Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge

  Heather­thwayte and Satan also had a good deal of refereeing to do, for in these last days of preparation, when excitement ran dangerously high, the battles between the Christ Church scholars and those of other Colleges were many and invigorating, and the Fair Gate was a bloody battlefield from early morning until the ringing of the curfew restored peace at dewy eve. The rest of the University naturally took it hard that the Queen’s Grace had chosen Christ Church as her place of residence. Why Christ Church, they demanded angrily at the Fair Gate. Other Colleges were older and the gentlemen resident at them were better supplied with brains, blue blood, wealth and theatrical talent. Were these gentlemen to be denied participation in the theatricals and the stag hunt in the quadrangle? What did Christ Church know about acting, they demanded to be told. Nothing, they shouted, before there was time for an answer to be forthcoming. Was a Christ Church scholar ever in at the kill, they yelled. No, they bellowed, and the whole lot of them were a lousy, stiff-necked, ignorant lot of varlets whose presence upon God’s earth was a weariness unto the eye and a stench unto the nostrils. . . . But at this point yet another fight would break out, and Heather­thwayte would have the greatest difficulty in cleaving a way through it for a couple of aldermen on their way to the more genteel battleground of the Deanery.

  Yet in spite of the utmost vigilance on the part of Christ Church one outsider managed to invade the sacred precincts of the College and insert himself into that holy of holies, the hall, where rehearsals took place behind locked doors, and the criminal was Walter Raleigh. He came by the overhead route which led via garden walls to the roof of the Leighs’ house, and from that to a window that opened directly above the dais in the hall. The window was high, but Walter Raleigh was always a man of considerable resource; it was an easy matter to remove a few panes of glass, and to fasten a rope round one of the Leigh chimneys, with its end dangling through the aperture; and after that he had only to wait until the actors below him had formed themselves into a group, whose surface would be more yielding than the bare boards, to let himself down and fall upon them with a blood-curdling screech.

  They were in the middle of a rehearsal of the Latin play “Marcus Geminus,” a dreary piece written by Canon Calfhill, and Philip Sidney, playing a long part befitting one whose beauty and whose Latin were alike incomparable, was just working up to the peroration when the blow fell. He sprawled sideways, hitting his beautiful nose against the corner of the table. Other gentlemen fell in other directions, Raleigh spread-eagled on top of them, and there was a wild confusion of arms and legs, shouts and yells, which continued unabated until Raleigh had picked them all up, dusted them down, shaken the senses into them and explained the object of his visit. “I’m going to be in this,” he said. “I’m a better actor than any of you.”

  They gathered round him in an angry crowd, threatening, infuriated. Even Philip Sidney, always so courteous and gentle, lost his temper and blazed and spluttered with the best, and Faithful, sitting in a corner with the prompt book, shouted “Shame!” as loudly as any. Raleigh stood among them, laughing, head thrown back, one hand on his hip and the other swinging his plumed purple cap. “Well, throw me out!” he taunted them. “Throw me through the window I dropped from. Unlock the door and pitch me down the stairs. We’re twenty to one, aren’t we?” But somehow they couldn’t. He dominated them, even as years later he dominated the Spaniards at Cadiz when jeweled and plumed he stood upon the poop of the “Warspite” blowing defiance at them through a silver trumpet. They might hate him for his impudence, his conceit, and his courage that was greater than theirs, but they could no more get rid of him than they could have freed themselves from a wind that had blown open the door and swooped upon them. He was as invincible as a force of nature.

  Finally he momentarily got rid of himself. “Look at Sidney’s nose!” he exclaimed. “And the Queen’s Grace due in four days! An onion, for the love of God!” And thrusting them away from him he sped down the hall like lightning. unlocked the door and catapulted down the stairs to the great vaulted kitchen where the perspiring armies of cooks were roasting their oxen and baking their pies. “An onion! An onion!” he shouted as he went. “In the name of all the saints and devils, an onion for Master Sidney’s nose!” And seizing it from the hand of the chief cook himself, who was just about to chop it up for use in a lark pie, he was back up the stairs again three steps at a time before anyone had had the presence of mind to lock the door on him, and anointing Sidney’s swelling nose and blackening eye with the tender solicitude of a mother for her babe.

  They could not but be mollified. Others of them presented their bruises for attention, and presently they found themselves consulting Raleigh about a few minor difficulties in theatrical production that had that morning cropped up. He dealt with them with ease. Then they got on to the topic of the major difficulty, the fact that the boy who was to play Arcite in the English play, “Palemon and Arcite,” had got so knocked about in a fight at the Fair Gate that he was no longer fit to be seen. Raleigh dealt with this difficulty easily too. . . . He would be Arcite. . . . After that he took complete charge of everything and for the rest of the day rehearsals went with a swing and a verve that they had not known before. They hated Raleigh when he cursed them for their stupidity, they glowered when his will rode roughly over theirs, but when everything that he touched, the lines of the plays and their own minds and wills, glowed with fire as when a flame runs among stubble, there was nothing to do but yield themselves. Sidney’s presence had given to their performance a moonlit beauty, but Raleigh’s made of it a conflagration.

  3.

  In the Leighs’ house also things hummed. The Leighs themselves had long since been distributed among the other Canons’ households, and only Great-Aunt and Tinker remained, fed from the Deanery table at great inconvenience to everybody. Efforts had been made to dislodge Tinker but to everyone’s surprise he refused to go with Diccon, Joseph, Joyeuce and the dogs to Canon Calfhill’s house across the quadrangle; every time he was carried there he slipped with sylphlike obstinacy from the nearest window and stalked back again to his own home, his tail carried in the perpendicular position, with twitching tip, and his paws placed one before the other with a delicate but disdainful precision that seemed to spurn the very ground that separated him from the place where he would be. . . . And they had thought that he loved Diccon. . . . It seemed he did not love Diccon. He had attached himself to Diccon in preference to other members of the household because Diccon’s single-minded determination to have what he wanted had given them a spiritual affinity one with the other; but what he loved was the house, that particular city of mice whose lanes and byways he knew. Canon Calfhill’s house might have other mice, but they were not his mice, and his lack of knowledge of the geography of their citadel gave to his soul a strange unease. . . . After the sixth return he was let alone. Cats had always been revered at Christ Church, and always would be, for had not Cardinal Wolsey himself adored them? A wrong-headed man in many ways, the great Cardinal, but he loved pussies. He always had a pussy on the Woolsack by his side.

  So by night Tinker hunted his own mice in his own house, and by day he sat beside Great-Aunt at her window and watched the things that went on in the hall below. . . . And a great deal went on. . . . Great-Aunt had never been so happy. The infernal din of a door being knocked in the wall of the room next her, the noise made by carpenters and decorators, the smells of paint and unwashed workmen, troubled her not at all, for her nerves were of iron. What she loved was the spectacle of Life flowing past her window. Old as she was it would never be over for her while she had eyes to see and ears to hear. Curiosity was her great gift, and daily she thanked God for it.

  The house was ready at last. The polished surface of it shone like glass, meadowsweet strewed the floors, the carved four-poster where the Queen would sleep had been gilded, and hung with peach-colored satin curtains embroidered with forget-me-nots, and upon it were spread fine shee
ts scented with lavender. Great bowls of flowers stood in shady corners and wherever the eye might turn it met priceless tapestries and pieces of furniture filched from all the finest houses in Oxford. Two days before that fixed for the Queen’s arrival the Chancellor himself galloped over from Woodstock, where the Queen and Court were now in residence, to cast his eye over all the final arrangements, and could find no fault with it whatever. He and Great-Aunt met at the hall door, with every appearance of deep mutual respect, and she herself conducted him round the apartments, pointing out every improvement and decoration, and receiving his compliments upon them as though they were all the result of her own inspiration and hard labor. “Do not mention it, my Lord,” she demurred with a gracious inclination of the head. “The supervision of these matters has been a great pleasure to me. . . . I shall, of course, myself receive the Queen’s Grace upon her arrival at the house; my niece Joyeuce Leigh being too inexperienced a chit to carry off these high matters with becoming grace.” Her eye, that had hitherto been of a melting tenderness, became fixed and steely in its regard and the Chancellor hastened to agree with her decision. . . . It seemed to him a thousand pities to defraud the little Mistress Joyeuce of an honor that was surely hers by right, but he had no time to waste in skirmishes with Great-Aunt; nor, remembering the outcome of the last one, did he think unseemly wrangles with elderly gentlewomen compatible with his dignity. . . . He bowed with a flourish and left her somewhat precipitately to attend a meeting at the Deanery, the frantic, heated, desperate, final discussion as to who should take precedence over whom when the great hour was upon them.

  “Upon the Day of Judgment,” whispered Dean Godwin to the Chancellor, “there will be quarreling as to who is to have the honor of helping the crowned heads to collect their bones.”

  4.

  The great day dawned fine, with a slight August haze that promised a time of cloudless sunshine. As soon as the sun had pierced its way through, and gilded the towers and spires with a most royal beauty, the bells were ringing and the streets were awash with color; garlands of flowers festooned from house to house, bright silks and tapestries fluttering from every window, eager citizens and scholars surging everywhere dressed in their gayest garments, flowers in their arms, smiles on their faces, pent-up excitement bursting from them in jokes and banter and such echoing roars of laughter that it seemed the very cobblestones cried out for joy. The city was drenched in happiness. If there were any sad people in it, if any sick folk, they did not show themselves. . . . They knew better than to intrude upon this day. . . . For it was one of those days when everything conspires together to make men forgetful of their fate. With bells ringing, color ebbing and flowing, sunshine pouring upon them and the Queen of England drawing with every moment nearer to their city gates, there could be no thought of past or future. With such strange turbulent joy in their hearts it seemed that they already held in their hands all that they longed for; what they had lost was theirs again and the garlanded flowers and fluttering silks were their dreams come true.

  The first great excitement of the day came in the early afternoon, when deputations from University and city rode out to meet the Queen. There was a burst of cheering as the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor and Heads of Houses, most good to look upon in full academic robes, passed up Cornmarket and under the North Gate towards the village of Wolvercote, on the road to Woodstock, where they would greet the Queen with a Latin address of welcome. After them rode the Mayor of Oxford and the city fathers, resplendent in scarlet robes and golden chains of office, who were to post themselves midway between Wolvercote and Oxford and greet Her Grace with three or more English addresses of welcome, according as Her Grace seemed to be fatigued, or not fatigued, by the Latin one that had preceded them. Hard at their heels pounded a horde of apprentices, self-appointed messengers who were to run backwards and forwards between Wolvercote and Oxford reporting the progress of events to those within the city.

  When the last shouting urchin had disappeared into the dust and sunshine beyond the gate, there was nothing for the crowds within it to do but wait with what patience they could muster. All the way down Cornmarket, across Carfax and down Fish Street to the Fair Gate, the scholars stood in two long lines keeping the way clear for the Queen’s processional passing, and packed behind them were the townspeople in their holiday clothes, swaying backwards and forwards in turbulent excitement, only kept from breaking across the street by the linked arms and the stalwart backs of the laughing scholars. But the time of waiting did not seem long. Every stray dog that ran up the route was cheered, every pretty girl who showed herself at an open window was loudly appraised, jokes flew backwards and forwards, laughter rang in the air, and all the time the bells were pealing that the Queen might hear their welcome as she came upon her way.

  Then suddenly the apprentices, all in a glorious perspiration of haste and enthusiasm, came dashing one by one back through North Gate with reports of the progress. News flew through the waiting crowds, and little whispers and cries of excitement broke from them. Yes, she was coming, and the whole Court with her. Oh yes, she was beautiful beyond words, dressed all in white and blazing with jewels, carried in a wonderful litter roofed with cloth of gold. Yes, she had reached Wolvercote and the Provost of Oriel had read the Latin address of welcome. Oh yes, she had replied to it; in Latin, of course, and at very great length. The Court had seemed a little restive but she had taken no notice, working up to her peroration in a way that was a marvel to all present. . . . Now she had reached the Mayor and the city fathers. . . . There had been five speeches and they had pleased her mightily. Had she replied? Oh yes. Five times? No, only once, for the horse of my Lord of Warwick had turned very troublesome, and my Lord had sworn in unseemly fashion, and it had seemed best to all to proceed upon their way. . . . Now she was nearly here. . . . She was passing St. Giles’ church. . . . Now she had stopped outside North Gate for Master Dell, a don of New College, to make another oration in Latin. . . . Now she was moving again. . . . She was so close that those inside the city walls could hear, through the pealing bells and the cheers, the trampling of horses and the jingling of their harness. . . . The procession was passing right under North Gate. . . . She was here. . . . Vivat Regina! Vivat Regina! A great roar went up, a roar that echoed through the streets like thunder, and all along the length of the route the scholars fell upon their knees.

  The procession passed very slowly, but even so there were so many eyes blinded by tears, so many pounding hearts and throats choked with excitement, that they all found it difficult afterwards to describe what they had seen. The Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor and the Heads of Houses had come first, they remembered, leading her in. . . . The Chancellor had looked magnificent, but they had hardly noticed him, for their eyes were straining to see the golden litter that was borne behind him.

  She sat upon it as though it were her throne, swaying easily to its motion, smiling at them, her lovely long pale, hands clasped upon her lap and her head held high. She looked beautiful, and so young. It was hard to believe she was thirty-three years old; she was so slender that she looked a girl still. They gazed in adoration at the face they had heard described a hundred times but yet had never seen, not even in pictures: a face of a beautiful oval shape, with a clear olive complexion, aquiline nose, fine dark eyes under delicately arched eyebrows; a fine, proud, shrewd face, the face of the woman who had saved England. Their eyes were suddenly misted and they saw only dimly the jeweled coif set upon masses of fair reddish piled-up hair, the beautiful ruff that framed her face like the calyx of a flower, the white satin dress scintillating with jewels and the slender feet in golden slippers set so firmly upon the velvet cushion.

  Then she had gone on her way and with a jingling of harness, a breath of many perfumes, in a glimmering kaleidoscope of color, the Court was passing by. So many lovely ladies, beruffed and jeweled, sitting their horses with lovely ease, their long skirts sweeping almost to the ground, their laughi
ng faces turned this way and that to greet the smiling scholars; so many magnificent gentlemen riding by, reining in spirited horses with a clatter of hoofs upon the cobbles, plumed hats raised in greeting, bold eyes roving up to the windows to exchange twink­ling glances with the pretty maidens gathered there. A few knowledgeable people in the crowd pointed out one and another, whispering their names in awed tones. “The Spanish Ambassador. Sir William Cecil. My Lord of Warwick, brother of the Chancellor. My Lord of Oxford, married to Sir William’s daughter, though he is but sixteen years of age. My Lord of Rutland.” The cavalcade swept by, the Mayor and city fathers bringing up the rear, and the crowd came tumbling at their heels to hear what they could of the Greek oration at Carfax.

  This was delivered by Canon Lawrence, the Regius Professor. It was very long and very learned and delighted the Queen greatly; she would have done her poor best to reply to it, she told Canon Lawrence later, but looking about her she saw that the distress of her illiterate Court was by this time very great, and in mercy she forbore. Then on again to the Fair Gate where Master Kingsmill, the University Orator, delivered a speech which it had taken him the best part of two days and nights to prepare and nearly as long to deliver. . . . . But yet, at the end of it, the Queen most unaccountably turned testy. “You would have done well had you had good matter,” she said, and turned abruptly away from him that the Chancellor and Dean Godwin might help her from her litter.