Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 463
“Cousin Meg!” he began, and then he stammered with the liquor that was in him. But he achieved again an owlish gravity and a sweet reason. His proposition was that, still, she should marry the Decies and that he himself would wed the Lady Rohtraut so that he could defend her interests the better. And so they could all live there comfortably together, for it was better to live in one great family than scattered here and there. The Lady Margaret was already laughing, but he continued with a great gravity, that, as for the Decies, he loved her so desperately he did not dare to come nigh her, but, now he had no need to conceal it, was rolling about the carpet in the great hall, bellowing with the pain of his passion.
“Well, I have been aware of it this many months,” the lady said, “and it is a very comfortable love that will not let him come nigh me. I pray it may continue.”
At that Vesey of Wall Houses fell to laughing.
He tried to explain that he had come to her with the idea that she might be more apt to wed the Decies if she knew that, by his wedding the Lady Rohtraut, the Castle should have for its head and guidance, such a sober, answerable, prudent and valorous head as himself.
“So the cage of apes made the parrot their captain when they went a-sailing to the Indies,” she said, and then he laughed altogether.
“Nay, indeed Meg, sweetmouthed Meg,” he said, “will ye still keep troth to the monstrous wicked, idolatrous, blaspheming lording called Lovell that dances with fair naked witches and all the other horrid things that we would all do if we could? Consider your wretched soul!”
But his liquorish manner showed that he believed nothing of that witches’ dance, and indeed he was pretty sure that the Young Lovell had been carried off by the outlaw Elliotts that had been seen near that place, and that he would return and send them ransom.
“Friend Henry,” the Lady answered, “good Sir Henry, if my love, who is a gallant gentleman, would not dance and courteously devise with beautiful women, naked or how they were, I should think the less of him supposing they entreated it. But I do not believe that he did this thing such as the calling up of succubi, however fair, since his desire for me only was so great, and that ye well wis.”
“Ah well,” the Vesey sighed, “sweet mouth that ye are, if it was I that had the ordering of this Castle I should not let you go so easily.”
“That I well believe and take it kindly,” the lady said.
“But, being as it is,” he continued, “the poltroons, my brother and Cullerford and their wives and the Decies and the lawyer tremble so at the thought of your kinsmen camped on Budle Crags that they are minded to open the gates on this pretty bird. But well I know that it is a lie, though they will not hear me.”
“In truth there is a monstrous great host awaits the waving of my kerchief,” she said, “with nine culverins planted there and all; and ye know what the culverins did to Bamburgh?”
He closed one eye slowly and then he sighed. “Well, I must take you down,” he said, “I am a reckless devil, woe is me, and if there are no Widdringtons and the rest there now, I know that Wall Houses would burn to-morrow and I should hang when they caught me.... But oh, I repent me to let you go....” And he regarded her with very amorous and melancholy laughing eyes.
“Friend Henry,” she laughed, “if you will open the doors for me, for me, for your good behaviour you may kiss me twice, once here and once at the gate, for I dare say, if the truth be known, though you are too much drunk to be clear and not drunk enough to speak the truth, you are more the friend of me and of my love than any here.”
“Well, they are a curst crew,” he said, “and I will not hang with them; only, where there are pickings I must have my poke, and that is good Latin.”
So, approaching and lifting his legs, as high as he might in the politer fashion of the day, though once in his progress he fell against the wall, he took her by the hand and kissed her on the cheek. She said she wondered how a man could make himself smell so like a beast with wine, and so he led her forth from the room, after he had waved away the guards and after she had taken leave of the Lady Rohtraut who spoke never a word. And that was as much as Elizabeth Campstones knew of her at that time, except that she promised not to rest a night in bed until she had roused all the Dacres of the North to come to her aunt’s assistance.
But afterwards Elizabeth heard that the Vesey of Wall Houses had conducted the lady very courteously, not only to the gate, but, having found her a horse and guards, to her very tower of Glororem. And on the way he gave her very good counsel as to how she should aid her aunt. But that had proved a very difficult matter, for the Dacres themselves, in those disturbed and critical times, lay under such clouds of suspicion that the best of them were detained in London near the King and his court; so that, if they were not actually in the Tower or some other prison, they might as well have been. As for coming to rescue the Lady Rohtraut by force, they could not do it and, as for aiding her by any process of law, that was a matter well-nigh impossible for its slowness and because the Knight of Cullerford had stolen all her deeds and titles. Moreover, all the middle part of Yorkshire was in a state of rebellion, so that it was very difficult for messengers to come through, either the one way or the other. It is true that a lawyer from Durham came to the Castle and sought an interview with the lady on behalf of the Prince Palatine, but they pelted him from the archway with dung at first and then with flint-stones so that they never heard what his errand was. And although many in that neighbourhood would gladly have set upon the Castle and sacked it, it was difficult to find a leader and head. For the Percy was afraid, not knowing how the law was or how he should best please the King, and the Nevilles were in the South, so that there was no one left of great eminence.
The Lady Margaret and some young squires of degree raised a force of a couple of hundred or so and began to march on the Castle. But before they reached it the men-at-arms repented, saying that they would not be led by a woman and a parcel of beardless boys; and when the Lady Margaret beat them with a whip these men shrugged their shoulders and rode back the faster to their homes. She had two of them led to the gallows and the ropes round their necks till they fell on their knees and sued pardons. But that did not mend things much and there the business sat.
The Lady Rohtraut came to herself one night and knew it was no dream. And she would have letters written to the Lord of Croy in Germany, that was her mother’s father, that he might come to her rescue. And no doubt he would have sent ships, though he was a very ancient man. He was a mighty prince, and had taken prisoner, in the old time, Edward Dacre, the Lady Rohtraut’s father, in a battle that his suzerain the Duke of Burgundy, who was of uncertain mind, fought against the English in Flanders. So, waiting in the Castle for his ransom to come, Edward Dacre loved the Duke’s daughter, the Princess Rohtraut, and was beloved by her. And, at the intercession of the Talbot, for the better soldering of a new friendship between the English and the Burgundians, the Duke, though sorely against his will, had given his daughter to Edward Dacre, he being made a baron of England on the day of the wedding. Her mother, the Princess Rohtraut, was still alive and lived with her son, the Lord Dacre, in London. But between mother and daughter there was a lawsuit about some of these very lands that her daughters sought to take from her, and in that way there was no commerce between them.
Thus it was that the Lady Rohtraut was very haughty, and would in no way submit to the importunities of her daughters and their husbands, for she had the pride of the Dacres and of a Princess of Low Germany. The daughters would still have had her marry the Vesey of Wall Houses, so that they might have the management of her properties, but she answered that for nothing in the world would she do that thing, and that it would be to give them both to Satan. She had the right to an annual dower of 3,000 French crowns and to all the furnishings that had been taken by her husband, upon their marriage, from her Castle at Cramlinton, as well as her houses at Plessey and Killingworth. And she had the right to enter again, her husband being dead, into the possession and administration of those places as well as of her lands by Morpeth.
She was minded to live as a proud and wealthy dowager and she was not minded to abate one jot of her rights and possessions to buy her freedom, though her daughters and their husbands came day by day and clamoured to her to do it.
So there abode, like a prisoner in that little room, the Lady Rohtraut till that hour. All of her servants were driven away from her, and she had only Elizabeth Campstones to dress and undress her: and of linen she had so little that the old woman must come forth and wash it every three days. And, when she brought it forth, the daughters searched it into the very seams to see that there was no letter to the Duke of Croy or to the Dacres concealed within it. And the Lady Rohtraut fell ill, and she thought her daughters had poisoned her with a fig laid down in honey, till the doctor cured her with another such fig, the one poison, if it were a poison, driving out the other.
PART II
I
So the Young Lovell sat listening to the old Elizabeth in the sun that grew hottish amongst the flowering bushes. He thought to himself nigh all the time, and still every second thought was of that lady.
His thoughts went like this —
There could be no doubt that the law would not help him to retake his Castle; but he longed for her red, crooked, smiling lips. He must therefore get together a band and besiege that place; and at the thought of climbing through a breach in great towers whilst the cannon spoke and the fascines fell into the ditches, arrows clittered on harness, greek fire rustled down, and the great banners drooped over the tumult, his blood leapt for a moment. But her hair he remembered in its filaments and it blotted out the blue sea that lay below his feet and was more golden than the gold of the broom flowers and the gorse that surrounded him. He thought that, first, he must have the sanction of the Bishop Palatine and his absolution from any magic he might in innocence have witnessed; but, in longing for her queer smile, he could scarcely keep from springing to his feet. He knew he must be moving over the hills, but the remembrance of her crossed breasts with her girdle kept him languishing there in the hot sun as if his limbs had lost their young strength.
So, when the old woman had finished her story, she sat looking at him with a queer glance. He spoke no word until she could not but say —
“Master, where did ye bide? Was it with the bonny witch-wives?”
He contemplated her face expressionlessly.
“Tell me truly, old woman,” he said, “where will ye say that I did bide, to save my name?” for he knew that this old woman could tell a very good tale.
“I will say Gib Elliott took ye up into Chevyside and held ye there in an old tower, till a scrivener of Embro’ could be found to take your bond for a thousand marks. And ye shall send fifty crowns to Gib by me — he was my mother’s sister’s foster son — and he shall say that so it was.”
“Say even that,” he answered, without either joy or sorrow in his tone.
“Oh my fair son,” she cried out in an unhappy and lamenting voice, “I knew ye had been among the witch-wives; and shall your face, a young comely face of a golden lording....”
“What ails my face?” he asked.
“Sirs,” she cried out, “his face is like the very still water of old grey rock-pools, with no dancing before the wind and sun.”
“Even let it be so,” he answered.
“Ay, ye are in a worse case than your dad,” she cried. “All the Ruthvens had these traffics.”
He looked at her hardly.
“My brother Decies was a witch’s son?” he said. “That was my father’s sin that sent him roaming?”
“Of a witch that dressed as a nun and stole into a convent,” she said, and rocked herself woefully where she sat beside her washing board at the edge of the pool. “They found witch marks upon her. They should have drowned the child, but he took it by force and with great oaths and sent it into foreign shires. And that made his sin the heavier.”
“Ah, well!” the Young Lovell said.
“You Ruffyns,” the old woman went on lamenting, “for, call yourselves never so much Lovells, Ruthvens ye will remain, and ye are never of this countryside but of the Red Welsh or the Black Welsh or of some heathen countryside. And always ye have had truck with witches and warlocks. The first of ye that came into these parts was your grandfather’s father and he had a black stone, like a coal but not like a coal. That was given him by a witch that loved him, as she went on the way to the faggots, for they burnt her. And without it, how could he have made his marvellous booties, riding thro’ the land of France, from how ’twas to how ’twas, and sacking the marvellous rich and walled cities? And I had thought to have saved you from these hussies, seeing that you might well be of a better race, your mother being of a German house and the Almains, as all the world tells, being foul and dirty in their lives, but almighty pious so that nine crucifixes in ten that we buy come from there. Therefore as you came first from your mother’s womb I put the fat of good bacon in your mewling mouth, and your sleeves I tied with green ribbons, and I took you to the low shed in the tennis court and rolled you down the roof — and the one thing should have saved you from the fiends and the other from the witches, and the third even from the fairy people. And these things are older than holy water, though you had enough of that....”
“May it save me yet!” the Young Lovell said. “But what I now have to consider is how to take my mother from these people and to get back what is mine own.”
“Aye,” the old woman said, “you were ever a good child to your mother; therefore I had hopes of you. For your sisters, they were all black Ruffyns, bitter and so curst that they had no need for resort to the powers of evil to help them.”
“Tell me truly now, old woman,” her master said, “how long may my mother live and abide the treatment that she now has and not die?”
“Ah,” the old woman lamented, “how altered is now her estate from what it was, who had the finest bower that was to see in the North Country! Not a Percy lady nor any Neville nor any mistress of a Canon of Durham had such a one. Remember the great red curtains there were to the bed, and the painted windows that showed the story of the man without a coat. And the great chest carved with curliecues from Flanders, and the other chest with the figures of holy kings, and the third that was from Almain and stood as high as my head upon twisted pillars and had angels holding candles at each corner. And for what was in the chest — the stores of gowns, the furs of zibelline and of marten, the golden chains joining diamond to diamond and pearl to pearl! ... And now she lieth upon a little pallet, and here, upon these bushes, is drying all the linen that she hath. The one gown of scarlet is all that there is for her back, except for the great slit coat that they have given her for fear that she die of the cold. And her little dog Butterfly is all that she hath for comfort, that sits in her sleeve.... But yet I think she will not die, and it is certain that none of them wish her death that should bring against them the mighty house of Dacre to have her heritage. But day after day they come in, now one, now two, now three and cry out upon her with great and curious words seeking to gar her give them her lands and render up her yearly dower. And so she sits still; and sometimes she gives them back hard words, but most often she says no more than that they shall give her her due and let her go. And so they rave all the more. But I do not think that she will die...”
“And has she never sent word to her own mother?” the Young Lovell asked, “I think that ancient dame could do more than another to save her.”
“I think she is too proud,” the old woman said. “Of the Duke of Croy she has spoken often enough, but of her mother never one word, so that, God forgive me, I had forgotten that she had that mother though it was in her house I saw the first of God His good light three score and twelve years was. For you know that these ladies have never spoken together nor written broad letters since your grandfather Dacre died, and your father, on the day the funeral was, was sacking the castles and houses that were your mother’s inheritance. And the old lady thought they should have been hers; so that to this day she is wealthy enough in gold but hath little or no land and dwells in but a moderate house in the Bailey at Durham, though when her son, the Dacre, is in London she is mostly there herself.”
The Young Lovell stood up upon his legs.
“Then if there is no great haste to save my mother’s life,” he said, “it is the better. I would else very well have hastened to get together twenty or thirty lusty bachelors and so we might have burst into this Castle of mine. But if my mother may stay out a fortnight or a month it is the better. For I will get together money and a host and cannon and so we may make sure.”
“Ay,” the old woman said, “but hasten all ye may for the sake of Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer.”
“Now tell me truly what is this?” her master asked.
The old woman burst out into many ejaculations how that with the haste and her master’s strange looks she did not know what she had told him and what she had missed out.
Certain it was that Richard Bek, Robert Bulmer, and Bertram Bullock held the White Tower for him, the Young Lovell. The others could not come to them for the White Tower stood on a rock twenty yards from the Castle and joined to it by such a narrow stone bridge that it was, as it were, a citadel. It could stand fast though all the rest of the Castle should be taken, having been devised for that purpose. Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer, poor squires, or almost of the degree of yeomen, had always been captains of the White Tower and in it the dead Lord Lovell had kept his marvellous store of gold — as much as four score thousand French crowns, more or less — and all these were theirs still, with such strong cannon as might well batter down the Castle; only Richard Bek would not do this. And to him there had resorted from time to time certain strong fellows that were still faithful to their master, creeping in the night along the narrow bridge into the tower ... such as Richard Raket, the Young Lovell’s groom that had lost his teeth at the fight of Kenchie’s Burn. There might be a matter of twenty-five of them that held it and victualled it by boats from the sea at night.
