THE CANKERED OAK GALL
That Walter was no fool, though that him list
To change his wif, for it was for the best;
For she is fairer, so they demen all,
Than his Griselde, and more tendre of age.
CHAUCER, _The Clerke’s Tale_.
IT was on an early autumn evening when the belfry stood out beautiful
against the sunset sky, and the storks with their young fledglings were
wheeling homewards to their nest on the roof, that Leonard was lying on
the deep oriel window of the guest-chamber, and Grisell sat opposite to
him with a lace pillow on her lap, weaving after the pattern of Wilton
for a Church vestment.
“The storks fly home,” he said. “I marvel whether we have still a home
in England, or ever shall have one!”
“I heard tell that the new King of France is friendly to the Queen and
her son,” said Grisell.
“He is near of kin to them, but he must keep terms with this old Duke who
sheltered him so long. Still, when he is firm fixed on his throne he may
yet bring home our brave young Prince and set the blessed King on his
throne once more.”
“Ah! You love the King.”
“I revere him as a saint, and feel as though I drew my sword in a holy
cause when I fight for him,” said Leonard, raising himself with
glittering eyes.
“And the Queen?”
“Queen Margaret! Ah! by my troth she is a dame who makes swords fly out
of their scabbards by her brave stirring words and her noble mien. Her
bright eyes and undaunted courage fire each man’s heart in her cause till
there is nothing he would not do or dare, ay, or give up for her, and
those she loves better than herself, her husband, and her son.”
“You have done so,” faltered Grisell.
“Ah! have I not? Mistress, I would that you bore any other name. You
mind me of the bane and grief of my life.”
“Verily?” uttered Grisell with some difficulty.
“Yea! Tell me, mistress, have I ever, when my brains were astray,
uttered any name?”
“By times, even so!” she confessed.
“I thought so! I deemed at times that she was here! I have never told
you of the deed that marred my life.”
“Nay,” she said, letting her bobbins fall though she drooped her head,
not daring to look him in the face.
“I was a mere lad, a page in the Earl of Salisbury’s house. A good man
was he, but the jealousies and hatreds of the nobles had begun long ago,
and the good King hoped, as he ever hoped, to compose them. So he
brought about a compact between my father and the Dacre of Whitburn for a
marriage between their children, and caused us both to be bred up in the
Lady of Salisbury’s household, meaning, I trow, that we should enter into
solemn contract when we were of less tender age; but there never was
betrothal; and before any fit time for it had come, I had the mishap to
have the maid close to me—she was ever besetting and running after
me—when by some prank, unhappily of mine, a barrel of gunpowder blew up
and wellnigh tore her to pieces. My father came, and her mother, an
unnurtured, uncouth woman, who would have forced me to wed her on the
spot, but my father would not hear of it, more especially as there were
then two male heirs, so that I should not have gained her grim old Tower
and bare moorlands. All held that I was not bound to her; the Queen
herself owned it, and that whatever the damsel might be, the mother was a
mere northern she-bear, whose child none would wish to wed, and of the
White Rose besides. So the King had me to his school at Eton, and then I
was a squire of my Lord of Somerset, and there I saw my fairest Eleanor
Audley. The Queen and the Duke of Somerset—rest his soul—would have had
us wedded. On the love day, when all walked together to St. Paul’s, and
the King hoped all was peace, we spoke our vows to one another in the
garden of Westminster. She gave me this rook, I gave her the jewel of my
cap; I read her true love in her eyes, like our limpid northern brooks.
Oh! she was fair, fairer than yonder star in the sunset, but her father,
the Lord Audley, was absent, and we could go no farther; and therewith
came the Queen’s summons to her liegemen to come and arrest Salisbury at
Bloreheath. There never was rest again, as you know. My father was
slain at Northampton, I yielded me to young Falconberg; but I found the
Yorkists had set headsmen to work as though we had been traitors, and I
was begging for a priest to hear my shrift, when who should come into the
foul, wretched barn where we lay awaiting the rope, but old Dacre of
Whitburn. He had craved me from the Duke of York, it seems, and gained
my life on what condition he did not tell me, but he bound my feet
beneath my horse, and thus bore me out of the camp for all the first day.
Then, I own he let me ride as became a knight, on my word of honour not
to escape; but much did I marvel whether it were revenge or ransom that
he wanted; and as to ransom, all our gold had all been riding on
horseback with my poor father. What he had devised I knew not nor
guessed till late at night we were at his rat-hole of a Tower, where I
looked for a taste of the dungeons; but no such thing. The choice that
the old robber—”
Grisell could not repress a dissentient murmur of indignation.
“Ah, well, you are from Sunderland, and may know better of him. But any
way the choice he left me was the halter that dangled from the roof and
his grisly daughter!”
“Did you see her?” Grisell contrived to ask.
“I thank the Saints, no. To hear of her was enow. They say she has a
face like a cankered oak gall or a rotten apple lying cracked on the
ground among the wasps. Mayhap though you have seen her.”
Grisell could truly say, in a half-choked voice, “Never since she was a
child,” for no mirror had come in her way since she was at Warwick House.
She was upborne by the thought that it would be a relief to him not to
see anything like a rotten apple. He went on—
“My first answer and first thought was rather death—and of my word to my
Eleanor. Ah! you marvel to see me here now. I felt as though nothing
would make me a recreant to her. Her sweet smile and shining eyes rose
up before me, and half the night I dreamt of them, and knew that I would
rather die than be given to another and be false to them. Ah! but you
will deem me a recreant. With the waking hours I thought of my King and
Queen. My elder brother died with Lord Shrewsbury in Gascony, and after
me the next heir is a devoted Yorkist who would turn my castle, the key
of Cleveland, against the Queen. I knew the defeat would make faithful
swords more than ever needful to her, and that it was my bounden duty, if
it were possible, to save my life, my sword, and my lands for her.
Mistress, you are a good woman. Did I act as a coward?”
“You offered up yourself,” said Grisell, looking up.
“So it was! I gave my consent, on condition that I should be free at
once. We were wedded in the gloom—ere sunrise—a thunderstorm coming up,
which so darkened the church that if she had been a peerless beauty, fair
as Cressid herself, I could not have seen her, and even had she been
beauty itself, nought can to me be such as my Eleanor. So I was free to
gallop off through the storm for Wearmouth when the rite was over, and
none pursued me, for old Whitburn was a man of his word. Mine uncle held
the marriage as nought, but next I made for the Queen at Durham, and, if
aught could comfort my spirit, it was her thanks, and assurances that it
would cost nothing but the dispensation of the Pope to set me free. So
said Dr. Morton, her chaplain, one of the most learned men in England. I
told him all, and he declared that no wedlock was valid without the
heartfelt consent of each party.”
“Said he so?” Poor Grisell could not repress the inquiry.
“Yea, and that though no actual troth had passed between me and Lord
Audley’s daughter, yet that the vows we had of our own free will
exchanged would be quite enough to annul my forced marriage.”
“You think it evil in me, the more that it was I who had defaced that
countenance. I thought of that! I would have endowed her with all I had
if she would set me free. I trusted yet so to do, when, for my
misfortune as well as hers, the day of Wakefield cut off her father and
brother, and a groom was taken who was on his way to Sendal with tidings
of the other brother’s death. Then, what do the Queen and Sir Pierre de
Brezé but command me to ride off instantly to claim Whitburn Tower! In
vain did I refuse; in vain did I plead that if I were about to renounce
the lady it were unknightly to seize on her inheritance. They would not
hear me. They said it would serve as a door to England, and that it must
be secured for the King, or the Dacres would hold it for York. They bade
me on my allegiance, and commanded me to take it in King Henry’s name, as
though it were a mere stranger’s castle, and gave me a crew of hired
men-at-arms, as I verily believe to watch over what I did. But ere I
started I made a vow in Dr. Morton’s hands, to take it only for the King,
and so soon as the troubles be ended to restore it to the lady, when our
marriage is dissolved. As it fell out, I never saw the lady. Her mother
lay a-dying, and there was no summoning her. I bade them show her all
due honour, hoisted my pennon, rode on to my uncle at Wearmouth, and
thence to mine own lands, whence I joined the Queen on her way to London.
As you well know, all was over with our cause at Towton Moor; and it was
on my way northward after the deadly fight that half a dozen of the
men-at-arms brought me tidings, not only that the Gilsland Dacres had, as
had been feared, claimed the castle, but that this same so-called lady of
mine had been shown to deal in sorcery and magic. They sent for a wise
man from Shields, but she found by her arts what they were doing, fled,
and was slain by an arquebuss in the form of a hare!
“Do you believe it was herself in sooth?” asked Grisell.
“Ah! you are bred by Master Lambert, who, like his kind, hath little
faith in sorcery, but verily, old women do change into hares. All have
known them.”
“She was scarce old,” Grisell trusted herself to say.
“That skills not. They said she made strange cures by no rules of art.
Ay, and said her prayers backward, and had unknown books.”
“Did your squire tell this, or was it only the men?”
“My squire! Poor Pierce, I never saw him. He was made captive by a
White Rose party, so far as I could hear, and St. Peter knows where he
may be. But look you, the lady, for all her foul looks, had cast her
spell over him, and held him as bound and entranced as by a true love, so
that he was ready to defend her beauty—her beauty! look you!—against all
the world in the lists. He was neither to have nor to hold if any man
durst utter a word against her! And it was the same with her tirewoman
and her own old squire.”
“Then, sir, you deem that in slaying the hare, the arquebusier rid you of
your witch wife?” There was a little bitterness, even scorn, in the
tone.
“I say not so, mistress. I know men-at-arms too well to credit all they
say, and I was on my way to inquire into the matter and learn the truth
when these same Dacres fell on me; and that I lie here is due to you and
good Master Lambert. Many a woman whose face is ill favoured has learnt
to keep up her power by unhallowed arts, and if it be so with her whom in
my boyish prank I have marred, Heaven forgive her and me. If I can ever
return I shall strive to trace her life or death, without which mayhap I
could scarce win my true bride.”
Grisell could bear no more of this crushing of her hopes. She crept away
murmuring something about the vesper bell at the convent chapel near, for
it was there that she could best kneel, while thoughts and strength and
resolution came to her.
The one thing clear to her was that Sir Leonard did not view her, or
rather the creature at Whitburn Tower, as his wife, but as a hag, mayhap
a sorceress from whom he desired to be released, and that his love to
Eleanor Audley was as strong as ever.
Should she make herself known and set him free? Nay, but then what would
become of him? He still needed her care, which he accepted as that of a
nurse, and while he believed himself to be living on the means supplied
by his uncle at Wearmouth to the Apothecary, this had soon been
exhausted, and Grisell had partly supplied what was wanting from Ridley’s
bag, partly from what the old squire had sent her as the fishermen’s
dues; and she was perceiving how to supplement this, or replace it by her
own skill, by her assistance to Lambert in his concoctions, and likewise
by her lace-work, which was of a device learnt at Wilton and not known at
Bruges. There was something strangely delightful to her in thus
supporting Leonard even though he knew it not, and she determined to
persist in her present course till there was some change. Suppose he
heard of Eleanor’s marriage to some one else! Then? But, ah, the
cracked apple face. She must find a glass, or even a pail of water, and
judge! Or the Lancastrian fortunes might revive, he might go home in
triumph, and then would she give him her ring and her renunciation, and
either earn enough to obtain entrance to a convent or perhaps be accepted
for the sake of her handiwork!
Any way the prospect was dreary, and the affection which grew upon her as
Leonard recovered only made it sadder. To reveal herself would only be
misery to him, and in his present state of mind would deprive him of all
he needed, since he would never be base enough to let her toil for him
and then cast her off.
She thought it best, or rather she yearned so much for counsel, that at
night, over the fire in the stove, she told what Leonard had said, to
which her host listened with the fatherly sympathy that had grown up
towards her. He was quite determined against her making herself known.
The accusation of sorcery really alarmed him. He said that to be known
as the fugitive heiress of Whitburn who had bewitched the young squire
and many more might bring both her and himself into imminent danger; and
there were Lancastrian exiles who might take up the report. Her only
safety was in being known, to the few who did meet her, as the
convent-bred maiden whose home had been destroyed, and who was content to
gain a livelihood as the assistant whom his wife’s infirmity made
needful. As to Sir Leonard, the knight’s own grace and gratitude had
endeared him, as well as the professional pleasure of curing him, and for
the lady’s sake he should still be made welcome.
So matters subsided. No one knew Grisell’s story except Master Lambert
and her Father Confessor, and whether he really knew it, through the
medium of her imperfect French, might be doubted. Even Clemence, though
of course aware of her identity, did not know all the details, since no
one who could communicate with her had thought it well to distress her
with the witchcraft story.
Few came beyond the open booth, which served as shop, though sometimes
there would be admitted to walk in the garden and converse with Master
Groot, a young Englishman who wanted his counsel on giving permanence and
clearness to the ink he was using in that new art of printing which he
was trying to perfect, but which there were some who averred to be a work
of the Evil One, imparted to the magician Dr. Faustus.