The Book of Days E-Book

Francesca Kay

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 368

Beschreibung

'At least that post-Reformation sovereignty of the word still yields novels as richly imagined and skilfully crafted as this' The Spectator Things change; we have to recognise that; the world will not stay still. What we must hope is that the new is better and stronger than the old. Anno Domini 1546. In a manor house in England a young woman feels the walls are closing round her, while her dying husband is obsessed by his vision of a chapel where prayers will be said for his immortal soul. As the days go by and the chapel takes shape, the outside world starts to intrude. And as the old ways are replaced by the new, the people of the village sense a dangerous freedom. The Book of Days is a beautifully written novel of lives lived in troubled times and the solace to be found in nature and the turning seasons. Reader Reviews 'A must read … Characters that one cares about, beautifully structured, a real page turner' 'A jewel of a book' 'Beautifully written' 'Atmospheric and compelling'

Leseprobe

In memory of Mark

The tenth day of the month of April

Caught on the daylight that comes glancing through the clear glass of the windows on the south wall, the stone dust dances, drifts away and invisibly falls. Stone-taste in the mouth, a breath of dust and bone. New light from the east where there was dark before, and dust on light-beam dancing, dancing to the music of mallets striking stone, a ringing and a rhythm. Jack the elder and Jack the younger taking turns and swinging forward, pulling back, and the stone dust rising as the old wall shudders and yields. A scatter of bright paint across the floor.

A ceremony this, the knocking through, that should have witnesses besides a pair of Jacks, the mason Simm and me. It marks the start of something new. But in the village they are afraid of newness and convinced that when the wall is breached, the roof will fall in too. Even the priest and the churchwarden are keeping at a distance for fear of shattered skulls. They should have greater trust in Simm. He may be saying his prayers this minute to the patron saint of masons but he has also driven iron bars into the stones above the intended rupture and made temporary buttresses from tree trunks; we will be quite safe. Although he was surprised to see me, he did not turn me away and simply warned me to beware of flying chips of stone. Yes, I will be, I remember that a young lad lost an eye last year to a nail that came arrowing straight at him from a piece of timber. Today, the men have bound lengths of cloth about their mouths and noses, and they squint cautiously beneath their caps.

If it were fresh stone that they worked, Simm would call the tune. He is the master musician of the band, the one who hears most clearly the inner note of every new block, who tests it, tapping gently with a chisel, listening, tapping again, ear cocked for the stone’s response. Stone speaks; it says to him: strike here, this is the place for the first cut, here will I break open for you, clean as chalk, clean as the bark of a beech tree lately felled. I have heard Simm whisper to a stone. And seen him tasting one; he tells the provenance of stone by tongue as well as eye, and by his sense of smell. When it is freshly cut, he says, limestone gives off a charnel scent, an autumn air of earth and dying leaves, as if it held within it a remembrance of a time before its form was solid.

But it is not new stone that makes this dust, it is stone that is part of a wall so old that no one knows how long it may have stood here. Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, there was an altar by this wall on which a bank of tapers burned, as they have always burned for untold years, and today the fragments of that altar are stacked up on a barrow. And in the wall itself, where Lazarus once was, for centuries emerging from his tomb still swaddled in his grave-clothes, there is now a widening hole. To make things new, we must destroy, my lord my husband said; but the new will bring great glory.

Jack and Jack work fast. Between the inner face and the outer wall a narrow gap is filled with rubble and crumbled mortar. Jack the elder reaches in and pulls out a length of bone.

Sheep’s bone, Simm says without looking. Throw it on the barrow.

He has a wooden template, the outline of an arch, a graceful shape like a wishbone or like the tips of fingers meeting, which he is holding at the ready. There is still a way to go but now the hole is wide enough to admit a slender person. Little Jack looks enquiringly at the mason.

Yes, why not, Simm says, and Jack crawls through to the far side, one leg first, then folded body, the other leg hauled after. Framed by jagged stone he reappears, his broad grin signalling success.

May I see too?

Simm shakes his head. You will break your ankle on the unsteady pile.

But Jack says he can make a sort of ledge for me from the tumbled stone and help me to jump down. She is but a thin creature, he says to Simm in a whisper that is not as quiet as he thinks. He scrambles back and offers his hand and I take it before Simm can stop me.

Climbing in is as easy as crossing a stile, but as soon as I am there, I feel trapped. The chapel is only half-built; it has a makeshift roof of rushes, the spaces left for windows want mullions and glass, and nothing stops the light from streaming in. But it is still a prison. Women are enclosed by men, in chantries and in tombs. I have a sudden fear that these four walls are drawing closer. Damp and mud-smell now, and Jack’s sweat, the leather of his jerkin and the stone dust, and pools of chilly water on the ground, for winter, having freely played through the scant thatch and the empty windows, has only just retreated, and there has been much rain. I shut my eyes and try to imagine the place when it is finished, to see the traceries of stone, to hear the chanting that it is made for, but I cannot; I must go back into the full light of the sun.

How is it that the seasons turn so fast? Here is a conjuring overnight of green – or white and green – new leaves and cherry blossom, wood anemones and hawthorn in drifts of pure whiteness, as if these green days could not quite surrender their memories of snow.

I should return to the house, now that I have seen what is happening in the church, but it is too hard to forsake this world of light for the stale air of a sickroom. I shall go to the river instead, there is no one here to see me and I will not be long. Such depths of sadness there have been in these past months, and such dark days that I almost stopped believing in the existence of the sun. Weeks of snow, with storms to follow, and then a Lenten spell of pewter skies and rain so fierce it flooded fields, made rivers of the furrows and tadpoles of the seed. Linen, clothing, paper, straw, everything was sodden, and men were fearing for the grain and the waterlogged feet of cattle. Everywhere the sickly bloom of mould. And then it changed. As if the skies had wept their fill, the rains stopped suddenly and left behind this well-washed world of colour.

Simm predicted yesterday that this fine weather would hold at least a week and therefore the building work could recommence. I was not so sure this morning. At dawn, a mist lay thickly on the water meadow or, more exactly, hung above it, like a cloud that is tired of holding itself high but wary of sinking to the ground, lest it be enveloped by the dew. However, Simm was right, and now that mist has disappeared, burned away by sunshine. This April day is already hot as June, and it is good to walk alone through the long grass and the world’s awakening to water that is likewise welcoming the sun’s return and reflecting it in a million discs of gold.

Here the willows, like the thorn trees, are misted in soft green and it is quiet but for the chatter of ducks preoccupied with nests, and the soliloquy of water. No, soliloquy is not the right word, the river does not talk to itself, it converses with its banks and the stones that it flows over. Listen to its voice change when it meets a clutch of roots and must eddy round it, or when it combs through a skein of weed.

When I walk by myself I talk to myself aloud. It is the only way I know of knowing what I think. How else to trap elusive thought but in a net of words? Although there is no call for thought when walking by the river; it conduces to the stilling of the mind. In the continual movement of the water, the dapple and the patterns that it makes of light, in the quicksilver flash of a fish so swift that it might have been imagined had it not left a testament in ripples, it is possible to lose oneself. The river has its own purpose and is indifferent to mine.

I am ever hopeful of the kingfisher, that heart-lifting dart of flame and sapphire-blue. He is in hiding, though, this morning – and why should he be generous with his jewel colours? – but there is a heron, standing so stock-still on the riverbank that at first I mistake it for a dead branch lodged above the water. And, strangely, the bird remains there, unafraid, until I come so close to it that I can see each feather of its schoolman’s cap, its cruel beak and the yellow roundel of its eye. For a while we contemplate each other, bird and woman, until it tires of me and takes slow, meditative, ungainly flight downstream. Yes, and its departure tells me that it is time to go back through the grass-scent and the cuckooflowers to the churchyard and the shadow of the yew tree, and from there to the darkness of the house.

The hangings are drawn back around the bed but the one window is closed and the air lies flat and heavy. He is leaning against pillows, red and gold embroidered, a gaudiness that by contrast turns his skin to parchment. His daughter Agnes sits beside him on a stool.

Do they make progress? he says to me in greeting.

They do. There is an opening almost as wide as a door now, in the north wall. I stepped through it.

And the roof is sound?

It is.

Good. And the Easter sepulchre?

It is broken. The mason Simm could not remove it in one piece but he thinks the stone can be reused. What should he tell the people of the parish? They love that altar.

We will put something finer in its place and the people will be happy. Ask the mason to come to me this afternoon. If this weather stays and the carpenters make haste, he can send for the stone-carvers from Tewkesbury. They are working with my chosen imager at present and he might make the journey with them. If he does, so much the better.

The weather is fair indeed. Will you rise and go to dinner today? Hugh is expected home.

Yes, I will.

Despite the warmth of the room, he is wrapped in furs, silver hair entwined with sable. I go to him and put my hand against his forehead, where I ought to put my lips instead. His skin is dry and scaly.

I am reading to my lord my father, Agnes says, unnecessarily, as she is holding a book open on her lap. She does not say, because she dare not, that I am an unwelcome interruption.

You are a clever girl, I tell her.

Titus, quiet until now, starts rattling the chain that ties him to a bedpost, and jabbering in that urgent way of his. Hush, Agnes commands, but he persists. He must think us very foolish that we do not understand him, however hard he strives to share his meaning. If he could talk in human tongue, would he speak of fetters? There is something deep in the brown pools of his eyes, but he also has sharp yellow teeth and spiteful little fingers. I do not think he is a fit companion in a sickroom, and I say so.

He is company for my father, Agnes protests.

A different accusation left unsaid. I let the matter drop.

I feel for Agnes. Her father’s sole surviving child, motherless since she was eight and finding the transition from girl to woman hard. Some girls slip into womanhood with ease but Agnes is all angles, awkward, stringy-haired and obdurate, and she suffers outbreaks of red pustules on her cheeks and chin. There might be remedy for those if mention of them were permitted, but it is not. Agnes is a proud girl and keeps her cares to herself. I wish it were otherwise, I wish we could be closer. She wrenches my heart. Motherless children, childless mothers, that’s the way of the world.

Agnes walked before me at my wedding to her father, bearing a gilded branch of rosemary. Twelve gold coins he gave me then, laid out on his shield, and a golden ring. Women are chattels that men dispose of: my father sold, my husband bought, his first wife by that time almost three years in her grave.

It is eleven before noon and he is coming down the spiral staircase to the hall, with his servant Lambert by his side. One hand on the stone banister, the other clutching Lambert’s lifted forearm. Step by single step, with great deliberation, slowly, slowly, slowly. Small children and the elderly do that same careful placing of both feet but he might reasonably have hoped for more time between those stages. Time is accelerating for him, winding his years onto its remorseless spool too fast, while for the rest of us it seems to be more lenient. I begin to see why the founding of the chantry is so urgent.

We who are already gathered, with our hands washed, observe this slow descent. When he gets to his place he lets go of Lambert. He can stand on his own still, supporting himself with both hands on the edge of the table. His nails are overlong, yellow on the bleached white cloth. Lambert fetches him the bowl of water.

The priest, Sir Joselin, having waited, takes his own place too, and so do we, remaining in silence for his mumbled grace: benedic, Domine nobis et donis tuis quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi, et concede ut illis salubriter nutriti tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus, per Jesum Christum Dominum et Servatorem Nostrum.

Amen, we say. Sir Joselin, irrevocably wedded to the old ways, hurries through the words, impatient for his food. Everyone is hungry. My husband is served first.

On either side of him we sit, his wife and daughter, and we both watch every spoonful as he lifts it stiffly to his mouth. His hand trembles but he does not spill his broth. Agnes eats almost as little as her father does; although Lent is over, she has forsworn meat because, she says, it tastes of blood. All she has on her plate today is bread and herring.

Sitting next to Agnes, Hugh, newly returned from his visit to Oxford, asks if the roof of the church still holds, without a wall beneath it. Did Saint Stephen save it? Does it float? I wish I could have been here to see that wall knocked down!

It holds, my lord my husband answers, and smiles at Hugh, his dear nephew.

Never mind Saint Stephen, my lord’s cousin Marmion says. The credit is all Simm’s. Although we may have need of that saint yet, for don’t forget he is also the patron saint of headaches. And of coffin-makers.

Hush, his wife, Dame Joan, reproaches him.

In the pause that follows, my mind-sight drifts to an image of a pitched roof and a steeple floating in the air, while far below a congregation gazes upwards in amazement, seeing sky where they expected rafters. Why not anticipate a miracle when it comes to the making of a chapel? There is a church in Rome that was built to the precise design of Our Lady. She came to the donor in a dream one August night and told him the place where she wanted it to be, and when he went there in the morning he found the outline of a church in freshly fallen snow. Only think of that: how the people must have marvelled at the sight, the sere and yellow grasses of high summer starred with snowflakes, the lovely coldness of them on their thirsty tongues. Mater castissima, our Lady of the Snows. Could there be a church made all of ice?

I am still thinking about snow when my attention is snatched back by a now-familiar argument between Marmion and my lord my husband.

Whatever you believe, the truth is that the church does not befit us as it stands, my lord says. I should have razed it to the ground, perhaps, and begun afresh. But in any case, walls have been pulled down before and new ones built, as anyone can tell from the traces that remain there. Have you never noted that ghost of an old arch and a window blocked up long ago?

The fault lies not in the destruction of the old but in the ambition of the new, Marmion disputes. This is no time to be building church or chapel, it were better to put your superfluity of gold into granaries and barns. Are memories so short these days?

No, but the times are quieter now and the greediest of the wolves is dead. I will have my chantry built, and no man will stop me. Besides, I do nothing that contravenes the law.

When he arrives, my brother will tell us how things are – they hear all the news at Lincoln’s Inn, Hugh says happily. I think he will be here within the week. Is the new priest travelling with him, did someone say?

At the mention of the new priest, all eyes turn towards the old one, but Sir Joselin says nothing and shows nothing of what he feels. He simply chews his steady way through his slab of pasty, doggedly and heedless of the fact that the rest of us have finished eating. O Joselin, sweet man, with grease stains on the black stuff of your gown, the relics of past meals, and drifts of white flakes on your shoulders. We all fall silent too, except for Titus, who is scratching around in the straw, playing daredevil with the dogs. And still Sir Joselin eats, without haste and without a single glance about him.

It was Hugh, my lord’s nephew, who showed me the ancient picture that is almost completely hidden in a corner of Yatt’s field, beyond the village, by the quarry. My first summer here, on a hot day before the harvest; I remember that we skirted the tall grain and came upon some stones by a tangle of briar and hazel, like the remnants of a wall, and a few broken red clay tiles. Hugh, knowing where to look, knelt to pull away a mat of grass and hedging and uncovered a picture made of little squares of different-coloured stones. The face of a man, wide-eyed, dark-browed, with the sun behind him, or a wheel with spokes of gold. Who put it there, and why – who knows? Hugh said that there would certainly be more to see if we went on digging, look, here is what could be a horse’s ear, probably the man was only part of a much larger picture, buried now beneath the earth. One day, he said, we will come back and search. Yes, perhaps we will. Meanwhile, I sometimes think about that man, mysterious and beautiful, with the curling hair across his forehead, resting there below his coverlet of grass. So many years he must have lain there, longer than mortal memory can stretch, seldom visited, almost entirely forgotten. And yet, who is he, that solitary man blazing out of darkness, who is he if not a god?

The nineteenth day of the month of April

As swiftly as it came, the warmth of last week has now left and this morning there was sleet. Having been trapped in the house all day I fled outside near dusk, to walk along the walls of the demesne, and the clouds were still low-lying and deep-dark. But then, above the bank of cloud, a sudden glow of setting sun. I was at the locked gate, looking through it at the near field, and I saw how the light fell on the new leaves of the purple beech, so that they seemed transparent and they shone.

Simm and his men make headway in the teeth of constant rain, and at mass times hang up an oiled cloth to shield the faithful from the wind. Whenever I can, I go to the church to admire what is new. Such considering, measuring, assessing, shaping; trammels, templates, springing line and span. Twenty-six voussoirs for the arched doorway and every one of them requiring to be strictly cut and dressed, the facing edges combed. Stone has a grain and a bed, Simm says; it remembers how it lay when in the quarry and it must be set into a wall in the same way. For Simm, stone is a living thing. He was stung by the decision to import the master stone-carvers from Tewkesbury, protesting that he and his men already had the necessary art. But when my lord husband dreamt of this work, in his mind’s eye he saw perfection; mere craftsmanship will not suffice. Limestone rubble might have done for old walls but the new stone must be immaculately dressed, smooth as butter in a mould. Instead of a plain wooden ceiling, there is to be stone tracery as delicate as the pinions of a bird or the skeleton of a leaf. This chantry and the other works that he has ordered are to be his monument, his lasting gift, and I think they may also be his penance.

Village mason though he may be, Simm is possessed of great skill, and it is a beautiful thing to watch him and his men at work. They slid those twenty-six cut blocks of stone, each larger than a child’s head, precisely into place, and now the arch is perfect, looking almost seamless, as if the stones were fused together or had forever been one curving piece, like a rib bone or the bent bough of a tree. And indeed the slender shafts that frame the doorway do look like a gracile cluster of newly sprouted birch trees, braceleted by hoops of honeycomb-gold stone.

While Simm’s men are finishing the doorway, the carpenters are working on the roof of the new chapel. Their beams will be concealed by the stone-carvers’ vault when all is done, but even so they cut and plane the green oak as carefully as they would if the end results were going to be on show. Until I looked, I did not know how much there is unseen or hidden in this place: rafters, the inner faces of outer walls, the finger-width of space behind the column of the stairs to the rood loft, the layers of ancient floor, and bones in their forgotten graves. What will they make of my lord’s chantry, those who step in through this arched doorway in centuries to come? As little as we who dwell here now do of the long departed who built the church’s tower and walled up the entrance that was there before and which has left its scar? Or of the legions of the nameless, beneath successive sheets of clay? Is there any consolation in the knowledge that my lord and I will be remembered in this building if it withstands the years, the storms, the wilfulness of kings, although we be translated into stone? I am not certain of that. I pleaded for my baby to be buried in the soft earth of the churchyard, where grass and flowers would grow and she would feel the touch of rain and sun, not here beneath the beaten floor with the other children. And I prevailed. Still, I must hope that the promise of stony immortality gives my husband comfort. I am afraid that some will say these works of his have been inspired by vanity, but I do believe it is his faith that moves him.

The last day of the month of April

Cow-dancing day, and to the world of white and green has come a wash of blue, a fall of sky onto the ground beneath the new leaves of the beech trees in the woods, a lake where last week there was grass. When I was walking there this morning, having escaped the house unseen, I wondered why we cloister God in stone and not in that sky-colour, with the blackbird’s song. Is it because he himself demanded that a tabernacle should be built for him, and its pillars overlaid with gold? Perhaps, and perhaps because no sinner ever won remission by putting up a church that had the sky for vault and woodland trees for walls. These blue flowers obey no man; they come to no one’s bidding and they die in their own season, their beauty while they live a careless rapture.

The cattle are in raptures too, released this morning from their byres for the first time since late autumn, kicking up their heels in the pasture as skittishly as young maids dancing, giddy with fresh grass and the warmth of sunshine on their backs.

Tomorrow is the first of May, and the stone-carvers are here from Tewkesbury, with the image-maker. At supper in the upstairs chamber, Hugh, teasing Agnes, said: so, cousin, shall you wash your face at dawn with morning dew? May Day dew makes women beautiful, you know. Agnes is already beautiful, I said, but she was cross and blushing, and we swiftly changed the subject.

Other girls will surely rise early in the morning or stay out all night long, for May Day dew has magic power and purifies the skin. Older women too maybe, in memory of beauty. In my father’s house, the women also gathered dew on other spring and summer mornings, going to the fields if there had been no rain the night before and spreading out a linen cloth, which afterwards they would wring out, saving the resulting droplets in a glass, to be distilled. May-morning dew is finest though, and the best is collected from the hawthorn. If I could, if I were not kept to the house by rank and by my husband’s illness, I would go with them. I would like to be by the river at sunrise, where the grass grows tall enough to hide a woman and the dew would fall cool upon my arms, my face, my breasts.

Some claim May Day dew engenders diamonds, Hugh said.

But that cannot be true.

A drop of dew, a world of dew, as fleeting as the blossom of wild cherry or a newborn baby’s breath.

In the month of May, a Tuesday

A Rogation Day, and a light rain falling as we process behind the cross and banner with Sir Joselin, along the fields, around the boundaries of the parish. Cadd the warden loudly rings a bell. Priest and borrowed cantors sing the litany of saints, and we who follow them respond: ora pro nobis, pray for us.

Sancta Maria

Sancta Virgo virginum

Sancte Michael

Sancte Gabriel

Sancte Raphael

Omnes sancti Angeli et Archangeli

Sancte Ioseph

Sancte Thoma

Sancta Lucia

Sancta Agnes

Sancta Caecilia

Sancta Maria Magdalena

Omnes sanctae Virgines et Viduae

Pray for us.

Bell and book to scare away the wicked fiends that would harm the wheat; prayers to make the air clean and the sun to shine; prayers against lightning, hail and tempest; prayers to spare men and beasts from sickness; orate pro nobis, pray for us. Green the barley still, and the tender corn, ramsons by the damp hedges, and the briar rose. The entire bounds we beat, and the men and women and children of this place have walked the same ways, sung these same words, heard the same prayers each year of their lives, season after season.

Ab omni malo, a morte perpetua, libera nos Domine, O Lord, deliver us.

Once, when I was a little girl, I made a long journey with my mother and my brother to the country where she came from, to the west. This was a short while before she died. Her father, my grandfather, was still living then; we stayed with him in his great stone keep, a place that I remember for unending staircases so strait that grown men must ascend them sideways, and windows without glass that were even narrower, set deep in stone embrasures and giving so restricted a view over the land beyond that to me it always seemed to be split into thin segments.

Abutting the walls of this castle of my grandfather’s was a church so old in parts that some said it had been built by the people who lived there before the present race of men. Strange people they must have been, if what was said was true, small and very cunning. The church was quite unlike the great abbey church in the town my father ruled or even ours here, in the village. Every church that I had seen in my life till then had been constructed to soar skywards, at least in intention, but this one was squat and round, more like a wasps’ nest than a house of God, and it teemed with carvings in stone. Almost every inch of it was covered: the outer doorway, the shafts and jambs of the thick columns that held up its curving roof, the font, the shallow chancel arch.

It was entrancing to a child. There were men and there were beasts: tumblers, jugglers, wrestlers and dancers, men playing pipes and viols, hares, rabbits, birds, dogs, a sow suckling her farrow. And there were creatures known to no one living in this land: scaly things, a fish with legs, winged things with quills and haunches, a lion-headed man. Over the doorway, which was so low that even my mother stooped to enter, was the round face of a laughing man with leaves and tendrils sprouting from his head and curling beard. And, most extraordinary of all, close by him, a mermaid with a bifurcated tail. A mermaid caught unaware by the carver in the act of dressing, it would seem, for half her hair was neatly plaited and the other half tumbling loose. Her breasts were bare. In her raised left hand she held a mirror, in her right a comb. Like her hair, her fish-scaled tail was parted equally in two, with both halves curving upwards in a half-circle round her, forming an escutcheon, the finny ends flowing into the doorway’s upper arch. Between the two forks of her tail, her woman’s parts unfurled and open, displaying the little bud of flesh within.

In the month of May: the day following the beating of the bounds

Titus has bitten Susan my maidservant, in spite of yesterday’s incantations against evil. She was straightening my lord’s sheets while I was out of the room when the creature jumped up from the floor as quick as a flea and sank his pointy teeth into the soft part of her arm above the elbow. Poor Susan, it is an unpleasant wound. I am suing for Titus to be banished from the upper chambers, like the dogs, for it is unfair to expect Susan to put up with him any longer, but Agnes says that if he is, she will have to sleep in the hall with him, for she will not be separated from her darling. Besides, there is no need for the maids to enter her father’s chamber as long she is there to tend him, together with faithful Lambert – who is not afraid of little Titus – and in any case he will be cured soon. It is but a matter of time.

I hope that she is right. Doctor Moreton comes every week from Banbury with leeches, purges and new tinctures, which he claims are doing their work but, before our eyes, the man is losing his power to move. It is as though thick clay crept through his veins instead of blood. In the warm week of April, he could walk in the garden, but since then he has kept to the house, and often to his chamber, night and day.

A root of herb bennet boiled in wine preserves against poisoning, plague and venomous bites, according to Dame Joan.

In the month of May: Ascension Day

Bell-ringing in the church again and a great stir and bustle in the house, for Roland my lord’s nephew has come, with another young man, a friend of his from Lincoln’s Inn, but not the expected chantry priest, whose whereabouts are unknown. The two arrived this afternoon in a swirl and jangle of hooves and harness, having ridden fast from Watlington as if they had urgent business, although it appears that they do not, and are here merely because they have nowhere else to be. Strange how some people agitate the air around them. Roland is one such: he can be sitting in silence in a corner of a room and still compel attention; he is impossible to ignore. It is as if some invisible thing clung always to his shoulder, shivering its unseen wings. All eyes turn to him wherever he goes and yet he himself seems heedless of his own effect. He absorbs the regard of others as a storm cloud does the sun.

Hugh is touchingly pleased to see his brother, and Roland’s appearance has also lifted my lord my husband’s spirits. I know that my lord is fond of both young men, these sons of his dead sister, but Hugh is familiar, a part and parcel of the household, having been here since his mother died. Roland, however, who is five years older, was a boy at Paul’s at the time, and later a scholar in Cambridge, and afterwards returned to live in London. Consequently, when he visits, he is a novelty and he brings to this secluded place a welcome breath of the outside world. He has acquaintances at Court, he has travelled across the sea to faraway cities – Paris and Geneva – he has studied law; he can converse with his uncle on terms that no one else can, in this house. He resembles him as well, they share the same dark eyes and unusual height.

I too am glad that Roland is here, but I do not love him as I love his brother. There is no sweeter-natured person on this earth. Hugh has something of a child’s directness and clarity of gaze, and he has deep wells of kindness. If he possessed as much gold as there are leaves on a pear tree, he would give it all away to anyone in need. When I came here, as the new wife of my lord, Hugh was but a boy, and yet even at his age he sensed how hard it was for me to conform to a house with long-established ways, to a man so much older and a bereft stepchild, and all without companion of my own, except for one maidservant. It was Hugh alone who strove to turn this strange place into home. He showed me everything – the house, the garden, the village, the fields, the meadows and the woods, the riverbank – until he thought I knew my way well enough to feel that I belonged here, to some degree at least. We still walk the demesne together, when we can. Dear, round-faced, gentle Hugh who, like my own lost brother, knows the names of flowers and stars and birds, and hears the songs of the fields.

Roland, though, is for the new. And, unlike his brother, he is not blue-eyed and plumpish but as gaunt and beaky as the heron. There are shadows beneath his cheekbones and his hair is black as night. He is a beautiful young man. His friend is called Henry Martyn, and so far he has said nothing but for that demanded by politeness. I have never seen a grown man so pale of hair and skin. He is as white as a garment washed in lye and left out in the sun to bleach. Thistledown hair, eyelashes as fair as strands of spider’s web and eyes a milk-whey shade of grey. When they stand side by side, Roland and Henry look like a painted allegory of darkness against light, although in life they are not in the least opposed but evidently think alike on every matter.

In the month of May: the day after the feast of the Ascension

At the church a whispering parliament is in progress. Now that the doorway is nearly finished, the supports removed and the rafters all in place, it is time to start upon the vault, the tomb pit and the porch. Simm is in command by general agreement, as he is the mason of the house, even though he has had reluctantly to cede the finer work to strangers. When I get there, I find him drawing over the painting on the north wall of the chancel with a stick of chalk. Jack the elder, the man called Dickon and others of the men whose names I do not know are clustering about him, somewhat abashed by this unaccustomed trespass beyond the rood screen, giving their opinions but keeping their voices low. The three stone-carvers, brothers or cousins I think, from their likeness to each other – stocky, dark men – are keeping their distance and their counsel. Sir Joselin, whose holy space is thus invaded, is nowhere to be seen and nor is the imager, as far as I can tell, although, having had work at Gloucester, he travelled here together with the carvers. Unlike them, he is to have his lodging in the house, for he is a man of standing, but I was in the blue-hazed woods when he arrived and have not seen him yet. Agnes says he comes from Italy.

The far side of this wall once faced the elements, but now that a part of it has been adopted as one wall of the chantry, its weather-beaten stone will soon be coated in thick plaster. Or, rather, the little left of it, for much will be torn down to give those of us to be buried here a clear view of God’s altar. This entails the destruction of the picture that is here.

From year to year wall paintings fade and are renewed but this one, protected from the touch of passing hands by its location, is older than the rest and may never have been repainted. It shows the Last Supper. Candle-grime has partially obscured it and the painter was not especially skilled – some of the disciples look more like Titus than the usual run of men and the hand in which Our Saviour holds the cup of his own blood could be mistaken for a paw – but the villagers revere it. Still, the nave is not the parish’s domain and in any case there will be fresh painting in its place. Other images have been despoiled more cruelly in the past. Saint Thomas, much beloved, who was once depicted on the square of wall beside the door, had his face scratched out by edict years before I came here. He is still here in a way, featureless and ghostly, his halo a faint arc of gold, for no one has had the heart to paint him out entirely. He had his own altar then, but that was outlawed too. Things change; we have to recognise that; the world will not stay still. What we must hope is that the new is better and stronger than the old.

Simm’s chalky line comes to a point that cuts through the neck of the Holy Ghost, who hovers above the head of Our Lord in the form of a dove. I can save the angels, he says.

Unobserved by me and Simm, Hugh and Roland have entered the church, with Henry Martyn. Hugh, having heard what Simm was saying, tells him not to be concerned about preserving any of the paintings, as they will all be made again when the new plasterwork is dry. While they are talking, Roland and Henry prowl about; this is Henry’s first visit to the church. As ever, Master Martyn, snow-white as the dove, is frugal with his words, but I note how closely he inspects the images and the figures on the rood screen. Henry is a watchful man.

Roland, seeing the new works for the first time, is also quiet but has a clouded air. Something is troubling him but he does not voice it, he simply runs his fingers up and down a pillar as if he were testing it for dust.

Hugh, coming away from Simm, explains to Henry that his uncle’s intention is to render this the most glorious church in the whole of the county and therefore fully worthy of the inestimable treasure that it already holds. Come look, he says.

Taking Henry by the hand, Hugh leads him to the altar of Saint Margaret on the north wall of the church, to admire the silver-gilt casket that rests upon it. It contains a fragment of her girdle, Hugh says, and it behoves you to kneel. Henry bends one knee, looks briefly at the casket, nods his thanks to Hugh and turns to leave the church. Roland follows him, and so does Hugh after a minute, I suppose to resume their tour of the demesne.

When they have gone and shut the door behind them, I pause before that altar too. The saint is pictured on the wall above it, at the instant of emerging from the fearful dragon’s gut. As she came forth unharmed and without pain, so women pray that they will be delivered. Although now it is forbidden of course to burn lights on that or any other altar, or to make offerings to the saints, women still do what they have always done, and kneel before her there. In the silence of an empty church, they pray to her, and she looks down upon them with pity in her eyes. Her painted belly is well smudged by the mouths that have kissed it and the fingers that have rubbed it in hope, or in thanksgiving, or despair. Often there will be a silver bead or a small coin left for her in secret. And sometimes Joselin can be seen carrying something wrapped in silk, going stealthily to aid a woman in childbirth. As he came to me. He undid the chain that secures the casket to the wall, brought it to where I laboured, unlocked the casket then, with the key that he wears always, and touched my belly with the scrap of hemp that Margaret was wearing around her waist when she was swallowed. Exi infans, Christus te vocat, Joselin prayed. And the child obeyed.

In the month of May, a Tuesday