Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge

  But she was all smiles again when she stood beneath the Fair Gate and saw the great quadrangle stretching before her wide and peaceful after the turmoil in the streets, with the spire of the Cathedral splendid against the blue sky and the buildings her father had loved standing beneath it, warm and serene in the sun. Towards her over the green grass came four doctors in their scarlet robes, holding a canopy under which she was to walk to the Cathedral. “It is a fair sight,” she said to Dean Godwin. “And it is a fair house, this house of Christ that my father founded. I am glad to be here with you all.”

  And they were glad to have her. The Christ Church scholars, coming pelting back from their posts in the streets, ran to line the path that led across the quadrangle and through the cloisters to the Cathedral door, and with them stood all the other people of Christ Church, the dons and servitors, the Canons’ wives and families. Joyeuce was there in her green frock, with Nicolas beside her, and Grace and Faithful stood together keeping a firm hold of Joseph and Diccon, who pranced and curvetted like puppies on the leash. The twins, in new daffodil-yellow dresses, curtseyed as Joyeuce had taught them, but unfortunately, owing to their weight and excitement, capsized at the critical moment, and Will and Thomas bowed so low that their tow-colored shocks of hair nearly touched the grass. The Queen paused for a moment as she passed this group, laughing at the bows and curtseys, returning with humor the impudent unblinking green stare with which Diccon fixed her. “The greeting of little poppets,” she said to one of the scarlet-robed doctors who carried her canopy—it happened to be Canon Leigh—“gives to any arrival the sense of home-coming.”

  She had unerringly struck the right note for her visit—“Homecoming.” The whispered word flew from one to another and was gloated over. This was the house that her father had founded and she had come home to it. They were her very own household. She belonged to them as she did not belong to other, inferior Colleges. When the procession had passed into the cloisters they all came tumbling after, calling out to each other, laughing and exuberant as they would not have dared to be but for that whispered intimate word; and over their heads the bells, Hautclere, Douce, Clement, Austin, Marie, Gabriel and John, rang out in a jubilation greater than any they had known since they had come from Oseney Abbey to live in the tower of Christ Church.

  When they had trembled into silence those who could not get into the Cathedral stood outside in the cloisters, listening to the solemn intoning of the long prayers, to the singing of the anthem to the accompaniment of cornets, and then to the intoning of more and longer prayers, until the first gold of evening stole into the sky and the coolness of it fell upon them like a benediction. . . . The first day was over. . . . It had gone well.

  5.

  Everything continued to go well. The Queen, except for the one regrettable lapse when Master Kingsmill’s oration at the Fair Gate had just for the moment turned her testy, was so gracious and so charming that every heart in Christ Church was bound to her in love forever. Everything seemed to please her. Never, she said, had she tasted such delicious food as that cooked at Christ Church, nor heard such sweet music as was played while she consumed the same, dining in state each day upon the dais in Christ Church hall. She thought her lodgings charming, and expressed herself as much touched that a door should have been made from the house to the hall for her convenience. . . . She was ravished, so she said, by the song that Nicolas sang beneath her window on the night of her arrival. She would never forget him, she said, looking down at him where he stood below her in the shadows of the garden. He was a comely lad, such as her heart loved, and one day he should ask of her what he wanted. She took a rose from her dress—she always had a flower of a knot of ribbons easily detachable upon the bodice of it, for it was by such little ruses that she bound men to her for life—and tossed it to him before she drew back again behind her curtains, leaving him to slip away through the apple trees to the garden gate in a tremor of ecstasy and excitement. . . . She even vowed she had taken a fancy to Great-Aunt; and spoke truly, for she found the old lady’s gossip highly entertaining and in the evenings would summon her to her presence to hear her malicious comments upon the life and character of those learned men who had that day delivered orations before the Queen. . . . For the orations continued. . . . Though she lodged at Christ Church, and spent most of her evenings there, the Queen did not neglect other Colleges. She heard orations at them all, and on three days attended disputations at St. Mary’s church, which on the last day went on so long, and aroused the Queen’s interest so keenly, that the disputants “tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky,” so that candles had to be set burning round the church.

  There, were, of course, as was inevitable, a few minor disappointments and disasters. The scholars found it hard to bear that on the day of the play “Marcus Geminus” the Queen should declare herself too exhausted by Latin orations delivered in the afternoon to attend a Latin play in the evening. But the Court came, and applauded loudly, and the Spanish Ambassador gave such a glowing account of the scholars’ acting to the Queen afterwards that she swore with vexation to think what she had missed, and vowed that she would lose no more sport thereafter. . . . Nor did she. . . . She attended the performance of the English play, “Pala­mon and Arcite,” in great magnificence, diamonds flashing, silks swirling, jeweled head held high, and enjoyed it enormously. Nor was she in the least put out when the stage collapsed, killing three scholars and injuring five more. These little things, she said to the profusely apologizing Dean, will occur at juvenile performances, and we must not dishearten the young ones by paying too much attention to slight mishaps.

  But nothing went wrong at the miniature stag hunt in the quadrangle, which took place by moonlight, and provided the scholars with the major thrill of the Queen’s visit. The poor stag, captured alive at Cumnor and conveyed to Oxford with great fatigue to itself and everybody, was let loose at the Fair Gate and fled across the quadrangle like a stag out of a fairy tale, its great branched antlers shining like silver and its slender body the color of pearl in the light of the moon. After it came the hounds, baying wildly, and then a few members of the Court and the more sporting of the dons, mounted on galloping horses, with white plumes in their hats and white roses fastened in their doublets. . . . The scholars, upon this occasion, were severely confined to the upper stories, where they leaned out of the windows shouting and yelling in such wild excitement that the Queen, watching with the Chancellor, declared she could scarcely enjoy the scene for fear they should all fall out. . . . Round and round the quadrangle fled the fairy-tale stag of silver and pearl, round and round went the shadowy shapes of the baying hounds, round and round the galloping huntsmen; until the poor stag saw the thicket of trees at the northern side of the quadrangle, fled to it and met its death with its silver horns entangled in a hawthorn bush, the huntsmen crashing round it in the undergrowth and the dogs leaping from the shadows at its throat. . . . The Queen, as she turned away, vowed she was surprised, though of course deeply thankful to the mercy of God, to find it was the only casualty.

  Such had been the excitement that she was tired that night, and glad to go to bed in the quiet room looking across the garden to the moonlit trees of the Meadows.

  Chapter 16: Patriotism

  There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees: humble vallies, whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshment of silver rivers: meadows enameled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers: thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating outcry craved the dam’s comfort: here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing; and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her voice-music. As for the houses of the country they were built of fair an
d strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honorable representing of a firm stateliness. The backside of the house was a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits, and new beds of flowers, which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion, and they to the trees a mosaical floor.

  THE ARCADIA. PHILIP SIDNEY.

  1.

  THE next afternoon, the last day of her stay in Oxford, the Queen attended archery practice in Beaumont Fields.

  Under a blazing blue sky scholars and citizens alike poured out of North Gate, swung to their left along the narrow lane beside the city wall, then to their right into Beaumont Fields. The scholars who carried bows, and who were to shoot before the Queen, were all very eager and excited, and a little strained, for this was a very great occasion. Archery was still tremendously important, even though the hand-gun was now taking the place of the longbow in modern warfare. You were no true Englishman if you could not shoot a straight arrow from your bow, and to be watched by the Queen of England while you tried to do it was enough to turn the hottest blood to water and the stoutest heart to mere pulp. Even Nicolas was flustered as he made his way out of North Gate, with Faithful behind him carrying his bow and arrows, and Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh, whom they overtook in the crowd at the gate of the Fields, had had their usual gravity and confidence so overturned that they were snapping and snarling at those who got in their way quite like the lesser brethren.

  But once in the Fields the beauty of the place quieted them all, for this was a spot of earth that everyone adored, especially on a sunshiny day in summer. Whichever way you looked, as you stood in the Fields, you felt glad to be alive. To the south, crowning a little hill, were the ruins of Beaumont Palace, the royal house built by Henry the First the scholar king, where Henry the Second had lived sometimes when he loved Rosamond, where his son Richard Coeur de Lion had been born, and where later the Carmelites had had their home. The same tempest of destruction that had dispossessed the monks had swept away the old palace too; the walls that had sheltered kings had been pulled down and sold as stone for fresh buildings; there was nothing left of it now but the foundations, and nothing left of the garden but a riot of roses and honeysuckle climbing over the old stones and the fruit trees that the monks had planted. . . . These were now the only fair ladies who inhabited the Fair Mount, and the only musicians who sang there were the singing birds.

  But one looked north over the same stretch of country that had delighted the eyes of kings and queens and courtiers, a stretch of country that in curve and color was like a piece of music composed by a happy man. Its rhythm was peace and its motif was yet more peace. There was neither grandeur nor the shock of contrast, but lazy curves that rose and fell like a contented sea, and misted colors that melted one into the other imperceptibly. To the west the woods of Rats and Mice Hill were a heavy deep green against the blue of the sky, and to the east the Forest of Shotover echoed their color, while between them a plain of green and tawny meadows and harvest fields stretched away into the distance, clumps of green willows marking the windings of river and streams. Across this plain meandered the highways to Woodstock and Banbury, their peace disturbed by nothing but an occasional lumbering cart or lazily trotting horseman.

  But at the butts under the palace wall there was a scene of eager activity. The seats of the spectators stretched the length of the wall, with a raised dais for the Queen in the center, and were already full; dons and scholars, stout merchants and their wives, and apprentices all in their gayest clothes. They were an audience whose comments never lacked ribaldry or point and under their scrutiny the groups of archers, waiting at each end of the butts for the arrival of the Queen, shifted nervously from foot to foot.

  As each man’s turn came he had to shoot from first one end and then the other, alternately, so that he should not get set in one position. In this continual flying of arrows in different directions there was a certain amount of danger, but according to the regulations if a man cried our “Fast!” before he shot he was not held responsible for the injury or death of anyone he might wound or kill. . . . The accident was unfortunate but quite in order. . . . A really expert English bowman could shoot ten arrows in a minute, with a range of two hundred yards, and Henry the Eighth had ordained that no person who had reached the age of twenty-four should shoot at any mark at less than two hundred and twenty yards distant.

  So two hundred and twenty yards was the distance between the two wooden discs set up at either end of the space by the palace wall. Robin Hood, of course, “clave the wand in two” from a distance of four hundred yards, but then Robin was a finer bowman than any man living now in the city of Oxford.

  Faithful, having handed his bow and arrows to Nicolas, found a vacant corner at the end of one of the seats and sat there, warm and cozy in the sun, glad to sit still and digest his dinner in peace and quiet while he watched the gay scene, glad for once in a way that his own archery was at present such a danger to the community that it could only be practiced in private, for lookers on, he thought, can sometimes catch more of the thrill of a great occasion than those taking part in it.

  In the distance a fanfare of trumpets sounded. The Queen was leaving Saint John’s, the beautiful College built in a grove of elm trees outside the city wall, where she had that morning been entertained and feasted by its dons. The sound of the cheering grew louder as she came nearer, growing into a roar as the royal party came into the Fields and mounted the steps to the dais. . . . But the groups of waiting archers did not cheer, for their tongues stuck most distressingly to the roofs of their mouths. They straightened themselves, gripped their bows with tense fingers and swallowed hard.

  The dons of Saint John’s College had the post of honor today and sat grouped around the Queen. The Chancellor was upon her right and with a thrill of delight Faithful saw her beckon to Edmund Campion, his friend of May Morning, and make him sit upon her left. They had all learned that he was in high favor with her. He had already made two orations before her, in the first one proving to her entire satisfaction that the sea is constantly blown out with vapors, like boiling water in a pot, and in the second speaking extempore on the subject of “Fire” with such eloquence that she vowed he was the finest scholar of them all.

  Yet seeing those three radiant figures, the Queen and the courtier and the scholar, laughing and talking together, and remembering the Chapel beneath the Mitre Inn, Faithful felt a sudden pang of apprehensive misery. In the bright sunshine there seemed to be shadows about, as though dark wings swept overhead and brushed those three figures in passing. But they seemed unaware of them. They could not foresee the years ahead, and the room in Leicester’s London house where they would meet again; an elderly heart-sick woman with a painted face and a red wig, a grizzled weary courtier and a Jesuit with the filth of the dungeon upon him, brought there on his way from prison to the scaffold that they might plead with him to save himself. They were unaware. They were in the sunshine of life and the darkness of night ahead was not remembered. But Faithful, because at the moment he had no one to talk to, was suddenly aware of it. He was afraid. It was suddenly dreadful to him that we do not know to what we travel; only that the way there is like an increasingly darkening tunnel. At the heart of it the blackness is like pitch. We must pass through it, there is no escape, and there is no one to come back and tell us what it is like in that darkness, or what it is like beyond.

  The trumpet sounded again, the murmur of voices died away into silence, and Faithful’s sudden depression fell away from him like a black cloak as the figure of a straight young archer stepped forward, brilliant in sunshine, his body laid on his great bow, drawing not with the strength of the arm but with the strength of the body, as Englishmen were taught to do.

  As one after the other the figures of the archers took their posts, at the sound of the drawn bowstrings and the sight of the arrows speeding through the air, a queer e
xultation seized hold of the whole company, consciousness was heightened and imagination took wing. For if it was true that the voice of France could be heard in the sound of the trumpets, that preserved the echoes of the horn of Roland, it was equally true that the voice of England was heard in the music of archery, in the humming of the bowstrings, that was like the sound of a plucked harp, and the singing of the arrows in the air. It was a music that was full of memories: of Crécy and the Black Prince, of Agincourt and Harry the Fifth. And not only their music but the bows and arrows themselves carried one back through time; the bows nearly as tall as a man, made of the wood of English yew trees, the descendants of the sacred yews that the Druids had planted round their holy places before the Romans came, the bowstrings of flax from English fields, and the arrows of birch wood feathered from the wings of gray geese. Over and over again, in battle after battle, had those gray geese, flying out from forests of bent yew, carried death upon their wings. For only Englishmen could use the longbow. Foreigners could never get the knack of it. It was something that Englishmen, yeomen and gentry alike, had to practice from their boyhood up in the butts that stretched behind every village churchyard, sweating over it while the old churchyard yews that had made the bows leaned over the wall to watch, and the gray geese that had feathered the arrows cackled approval up and down the village street. Agincourt had been won by the whole of England, by the yeomen, the yew trees, the gray geese and the fields of flax. The young archer who dazzled Faithful’s eyes as he stood in the sunshine was a symbolic figure to the whole of that excited crowd. They thrilled with pride as they looked at him, but they were sad too. He stood for the fast-dying days when a man fighting for his country could feel himself something of an artist and not solely a butcher, and for a voice of England that would soon be stilled. . . . When the last archer had sped the last arrow to its mark a sigh went up from Beaumont Fields, and then a silence before the trumpets spoke again and the Queen stepped down from her dais.