The Town House (39 page)

While I stood, almost weeping with indecision the door opened and one of the young ladies who had been dicing, hurried in. I knew her by her violet-coloured dress. She threw up her skirt and took the stool next to the one opened for me.

‘Holy Virgin,’ she said, ‘that onion broth! It goes through me like a purge.’

Encouraged I sat down and did what I wanted.

My friend, so pale and slender, looking so far removed from such gross human needs, lifted her sleeve and held it before her nose.

‘Catherine, what a stink! Little one, have you done?’

She took up a bell which stood on the ledge of a niche like an unglazed window set in one of the inner walls, and rang it vigorously.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘if anyone knows about you it will be Dame Margaret and I think she is in the Still Room. We’ll find her. So you are Blanchefleur’s niece; yes, you have his eyes.’

In the passage we met an old woman carrying a bucket and a jar of sudsy water; she stood aside to let us pass. When the passage widened the young lady took my hand, asked me to tell her my name again, asked how old I was, was I homesick? Yes, so had she been, she said, when she first came to Beauclaire, but that soon passed; in the Children’s Dorter there were several boys and girls, some about my age, and I should enjoy playing with them; and Dame Margery, who governed us was not too strict, it was said.

I made bold to ask her her name.

‘Melusine.’ It was one I had never heard before and I repeated it to make sure I had it right.

‘Yes. Melusine. I was named for a fairy lady in a French romance.’

‘You could be one,’ I said. ‘I thought just now…’ but I could not tell her the thought I had had in the Stool Room.

‘What did you think?’

‘That you are beautiful.’

She laughed.

‘You have the Blanchefleur tongue, too.’

But she sounded pleased.

When we had walked for what seemed to me a long, long way, she stopped and opened a door. It smelt as though the lid had been taken off a spice box. Behind the door was a smallish cosy room, lined with shelves and cupboards, all the shelves full of jars and bottles and boxes. At a solid table in the middle of the room sat a stout, elderly woman with a plain linen head-piece, moving her hands about in a wooden trough, full
of some dry-looking, sweet-smelling mixture. Ranged along the table were many bowls, some of silver, some of pottery, pewter and wood.

‘What have we here?’ she asked, looking up.

‘We have Maude Reed, who has come to live here.’

‘Why, yes, of course. They were warned at the entrance that she would arrive, today or tomorrow and should be taken to Dame Margery. What has happened?’

‘She came to the Well Yard door, and Dame Margery has taken all the children blackberrying, or so I thought.’

‘You thought right – so tomorrow I shall be busy with the cordials. And this not off my hands yet! Very well, very well. They will be back very soon, it’s nearly dark. She can stay with me.’

Melusine smiled and left me. Dame Margaret asked if I were at ease, and if I needed to eat now or could wait until supper.

I said I could wait. So, having tossed the mixture again she said I could help her to dish it out into the bowls.

It was just the kind of task most useful at the moment; it kept me busy and made me feel a little less lost and unwanted. When she saw that I was careful and neat-handed, she left it all to me. She took a cup and poured some dark rosy-red liquid into it and sat down, leisurely sipping. Between sips she asked me questions. At one point she snapped a finger and thumb and said,

‘But of course. Your mother was Anne Blanchefleur. I remember her well.’ She looked at me with a new, close interest, up and down, noting my very shoes.

‘Reed, you said? And your father is a wool-merchant.’

‘No. My father is dead. My grandfather is a wool-merchant, the biggest between London and Lincoln.’

She made a little noise as though clearing her throat.

‘Family ties are strong, for all that. Lucky for you you are like your mother – in appearance, I mean.’

‘I’m not. My mother is very pretty, and I have red hair.’

‘It runs in this family. My Lord Astallon is red as a fox. As for prettiness, one day you may be pretty too if you learn not to glower.’

The door opened and another plain linen head-piece poked around its edge.

‘Ha, Margaret! There is no linen, nor towels laid out for the Merlin Chamber, and my Lord Ashford just arriving.’

‘God be my judge!’ cried Dame Margaret, jumping up. ‘It was tomorrow. I swear my Lady said tomorrow. …’ She trotted out of the room.

In the moment or so that the door had stood half open the scent of roasted meat had come in and mingled with the spicy air of the room. I realized that I was, if not actually hungry, very empty. All through the journey my stomach had been full of misery, and the food at the inns, for the last three days, had been very unappetizing. Scratching up the last of the mixture of rose petals and lavender and bergamot heads out of the wooden trough and into the bowls I began to think about supper. And that made me think of the Old Vine, of the bustle and chatter as the weavers and pack-whackers and smiths came trooping into the dining hall, my grandfather, quiet but kindly, taking his place at the end table, Mother beside him and Walter next to her. My place empty .…

Here, at least, I was alone and could snivel a little; so I did, folding my arms on the table’s edge and leaning my face on them. I snivelled until one of the candles went out. The Still Room was on the inner side of the house, with only one small window which looked out on a narrow court, so the candles had been lighted there early. Now one, and then another guttered away. And I was afraid of the dark. Walter was too; but somehow he had managed to make his fear known, and when, one day I confessed to Mother an equal dread of darkness she had said, ‘Copy cat! Just because Walter has this whim, so must you.’ So after that I had made light of it, sheltering behind Walter’s need to have a light through all the hours of darkness. Now I was alone in a strange room, and where there had been four candles there were now two, and they were failing.

I went over and opened the door. The passage outside was quite brightly lighted. I walked along it, following my nose which would, I thought, lead me to the food, the scent of which was now powerful. Soon the passage divided, one arm of it, narrow and dimly lighted ran off to the left, the other, wider, very bright, led towards a set of stairs. I went that way, and at the stair head found myself in a room which was as much bigger than the one by the Well Yard Door as that was compared with the solar at the Old Vine.

It was so magnificent, so unlike anything I had ever seen before that for a moment I could forget that I was homesick, alone, hungry and forgotten, and just stood staring. Every inch of the walls was covered with tapestry. At home we had one, and that was reckoned a marvel; here one joined on to the next, all the way round the great room. Ours at home was a scene from the Bible, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their nakedness screened by flowers and bushes, Eve offering Adam the fatal apple and the Serpent, coiled about a tree-trunk and wearing a human
face, watching the triumph of his wiliness. The tapestries in the Long Gallery at Beauclaire were pictures of stories which I had never heard; there was a knight on a great horse driving a lance into the body of a thing all covered with scales like a fish, but with a thick solid tail and claws like a bird and a head more like that of a horse than anything else. The knight wore a red cross on a white background on his breast-plate. Every one of the woven pictures was concerned with knights. In one a knight lay on the ground, sorely wounded to judge by the blood that oozed over his shoulder from under the edge of his gorget, but he was blowing a great horn, and his enemies made a ring about him, waving their swords, aiming their pikes, while far off, on a distant hill a gathering of knights seemed to be waiting and listening.

I walked all the way round, looking at the pictures and wishing that there were someone with me who could tell me the stories about them.

At the far end there was another high doorway and I went through it and found myself in a smaller room, all hung with rose-pink draperies; and beyond that was another passage. There were many doors in it, and I opened them, one by one. Most of them opened on to darkness, and one, just opposite a candle sconce on the passage wall, gave me a fright, for it was full of suits of armour, on their stands, which looked, at first glance, like men. That room smelt of the oil used on the harness, and of the vinegar which was mixed with the woodash for polishing the metal.

By this time I could not even smell the food and knew I was lost. But just as I knew this I opened the door and found myself in the room into which, a lifetime ago, I had walked. There was the screen about the door, the table at which the ladies had diced, the piece of embroidery, and, on the window seat, Melusine’s lute, just as she had flung it down. The candles were burning low here, too, but there were so many of them that the light still served. I walked over to the window seat and stood there, thinking that this was her place, and she was the only one who had been kind to me. I touched a string of the lute and it gave a little tuneable twang.

There was a lute at home; it hung by a silk ribbon from a peg in the solar and I had always wanted to handle it; but it had belonged to my father and was sacred. One day, however, Mother had reached it down and put it into my hands. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘see what you can do.’

All I could do, to start with, was to make a discordant noise. She sat and watched me, which was not helpful. I had however just begun to work it out, that when I touched this string such and such a sound came
forth and when I touched this, another … and in a moment I felt sure I should have made a less distasteful noise when she jumped up, snatched the lute from me and hung it back on its peg saying,

‘You have no art.’

Now, left alone with a lute, I would have tried all the strings again and endeavoured to remember what I had learned in that one brief handling; but as I reached the window seat where Melusine’s lute lay, I could look out of the window and saw that the wall which ran out at right-angles to the Well Yard Room was pierced with windows, all aglow, and as I looked a door opened and a man came out, holding something in his hand which he raised to his mouth and bit upon. So I went through the screen and out by the door and across the Well Yard and in through that opened door.

I was at the lowest end of the dining hall, from which all but a few servants and a table full of pages, had gone. At the other end was a low platform, with a table running across it, from side to side of the hall, and that table was edged with crimson velvet, heavily embroidered, a little like an altar cloth. Another vast table ran the whole length of the hall, and at the lower end there were others, set near the wall. Broken meats, half-eaten trenchers of bread soaked in gravy, spilled ale, gnawed bones and apple cores littered the boards. Some men, each with a bucket, were going around sweeping everything from the tables, and behind each man came a boy with a filthy cloth which he drove – swish – across each surface as it was cleared.

The pages were eating heartily and talking and laughing at the same time. One looked up and saw me, nudged his neighbour, who looked and nudged his. They all stared but not one did more, and though some of the servants eyed me they said nothing. I walked along by the long central table, looking for something to eat. When I did – it was a pigeon, all that was left of a dishful, to judge by the bones scattered round – I sat down, pulled the dish towards me and began to eat. It was in that worst state, no longer hot, yet not quite cold, and I should have liked some bread with it, however, it took the edge from my hunger. As I ate I watched the clearing being done and thought how much more carefully we did things at the Old Vine, where the bones were collected separately and put on to the dung-heap where they softened down into manure, and all the soft waste went into the swill pail for the pigs. Nor would my mother, or for that matter Old Nancy, have allowed such filthy cloths as the boys were using anywhere within reach of our tables.

I crammed the last piece into my mouth just as the clearing man reached the place where I sat. I then walked down the hall again and out into the Well Yard and into the room where the ladies had been, hoping to find Melusine. There was no one there and the candles were almost dead.

I have known sharper grief, deeper misery, but never a feeling of more complete wretchedness, of being alone in a hostile world. Dame Margaret had spoken of my having been expected by the main entry; if I only knew where that was, I thought, I might find someone who would know me and tell me where to go. The idea of still being alone and lost when all the lights were dead and darkness everywhere filled me with panic.

Often, during the next few days, I looked back on my first evening at Beauclaire and thought how contradictory was its way of life. I truly believe that a homeless person, provided he or she were decently dressed, could have moved about the house, eaten in the hall, slept in a corner and gone unchallenged for a week, a month, maybe for ever. Everyone would assume that the stranger belonged to some other department, or to some visitor’s train. Yet, side by side with this was the equally true fact, that once you
were
claimed and recognized, and made part of the establishment you could never for a moment get out of the place. There was somewhere where you must be, someone you must be with, something you must be doing from the moment you left your bed until you went back to it.

The household, which to me just then seemed so dreadfully disorganized was, in fact, very closely and highly organized. All my misery was the result of having been sent to the wrong doorway.

Not daring to stay longer in the empty darkening room I opened a door, found myself in a passage, and could hear some music and the sound of someone singing. The sounds seemed to come from the top of a flight of steps, so I climbed them and opened the door at the top and knew at once that I had solved one problem: I was no longer alone. The room was crowded with ladies and gentlemen, some ladies seated on benches and chairs with gentlemen around them, but most standing in groups. The music came from the other end of the apartment and most of them were facing it, so had their backs to me.