The Town House (40 page)

I went in, like a pup looking for its master, hoping to find either Melusine or Dame Margaret. Here again, as I moved about people looked at me with a mild curiosity, but nobody asked why I was there. I was half-way up the room, at a point from which I could catch glimpses of the lute player, and of a man with a harp and a boy with a wooden
frame, the top bar hung with little bells, arranged in order of size, the smallest like a thimble, the largest as big as a cup, when I saw Melusine standing with a very fine young gentleman.

I had been moving diffidently, but at the sight of her I flung myself forward and took her hand.

‘What!’ she said. ‘You again? You should be abed.’

‘I know.’ I began to blurt out my woes, how Dame Margaret had left me and nobody had called me to supper and how I had been lost.

Faces began to turn in our direction; somebody said, ‘Hush!’ The music ended with a loud sweep of the player’s fingers across all the strings, and in the vibrating silence immediately following a sweet, high, languid voice called,

‘What is all this ado?’

Holding me by the hand Melusine led me towards where a lady sat on a bench with high, in-curved ends, all gilded. The lady did look, indeed, like a statue of gold; her dress was yellow and so was her hair, and she wore it uncovered, pulled back from a high white forehead, and held in a net of gold, set with yellow stones where the strands crossed. Her face was like a statue’s too, carved into an expression of faintly shocked surprise, due to her eyebrows being shaved off and then painted on again, a full inch above their natural place.

Melusine let my hand fall and stepped back a pace and said in a stiff way,

‘Madam, this is Maude Reed.’

‘Maude Reed,’ she repeated the name, just as I had hours ago repeated Melusine’s. She turned her head towards a man who stood behind the gilded bench. I remembered Dame Margaret’s remark about the red hair. His was very red, quite different from mine. He leaned over and whispered in the lady’s ear.

‘Of course,’ she said, and turning back to me gave me a smile and said,

‘You are welcome.’

I knew what to do and I meant to do it, to make her the best curtsey I had ever made, holding my skirt clear on each side and letting my head dip just at the right moment. And I did.

But the truth was that one of my reasons for misery and wanting to find Melusine, was that I needed, once again, to visit the Stool Room; and my inside didn’t know that I was making my duty to my mother’s kin, Lord and Lady Astallon of Beauclaire; it thought I was attending to its needs. I felt the warm wetness run free, scouring my saddle-chafed thighs.

For ever disgraced, I thought, rising with the shamed blood scorching my face. I cannot stay here. Tomorrow I must go home. And here they will remember me for ever – Maude Reed, the girl who made a curtsey and made water at the same time.

There was the little puddle; the moment I moved it would be seen by all, and though I knew that I must move and that it would be seen, something made me try to defer the evil moment. I was like a person on his way to the tooth-puller’s booth, lingering by every other booth that he passed.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘my mother sent you her loving greetings and her deep gratitude for taking me into your household.’

‘Your mother,’ she said, and again turned her head. My Lord again leaned forward and whispered into her ear.

‘Your mother has trained you very prettily,’ said my Lady, turning back to me. ‘Now … You will join the Children’s Dorter and be governed by Dame Margery, and I trust you will learn well.’

Ignorant as I was, I recognized the tone of dismissal. But I still stood, guarding my shameful secret.

My Lord saved me. He made a sign to the musicians, who broke at once into a merry tune; and a slim young man with red cheeks came from behind the bench and bowed and extended his hand and said,

‘Madam, I beg you, dance with me.’

She smiled and stood up; and since she could neither walk through me nor over me, I was bound to step aside.

Now, I thought, they will all see.

But her skirts were long and full and edged with fur. When she had passed there was nothing left to show that I had misbehaved myself. After a moment Melusine came to me and said,

‘I will take you to Dame Margery.’

The young gentleman who had stood by her said,

‘When did you turn nursemaid? May I be your next charge?’

She said, ‘You do not expect to reach second childhood so soon, surely?’

Outside another door, which we reached after a long walk, Melusine halted, put her arm around me and kissed me.

‘Our paths may not cross for many a long day,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll be happy.’

I clung to her for a moment; then she put me gently away, and once we were inside the room, face to face with a dignified, solemn-looking lady, her manner was formal again.

‘This is Maude Reed, Dame Margery,’ she said. ‘By some mistake she came in by the wrong door.’

The Children’s Dorter at Beauclaire was really an establishment on its own. The actual Dorter was the chamber in which we all slept, boys and girls together, but separated by screens down the centre of the room; when people spoke of the Children’s Dorter, however, they meant also the big room in which we worked and played, and took all our meals except the mid-day dinner, and very occasionally our supper.

There were eight of us at the time when I joined the Dorter; my Astallon cousins had two children of their own, a boy of nine, named Ralph, a girl of six, Constance. There was another girl of eight who bore about the same relationship to them as I did myself, she was a Fortescue – sent, after the fashion of the time, to be schooled in the house of a cousin, while, in her own home, other girls and boys were being trained; her name was Alison. There were two brothers, aged nine and seven, Henry and William Rancon, whose father had died by my cousin Astallon’s side in the French Wars lately ended; and there was an eleven-year-old girl named Helen Beaufort, who was a relative – some believed an illegitimate daughter – of the great Cardinal. There was also a girl named Madge Fitz-Herbert who was a true half-wit; she understood very little, spoke indistinctly and had protruding brown eyes which did not see very well. I never knew her to manage to thread her needle. She was there because her own mother was dead and her father, when he re-married, did not wish his new wife to see what manner of child he had bred already. He had some position at Court and was in high favour, especially with the Duke of Gloucester, the King’s uncle. My cousins had accepted Madge as an inmate of their Children’s Dorter in return for some favour which her father was able to do for them. My Lady Astallon had ambitions and was always craving to live in London and take what she called ‘her proper place in the world’, but her husband preferred to stay at Beauclaire, with only short visits to his other estates, to attend to the management of his affairs and mind no will but his own. I’ve heard him say that the Duke of Gloucester was ‘riding for a fall’, that when the tree fell the ivy fell too, and that for himself he would sooner rule his own acres than be just one voice on the Privy Council of the King.

Our days were strictly ordered, but by no means tedious. We girls learned to sew and embroider; not to spin, spinning was at that time out of fashion for the gently reared and the distaffs lay idle in a corner. We learned to dance, and to play various games without showing chagrin when we lost, or pleasure when we won. Self-control was a virtue highly rated by Dame Margery; she never, for example, minded how much, how often or how viciously we quarrelled but we were not allowed to smack one another, or scream, or cry. The boys, when they fell out were allowed to use violence on one another, but not in the house.

‘Into the yard and settle it,’ Dame Margery would say; and the one who came back defeated had scant sympathy,

‘You’ll take harder knocks, if you live.’

The boys, when they were ten years old were removed from her care altogether – ‘And I want no one saying, when you get amongst men that I have brought you up soft.’

We girls, though treated differently, were disciplined too. We must learn to stand still, perfectly upright, without fidgeting or sighing for long stretches of time on end; we must always eat, without any sign of distaste, anything put before us. We must learn to govern even the working of our bowels.

‘Bless you, child,’ Dame Margery once said to Helen Beaufort, ‘in a few years’ time, when you wait upon some great lady and are tiring her hair, will you drop the pins and cry “I must to stool!” You will
not
. Go stand in that corner, place your hands on your head and await my permission to go.’

Unlikely as it sounds, impossible as it seemed to us at the time, her methods did work; bowels and bladders learned that they were not masters to be pandered to, but servants to be obedient.

In many ways we were fortunate in our mistress; she was a countrywoman who after some years in London had come back to the place that she loved, and she liked nothing better than to take us out, riding, or afoot, naming us the wildflowers or the birds, warning us which berries were poisonous, letting us share, in a manner unusual in most households, the seasonal activities of the manor. On the day of my arrival the children had all been blackberrying; later we gathered mushrooms and hazel nuts. When the summer came, we were allowed – the girls demurely sun-bonneted – to toss hay in the meadows, play amongst the stooks in the harvest fields. Once she took us all into the woods, carrying food with us, and let us make a fire and cook, tinker fashion.
The meat was bitter with smoke on the outside and red raw within, but somehow it tasted different, and better than a dish similarly spoiled would have seemed eaten indoors.

My appreciation of our Dame did not come all at once. My first weeks at Beauclaire were very wretched. I made mistakes and was punished, I lost myself several times. When the boys teased me I fell into a rage, when Alison and Helen tried – as they did at first – to show themselves superior to me – I wept. So much that we did seemed to me useless, false and hypocritical, and there was so much else that I did not understand.

This wool merchant business, for example. Alison and Helen seemed to hold it against me that my grandfather was a wool merchant. At least here Helen, who was the older, always gave the lead and Alison followed her.

Once I cried, ‘And what’s wrong with being a wool merchant?’ and in fury took up the scissors and slashed into Helen’s embroidery. Dame Margery punished me and I yelled that it was not fair, I hadn’t started the dispute.

‘And do you expect fairness in this world, Maude? If so you are going to be very sorely disappointed. Better learn now. Go stand in the corner and place your hands on top of your head.’

I could learn, that was one blessing, I wasn’t like poor Madge who could make the same mistake three times in one day. Next time Helen twitted me about the wool business I stayed calm. I didn’t even look at her, I looked at the wall straight ahead and I said,

‘My
father
was in the wool business too. And when I was born he did not call me his
niece
!’

Now for that I should have been whipped. But no! Dame Margery, a little later said,

‘I am glad to see that you are learning to stand up for yourself in proper fashion.’

Proper fashion, for young ladies, meant lashing out with hurtful words, not slashing with scissors.

Not long after that I performed, out of cowardice, an act of bravado which gave the boys a good opinion of me.

Every fine day, after the mid-day dinner, unless Dame Margery had something planned for us, we were allowed to go and play in what was called the Low Garden. In days long past, when Beauclaire consisted of the castle only, this garden had been the pleasance where, in times of peace, at least, the ladies could take the air. Since then new and better
gardens had been made near the new house, but they were for the pleasure of grown-up people who did not wish to be disturbed by children’s games. The Low Garden was now somewhat neglected, its grass tufty, its bushes overgrown, the walls surrounding it tumbled in some places. There was one stretch of wall, still quite sound, however, and one day the boys took a ladder into the garden, climbed by its help to the top of the wall and there strutted about like young cockerels, jeering at us girls who, they claimed, couldn’t do what they were doing. They then began a game of taking turns to run the length of the wall and back.

My head for heights had never been put to the test and I couldn’t see why William, a month or so younger than I was, could do something which I could not, so in the end I called that it was now my turn; and I climbed the ladder and stood on the wall, which was about twelve inches wide at the top, and which, on the garden side dropped ten feet, and on the outer side twice as much. The moment I stood on the wall and looked down I realized the truth of their jeers, this was something no girl could do, or should attempt. I also knew that to stand there, teetering, was the worst thing I could do; only speed could save me. Trying not to look at or think about the drop on either side, I walked briskly to the end of the stretch of wall where it ran into the side of a solid square tower. I turned and pressed my back against the blessed solidity of that tower and knew that I should never have the courage to leave it and set out on the return journey. My head was already spinning and my knees had turned to melted wax. So I did the only thing there was to do; crying, ‘I’ll wager you daren’t do this!’ I jumped down into the garden. A sharp sickening pain stabbed through my ankle, but Dame Margery’s exhortations of self-control bore fruit; I did not cry out, nor did I hobble, though my ankle remained swollen and painful for many days, and will even now, in wet weather, pain me.

Henry Rancon took up the challenge, climbed the wall, ran along and jumped as I had done. William said he couldn’t jump because he would jar a tooth that was already giving him trouble, and Ralph Astallon said it was time we went back to the house.

After that, however, whenever they wanted a fourth for any game they chose me rather than Helen, who was older and stronger.