John Powys - The Brazen Head

“It doesn’t seem quite right for a young man as well-born and well-educated as Tilton to work like a mason with his own hands at that little shrine to Our Lady he’s building out there: but it shows what a good, firm, steady, reliable mind the dear boy has that he is anxious to serve God in a really practical way, rather than indulge in all these crazy and immoral ideas about inventing ships to fly to the Moon and boats to dive to the bottom of the sea and Heads of Brass to utter oracles. O my little John, my little John, if I, your mother, can’t get this nonsense out of your head I can only hope that when you’re a man you’ll find a woman who’ll be able to do what your mother can’t!”

At this point Lady Valentia was seized with such a spasm of frustration and with such a sense of all the weariness and disillusionment that exist in this human world, that she bowed her head over the arm of her chair, and closing her eyes uttered a piteous prayer to her guardian angel that she might go to sleep like those people in fairy-tales and not wake up till her husband was dead and John was a man and Lil-Umbra was happily married.

It was at this moment that Master Cortex, breathing heavily and gasping a little, not only by reason of the speed at which he’d come, but also from apprehension as to the effect of his news, was ushered into that little ante-chamber.

Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery jostled each other to be the first intermediary between this Euripidean messenger of fate and the lady of the manor; and Mother Guggery being the nearer at the start won the race. With a word and a wave she dismissed the scullery-boy who had ushered Cortex into the lady’s presence, and she would have dismissed Cortex too if she could have got his news out of him before doing so; but Lady Val’s instinctive tact and instantaneously available domestic wisdom anticipated any such move.

“What is it, Tex?” she enquired; and her choice of the diminutive syllable which Sir Mort always used for his doorkeeper so delighted the professional pride of Mistress Bundy’s stolid mate that he couldn’t resist giving to both Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery a grimly sardonic glance, not even including them in one general look but giving them each a separate rebuff, as if he said to the one, “You see it’s ‘Tex’ between your mistress and me,” and to the other, “You see how well she knows the way they treat door-keepers in King’s houses!”

“Did this man you’re speaking of,” enquired Lady Val, “I mean the one on the horse with two heads, mention how many were coming? Did he know if the saintly Bonaventura was among them?”

Having completely disposed of the two old wives, who were now so riddled with curiosity that nothing but direct dismissal by their mistress would have got rid of them, Cortex answered Lady Val’s questions with the utmost honesty.

“The man didn’t say how many they were, my lady, nor did he say whether Saint Bonaventura was coming with them. But he certainly said they would be at the great gate in a few minutes; so, as I knew you and Sir Mort, my lady, would wish them to have a taste of cook’s good oat-cakes on this morn of morns, I told him that their men would have to take their horses round to the stables themselves, and that if his noble lords were wearing heavy armour it had better be left in the gate-room, as we hadn’t—”

“Did the man tell you that Saint Bonaventura was coming with them?” interrupted Lady Val with some degree of impatience.

The Nurse and Mother Guggery looked significantly at each other as Cortex began to explain at length just when and how, in his recent conversation, the name Bonaventura had been introduced:

“Well, Tex,” Lady Val announced at last, “you’d better bring them all in here, into our reception-passage. Yes! All the lot of them! It won’t do to discriminate; ‘In for a shepherd’s crook, in for a royal sceptre!’ as the proverb says. But I wish Peleg and Lil-Umbra would come back! I can’t think where Lady Lil has made him carry her. Well! you’d better go back and wait for them at the gate. I must go to the kitchen at once and find out what we’ve got and what cook will be able to do with what we’ve got”—she broke off with a little cry and a gesture that might have been of exasperation or might have been of intense relief; and while Cortex with a rather dissatisfied countenance stalked out of the chamber, Lady Val turned to Nurse Rampant.

“I think,” she said, “that was the postern-gate. If it was, it must mean that Peleg and Lil-Umbra have come in. I expect you had better take the child to her room at once, Nurse. For I know her Father would want her to look her very best if what Cortex said is true and this company really comes straight from France. Cortex isn’t one to exaggerate, and I know there’s been talk of this saintly Bonaventura becoming a Cardinal, perhaps even Pope, if his glory goes on mounting up at its present rate.”

Seldom have three women separated more hurriedly and with expressions more definitely divided between lively excitement, irritable anxiety, and gloating interest than these three did now. But not much time elapsed before Nurse Rampant and Lady Valentia were in sight of each other again, although surrounded now, each of them, by a closely jostling crowd of extravagantly attired lords and ladies.

The reception of guests in this central portion of the Fortress of Roque always took place in a wide and spacious but low-roofed passage, half cloister, half gothic corridor, between the kitchen and the dining-hall. Of these it was the kitchen that was far the more richly decorated, and in its roof, walls, and general aspect, far the more flamboyant, and grotesquely intricate in its ornamentation. The dining-hall was of much simpler and much older construction. In fact it must have reverted to an age only a little later than the withdrawal from Britain of the Roman Legions.

Entering it you felt you were entering what might have been a giant cave in a fairy-tale; and when you were within it, it was as if it had been through primeval forests that you had to thread your way, crossing some Roman road, and losing yourself in mouldering and broken-up vestiges of shadowy romance. It was the spacious cloistered passage between these two impressive constructions, the eastward-looking prehistoric dining-hall, and the westward-looking, intimately gothic and mediaeval kitchen, that was, upon this particular February morning, in the year of grace twelve hundred and seventy-two, when the little daughter of the house accompanied by the Mongolian giant Peleg came in through the postern-gate, more crowded than it had been since the day when the Norman bride of Llewelyn the Great was entertained here by Lady Val’s family.

The crowd by which Lil-Umbra and Peleg were now confronted was indeed a brilliant one and yet it was also an extremely confused and motley one. If there were plenty of lords and ladies, there were also plenty of menials and dependents; some of these latter being almost strangers to the place, such as the blue-eyed, wispy-bearded rider of the deformed horse called Cheiron, others, like the Sygerius family, who had been Bailiffs of Roque for two or three generations, being wholly local people.

It was immediately apparent to Lil-Umbra and Peleg, even before Lady Val had been able to make her way through the crowd to reach them, that the chief topic of excited talk among all these people had to do with the coming of the famous Bonaventura, and with the relation between him and the equally famous — though some would say the abominably infamous — Friar Bacon.

The names Bacon and Bonaventura kept rising and falling like a musical refrain from all parts of the crowd. The impression Lil-Umbra first got was that at any moment the philosopher in disgrace and his saintly punisher might suddenly emerge from somewhere behind the scenes and burst into a dramatic dialogue. Then she suddenly became aware that there really was a violent argument between two excitable competitors for public attention approaching them through the crowd, but that this was a dispute between her own brothers.