Author: Anya Seton
Category: Literature
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“Lily Taylor, look at me!”
She raised her head slowly and met his stern, concentrated eyes, the dark brown irises were focused on her like two beams until the fog of misery and utter weariness was pierced, and an image slipped into her mind.
“There is a church,” she whispered, “I might like to pray in. I was there once years ago on an earlier visit.”
“Yes,” he said, “go on!”
“It’s across the river, Southwark—a cathedral. I liked it. They call it St. Saviour’s, I think, but that isn’t its real name.” She stopped, startled by a shiver down her back, like the shiver from hearing a strain of nostalgic music. She tried to look away from Akananda, but she could not.
“What used to be the cathedral’s name, its old name?” he asked. “Quickly! Don’t think!”
Her voice obeyed him without volition. “St. Mary Overies. Next to Montagu’s priory.”
“Ah-h—” murmured Akananda on a long breath, “Montagu.” She had given him a clue he needed to help Celia. During his internship at Guy’s Hospital he had lived in Southwark, and had himself been drawn to St. Saviour’s and its history. He had been uncertain how to guide Celia in his attempt to penetrate her past life. That Celia had been a part of some Tudor period seemed likely in view of the facts given in the Marsdon Chronicle, and the name “Stephen” so strangely heard or imagined by Arthur, but there was no other lead aside from her behavior at Ightham Mote. He knew that “Montagu” provided one, and that it came from the unhappy mother’s own buried memory.
A nurse hurried in with the sedative he had ordered.
“Take this, my dear,” said Akananda, giving Lily a large red capsule. “It’ll calm you. Then go over to Southwark Cathedral, which was indeed, as you say, once called St. Mary Overies. You should be able to pray there.”
Lily nodded mutely. The whole terrible situation had receded; she had entered a state of abeyance where only Akananda and his directives were real. She put on her gloves and rose, giving the Hindu a polite smile. She went out to the cab stand. He followed slowly; saw her enter a taxi, then got one himself which he directed to the British Museum. There he spent two hours consulting Collins’s Complete Peerage and the Dictionary of National Biography. Considerably enlightened, he walked to his Bloomsbury flat where he settled himself in the Asana position and gradually immersed himself in profound meditation.
The long June daylight was fading into violet shadow; the myriad lights of London glinted like topazes when he left the flat and returned to the hospital where Celia lay.
The night staff had come on, but Sir Arthur’s orders had been relayed and he was received with politeness and veiled curiosity.
“Lady Marsdon’s condition seems quite unchanged, Doctor,” said the capable Irish nurse who accompanied him to Celia’s room. “I’ve kept a sharp eye on her, but not touched her, of course. Sir Arthur said not. Will you be wanting medications? Or glucose? We’ve the IV drip ready.”
“Nothing,” he answered smiling, “except no interruptions for any reason. I shall lock the door and take all responsibility.”
The nurse’s sandy eyebrows twitched, but she only said, “Very well, sir.” Then added in a rush, “Good luck, Doctor. I pray you can save her, I’ve seldom seen so sad a case, ’tis worse ’n death, ’tis like her spirit’s stifled—gives me the shivers. Uncanny. May the Blessed Lord and His Holy Angels have mercy.” She shut her lips and flushed. “Sorry, sir.” She went out and shut the door.
Akananda locked it after her. He pulled a chair up to the bedside and took Celia’s limp, chilly hand in his. He gazed at her calm upturned profile, an alabaster effigy as remote and passionless as those on medieval church tombs. Her dark curls, gummy and matted from the electrodes, looked no more alive than painted hair.
Under the cotton hospital gown her chest did not move. Akananda was dismayed. Had the tiny flicker of life really been snuffed out? Was it hopeless? He clasped her hand tightly, trying to propel vital force down his arm through his hand into her body. His firm grasp encountered cold resistant metal, and he saw that she was wearing a heavy amethyst heart-shaped ring over the plain gold wedding band. The Marsdon wives’ ring. He had casually admired it on the night of his arrival at Medfield, and Sir Richard had said smiling, “That’s the Lady of the Manor’s badge of servitude, complete with baleful cockatrice!” They had all laughed, and surely Richard had thrown his wife a teasing, affectionate glance, yet even then Akananda had noticed tension in Celia, she had swallowed several times and the look in her gray eyes had seemed apprehensive.
Frowning and uncertain, Akananda slipped the ring off the small cold finger and laid it on the bedstand. He was watching intently, and thought he saw a tremor flit across the ashen face. But, he knew how easily intense desire could deceive one. Tentatively he moved the wedding ring. There was no doubt of some reaction this time. The hand quivered under his fingers, and he apprehended a faint resistance, though the quiver vanished at once.
Groping, yet greatly relieved, he spoke to her. “The Marsdon ‘badge of servitude’ is gone from you, Celia. But you wish to keep the wedding band?”
There was no further response to his touch. She had slipped back into her faraway void. He sighed and put his other hand on her forehead.
“Celia . . .” he said as he had before, in the Sussex hospital. “Celia . . . where are you?” There was no response.
“You must let me in, Celia,” he said very low. “Take me back to where you are. Trust me.” He thought of one of his master’s teachings. There was no such thing as circumscribed time. Time was a dimension. Even as Einstein had proven to those in the West who could understand him. All time existed now. The master had spoken of the “Akashic Records,” as well, the imperishable etheric recordings of all events, and explained them to his young disciples as vaguely like a storage-housing motion picture film which might be selected and viewed at will by those sufficiently enlightened and instructed to do so. But how?
Sweat gathered on Akananda’s forehead as he sat in the hospital room, dimly hearing the sound of London traffic; muffled creakings and voices from the tumultuous hospital life outside this quiet room.
He spoke to Celia again, using the power of the words which he felt must reach her. “Is Stephen with you?” he asked urgently. There was no response. “Montagu . . .” he said, “Cowdray . . . Ightham Mote . . . Are you afraid, Celia?”
The skin under his hand grew colder, and he knew again an overwhelming sense of defeat. The many years of his Western training gathered themselves together to jeer at him. What a credulous fool Arthur Moore would think him, and their professors at Guy’s. The brain surgeon—Mr. Lawrence—“Now, Mr. Akananda, kindly dissect this pineal gland for us, we wait with bated breath to see you disclose that mystical third eye you keep talking about, and maybe you can find the soul, or at least its erstwhile habitation, for I must be fair and grant you this brain’s as dead as mutton.”
How the other students had laughed, taking their cue from the elegant, supercilious professor. And I laughed with them. Fearful of their scorn. Apostate, lickspittle, coward! I made a brilliant mockery of that dissection, repudiating all my teachings and my certainties. Deserting the two students who had believed in me. I remember their startled disappointed eyes. I wanted to curry favor with Lawrence, I wanted him to pass me.
A little thing, a trivial incident, but . . .
“You behaved like that before, and the outcome was not trivial.”
Akananda heard the accusation. And the words were in Bengali. He opened his tight-shut eyes and saw a glow on the yellow-painted hospital wall beyond the patient’s bed. Through the glow appeared a luminous white figure. From it flowed pity and authority. Akananda prostrated himself on the bare wooden floor.
The communion now was wordless. A series of questions and commands. When St. Marylebone’s bells rang ten o’clock from around the corner, the presence vanished. Akananda raised his head, his face was wet with tears, an
d he knew with certainty, at last, what he must do to redress the wrongs he had inflicted and help those now again in danger. He could not stand aside from bygone sufferings. He must take part and relive with them the past.
He must negate his present selfhood and enlightenment. He must watch the transcendent film unroll, in full identification with each character.
Akananda rose to wipe his face and damp hands on his white linen handkerchief. He walked to the water carafe on the night table and drank. Then he returned to the bed and pressed his bunched fingers between Celia’s eyebrows.
“Where are you, Celia?” he asked for the third time, but now with assurance. “Answer me!”
In a moment she sighed, her bluish lips moved and he heard a faint whisper.
“In the Great Buck Hall, we are waiting for the young King. The family is in sorrow, but we must hide this. There’s gay music from the minstrels’ gallery. I smell thyme and lavender amongst the new rushes on the floor. I’m afraid for Stephen . . . they’ve locked him up.”
“Yes . . .” said Akananda. But there was one more question, one more link necessary.
“Who am I, Celia?” he said quietly. “Am I there?”
He felt the faint nodding motion under his hand. “Then who am I?”
He waited a long time while her lips twitched feebly. He exerted no will power, no internal commands. He waited.
At last she spoke. “You are Julian, Master Julian.”
As she spoke the name he stiffened once. The gap was bridged. He shut his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.
PART TWO
(1552–1559)
Four
AT COWDRAY CASTLE, Monday, July 25 of the year of Our Lord 1552, the Great Buck Hall was garnished and decorated as it had never been in the five years since old Sir Anthony Browne had completed it; by erecting the lofty bay window, and extravagantly glazing its sixty lights, then vaingloriously placing on high brackets the wooden statues of eleven life-size stags as reminders of the Browne crest. From the buck antlers now dripped flowery garlands; wreaths of roses encircled their necks. The entire Hall was fragrant because yesterday the old rushes had been swept out into a fetid heap behind the cowbyre, and on the oaken floor planks there was a carpeting of sun-dried green rushes from the River Rother, strewn with crumbled lavender and thyme. So fresh was the scent that it counteracted the usual smells of sweat and musk exuded by the long-packed Court dresses worn by the guests and household assembled by young Sir Anthony for welcoming their King.
Celia Bohun gloried in a new gown, lovingly made for her by her aunt, Lady Ursula Southwell, out of old treasured lengths of peacock brocade and cream satin. There was even a small lace ruff, and a demure heart-shaped cap which framed the soft shining ripples of Celia’s corn-colored hair. The new finery was one of Ursula’s many kindnesses to the orphan girl who shared her blood, and also shared her anomalous position at the Castle. Ursula and Celia were de Bohuns. Their family had lived here for nearly four centuries. The magnificent Brownes, for all their careless generosities, were upstarts, usurpers of Cowdray.
It was true that the Browne men had great swashbuckling charm, coupled with loyalty which King Henry had rewarded in the elder Sir Anthony, who had been a trusted emissary and Master of the Horse, despite his staunch Catholicism. It was also true that the Brownes had counteracted their obscure origins by a number of shrewd marriages with younger daughters of noble houses, like the present marriage of young Anthony to Lady Jane Radcliffe. And Anthony’s maternal grandfather, Sir John Gage, was even now Constable of the Tower, a fearsome old man. He had quarrelled bitterly with his son-in-law, so that though Sir John lived at Firle Place in East Sussex, Cowdray never saw him.
None of these connections outweighed Ursula’s hidden hurt at the ousting of her solidly aristocratic line from their ancestral home. But Ursula had long been widowed, and she was nearing sixty. She had learned to hide her feelings, except to Celia, and with true gratitude accepted a small upper chamber in the Castle and a seat just above the salt at the long trestled dining table. When the impoverished Bohuns had been forced to sell all their property to the Browne family, though, the natural expectation was that Ursula would enter some convent—the usual refuge for superfluous women. Two things prevented: the lack of a dowry and her own lack of interest in monastic routine. Then, lately, there was Celia, her half brother Jack’s forlorn child.
In the minstrels’ gallery this noon of the boy King’s arrival, the musicians were nervously practicing a new French madrigal. Edward disapproved of most music, as he disapproved of dancing or levity. The fourteen-year-old King had strong prejudices, all of which increasingly verged on the puritanical. One must be of offense.
Celia stood with her aunt Ursula by the buttery screen in the huge Buck Hall, eagerly savoring her first glimpse of assembled nobility. Her cheeks glowed a bright pink, her long bluish-green eyes sparkled with excitement. Lady Ursula possessed no mirror, but the girl knew that the peacock brocade was becoming. She noted the startled stares of two castle pages who had previously ignored her on her visits to Cowdray. Far more flattering recognition followed.
Sir Anthony and his wife, Lady Jane Radcliffe, daughter to the Earl of Sussex, were circling the Hall to greet important guests, and to make a last tour of inspection. They were both dressed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold and pearls. The splendor suited Anthony who was tall, stoutly built for a man of twenty-five, and had the bearing of a born horseman, added to the assurance of wealth.
Lady Jane was puny and shrinking; she had a desolate mouse face, the eyes, at present, reddened from weeping. Three days ago their infant son had died of a convulsion. The little coffin under its white satin pall stood not in the chapel as it should have, but in an alcove off their bedchamber. No Masses were being said for the tiny soul, and there must be no mention of the tragedy to cloud the King’s visit. “We’ll make other babes, my lady!” Anthony had cried with his usual hearty optimism. “’Tis an easy pleasant task.”
Lady Jane did not think so. She had suffered an agonizing childbirth, nor was yet recovered. But she never gainsaid her husband.
Sir Anthony had finished his inspection of the Hall and came near Lady Ursula on his way through the screens to the courtyard. He gave Ursula a quick nod, then caught sight of Celia.
“Haloo-oo!” he exclaimed, his bold blue gaze examining the girl. “Who may this be?”
“Celia Bohun, Sir Anthony,” said Ursula flushing a little. “My niece. I trust I’ve not offended in letting her come today—this glorious day for Cowdray. She has few pleasures.”
Anthony shook his head amiably, uninterested in the connection, or in Ursula, whom he had inherited as a charge from his father and very seldom saw. The girl’s from that bastard branch of the Bohuns, he thought, staring at Celia. He had heard there were some around Midhurst.
“So fair a maid is ever welcome,” he said. “How old are you, poppet?”
“Fourteen, sir,” answered Celia promptly. “Last month, on St. Anthony’s Day, your own name day, an’t please your lordship.” She curtsied.
Anthony chuckled, momentarily forgetting the anxieties attendant upon Edward’s arrival, the factions involved—the dangers. Celia’s ready pert reply amused him, and he noted the innocent provocativeness of the white cleft between her full breasts, the slight protrusion of her red underlip, and the square uptilted chin.
“This luscious fruit is ripening fast, eh, Lady?” he said to Ursula. “Wherever you’ve been keeping her. We must find her a husband. Some lusty yeoman to her taste, or even a squire if I can spare a few angels for a dowry—though, by God’s bones, I doubt it after this royal visit.”
He glanced at his wife whose mournful eyes were fixed patiently on the wall tapestry.
Ursula spoke up quickly, knowing that her patron might soon forget Celia’s existence. “The girl is as apt to learn as she is comely, sir. I’ve taught her household skills and her letters, and Brother Stephen has giv
en her religious instruction.”
“What!” Anthony started. His eyes flashed. “We do not mention him, madam! Not while the King is here. You and all my household know that, madam. You have been warned!”
Ursula’s long face which was like a kindly mare’s, reddened to the roots of her iron-gray hair. “Aye, sir, pardon, sir,” she said. “It was a slip.”
“There must be no slips,” said Sir Anthony who could, on occasion and despite his youth, be quite as formidable as his father had been in striving to keep the precarious favor of old King Harry. An easier task, Anthony thought, than pleasing his son—the earnest, bigoted and autocratic young sprig who was now swayed daily by the real enemy. The real danger. Northumberland—mad for power, slick as a ferret, cruel as a wolf, and virtual King of England. Lauded be God and His Blessed Mother that Northumberland was occupied on the Scottish Border at this moment. But, he had his spies everywhere near Edward. “There must be no’slips,” Anthony repeated in a softer voice, “and I know my household is loyal. Come, my lady.” He put his hand on Jane’s arm.
Ursula curtsied as the couple moved on; she turned to Celia and whispered, “Let’s mount to my chamber and wait. We can see the approaching heralds from my window. ’Tis close down here and I’m shaken by the annoyance I caused Sir Anthony.”
Celia obediently followed her aunt up circular stone stairs to a small comfortable room on the third story. It was near the servants’ attic, and in winter heated only by a brazier, but it contained Ursula’s few treasures—the four-posted bed of blackened oak, hung with faded crimson, where she had slept long ago with her husband, and at the bed’s foot stood her dower chest carved in linen-fold, her Italian X-shaped chair. Her strip of rich Turkey carpet covered the plain square table, and hanging against the stone wall near the window was the sole remembrance of her dead husband, Sir Robert Southwell—his sword in its gilt-encrusted sheath. On the east wall near the bed hung Ursula’s ebony crucifix. There were besides these, two unexpected objects on a shelf: a small ephemeris for computing the daily positions of the stars, and a neat roll of horoscopes tied up with a golden cord. Ursula practiced astrology; she had received instruction twenty years ago from the Duke of Norfolk’s resident Italian astrologer, while Sir Robert was alive and the Southwells were visiting the Norfolks at Kenninghall. Most of the great households consulted astrologers; there were official royal astrologers too. Cowdray had none. Sir Anthony was a practical man, and felt himself quite able to control his own future.