Philippa Carr - The Miracle at St. Bruno’s

“Bruno is so strange.”

“Does he not love you?”

“He does not love as other people do.”

“Bruno loves passionately…himself.”

“How should you know?”

“I know that he has great spiritual pride. So he will build a great castle; he will have a son to follow him. He will be lord of his enclosed world. He will restore the Abbey.”

“No!”

“Not yet. In time perhaps.”

“It would be treason.”

“Kings do not live forever. But our conversation grows dangerous, and speaking of Kings, before Remus set out for Calais he was most graciously received by the Queen.”

“Tell me of her.”

“A kind and calm lady, with a different sort of beauty from that of the English ladies who had previously caught the King’s fancy. Such an excellent nurse she is. I have heard that none can dress his leg as she can. She has a deft and gentle touch and if any other do it he will scream with pain and throw the nearest stool at them ere they have time to retreat. But she dabbles with the Reformed religion.”

“Kate, how many people are dabbling with it, think you?”

“More and more each day. And I will tell you that the King’s sixth wife has recently been in danger of losing her head through it.”

“But I thought she was such a good nurse to him.”

“Doubtless that saved her. Bishop Gardiner has been working against her. You have heard of Anne Askew?”

I had assuredly heard of Anne Askew who had declared herself publicly in favor of the Reformed ideas and for this had been sent to the Tower. She had been racked cruelly and finally consigned to the flames.

“It is known,” went on Kate, “that while Anne Askew lay in prison the Queen sent her food and warm clothing.”

“An act of mercy,” I said.

“To be construed by those who upheld the old faith as an act of treason. It is said that the King’s wife has come within hours of losing her head.”

I often wondered how Kate was so conversant with Court gossip. But she told her stories of the Court with such verisimilitude that one completely believed her.

She made me see the serious-minded Queen who was so interested in the new ideas that she even talked of them to the King. She made me see cruel Wriothesley, the King’s Lord Chancellor, who had determined to bring her to the block. I could hear his insinuating voice asking the King if the Queen had so far forgotten her place as to seek to teach the King religion. And the poor Queen’s ignorance of what was happening until the King had signed the order to commit her to the Tower.

But the King was weary of hunting for a new wife. It was true the Queen had not given him a son; but she was a good nurse and if she were a headless corpse who would dress his leg? And the Queen, suddenly being aware of imminent danger, had used all her wits to extricate herself. She had become ill with anxiety but recovering in time she had told the King that she would never learn from any except God and himself.

As she had when a child, Kate assumed the parts of the people in her stories. Now she struck an attitude; she strutted—she would have made a good mummer. She seemed to grow large and royal; she narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips and she was the King.

“And he said to her—for I have it from one who overhears—‘Not so, by Saint Mary. You have become a doctor, wife, to instruct us and not to be instructed of us, as oftentime we have seen.’

“At this,” went on Kate, “the Queen trembled, because she saw the hand of Wriothesley in this and the ax very close and turned toward her.”

Kate was the Queen now. “ ‘Indeed if Your Majesty have so conceived then my meaning has been mistaken, for I have always held it preposterous for a woman to instruct her lord; and if I have ever presumed to differ from Your Highness on religion it was partly to obtain information and sometimes because I perceived that in talking you were able to pass off the pain and weariness of your present infirmity.’

“With which clever reply His Majesty was pleased and he said, ‘And is it so, sweetheart. Then we are perfect friends.’

“And when they came to arrest her they found her in loving discourse with them in the gardens, at which His Majesty vented his fury on them. So you see the King’s sixth Queen came very near to losing her head and we might well be asking ourselves who the seventh was to be.”

I shivered. “How near queens are to death,” I said.

“How near we all are to death,” replied Kate.

Kate left us soon after that, and I was surprised when a messenger brought me a letter from her in which she told me she was expecting a child.

“Remus is beside himself with glee,” she wrote. “As for myself I am less gleeful. I deplore the long unwieldy months almost as much as the painful and humiliating climax. How I wish there were some other way of getting children. How much more dignified if one could buy them as one buys a castle or a manor house—and choose the one one wants. Would that not be more civilized than this animal process?”

I confess to a twinge of envy. I thought with burning resentment of my boy who had been allowed to die, how much I wanted him. And Kate was to have another child although she was never meant to be a mother.

During the next months I devoted myself to the little girls. I tried not to mourn for my lost child. I watched the gradual growth of our castle and I was amazed that Bruno should have had such wealth as to be able to create such a place.

When I asked him about it he showed great displeasure. He had changed toward me. The disappointment over the loss of the boy was intense and he made no secret of it. I could not help thinking of poor Anne Boleyn when she had failed to produce a boy. Then I remembered that Kate had referred to Bruno as a King.

Where was that young and passionate boy who had wooed me? I sometimes wondered whether that had been a part he had played for some purpose. Purpose! That was it. There was some purpose behind everything that had happened since his return.

My mother was a frequent visitor, for since I did not go to Caseman Court she must come to me.

“Your stepfather marvels at the magnificence of this new place you are building. Your husband must be a man of boundless wealth, he says.”

“It is not so,” I said quickly. “You know the Abbey was bestowed on him. We have the material we need. We are using bricks from the lay quarters, so it is not so very costly.”

“Your stepfather says that there is a movement in the country to bring back some of the monasteries, and that monks are getting together again and living together as they did before. Your stepfather thinks this is a highly dangerous way of living.”

“So much is dangerous, Mother. It is dangerous to concern oneself with the new ideas.”

“Why cannot people be sensible and live for their families?” she said irritably.

I agreed with her.

She would bring the twins with her and the children would all play together while we watched them fondly and laughed at their antics. I saw what Kate meant. My mother and I were of a kind after all—the eternal mothers, as Kate would say.

In due course Kate’s son was born. She wrote:

“He is a healthy, lusty boy. Remus is as proud as a peacock.”

When I told Bruno I saw the faint color touch the marble of his skin.

“A boy!” he said. “Some women get boys.”

It was a reproach and I cried out: “Was it my fault that my child was born dead? Do you think I rejoiced in that?”

“You are hysterical,” he said coldly.

I felt envious of Kate and my heart was filled with a burning resentment because my boy had died, while Kate, who was never meant to be a mother, had hers.

She wanted me to go to the christening.

“Bring the children,” she wrote. “Carey does nothing but plague me to produce Honey and Catherine. He has thought up all kinds of new ways of teasing them.”

Bruno made no attempt to prevent my going to Remus Castle as in due course I set out with the two little girls.

Kate’s child was christened Nicholas.

“After the saint,” she said.

After a while Kate shortened his name to Colas.

Before I went back to the Abbey news reached us that the King was dead. Oddly enough I was deeply affected. The King had been on the throne for as long as I could remember; my mind kept returning to that day when my father had been seated on the wall with his arm supporting me as I watched the King and Cardinal pass by. Then the King had been a golden young man, not yet a monster; and the Cardinal, long since dead, had traveled down the river with him to Hampton. Since then he had brought about the death of two wives and the wretchedness of at least two others. And now he himself was dead.

I was on my way back to the Abbey when I saw the funeral procession passing from Westminster to Windsor. The hearse with its eighty tapers, each one of them two feet in length, and the banners of the saints beaten in gold on damask and the canopy of silver tissue fringed with black and gold silk, were very impressive. It was the passing of an age. I wondered what augured for the future. I thought of my father’s being taken from his beloved home to a cold prison in the Tower and I could hear the cries of those who by this King had been condemned to the flames or the even worse fate of hanging and quartering. We had lived long under a tyrant. Surely we must hope for a brighter future.

We had a new King—Edward who was but ten years old, too young to govern, but he had a powerful and ambitious pair of uncles.

I reached the Abbey. It seemed to rise over me menacingly and I felt little confidence in the future.

THERE WAS CONSTERNATION IN the Abbey. James, one of the fishermen who had gone into the City to sell the surplus of fish which had been salted down, came back with the news that he had seen images taken from churches and being burned in the streets. He had joined a crowd in the Chepe and had listened to ominous conversation.

“This is the end of the Papists. They’ll be hanging them from their churches ere long.”

The new King was leaning toward the Reformed ideas and he was surrounded by those who shared his views—and perhaps had formed them. In his chapel prayers were said in English, and it would no longer be an offense to have a translation of the Bible in one’s possession.

My mother visited us with the first spring flowers from her garden.

“The King is gone, God rest his soul,” she said, “and it would seem to be the beginning of a new and glorious reign.”

I knew that she was repeating what she had heard and I guessed that Simon Caseman was one who was not displeased with the turn of events.

I was uneasy though. Bruno would have to be careful. If the new religion was in favor, those in authority would frown on a community such as Bruno was attempting to build up, and although he might try to give an impression that he was merely the head of a large country estate, he would assuredly be under suspicion.

Because the King was too young to rule, his uncle, the Earl of Hereford, was made protector. He was immediately created Earl of Somerset and became the most powerful man in the country. He was ambitious and eager to carry on the war in which the late King had interested himself and less than six months after the death of Henry VIII he was marching up to Scotland. Remus was with him and actually took part in the famous battle of Pinkie Cleugh, a costly victory for the Protector.

It brought the war home to us too—in the past it had all seemed too far away to concern us much—for at Pinkie Remus was killed.

Kate wrote of her dear brave Remus but it was not in her nature to mourn or to feign grief which she did not feel. She was now rich and free, so I guessed that she would not repine for long.

Our castle was now complete. I called it castle, although it still bore the name of St. Bruno’s Abbey, for with its gray stone walls and Gothic style it had a medieval aspect. The Abbot’s Lodging had been completely swallowed up in this magnificent structure. It had been built in the form of a square closely resembling Remus Castle with circular towers at the four corners. There were two flanking towers at the gateway with oiletts as seen in Norman structures and which were meant for arrows—something of an anachronism in our day, but Bruno had said that since we were building with old stones which had been used two hundred years before when the Abbey was built we must use them in the manner in which they were intended.