Towers in the Mist Page 8

  It was lovely in the garden. The house was on the south side of the great quadrangle of Christ Church, and the garden lay between the back of the house and the Christ Church meadows. It was small but packed as full of flowers as Joyeuce could get it and as gay and neat as a patchwork quilt. Paved paths led between beds edged with rosemary, lavender, marjoram and thyme, their centers filled with the blue and golden flowers of spring: cowslips, primroses, daffodils and forget-me-nots. When the summer came they would be filled with rich warm flowers, roses and pinks and pansies and sops-in-wine. There were fruit trees in the garden, apples and cherries, and on the west side a yew hedge with a clipped peacock at each end hid the stables and outhouses, built out at an angle from the house. Beyond the garden the trees in the meadows were wearing the fresh green of spring, a garment as mistily mysterious as the rain-drenched grass below and the blue sky above.

  It still felt cold and fresh after the rain in the night but the bright sun poured down a wealth of light and filled each wet flower cup with a twink­ling golden coin. The twins ran all round, visiting their friends and touching them very gently with the outstretched tips of their right forefingers; very gentle forefingers that hardly disturbed a drop of rain when they touched. The late daffodils were bowing and curtseying to the west wind and Joan thought they looked like beautiful ladies dancing the pavane. Their farthingales, she pointed out to Meg, were a lovely pale yellow, pale as the first clouds of the morning, but the kirtles underneath them were much richer in color, like the kingcups beside the river or the buttercups in the quadrangle. The twins had once been taken to see some beautiful ladies and gentlemen dancing the pavane in Christ Church hall and they had never forgotten it. One day, they told each other, they too would be grown up and dance in Christ Church hall, and the candle flames that would be burning in their hundreds to light the dance would not be so yellow as the dresses they would wear. . . . It must be a wonderful thing to be grown up. . . . Like being born again.

  The apple trees were a mass of exultant pink and white blossom and when Meg and Joan ran up to them they threw out breaths of delicious warm scent that made the twins wrinkle their noses in delight. These apple trees seemed a miracle to the little girls. Only a little while ago they had seemed old, almost dead things, just gnarled black wood drenched by the winter storms and twisted into ugly fantastic shapes like the poor old beggars one sometimes saw in the streets. And then quite suddenly they had been plastered all over with comic fat buds that entirely altered their expressions, as though the surly old trees were trying to smile. The cold spring winds had shaken the buds and the rain had streamed over them, but nothing daunted they had slowly opened and green leaves had appeared, as though tightly shut hands unclosed and were held up to the sun, palms upward and fingers crooked in supplication, begging for warmth. The tip of each green leaf had been faintly tinged with red, as though the warmth had already been given and the fingers glowed. And now the warmth had spread and deepened until the ugly old men, the beggars, had become rich and radiant as young gods. . . . It was very odd, the twins thought, very odd indeed, and they wondered if they would be as changed when they grew up and wore those yellow dresses and danced in Christ Church hall.

  They turned their backs on the fruit trees for a moment to survey the center of the garden, where the soft, silver gray of the herbs edged the blue forget-me-nots like mist upon water, and then ran eagerly to the yew hedge that hid the stables, for in the depth of the yew hedge there was a bird’s nest. It was a wonderful nest, its rough outside made of twisted twigs from the meadows and straws from the stable yard and its inside a perfect smooth bowl of grass and moss. There were five eggs in it, blue-green in color with little specks of brown upon them. The twins did not stay long by the nest, lest they should annoy the parents, and they were careful not to touch, they just peeped hastily to see that all was well and then ran away. They had personally entrusted the nest to the care of Romulus and Remus, the two yew peacocks, and these birds had up to date justified the confidence reposed in them.

  An archway had been cut in the center of the yew hedge and this led through to the stables. A visit to the stables was the last item in the program of early morning inspection but it took a very long time owing to the enchantment of the stables. One went under the archway into the yard, where tufts of bright green grass grew between the cobbles and where the garbage heap led its interesting life. This latter exercised a deep fascination not only over the dogs but over the twins too, for the things that could be found in it varied day by day and were always of an attractive nature, including as they did dead rats and mice in various interesting stages of decay, bones, old shoes, old pots and pans and scraps of wool and silk left over from the weaving. The twins played all sorts of fascinating games with the things they found in the garbage heap, and the dogs were safe here from interruption by Tinker the cat, for Tinker was nothing if not a snob and despising the Leigh garbage heap invariably betook himself to the superior one at the Deanery.

  To the south of the yard was the outhouse where the harness and gardening tools and oddments were kept, with the room where Diggory slept above it. His window looked straight out on to the garbage heap but Diggory, as completely inured to smells as other Elizabethans, suffered no inconvenience. To the west was the stable proper, with the loft above it, and to the north a cobbled lane led between the stables and the house to Fish Street.

  There were three inmates of the stables: Great-Aunt’s old white mule Susan who had brought her from Stratford, Canon Leigh’s black horse Prince and the children’s pony Dapple. Diggory was busy grooming Dapple and Prince and Susan, and leaving the dogs to dig happily in the garbage heap the twins ran to the stable to help him.

  Diggory never minded being helped by the twins. He suffered them in silence until they got in the way and then picked them up very gently, put them outside and shut the door; and they never seemed to resent this dismissal, or to question it. The relations existing between Diggory and the children were rather puzzling to Canon Leigh. They talked to him by the hour together quite undeterred by the fact that he never made any answer except an occasional grunt. And what did they talk to him about? And how is it possible to talk for two hours at a stretch to a person who never answers? Or was there a world of meaning in each of Diggory’s grunts that the children and the animals alone were able to interpret? Canon Leigh could only suppose that those very near to the earth, the peasants whose life is regulated by her seasons, the animals who make their homes among the roots of her trees, and the children to whom her flowers and grasses are still enchanted forests, are bound together in a closer understanding than can be comprehended by those others whom education and the customs of so-called civilization have carried far away from the source of their being.

  The twins, having kissed Dapple, Prince and Susan on their gentle noses, spent half an hour helping Diggory and talking to him so incessantly that not a pin point could have been inserted between one sentence and another. At the end of that time he silently picked them up and put them outside the door.

  “Diggory,” they called from outside, “could we go up into the loft?”

  For answer Diggory silently picked them up again, one under each arm, and placed them one in Dapple’s manger and one in Prince’s. From here they were able to scramble up by hoisting themselves through the rafters over their heads, left open so that fodder could be lowered down from the loft to the mangers below.

  Scrambling and kicking, and pushed by Diggory from behind, they emerged from the mangers and arrived on all fours on the floor of the loft. Picking themselves up, and removing streamers of hay from their own persons and those of Bloody and Bess, they surveyed the loft and found it as attractive as ever, with its one cobwebby window looking on Fish Street and its fascinating smell of well-kept horses, hay and sunshine. . . . That sunshine has a scent, and that it lives in hay long after it is cut and dried and brown as autumn leaves, all the Leigh children firm
ly maintained. It is not a scent that can be defined but when you smell it you think instantly of gorse and the song of the lark. . . . There was real as well as preserved sunshine in the loft, that fell through the cracks in the roof in long rays in which the motes of dust hopped and skipped with a gaiety that warmed the very cockles of the heart. Sparrows built under the eaves of the loft and their chatter filled it all day long. The generous load of hay that had been brought from the Christ Church meadows last summer had dwindled during the winter, so that most of the floor space was left free and made a fine dancing floor.

  Meg and Joan danced here daily. Laying aside their cloaks and Bloody and Bess they picked up their skirts on either side and curtseyed gravely to each other, pointing their booted feet with as much delicacy as was possible under the circumstances. They went carefully and seriously through the steps of the stately pavane that they had picked up from watching Great-Aunt teach them to Joyeuce and Grace. Their chubby faces were composed in earnest gravity and their eyes had a faraway look. Between the fingers and thumbs that held their rough homespun skirts they could feel the softness of yellow satin, the chattering sparrows were the players of lute and viol and virginal and the slanting rays of light that touched their fair hair to gold fell from the hundreds of candles burning round Christ Church hall.

  It was while they were dancing that they heard again that exciting sound of pipes and drums and ringing bells. At first it was only a faraway sound, at one with the music of their imagination, but gradually it grew louder and their pattering feet began to keep time with it, and then it became a regular uproar, drowning the chatter of the sparrows and the hissing sound that Diggory was making down below.

  “The morris dancers!” shrieked Meg.

  “Coming down Fish Street!” yelled Joan.

  They dashed to the window, pushed it open and leaned out. Down from the town that glorious crowd came dancing, a stream of color that washed up against the walls on either side as though it would lift up the houses and carry them with it. The merrymakers were more uproarious than ever now, for they had been on the go for some hours, imbibing cakes and ale all the time, and their enjoyment was absolutely irre­sistible. The twins leaned further and further out of their window, squeaking excitedly, watching the figures of fairy tale and legend passing by under their very noses. . . . The Men in Green, Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Little John, Maid Marian, the Queen of the May, the Fool, the Hobby Horse, the Dragon, and that hero of the best fairy tales, the Younger Son. . . . It was this last character who attracted the twins most of all because though they had heard about him so often, following his career over and over again as they sat by the fire on winter evenings listening to Joyeuce’s bedtime stories, they had never actually seen him before, and now they found that he looked exactly as he ought to look: ragged and dirty but jolly and laughing, and such a gentleman that, after a bath, he would have been a fit mate for any princess. . . . The twins knew he was a prince in disguise because of a certain royalty in his bearing; he moved as a man moves whose reason controls his body and whose immortal spirit has climbed up far enough to sit enthroned as king of his reason. . . . Where was he going, they wondered. To London to be Lord Mayor? Out of South Gate and up into Bagley Forest to kill giants? Or far away into the blue distance to look for a crock of gold buried at the foot of the rainbow?

  Wherever it was it seemed to the twins that it must be the most exciting place in the world. Why shouldn’t they go there too? Why must they, because they were Well Born, be shut out from all the fun in life? Why could not they too join that glorious dancing colored crowd and go with it over the edge of the world into fairyland? They never had any need to speak their thoughts to each other, for their spiritual nearness was so great that they were practically one child; what one thought the other thought, and what one did the other did, and so instantaneously that there was hardly time for others to notice the quick leaping of thought from mind to mind, or to see more than a tiny chink of daylight between the ballooning skirts as one bustling little body followed the other into action. So now it was as one child that they took a firmer hold on Bloody and Bess, leaned out of the window and yelled to the people below, “Lift us down! Lift us down!”

  Some obliging apprentices did so, one boy standing on the back of another and handing the twins down to a third, who placed the fat little creatures firmly upon the cobbles and pulled down their petticoats with great kindness and condescension.

  “Thank you, sirs,” panted the twins. “Thank you very much, sirs,” and were instantly absorbed into the crowd like drops of water into the ocean.

  Faithful, clinging to the tail of the Dragon and reeling over the cobbles drunk with color and noise and excitement, was astonished when he looked down and saw two fat little girls with voluminous dark blue skirts, white aprons and caps, dolls clutched in their free hands and round pansy faces turned up to him in unconcealed adoration. . . . Faithful, adored by two females for the first time in his life, turned a bright pink.

  “Where are we going?” asked Meg. “To London Town?”

  “I don’t think so,” gasped Faithful in some confusion. “I’ve just come from there.”

  “Let’s look for a crock of gold at the foot of the rainbow,” panted Joan.

  “Would you like a crock of gold?” inquired Meg, looking up into Faithful’s face as she pattered along beside him.

  “More than anything else in the world,” he gasped.

  “We’ll find it then,” announced Joan, and the pace at which they were going having now robbed all three of breath the thing seemed settled.

  At the South Gate of the city the cavalcade was brought to a full stop for further uproarious refreshment. Cakes were again thrown out of the windows and tankards of ale carried out of the houses from beneath the branches of may above the doorways. No one seemed to question the presence of the two fat little girls and their dolls among the May-Day crowd. They were quite in place among those fairy-tale people. They were sat up astride the Dragon’s tail and given cakes to eat, and even sips out of Robin Hood’s tankard of ale. . . . Sips that went to their heads at once, so that they rolled about on top of the Dragon, squeaking with ecstasy, laughing so much that their eyes disappeared into rolls of fat, and kicking their short legs among their voluminous petticoats in a way that would have turned Joyeuce pale with horror had she seen.

  Then suddenly they had turned round and were off again, drums thundering, bells ringing, handkerchiefs fluttering and feet pattering, streaming back up Fish Street like spring let loose.

  As they went a shower passed over them, but the two little girls, clinging to the Younger Son while he in turn clung to the Dragon’s tail, did not care in the least; for it did not seem like real rain; it was like the rain that falls in fairy tales, lovely crystal drops that only refreshed without soiling the flower-like figures it touched, and quite cleared away the fumes of ale from little girls’ brains. It swung away on the wings of the west wind and the sun came out again, lighting every dancing figure to a dazzling blaze of color, washing the wet cobbles with silver and turning every thread of raindrops on windowsill and gable to a string of diamonds.

  “The rainbow!” squeaked Meg.

  It shone ahead of them, one end of it planted firmly in the heart of the town and the other disappearing into the sailing mass of cloud that had given them their shower.

  “Come on!” squeaked Joan, pulling at Faithful’s jerkin and bouncing uphill at a great pace. “Come on! Come on!”

  Faithful came on, by now so bewildered by fatigue and noise that he hardly knew where he was or what he was doing; indeed grown man of fourteen though he was he almost believed himself to have fallen head over heels out of the world of reality into that fairy world whose figures surrounded him. . . . The little girls one on each side of him believed themselves to be in it, and perhaps their faith was contagious.

  The rain was falling again, though the s
un still shone. The Fair Gate of Christ Church floated by in a golden mist and he found they had reached the heart of the town again, a place where four ways met, and had swerved to the right, back once more into the High Street. Looking up through the rain and the sun he saw the sign of the Mitre Inn swinging over his head, with above it the beautiful outline of a gabled roof, and, springing straight up from the roof into the sky, the dazzling curve of the rainbow. He let go of the Dragon’s tail and stood stock-still, gazing at it. He could not help himself. It was the loveliest rainbow he had ever seen.

  The wide-open inn door, yawning like the black mouth of a cavern beneath the swinging sign, was absorbing the fairy-tale figures. One by one they danced in and were lost in the darkness: the morris dancers, the drummers, the pipers, Robin Hood, Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, the Queen of the May, the Hobby Horse and the Dragon; they were gone and only the rainbow remained, springing from the roof of the inn, glowing more and more brightly as though it had absorbed into itself the vanished colors of fairyland.

  Faithful might have come to himself at this point, he had indeed already raised his ragged sleeve to wipe the sweat off his forehead and the dreams out of his eyes, but the twins had not returned to normal and had no intention of doing so for a long while yet. “Come on!” they cried, pulling at him. “The rainbow went right down through the roof. The crock’s inside! Come on!”

  They dragged him over the threshold into the cool, ale-scented darkness of the stone-flagged hall beyond. To their right a door shut off a tumult of sound that was the merrymakers sitting down to a dinner of roast beef to which the ceaseless absorption of cakes and ale through-out the morning had been a mere preliminary. But the twins knew better than to go in there. The crock of gold, they knew, was always buried deep down, and deep down being associated in their minds with darkness they made instantly for the place where the shadows were deepest. . . . Under the old oak stairs that led up to the gallery above.