The Town House (44 page)

And I said, ‘She said so, besides, I saw you come in.’

‘You saw me come in?’ She was upright in the bed again. ‘Where have you been, Maude? In the Low Garden?’

I nodded.

‘Then you saw us?’

I nodded again, stricken to think how I had given myself away.

She reached out and took hold of my arm; I could feel the heat of her hand through my sleeve.

‘That’s a secret. It must be kept, Maude, until the end of July. Do you understand? Will you promise?’

‘Anything you said was a secret, Melusine, I would keep to myself, even on the rack.’

‘My poor dear child, you’ve never seen a rack! And it isn’t so serious. Just till the end of July.’

‘And then you will be married?’

She nodded.

‘Where will you live?’

‘On his manor at Minsham.’

I thought of that cold, bare hall, with the damp dew on the stone walls, the unrailed stairs, the bleak bedchambers above, and of that poor drooling old man, my grandfather Blanchefleur.

‘Oh no!’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you stay here?’

She said sharply, ‘No!’ And then in an ordinary voice, ‘I forgot that you knew Minsham. Tell me about it’

I described it as well as I could. I also mentioned my grandfather. Melusine looked surprised and said she had never heard of him.

‘He may be dead,’ I said. ‘I last saw him before I came here, and then he was almost dead.’

‘The house,’ she said, ‘it could be made comfortable – if money was spent on it?’

I pictured Minsham furnished with some of the comforts of the Old Vine, some of the elegance of Beauclaire.

‘Oh yes.’

‘They’ll soon be back,’ Melusine said, ‘you had better go. We’ll talk tomorrow. And remember, this is between us.’

I repeated the words which were traditional in the Children’s Dorter for the making of any very special promise.

Melusine laughed and said,

‘Oh, the memories that recalls! A most solemn oath.’

I was in my bed and almost asleep when a thought jerked me wide awake again. If my Uncle Godfrey and Melusine were married and went to live at Minsham, perhaps I could go there too. That would be even better than staying at Beauclaire. Thanks be to St. Joseph, I thought, that I hadn’t written my request to Walter. I wouldn’t write now until the end of July when I could convey the news in any case, and, if I had persuaded Melusine to agree, beg to go to Minsham instead of to Clevely.

She was easily persuaded; she was, I think, genuinely fond of me, and as she said, she would lack company, because my uncle would be away a great deal. I asked again couldn’t she stay at Beauclaire, and I cannot remember whether it was then or another time that she told me what lay behind the secrecy and the need to leave Beauclaire once the truth was out. My Lady Astallon, Melusine said, would be furiously angry.

‘But why? Uncle Godfrey is bound to get married some day.’

‘She sees no need for it. And if he did she would like to do the choosing for him, somebody he couldn’t care for. You see…’ she checked herself ‘I shouldn’t speak of such things to you, Maude. Here in this room I forget how young you are.’

I would show her, I thought, that young as I was I fully understood the situation.

‘He is her lover
in fact?
They bed together?’

‘They
did.’

‘Would she have minded his marrying Alys Courtney? There was talk of that, wasn’t there?’

‘Alys Courtney was very rich. That would have been understandable. She was plain, too. Our marriage will be a very different thing. He loves me, and that my Lady will find hard to accept.’

‘I see,’ I said; and I did, though not very clearly.

Another time when we were talking – for we now talked far more than we read in the Book Room, I asked her how long she and my Uncle Godfrey had been in love.

‘He with me, or I with him? He with me only lately, a year maybe; I with him, oh, years, ever since I moved into the Well Yard Room. The first thing I noticed about you, poppet, was that your eyes were like his.’

I remembered how she had said, ‘You have his eyes,’ and that simple statement which had pleased me when it was made, because it gave me a feeling of belonging somewhere, now hurt because I loved her and was afraid that all her kindness to me had been on account of that likeness and not for myself.

‘A year, eh?’ I said, fumbling about amongst the thoughts in my head. ‘Then how would you have felt had he married Alys Courtney?’

‘How you harp on her! There was nothing in it. My Lady tried to match them, that is true. But Godfrey
loved
me and so nothing came of it.’

That was not the way I had heard it, the failure of the match between my Uncle Godfrey and the Courtney heiress had been reported to me by Helen Beaufort and she had said that he was willing, eager, the Courtney family reluctant. But then, Helen had a spiteful tongue and would gladly deal me a slap through my Uncle. And Helen, naturally, did not know the truth.

In another of these most exciting conversations I learned why the end of July was so important.

‘He’ll come riding back from Dover with that great prize in his hand, and then the announcement will be made. In the hall? Is that the way it will be? Oh, I hope I shall be there.’

‘Hope that he wins the prize! It will be all that we shall have to live on until my rents come in at Michaelmas. I’ve been such an improvident, prodigal fool. On Lady Day I had the price of as good a destrier as ever wore harness, and I frittered it away on a new dress and a brooch to go with it, and a ring for
him.
How was I to know that Tristram would take a wound?’

‘Tristram. What has the horse to do with it?’

Melusine made her right hand into a fist and ground it in the palm of her left hand.

‘This waiting,’ she said. ‘He must joust at Dover, and he must win. And his horse is unsound. My Lady Astallon has promised to mount him – a Great Horse from Flanders – so well trained, they say, that if you mounted a sack of flour on him, with a lance fixed, he could unseat his man. Goodfrey, with such a horse, could not fail.’

‘He won again here,’ I said, ‘and on Tristram, wounded as he was.’

‘He’ll win at Dover, a silver cup filled with gold pieces.’

We counted the days to the end of July. I wanted to write my letter to Walter, asking him to ask Mother if I could go and live at Minsham, but of course I must not do that yet, for to do so would betray the secret.

In our counting of the days we reached the place where we could say, ‘Only twenty days more.’

Earlier in the summer, in June when the people assembled for our St. Barnabas Tourney, some of them had brought rumours that this year the plague was worse than usual in London. Lord Astallon had seized upon this fact gleefully, and said in the Hall, loud enough to be heard from end to end of the High Table,

‘There you are! Was I not right to refuse Bowdegrave’s invitation to spend the summer in his London house?’

Lady Astallon said discontentedly, ‘Your cousin Bowdegrave is now with the King at Windsor, which is full as healthful as this.’

‘I doubt it,’ said her husband.

And he was right. This year the plague reached Windsor, and amongst its victims were Madge FitzHerbert’s father, his wife and the child of their marriage, a boy of five years old. All in a moment Madge changed from being a half-idiot, kept in the Children’s Dorter because she was too stupid and ugly to be promoted to the Well Yard Room, into that most covetable piece of property – an heiress.

It was Helen Beaufort, who now knew everything – and who was quite pale and venomous with jealousy – who explained all this to me. Unmarried girls who had great fortunes were always taken into wardship by some man who administered their estates, and arranged a marriage for them, and out of both procedures made some pickings for
himself. This was so well known and accepted a rule that the wardship of an heiress would be given away as a reward for service to the King.

‘The King’, said Helen, ‘is probably at this moment looking around to decide who shall have the privilege of being that ninny’s guardian.’

‘My cousin Astallon should have it,’ I said. ‘She has lived under his roof all these years; as far as I can see nobody else has minded whether she had enough to eat or not, or anything to wear.’ It was a fact that any garment more than was strictly necessary which poor Madge possessed had been given to her by me, for I had passed on to her everything my mother had sent me in the way of a present.

‘Astallon’, said Helen, ‘will never be thought of. He is not near the King, nor has he done him any service.’

‘Then it’s very unfair.’

‘The whole thing is unfair,’ said Helen bitterly. ‘They’ll probably marry her to an Earl.’

‘That couldn’t happen. She still can’t thread a needle for all her riches,’ I said.

‘If Astallon knew his business,’ said Helen in her most adult manner, and probably repeating something she had overheard, ‘he’d betroth her quickly to Ralph, or to Henry Rancon, and so keep control for himself.’

Madge’s new status, and her future, though a matter of interest to me was not very near my heart, and as soon as Helen and I parted I half-forgot about it, and went back to thinking about my own future, with Uncle Godfrey and Melusine at Minsham. However, on the evening of the next day I learned that Madge’s future was very much my concern, and that Helen’s gossiping prophecies had been wrong in only one respect. My cousin Astallon had taken the one way open to him to make use of Madge’s fortune for the family good, but he hadn’t chosen Ralph or Henry as a husband for the heiress; he had chosen his kinsman, Sir Godfrey Blanchefleur.

Before supper in the Great Hall, in full sight of the whole assembly, up stood the Beauclaire chaplain, silly Madge and my uncle, and the betrothal vows were made. Madge repeated her words in her thick flannely voice, without any sign of understanding; my uncle pushed a ring on her finger and kissed her on the brow. And all over the Hall people got to their feet and raised their wine cups or their ale mugs and wished the happy couple well.

For a moment or two I was too stunned to think. When I did my first thought was a thoroughly selfish one. Now I should never go to Minsham! Immediately I thought of Melusine. If I was too stunned and shocked what, in God’s name, was she feeling? I turned my head cautiously and
looked along to where she sat. In my heart I saluted her. Men may win honour in battle and prizes and praise in tourneys, but women have their own kind of courage. You could never have guessed that the scene on the dais meant more to Melusine than to Ella or Philippa or any other of the ladies. She was laughing and raising her cup.

All through the meal – and it was a festive one, with several extra dishes, Melusine’s behaviour was so ordinary that in the end it deceived me. I thought to myself that this was just another trick – like getting the Great Horse of Flanders out of Lady Astallon. My uncle had gone through the act of betrothal in order to further some scheme of Lord Astallon’s: now, if they sent from Windsor to take Madge into wardship, she need not go, she was betrothed. Then afterwards, when it was all forgotten, the betrothal could be annulled, and my uncle and Melusine be married after all.

That must be it, I thought; and Melusine knew. How else could she laugh and talk as though nothing had happened? I gripped on to this thought because it was the only comfort in my desolation, and soon I came to full belief and felt better.

However, next morning, in the Chapel, the Chaplain called the banns – for the second time, he said. And as soon as we were all back in the Children’s Dorter my Lady Astallon came there, a thing rare in the extreme; she brought with her a sewing woman who carried a roll of rich tawny-coloured silk. Madge stood there like an ugly doll while the sewing woman measured her and my Lady and Dame Margery conversed in voices too low for us to hear. Then the silk was spread out on the table and slashed into by the shears; the sewing woman treated the lovely stuff as though it were the coarsest cheapest homespun. When the gown was cut out Lady Astallon said something that Alison and Constance and I did hear, all too clearly. We were to spend the day sewing the long seams of the skirt while the ladies in the Well Yard Room did the more skilled work on the bodice and the sewing woman managed the trickiest part of all, the long, falling sleeves. The wedding was going to be solemnized next day and the dress must be ready.

So it was going to happen.

Sewing was the worst occupation for me just then, since it left my whole mind free to brood over my misery, and Melusine’s. Presently, I thought – nothing goes right for me! – and all in a moment the tawny stuff and my needle and thread wavered and blurred; one tear, then another splashed on to the silk, making dark, star-shaped blotches. Dame Margery, who was watching, quickly thrust her plump white hand between me and the work and made the sign of the Cross.

‘Tears on a wedding gown,’ she said in a shocked voice, ‘the worst possible luck, God and all the Saints guard against it! What ails you, Maude Reed, to behave so unseemly?’

I said the first thing that occurred to me.

‘This is my morning for lessons; and I do not like to sew.’

‘And you dare show me this rebellious spirit, after I have governed you for three years? Shame on you,’ she said, and dealt me a clout on the ear. Her hand, for all its plump white velvet look, could deal a shrewd blow. ‘Get into the corner and put your hands on your head until you can control yourself.’

She sat down in my place and began to stitch.

In the corner, gazing at the blank wall, I thought about Melusine. I had ceased crying, it is almost impossible to cry with your hands linked above your head; and presently I was able to say – without turning from the corner,

‘Madam. I am now controlled.’

‘Then you may return to your work.’

‘The Lady Melusine,’ I said.

‘What of her?’

‘She will be awaiting me in the Book Room.’