Green Darkness (16 page)

None of these connections outweighed Ursula’s hidden hurt at the ousting of her solidly aristocratic line from their ancestral home. But Ursula had long been widowed, and she was nearing sixty. She had learned to hide her feelings, except to Celia, and with true gratitude accepted a small upper chamber in the Castle and a seat just above the salt at the long trestled dining table. When the impoverished Bohuns had been forced to sell all their property to the Browne family, though, the natural expectation was that Ursula would enter some convent—the usual refuge for superfluous women. Two things prevented: the lack of a dowry and her own lack of interest in monastic routine. Then, lately, there was Celia, her half brother Jack’s forlorn child.

In the minstrels’ gallery this noon of the boy King’s arrival, the musicians were nervously practicing a new French madrigal. Edward disapproved of most music, as he disapproved of dancing or levity. The fourteen-year-old King had strong prejudices, all of which increasingly verged on the puritanical. One must be of offense.

Celia stood with her aunt Ursula by the buttery screen in the huge Buck Hall, eagerly savoring her first glimpse of assembled nobility. Her cheeks glowed a bright pink, her long bluish-green eyes sparkled with excitement. Lady Ursula possessed no mirror, but the girl knew that the peacock brocade was becoming. She noted the startled stares of two castle pages who had previously ignored her on her visits to Cowdray. Far more flattering recognition followed.

Sir Anthony and his wife, Lady Jane Radcliffe, daughter to the Earl of Sussex, were circling the Hall to greet important guests, and to make a last tour of inspection. They were both dressed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold and pearls. The splendor suited Anthony who was tall, stoutly built for a man of twenty-five, and had the bearing of a born horseman, added to the assurance of wealth.

Lady Jane was puny and shrinking; she had a desolate mouse face, the eyes, at present, reddened from weeping. Three days ago their infant son had died of a convulsion. The little coffin under its white satin pall stood not in the chapel as it should have, but in an alcove off their bedchamber. No Masses were being said for the tiny soul, and there must be no mention of the tragedy to cloud the King’s visit. “We’ll make other babes, my lady!” Anthony had cried with his usual hearty optimism. “’Tis an easy pleasant task.”

Lady Jane did not think so. She had suffered an agonizing childbirth, nor was yet recovered. But she never gainsaid her husband.

Sir Anthony had finished his inspection of the Hall and came near Lady Ursula on his way through the screens to the courtyard. He gave Ursula a quick nod, then caught sight of Celia.

“Haloo-oo!” he exclaimed, his bold blue gaze examining the girl. “Who may
this
be?”

“Celia Bohun, Sir Anthony,” said Ursula flushing a little. “My niece. I trust I’ve not offended in letting her come today—this glorious day for Cowdray. She has few pleasures.”

Anthony shook his head amiably, uninterested in the connection, or in Ursula, whom he had inherited as a charge from his father and very seldom saw. The girl’s from that bastard branch of the Bohuns, he thought, staring at Celia. He had heard there were some around Midhurst.

“So fair a maid is ever welcome,” he said. “How old are you, poppet?”

“Fourteen, sir,” answered Celia promptly. “Last month, on St. Anthony’s Day, your own name day, an’t please your lordship.” She curtsied.

Anthony chuckled, momentarily forgetting the anxieties attendant upon Edward’s arrival, the factions involved—the dangers. Celia’s ready pert reply amused him, and he noted the innocent provocativeness of the white cleft between her full breasts, the slight protrusion of her red underlip, and the square uptilted chin.

“This luscious fruit is ripening fast, eh, Lady?” he said to Ursula. “Wherever you’ve been keeping her. We must find her a husband. Some lusty yeoman to her taste, or even a squire if I can spare a few angels for a dowry—though, by God’s bones, I doubt it after this royal visit.”

He glanced at his wife whose mournful eyes were fixed patiently on the wall tapestry.

Ursula spoke up quickly, knowing that her patron might soon forget Celia’s existence. “The girl is as apt to learn as she is comely, sir. I’ve taught her household skills and her letters, and Brother Stephen has given her religious instruction.”

“
What!
” Anthony started. His eyes flashed. “We do not mention
him,
madam! Not while the King is here. You and all my household
know
that, madam. You have been warned!”

Ursula’s long face which was like a kindly mare’s, reddened to the roots of her iron-gray hair. “Aye, sir, pardon, sir,” she said. “It was a slip.”

“There must be no slips,” said Sir Anthony who could, on occasion and despite his youth, be quite as formidable as his father had been in striving to keep the precarious favor of old King Harry. An easier task, Anthony thought, than pleasing his son—the earnest, bigoted and autocratic young sprig who was now swayed daily by the real enemy. The real danger. Northumberland—mad for power, slick as a ferret, cruel as a wolf, and virtual King of England. Lauded be God and His Blessed Mother that Northumberland was occupied on the Scottish Border at this moment. But, he had his spies everywhere near Edward. “There must
be
no’slips,” Anthony repeated in a softer voice, “and I know my household is loyal. Come, my lady.” He put his hand on Jane’s arm.

Ursula curtsied as the couple moved on; she turned to Celia and whispered, “Let’s mount to my chamber and wait. We can see the approaching heralds from my window. ’Tis close down here and I’m shaken by the annoyance I caused Sir Anthony.”

Celia obediently followed her aunt up circular stone stairs to a small comfortable room on the third story. It was near the servants’ attic, and in winter heated only by a brazier, but it contained Ursula’s few treasures—the four-posted bed of blackened oak, hung with faded crimson, where she had slept long ago with her husband, and at the bed’s foot stood her dower chest carved in linen-fold, her Italian X-shaped chair. Her strip of rich Turkey carpet covered the plain square table, and hanging against the stone wall near the window was the sole remembrance of her dead husband, Sir Robert Southwell—his sword in its gilt-encrusted sheath. On the east wall near the bed hung Ursula’s ebony crucifix. There were besides these, two unexpected objects on a shelf: a small ephemeris for computing the daily positions of the stars, and a neat roll of horoscopes tied up with a golden cord. Ursula practiced astrology; she had received instruction twenty years ago from the Duke of Norfolk’s resident Italian astrologer, while Sir Robert was alive and the Southwells were visiting the Norfolks at Kenninghall. Most of the great households consulted astrologers; there were official royal astrologers too. Cowdray had none. Sir Anthony was a practical man, and felt himself quite able to control his own future.

Had he known of Ursula’s hobby he would have laughed or shrugged. But he did not, nor anything else about her.

Celia rushed to the window seat, peeped through the diamond panes to catch a first glimpse of the King’s procession on the highway from Easebourne. There was nothing to be seen and she turned into the room frowning, “My Lady Aunt,
why
must Brother Stephen be hid? He told me so little.”

The girl was unaware of how her voice softened and lingered when she spoke the young priest’s name, but Ursula felt a twinge of guilty foreboding. She sighed and sat down. “I’ve been wrong not to tell you, Celia. Acting heedless as a maiden myself in the joy of dressing you, of at last being able to present you below in a manner worthy of a Bohun. Listen! Three days agone, when we knew that the King was at Petworth and would surely come here, Sir Anthony gathered us all in the Hall, all of us down to the lowliest potboy. He stood in the minstrels’ gallery and gave his commands. He said that to be sure, we were Catholic, that we were as devout a family of the True Faith as could be found in England. Nonetheless, we owed temporal allegiance to our King, and must respect his heretic views. That during the royal visit there would be no Masses, though there might be an English prayer service read from Archbishop Cranmer’s new book. That nobody wes to genuflect or cross themselves, nor mention saints. That our chapel would be stripped of its holy statues, even the crucifix! This was done that night, my dear, and oddly forlorn our chapel is now. Empty, barren.”

Celia considered this. “How strange,” she said. “Surely a great lord like Sir Anthony may do as he pleases.”

“Obviously not,” answered Ursula tartly. “Don’t you know, child, that a year ago March, Sir Anthony was thrown in the Fleet like a common criminal?”

The girl’s eyes widened. “Prison?” she said. “For what?”

“For hearing Mass at his mansion in Southwark. It’s forbidden. Oh, he stayed in the Fleet but six weeks. He has powerful friends, and the King likes him as his father liked Sir Anthony’s father.”

“But he had Masses
here,
until just now,” protested Celia.

“Aye,” said Ursula, “and will resume them. He’s lord on his own manor which is a long way from London. No need for the King or his advisors to know this during their two-day visit.”

“Oh,” repeated Celia, “how very odd.” And she thought with increased fear about Stephen. She knew vaguely of the religious storms and violent changes which had shaken England since before her birth, but until last September her childhood had been monotonous, isolated and dreary.

Her father she could scarcely remember. When she was three he had been stabbed to death in a tavern brawl while defending the Bohun name. Celia had lived thereafter in a garret at the Spread Eagle Inn in Midhurst with her mother who served as barmaid. Celia ran errands, washed tankards, sanded the floors, and even turned the spit, until her gentle, pretty mother, Alice, began complaining to Celia of sharp pains in her belly, which swelled as though there were a babe inside. Celia soon knew that the other servants at the inn thought there was; she listened half-comprehending to many a lewd jest and coarse speculation as to the father. Alice herself bore these jibes in white-faced silence.

But, though the young woman swelled enough to contain twins, none ever came. And at Michaelmas, while the inn was roasting the usual geese and the parish church bell was ringing for curfew, Alice suddenly gave a scream and fell to the floor of their attic room. In a few minutes her heart stopped beating, and by the time the terrified Celia had summoned help, Alice was dead.

They were good to Celia at the inn. Master and Mistress Potts, the innkeepers, set her behind the bar to serve ale in her mother’s place, but she was dazed and lost. She upset tankards, she bungled orders, and she wept much in the night. She had nobody to turn to. Her mother had kept to herself in Midhurst.

Alice had been a Londoner, the only child of a respectable tavern keeper—the owner of the Golden Fleece, which was well-known for its high-toned patronage. The Golden Fleece was proud to welcome visiting gentry from the shires, and it was there that Jack Bohun stayed during his only visit to London in 1537. A moody, hot-tempered bachelor of forty-odd years, he fell headlong in love with Alice.

Jack Bohun was neither a knight nor recognized gentry; yet though he seldom spoke of it, he was never forgetful of his distinguished—albeit unofficial—lineage; he was a Bohun bastard. But until the Bohuns were forced to sell their patrimony to the Earl of Southampton, who left it to his half brother Anthony Browne the elder, Sir John—Jack’s father—treated the boy as his legal heir. Sir John despised his fat wife—a bearer of daughters only—and had felt very much like his King about this matter, though he had none of the King’s power to replace wives. Sir John would have liked to legitimate young Jack, whose mother was a beautiful Bohun cousin. Yet, though the liaison was accepted everywhere, there could be no marriage as long as the inconvenient wife lived, and she did—for some years after her husband. The young bastard, however, was taken to the crumbling Bohun stronghold on St. Ann’s Hill. He was raised with his half sisters, the legitimate heiresses, Mary and Ursula. He shared in the brief years of security, during which Mary was married to Sir Davy Owen, himself a bastard but a Tudor. Jack also shared in the family downfall, when Cowdray and Easebourne and large pieces of Midhurst were bought by the Earl of Southampton and inherited by the Brownes in 1542 when the Earl was killed fighting the Scots.

Jack Bohun was a man of fierce passions and family loyalty, perhaps all the stronger because he was not legitimate. He had deeply resented the newcomers and had quarrelled with Ursula, his remaining half sister, for her acceptance of the Brownes’ hospitality over the years.

Ursula accepted this break with her own realistic philosophy. But she inquired from time to time about the welfare of her brother’s widow. Through the servants at Cowdray, she soon heard of Alice’s death and the sorrowful plight of little Celia, her blood niece.

One day in October Ursula rode from Cowdray into town to the Spread Eagle Inn and asked after the Bohun girl.

Ursula was shown to a small black-beamed chamber off the taproom, and waited with no more than charitable curiosity until a slender girl with matted golden hair and frightened eyes walked slowly through the door.

“Ye sent for me, m’lady?” asked the girl in a breathy, stifled voice.

“If you are Celia de Bohun,” said Ursula. Her voice quavered. At this first glimpse of the downcast face she felt a shock of inexplicable sympathy, a sensation of fulfillment, as though this were her own long-lost child, though Ursula had never borne any.

“Pray sit down, sweeting. Pray do,” she said.

“I’m Celia Bohun, true enough . . .” The child twisted her work-chapped hands and dropped a curtsy, then stood-faintly hostile—in the center of the sanded floor, scarcely seeing the elderly lady whose name she had never heard, and who’d come from the castle for what mysterious purpose she could not fathom, except that it probably represented another blow from fate.

Ursula looked again at the girl, who must be about thirteen, for the bitter quarrel with Jack and his visit to London and lowly marriage had happened fourteen years before. She saw that the tousled hair, properly cleansed would be of a rich buttercup yellow, that the breasts were rounded and straining against the tight, shoddy brown bodice, that the hands though red were delicately made, that the little face had a nascent beauty—full lips, large turquoise eyes with long dark lashes. There was a promise of vibrancy and allure which Ursula herself had never had.