Wonders Will Never Cease Read online

  It is possible that the hurling times are over and that Anthony will see no more battles in his lifetime. But his father has been shaped by and made cynical by past disasters. Above all, his father broods obsessively over his humiliation at Calais earlier in this year. Earl Rivers had been sent by Henry’s Council to Sandwich where he was to organise the mustering of a fleet to assist the Duke of Somerset against the rebels in Calais who were commanded by Warwick and Edward of March, the son and heir of York. But before much of Earl Rivers’ work was done, a Yorkist captain launched a surprise attack on Sandwich and not only sank some of the Lancastrian ships but captured Earl Rivers and Anthony and carried them off to Calais. There they were brought before Edward of March and the Earl of Warwick. When his father started to protest, Warwick had shouted him down and told him that he was ‘the son of a squire and so not fit to talk to lords who were of the King’s blood’ and he added that Rivers was ‘a knave who was not born of a noble lineage, but who had seduced his way to marrying into it’. Anthony continued to watch as Warwick berated his father as if he were a naughty schoolboy. Though the Woodvilles were released soon enough after this, since at that time Warwick and York still pretended loyalty to King Henry, Warwick’s abuse continued to fester in River’s mind.

  Now that both Warwick and his father serve King Edward and sit in his Privy Council, Anthony wonders how things will turn out. He knows that his father thirsts for revenge and has a penchant for plots with long fuses. Anthony thinks that, if Warwick had been clever, he should have killed them both while he had the chance. Yet Anthony cannot die. And he will not allow himself to become an accomplice in his father’s intrigues. Nor will he pay attention to his mother, Jacquetta’s relaying of fairy whisperings. He thinks that he will shape his own story far away from the court.

  He stops and rests at monasteries when he can. The talk at mealtimes is customarily about holy matters. The Priory of Holbeach is no more than a day’s journey from Norfolk. There he has to attend a sermon in which the Prior dwells particularly on the virtue of chastity.

  ‘Samson was undone by his lust for Delilah. Lancelot would have been judged a perfect knight had it not been for his adultery with Guinevere, after which his sin sent him running mad in the forest. Lust makes fools of all men. Love is a kind of madness that chains men to women. Bright eyes, golden hair and young flesh give enchantment, yet all end up in the grave as food for worms. It is written in Proverbs: “For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” May God never forgive him who wishes to honour and serve these passionate and impassioned whores who are worse than I can tell you. And consider these words from Corinthians: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”

  The following day as Anthony rides on, he broods on the Prior’s words, yet though he should meditate on the decay of mortal flesh and the steps that lead to hell, the image of Lady Scales rises up before him and he recalls her high-arched eyebrows, her arrogant face and the fleshy curves encased in a gleaming black dress – a promise not of Hell but of Paradise. As he considers her assumed piety and the difficulties she has made, his suspicions return. She is not really in mourning for her late husband, he thinks. The truth is that she has been lusting after handsome James Butler, the Earl of Wiltshire and ‘the fairest knight of this land’. When they were at Eltham he has watched how Beth gazed at Butler who was demonstrating some fancy piece of swordplay. Half the noblewomen in England, including Anthony’s own sister, have been dreaming of bedding him. Butler was slim and he had long, dark curly hair, piercing eyes and a strong chin. Though he was dubbed ‘the fairest knight in all the land’, he has also been called the ‘flying earl’ and men, most of them, liked him little and said of him that he fought ‘mainly with his heels’, since he had fled from the Battle of St Albans disguised as a monk, and he then had run away from Mortimer’s Cross before the battle had even begun, dressed this time as a serving man. Still it was enviable to have been blessed with such looks.

  By the time Anthony reaches Norfolk, he has resolved to put an end to his wife’s playing at chaste mourning and to take her by storm, even if he should find her kneeling in the chapel where she pretends to pray for her dead husband. He spurs Black Saladin on.

  It is night by the time he arrives at the Manor of Middleton. Once there, he brushes the servants aside and he runs up the stairs as urgently as if he were scaling a fortress and he flings open the door of the bedroom. The four-poster bed is surrounded by candles. By their light he can see that she is seated upright and terrified and beside her, also seated upright, is James Butler, who grins.

  Anthony turns away shuddering. He had not guessed that there could be such horror in the world… for now he has seen his wife in bed with a dead man. At Towton, James Butler, ‘the flying earl’, had fled the field, but this time not fast enough and Yorkist horsemen caught up with him at Cockermouth and brought him to Newcastle, where, at the King’s command, he was beheaded. The earl’s head was then sent south and presently, so Anthony had heard, the head is displayed impaled on the gate of London Bridge. Though the thing he had seen in Beth’s bed still had its head on its shoulders, James Butler, if it was he and not some simulacrum, could no longer be described as ‘the fairest in the land’, for his face was hideously gashed about and plastered with blood.

  Anthony hurls himself downstairs and runs out to his courser and leaps into the saddle. His wife, barefoot and in her shift, comes running after him. She is crying out to him to take her with him, but he will not face her and he digs his spurs into Black Saladin’s flanks and rides at a wallop, as if his wife were the spectre that was pursuing him. A little before dawn, he arrives at Crowland Abbey. The Abbey is a kind of closely guarded castle; the monks are its garrison against the wickedness of the world outside, and perhaps he should be safe here from the monstrous thing that he has seen in Elizabeth’s bed. This Benedictine Abbey is particularly well-provisioned against any siege by demons, and indeed its monks pray and meditate in great comfort. Anthony is found lodgings in the most luxurious of the guest rooms in the Abbey’s hostelry.

  Having slept for many hours, towards the end of the day he asks to make confession. His confessor advises him to tell the Abbot about the apparitions.

  ‘He will love hearing of this.’

  As they make their way from the vespers service to the refectory for dinner Anthony starts to talk about his visions of dead men. Abbot John Littlington smiles broadly, but puts a finger to his lips. They dine without speaking on roast bream and salted Cambridge eels with barley bread and Gascon wine. As they eat, a young monk standing at a lectern in front of the table reads the chapter in the life of St Guthlac in which the saint’s participation in the Wild Hunt is described. After dinner the Abbot and some of the senior monks, including the Prior, the guest-master, the almoner, the librarian, the infirmarian, the cellarer and the Chronicler, process to the chapterhouse. Its hall is hung with tapestries, one of which shows the three dead and the three living Kings, a second the siege of Jerusalem and a third the instruments of the Passion. The monks are eager to hear from Anthony of the great battle in the north and the politics arising from the gathering of the Yorkist lords around Edward, but Anthony has little to say on these matters. Instead he hurries on to tell them how he has encountered two men who are dead but yet seemed as if they were alive.

  ‘Now reverend sirs,’ Anthony asks, ‘Am I mad or am I cursed?’

  Though he hopes that they will advise him on how to avoid any future visitations of the dead, in this he is disappointed.

  The Abbot is a big man, vigorous in his movements and opinions. He is also a little drunk and he boisterously thumps the table so hard that it shakes.

  ‘Certainly not mad!’ he insists. ‘The world is full of wonders and is not as the commonalty conceive of
it. Did you hear what happened at Coggeshall only a few years ago? All the parishioners of Coggeshall witnessed it, for they were coming out from Sunday service. They saw before them an anchor attached to a rope and, though the ship was above and hidden in the clouds, they could hear the sailors trying to haul the rope up, but to no avail. At length one of the sailors came down the rope, hand under hand, whereupon he was seized by the church-goers who wanted to know what he did. Alas, he could not breathe in the moisture of our denser air and expired almost immediately.’

  Anthony senses that the other monks had heard it all before. The infirmarian does not trouble to conceal his disdain.

  The Abbot claps his hands.

  ‘God has created marvellous things for us to marvel at! Rejoice and be astonished! Who has not heard of the green men and women who live in caves and under the ferns and who cannot speak English? And what do you say about the rain of frogs and toads that fell upon Tilbury only last year? Wise men know that one thing shades into another and there are no hard frontiers between the living and the dead, the animal and the vegetable, those who dwell in the sky and those who dwell on earth, for it is all a perfect continuum. Consider the wondrous vegetable lamb of Tartary, which grows everywhere in the meadowlands inhabited by the Mongols. The lamb, which has its roots in the earth, feeds on the grass around it and then when it had eaten all the grass which the lamb’s stem allows it to reach it starves to death. But its seeds give birth to other vegetable lambs. Our earth has trapdoors that are hidden and strange things go in and out of them. Why only last week here in Crowland we all saw a troupe of naked men and women standing on the branches of a tree less than a bowshot from the entrance to the Abbey! As we read in the Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach, God sends us miracles as signposts to guide us to the greatest Miracle which is Himself.’

  The Abbot spreads out his hands as if inviting Anthony to come to the God of wonders, and Anthony replies, ‘These are marvels indeed. But I have seen Sir Andrew Trollope and the Earl of Wiltshire, who were men I was familiar with but who are now dead. How can this be?’

  But the Abbot is at home in such matters and he replies, ‘It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror and destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them. Did not frequent examples occur in our own times which suffice to establish this fact, the truth of which there is abundant testimony?’

  The Abbot’s voice drops as he continues, ‘Dead men walking are common enough and I could tell you many tales about them. I will tell you just one. It is this. An evil man on the run from the law fled from York and settled in a distant village and married there. But he soon became suspicious of his wife and so he hid in the rafters of their bedroom from where he was able to observe her infidelity. But in so doing he was careless and fell to the floor and his fall proved mortal for he died of it a few days later. The man received a Christian burial even though he, being the handiwork of Satan, did not deserve it and afterwards he was not suffered to remain in his grave but was pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, so that the people of the village were compelled to bolt their doors from sunset to sunrise for fear of encountering this horrible monster. Those who did stray from their homes were invariably killed.’

  ‘In the end the villagers took spades to the man’s grave and were surprised how little earth they had to clear before they found the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence and the face turgid and thick with blood and the monster’s shroud mostly ripped to pieces. Anger gave courage to the young men beside the grave and they hacked at the corpse with the edges of their spades, whereupon so much blood poured out from it that they might have been attacking a sack full of leeches that had fed on many persons. Then, when they dragged the body to its pyre, they found that it would not burn until they had cut its heart out and then finally it did burn. Events such as these are warnings, calling us to a virtuous life. My lord, what you have seen is not so very unusual or important. Still I admit that I do envy you for your encounter with the creatures of the afterlife.’

  His tale concluded the Abbot asked the Chronicler of Crowland to conduct Anthony to the scriptorium so that Anthony might dictate what he had seen at the Battle of Palm Sunday, as well as give an account of his ghostly visitations. (The Abbot was particularly interested and pleased to hear how the dead are conducted up along a tunnel of light to be greeted by men in white robes.)

  Alone with the Chronicler Anthony asks, ‘Am I mad or is the Abbot mad?’

  ‘Our Abbot is a great man,’ says the Chronicler sulkily before he sets to writing. He dutifully and briefly records what Anthony is prepared to tell him about the ghosts. But really he is more interested in what Anthony can tell him about his meetings with King Henry and King Edward, as well as the Battle of Palm Sunday.

  ‘Do I have it right?’ the Chronicler wants to know. ‘I have never been in a fight.’ He sounded wistful. Anthony tries to describe the battle, but in truth, so long as his visor was down, he had seen so little of the fighting – just the confusion and the crowds of armoured men pressing against one another. The Chronicler showed him what he had written already: ‘The blood of the slain mixed with the snow, which covered the land at that time, and when the snow melted it flowed into furrows and ditches over an area of two or three miles in a most gruesome fashion’. Yes, that was how it had been and was it not strange that those carefully inked words should conjure it up so exactly? Anthony is impressed.

  The Chronicler persists in questioning him about politics and warfare. Finally he puts his pen down and sighs.

  ‘You and your peers make history whereas I merely record it. The names of Scales and Rivers are already famous and talked about, whereas my own name will be forgotten within a generation. Even now there are few enough people who know my name.’

  (This must be true. Even though Anthony had been properly introduced to the Chronicler, he has already forgotten his name.)

  Anthony turns over a few of the earlier pages of the chronicle. Most of it is the stuff of parish talk and a record of the remarkably few things that had happened to the Abbey and, above all, repeated praise of the deeds and wisdom of Abbot John Littlington. Indeed, the Abbot features more prominently in the chronicle than do King Henry or the Duke of York. Apart from Anthony’s deposition, the most recent entry deals with the Abbot’s inspection of a two-headed calf in a nearby village.

  At this point the Abbot comes staggering in, ‘My lord, it will soon be compline. Will you walk with me?’

  As they walk towards the abbey church the Abbot turns to Anthony, ‘You say that you saw the Earl of Wiltshire, though dead, in the bed that you customarily share with your wife?’

  Anthony nods and then the Abbot continues, ‘According to St Augustine, “Passionate love for one’s own wife is adultery.” If you have had a vision of the Earl of Wiltshire in such a place, then it was to put a curb on your own lust for your wife. But what a wonder! I wish that I had been there to see it.’

  Anthony is thankful that this was not the case. The Abbot has been no help at all. A little later Anthony is listening to the evil-averting prayer of compline.

  ‘Scuto circumdabit te veritas ejus; non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulente in tenebris ab incursu et daemonio meridiano.’

  ‘His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’

  Though there are no apparitions in the night, Anthony’s sleep is fitful at best. First, he makes plans to escape the tedium of England and the wearisome factions that struggle for power at the English court. He wants to see the vegetable lamb of Tartary with his own eyes. He conjures up his future journey to distant lands where there
are underground cities and smoking lakes and where men in conical hats walk amidst mountains built of bricks, while long-snouted creatures with teeth struggle out of the swamps. There is nothing for him in England, where everything is so old and familiar: old roads, old customs, old castles, old lineages, old feuds, old laws, old churches, old books and an old religion. Living in England is like camping in a graveyard.

  But no sooner has his mind touched on the graveyard than it turns to less pleasant things. The fear comes upon him that some ghostly demon may smuggle itself into the monastery and make its way into his chamber. In fact, no demon visits him, but in his mind’s eye again and again he imagines Lady Elizabeth de Scales raising the hem of her black satin skirt… And only now does it come to him as a thought that is vague and confused yet horridly powerful that the monster may already be in the room, already on the bed, for is he himself not the monster? And was not the Abbot’s story a warning to those who are prey to demonic lust and jealousy? Though night is frightful, he fears the coming dawn more, for in the morning he will ride out and he knows that then he must return to Scales Hall to confront his wife and, if it must be, also the spectre that was her companion in bed.

  The following morning he has an appointment with the infirmarian who is to inspect how well his wound is healing. The infirmary is in the form of a long aisle with bays running off it with beds in them. All the beds are empty and Anthony lies on one of them and, while the infirmarian runs his fingers over his scars, Anthony thinks about his visions and he fears that the seeing of such things may be a symptom of some weakness in himself. To his mind, a visionary is a sick man, no better than a cripple. At length he repeats the question he had asked of the Chronicler, ‘Am I mad, or is the Abbot mad?’