s clerks had already gone to summon Master Parry, and she need not concern herself in the matter. That struck her hard; but the shock passed as quickly. It seemed the prince would not have a witness influenced, even by his own daughter. She had relied on having time and opportunity to confide in him, and set his mind at rest about the unexpected summons. She knew him, and could imagine his state now, half surly defiance, half anxious and defensive fear. He was not a brave man, and often said so, brandishing his supposed nervousness like a banner. If they did not let her see him until they both appeared before the prince, what wild errors might he not commit in his insecurity?

  Yet she could not, once that first convulsion was past, feel any unease. Hotspur had promised her a fair deliverance, vouching for the prince no less than for himself, and in his promise she believed as in the mass. So she waited for the summons to the prince’s presence, and went with a demure step and a high heart when she was called at last.

  Her father was in the anteroom, waiting for her with a dour face and uneasy eyes, but so closely attended by page and chamberlain that barely a word beyond her submissive greeting and his mumbled acknowledgement, phrased as a blessing but uttered like a malediction, was able to pass between them. Then they were ushered together into the presence-chamber.

  She looked round for Hotspur, but he was not there. She was not to be trapped into suspicion again; if he knew his power so well that his presence was unnecessary, that was enough for her. The prince was seated, not in his chair of state, but between two of his clerks at a trestle table, with a quantity of papers and parchments spread before them; and his treasurer stood at his shoulder, ready to advise if requested, but looking on so impartially that it seemed to her he had already done his share. Before the table Edward Hussey stood hunched in defensive composure, very plainly dressed—had he set out to demonstrate the modesty of his means?—and with his countenance fixed in an expression of resigned and dutiful benevolence. It was somewhat of a disappointment to her vengeful mind to consider that he might have taken yesterday’s omen to heart, and prudently drawn in his horns, resigning his pretensions on her rather than venture even token opposition to the fiat of the prince and his governor. It was, she supposed, a possibility. The girl was well enough—all the better for hating and fighting him!—but not worth that risk. There were plenty more to be had cheaper!

  “Mistress Hussey,” said the prince as she entered, “we beg your forgiveness for keeping you waiting a little beyond the time we appointed. Master Parry, pray pardon also a summons at such short notice, but the case we have to judge concerns you nearly, and I make no doubt that your daughter’s wellbeing is your first anxiety. We have pleased to reserve this hearing until we had had an opportunity of acquainting ourselves with all the circumstances.” He lowered his eyes for an instant to the parchments that littered the table. The hovering clerk at Hussey’s back was watching them narrowly every moment, as though one of them might elude him when he came to gather them up again. “The matter at issue, as you no doubt know, is the return to your household of your daughter, now widowed and without children, and the repayment of her dowry. Madam, it is your personal wish that you should so return, is it not?”

  Julian inclined her head and veiled her eyes.

  “To the end that you may make a second and happier marriage from your father’s house—is that so?”

  This time she raised her face, blazing with candour, and said: “Yes!” boldly. She was not one of those who cannot lie with wide-open eyes and angelic faces when needful.

  “Such an intent we find wholly commendable,” said the child gravely, monumentally sure of his shaky ground, “and we confide that your father must feel with you, as is but natural.”

  He is acting, she thought, touched and elated, he is prompting my father; he has learned his lesson well. But then she looked into his eyes, which dwelt upon her in huge solemnity, and knew that he was burningly sincere. If he delivered her, with her endowment secured, as she had been promised he should, he did so of his own will, because he was convinced of her need and the justice of her complaint. And he had been left to conduct this hearing on his own, secure that he would make the decision both Hotspur and she needed. Never had he surrendered, or been asked to surrender, his independence of action. Had Hotspur even confided to him all that she had urged and confessed, yesterday evening? But yes, surely he had. He had given the boy all the evidence, dumped it in his lap without ceremony, and left him to examine all, and act as the prince he was.

  That argued a very profound knowledge of the royal mind on Hotspur’s part, and an even deeper confidence in its infinite will to justice. On what grounds, she reflected now, enlightened, had he vouched for the boy? He had never said: “The prince will do as I tell him,” but simply: “The prince is wise beyond his years.”

  Why, after all, should that cause her any surprise? The boy had been in his tutelage now for two and a half years, closer far to him than to his own Lancaster kin.

  “Very well! We have now examined into Master Hussey’s means, and we are satisfied,” said the prince, very gravely and courteously, “that even though no exact inventory has yet been made of all the property passing to you, Master Hussey, by your uncle’s will, yet you have certainly acquired assets which must be disposable, and of such a nat
ure as to be very readily disposable. You are already possessed of a substantial household, and have here been visited with a second. We are taking into account that both manors must be properly manned and maintained. But there is still a handsome balance of advantage to you. And it is our judgment that you can and should pay at once a portion of Mistress Hussey’s dowry, so that her maintenance may be assured, and she may return to her father’s house from this court, as is her wish. We cannot feel that such an arrangement is in any way unjust to you. Even if we were to order the repayment of the whole sum at once, the amount would be less than if you were paying tax of a lawful fifteenth of your movable goods. Which could well happen,” said the Prince—was it possible that he was capable of a strain of malicious humour?—“whenever parliament meets. But we are not demanding the whole. One half of the dowry, four hundred marks, you will pay to our treasurer here by this day week, and we ourselves will see it conveyed to Master Parry. The remaining four hundred you will pay through the bailiff of our town of Shrewsbury within six months from today. We have given our judgment,” said the prince formally, and sat back in his chair with an authority and finality that no one cared to challenge.

  There was nothing for Hussey to do but bow before the wind with as good a grace as he might, profess his resolve to do all that was required of him—at whatever penal cost to himself, his martyred countenance implied—reverently kiss the prince’s hand, and withdraw to his plain, melancholy wife and his two fat manors up-river.

  Julian made her reverence in her turn. Over the extended hand she looked up into the prince’s eyes, and saw there the same candid regard she had seen in his model; yet the shafts that pierced into this boy’s inmost being were somewhere shuttered close, standing off all communion. There was no obliquity, no deceit; neither was there any revelation. The boy had learned what the man would never learn.

  She watched dispassionately, concealing a faintly malevolent smile, as her father’s inflexible knee forced itself to bend before the wrong prince of Wales. The return of his four hundred marks was a strong inducement, nevertheless it went against the grain with him to do homage to an Englishman.

  “Master Parry,” said the prince, innocent of his offences as of the benefits that spoke loudest for him, “we will make it our business to see this money duly paid to you. Madam, I pray you may enjoy a more fortunate marriage hereafter.”

  They were blessed and dismissed. They went out into the precinct of the abbey church, and the showers had passed, and April wore its radiant face. Distant across the river the towers of the castle rose against the sky, straddling the only land approach into Shrewsbury. Pale, rushing clouds danced across a blue almost as pale.

  “And what the plague,” demanded Rhodri Parry irritably, grasping her arm as they crossed towards the guesthouse doorway, “did you want with starting such a frantic legal bother, without a word of warning to me, without a hint of your purpose? Could you not have sat tight in the fellow’s house for a few weeks longer?”

  “Not a day longer! I could not stand another hour of the man himself or his bleating sheep of a wife,” she said tartly. “And moreover, could I know how long the prince would stay here? It might have been no more than two or three days. I had to strike now or never. And you had best be grateful to me, for if you had left it to the little men of law he could buy better and shiftier than you, and you would never have got your money at all.”

  The old man—she was the child of a second marriage, and he had been well past forty before she was born—snorted his disbelief, but she knew he was doing little more than vent the nervousness of the past hours, now that the suspense was over. “He could not have denied me. It was due. Or else he could have fed and kept you for the rest of your life!”

  “Then there would have been bloodshed, for I tell you I could not be in the same house with them and keep my temper. And as for letting go of what he had, he would have gone to every possible shift first. It might have cost you more to get it than the gold was worth. You should never have been so eager to pay so much for so poor a privilege.”

  “Poor? Do you know the value of that manor of his? It is a noble name and a noble family.”

  “Very like, and I make no doubt there are even some noble members somewhere within the clan, but my husband was none, nor is this nephew of his. I suppose if he had been wifeless you would have had me married off to him as soon as I was out of mourning!”

  There had never been a time when they had not wrangled, and yet after his fashion he was fond of her.

  “You might have done worse. But let it go—the man is married, and there’s an end of it. And I’m glad enough to have you back, since you could not give me the grandson I hoped for—”

  “I could,” she said fiercely. “Will you have me prove it? On what stock shall we graft? You should have bought me a man, and not a threadbare purse.”

  “In God’s name, girl,” he protested, shaken, “what devil has got into you, to talk to your father so? You were not wont to be so loud and bold.”

  “I was not wont to be a married woman, and now a widowed woman. The degree loosens the tongue.” And she meant to use it to the full, though perhaps not in this wasteful way. In one unwelcome marriage you learn much about the means of evading a second, and still retaining the consequence gained by the first. It had been her only gain; she did not mean to let it be whittled away. “Wait but a few moments here for me,” she said more gently, “for I must make my farewell to the Lady Percy, who has been more than kind to me.”

  Elizabeth gave her a warm, vivid smile, and her hand, and good wishes to go home with her. Her faith in the prince’s justice—perhaps larger than that, in God’s—had never admitted any question of the outcome, assured that a plaintiff her husband favoured must be in the right. Julian went out from her strangely uneasy for creatures who walked through the world so openly and confidently. It is too simple a matter to damage those rare few who are too brave, too scornful, and too trusting to put on armour.

  “Lady Percy!” said her father, musing, as they walked side by side towards the gatehouse. “That’s Harry Percy’s wife? He they call Hotspur? He was not there with the prince at the audience?”

  “No,” she said, “he was not there.”

  “A pity! Since you needs must drag me here, I should have liked to see this Hotspur men talk so much about.”

  She said nothing to that. It might be needless caution, yet she kept silence by instinct in all public places upon all that touched Hotspur’s affairs, and more because they were his than because they affected the state, and such gravities as peace and war. All the way home she held her tongue, answering only in monosyllables to her father’s habitual complaints and strictures, which never were meant to be taken too deeply to heart.

  It was not so long a walk, though it led her back in twenty minutes through a year and a half of her life, and was quick with memories both sharp and sweet. The sun had come out fully over the abbey mills and the narrow bridge of Meole brook, and in the foregate there was bustle enough. This English gate into Shrewsbury was guarded less stringently than the Welsh bridge on the further side, and therefore used more freely, and the drawbridge was lowered from earliest dawn. The river was high and sparkling, piling light debris of branches and leaves against the piers of its four stone arches; and beyond, the walls of the town rose, and the tunnel of the open gate. Down the steep slope from the walls to the shore the narrow terraces of the abbot’s vineyard ranged like a staircase, the vines like charred black stumps as yet barely showing the first shadowy tint of green. Reflected light shimmered upwards from the rapid water, and rippled along the stone of the ramparts. A fair city, something dishevelled after uneasy times, and hampered and straitened now by the loss of the thriving Welsh trade which was half its life, but still capable of living on its own fat for some while yet, and still hard to take and invaluable to hold.

  “You’ll not find it easy to get the keys from old Joanna,” Rhodri remarked with m
alice, as they passed in through the archway and continued along the town walls. “She’s had her own way too long now.”

  She cared less than nothing for the privileges of the housewife; the old woman could have kept the keys for ever, and Julian would have been indifferent. Yet her homecoming and remaining at home would have to be justified, and there was no other immediate way except by assuming the direction of the household. “Leave me to fend for myself,” she said. “What’s my due I shall have, and today.”

  She had not tried, as yet, to see beyond today; she sensed that what she saw when she did lift her eyes might well be a void, and as bleak as winter ice. Another marriage—probably as chill and loveless as the last—or a comparable prison in her father’s house. Some women found at any rate a sanctuary behind the veil, but a convent was more likely to be a hell of rebellion and constraint to her. And yet, she thought, as they picked their way gingerly along under the stooping eaves of the alley that led to the rear of St. Chad’s church, to avoid the running kennel thawed and filled by the morning showers, the finger of God had intervened in her life only yesterday, and might again lean down to point out for her an acceptable and fruitful way.

  What she wanted was not a sanctuary, but a battlefield. But nobody less than God was ever likely to offer her one.

  The house of the Fleece was timbered and dark and beetle-browed on the side next the street, with jutting upper storeys and shuttered windows. There was an arched cartway into the yard, and a narrow wicket let them in through the thick oak portal to the cobbled court, ringed round with stables and storehouses. Another prison, indeed, but at least this one had a visitation promised.

  Not until they were within, the door closed after them, and the silence of the thick walls like a seal against the world, did she tell him what manner of guest she had invited to his dwelling, and how soon he was to have his wish.