Towers in the Mist Read online

  “And Father hasn’t taken us to Saint Bartholomew’s with him,” said Meg.

  This was a grievance with them. Other children were permitted to go with their flowers to Saint Bartholomew’s, or alternatively to watch the coming of the dawn at Magdalen tower, but they, because of their father’s ridiculous fear of draughts and diseases for them, had to remain in bed snoring through the glorious hours of May morning like so many insentient pigs.

  “Nasty selfish cruel man,” said Joan cheerfully.

  “He’s an ogre,” said Meg. “An ogre who ill-treats little children.”

  If it was not the fashion of the time for children to express their candid opinion of their parents to their face a good deal of satisfaction could be obtained from doing it privately.

  “You dare speak like that about Father, you naughty little girls!” said Grace, bounding indignantly from bed. “You wait till I catch you!”

  The twins doubled and dodged over the herb strewn floor, shrieking with mirth, but being careful not to let Grace catch them, for she could smack even harder than Joyeuce. Their room was big enough to allow of escape for it stretched through the whole width of the house, with one window looking on the garden and the other on the College quadrangle. Tapestries made long ago by Canon Leigh’s grandmother and great-aunts, mother, aunts and sisters, covered the walls. They had been designed to elevate the mind as well as delight the eye and showed Adam in the Garden of Eden praying to God in the cool of the evening, Ruth in the arms of Naomi and baby Moses in the bull-rushes. The flowers of England, spring and summer and autumn blossoms all mixed up together, filled the Garden of Eden, Ruth and Naomi were journeying to the land of Judah in farthingales that must have measured yards round, and the wooden cradle in which Moses lay was richly carved in the Elizabethan manner. The smoke of winter fires and the hot suns of many summers had dimmed the original bright hues so that now they were soft as the colors on a pigeon’s breast. The beds, and the chests where the children kept their clothes, were as gloriously carved as Moses’ cradle, and the bed curtains were of olive green embroidered with forget-me-nots and sops-in-wine. There was no other furniture, and no pictures and no ornaments to distract the mind from the beauty of those beds and chests and the glory of that tapestry.

  The domestic staff of the Leigh household consisted of only two, Dorothy Goatley and Diggory Colt, and neither Dorothy nor Diggory could spare time to go dashing about the place with jugs and basins for people to wash themselves in, after the modern habit, so the children washed, if they washed at all, at the well in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  The twins scampered back to bed, picked lavender and rosemary from between their toes, pulled the curtains a little way and proceeded to dress themselves. There was a great lack of passages in the house, one bedroom opening out of another, which meant a distressing lack of privacy in one’s bedroom, so the great four-poster was dressing-room as well as bed and the more private part of one’s toilet was performed behind its drawn curtains. The girls’ room could only be reached through Great Aunt’s and she had a very trying habit of walking suddenly in and commenting unfavorably upon their persons and garments, so that they were careful to put on their petticoats, stitchets, and gray worsted stockings clocked in scarlet well out of sight within their beds. When these garments were in position they emerged and helped each other into the simple dark blue homespun gowns that they wore in the mornings, with lawn ruffs and caps and aprons edged with lace, and their hornbooks hanging from their waists. Joyeuce and Grace made all their everyday clothes. They spun the wool, dyed it and wove it into cloth, and made the lace that edged the ruffs and caps.

  Joyeuce dressed herself before she dressed Diccon. She would have been beautiful had she not been the eldest of eight. She had a tall upright figure and lovely hands and feet. Her hair, demurely parted under her cap, was straight and honey-colored like the twins’, but her blue eyes were so dark that they looked almost purple and she had Grace’s dark brows and lashes, a contrast that made her small pale pointed face curiously arresting. But being the eldest of eight had a little marred Joyeuce’s looks. A permanent worried frown wrinkled her forehead, her lips were set in too hard a line, and the figure that should have had the grace of girlhood was always stiffly braced to meet the action that was demanded of Joyeuce from the time she woke up in the morning until the time when merciful sleep lifted her burdens off her, and set her free to run and sing and dance in a dream world where there was no washing day, and no Great-Aunt, and where she found her mother again.

  Diccon would never find living a burden. If he derived from the Leighs at all he derived from the happy side of the family, the side of the mother who had died smiling, murmuring to her stricken husband that to die giving birth to a baby was the very nicest way for a woman to die. “A new life for an old,” she had said. “A good exchange.”

  But if Diccon had Mistress Leigh’s optimism he was like no one but himself in looks. His head was thickly covered with tight dark curls with a hint of red in them, and his eyes were bright green. His brown little face was covered with freckles that Joyeuce strove valiantly to eradicate by bathing his face with dew, but it was no use, the more she dewed him the more he seemed to freckle, until now at the age of four there was scarcely room to put a pin’s head between one freckle and another.

  There was a distressing amount of the old Adam in Diccon and what he would be like in another two years his family trembled to think. Joyeuce, who loved him passionately even while she deplored his wicked ways, knelt down to pray for him whenever she could spare a moment from her baking and washing and spinning and weaving, and Canon Leigh occasionally spent whole nights wrestling in prayer, laying before the Almighty the evil propensities of his youngest son.

  So naughty was Diccon that the frightful idea had been expressed by Great-Aunt that he was in reality no child of theirs but a changeling. Mistress Leigh had died leaving her son shouting the place down in furious hunger, and so outraged had been his yells that a foster mother had been imported with more haste than discernment. She had been a gypsy woman, a magnificent black-eyed creature who had walked into the house with head held high, her gay, ragged clothes sweeping round her like the silks of a queen and her own child held negligently in the fold of her cloak. She had remained for four days, crooning strange songs to the two little babies who lay in utter content, one on each arm, and had then suddenly departed, taking with her one of the babies and all of the spoons. Another foster mother had been imported, a widowed girl whose own baby had died, the same Dorothy who was with them still. But from the start she had had grave misgivings about Diccon. . . . He took his food, she said, with a greed and determination shocking in a Christian baby.

  Diccon had not cried at all at his baptism, so that the devil was obviously still very much in him, and when the water had touched his forehead he had kicked in a very worldly sort of way. . . . It was on the evening after his baptism, when he was making up for his previous silence by a display of frightfulness hitherto unexperienced in the Leigh family, that Great-Aunt had hazarded the suggestion that he was no child of theirs.

  “Had he been the gypsy’s child he would have had black eyes like hers,” poor Joyeuce had said as she tramped up and down the parlor with the shouting infant.

  “Who knows whether the child she brought with her was her own child?” Great-Aunt had retorted. “We don’t,” she had continued ominously, “know what it was.”

  And indeed as Diccon increased in size and wickedness he developed a good many fairy attributes. There were his dancing green eyes, for instance, and his ears that were undoubtedly pointed at the tips, the way he could fall and roll in all directions and never hurt himself, his mischievous tricks and the frightful noise he could make, a noise out of all proportion to the size of his body; and then, in contrast to all this, the sweet loving little way in which he would suddenly come running to you and climb on your lap and lie with
his curly head snuggled against you, your hand rubbing his cheek. He would lie like this for five minutes, cooing like any turtle-dove, and then suddenly turn his head and bite the caressing hand hard. His baby teeth were white and pearly, and daintily pointed like his ears, but of an inconceivable sharpness. . . . And upon his back was a triangle of three small moles; the mark, so said Great-Aunt, that the fairies set upon their own.

  But Canon Leigh and Joyeuce wouldn’t have it that Diccon was a changeling. He had, they thought, absorbed a certain wildness with the milk of his first foster mother, but he was their own dear child and by prayer and the help of God this should be cast out.

  The roar with which Diccon had greeted the dawn had been short-lived. He always bellowed at any moment of transition, such as that from night to day or eating to not eating, but he never bellowed for long. The noise he made was merely the fanfare of trumpets that announces to adoring subjects that royalty is now doing something different to what it was doing a short while before.

  Having announced that he was awake he shut his red mouth abruptly and scurried on all fours to the bottom of the bed, where he sat with his back to the room, industriously picking a crimson embroidered carnation out of the curtain with his sharp little nails. He had been working at that carnation for a week and had nearly finished it. When his activities were discovered he would be smacked, but he had no objection to being smacked. If he had any nerves at all they were made of steel and never incommoded him.

  By his side sat Tinker the cat, watching gravely, with his tail twitching slowly from side to side. Tinker was black, with eyes as green as Diccon’s own, and he was Diccon’s inseparable companion. They did everything together and seemed to have a great affection for each other, though their sufferings at each other’s hands were shameful. Diccon would drag Tinker round the garden by his tail, remove from him by force those just perquisites, his mice, bury him in the earth when playing at executing traitors at Tyburn and put him down the well when playing at Joseph and his brethren. A hundred times had Tinker been rescued at the point of death, yet his devotion to Diccon never wavered. . . . Though he retaliated. . . . Diccon’s face and hands were a mass of scratches and on one occasion the child had nearly died of blood poisoning, Tinker having bitten him immediately after refreshing himself at the Deanery garbage heap.

  There was something ominous, Great-Aunt said, in this friendship of the child and the cat. . . . For do not witches consort with black cats? . . . There was no denying that Tinker had introduced himself into the Leigh household on the very same day that the gypsy woman had arrived, strolling in from the quadrangle dripping wet with a tin can tied to his tail.

  “It is time to get dressed, Diccon,” said Joyeuce.

  Diccon gave her one of his lovely, rippling smiles, leaped from the bed and dragged his night-rail over his head.

  “No, no, Diccon!” cried Joyeuce in horror, seizing his little bare body and lifting him back on to the bed. “You must be dressed behind the curtain, like a modest child.”

  Diccon was lacking in modesty, and one of the most frightful of his escapades had taken place on a hot afternoon last August, when he had called at the Deanery with nothing on. For this his father had beaten him, for the first time, with the rod that he kept for use upon the older boys. Asked for an explanation of his behavior he had said, through sobs, for the rod had really hurt, that he had felt hot and he liked the Dean. Asked not to do it again he had not committed himself.

  Diccon looked fascinating when he was dressed. He wore doublet and trunk and hose of russet, with a little pleated ruff at the neck. . . . It had been the pricking of his ruff round his neck that had led to the regrettable incident of that hot August.

  As soon as he and the little girls were dressed Joyeuce knocked at Great-Aunt’s door for permission for the children to walk through her room on their way to wash their hands and faces at the well, which was given by Great-Aunt’s usual remark of, “Tilly-vally, tilly-vally, why did God make children! Hurry up, then, malapert poppets!”

  Joyeuce lingered behind to straighten the untidy beds. This done she drew back the curtain that covered the window looking on the quadrangle. She always waited until the children had gone before she pulled back this curtain, for it would have been a thing not easily forgiven by their father if a passing scholar should have seen a twin in her petticoat. . . . And she had another reason for waiting. She had grown from a child to a girl in this house, she had loved and laughed and suffered grief and pain in it, and somehow the view of Christ Church and Oxford seen from its windows for so many years as the setting of her home had become extraordinarily valuable to her. She liked to be alone when she drew back the curtain, like a connoisseur before a picture or a worshiper before a shrine.

  2.

  She pulled it aside and opened the diamond-paned lattice window, leaning out. She got up so early that to her the dawn was a well known friend, not a casual acquaintance seen so seldom that its appearance is greeted with astonishment. She knew all the dawns: the golden dawns of fair weather, the gray dawns of rain and the flame and indigo dawns of storm. She watched them morning by morning as their banners unfurled and streamed across the sky, and she loved them, even though the moment of unfurling was to her a moment of dread as well as of joy. . . . For each day one marches out to fight behind those banners, and the stout and lusty like the fighting but the timid, as they buckle on their armor, cannot help a beating of the heart. . . . Today was a fine weather dawn and on the banner of it was embroidered a golden-hearted flower whose blue petals crisped into saffron at the edges.

  The rough grass of the quadrangle was still misted and the buttercups and daisies in it were tightly shut up. Presently they would open their eyes and look at the sun and then the quadrangle would look like Grace’s Sunday kirtle, green silk scattered over with yellow and silver dots.

  The north side of the quadrangle had not yet been built and Joyeuce looked from her window across the grass to a thicket of hawthorn trees that were a froth of silvery blossom. Beside them, to the right, were Peckwater Inn and Canterbury College, and beyond them were the roofs of the city and towers and spires rising out of the morning mist in marvelous beauty. To her right, as she leaned out of the window, Joyeuce could see the tower of the Cathedral surmounted by its thirteenth-century spire, and to her left she looked on the Fair Gate. It still lacked its bell tower, and Great Tom, the bell that was destined one day to hang there, now tolled out the hour from the Cathedral, but if it boasted no tower the Fair Gate was yet very fair, with the arms of Henry Tudor and Cardinal Wolsey “most curiously set over the middle of the Gate, and my lord grace’s arms set out with gold and color.”

  The whole view was gloriously fair and Joyeuce almost worshiped it.

  She was a romantic to whom as yet the details of practical living brought no joy. . . . She missed her mother. . . . She did her duty as housewife with thoroughness, a sense of duty having been whipped into her from babyhood up, but she did not think that doing one’s duty was very enjoyable. The life she wanted seemed always to elude her, to be around her and in front of her and above her but never quite within her reach. She did not quite know what it was that she wanted, she only knew that it was not what she had. The view that she saw from her window every morning was to her the symbol of this life. She stood in her house, surrounded by a hundred irksome problems and duties, and she looked out at a loveliness that she could see but could not grasp. . . . Yet if she left the house and went outside, treading the green grass with her feet and touching the silvery hawthorn with her hands, her worries would go with her, making the grass wet and cold and setting thorns among the flowers; the ideal world that had seemed to be there outside would, like a mirage, recede yet a little further. . . . Would life always be like that, she wondered. Did the things that men longed for and fought for always disappoint them as soon as they had grasped them in their hands? Did one go on and on like that, chasing a will
-o’-the-wisp until you and he went down together into the darkness of death? Perhaps, she thought, once you were through that darkness he suffered a change. Perhaps he stood still, then, and let you catch him, and the grip of his arms would satisfy at last.

  But Joyeuce could not feel certain that that would happen, and anyhow it seemed a very long while to wait. She wanted something nice now. She wanted the beauty of earth that was outside her window to become to her something more than a painted picture, she wanted it not to recede like a mirage but to take some actual form that would come in to her and bring her comfort and reassurance. . . . Like her mother had done.

  “Good morning, Mistress Joyeuce.”

  Leaning with her elbows on the sill, her eyes on the white hawthorn and white towers against the sky, her ears filled with the song of the birds and her thoughts wandering, Joyeuce had forgotten time and place. At the moment her feet were not on the earth and the figure who stood outside in the quadrangle seemed not of the earth either. She did not know if it was a man or a woman. It was just a figure that gathered up into itself all the elusive beauty of that outside world and brought it close to her. It was not receding, it was coming nearer, standing right under her window so that she could almost have touched it; touched the beauty of earth, the gold and blue and green and silver.

  Then her wandering thoughts suddenly recollected themselves and their duties. They came hurrying back, very shamefaced, and folding their wings curled themselves up into the tight, hard ball that is the grimly recollected mind of a housewife in the early morning. . . . There was a tiny click in her head, as the component parts fitted together, and Joyeuce started and looked down into the upturned impudent face of what was after all only one of the scholars.

  He was a stranger to her and it was clearly her duty to blush with maidenly modesty and withdraw from the window with grace and dignity; but somehow she did not. Her thoughts might have returned to their duties but they were not yet exercising as much control over her actions as could be wished. She stayed where she was, staring down at the face below her with a concentration that bordered upon the bold, and instantly every detail of it seemed to be graved almost painfully into her memory. In one moment she knew his face almost as well as she knew Diccon’s, that she had been learning hour by hour and day by day all through his short little life. And there was a certain likeness between the two, a likeness that bespoke them both the sons of Belial. These eyes, though they were as dark as sloes, had the same dancing points of light in them and when their owner laughed they were transformed, as Diccon’s were, from round twink­ling orbs to narrow wicked slits. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s and his eyebrows had that faint upward kink at the outer edges that, together with the suspicion of a point to the ears, is one of the sure marks of mischief. The fine texture of his sunburnt skin was girlish too but the lips were full and strong and the chin obstinate and deeply cleft. . . . Altogether a face so full of contradictions that nothing at all could be foretold about the future of its owner. . . . Joyeuce’s truant eyes, all unbidden by her will, took as serious note of these things as though his face were the page of a book that she must at all cost get by heart.