Читать книгу King's Fool - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 6

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I was Shropshire-born, essentially a country lad, brought up together take my place among the new middle class which Tudor rule begat. Under the Plantagenets there had been titled folk and peasants. But when Henry the Seventh defeated the last of them on Bosworth Field and filched dead Richard’s crown he changed all that. With his encouragement of merchants and explorers, and this new printing, and learning for the sons of solid citizens, he opened up life for those who knew how to profit by it. Perhaps a prince who has known exile and hardship is apt to have new and wider ideas. And I was particularly fortunate in this matter of learning because my father taught the choristers of Wenlock Priory, and every day I went with him to be schooled in Latin and calculus and other clerkly knowledge as well as music. From boyhood I knew the grandeur of architecture as well as the beauty of the countryside.

But though I was fortunate in one way I was misfortunate in another, for I was an only child and my mother died of the plague when I was four. She was a Welsh woman from over the border and it must have been from her, folks said, that I inherited my dark leanness and love of music. Although I respected my father, I had no particular love for him, so mine was a lonely childhood. While often poking fun at my schoolmates, I envied them secretly and fiercely because they had real homes. Not just a house swept by a hired woman, and empty to come back to. But warm, candlelit homes full of family bickering and laughter, with some mothering person at the heart of it. It would have been easier for me, I sometimes think, had my mother died a year earlier so that I could not remember her at all. For then my mind would not always have been searching for, or my heart hungering for, a shadowy half-remembered presence, never completely visualized, yet all-pervading. A childish hungering of the heart which went on throughout my youthful life.

Because I am hardier than I look some of my happiest hours were spent helping with the work at my uncle Tobias’s farm. Gathering the golden harvest through long summer days leaves a lasting sweetness to ripen in a man’s soul. The smell of newly carted hay can be a lasting memory even in strange cities. The indiscriminating hospitality of my uncle’s wife, feeding willing helpers as if they were her own strapping sons, taught me the core of kindness. The glowing companionship of harvest suppers established a belief in humanity against the mean buffets of the years. I shall always remember the glow of those sunsets over Wenlock Edge, and the gloaming covering the softly thatched houses like a gradual benediction. The rough voices of the farm lads and the giggling of the lasses handing round the ale pots making a homely kind of music as precious as the chanting of the monks. The older folk sitting around the cleared trestles afterwards, and the lads drawing the lasses away into the warm darkness. The shrieks and stifled laughter coming from the deeper shadow of the great tithe barn, and then the stillness and the rustling in the straw stack. That was the time I half dreaded. I’d always been the life and soul of the party with my mimicry and quips, and the topical jingling rhymes that even then came to me so easily. But the girls with whom I was popular enough in the daytime had no use for me under a hedge or in the hay. My awkward attempts had always been rebuffed, and I was never one to press myself where I was not wanted. Perhaps they felt me to be different, being the schoolmaster’s son, or maybe it was just because I was plain, with quick mind and tongue, and unreddened skin drawn tight across my cheek bones.

So when the lasses and lads paired off with that excited catch in their voices and the glitter of expectation in their eyes I would invent some face-saving errand to the elder folk, and slip away through the beauty of the summer night to listen to the spilled out ecstasy of nightingales and watch the great gold-white moon sail up behind the branches of the trees. Lonely, I was, and aching for I know not what. But because such beauty could lift the soul clear out of my scrawny body in ecstasy—because I had found celestial beauty in the stone lacework of soaring arches or in the echo of some lingering chord—I seldom hankered for long after the coarse, comely, sweat-soaked bodies and the toil-hardened limbs of the kind of girls I knew. I thought, Heaven help me, that I was immune and never could be driven crazy by a woman.

And so it happened that when I left Shropshire I was still inexperienced and fancy-free.

Until I was fourteen the highlights of my life had been during High Mass or Vespers when I sent the pure treble of my carefully trained voice soaring up in praise to the very roof of the Priory, or muted it to plead for God’s compassion so that it filled the dimness of arcaded aisles with sweet sound. How my world seemed to shatter about me when my voice broke! How restlessly I waited through those awkward months of adolescence when any remark I made croaked between childish treble and manhood gruffness, when I felt like an outcast waiting to creep back into the choir among the alto line. My secret hope was that one day I should be able to sing the tenor solos on saints’ days, or even in the new anthem which my father told us the King himself had composed. But to my bitter disappointment my voice never came again. Oh, of course it was trained and true, good enough to warble a love song as I went about my work, but never again to draw the hearts out of worshippers in a Cluniac priory famous for its music.

Although this was no fault of my own my father was unforgivingly disappointed, lacking the imagination to conceive how much worse it was for me. Half the tragedy of youth is that it has no measuring stick for grief. With a mother I might have talked some of mine out of my heart, bringing it into lighter proportion—indeed, I think that mothers sense such things without being told. But our musical work as master and pupil was the sole thing my father and I had in common. So I tried to assuage my frustration by sitting moodily strumming my shabby lute when I ought to have been chopping logs for winter fuel, or wandering over the hills making up ribald couplets about my betters when I was supposed to be construing Latin, or—with a sudden change of mood—driving the neighbors to distraction with practical jokes and leading the other lads in wild bursts of revelry. By then my poor father—God rest his soul!—was not only disappointed in me, but exasperated and bewildered beyond measure, not knowing what devil possessed me so to dishonor his standing in our little Shropshire town. Twice he beat me, grown lad as I was. Once for hanging a pewter chamber pot on a gable of our Guildhall, and once for releasing a pretty drab from the stocks to annoy our pompous beadle. And heaven knows the parental chastisements were well deserved! “What is modern youth coming to?” my father would mutter, running a scholarly hand through his rapidly graying hair. So that I imagine he must have been much relieved to send me away into another county to learn better manners.

Actually it was my simpler-minded and more practical Uncle Tobias who brought this about. With more free time on my hands I was often helping him at Frith Farm and, although my thoughts wandered far further than theirs, I enjoyed the company of my sturdy, uncomplicated cousins. With the failure of my voice I had fallen between two stools, as it were, being neither scholarly enough to teach nor robust enough to make a full-time farmer. And so it happened that I was up a ladder searching for one of my aunt’s hens when a strange gentleman came galloping into the yard, and by the wayward chance of a nitwit bird’s going broody on a half-cut strawstack the whole course of my life was altered and enriched.

“Ho, you up there!” I heard him calling urgently. “Find your master and tell him that one of my men has broken his ankle getting a sheep out of a roadside ditch, and by his good leave we are bringing him into the house.”

I came down the ladder in haste, with the clucking hen clutched against the front of my borrowed smock.

The stranger was of middle height and mud-bespattered, soberly dressed for riding, but obviously accustomed to command. So I let the hen flop squawking onto a heap of midden and sprinted across the yard to the house, calling to one of my cousins to bring a hurdle as quickly as he could. And in no time at all we had brought the young shepherd into the warm kitchen and my aunt was fussing over him with strips of torn linen, essence of mandrake and the like. He was not much older than I but twice as robust-looking, even with the color blanched from his cheeks.

“He’ll need to rest that ankle for weeks, sir,” prophesied Uncle Tobias, hurrying in from the stable.

“I’m afraid you are right, my friend,” agreed the lad’s master, passing an experienced hand over the swollen flesh. “If you and your good wife here will be so kind as to keep him until he is fit to follow us I will send back a doctor as we pass through Bridgnorth.”

“Do you have far to go?” asked my uncle.

“Across two counties to Easton Neston near Towcester in Northamptonshire.”

My uncle’s round red face lit up with pleased surprise. “Then you’ll be Master Richard Fermor, who knows more about the wool trade than any other landowner in the Midlands?”

Master Fermor nodded, and while he shook a generous cascade of silver from his pouch onto the kitchen table the black-visaged man who appeared to be his bailiff surveyed the groaning lad gloomily. “Old Hodge and the collies be keeping the flock together out there now, but how we be goin’ to get ’em home without this agile young ’un beats me,” he said.

It was then, following the two men out into the yard, that we became aware of concerted bleating from the direction of the Bridgnorth road, and Master Fermor explained how he had made the journey into Wales to visit his old home and to buy some strong mountain ewes to improve his own flocks in Northamptonshire. “But they need careful handling on the roads, being less tame than ours,” he added, obviously sharing his bailiff’s anxiety. “I suppose you good Shropshire folk could not spare me one of those strapping sons of yours to help drive them? I’d make it worth your while and send him back with all speed.”

My uncle scratched his sandy-colored head, torn between practical necessity and his habitual desire to oblige. His gaze roved over his few newly ploughed fields from which, even with free grazing on Frith Common, he barely managed to scrape a living for his hard-working family. “Well, scarcely, sir, what with seed time comin’ along an’ all—” he began regretfully. And then his eyes must have fallen upon me, gazing like a goon at the gentleman’s fine bearing. “But there’s my nephew here—” he added, well aware that my willing agricultural efforts would scarcely be missed.

Richard Fermor turned to look at me too, and a poor, uninviting sight I must have made with my thin gangling limbs and straw wisps still in my hair.

“Be he much good?” demurred the bailiff.

“Well, only middlin’,” admitted my uncle, being essentially a truthful man.

Master Fermor smiled, though not unkindly. “Middling farm hands are no good to me with shiploads of the best quality wool to be sent abroad, and all the keen cloth competition in Flanders.”

“Hundreds of fleeces to be sheared and carted and shipped, as well as a clowder of other goods,” elaborated Jordan, the bailiff.

I could see my cousins grinning at my discomfiture, but some eagerness in my stance or some understanding of my father’s disappointment in me must have moved my invaluable Uncle Tobias to make another try. “At least he could count ’em,” he urged. “The lad has learning, his father being the schoolmaster up to Wenlock Priory.”

Master Fermor seemed to take a new interest in me then. “He certainly had his wits about him in getting help so quickly just now. Perhaps he could stay with us and help you with your accounts, Jordan,” he suggested. “What is your name, lad?”

“William Somers, sir,” I told him.

“If you want work I suppose I could use you. Before leaving Neston I ridded myself of a young clerk because he cheated me of a shilling. Of a single shilling,” he repeated, although he had generously left an uncounted pile of them upon the table. “I suppose you can assure me, William Somers, that though you may be but middling with the sheep, you are more than middling honest?”

“Utterly honest,” I heard my uncle vouch for me firmly. And because I suddenly wanted to start out in the service of this gentleman more than I had ever wanted anything except to see my mother and to send my voice singing up to the Priory roof, I stopped slouching by the rain butt and pulled myself erect and looked him straight in the eyes.

“I may be a fool, but God strike me dead if I ever wittingly cheat you,” I heard myself saying in a choky sort of voice that seemed to run up several octaves beyond my control. I suppose my absurd youthful earnestness must have touched him. I remember wondering at the time whether it was because he happened to have a son or daughter of about my age. And in a daze of incredulity I soon found myself showing him and his disapproving bailiff the way to the school cottage, where my father greeted him with great respect and seemed willing enough for me to go—although, to give him his due, I do not think he would have sent me away had he not already heard tell of the squire of Easton Neston and felt sure that all would be well with me.

“As good a man as ever God made, if report speaks truly, and trades in silks and wheat as well as wool,” he assured me as, with a sudden wave of homesickness, I went around the familiar rooms hurriedly gathering up my lute and a few other personal possessions. “See that you make good use of so fine a chance and prove a credit to me and to the good mother who bore you.”

It was usual enough for lads of sixteen or so who were not destined to help in the forge or follow the plough to be placed in some gentleman’s household. I know now that my father acted wisely in taking the sudden chance, and for me it proved a gateway to the world—to a world of loves and cruelties and ambitions beyond my adolescent understanding, to rare experiences which could not fail to teach even a fool some sort of wisdom, and to success in a guise which neither he nor I nor any of the good people of Wenlock could possibly have foreseen.