Authors: Norah Lofts
‘I doubt that. She will be sewing too.’
‘She goes to the Book Room early….’
‘Then run along and tell her that you are sewing and she should be. And waste no time. You are to be back by the time I reach here.’ She measured off a tiny length of seam.
I held my skirt high and galloped in the most unseemly way to the Book Room, but it was locked. I thought she might have locked herself in, so I knocked on the door and called that it was I, Maude. There was no sound from within. I then turned and ran to the Well Yard Room, which was like running from the Old Vine into Baildon town; only two of the young ladies were there, sewing diligently on the tawny silk. One said that Melusine was in the Book Room, the other said she was in attendance upon Lady Astallon. Just as I was leaving three others, Ella amongst them, came rustling in and I asked them if they knew where Melusine was. Nobody knew; and I had already been away much longer than I had been given leave for; so I had no choice but to go back and sew on that hateful tawny silk. I looked forward to the dinner hour; somehow I would make an opportunity to speak to Melusine then, no matter what trouble I brought down on myself.
But Melusine was not in the Hall for dinner; several other young ladies were absent, Helen Beaufort amongst them. Word went round that my Lady had suddenly decided that she had nothing fit to wear for a wedding, and that they were sewing at full speed on a new, wonderful cloth-of-silver gown.
My Lady having decided to make the wedding properly festive (and from my talk with Melusine I could see that this was, to her, the most welcome match in the world) the Chapel was to be hung with wreaths, the symbol of unity. So first thing in the morning we were all sent out in search of flowers. We children were to confine our search to the Low Garden, which yielded very little, the first flood of flowers was over, the big daisies which grew in the long grass were withering and the poppies which had taken their place were useless for wreaths as they shed their petals too easily. There were a few roses on the bushes and a few heads of blue bugloss and that was all. Then Alison said she had seen, on the banks of the moat, a great bush of honeysuckle.
‘Honeysuckle smells sweet, and it isn’t prickly and it weaves well,’ she said.
So the four of us – Madge of course was indoors, being washed and made ready – went off to find the bush. Alison had seen it when she went to the bear-baiting, and it certainly was a big, lush-growing bush but it was on the outer bank of the moat and to reach it our shortest way would be across the drawbridge, upon which we were expressly forbidden ever to set foot. William said,
‘Who will know? And even if they did nothing would happen today. It’s a
wedding
!’
Alison was in favour of venturing, because the bush was her find, and I didn’t care one way or the other, and Constance always did what we did. So we ran across the bridge and set about the bush, pulling off great flowery strands, some of them a yard long. And I thought with what joy I should be gathering flowers and making the wreaths were Melusine to be the bride, and what a sorry mockery it was now.
Then we heard men’s voices shouting from the inward end of the bridge, and looked up guiltily, thinking that they were calling us. But they were not. They were looking and pointing down into the water of the moat.
‘One of them’s dropped something,’ William said. ‘Look, they’re bringing a rope and grapple. Here, you have these…’ he pushed all his flowers into my arms, and went scampering off to watch something he hoped would be exciting.
I laid the bundle of leaves and flowers that he had given me aside and went on, dully and methodically gathering more, until I heard Alison, just beside me, let out a kind of hissing breath. I looked at her and saw that she was staring bridge-wards, so I looked that way and saw Melusine brought up from the water.
The hooks had taken her by the middle and she hung in a curve, very gracefully, almost as a girl might hang from a man’s arm in a more than ordinarily roisterous dance. At one end of the curve hung her blue-green dress, at the other her silver-gilt hair, both a little darkened by the water and that was all; and as they pulled her up the water fell from her hair and from her skirts, in sparkling, sun-touched drops. The thought shot into my head and out again – Even so, she is lovely.
Then I began to cry. Clutching the latest-gathered sprays of honey-suckle and crying wildly I ran back to the bridge and crossed it. By that time they had laid her flat on the grey stone pavement, and they tried to prevent me going near, but I pushed past and looked down on her I noticed then, and later took comfort from the fact, that she looked most peacefully happy; her eyes were closed and her lips were almost, not quite, but almost smiling. My own raucous, gasping sobs seemed an intrusion upon that peacefulness, but I could not stop them.
One of the men took hold of me and told me in a rough, kind voice not to distress myself. Alison came up beside me, and Constance; they stared, shocked, but quiet.
‘Come on now,’ one of the men said, ‘you must go in. Rightly you shouldn’t have been there, you know. What’s your Dame about this morning?’
Alison and Constance had gathered up all the flowers; they were loaded. Alison said,
‘Come along, Maude, we still have the wreaths to make, you know.’
Across the bodice of Melusine’s blue-green dress the green slimy strands of water weed lay, soiling, out of place. I laid my strands of honeysuckle over them, thinking, Wedding wreath! and sobbing more and more noisily.
More and more people had come running; there was quite a crowd. Alison said in my ear the most damning of all Dame Margery’s rebukes,
‘Maude, you are making an exhibition of yourself!’
I knew that, but there was no help for it. I went on crying. One of the men picked me up and carried me into the house.
Dame Margery was kind at first. She petted and patted me and gave me something soothing to drink; then, when I continued to cry she lost
patience, shook me, finally slapped me and forbade me to attend the wedding. So I lay on my bed and wept for Melusine while silly Madge became my aunt-by-marriage.
I knew that crying was useless; all it did was make my head ache more and more; I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. Even when every tear was squeezed out of me and I was as dry as sawdust inside, I still went on making the hiccupping noise.
Dame Margery came back from the wedding feast, and finding me still crying, gave me another drink, a poppy-smelling one, which sent me to sleep. But the moment I was awake I was crying again.
They began to treat me – perhaps rightly – as though I had gone out of my wits. I was moved out of the Children’s Dorter and lodged in a small room alone. Dame Margery seemed most concerned because I could eat nothing; she was convinced that if I would only try, I could do so. Once she seized my nose and held it until, in order to draw breath, I was forced to open my mouth; instantly she popped in a spoonful of something she had ready at hand. It was a dish of fresh raspberries sprinkled with crushed sugar which was a rare luxury, even at Beauclaire. For me that mouthful had the very taste of misery and I have never eaten raspberries again, nor indeed any sweet thing at all.
Finally, as though in desperation, they fetched the Chaplain to me.
Remembering that he had taken the betrothal vows and called the banns, and officiated at that farce of a marriage ceremony, I had nothing to say to
him,
and lay on the bed, with my face turned towards the wall, crying and hiccupping, my mind closed to his talk until he said,
‘I am surprised. I was given to understand that there was an affection between you and Melusine Talboys.’
‘There was,’ I said, without realizing that I was speaking at last. ‘She was my friend, the one person who was kind to me when I came here, frightened and alone.’
‘Then you owe her a debt which you should begin immediately to repay.’
He now had my attention. I cried,
‘But she’s dead, she’s dead. I can never repay her now.’
‘Her body is dead. But her soul – and that surely was the source of her kindness to you – is still alive and more in need of help from you, from us all, than ever before. If you had seen her cast herself into the water would you have stood in a safe place and wrung your hands and wept, or would you have tried to save her?’
‘I
would
have saved her.’
The arrogance of that remark he deplored with a small sigh and went on,
‘Her state of mind no one can know, therefore no one can say that she died finally impenitent; she did die unshriven and her last act on this earth was the sin of self-destruction. She will be long in Purgatory, I fear, poor child. But her time there could be shortened, and her way out of it eased, by you, by your faithful and unremitting prayers. The scales of God’s justice are finely balanced, and against the sum of all her sins and her final awful wrongdoing, prayers inspired by love and gratitude would weigh heavy.’
I gave a great gulp and said, ‘I will pray.’
‘Ah,’ he said, in a pouncing, triumphant voice, almost as though he had said, ‘I’ve
got
you!’ ‘Ah, but are you in a state to pray effectively? This unrestrained grief – as though you were a heathen for whom physical death was the end of all things, this refusal to eat or sleep, as though you too were bent on self-destruction, do these make for a claim to God’s ear?’ He gave another small sigh. ‘You’re very young. I will try to put it plainer. Suppose your friend Melusine had deeply offended Lady Astallon and was to be punished, quite rightly, but you wished to plead for some mitigation, would you, do you think, serve any purpose by rushing into the Bower, crying loudly, your clothes in disarray, your whole manner distraught? Answer me?’
‘No.’
‘Very well, then. If you believe, as you must believe, being a Christian, that Melusine is not that poor dead body, but a living and immortal soul, at this moment suffering the cleansing pains of Purgatory, you will get up from that bed, wash and tidy yourself and eat some plain, nourishing dish. You may have small appetite for it, but our appetites should at all times be under our control. Tell yourself that you eat in order to gain strength because your strength is needed. When you have done these things, come into the Chapel. I shall be waiting for you there.’
Later in my life, when I often heard priests discussed critically and designated ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I would remember the Chaplain at Beauclaire. He was, so far as anyone could judge from outward signs, a worldly man, he lived luxuriously, he did Lord Astallon’s bidding quite unquestioningly (as in that hasty marriage between my uncle and silly Madge), he was fond of fine clothes, addicted to hunting, not, in fact, a ‘good’ priest. But, and this I do believe, ordination to the priesthood does convey some power, some authority outside the layman’s understanding. And those upon whom that power has been conferred carry it, as a man may carry a lantern. He may
keep the horn clean and clear so that the light is always visible, or he may let it grow smoky and smeary so that you might not know that the light was there. It is there, however, and in a moment of emergency it can be produced. So now the Chaplain without saying anything which was new to me, without even being persuasive in his talk, had altered everything. I no longer saw Melusine as they lifted her from the water, dripping and dead. I saw
her,
as alive and real as she had ever been, suffering the physical pain and the spiritual misery of Purgatory, but knowing that it was only for a season, hopeful, not lost, not despairing.
The effect of this was not only to assuage my sorrow; it altered my whole attitude towards life. I no longer wished to remain at Beauclaire and as that summer passed into autumn, and the autumn into winter I began, more firmly every day, to look forward to going to Clevely and joining the nuns. I made no hasty decision about becoming a nun myself; in that mood of religious mysticism which followed my talk with the Chaplain I doubted my own worthiness to take such a decision. When I thought of Clevely I thought of it as a quiet place, with no distractions, where I could spend hours on my knees praying for Melusine without seeming odd or making myself conspicuous. At the age of twelve, having seen only one of the world’s many aspects, I was prepared to retire from it.
I left Beauclaire soon after my twelfth birthday. With one exception nobody seemed sorry to see me go. Madge might have been, but she was gone already, making with my Uncle Godfrey, a tour of all her estates and hereditaments. The exception to the general indifference was, most startlingly, Henry Rancon, to whom I had hardly spoken a word since he had left the Children’s Dorter and become a page.
I had seen him, of course, in the hall and about the courtyards and I had noticed, in an idle kind of way that since leaving Dame Margery’s rule his appearance had not improved. He was never very clean and he was often bruised, or scratched or scarred in some way. He’d grown very rapidly too, and however often he was given a new outfit of the Astallon green, his clothes seemed too small.
On my last afternoon at Beauclaire I was sorting out my possessions and packing what I had decided to take with me in the same little chest which I had brought from the Old Vine. I discarded whatever seemed to
me, in my limited knowledge, to be unsuited to life in a nunnery. Nuns, I believed, were vowed to a life of poverty and non-possessiveness, and a girl who went to live with them would need very little.
The other children were in the Low Garden, it being a fine afternoon, and Dame Margery having seen me employed, took a little nap and then went out to gossip with one of her cronies. When she returned she had Henry Rancon with her. She said, with one of her smiles which were secretive and sly and knowledgeable,
‘Maude, Henry wishes to bid you Godspeed. He has remembered some of the mannerliness I beat into him, it seems.’
I had been taught manners, too, so I said,
‘That is very kind.’
We stood and looked at one another across the little chest and the pile of discarded clothes. He wore the Astallon green – velvet for pages and they were supposed to change from their uniform when they went to the stables or out for their exercises, but Henry plainly hadn’t bothered; his velvet was rubbed and spotted and he stank of sweat, horse and human. His hair had just been roughly clubbed and should have been washed. He had a long scratch down one cheek and a large scab on his chin.