II

In the part of Lincolnshire that is a little to the northeastward of

Stamford was a tract of country that had been granted to the monks of St

Radigund's at Dover by William the Conqueror. These monks had drained

this land many centuries before, leaving the superintendence of the work

at first to priors by them appointed, and afterwards, when the dykes,

ditches, and flood walls were all made, to knights and poor gentlemen,

their tenants, who farmed the land and kept up the defences against

inundations, paying scot and lot to a bailiff and water-wardens and

jurats, just as was done on the Romney marshes by the bailiff and jurats

of that level.

And one of these tenants, holding two hundred acres in a simple fee from

St Radigund's for a hundred and fifty years back, had been always a man

of the name of Hall. It was an Edward Hall that Mary Lascelles had

married when she was a maid at the Duchess of Norfolk's. This Edward

Hall was then a squire, a little above the condition of a groom, in the

Duchess's service. His parents dwelled still on the farm which was

called Neot's End, because it was in the angle of the great dyke called

St Neot's and the little sewer where St Radigund's land had its boundary

stone.

But in the troublesome days of the late Privy Seal, Edward Hall had

informed Throckmorton the spy of a conspiracy and rising that was

hatching amongst the Radigund's men a little before the Pilgrimage of

Grace, when all the north parts rose. For the Radigund's men cried out

and murmured amongst themselves that if the Priory was done away with

there would be an end of their easy and comfortable tenancy. Their rents

had been estimated and appointed a great number of years before, when

all goods and the produce of the earth were very low priced. And the

tenants said that if now the King took their lands to himself or gave

them to some great lord, very heavy burdens would be laid upon them and

exacted; whereas in some years under easy priors the monks forgot their

distant territory, and in bad seasons they took no rents at all. And

even under hard and exacting priors the monks could take no more than

their rentals, which were so small. They said, too, that the King and

Thomas Cromwell would make them into heathen Greeks and turn their

children to be Saracens. So these Radigund's men meditated a rising and

conspiracy.

But, because Edward Hall informed Throckmorton of what was agate, a

posse was sent into that country, and most of the men were hanged and

their lands all taken from them. Those that survived from the jailing

betook themselves to the road, and became sturdy beggars, so that many

of them too came to the gallows tree.

Most of the land was granted to the Sieur Throckmorton with the abbey's

buildings and tithe barns. But the Halls' farm and another of near three

hundred acres were granted to Edward Hall. Then it was that Edward Hall

could marry and take his wife, Mary Lascelles, down into Lincolnshire to

Neot's End. But when the Pilgrimage of Grace came, and the great risings

all over Lincolnshire, very early the rioters came to Neot's End, and

they burned the farm and the byres, they killed all the beasts or drove

them off, they trampled down the corn and laid waste the flax fields.

And, between two willow trees along the great dyke, they set a pole, and

from it they hanged Edward Hall over the waters, so that he dried and

was cured like a ham in the smoke from his own stacks.

Then Mary Lascelles' case was a very miserable one; for she had to fend

for the aged father and bedridden mother of Edward Hall, and there were

no beasts left but only a few geese and ducks that the rebels could not

lay their hands on. And the only home that they had was the farmhouse

that was upon Edward Hall's other farm, and that they had let fall

nearly into ruin. And for a long time no men would work for her.

But at last, after the rebellion was pitifully ended, a few hinds came

to her, and she made a shift. And it was better still after Privy Seal

fell, for then came Throckmorton the spy into his lands, and he brought

with him carpenters and masons and joiners to make his house fair, and

some of these men he lent to Mary Hall. But it had been prophesied by a

wise woman in those parts that no land that had been taken from the

monks would prosper. And, because all the jurats, bailiffs, and

water-wardens had been hanged either on the one part or the other and no

more had been appointed, at about that time the sewers began to clog up,

the lands to swamp, murrain and fluke to strike the beasts and the

sheep, and night mists to blight the grain and the fruit blossoms. So

that even Throckmorton had little good of his wealth and lands.

Thus one morning to Mary Hall, who stood before her door feeding her

geese and ducks, there came a little boy running to say that men-at-arms

stood on the other side of the dyke that was very swollen and grey and

broad. And they shouted that they came from the Queen's Highness, and

would have a boat sent to ferry them over.

The colour came into Mary Hall's pale face, for even there she had heard

that her former bedfellow was come to be Queen. And at times even she

had thought to write to the Queen to help her in her misery. But always

she had been afraid, because she thought that the Queen might remember

her only as one that had wronged her childish innocence. For she

remembered that the maids' dormitory at the old Duchess's had been no

cloister of pure nuns. So that, at best, she was afraid, and she sent

her yard-worker and a shepherd a great way round to fetch the larger

boat of two to ferry over the Queen's men. Then she went indoors to redd

up the houseplace and to attire herself.

To the old farmstead, that was made of wood hung over here and there

with tilework with a base of bricks, she had added a houseplace for the

old folk to sit all day. It was built of wattles that had had clay cast

over them, and was whitened on the outside and thatched nearly down to

the ground like any squatter's hut; it had cupboards of wood nearly all

round it, and beneath the cupboards were lockers worn smooth with men

sitting upon them, after the Dutch fashion--for there in Lincolnshire

they had much traffic with the Dutch. There was a great table made of

one slab of a huge oak from near Boston. Here they all ate. And above

the ingle was another slab of oak from the same tree. Her little old

step-mother sat in a stuff chair covered with a sheep-skin; she sat

there night and day, shivering with the shaking palsy. At times she let

out of her an eldritch shriek, very like the call of a hedgehog; but she

never spoke, and she was fed with a spoon by a little misbegotten son of

Edward Hall's. The old step-father sat always opposite her; he had no

use of his legs, and his head was always stiffly screwed round towards

the door as if he were peering, but that was the rheumatism. To atone

for his wife's dumbness, he chattered incessantly whenever anyone was on

that floor; but because he spoke always in Lincolnshire, Mary Hall could

scarce understand him, and indeed she had long ceased to listen. He

spoke of forgotten floods and ploughings, ancient fairs, the boundaries

of fields long since flooded over, of a visit to Boston that King Edward

IV had made, and of how he, for his fair speech and old lineage, had

been chosen of all the Radigund's men to present into the King's hands

three silver horseshoes. Behind his back was a great dresser with railed

shelves, having upon them a little pewter ware and many wooden bowls for

the hinds' feeding. A door on the right side, painted black, went down

into the cellar beneath the old house. Another door, of bars of iron

with huge locks from the old monastery, went into the old house where

slept the maids and the hinds. This was always open by day but locked in

the dark hours. For the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went

savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master's

throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare

the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that

their poor cellar afforded. The floor was of stamped clay, wet and

sweating but covered with rushes, so that the place had a mouldering

smell. Behind the heavy door there were huge bolts and crossbars against

robbers: the raftered ceiling was so low that it touched her hair when

she walked across the floor. The windows had no glass but were filled

with a thin reddish sheep-skin like parchment. Before the stairway was a

wicket gate to keep the dogs--of whom there were many, large and fierce,

to protect them alike from robbers and the hinds--to keep the dogs from

going into the upper room.

Each time that Mary Hall came into this home of hers her heart sank

lower; for each day the corner posts gave sideways a little more, the

cupboard bulged, the doors were loth to close or open. And more and more

the fields outside were inundated, the lands grew sour, the sheep would

not eat or died of the fluke.

'And surely,' she would cry out at times, 'God created me for other

guesswork than this!'

At nights she was afraid, and shivered at the thought of the fens and

the black and trackless worlds all round her; and the ravens croaked,

night-hawks screamed, the dog-foxes cried out, and the flames danced

over the swampy grounds. Her mirror was broken on the night that they

hanged her husband: she had never had another but the water in her

buckets, so that she could not tell whether she had much aged or whether

she were still brown-haired and pink-cheeked, and she had forgotten how

to laugh, and was sure that there were crow's-feet about her eyelids.

Her best gown was all damp and mouldy in the attic that was her bower.

She made it meet as best she could, and indeed she had had so little fat

living, sitting at the head of her table with a whip for unruly hinds

and louts before her--so little fat living that she could well get into

her wedding-gown of yellow cramosyn. She smoothed her hair back into her

cord hood that for so long had not come out of its press. She washed her

face in a bucket of water: that and the press and her bed with grey

woollen curtains were all the furnishing her room had. The straw of the

roof caught in her hood when she moved, and she heard her old

father-in-law cackling to the serving-maids through the cracks of the

floor.

When she came down there were approaching, across the field before the

door, six men in scarlet and one in black, having all the six halberds

and swords, and one a little banner, but the man in black had a sword

only. Their horses were tethered in a clump on the farther side of the

dyke. Within the room the serving-maids were throwing knives and pewter

dishes with a great din on to the table slab. They dropped

drinking-horns and the salt-cellar itself all of a heap into the rushes.

The grandfather was cackling from his chair; a hen and its chickens ran

screaming between the maids' feet. Then Lascelles came in at the

doorway.