Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (404 page)

And suddenly she cast herself into Mr. Sorrell’s arms, and began to kiss him hotly on the lips.

“Holy man,” she whispered, “I do this that you may not have a mistaken view of my character. All day long you have seen me acting in a high, haughty, and militant fashion, and you will have heard that I have frequent dissensions with my husband, and that with ferocious determination I must set my peasants to do their work. But all these things are necessities forced upon me by the hard nature of my life, and actually I am such a tender woman and as well fitted for the gentle sports of love as ever was the Countess Helen, for whom great battles were fought in past times. Nay, I am as patient as Grisel of the Balance, who had in truth not more need for patience than myself.”

Mr. Sorrell felt himself in an exceedingly awkward and somewhat ridiculous situation. He had a feeling that he had his arms round an exceedingly savage tiger, whom, on the one hand, he might enrage if he were not warm enough. On the other hand, he might enrage her still further by going too far, and he wished to heaven he could come across some man who could give him a hint or two as to how to behave upon such occasions, which, as far as he could see, appeared likely to crop up every ten minutes or so.

The Lady Blanche exclaimed:

“Press me close to you, and say that you do not believe I am a sharp-toothed wolf.”

She was very warm and smelt of musk, and Mr. Sorrell half sighed, and exclaimed:

“Oh, well —— !”

And after a minute he asked, as if the time for tender confidences had approached:

“Now, tell me really, really the truth. Is this a pageant, or is it the year of grace 1327?”

“As surely as that lark sings in the sky,” the Lady Blanche answered, “so surely it is that year and no other.” High in the air above them a lark was sending down high thrills of song, its little breast illuminated by the light of the upper air.

“Well,
that
is not an anachronism,” Mr. Sorrell said resignedly; “and anyhow, I suppose I must believe that you aren’t kidding me. For the life of me, I don’t know what is an anachronism in these days, and what isn’t. You may have cannon or you mayn’t, and you may have eau de Cologne, and you mayn’t. I’d no idea I was so ignorant; but I am, and it puts me into your hands — I’m entirely in your hands.”

She disengaged herself slowly and regretfully from his arms, and she gazed at him with a level and devouring glance.

“Oh, pilgrim,” she said, “yes, you are entirely in my hands; and of this you may be very certain, that I shall never let you go till you or I are dead. It is all very well to put it to the test of a game. But, if I win the game, I will keep you and the cross, and no one shall gainsay me; and, if I lose it, I will keep you and it by force or by fraud. I have some stores of gold unknown of by my husband or any man, for that is fit and proper in these idle and extravagant days. Your captivity shall be a very sweet one, since you shall be more splendid than all the men around. But by this you shall know that never with your cross shall you leave this place till you or I be dead.”

“I say,” Mr Sorrell said, “all that sounds distinctly nasty. I can’t go in for that sort of game, you know. If this is really the fourteenth century, I daresay I could put you up to some uses for your money that could pretty well do anything for you. I believe I could make you Empress of the World.”

And suddenly at the prospect he became enthusiastic. “Why, good Lord,” he said, “if it’s the fourteenth century I can do anything. Just think of the things I can invent! Why, we can begin right bang off with flying machines; there’s no need to go through any intermediary stages. How would you like to go flying through the air, my lady? I’ve done it, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Why, we can terrorise every city in the world. We could burn Paris down in a night. They couldn’t do anything — anything at all.” The Lady Blanche looked at him, with her broad nostrils quivering and her eyes alight with the contagion of enthusiasm.

“That is how I would have men speak to me,” she said; “that is how I would have my lovers speak to me.
 
And if you will make me Empress of the World, surely you shall be my Emperor.”

“Oh, hang it!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “that won’t do at all, You’ve really got to remember you’ve got a husband. I’ve always found — and all history shows it, too — that if you’ve got a big thing on hand you’ve got to behave respectably. You’ve got to make large masses of men obey you, and you can’t ensure obedience if you have scandals. It simply can’t be done.”

“As for my husband,” the Lady Blanche exclaimed, “we will kill him in the night. I will make him sleep heavily with very much wine, and you shall stab him while he sleeps. That was done by the Lady of Mormand. And you will make me an Empress! You will make me an Empress! You are a very great magician. I knew it the moment I set eyes on you.”

“Oh, I’m a very great magician,” Mr. Sorrell said; “but you aren’t going to get me into that sort of game. It doesn’t pay, I tell you. It can’t pay! You’ve got to behave respectably if you go in for a deal with me. It’s always been my first business principle.”

The trumpet blew three times to show that the meats of the first course were coming from the kitchen, and the Lady Blanche gave Mr. Sorrell her hand, that he might lead her down the staircase. In the thick darkness she kissed him three times, exclaiming:

“My magician! my magician!” and several other things that seriously discomposed Mr. Sorrell.

It left him in a very angry and discomposed frame of mind. His brain was commencing to boil with plans for exploiting the fourteenth century. There were so many things to do that he did not know where to begin to think about it, and he did not want to have any red herrings drawn across a trail that, he felt confident, would lead him to an unheard-of glory. He did not see why he should not have a fleet of airships hovering over the Channel within three months’ time, and he did not see who in the world was going to stand against him.

CHAPTER II.

THE Lady Dionissia de Egerton de Tamworth was the eleventh daughter of Henry de Mabuse, Earl of Morant. The earls of Morant had been great and independent noblemen in the days of Henry III, but the accession of the third Edward found them somewhat impoverished, owing to a succession of heavy fines which had been incurred by the Lady Dionissia’s father. The Earl had been of the Queen Isabella’s party before her flight from the Court of Edward II to France, Thus no sooner had the Queen been gone than the Earl had been fined no less than a sum of
£6000
at the instance of the De Spensers. This fine had converted him into a strong supporter of Edward II. So that, upon the return of the Queen with a small handful of men from Hainault, the Earl, dreading further fines from the King, and regarding the Queen’s exploit as foolish and foolhardy — the Earl had hastened with all his men into the south to oppose her coming.

He failed to find the Queen. But when she had succeeded in deposing and murdering her husband, she fined the Earl another
£7,000.
These successive fines, which would have amounted to about £182,000 in the currency of Mr. Sorrell’s date, were not sufficient entirely to ruin the Earl, but they made him unreasonably anxious to marry off his daughters, of whom he had thirteen. He desired to marry them off, not only in order to avoid the expense of maintaining them, but in order to contract alliances with noble families so that he might once more become the head of a powerful faction in the country and get his fingers round the national purse-strings.

The matches which he made were mostly in the West of England and along the Welsh border where his own lands lay. And amongst the families of the West of England few were more powerful than that of the Egertons of Tamworth, of Creswell, and of Bedington — three castles each of prime strength. It is true that the marriage which he made for his daughter Dionissia was with Sir Stanley Egerton, a younger son. But Sir John, the elder, was away in Palestine, and was reported to be so ill with poisons and wounds that he could hardly come home. And, indeed, the Lady Dionissia, attended by her ten savage Welsh men-at-arms, had not been set out three days upon her journey to Tamworth before the news reached the Earl that the Crusader had died at Sandwich. In the ordinary course, the Earl would have been too proud to let his daughter make a marriage of the sort that was known as de Changellerie, and prevailed much amongst the knights of the West of England and the Welsh Marches.

But the younger Knight of Tamworth was accounted for his deeds of arms so very famous throughout chivalry, and appeared so certain in those modern and degenerate days to become one of the most powerful knights in England, that the Earl after protracted bargaining had consented to the proposition. The young knight had done extraordinarily well in tournaments, having sent his cartels to the Courts, not only of Spain, but of France and the Roman Emperor. In his conflicts he had been uniformly successful, and he had gained great renown by fighting in Spain against the heathens. The Earl of Morant being of the old school, which included the Lady Blanche, regarded these exploits with a certain amount of contempt, as being on the one hand modern, and on the other hand rather unprofitable trickery. They did not pay and they cost a great deal of money, bringing in very little more than a great deal of fame and no land worth speaking of. The Earl of Morant’s idea was to get hold of land by force, to occupy it, and to sit down over many miles of territory until the King, for the time being, was in sufficiently low water to ratify the conquest. This, of course, was the frame of mind of a nobleman whose family had for long been established on the Welsh or Scotch borders. It was already, as the Earl recognised, a little antiquated for the Marches of Wales. It had become antiquated as soon as Edward I had seized all the territory of Wales. There was not any land within a hundred miles of the Earl that had not been granted, upon the conferring of the Princedom of Wales on the late king, to English knights whose land it was altogether too difficult a matter to appropriate.

Thus, although the Earl was an old-fashioned man, he realised that the days of forays and raids were over in his part of the country. It was difficult for him to move with the times, since he had never been able, try as he would, to master the elementary details of modern tournaments and single combats, but he was quite determined to choose as his sons-in-law men who were as entirely up-to-date as it was possible to find. Pure Norman in his blood, the Earl had a great deal of shrewdness. Indeed, the first of his family to come to England had been an excellent lawyer, who had arrived when things were settling down after the Conquest, and had gained his advancement very much more as an administrator than by means of his sword. Thus the Earl recognised that even a marriage de Changellerie with so eminent and modern a personage as the younger Knight of Egerton would be very well worth having. According to that Western custom, which prevailed perhaps more in Scotland than in England, a wife was married for one year, during which she enjoyed all the privileges of the married state. At the end of that time, if in her mind and body she satisfied the necessities of her husband, the marriage became permanent — or if she bore him a child. If it was not so she returned to her guardians with her honour untouched, except in so far as it was affected by failure in the undertaking. And with her there came back from one-half to two-thirds of her dowry, this being a matter of bargaining. The Earl felt, however, fairly sure that this transaction would turn out very well. His daughter was perfectly healthy, and so, he had ascertained, was the Knight of Tamworth. So that he had very little doubt that a child would result from the union. The parties’ predilections or aversions to or from one another would have very little to do with the matter. As to his daughter’s dowry, which was £1000 in gold and some parcels of land, which the Earl happened to have in Gloucestershire — in that respect too he felt fairly confident, for he would find means to delay paying it over until the marriage was finally ratified.

The Lady Dionissia, who thus set out, was at that time nineteen years of age. She was tall, large-limbed, and of an exceeding and most unusual fairness. Her features were oval and aquiline, but she had at the same time so abstracted and reflective an expression that all the harshness of their aquilinity seemed to be tempered and done away with. It was always very difficult to get at what she thought, for she spoke extremely little, being immersed in frequent and very long day-dreams, which would fall upon her in the midst of the gayest of companies. Her ten sisters regarded her as being slightly mad; for, when it came to action, her actions were of singular abruptness, and of some inscrutability as to what caused them. And since she was of extreme physical strength, though she was the youngest but two of them, she was allowed to go her own way.

Their castle, which was about twenty miles towards Wales from the city of Chester, was remote and solitary, but it contained so large a number of squires, retaining knights, men-at-arms, and other dependants, that they sat down usually 300 to table, with one man or page to wait upon every three of them. And jongleurs and minstrel knights and ballad-singers in great numbers travelled that way, for the Earl was notedly liberal in his rewards, and the daughters were reputed beautiful and kind, so that the castle had of late years been nicknamed “The Maidens’ Hold.” It was accounted fashionable to pass that way, and there spend a night or two.

Thus the Lady Dionissia was as well acquainted with the gossip of the day and with the high feats of chivalry as was any lady of Salisbury or the other metropolitan cities where the tournaments were then held. And her mind had roamed over great expanses of the world. She heard them described with their strange trees, flywers that devoured wanderers, apes, dragons, parrots, and porcupines that discharged their quills like arrows and sands of the desert so heated that their fire melted at noon-time the armour of men and horses — yet she could not in her mind picture them as otherwise than resembling the dark blue distances that she had seen from the tops of her craggy Welsh mountains, with their deep ravines, their swiftly descending streams, and their endless rain-clouds. Travelling southwards, she had come by way of Upton over the Severn and to Worcester, and so by way of Devizes down over the great Plain.

She had seen walled towns and great abbeys and minsters, and she had become acquainted with strange tongues. Norman - French was her own language, for she was of Norman blood on both sides, and of English she had very little, for upon the Welsh border the poor spoke Red Welsh alone, and that was a language not easy to learn, and not very much worth the learning. Still, in English she could make herself understood, and could understand most things, English being the language of daily matters, such as the washing of linen or the slaughtering of beasts.

Arriving at Tamworth, she had found herself in command of a castle a little larger than her father’s, spreading abroad over a fertile champaign country, with the low hills of the bare Plain all around it. And this delighted her eye and pleased her sense of command, so that she had no impatience because her husband by proxy was away at the wars. It pleased her, indeed, to be able to settle down before he should arrive there. The Lady Blanche she had found very much inclined to rule within the domains of Tamworth, but the Lady Dionissia, without contradicting her cousin when she was present, exactly countermanded each of her orders as soon as she rode away. For the sake of safety, when they heard that Hugh of FitzGreville, the outlaw, was anywhere within twenty miles of them overnight with his band that infested the Plain, they slept in each other’s castles together for two or three nights on end. This they did for greater safety, so as to join their bands of ancient armed men. For, although it was unusual, it was not at all an unheard-of thing that outlaws should take a kernelled castle in the night-time, sacking the place, and carrying off to hold for ransom such women as seemed worth the trouble. Whereas, joined together in one strong place, the two ladies would be very well able to hold it against Hugh of FitzGreville, whose band did not number very much more than forty men, roughly armed — for the most part with clubs.

It was their custom to set forth a little before sundown with all their men and all the furnishings of the castle, which were no great matter, and could be carried upon mules. The unoccupied castle would be left quite empty, except for ploughs and such implements as could be of little value to the outlaw, whilst the castle itself would be too strong and too stony for Hugh to do it much damage. Besides, why should he desire to damage it, which would be a strenuous and very difficult enterprise, at which he could gain nothing at all?

Thus they passed some agreeable days together, playing draughts and walking in the gardens after supper, and going a-hawking or shooting with bows, and listening to stories during the day-time. It could not be said that the Lady Blanche did anything more than heartily dislike the Lady Dionissia, or that the Lady Dionissia did anything more than good - naturedly ignore the Lady Blanche, whom she regarded as a disagreeable person. But, on the other hand, their attendant ladies met and mingled and laughed and were good sisters, and their young pages strove in a very friendly manner with each other at running races, jousting at the ring, or casting quoits. So that there was generally laughter to be heard and little tittering over small secrets, and in that way much pleasure in the air, though it would have been better had there been also able-bodied men of good birth and gentle courtesy.

The peasants of their respective domains grumbled a little when their ladies were absent, for thus they lost their natural protectors. But it had to be remembered that these peasants were so extremely poor that they had nothing whatever for the outlaws to take away except now and then a beast or a sheep for food, or a daughter for their recreation, or a son that they would train up to be an outlaw. And, as all the world knows, it is the will of God that a peasant should lose an occasional beast, sheep, daughter, or son, though at such times as the lord of the domain was at home and had with him a strong force, he would frequently revenge the wrongs of his subjects. Thus before the Knights of Egerton and de Coucy had gone away to Scotland, they had made a drive of all the outlaws that they could catch in the Plain, Egerton hanging eighteen, and de Coucy twenty-five, whose bodies might still be seen decorating gallows and oak trees all round the hills of the valley. And this was to be held as a very high and knightly kindness shown by these lords to their dependants.

There were at the high table on the dais at supper six ladies — the Lady Blanche and her two attendants, and the Lady Dionissia and her two, who were named Amarylle and Cunigunde. These ladies who had come with the Lady Dionissia were of very high English families from the neighbourhood of Chester, the one being called of Rolls, and the other of Birken, both being descended from great English earls that were before the Conquest. Of men there were Mr. Sorrell, who sat beside the Lady Blanche; the Dean of Salisbury, who ate out of the same plate as the Lady Dionissia, and was a fat man of about perhaps forty. He had come to Tamworth to get some hawking and for change of air, he having been ill of a surfeit. And this indeed was his general custom when he found that he was growing over-bearing to the chapter. For he was normally a man of a good-natured and chuckling disposition, beloved by such of his inferior clergy as were submissive in habit; yet at times, fits of anger would visit him, and there would arise great quarrels of troubles among his officers.