The Queen's Bastard Page 14

  We were fortunate at least in that my Mother had other matters to attend to in this great preparation. A feast to be planned and executed, the manor house hung with new draperies, cushions recovered, rickety furniture repaired, every surface scrubbed spotless. We would all heave a great sigh of relief when Mother would throw up her hands in disgust with us children and stomp from the nursery to see to her other chores. But then, whilst John and my sisters would repair to their various rehearsals, I would sneak away for my private preparations.

  Father had given me a horse for my own and Charger was the name I gave him. He was a bay stallion — the most perfect color for a horse — with a pretty whorl of white between the eyes and one at the base of his tail. He was smallish, just fourteen hands high, but I was only eight and so I sat in good proportion. My Father always cautioned the gentlemen who came for his advice never to mount a horse too small. That however handsome or magnificent a man might be, a little horse would make him appear insignificant. Riding a high horse showed the quality and superiority of a man.

  Charger was a lively beast, sound of foot and leg with good speed and action. He was docile, hardy and owned a good mouth. I, of course, thought him most intelligent. Best of all I saw in Charger a keen willingness to please me, a generosity of spirit. We had not broken him at the Enfield Stables, and my Father believed that his breaking must have been done with a gentle, temperate hand and not in the usual manner.

  Twas a cruel business, backing and training young horses. A circular pit was first dug in a plowed field, and the horse set to treading the ring. Sometimes fetlock deep in mud he was tethered to a lunging rein, flogged round and round and beaten between the ears with a stick. Those animals of high courage were beaten more severely. This punishment they called correction. Once all disobedience had been discharged the backer would attempt the mount. If the horse resisted, the voice was used to rate and scream threats, with more hard beating on the head.

  And there was worse. If a horse mulishly refused to move forward, an iron bar set with prickles might be suspended from his tail and passed tween his legs linked to a cord. When correction was required the device was drawn up to cause pain. Sometimes a knotted cord was tied to the horses stones, and some trainers applied fire to the tenderest parts of the poor beasts anatomy. Harsh bits studded with spikes were nothing less than instruments of torture on a horses mouth, and nosebands made of twisted iron tormented and mangled the tender gristle, wearing it to the bone.

  You could always tell a horse who had been cruelly used by the look of resignation in the eye, and a skittishness or sullenness that would occasionally afflict an otherwise tame animal, as tho the thin veil of habitation and training had momentarily slipped away and defiant memories overtaken them.

  Charger was happily not such a horse, but retained the proud nature with which he had been born. He was hollow backed and took well to the saddle. The carriage of his head was high and stately when trotting, but in a bolt or gallop his neck and head stretched into a great long arrow. To feel that muscular machine pounding in hard rhythm tween my thighs, the wind whipping my face, was the purest and sweetest of sensations, and it was there and there alone that I felt Gods hand in the world.

  My horse and I trained and practiced daily. Truly if I had not been forced to eat and sleep, study and complete my chores, I would have done nothing else in my life but ride him. Sometimes I rode so long that my hams ached me fiercely, and John needed to help me into my bed. Sometimes I took him far afield where no one might come upon me and removed Chargers saddle and my own breeches and rode bare upon his back. My skin hardened from such use and I found with practice and some good sweat — both Chargers and my own — the best grip to be had on my horses sides.

  I worked at the skills of a cavalryman too — or what I thought those skills might be. I became a horse soldier from other times, other lands. A Crusader fighting the Turks in heavy armor which I fashioned of discarded metal from the smithy dump, lashed together with rawhide thongs. I became a shaggy headed Knight of the Temple who, under strictest supervision, could not even tighten his horses straps without permission from his superior. I hurled javelins overhand like some barbarous Frank, and rode home victorious with the stinking heads of my enemies hanging from my saddle bow.

  But as the day approached for the Queens visit my training came full about to the practice of manège. Twas an art, my Father said, a difficult but satisfying form of equitation whose highest purpose was to ride in best show before a Prince. For Charger, who had heretofore known nothing but of the commonest sort of riding, manège was a curious sort of exercise. On the first day of that training he stood transfixed, and all my strange commands seemed to be falling on deaf ears. Once he cocked his head with such consternation that I laughed aloud. But with much kindness and cherishing, touching and reassurance on my part, he soon learnt the movements and came to be in great union with my self. He even seemed to take pleasure in them.

  My Father had none of these skills, being a dairyman by trade, and only the keeper of the Chase and stables through a Royal grant. But he had in his employ a horseman named Barlington who had once lived in France and there learnt the art of manège. Barlington had very little time in his days of riding instruction and leading the hunts to teach a young boy so exacting a skill. But I begged him and he complied. I was like a soft cloth set in liquid, soaking in each word, each studied movement, and locked it away so that it need never be taught again.

  Manège was taught with the voice — words of urging, “hey hey” or “now now”; words of helping, “back boy, back I say”; words of cherishing, “so boy” and “holla holla.” The tongue was used clicking against the palate to encourage stopping or turning. The crop was used gently, touching the horse on different parts of his body as a signal — on his forelegs to rein back, near his eye to turn, or the crop might be whipt thro the air to tell a horse to quicken his pace.

  Charger and I learnt the volte, turning in a circle on the haunches, the curvet, a haughty, high headed raising of the forehand in half rear while prancing in cadence behind, the figures of eight, and what Barlington called “the airs above ground.” These were indeed difficult movements to perform, as all four of the horses feet were required to be, when properly accomplished, altogether off the ground. A horse would be made to contain his fear so he might raise his forehand, and also to yerk, which was kicking both legs out behind. When practiced together the beast would bound aloft, his two feet yerking in a goatlike leap — the capriole.

  I was bound and determined to display our heroic talents — mine and Chargers — before the Queen, but in fact twas another whom I wished more heartily to impress with our skills, the Queens Horsemaster, the Earl of Leicester. He was the most famous horseman in all of England, renowned for his knowledge of horseflesh, his strength and manliness in the saddle. Night after night I envisaged the moment I would ride out before him and the Queen to prance and leap, kick and turn with all the grace and brilliance of a lordly knight. She would clap delighted, and he would address me man-to-man in all dignity and respect.

  So my life became practice with Charger, and learning to stay out of my Mothers vision, for whenever she caught me she found something always — an unfinished chore, a poorly rehearsed verse — to punish me for.

  My Father was meanwhile attending calmly to his preparations for the visit. His administration of the Chase had always been so diligent that little extra work was needed. From the first sight of the parkland my Father had found his love. Cattle and the dairy had been his profession since apprentice days, but the great sprawling woodlands, the grace and beauty of wild game, had soothed his soul and set alight a piece of his spirit never before kindled. He gloried in his role as Keeper of the Forest, and protected its inhabitants from poachers with a fierceness I saw nowhere else in his being.

  He was good to me, more kind and giving than a father was wont to be to a second son. He allowed me my weaknesses and gloried in my strengths. We foun
d shared pleasure in the study of animal husbandry, and I became his willing apprentice. Though John would, thro law, inherit Enfield Chase, my Father claimed my skills would travel well, and in time and with luck I would one day be the keeper of some other parkland.

  Of my Mothers abuse to me he said little. Twas something I never did understand. He was a true man, and kept his wife to her place in all other ways. But when he saw a storm brewing tween my Mother and me he seemed to dissolve into air, disappear so that he never saw the beatings, never heard my cries, tho I know he knew of them. Only once did he see me incur her full and furious wrath for some imagined trespass. As she fell on me with a broom handle, and before he slipped silently out the door, I saw on his face what I can only now describe as resignation mingled with guilt. Twas the family history, all of us knowing that Mothers unhappiness had waxed large with the move from dairy to Chase, and that even her raising from the yeoman class to gentry had never enlarged her country contentment. But why I should have attracted her particular anger, and why my otherwise strong and fair minded Father would allow such behavior, baffled me always.

  The day of the Queens visit dawned grey and threatening, which served to stoke my Mothers frenzy to a wild blaze. She feared now that rain would kill her perfect roster of festivities, and certainly the hunt could not go on in a downpour. She had writ a great list of final preparations on our schoolroom hornbook and strode round the manor shouting out orders and harassing servants. As I snuck out to the stables to groom Charger I quietly passed her in the kitchen as she roughly shoved aside our faithful old cook sweating over a dozen kettles, berating her efforts and insisting she could do a better job her self.

  When at nine the harbinger came galloping through the gates into our yard with news that the Royal Procession would arrive in three hours time, the sun was endeavoring to chase the dark clouds from the sky. This should have quelled my Mothers fears to some degree, but in fact the appearance of the harbinger made the Queens visit only more real, and her unfinished chores more unsettling. She began running from room to room calling for my Father who was elsewhere occupied, and raged that he had left her to fend for her self.

  And then she called the children for final rehearsal of our performances. Meg and Alice, already trussed into their fine gowns, and John tolerating — but barely — his confinement in velvet and starched ruff, filed down and stood for the inspection. The girls clutching their instruments looked pretty and even Mother could find no fault with their appearance or their duet. Then she turned to John who stood stiffly with Euripides in hand, and of course expected to find me with him. I was not. When she demanded of them my whereabouts, their sweet loyalty kept them silent at first, but with my Mothers threats of drawing and quartering if they did not tell her the truth — threats which those children full believed would be carried out — John finally stammered, “The stables.”

  I had nearly finished a vigorous brushing of Charger whose coat now gleamed richly, when I felt a sharp pain on my ear. I was spun suddenly round by that sensitive appendage to face the Medusa her self.

  “How dare you defy me!” she shrieked, her face distorted with a terrifying rage. “Look at you, filthy little wretch!” She picked up my hands. “Twill take hours just to get the dirt from under your fingernails!” She slapped me hard and then her eyes fell on Charger. I began to tremble for I knew that whilst I could withstand her physical abuses, if she took away privileges with my horse I would surely wither and die. I did never expect the words she then spat from her hateful mouth. “Tis this bony nag of yours which puts the Devil in you, yes I can see that.”

  “No, Mother!” I cried. “Charger is a good friend. There is nothing evil in him, I swear it.”

  “Oh you swear, do you?” She glared at my horse and blessedly he remained calm, staring back with those sweet brown eyes. “Then how is it he keeps you from your family chores and prayers and other Godly work?” she demanded. “What power has this horse to keep you occupied with him when the Queen is coming here in two hours! I say he is the Devils incubus!” She was shrieking now and the stablehands had all made themselves scarce. I prayed that Barlington or Father would appear, but I knew they were making a final round of the woodland trails and I had no savior in them.

  Without warning my Mother picked up a shovel laying against the wall and before I could put up my hands to stop her, she swung it at Chargers head. His reaction was swift and her aim was poor. The shovel blade smashed into the stall door with such force it knocked her off her feet and she fell heavily into a pile of stuff recently mucked from a stall. She sat there with a look of surprise for only a moment before pulling herself up and grabbing me by the hair. Thus she dragged me from the stables across the yard to the manor, muttering her intention to have Charger hacked into a hundred pieces.

  Up the manor house stairs we went, my knees banging the steps, my head burning with the hair wrenched by its roots. I vaguely recall seeing the faces of my horrified sisters and brother as I was carted to the nursery. There I was required to drop my breeches and bend over the table. I never saw what the instrument of punishment was, but the lash felt like thin leather strips — perhaps she had grabbed some reins from the stables as we left it. The pain was excruciating, and she held back nothing of her strength. She must have forgotten in her madness that I was a child of eight and not some Devil possessed ruffian who claimed to be her son.

  Twas only thro the bravery of my brother and sisters that she did not beat me to death. They ran into the nursery and pulled her bodily from her task. When she saw them gathered round her all dressed in their finery she suddenly calmed. Then Meg said, “Mother, tis time that you dressed. The Queen is coming. Come, let me help you. I shall do your hair the way you like it.” They led her away out of the nursery, never letting her eyes fall on me — a pathetic filthy boy curled whimpering on the floor.

  There I lay for what seemed like hours, and only John peeked in to see me, furtive and afraid of being caught. Never the less, seeing my condition he hurried in and lifted me carefully, inspecting my poor bloodied flanks and wincing at the sight. He said that Mother had become strangely docile, even kind, and that Father had finally come in from inspecting the forest to bathe and dress, but that the children were under strictest orders not to mention my punishment. I was not, under any circumstances, to show my face to the Queen, with my excuse being illness.

  A commotion in the yard announced the advance guard of the Royal Progress, and John reluctantly left me to my solitary misery. I craned my neck and chanced a look at the ruins of my buttocks. The skin was badly bruised and flayed to bleeding in many places. I could move, but only stiffly and with great suffering. I cried then, tho the tears were shed less for the pain of my injuries than the unfairness of my “correction”, and the frustration that all my efforts of training with Charger in manège had been wasted, that the Earl of Leicester would never witness our virtuosity.

  A great clattering of hoofbeats and creaking of many wheels, shouts of riders and servants filled the yard. I limped to the window which overlooked it and saw a spectacle I might never in my life see again — the Queens Court, fine coaches, splendid mounts caparisoned in rich cloth and worked leather saddles with gold and silver trimming, great lords and ladies, Dukes and Archbishops, all disembarking at my doorstep. I could see my family and our servants standing at the entrance in welcome. All eyes looked towards the gates, and now the finest of all the carriages — painted red, carven and gilt, with a team of matched white palfreys in white feathered headdresses — sped through the gates and came to a stop. Footmen scrambled to the door and out stepped Queen Elizabeth.

  She was a sight burnt permanently into my memory — the ghostly pale skin, the bright red hair twisted and braided into shapes and piled atop her head. The broad smile and pearly teeth, the extreme grace and majesty of her movements, the long long white fingers she extended to be kissed. And, unexpected, the look of pure joy to be so welcomed by her subjects. The gown she wore
was like nothing I could ever have imagined, yellow and orange silk all embroidered with intricate designs. My head spun and in the stunning vision of my Queen, I momentarily forgot that other Noble Person-age who had captured my imagination — the Earl of Leicester.

  But now he came riding, a lone horseman on the most magnificent stallion I had ever laid eyes on — enormous, jet black, and the saddle in the Spanish style, black moroccan leather with silver fittings. The man too was apparelled all in black, more dashing and rakish a figure than in all of my dreams.

  I was suddenly filled with an anger so sharp and bright I was blinded. A tight knot had formed in my belly and I found my balled fist ready to smash the window glass. But I held back, for a conviction was growing in my head like a spring seedling under a warm sun. I saw that I had incurred more than enough injuries for one day and would need as many of my parts in good order as I could man-age. I turned from the window and forced my self to look in the mirror. The figure that peered back at me was a sore sight in deed. Red rimmed eyes, filthy tearstreaked face, dishevelled hair, torn shirt, naked legs dripping blood.

  I moved to the copper tub wherein my brother and sisters had bathed and found the water still tepid. Unaccustomed to immersing my body — only once before had we bathed in such a manner — I stept gingerly into the tub and lowered my self down. I had decided I must ignore the pain, and tho my resolve was strong I gasped as the water touched my raw flesh. Once in I dunked my head and lathered it well with lye soap and scrubbed my hair. I washed my body quickly and did not tarry in the tub one moment longer than was needful, then grabbed a bedsheet and blotted my self dry. I located the suit of clothing and hose and slippers my Mother had had made for this occasion and very carefully dressed my self in them — except for the velvet slippers. Instead I put on my best cordovan riding boots, the ones my Father had gifted me on the last New Year. I had grown so much they were already tight, but they would have to do — my everyday boots a disgrace.