The Christmas Wassail (12 page)

That afternoon I took the older children to see the second of the mummers' plays as, in a rash moment, I had promised to do. Adela elected to stay at home in order to make her Twelfth Night cake so that the brandy with which it was laced would have plenty of time to soak into the rest of the ingredients. (This Christmas was costing me a fortune.)

‘Don't forget to put in the bean and the pea,' Elizabeth instructed before we left the house, ‘or we shan't have any King and Queen of the Feast.'

‘How long do you think I've been making …' Adela was beginning furiously when I pulled my daughter outside and firmly closed the door behind us. (Even now, as a mature woman, she still has no sense of danger.)

The outer ward of the castle was once more crowded, although not quite as full as it had been the previous day. And the general talk was still of Alderman Trefusis's murder, but I could sense that interest was beginning, very slightly, to wane. In a day or two other topics would have superseded it in the public mind.

The mummers' arrival, too, was greeted with a little less warmth than on their first appearance, but this may have been simply that the choice of play was less popular than that of St George. In spite of featuring Old Man Winter and Beelzebub – both parts taken by the elderly couple – and a very realistic fight between a Saracen Knight and a Christian Knight for the love of the inevitable Fair Maid, it was not as humorous a play as yesterday's. Adam, for one, whined all the way home because he had not seen the Doctor – ‘that funny man', as he called him. In the end my patience ran out.

‘Just stop moaning, Adam,' I admonished him. ‘It's not my fault the mummers didn't play Saint George and the Dragon again today. You just have to take what you're given in this life. You're five. It's time you accepted that.'

‘Tomorrow,' announced my stepson, ‘is Childermass. You have to be especially kind to us all day.' Nicholas could be annoyingly sententious when he wanted to be.

‘Specially kind,' echoed Adam severely, thrusting out his lower lip.

‘You can't scold us or be nasty or anything like that,' said my daughter, adding her mite to the conversation.

It was true that tomorrow, as well as being Sunday, was also Holy Innocents' Day on which the children slaughtered on the orders of King Herod were remembered. And, if one were not careful, it could also be a time of extreme bad luck. It was, I reflected bitterly, just my sort of day.

We went, next morning, to our customary church of St Giles for the Childermass service, and were early enough to find ourselves places near the front of the nave. All four children were dressed in their best clothes and shone with cleanliness, even Luke honouring the occasion by managing to dribble a little less than usual. At Adela's behest, I wore one of the two decent suits of clothes bestowed on me a year earlier by our present king when he was Duke of Gloucester. Consequently, in my brown woollen hose and green tunic with its silver-gilt buttons, I already felt miserably overdressed long before I realized that the five mummers had entered the church and were standing next to me.

I had been conscious of some little commotion, a sudden whispering amongst the congregation, but had not bothered to turn my head to discover its cause. Now, however, a certain smell assailed my nostrils; the smell of very old clothes which have been washed, then put away without being properly dried. Glancing to my left, I saw the puckered skin of the older man's right eye and his right hand with its missing first two fingers raised to scratch his cheek. Next to him stood the old woman and, beyond her, the three younger members of the troupe. All five had obviously taken trouble with their appearance, shabby though it was, and the young woman had tied a knot of red ribbon in her long fair hair which she wore loose under a veil of white lawn (an unconventional headdress for a married woman and one which was causing hushed comment amongst the matrons).

It became apparent why they had pushed their way to the front of the crowd thronging the nave, to stand with the parents and children, when it came time for the latter to be blessed. As each child went forward to receive the priest's benediction, the girl followed them, thrusting out her swollen belly so that her unborn child would also receive a blessing. And although, in general, mummers were regarded as on a par with rogues and vagabonds and outside respectable society, there was a murmur of approval from the gathering.

I thought that the young woman – whose name I suddenly recollected to be Dorcas – looked extremely pale as she returned to stand beside her husband, so it came as no surprise when, a moment or two later, she gave a queer little sigh and fainted. There was immediate consternation, and several of the women standing close by, including Adela, who pushed Luke unceremoniously into my arms, stepped forward to lend their aid. This was not needed, however, as the husband, who must have been a great deal stronger than he looked, stooped and, picking his wife up as if she had been a featherweight, carried her out of the church, closely followed by the other three mummers.

And closely followed, also, by my wife.

I sighed. I might have known it, I thought: at present, anything and everything to do with babies had Adela's undivided attention. With a jerk of my head, I indicated that Elizabeth, Nicholas and Adam should accompany Luke and myself outside to where Adela was already insisting that the five mummers must return home with us to share our dinner and allow the younger woman to rest.

‘For you can see that the poor child is quite worn out,' my wife was saying, one arm about the shoulders of the girl, who seemed to be recovering a little, revived by the cold, fresh air. ‘You can't be very comfortably housed in the castle. The place is falling to bits.'

The old couple demurred, not wanting to be beholden to anyone not of their own kind, but the two younger men, who were plainly anxious concerning Dorcas's well-being, accepted with alacrity.

‘Our lodgings aren't what a woman in Dorcas's condition should have to put up with, and that's a fact,' the man who was her brother admitted. ‘Truth is, we'd all be glad of a meal and a rest in a decent home.'

The husband – Tobias Warrener? Was that what he was called? – nodded in agreement. The old woman would have made more difficulties if she could, but the excitement of our children at the prospect of having the mummers actually under their roof put paid to any further argument. We set off without further delay for Small Street.

Fortunately, because it was Christmas we had a greater store of food than usual; in addition to which, Adela was never without a supply of pottage kept in a small iron cauldron and ready to be heated over the fire at any time of the day. Furthermore, the girl, Dorcas, professed herself uninterested in food for the moment and was swept off upstairs by Adela to lie down upon our bed, a proceeding I regarded with the greatest misgiving.

The older woman, who reintroduced herself as Tabitha Warrener, proved to be very handy in the kitchen, skilled at making a little go a long way by adding a bit of this to that, or that to this, ideas over which my wife enthused to me later. (‘I suppose she's had to skimp and scrape all her life, but she's certainly a remarkable cook.') The old man, Ned Chorley, was also worth his weight in gold by keeping our three imps and myself amused with tricks and ‘magic' in the parlour while the women prepared the food. (I couldn't help reflecting that Adela wouldn't approve of such things on a Sunday, but unless one of the children informed her, she would never know. And what she didn't know couldn't hurt her.) Meanwhile, Tobias Warrener and his brother-in-law, Arthur Monkton, sat with Dorcas until they were called downstairs to dinner.

During the meal, Adela and I tried to draw them out about their life in general, but although they were all perfectly willing to recount amusing anecdotes of their life on the road, and although Tabitha was happy to talk about her girlhood in Hampshire, where her father had been head warrener on one of the manors near Southampton and a young Ned Chorley one of his assistants, I couldn't help feeling that there was a large part of the older couple's lives that remained veiled in mystery.

(‘You're imagining things, as usual,' Adela said tartly when, later, I suggested this to her.)

But I was satisfied I wasn't. They had both talked perfectly freely about their younger days with her father, but then, suddenly, her parents were dead and she was married with a child. And I remembered distinctly her telling us that she was quite old when her son was born. Indeed, she reckoned she was well past twenty, maybe nearer thirty. So what happened to the years in between?

Tabitha went on to tell us how her ne'er-do-well husband had deserted her shortly after the birth of their only child, never to be seen again; how she had reverted to using the surname of her girlhood; how she had been helped in those dark days by her old friend, Ned Chorley; how her son, who had borne my name, Roger, had married very young ‘a sweet, pretty little maid, but with no strength in her', who had died when Tobias was born. ‘And poor Roger, he took and died of a broken heart less than a twelvemonth later,' she concluded. ‘So I set to and reared Tobias all on me own. Not that it were any hardship,' she added, smiling fondly at her grandson on the other side of our kitchen table. ‘I'd done it once. I could do it again.'

‘And a very good job you done of it, too, my old sweetheart,' endorsed Ned Chorley. ‘'E's a credit to you, and that's the truth.'

‘When did you decide on the mummers' life?' I asked.

The old man shrugged. ‘Some twenty years back, maybe. Times were hard. The nobles were still fighting each other. Sometimes we had one king, sometimes another. A man didn't know where he was. We' – he jerked his head at Tabitha – ‘were living near Romsey at the time trying to keep body and soul together, selling a few vegetables, taking in washing. And then this troupe o'mummers arrived and every single one o'them died of the plague. Terrible summer for plague, it were.' Tabitha nodded gravely. ‘So there was their stuff all left with no one to claim it, lying rotting in a field. I says to Tabitha, why not? Shall we try our luck? May make a better living at it than what we're doing now. She said yes and we've been on the road ever since. Young Toby then were only two. He ain't ever known any other way o'life.'

‘You can read?' I asked.

‘Grandmother can,' Tobias answered, spearing a slice of goat's milk cheese on the end of his knife. ‘She teaches the rest of us our parts. Tried to learn me my letters once,' he added cheerfully, ‘but I ain't got no head for words. Not written down, that is. I'm all right at reciting.'

They went on talking for quite a while after that, answering the children's eager questions as to how certain stunts and tricks were done, while I poured more ale for us all and watched with anxious eyes as the level in the barrel slowly dropped. And it was about that time that I began to reflect that there was a gap, quite a big one, in both Tabitha Warrener's and Ned Chorley's life histories that they hadn't told us about. And neither had mentioned how the latter came to be so maimed, even though he obviously had difficulty using a knife with his right hand. He had seen me looking curiously at him, too, but had offered no explanation.

Not, of course, that it was any of my business. And to be fair, I'd noticed how they all stared curiously around them, obviously wondering how a mere pedlar – for I had told them that much – could afford such a house. So, in the hope of encouraging equal frankness, I briefly recounted how I and my family came to be living in Small Street and the service I had rendered Cicely Ford which had provoked this generous return.

‘You'm clever with your brain, then,' Ned Chorley remarked admiringly. ‘Can read and write.'

I have no idea what made Adela say what she did next, for she is normally as reticent concerning my achievements as she is about her own.

‘Oh, he's clever all right.' She smiled proudly at me. ‘He's done favours for a lot of people, including our present king. Indeed, he was given a place at the coronation and at the feast afterwards as a reward for his services.'

I'm not sure that any of them really believed her, but they had the good manners to pretend that they did and exclaimed suitably. But the conversation then naturally drifted to the dramatic events of the past year and to the fact that this same time last December no one would have believed that King Edward would be dead by now.

‘And if we had believed it,' Tabitha said, ‘no one would've thought to see the old king's brother wearing the crown instead of his little son.'

Ned Chorley then proved himself to be a man after my own heart. ‘Well, a good job Richard o'Gloucester did take the crown,' he said positively. ‘We didn't want no Woodville brat on the throne and all his family ruling the roost. Like cocks on a dunghill, they'd have been. And a very good king King Richard's proving to be.'

‘I dunno about that,' Arthur Monkton demurred. ‘What about this here story that he's had the boy king and his brother killed?'

Before I could say anything, the old man spluttered, ‘You don' want t'believe shit like that, lad. That's a lot o'moonshine, that is.'

‘Then why don't he produce the boys and say, “Look! Here they are, so stop yer chattering!”?' demanded the other man.

I waited with bated breath to hear what Ned Chorley's answer would be, for the question was still troubling me.

‘Strategy!' he exclaimed scathingly. ‘Strategy, son! Something what you young fellows knows nothing about. He's a good soldier is our present king. Fighting in the field, he were, long before he were our Toby's age.'

‘What strategy?' Monkton scoffed.

Ned stabbed at him across the table with the point of his knife. ‘There's been one rising already on behalf o'them boys, and if King Richard produces them and says, “Look, here they are!” like what you want him to do, there'll be another. So, he don't say nothing.'