Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 6

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In the late autumn of the year 1558, the night, lying over England, was a pall of darkness that shuddered like the ash left over from remembered fires.

The land seemed as if poisoned, like the land of the Atridae, which, we read, was ‘a land of Fire, of thirst, and of delirium’, as if it must still give forth the exhalations of monstrous deeds.

All day long, in the murky, marshy air, strange apparitions had been seen, tall pale flames suspended high up in the air, above the heads of the passing people. They had been seen in Finsbury Fields, in Moorfield, and by a certain Dame Annie Cleres, ‘above the Dog-house’. Passers-by, terrified by these apparitions, had the furtive air and livid faces of ghosts, or seemed like phantoms of the sun that ‘on foggy days hid his head, or appeared with a discoloured face, pale, or dusky, or bloody, as if all Nature were to suffer some agony’.

The people passed silently; and on the brows of some the reflections of those ghosts of flames suspended high above their heads cast a scarlet mark like the brand of Cain. For were not those apparitions of fires the ghosts of the martyrdoms?

The sun hung in the firmament like a lump of blood.

Lit by those flares high up in air, and by that phantom sun, the false saints and prophets went, seeking their own destruction.

No longer did the cries of ‘There are no fires in Hell’, ‘The Millennium is here’, sound in the streets. The falsely illuminated prophets from whose mouths those cries had sounded were gone. The fires of Hell were here. The Millennium was come. But still you could not tell against whom your sleeve brushed in the street. For other madmen walked those streets, lit by the sheet lightnings of the martyrdoms—fleeing from, as they thought, but actually approaching ever nearer to, the flames.

Some denied the Godhead of the Holy Ghost. They would not say ‘God have mercy upon us, miserable sinners’, for the reason that they were not miserable, nor would they have it said that they were. Some would not use the Lord’s Prayer, for they could not pray ‘Thy Kingdom come’, since God’s Kingdom was already come upon earth. Nor could they pray ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, since they were sinless.

These went to join the martyrs in the flames.

But in the night through the streets of London sounded strange wandering cries. Not like the shrieks that arose from the Maryan martyrdoms, that arose from the martyrdoms under King Henry; but as if ghosts cried out in warning.

It was not always possible to discern what was said. But now and again, coming nearer to the Palace of St. James, in which the sleepless Mary waited for one who would never come again, those cries, sounding close, then wandering away again, bore this meaning: ‘Bloody Bonner is Bishop of London’.

And the Bishop shook in his Palace.... There were six martyrs awaiting their death by fire; but he did not dare to burn them in the sight of day, because the people of London had uttered threats against him. So they must be tried in secret in his Palace at Fulham, and burned by night at Brentford—consumed to ash like the heart and hopes of the Queen.

‘So good and virtuous a lady!’ This was said of her by de Noailles, the French Ambassador. But where had that good lady gone? At this time, when her life would soon be over, the warmth of her heart, her pity for the poor, her loving charity, her loyalty to her friends, were forgotten.

Even her appearance was so changed by illness and despair that it lent colour to the belief in her wickedness. The eyes that had been ‘dark and lustrous, and vehemently touching when she fixed them upon anyone’, now started from her wasted face, and had a peculiar, fixed, and menacing glare:

The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

Kneeling in the silent Palace, where the wandering cries awakened no sleepers, this unhappy being bent her head, that had been fox-coloured, red as a winter sun, but was now dank from her approaching death, in supplication. Lower and lower it sank, as, with lips wet from her tears, she murmured the prayer written for her by her cousin Cardinal Pole, who was her only earthly consolation now that the being she loved was gone, and her life was going:

‘Domine Jesu Christe,

‘—Lord Jesus Christ, Who art the true husband of my soul, my true King and my master.... Thou didst choose me for spouse and consort a man who, more than all others in his acts and his guidance of mine, reproduced Thy image—Thy image Whom Thou didst send into the world in holiness and justice; I beseech Thee by Thy most precious Blood, assuage my grief.’

But there was no answer. No one came to lift the darkness. Her grief remained with her, seeming a part of time, that would only leave her when time was no more.

In the days before her husband had gone (in those days in which she believed that the death she carried within her was a living child), in every room of the Palace there was some record of her hope and of her agony. Her prayer-book, for instance, dropped by her hand at a moment when faintness overcame her, with the page open at the prayers for women in childbirth, wet with her desperate tears.

It was long ago—aeons ago—the time of those prayers that had been said in vain. Now the forlorn creature that was Queen of England rose from her knees and wandered through the Palace. Every night, had anyone been wakeful, they could have heard that sound of a ghost drifting through the rooms. Loitering sometimes, at a remembered scene, to impress it upon the eyes that would soon see no more—or walking quickly, as if hunted, or as if searching for something. For what? For some word from her mother’s tomb, bringing her forgiveness for a terrible, though unwilling betrayal—the document signed, in order to save her and her faithful servants from the axe: (‘Item: I do freely, frankly, and for the discharge of my duty towards God, the King’s highness, and his laws, without any other respect, recognise and acknowledge that the marriage hitherto had between his majesty and my mother, the late princess dowager, was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’). For some belated words from Philip, telling her that he loved her (those words that had never been borne in his heart)—Philip, who had left her, and whom she would never see again?

From time to time she would pause in one of the rooms, and hurriedly turn over the contents of a drawer, only to find an unwanted, long-forgotten letter—one, perhaps, from a little boy, Lord Darnley, the son of her cousin Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, thanking her for a gold chain she had sent him as a reward for an exercise he had written, and telling her he wished his ‘tender years’ had not prevented him from fighting against her rebels.

No, that was not what she was looking for. Nor for these old records of past small happinesses, or of a time when she still believed that happiness might be hers, in a velvet-covered book containing her accounts, which she always superintended personally: ‘Item: 5s. for the woodbearer, bringing the white larke from Hampton’, ‘To my lady of Troy’s woman for bringing two swans and eight turkey hens for my lady grace’s larder’. ‘For straunge minstrels.’ ‘To a poore woman bringing her a bird in a cage.’ (Long years ago. And dust had long stopped the bird’s sweet voice.) ‘One penny, for needles for Jane the Fole’ (who had been ill and had amused herself with needlework till she should be well again). Money for presents to her godchildren, when she, still a girl, had walked in the green forest lanes with her ladies, visiting the cottages.

Small and pathetic reminders of the time that lay between her mother’s tragedy, and the tragedy of her own love for Philip.

Or was she looking for some memorial of the first Christmas she had spent with the King her father after their estrangement had ended? Then, everything seemed made of gold. The King had given her a bordering of goldsmith’s work for a dress. She had lost six gold angels at cards. That Christmas time there had been much music; the Court danced to the sound of Mrs. Winter’s Jumpp, and King Henry’s Galliards. But the music had faded.

Now, as she sat at a table reading these records of past happiness, the gold light from the fire fell on her haggard cheek, turning it to gold as it had done on a Christmas Eve at Greenwich when she was a little child of four. Then, too, everything had seemed of gold—the gold cup given her by Cardinal Wolsey, the two small gold flagons from Princess Katherine Plantagenet, the gold pomander from her aunt, Queen Mary of France.... There was even a rosemary bush hung with spangles of gold, brought by a poor woman of Greenwich for the King’s little daughter. And the King had swung her round and round the rosemary bush till he seemed, with his beard of gold, like the sun, and she a little planet in her course round that sun.

Long ago. Now all the gold had gone.

Looking round, she told herself that there was someone she had come to meet. Not Philip—for he would never come again. Not Renard, the Emperor’s Ambassador, for he, too, had gone—though still the Palace seemed to echo with his whisper, bringing death to those of whom that whisper spoke.

No. It must be her lost self whom she had come to meet.

But would she know her now? What mirror would restore to her that lost and laughing woman of the few short months of her illusory happiness?

How cold it had become! She had thought it was spring, but it was winter. Why, of course—a few weeks more, and it would be the time of the coming of the Christ Child.

But before that, she must be gone.