Towers in the Mist Page 5

  With a sigh she stirred and got up, aware at last of the clamoring, outraged commands of her thoughts; she blushed a little, smoothing her snowy apron, and the practical world once more flowed maddeningly around her. Holding herself now as stiffly as a poker she had another good look at the young man before her; but this time her eyelashes were lowered and she peeped through them with the cold aloofness of a superior tabby kitten.

  Morning prayers were at five o’clock in the Cathedral and this young man was the first out. . . . There was something about the jaunty way he wore his gown, the twinkle in his eye and the crisp curl in his hair that suggested that he was always the first out. . . . His clothes were simple, for it had been ordained that every Christ Church scholar should “go in fit and decent apparel,” and might not on any account burst upon the scene clothed in “white or pricked doublets, galligaskins or cut hose, welted or laced gowns, upon the several pains next before rehearsed.” So Master Nicolas de Worde was clothed in a plain dark blue doublet, with a simple ruff, and no part of his person was pricked, cut, welted or laced; but the fineness of the dark blue cloth and the snowy whiteness of his ruff, together with a certain arrogance in his bearing, showed him to be a young man of means and breeding. He was also a gentleman of some age, Joyeuce thought, eighteen or so. Scholars could present themselves at Christ Church at any age, the youngest recorded age of any gentleman arriving to devote himself to learning at that institution being twelve years old, so eighteen was to Joyeuce very much years of discretion, and she answered his greeting with the respectfulness due to age and learning.

  “Good morning sir,” she said, and curtseyed.

  Nicolas regarded her with interest and amusement. When he had first seen her she had been apparently kneeling on the floor, with her elbows propped on the window sill and her chin resting in her hands. She had been illumined by one of her rare moments of beauty; her pale little face softened by her dreams and her bearing relaxed into grace. She had looked frail and sad, too, and Nicolas, who always enjoyed the best of health and spirits himself, was always attracted by frailty and sadness; succouring the afflicted increased his own sense of strength and well-being and that was nice for him. He had noticed Joyeuce before but never to such advantage. He would like to see her close to, he had thought, for he was a connoisseur of pretty ladies, and as he always did what he liked unless forcibly prevented he had immediately crossed the quadrangle and planted himself beneath her window. And to his delight she had returned his scrutiny with interest. She had opened her eyes wide and gazed at him as though he were the personification of all beauty and all joy. . . . Nicolas had a good opinion of himself and he was overjoyed to find her in such evident agreement with him. . . . She had beautiful blue eyes, almost as dark as violets, set strikingly in that ivory face beneath dark eyebrows like delicate feathers, and smooth honey-colored hair. . . . A nice girl. . . . And when she suddenly changed from a melting and rather forward goddess into a stiff, demure maiden he discovered that she was one of the few women who can blush becomingly. . . . Your rosy maidens, Nicolas was apt to say when expatiating on the beauties of the sex, are all very well on the whole but they show to disadvantage in moments of embarrassment, while your pale maidens, though they may be less striking in the ordinary way, put on an added beauty with added heat. . . . For himself he liked pale maidens.

  “You have not gone maying, mistress?” he asked.

  Joyeuce shook her head a little sadly. . . . She had always longed to go maying.

  “Nor I,” said Nicolas arrogantly. “I hate the vulgar crowd at Saint Bartholomew’s. . . . Besides, I overslept.”

  Joyeuce, not noticing that the grapes were sour, immediately saw that it had been quite wrong of her to want to go maying. She blushed again, and changed the subject.

  “Who are you, sir?” she asked humbly. “I have not seen you before.”

  A ludicrous expression of astonishment spread over Nicolas’s face, for he was accustomed to be known and admired and took recognition of his merits and admiration of his person as his due.

  “I’ve been here for years,” he said indignantly, “and I’ve walked past your window a thousand times if once, and I sat opposite you last week in the Cathedral.”

  “I never noticed you,” said Joyeuce.

  “You can’t be observant,” he said, slightly nettled.

  “I was saying my prayers,” explained Joyeuce.

  Nicolas considered this a joke, and laughed.

  Joyeuce drew herself up yet more stiffly, her eyes flashing, for she had been well brought up and knew what should be laughed at and what should not. “And so,” she said, “should you have been.”

  “But we say so many in this place,” he complained bitterly. “Every morning at five o’clock do we pray, wet or fine, warm or cold, dark or light. Jupiter, the horror that are College prayers at five o’clock on a January morning!”

  “How did you know my name?” asked Joyeuce.

  “No one can walk past this house and not know your name. It is bellowed by every inmate of your household from dawn till night. ‘Joyeuce, the cat is in the cream! Joyeuce, where are my shoes? Joyeuce, the children are making too much noise! Joyeuce, I have bumped my head! Joyeuce, the dogs are out in the quadrangle again! Joyeuce, the twins are lost!’ When I saw you in the Cathedral, surrounded by the children, praying so earnestly for the cat, dogs, shoes, twins and bumped heads I knew that you were Joyeuce. . . . A most inappropriate name.”

  “Why?” demanded Joyeuce.

  “Can so burdened a lady be joyous?” He came a little nearer, his head tilted back and his hands creeping wickedly up the wall as though he would pull her down out of her window, compassion and mischievous invitation comically mingled on his face. “Do you ever do joyous things, Mistress Joyeuce? Dance to the music of the virginal? Go hawking? Run through the kingcups in the meadows with your shoes and stockings off?”

  “No!” whispered Joyeuce in horror. “Of course not!”

  “By cock and pie it is a disgrace!” he announced. “This evening at seven o’clock you will meet me at the Fair Gate and we will go—I do not know where we will go—but it will be somewhere lovely. Do you hear me, Mistress Joyeuce?” He laughed, keeping his eyes fixed on hers so that she could not look away, drinking in the flattery of the palpitating longing and dismay that robbed her of breath so that she could not answer.

  “Joyeuce!”

  The exclamation, deep-toned, astonished, outraged, yet with a hint of amusement behind the outrage, came from Canon Leigh, brought to a standstill on his way home from Saint Bartholomew’s by the shocking sight of his eldest daughter leaning from her bedroom window and talking to that malapert scoundrel Nicolas de Worde, a creature unworthy of the name of scholar, the horror of his Greek being equaled by nothing except the outrage of his Latin.

  Joyeuce jumped back as though detected in a burglary but Nicolas remained unflurried. He bowed with exaggerated gallantry first to Joyeuce and then to her father, smiled bewitchingly at them both and strolled off to his rooms beside the Fair Gate, disappearing with a whisk of the tail end of his gown that reminded Canon Leigh of a cock robin; never a humble bird. He watched that flourishing tail vanish from sight with a cold eye, and then turned back to his daughter.

  “I shall see you,” he said, “later,” and disappeared through the front door below.

  Joyeuce stood back from the window with her hands pressed against her hot cheeks. She cast an anguished glance at the sky and saw that the golden clouds had all disappeared, swept away by the wind that had sprung up and was rustling the hawthorn across the way. Only one cloud sailed across the sky from west to east, from the Fair Gate to the Cathedral, a galleon of unsullied white in the warm blue of full day. . . . She must have been dreaming and gossiping for half an hour, with the children up to goodness alone knew what down below; and she had not even said her prayers. She knelt down beside her g
reat bed and covered her shamed face with her hands. In thirty short minutes she had committed the three sins of day-dreaming, laziness and impropriety, and she was almost too ashamed to pray. It was so much worse, she thought, to sin in the morning than to sin in the afternoon, for a fall once taken it is hard to recover foothold and now she would spend the whole day being disagreeable to everybody. “Ne nos inducas in tentationem,” she prayed, Nicolas’s unforgettable face mocking her within the darkness of her closed eyes, “sed libera nos a malo.”

  Canon Leigh, an economical man, had taught his children to pray in Latin so that two birds might be killed with one stone, the soul and the Latin being strengthened together.

  She got up, shook dried herbs out of her dark blue skirt, straightened her apron and cap and stood for a moment, braced, before facing Great-Aunt. Then, her courage screwed to sticking point, she knocked at the door.

  Great-Aunt admitted her, as always when displeased, by a short, peremptory bark.

  Great-Aunt’s room was smaller than the girls’ though it suited her better owing to its extremely central position in the house, enabling her to keep her finger on the pulse of the household’s life. One window looked out on the garden and the other looked down into the big combined hall and dining-room of the house, a glorious stone-floored, oak-paneled place that stretched right up to the raftered roof. Great-Aunt was therefore very happily placed. Her outside window enabled her to see all that went on in the garden and her inside window commanded not only the hall but the great oak staircase, the front door, the dining table and the doors into kitchen, study and parlor. Nothing, therefore, could happen in the house that Great-Aunt did not know about, and nothing did. Her felicity was further increased by the fact that her room was over the kitchen and she could hear everything that Dorothy Goatley was up to down below. It was unfortunate that the yew hedge hid the stables and the loft where Diggory Colt slept from her view, and still more unfortunate that Dorothy’s bedroom was downstairs on the other side of the house, but to counterbalance these drawbacks, the girls’ room was reached through hers and they could not even fetch a clean kerchief without her knowing it. . . . And one cannot have everything, as she was constantly remarking to Joyeuce, and for those blessings which are ours we should be thankful to a beneficent Creator.

  Joyeuce entered and stood waiting for Great-Aunt to pop out from behind her bed curtains and express herself as to the row Diccon had made in the early morning. It was part of Great-Aunt’s technique always to leave a few moments’ awed silence between the entry of her audience and the delivery of her own remarks, tension being thus introduced and the point of her discourse much strengthened.

  Joyeuce could never get over the fear that the furnishings of Great-Aunt’s room had implanted in her when she was still a child. The enormous bed, curtained in purple velvet and reached by a flight of steps, was like a catafalque, and the tapestries of Great-Aunt’s choice, representing the Day of Judgment and Salome presenting King Herod with John the Baptist’s head on a charger, covered the walls with purple clouds, green lightnings and crimson drops of gore. Great-Aunt disliked the modern fashion of herb-strewn floors and the black, polished boards gleamed somberly like the inky water of a bottomless tarn; one of those tarns where murdered bodies sink down and down and are never found.

  When Canon Leigh and his young wife had first come to live at Christ Church, happy beyond words at the prospect of a beautiful home of their own, Great-Aunt, then resident at Stratford and intensely bored by the life of a dignified, childless widow of ample means, had written suggesting that she should live with them. They had hastily written back pointing out all the disadvantages to Great-Aunt herself of her proposed change of residence; for she was exceedingly well off, enjoyed excellent health and had no claim whatsoever upon their charity; but before the letter had time to get there Great-Aunt herself, a woman the reverse of dilatory, had arrived at Oxford. Going out for a stroll one afternoon they had beheld her ambling up to the Fair Gate on her white mule, sitting sideways with her feet on a board, four packhorses behind her carrying her tapestries, bedding and other personal luggage. At the age of seventy-nine she had ridden all the way from Stratford, putting up at the inns along the way, and had derived great enjoyment from the adventure. It was impossible to disappoint so gallant an old lady; moreover Canon Leigh after a night of wrestling in prayer felt the visitation to be the will of God; so Great-Aunt was unpacked and arranged at Christ Church. With the Dean’s permission, withheld at first but granted after a stormy personal interview with Great-Aunt herself, a window was knocked in her bedroom wall so that the few years that remained to her—she numbered them at two or three—might be enlivened and sanctified by the spectacle of innocent children and learned divines partaking of nourishment in the hall below. Mistress Leigh herself had failed to see any indication of the divine Purpose in Great-Aunt’s arrival—the old lady was Canon Leigh’s aunt, not hers—but she had submitted, as was her wifely duty, and had hung up the Salome tapestry with her own hands. . . . After all, she had reflected, the old dame could not live for ever. . . . But the old dame had outlived Mistress Leigh herself, had indeed contributed to her death by worrying her frantic during her months of pregnancy, and now at the age of eighty-five, after six years’ residence at Christ Church, was enjoying better health than ever.

  And yet, though she was really rather a nasty old lady, it was impossible not to feel for Great-Aunt the admiration that abounding vitality in the very old always calls out in the young and the middle-aged. Great-Aunt had lived for eighty-five years in a very terrible world. Her Catholic brother had been hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn by the command of Henry Tudor, her Protestant husband had been burned at the stake by Henry’s daughter Mary and her four children had died in one of the terrible visitations of the plague. That she had weathered it all and now in her old age faced life with undiminished zest implied a courage of no mean order. . . . Though it must be owned that Great-Aunt had had very little sympathy with her heroic brother and husband. If her relations liked to be martyred for their religious convictions the more fools they, she said; as for herself she had always trimmed her sails to whatever winds might blow and here she still was, hale and hearty in her old age.

  Great Aunt’s head, encircled in fold after fold of nightcap, popped out from between the purple curtains and Joyeuce jumped as at the eruption of a jack-in-the-box.

  Dame Susan Cholmeley had once been beautiful. Her dark eyes under black, bushy brows still had the depth of velvety color and the bright sparkle that had enslaved the lovers whose number increased by ten every time she told the story of her early triumphs to the children, and her wrinkled cheeks were still rosy. Her most alarming feature was her large, hooked nose, that nearly met her chin and gave a witch-like look to her face. She had lost all her teeth and it was the difficulty of mastication and conversation under the circumstances, and not ill health, that led her to spend most of her time in her own room. She was still capable, had she wished it, of riding her mule from Stratford to Oxford and enjoying it.

  “I heard you, Joyeuce Margery Leigh,” remarked Great-Aunt. “And a more disgraceful exhibition of impropriety I never overheard in all my life. . . . And let me tell you, child, I’ve overheard a good deal in my day.”

  Joyeuce smiled in spite of herself. Great-Aunt had a naïve way of exposing her own weaknesses that was very endearing, and it was a relief that Joyeuce’s greater sin had driven Diccon’s early-morning yells out of her mind, for if there was one thing that Joyeuce could not endure it was criticism of Diccon.

  “Had I the strength I used to have,” said Great-Aunt, “I should take a slipper to you. . . . And who was the young man?” she continued eagerly in almost the same breath.

  “Master Nicolas de Worde,” said Joyeuce, standing meekly beside Great-Aunt, her hands folded on her apron and her eyes cast down. “He said good morning to me.”

  “It takes a long time
to say good morning nowadays,” commented Great-Aunt drily. “And is it your intention to meet him at the Fair Gate this evening?”

  Joyeuce looked up sharply, the crimson blood running up into her cheeks. Though Great-Aunt’s hearing was preternaturally sharp it was quite impossible that she could have heard Nicolas’s request, made out in the quadrangle. It was just another instance of what the children called “Great-Aunt’s second sight.” The old lady had in reality no more second sight than a rabbit, but after eighty-five years of life in this world she knew the unvarying reactions of human nature to the circumstances that beset it. “Meet me at the gate” was the first coherent remark made by all lovers; though no doubt, poor creatures, they thought their idea original. They all ran to gates: city gates, palace gates, garden gates; for gates are symbolic of the entry from one state of being to another and even to stand at them, looking out, gives you a sense of freedom. . . . Great-Aunt had presented herself at a good many gates in her day and had indeed perfected herself in the technique: the man must be kept waiting at the gate that his ardor be inflamed, but not too long, lest it should cool; the weather, too, must be taken into consideration, and the kind of gate; for tall gates are made to be peeped through coquettishly, short gates to be leaned upon in intimate conversation, flat-topped gates to be sat upon while sunsets are admired, while the gate that has an easy latch is made to be escaped through to quiet places of woods and streams where time does not pass and prying eyes do not tarnish. . . . Great-Aunt, always deeply interested in the affairs of the heart, forgot her annoyance in curiosity and decided that the time had come to give Joyeuce a little elementary instruction in these things, and opened her mouth to begin; only to discover to her rage that the malapert girl had left the room.