Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge
Towers in the Mist (eBook edition)
Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC
P. O. Box 3473
Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473
eISBN 978-1-61970-713-9
TOWERS IN THE MIST. Copyright © 1938 by Elizabeth Goudge. Copyright renewed 1965 by Elizabeth Goudge.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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First eBook edition — July 2015
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Author
Note
Chapter 1: May-Day
Chapter 2: A Stirring Housewife
Chapter 3: The Madonna
Chapter 4: Ages Past
Chapter 5: The Teachers on the Steps
Chapter 6: Riot in the Town
Chapter 7: Midsummer Eve
Chapter 8: Sunday
Chapter 9: Saint Giles’ Fair
Chapter 10: The Holy Well
Chapter 11: Dark December
Chapter 12: Christmas Eve
Chapter 13: Promise of Spring
Chapter 14: The Troubadour
Chapter 15: The Queen’s Grace
Chapter 16: Patriotism
Chapter 17: Farewell
DEDICATED TO
My Father
Here now have you, most dear, and most worthy to be most dear Sir, this idle work of mine; which, I fear, like the spider’s web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than worn to any other purpose. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment.
Philip Sidney.
The Author
ELIZABETH Goudge, born at the turn of the 20th century in England, was a gifted writer whose own life is reflected in most of the stories she wrote. Her father was an Anglican rector who taught theological courses in various cathedral cities across the country, eventually accepting a Professorship of Divinity at Oxford. The many moves during her growing-up years provided settings and characters that she developed and described with great care and insight.
Elizabeth’s maternal grandparents lived in the Channel Islands, and she loved her visits there. Eventually several of her novels were set in that charming locale. Her mother, a semi-invalid for much of her life, urged Elizabeth to attend The Art College for training as a teacher, and she appreciated the various crafts she learned. She said it gave her the ability to observe things in minute detail and stimulated her imagination.
Elizabeth’s first writing attempts were three screenplays which were performed in London as a charity fund-raiser. She submitted them to a publisher who told her to go away and write a novel. “We are forever in his debt,” writes one of her biographers.
Note
IT is impossible to live in an old city and not ask oneself continually, what was it like years ago? What were the men and women and children like who lived in my home centuries ago, and what were their thoughts and their actions as they lived out their lives day by day in the place where I live mine now? This story is the result of such questions, but I would ask pardon for the many mistakes that must have been made by a writer as ignorant as I am. Three mistakes I have made knowingly. The Leighs are an imaginary family, whom I have set down in the house at that time occupied by Canon Westphaling. The book of manners for children, quoted in Chapter Three, is a real book, and is to be found in the South Kensington Museum, but it is later in date than the date of this story. Worst of all, I have been guilty of bringing Philip Sidney up to Christ Church several months too early.
Chapter 1: May-Day
SPRING, THE SWEET Spring, is the year’s pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
The fields breath sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;
In every street these tunes our ears do greet:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Spring, the sweet Spring!
THOMAS NASHE.
1.
THE first gray of dawn stole mysteriously into a dark world, so gradually that it did not seem as though day banished night, it seemed rather that night itself was slowly transfigured into something fresh and new.
So shall I be changed, whispered a dirty, ragged boy who lay on a pile of dried bracken, two books beneath his head for a pillow, within a gypsy tent, and he sat up and grinned broadly at the queer gray twilight that stood like a friend in the narrow doorway. He had been awake for an hour or more, waiting to welcome this day, and now it had come upon him unawares, stealing into the world as though it were something quite trivial instead of the most important thing that had ever happened to him.
He got up and went to it, tucking his two books under his arm and picking his way cautiously over the recumbent forms of the six children and five dogs who had been his bedfellows through the night. . . . And a wild wet night it had been, the last of the stormy nights that usher in the spring, or he would never have exchanged a sweet-smelling and wholesome ditch for the vile stench of the suffocating tent. . . . To come out of it into the new day was like plunging head over heels into a clear bath of ice-cold water.
It had been dark when the gypsies arrived at their camping place the night before and the boy had seen nothing of it but the smooth trunks of the beeches lit by the glow of their fire, and the javelins of the rain that spun by in the night beyond the shelter of the trees. The wind had been wild and high and there had been a tumult in the branches over their heads like the tumult of the sea. It was winter’s death agony and the boy had trembled as he lay listening to it, suddenly afraid of the world in which he found himself and the life that lay before him; hearing rumors of pain and grief in the drip of the rain from sodden trees and a prophesying of disaster in the clamor of the storm that had swept up so suddenly out of the darkness and filled the vault of the night with its power. . . . He had fallen asleep still trembling, and waked up in the pitch black of the hour before dawn to a stillness so deep and so perfect that even to breathe had seemed a desecration. It had seemed wrong to be alive in this depth of silence and darkness, and he had understood how at this hour more than at any other sick men yield themselves to death. . . . And then, imperceptibly, it was death and winter that yielded, and life and the spring stood at the door and beckoned.
Outside in the chill mist he greeted again the things that belong to the morning; the strong crooks of the young bracken pushing up out of the wet earth, the new crinkled leaves that stained the mist over his head to a faint green, and the sudden uprush of joy in his own heart. He was poor and ragged and dirty and hungry, but what did that matter? He was in Shotover Forest, within a few miles of Oxford and the end of his pilgrimage, and in a short while he would see the city of his dreams, the city that was to change him from a disreputable young vagabond into the most renowned scholar of sixteenth-century England. . . . Or so he thought. . . . And the gift of faith was his in full measure, together with a good brain and a certain amount of cheek, so perhaps he was right.
The ghostly trees dropped raindrops on hi
Suddenly, from high over his head, a lark, the plowman’s clock, sang a quick stave of song, and from the unseen woods below, a robin called. The heaven had cried out for joy, and the earth had answered, and between the two the smell of the gorse rose up like ascending prayer and linked them together. Music and scent were alive once more in the world; only color tarried, waiting upon the sun.
It came slowly. The mist that had been as thick as sorrow became tenuous and frail. It had been gray like the rain but now it was opal-tinted. The green of the woods was in it, and the blue of the sky, and there was a hint of rose color that told of the fires of the earth, of the sun and the warmth of daily living.
The light grew yet stronger and showed Faithful that his valley was filled with trees and backed by low hills. He followed the curve of it with his eyes until they reached a certain spot to the right that the gypsies had told him of, where they stayed, his heart looking through them as though the eyes of a lover saw his mistress.
Gradually, with the same mysterious slowness with which night had changed to day, towers rose out of the mist, and he looked down from the heights of Shotover upon the city of Oxford. It could not be real, he thought. It was a fragile city spun out of dreams, so small that he could have held it on the palm of his hand and blown it away into silver mist. It was not real. He had dreamed of it for so long that now, when he looked down at the valley, the mist formed itself into towers and spires that would vanish under the sun the moment he shut his eyes. . . . He shut his eyes, opened them, and the towers were still there.
2.
Having proved the city’s reality he suddenly became rather unpleasantly conscious of his own. He had felt, as he gazed on the beauty all round him, at one with it and so beautiful too, but now he remembered that no amount of spiritual union with beauty has the slightest effect upon one’s own personal appearance. . . . More’s the pity. . . . The moment when one remembers this is the death knell of any moment of exaltation. . . . He was still himself, Faithful Crocker. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and had a good look at as much of himself as he was able to see, and the sight was not reassuring. His jerkin, made of coarse brown frieze, was dirty, and so torn that his elbows showed through the holes, and as for his shoes, he had walked them to pieces and they were kept in place on his swollen, bruised feet by strips of dirty rag. It was many weeks since he and a looking-glass had come face to face but it was too much to hope that there had been any change for the better between then and now, and it was with gloom that he recollected what he had last seen. . . . A boy of fourteen with a head far too large for the puny body it was set upon, a round face pitted with smallpox, a snub nose, a large mouth with a front tooth missing, and a shock of rough, dust-colored hair that stuck out in plumes over the large ears that did not lie flat against the head but projected at the side in a very distressing manner. Would Oxford, when this creature presented itself at the gates of the city, be impressed? . . . Faithful feared not.
Yet, though he did not know it, he was attractive. The Creator, when He thought good to take Faithful out of eternity and cast him upon the earth, had taken him out of the same box as the baby donkeys and the penguins, and his ugliness had an endearing quality that made it almost as valuable as beauty. . . . And he had a few good points. . . . His fine mind declared itself in a wide clear forehead that the smallpox had not touched, his gray eyes had that expression of peace that is noticeable in those who know their own minds, and the good humor of his grin was the most disarming thing in the world.
From gloomy consideration of his personal appearance Faithful let his thoughts slip back over his equally disreputable past. It held, he felt, only one qualification that fitted him to present himself at the city down below, and that was his passionate love of learning. He had pursued it from his cradle. He had been hitting his nurse over the head with a hornbook, so said his father, at an age when most infants were brandishing rattles, and he could lisp out sentences from Virgil when other children were still entangled in their A.B.C. When as a small boy he became a scholar at Saint Paul’s, Westminster, where his father was a master, he was hailed as a prodigy, and his path seemed to stretch straight and easy before him, winding over hill and dale to Oxford, that goal of pilgrimage to which came rich men, poor men, saints and sinners to drink deep of the well of learning. . . . Or at least so thought Faithful, ignorant as yet how many other things could be drunk deep of within the walls of the city of dreams.
But poor Faithful had no luck, for his father, an improvident and tiresome person who had already done Faithful an injury by giving him for a mother a slut out of the streets whom he had not bothered to marry, now got himself dismissed for petty theft and then died, leaving Faithful entirely alone in the world and with no possessions at all except his clothes, a cat, his father’s Virgil and a tattered copy of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs.” Faithful’s subsequent adventures would have filled an entire book. He, the cat, Virgil and the Martyrs went on the streets together and proceeded to pick a living as best they could. The cat who, like all cats, was a snob, soon decided to better herself and took service with an alderman, but Virgil and the Martyrs, hung round his neck in a bag, stuck to Faithful, and together they washed pots at taverns, swept chimneys, cleaned windows and carted garbage. At one time they fell in with a performing dog and ran a little theatrical performance of their own with him; Faithful standing on his head with Virgil balanced on his feet and the dog standing on his hind legs with the Martyrs balanced on his nose. Another time they, like Shakespeare in his bad days, were employed to hold the horses outside a genuine theater; but the poor dog got kicked and died of it and Faithful had not the heart to go on. Yet he did not become embittered by these experiences; on the contrary, they did him good. His great gift, that peacefulness that could create an oasis of calm about himself and other people wherever he might be, stood him in good stead even when stuck halfway up a chimney, and his amazing intellect fed itself on every experience that came his way. But nevertheless he was not contented. He still wanted above all things to be a scholar and go to Oxford, and standing on his head in the street did not seem likely to get him there.
Then quite suddenly he decided that he would walk to Oxford, risking starvation and death by the way; and here his luck came full circle back again for, with Virgil and the Martyrs still hanging round his neck, he was able to attach himself in the capacity of valet to the person of a famous bear who was traveling from inn yard to inn yard for the bear baiting. Unfortunately halfway to Oxford his path and that of the bear diverged and he had to go on by himself, begging his way and suffering horribly from the cold, until he fell in with some kind-hearted gypsies and tramped with them as far as Shotover. . . . And now here he was. . . . How he was to find a friend who would tell him how to become a scholar, or where he was to find the gold to buy his books and clothes, he did not know. He just hoped, with that confident hope of childhood that is as strong as faith, and which was still his despite his fourteen years, that the friend would meet him at the gate of the city, and that across his path would bend a rainbow at whose foot he might dig for his crock of gold.
3.
He got up and ran back to the gypsy encampment. The sun was up now, the gorse was golden and the pines and beeches were splendid against the sk
But Sara cut short his stumbling words of sorrow and gratitude with a laugh, thrust her hand into the bodice of her dress and brought it out again with a silver piece lying on the palm.
“I can’t take that,” said Faithful firmly. . . . Sara told fortunes and many silver pieces came her way, but Faithful knew that she needed them for herself and the boy. “No,” he repeated.
Sara’s eyes flashed and she showed her teeth like an animal. She had a will of iron and if she wished to dispense charity she did so, quite regardless of the wishes of the recipient, whose acquiescence was forced with a blow if need be.
“Take it,” she commanded. “There’ll be no hedge to sleep under down there in the city, and no gypsy to give you food for love. . . . Take it, or I’ll give you a clout on the head you’ll not forget in a hurry.”
Faithful took it and bowed low. She smiled at him, agreeable once more now that her will was obeyed, laid a dirty brown hand for a moment on his shoulder and then turned back to the encampment under the trees. But the child, kicking and squeaking, scrambled down out of her arms and ran after Faithful.
“Here, you can’t come with me, Joseph,” said Faithful.
He called the child Joseph because with his fair hair and blue eyes he seemed as much out of place among the gypsies as Joseph among the Egyptians.