Читать книгу Superstition Corner - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 4

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Catherine Alard rode down the hill to Conster Manor. The day had suddenly fallen into twilight, with the coming of a mist over Odimere Ridge, a mist glowing faintly red with the bonfires that still burned along the coast. There was red in the sunset, too, and red on the waters of the River Tillingham, which spread forty feet wide between her and Conster at the foot of the hill. The tide came up as far as the ford, though here it did no more than brim the river; farther down, where the land had not yet been inned, it spread from slope to slope, filling the valley with a great sheet of pearly, mysterious water, flushed here and there with the colours of the sky.

Close to the ford, the Manor drive led from the lane—not very nobly yet, for its oak trees were mere saplings, newly planted by Peter Alard. He had married a rich wife—the Lady Elisabeth Burdett, whose father had been given an earldom and abbey lands in Essex by Thomas Cromwell—and he had long been busy spending her money on Conster and its estates.

He had rebuilt the house almost entirely some twenty years ago. Catherine could dimly remember the old place, with its huge raftered hall, which was always full of the smell of wood-smoke and resin, and its kitchen, nearly as large as the hall and shut off from it only by a wooden screen, so that from her seat at table she could see the fire and watch the little yellow dog that turned the roaster. Masters and servants had all sat down to eat together then, but now these things were changed—to the comfort and relief of the Lady Elisabeth, who for long had bitterly complained of their uncouthness.

The new hall was smaller than the old, and lighter, for Squire Alard, to amuse himself and please his wife, had lanced the walls with windows—which window-taxed Alards of the future would curse and brick up. There was a large, modern fireplace, with handsome dogs and andirons, and the walls were mostly panelled in the modern style, though a few pieces of tapestry hung to jewel the remaining shadows. The kitchen and buttery were now completely shut off, and the daïs in the bay window had become the privée parlour, where the family dined and supped.

They were at supper now. Treading through the unlit hall, Catherine could hear their voices in the privée. Besides the voices of her parents she could distinguish that of her cousin Kit Oxenbrigge, for the last two years steward of the Alard household, and a fourth voice which had a foreign note in it. She remembered with a grimace that Robert Douce would be there, planning furnaces and bellows and hammer-ponds for Conster. The grimace was only half smiled off her lips as she entered the room.

"Kate!" cried her mother. "Where have you been? You look like a gipsy."

"Kate!" cried her father in a different voice. "Roiling, roaming, romping Kate! Come, kiss me—'at's a good pug."

Catherine kissed him, and held out her cheek for Robert Douce to kiss—a countrified fashion that made her mother sigh reprovingly.

Elisabeth Alard found it easier to remember that she had been bred up in the French style than that her grandfather had kept hogs in Suffolk. She was a beautiful, graceful woman, dressed harmoniously in dark colours, with pearls braided in her hair. She had been no more than eighteen when her twins were born, and might now be taken for Catherine's sister; for whereas the daughter's skin was already weatherbeaten with exposure to sun and wind, the mother's was white and soft as milk and cucumbers could make it.

In looks Catherine was like her father; he too had a dark skin, a wide mouth and prominent eyes, though his eyes were not brown, but a pale, bright Saxon blue—Alard eyes. Kit Oxenbrigge had them, though in other ways he favoured his father's side of the family, with his clean-cut hawklike profile, from which a dark sweep of hair lay back like a raven's wing. He was not so countrified as his uncle or his cousin, for he had been to Winchester College, and had travelled in France and Italy. His face was shaven, and his speech, though it burred a little, was free of country idiom. Elisabeth Alard spoke the Queen's English in a slow, plaintive voice; Catherine and her father spoke unashamedly the language of the Sussex country-side, with its broad vowels and slurring consonants.

"Where hast thou been, Kate?—the fields an't saafe for a maid after dark."

"I went up to Staple to see if the bonfire burned . . . and on my way home I stopped at Holly Crouch. But, Father, a tur'ble thing hath happened—a tur'ble, larmentable thing. They've broken down the cross at Holly Horns."

"By Cock! Who's broken it down?"

"I dunno. Soldiers, I reckon. They say there's been a troop of 'em riding around. When I came there this evening the cross was gone—thrown down and broke in pieces."

"Shame on the deed! But reckon it had to go. I marvel it was let stand so long."

"There's like to be a fresh outbreak against Catholics after this Spanish business," said Oxenbrigge. "Catherine, you must go to church next Sunday."

"I'd sooner die."

"You're a fool!" rapped her mother. "Many parents would have you whipped every time you didn't go, instead of paying your fine."

"Paying's less trouble than whipping. My father's rich."

"I've better things to do with my money than pay for thy nonconformity."

"You might have had to pay for your own."

The Squire's good-natured face darkened.

"None o' that, now, wench! By Cock! there's things I won't endure."

"Eat your supper, Kate," said her mother. "We've all but finished ours."

Catherine sullenly fell to her supper. She loved her father—and her mother too, though a little less. But there was always this question of religion between them—ever since her father had decided to conform. He had kept to the old faith for the first twenty years of the Queen's reign, and his practice had not been attended by those martyrdoms which had visited some of his neighbours. His alliance with a powerful Protestant family—made while that family was suffering eclipse under Queen Mary—had protected him from the full severity of the law, which, moreover, worked less rigorously in the Sussex forests than in more civilized regions. He had maintained his position at the expense of an occasional fine and much private joking with Master Nicholas Pecksall, Vicar of Leasan, who, a priest in Marian orders, said his Mass regularly every Sunday, before opening the church for Morning Prayer.

But everything had been changed by the Papal Bull excommunicating the Queen and the acts of retaliation that followed it. Mass was no longer said in Leasan Church, even behind locked doors, and the Catholic religion, which till then had been no worse than an expensive luxury, had now become High Treason—not only his purse was threatened, but his land and his life. The Burdetts could no longer protect him. It was too much for his easy allegiance, and he conformed, as his wife had long been praying him to do.

Only his children reproached him. He had expected them to conform with him, and it had been a shock to find them so set in the ways he had abandoned. But he was a kindly, easy soul, and after a few efforts at coercion, time wasted in beatings, starvings and tears, he had left them alone. After all, they were nearly of age, and he could not be held responsible for their recusancy. But it had been hard, bitterly hard, for him, when Simon, his only son and Alard's heir, slipped out of the country to be trained for a priest in Rome, thereby forfeiting for ever his inheritance of English land, even life itself should he return.

In comparison, Kate, poor maid, had been no trouble at all. No one could regard the recusancy of a spinster female so seriously as the same offence in a male or even in a married woman. Here again his great Protestant relations had been able to help him, and he knew that as long as he kept his daughter in bounds he had not much to fear. His chief trouble was that no man would marry her—and next to that, that she would talk theology.

She was talking it at this moment to Robert Douce, talking it with her mouth full of pottage, breaking into the tale he loved to tell whenever there was any complaint of harshness against Romanists—of how he had fled from Paris the day after the massacre, with a white kerchief tied round his arm and on that same arm a basket containing the infant Maria disguised with lettuces . . . Catherine had heard that story many times before and always capped it with tales of landless Papists fleeing to Italy and France. When he went on to tell of the kennels of Paris running with Huguenot blood, she would be sure to have a massacre of Catholics to match it with . . . But they were far too much the children of their time to be content with mere controversial anecdotes; from the concrete they passed on to the abstract, from history to theology—now they would be at it for hours . . . and Squire Alard hated theology—he wished it were not so much the fashion. He was relieved when a growing sound in the hall swelled suddenly into a racket.

§ II

"Lord save us! what is that?" cried Elisabeth Alard. "Husband, we have the noisiest set of servants in the country."

"I'll go and see what's toward," said Kit Oxenbrigge.

"Yes, go—and send them back into the kitchen. I've given orders many times that only the footmen are to come into the hall."

Oxenbrigge went out, and came back grinning.

"They're asking you to come out, Squire. They say there's an anabaptist in the kitchen, who will tell our fortunes."

"An anabaptist!" cried Elisabeth. "Abominable!"

"'Tis agäunst the law," said her husband. "By Mary-gipsy! I wonder he dare come into a magistrate's house. Bring him here, Kit, and I'll sentence him to the stocks."

"Aye, do," said Catherine. "Most like he's a Gospeller or a Mumpsimus man."

"I never heard of an anabaptist who told fortunes," said Robert Douce in his slow, foreign-sounding English.

Oxenbrigge went out again, and soon came back with a seedy-looking fellow, dressed in the style of a small shopkeeper, in dark homespun and a noggen shirt. In one hand he clutched his shapeless felt hat, in the other a sugar-loaf of stout parchment, black, and pasted with silver stars. Behind him the door was full of the craning, goggling faces of Conster's maids and men.

"A mistake," said Oxenbrigge; "he's no anabaptist, but an astrologer."

"I swear I'm as good a Protestant as anyone here!" cried the stranger. "I came only to see Bess Hallaker, a maid in your ma'ship's and la'ship's service, and to give my blessing on her handfast to your ma'ship's and la'ship's John Fuller—seeing that I'm her uncle, and her father is dead, and her mother, my sister, on the straw with her eighth child. I keep a tallow-chandler's shop in Hastings, but the shops are shut to-day while the bells ring for the glorious victory. So I bethought me to walk into the country, to visit my niece, and brought my philosopher's hat with me to tell her fortune. For years now I've read the future by the stars and by coats of arms. I swear I meant no evil."

"There an't no evil, surelye—save that by telling the future by coats of arms thou breakest the law as surely as if thou refuse baptism. I can send thee to assizes for this."

"My lord! my lord!" cried the poor man, falling on his knees.

Oxenbrigge and Elisabeth Alard laughed loudly, but Catherine was sorry for him, now that she knew he was not one of those terrible Mumpsimus men, who go about mocking the Mass with tin cups and pellets of bone.

"Donna' be scared," she said. "The Squire woan't hurt 'ee. Put on thy philosopher's hat and read our quarterings. Then thou shalt have a drink of huffcap."

"That's right. Give orders for the law to be broken in my house. Kate's the Squire!"

"'Tis only a game, Father. The poor old fellow came to make the servants laugh, and now seemingly we've scared him out of his wits."

"That's true, my lord. 'Tis only a game, and one I've played before all the nobility and gentry in these parts. I read the future for Squire Wildigos at Iridge place, and told him on an heir, who came, sure enough, two months later."

"And how big was his lady at the time?" cried Catherine. "Stick to the game, fellow, I counsel thee, or my father will have thee in the stocks."

"Surelye, my lady, surelye. I'm well known hereabouts for an honest man, and for telling honest fortunes. For the gentry I use coats of arms, for the poor folk the stars. I've already told my niece that since her moon is in gemini she may expect to be brought to bed of twins at her second lying-in."

A loud squeal from Bess Hallaker behind the door.

"It would divert me to have our bearings read," said Elisabeth. "We all know it is forbidden only because some fool once foretold the Queen's sudden death."

"Talk not so much of its being forbidden," said her husband, "or I won't have it done here."

In his heart he was a little afraid of the astrologer, afraid yet enticed. He had often wished to have his future read, and would no doubt long ago have sent for some magician, but for his fears, which in reality dissuaded him more than the thought of breaking a law that was often broken.

"By Cock! Tis but a game," he said, reassuring himself.

"We'll have it done to tickle the servants," said Elisabeth Alard, moving towards the hall.

She too was a little afraid. Suppose the magician read in her heart the thoughts that grew there for Kit Oxenbrigge . . . She watched Kit as he carried a torch to the fireplace, above which was handsomely carved and painted the Alard coat of arms—a shield argent, three bars gules, on a canton azure a leopard's head or. He held the torch high, to illuminate the carving; the red light shone in his eyes, and she saw fear there—fear like her own.

Then she heard a laugh—careless and heavy. That girl laughed like a ploughboy, and she alone, of all the company, was not afraid.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

"This is he, I understand, Who killed the blue spider in Blanchpowder Land."

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Catherine laughed again when the magician's cap was on. He looked more seedy and comical than ever with the great black sugar-loaf upon his head. He did not mind her laughing, because she had spoken kindly and had taken his part. He would tell her a fine fortune. He would tell them all a fine fortune, for the matter of that. He knew his business too well to go croaking of sorrow and sickness and death.

"My lords, ladies, gentlemen and good folk all. Harken to the Magus, pupil of that illustrious doctor Polimackeroeplacidus of Switzerland, Doctor of Philosophy, Astrology, Alchemy and Virtue——"

"Who's that, fellow?" interrupted the Squire. "The doctor or thyself?"

"Nobody, Master. 'Tis only a piece I say to begin——"

"Leave it out. Reckon we'll have had enough lies without it."

The old man stammered and fumbled. His piece of rote-learning gave him confidence, helped him to start. Now he hardly knew how to go on, but saved himself by remembering and repeating the last words: "Philida, phileridos, pamphilida, florida, flortos, rub-a-dub."

Then he took out of his belt a little wand, and pointed to the coat of arms upon the wall.

"Of all the noble and ancient families in the land there is none more noble or more ancient than the noble and ancient house of Alard. De Icklesham and de Etchingham were both proud families, but now they are under the crumbling stones. This silver shield stands for eternity, and these stars are Alard's shining sons that shall shine upon the world. That's when I speak for eternity, but when I speak for today I see great merrymaking—I see great fires and holly and chop-cherry and blindman's buff, and men and maids dancing round the Lord of Misrule. Ale and pies. There's plenty in Alard's kitchen, and none goes hungry—ale and pies for all. There's a maid's wedding too, and dancing for it and more ale—barrels of ale—and blessings on the bridal bed, and all according to religion. That's for the kitchen. Now let me speak for the hall. There's a wedding in the hall, a grand and noble wedding to a noble lord. That canton azure is blue blood—the bluest blood in the kingdom is proud to mate with Alard's noble lady. She leaves this noble hall to live in a noble castle and to be the mother of seven sons and seven daughters. A golden leopard's head. Simon Alard goes to the Crusades, and rides against the true religion. His sister rides to meet him, and they meet under the Cross . . ."

He blinked and stammered as if he were losing the thread of his speech, then he seemed to recover himself, and went on again.

"Aye, indeed, there's a fine marriage for the daughter of the house—noble quarterings, bags of gold and a bridegroom with hair as black as pitch and ebony. I see noble alliances, and great fruitfulness and riches and religion. And for the noble Squire and his lady I too see much wealth. It comes from Alard's land—forests and fields and farms and hamlets, paying tithes and rents and fees. But the riches come from the depth rather than the breadth. I see the fires of many forges, and I hear great bouncing rumbelow, hammers making cannons and cannon-balls. Wars bring riches to Alard, and wheresumever I look I see health and wealth and merry-making and love-making and religion and long life for all."

He stopped, breathless.

"Well done, fellow!" shouted the Squire. "Thou couldst not have done it handsomer. Thou'st left out nobody and nothing."

"What was it thou wouldst say about my brother Simon?" asked Catherine. "I couldn't understand."

"Mistress, I spoke only of those present."

"Nay, thou didst speak of Simon, going to the Crusades, against the true religion . . . I never heard such rim-ram-ruffe."

"Mistress, I've no memory of it. I never speak of the absent."

He had decided to leave out Simon, not knowing how he was thought of by those at home.

"But thou didst speak of him."

He shook his head, looking bewildered.

"He spoke nonsense," said Elisabeth, who had been pleased to hear of Catherine's marriage, but had rather her bridegroom's hair had not been black.

"Arrant nonsense," said the Squire, "but he shall have a shilling and a glass of huffcap."

"Thank you, my lord, and I can tell you that in all my mortal days as a philosopher I've never seen so fair a fortune as I've seen to-night."

"Ho! philosopher, art thou, maple-face? I thought this was but a game."

The old man remembered his danger, and quickly shed the small air of dignity he had assumed in the heat of what he held to be a good success.

"Surelye, 'tis only a game, my lord—a game to delight the nobility and gentry."

"'At that's right. Now be off. By Cock! thou'rt a valiant mountebank and hast tickled us famously."

The little astrologer bowed, and bowed again, and withdrew amidst much laughter. Everyone was light hearted because of the good fortune he had told.

§ III

The servants went shouting and chattering back to the kitchens, full of the thought of Bess's wedding and the good cheer it would bring, though Bess herself did nothing but screech "twins in gemini! twins in gemini!" and run from the hugs and caresses of her sweetheart. The gentry returned to the privée, where the Squire poured out some wine.

"Here's to our success. He blessed our plans, Robert Douce—he foretold all that you've been telling me."

"And you believed him? That's wonderful. Foretelling is better than telling, then?"

The Squire looked uneasy.

"Surelye, I an't a child, and I don't believe what I'm told by mountebanks. But it was a valiant good fortune all the same."

"It wants no mountebank to tell there's iron at Conster. Earth and water both declare it, and, besides, it is a matter that hath been known for years."

"By mack, it hath! But it döan't follow that if we blow a furnace we'll make our fortunes."

"You have many hundreds of acres of forest land to give you timber for the fires."

"Aye, and the fellow said I'd have more."

"Believe him, then, since you find it easier to believe him than to believe me. He knows nothing of iron or of your land, and I smelted iron in Beauface before I became clerk of the works to Sir Philip Sidney. Besides, I have this very day examined every ditch and stream and mount about Conster for the iron that is well known to be there. But believe him rather than me."

"By Mary-gipsy! I tell 'ee I döan't believe him—he's a mountebank, and should be in the stocks. But I'm uncommon glad he told us such a fine fortune. What did 'ee think of thy share of it, Kate?"

"I thought more of what he said about my brother."

"He said näum that was sensible."

"Reckon he didn't, but I should like to understand it for all that."

"There's no understanding it. He only prated—I reckon he started to say summat, and then got scared of what we'd think, and turned it into nonsense."

"He said that Simon would ride against the true religion."

"He'd never do that, surelye, seeing all he's working for it now."

"Husband, you forget!" cried Elisabeth. "The true religion is the Protestant religion."

"Aye, and so it is—I had disremembered. Poor Simon 'ull ride against that, right and sure enough."

"And I ride to meet him?—maybe, that's also true. But I döan't follow what he said about the Crusades and the Cross."

"Maybe it was another Simon he spoke of. 'Tis a name that Alards have been called before this."

"Did a Simon Alard ever go to the Crusades?"

"For shame, thou ignorant girl! Why, Kit here hath his coat of arms from Simon Alard who went to the Crusades and came back with a border of scallop shells for his shield, same as the Oxenbrigges have now. His daughter married an Oxenbrigge and the family took over the Alard arms, seeing that was the end of 'em. Simon Alard had no son."

"Our Simon will have no son."

"No need to tell me that. By Cock! I think enough of it, knowing that all I do will be done for thy cousin Tom—my house with its new porch and hall, my new ploughed lands, my innings on the marsh; aye, and if I blow a furnace it will blow for Tom and his sons and not for Simon and my grandsons. 'Tis hard, hard fortune, and my only comfort's that I'm a lusty man and will most like live eighty years like my father before me."

"If your mountebank spoke truly," said Robert Douce in his softly mocking voice, "you will still have many grand-children. Did he not promise seven grandsons and seven granddaughters?"

"Aye—out of Kate. She'll have to mend her ways if she looks to get married."

"'A done, do, father—'a done with baiting me."

"Thou'st not told us yet what thou thinkest of thy fortune."

"And I'll never tell you. I'm going to bed. I'm tired."

"You run about the country all day," said her mother. "No wonder you're tired. Can't you sit for an hour like a gentlewoman? There's your lute. Will you not play it?"

Catherine shook her head.

"No, I'm tired, and I've no heart for music. Good night, father and mother. Good night, Master Douce. Good night, Kit."

She bobbed half a curtsy at the room and went out.

"Why is she so sad and heavy all of a sudden?" asked Lady Elisabeth.

"She's thinking of Simon. Poor girl! she loves him dearly."

"It is always sad for twins to be parted," said Robert Douce; "they partake of the same element, and need each other's breath to sweeten the air. I know what I am speaking of, for I left my twin brother in Beauface, and to this day I know not if he's alive or dead."

"Did he follow the Huguenots?" asked Lady Elisabeth.

"He did."

"It is not only the Papists who suffer for their religion, as I often tell Kate."

"No, every man that hath his religion at heart must suffer now. It is the way of the world. A time may come when we shall no longer harry one another, but it will not be any time of ours."

"And maybe when it comes," said the Squire, "'twill be only because religion hath gone cold and an't worth harrying. Now I'm an easy man, and if I had my way Papists could do as they pleased for worship, as long as they said nothing against the Queen. I tell Kate that the day she says a word against the Queen I send her to assizes. But she won't ever say it, for she's a good, loyal maid and hates treason. Now what I would tell you is that I'd have all men worship as they please, so long as 'tis without treason. But is this because I'm a good religious man, who loves my neighbour too much to see him hurt? No, 'tis because one religion seems to me pretty much as good as another and not worth fighting about. Give me my house, my land, my hunting and my hawking and, by Mary-gipsy! I'm a happy man and 'ud let other men alone."

"Is this how were to spend the evening?" asked Lady Elisabeth, who did not like to see her husband make an exhibition of himself. "I think we have all talked enough. Is there to be no music?"

"I will play for you," said Oxenbrigge.

"Aye, Kit. Take your lute and play to her ladyship while I lay out the land with Mounseer Douce."

The servants had cleared the table of plates and food, and Squire Alard could spread his great map of Conster in the light of the four tall candles that had shone upon their meal. Oxenbrigge wanted no light for his singing and playing. He picked up his lute from the window-seat and came over and sat by Lady Elisabeth in the shadows beside her idle spinningwheel.

§ IV

"What shall I play?"

"Play me a lavolta."

His long, strong fingers shook the strings into a lively dance. In the shelter of it they could talk.

"Well," she said, "and are you pleased with your bride?"

"Which bride?"

"The conjurer gave you Kate in marriage."

"Indeed! I thought he said her bridegroom was to be rich."

"He will be, when hath married Kate."

"Ah, but I plainly understood that he was to be rich first, in his own right. The prophet spoke of two rich and ancient families."

"The Oxenbrigges are not poor."

"They are beggars beside Alard."

"So, here is a chance of their becoming rich."

He lifted his head, and looked at her full with his piercing, Alard eyes. "Why do you plague me? I've told you many times that I will not marry Kate."

The merry, kicking lilt of the lavolta was ended, and the words "marry Kate" hung on the air. The Squire heard them.

"Aye, that's right. Marry Kate. So, you're trying to persuade him to fulfil his fortune."

"He will not be persuaded."

"It is an honour I've declined before."

"'At that you have! No man will marry poor Kate. Mounseer Douce, I have a daughter whom no man will marry, though a hundred bags o' trash go with her. She can't have Conster, for 'tis entailed on heirs male, but none of my money is tied up with the land. She can have it all."

"She will surely marry soon."

"I wish I thought it. But we've tried a' dunnamany matches for her and all have failed. Why won't you have her, Kit?"

Kit laughed, and began another tune.

"Why won't you have her?" whispered Lady Elisabeth.

"You know why I will not."

"She's not so wild but that her husband could tame her; it is having gone husbandless so long that hath made her a wildcat. And as for her religion, tell me not, Kit, that if you had a wife you couldn't make her a Protestant in a night's love."

The unexpected end of the tune again left her words hanging defenceless in silence.

". . . a night's love."

". . . Bloomery cinder."

Robert Douce's words came at the same time and covered them, and for once she felt grateful to that dark, mocking man. She had bitten down on her lip in her first fright . . . then she wondered why she had been afraid. She was speaking only of Kate.

Oxenbrigge plucked slowly a slow, sad air of Tye's. "Kit," she repeated, teasing him. "You know that if you made Catherine love you, she would do as you pleased."

"I would not make her love me."

"But you are a man of family and substance. You should marry. Why do you not fall in love?"

"'Tis because I've fallen in love that I cannot marry."

"Kit . . ."

The ribbons of the lute poured over his arm, and her hand crept under them, the fingers digging and kneading into his flesh, while her hand and her whole arm shook and burned as if with fire. For a moment the music wavered, then slipped without pause into a gayer, louder tune, a hay-de-guy that made the strings thrum and shake and woke great rumbling echoes in the belly of the lute.

§ V

Upstairs in her bedroom Catherine could hear the music. Her room was not directly over the privée, but a little to one side of it, though near, looking northward over the River Tillingham to where a steep hillside lay black against the stars. If she leaned out of the window she could see the spread waters of the eastern valley, the tidal lake that stretched between Pesenmarsh and Odinmere. But to-night she did not lean out, choosing to sit at her window and watch the stars.

She had sent away Nan Jordan her woman, because she wanted to be alone, and also because she had never liked the processes of being dressed and undressed. She could dress and undress herself and arrange her own hair—not to her mother's satisfaction but to her own. To-night she loosened her bodice and let it fall from her shoulders. The window was unglazed, and she enjoyed the heresy of the night air. Many and many a time they had told her she would die early, but here she was, still alive, though unwed.

A dreamy smile changed and softened her face. Unwed . . . wed . . . the unwed may be wed . . . She knew it was folly to believe the words of conjurers, and against religion too, but there was pleasure in a good fortune all the same. Her bridegroom's hair was to be black as pitch and ebony. . . . She had often wanted to put her hand on Kit Oxenbrigge's head, and push and flatten that shining lock of hair. Black as pitch . . . pitch black . . . black Protestant . . . but she could change him—his Protestant roots could not be deep. The green bay tree has only just been planted in the land and can easily be plucked up. . .

But he would not have her. The rub was there rather than in religion. He had been asked to have her, and would not. She knew that and had been told. No one would have her, because she was a Papist, and too masterful for most—and now she was growing past the age . . . and it is against religion to believe the words of conjurers.

Sighing deeply, she put her elbows on the sill, and cupping her chin in her hands, stared up at the glittering sky. Then the music began. She knew that Kit's fingers were plucking it for her, plucking it and sending it up to her without knowing or caring if she heard it. Down in the parlour it was a merry tune, but as the notes crept out the night breathed on them and turned them to sadness. It was a sad melody that reached her ears, making her feel sad, with a sadness that was part of the night, of the black, sighing trees, and the tunnels under the trees, and the wild, shaggy places of the garden, the ghostly waters of the river, and the far-off dazzle of the stars.

She knew that the stars were set in spheres, crystal spheres girdling the earth, and that these spheres made music, singing together a song so sweet and loud that it is silence. Her mind made play that this music creeping to her from the darkness was the music of the spheres, tinkling and singing eternally, the music of the stars in their solemn, far-off houses. But every now and then her heart would remember Kit Oxenbrigge's hands upon the lute, and his sleek head bent towards it; she would think of putting out her hand to stroke that head. . . . Such thoughts had nothing to do with the music of the spheres, and soon her mind fell back to earth.

Why must she have a different lot from the lot of the women round her, who married and bore children? In spite of her wildness, of her boyish looks and ways, she wanted to be married. Not only was she the child of a day which knew the spinster only as a monstrosity—an unreckoned and sinister fruit of the Dissolution—but she wanted love and the fulfilment of her body in childbearing. Already, at twenty-eight and hale as a lad, she seemed to feel the life in her wither as she watched girls ten years younger than herself suckle and lead their children. Once or twice she had been asked in marriage by men she barely knew, but that had been years ago, before her need was great. Then she had refused to take a Protestant, and now it seemed that no Protestant would take her. Of late years no one had even approached her, in spite of the money that would go with her; she knew that Oxenbrigge had been her parents' last hope. . . .

"Oh God," she prayed, "stop the music!"

It did not stop just then, but a little later. The night was suddenly healed with silence. Her heart found balm in the smell of the dew; leaning out of the window she could smell the dew, and it was comforting as the smell of a friend. The night was black round Conster, with the tall, shadowing trees and the waters ebbed from the valley. Only when she lifted her eyes could she see the stars above the hill—Starvencrow Hill, it was called, and she knew the lines of it as well as the lines of her own body. She watched the lines of the hill and of the strip of firmament above, the firmament of the northern constellations, where the Plough heels slowly round the polestar, and Cassiopœia sits glimmering in her chair, and Pegasus lights the corners of a black field.

Many times she and Simon had watched the stars from this window, telling their names and counting them in their bunches. When she thought of Simon she could pray. . . . It was no longer just a prayer of relief, for the music to stop, but the prayer of her own voice talking to God: "Oh God, Thou hast become my firmament and my refuge, and in Thee will I put my trust. . . . Oh God, my firmament . . ."

After all, if she was to be a stranger in her own land, she was only sharing her brother's fate. Simon must always be a hunted stranger, so why should she seek a country? She and Simon were the lost boy and girl of the Alards—lost in the wood of a strange faith but with the unchanging firmament above them, the immovable starry sky, pricked with the lights of heaven. She need not fear when she was with Simon; she wanted no black Protestant to pluck her out of the wood and shut her from the stars. Better far be lost with Simon where she could see those set and faithful stars; and perhaps one day she would really hear their music, instead of being earthbound with the music of a lute.

What was it the old mountebank had said? "Simon Alard rides to the Crusades, against the true religion—and his sister rides to meet him." That was strange, though doubtless she would ride to meet him if she knew when he would come.

"They meet under the cross"—that certainly was not true, for the cross was broken down. Heigho! there are no crosses in the land—they are all broken down. The conjurer must have been wandering in his wits . . . and anyway 'tis all superstition.