Under a hawthorn bush, near a white road leading up a hill, in sight of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, two little girls were playing house. Their names were Edwitha and Audrey, and they were cousins. Audrey’s father lived in the farmhouse and kept sheep on the Downs, and Edwitha had also lived there nearly all her life. Her father had been lost at sea, and her mother had brought her back to the old home, and died not long after. The two girls had grown up like sisters, for the farmer was not a man who did things by halves, and when he adopted his brother’s orphan child he made her his own.
The two children were almost exactly of a size, and within a year of the same age; and both had the milky skin and rose-pink cheeks which make English children look so like flowers. But Audrey’s hair was yellow as ripe wheat, and Edwitha’s was brown like an oak-leaf in autumn; Audrey’s eyes were gray, and Edwitha’s were dark and dreamy. They wore homespun linen gowns off the same web of watchet blue, and little clumsy leather shoes like sandals, made by the village shoemaker. This particular place was their favorite playhouse. There were two hollows, like dimples in the hill, and the bush bent over one like a roof, while the other had been roofed over by a neighbor-lad, Wilfrid. He had stuck saplings into the ground, bent the tops over and woven branches in and out to hold them. They took root and came out in fine leaf. Wilfrid had seen something like it in a garden, where a walk was roofed in this way and called a “pleached alley.” It looked like a bird’s nest built on the ground, but it was a very nice little bower.
At this particular hour they were making ready for a feast, setting out the eatables on all their best bits of crockery. Whatever was broken in the house was likely to come to them, and besides this, they found a good many pieces of pottery of different kinds on the farm. This had been, a thousand years before, a part of a Roman governor’s country estate. When the men were plowing they often turned up scraps of bronze, tiles, or dishes that had been all that time buried in the earth.
Edwitha was especially fond of the tiles; and she had collected almost enough of them to make a little hearth. The one she intended for the middle had a picture in colors of a little brown rabbit sitting on the grass, nibbling a carrot, with a blue flower and a yellow one growing close by. It was almost whole—only one corner was broken.
Edwitha’s dishes were nearly all of the old Roman ware. The fragments were deep red, and some had little black figures and decorations on them. No two fitted together, and there were no pieces large enough for her to make out what the dish had been like. She used to wonder what sort of people had used those dishes, and whether they lived very differently from the Sussex people who came after them. It seemed as if they must have. No dishes made nowadays had any such appearance.
Audrey did not care about such matters. She preferred a bowl and jug she had which came from the pottery, and were whole, and would hold milk and honey. When the two girls ate their dinner in their bower, as they sometimes did, they used little wooden bowls with horn spoons.
Wilfrid was the only person Edwitha knew, besides herself, who was at all interested in the unearthed pottery. He had brought her some of the best pieces she had, and had asked the priest at the village whether he knew who made such things. Father Cuthbert knew that there had been Romans in England, and he told Wilfrid some Roman history, but there was nothing in it about the way in which the Romans really lived.
The very road that ran past the bower had been made by the Romans. It gave its name to the farm—Borstall Farm. It was a track cut deep into the chalk of the hill, not more than ten feet wide, leading to the camp which had once been on the top of the Down. Nothing was there now but the sheep and the gorse and the short, sweet grass of the Downs. On a level terrace-like break in the hillside, overlooking the valley, a Roman villa had stood, a great house with white porticoes, marble columns, tiled floors and painted walls. Mosaic pictures of the gods had been a part of its decorations, and if any one had known it, those buried gods were under the hillside quite uninjured—so firm and strong was the Roman cement, and so thorough the work. Hundreds of guests and relatives and servants had come and gone in the stately palace of the provincial Governor; the farm lands around it had been tilled by hundreds of peasants in its two hundred years of splendor. No wonder there were so many fragments! A great many dishes can be broken in two centuries.
Pincher, the old sheep-dog, had been invited to the feast in the bower, but when it was ready he was busy elsewhere. Edwitha went looking for him, and after she had called several times she heard his answering “Wuff! Wuff!” and caught sight of him down among the brambles at the boundary-line of the next farmstead. He came leaping toward her, and as she looked at the place where he had been, she saw that a piece of the bank had slid into a rabbit-burrow, and something red was sticking out of the earth. It was a little red bowl.
No such bowls are made in these days. They are never seen except on a shelf in some museum. Wise men have called them “Samian ware,” because they have been found on the island of Samos, but as some of this ware has been found wherever the Romans went in Gaul or Britain, it would seem that they must have had some secret process in their potteries and made it out of ordinary clay.
The bowl was deep red, and beautifully smooth. Around it was a band of little dancing figures in jet black, so lifelike that it almost seemed as if such figures might come out of the copse and dance away down the hill. Edwitha took some leaves and rubbed off the clay that stuck to the bowl, and the cleaner she made it the prettier it was. Very carefully she carried it back to the bower to show Audrey.
Half way there, a dreadful thought came to her. What if Audrey should want the bowl? It was quite perfect—the only whole one they had found—and Audrey always liked things that were whole, not broken or nicked, better than any sort of imperfect ones. Certainly they could not both have it.
Edwitha came to a stop, and stood quite still, thinking about it. She knew a place, under the roots of an old tree, where she could keep the bowl, and go and look at it when she was alone, and no one would know that she had it. If Audrey wanted the bowl, and took it, she might let it get broken, and then she would be willing that Edwitha should have it; but that would be worse than not having it at all. Edwitha felt as if she could not bear to have anything happen to the pretty thing. It already seemed like something alive—like a strange, mute person whom nobody understood but herself. She was the only person who really wanted it, and she knew that it wanted her.
But under these thoughts which pushed unbidden into Edwitha’s mind was her own feeling that it was a meanness even to think them. She and Audrey had all their lives done things together, and Audrey always shared. She always played fair.
Edwitha took the bowl in both hands and walked straight and very fast up to the bower.
“Audrey,” she said, holding out the bowl, “see what I found.”
Audrey looked at it.
“That’s like your other dishes, isn’t it?” she commented. “Only it is whole. It is just the thing for the dewberries. They will be prettier than in the basket.”
Edwitha set the bowl in the middle of the table and poured the shining dark fruit into it. It did look pretty, and it had a mat of green oak-leaves under it which made it prettier still. Audrey began sticking white blossoms round the edge to set off the red and green.
“I’m glad you found it,” she added placidly; “you haven’t one dish that is quite whole, and I have a blue one, and a white one, and a jug.”
Edwitha touched the bowl caressingly with the tips of her fingers. “I will try to find another for you,” she said.
“If you find any more,” answered Audrey, pushing Pincher away from the dish of cold meat, “you can have them. I’d rather have our dishes in sets, I think.”
Edwitha was poking about in the bank where she had found the bowl, late that afternoon, when Wilfrid came up the bank. There seemed to be no more dishes in sight.
“What have you found?” asked Wilfrid. He held it up in the sunlight, and drew a quick breath of delight. “How beautiful it is!” he exclaimed in a low voice.
Edwitha was silent. She was filled with a great happiness because she had the bowl.
“I wonder how it came to be here,” mused Wilfrid, and fell to digging and prodding the earth.
“There isn’t another in the hole,” said Edwitha. “I’ve been here a long time.”
“This is the only bit I ever saw that was found just here. But see here, Edwitha, this is clay. It is exactly like the clay they use at the pottery down by the ford, but finer—I think. I tell you—I believe there was a pottery here once.”
He and Edwitha took the bowl and a few lumps of the clay, next morning, to the Master Potter beyond the village. Wilfrid had served his apprenticeship at this pottery and was now a journeyman. The clay proved to be finer and more workable than that near the pottery, and the deposit was close to the high road, so that donkeys and pack-horses could come up easily to be loaded with their earthen pots. It was even possible, so the Master Potter said, that it would make a better grade of ware than they had been able to make hitherto. Finally, and most important from the point of view of Wilfrid and Edwitha, it was on Wilfrid’s own farm, he had his old mother to support, and this discovery might make it possible for him to have his own pottery and be a Master Potter.
Edwitha often wished that the bowl could speak, and tell her how it was made, and who drew the little dancing figures. In course of time Wilfrid tried some experiments with pottery, ornamenting it with figures in white clay on the colored ground, and searching continually for new and better methods of glazing, baking, and modeling his wares. At last, when the years of his apprenticeship had all been served, and he knew everything that was taught in the old Sussex pottery by the ford, he came one spring twilight to the farmhouse and found Edwitha in the garden.
“It is no use,” he said, half-laughing. “I shall never be content to settle down here until I have seen what they are doing in other lands. If there is anywhere a man who can make things like that bowl of yours, I must learn what he can teach me. It may be that the secret has been lost—if it has, I will come back and work here again. A man was never meant to do less than his best, Edwitha.”
“I know,” said Edwitha. “Those figures make me feel so too. They always did. I don’t want to live anywhere but here—and now Audrey has gone away, uncle and aunt could never do without me—but I wish we could make beautiful things in England.”
“Some of the clever ones are in England,” Wilfrid answered. “They are doing good work in glass, I know, and in carven stone, and some other things, but that is mostly for the rich abbeys. I shall never be aught but a potter—but I will be as good a one as I can.”
Therefore Wilfrid took scrip and staff and went on pilgrimage to France, and there he saw things which made him sure that men had not lost the love of beauty out of the world. But he could hear of no master potters who made anything like the deep red Roman ware. After a year of wandering he came back, full of new plans, and with many tales to tell; but he told Edwitha that in all his travels he had seen nothing which was better worth looking at than her little Roman bowl.
It was in the early springtime, when lambs are frisking like rabbits upon the tender green grass, and all the land is like a tapestry of blue and white and gold and pink and green. Robert Edrupt, as he rode westward from London on his homeward way, felt that he had never loved his country quite so well as now. He had gone with a flock of English sheep to northern Spain, and come back in the same ship with the Spanish jennets which the captain took in exchange. On one of those graceful half-Arabian horses he was now riding, and on another, a little behind him, rode a swarthy, black-haired and black-eyed youngster in a sheepskin tunic, who looked about him as if all that he saw were strange.
In truth Cimarron, as they called him, was very like a wild sheep from his native Pyrenees, and Edrupt was wondering, with some amusement and a little apprehension, what his grandmother and Barbara would say. The boy had been his servant in a rather dangerous expedition through the mountains, and but for his watchfulness and courage the English wool-merchant might not have come back alive. Edrupt had been awakened between two and three in the morning and told that robbers were on their trail, and then, abandoning their animals, Cimarron had led him over a precipitous cliff and down into the next valley by a road which he and the wild creatures alone had traveled. When the horses were led on shipboard the boy had come with them, and London was no place to leave him after that.
They rode up the well-worn track into the yard of Longley Farm, and leaving the horses with his attendant, Edrupt went to find his family. Dame Lysbeth was seated in her chair by the window, spinning, and would have sent one of the maids to call the mistress of the house, but Edrupt shook his head. He said that he would go look for Barbara himself.
He found her kneeling on the turf tending a motherless lamb, and it was a good thing that the lamb had had nearly all it could drink already, for when Barbara looked up and saw who was coming the rest of the milk was spilled. She looked down, laughing and blushing, presently, at the hem of her russet gown.
“Sheep take a deal o’ mothering,” she explained, “well-nigh as much as men. Come and see the new-born lambs, Robert, will ’ee?”
Robert stroked the head of the old sheep-dog that had come up for his share of petting. “Here is a black sheep for thee to mother, sweetheart,” he said with a laugh. “He’s of a breed that is new in these parts.”
Barbara looked at the rough, unkempt young stranger, with surprise but no unkindness in her eyes. She was not easily upset, and however wild he looked, the new-comer had been brought by Robert, and that was all that concerned her. “Where did tha find him, and what’s his name?” she inquired.
Edrupt laughed again, in proud satisfaction this time; he might have known that Barbara would behave just in that way. He explained, and Cimarron was forthwith shown a corner of a loft where he might sleep, and introduced to Don the collie as a shepherd in good standing. He and the sheep-dog seemed to understand each other almost at once, and though one was almost as silent as the other, they became excellent comrades.
Besides the sheep, Cimarron seemed interested in but one thing on the farm, and that was the old loom which had belonged to Dame Garland and still stood in the weaving-chamber, where he slept. Dame Lysbeth, rummaging there for some flax that she wanted, found the boy sitting on the bench with one bare foot on the treadle, studying the workings of the clumsy machine. It was a “high-warp” loom, in which the web is vertical, and in the loom-chamber where Barbara’s maids spun and wove, Edrupt had set up a Flemish “low-warp” loom with all the latest fittings. Into that place the herd-boy had never ventured. But Dame Lysbeth saw with surprise that he seemed to understand this loom quite well. When he was asked, he said that he had seen weaving done on such a loom in his country.
“Robert will be surprised,” said Barbara thoughtfully. “Who ever saw a lad like that who cared about weaving?”
But Edrupt was not as mystified as the women were. He thought it quite possible that the dark young stranger might have come of some Eastern race which had made weaving an art beyond anything the West could do. “I think,” he said one morning, “that I will take him to London and let him try what he can do in Cornelys Bat’s factory.”
Cornelys Bat was a Flemish weaver who had come to London some months before and set up his looms in an old wool-storeroom outside London Wall. He was a very skillful workman, but Flanders had weavers enough to supply half Europe with clothing, and his own town of Arras was already known for its tapestries. The Lowlands were overcrowded, and there was not bread enough to go around. Edrupt, whom he had known for several years, helped him to settle himself in England, and he had met with almost immediate success. Now he had with him not only his old parents, a younger brother and sister and an aunt with her two children, but three neighbors who also found life hard in populous Flanders. He felt that he had done well in following Edrupt’s advice, “When the wool won’t come to you, go where the wool is.” He was a square-built, placid, light-haired man with a stolid expression that sometimes misled people. When Edrupt came to him with a strange new apprentice, he readily consented to give the boy a chance. It was the only chance that there was, for the Weavers’ Guild would not have had him.
After a while Cimarron, or Zamaroun as the other ’prentices called him, was promoted from porter to draw-boy, as the weaver’s assistant was termed. This work did not need skill, exactly, but it did demand strength and close attention. The boy from the Pyrenees was as strong as a young ox, and he was never tired of watching the work and seeing exactly how it was done. His silent, quick strength suited Cornelys Bat. Weaving is work which needs the constant thought of the weaver, especially when the work is tapestry, and just at present the Flemings had secured an order for a set of tapestries for one of the King’s country houses. Henry II. was so continually traveling that the King of France once petulantly observed that he must fly like a bird through the air to be in so many places during the year. He had a way of mixing sport with state affairs, and a week spent in some palace like Woodstock or Clarendon might be divided evenly between his lawyers and his hunting-dogs. It is also said of him that he never forgot a face or a fact once brought to his notice. Perhaps he learned more on his hunting trips than any one imagined.
The tapestry weaving was far more complex and difficult than anything done by Barbara Edrupt’s maids. The loom used by the Flemings was a “low-warp” loom, in which the web is horizontal. When the heavy timbers were set up they were mortised together, that is, a projection in one fitted into a hollow in another, dovetailing them together without nails. Wooden pegs fitted into holes, and thus the frame, in all its parts, could be taken to pieces and carried from place to place on pack-horses if necessary. An ordinary loom was about eight feet long and perhaps four feet wide, the web usually being not more than a yard wide, and more commonly twenty-three or four inches. Broadcloth was woven in those days, but not very commonly, for it needed a specially constructed loom and two weavers, one for each side, because of the width of the cloth. In tapestry weaving the picture was made in strips, as a rule, and sewed together.
The idea of tapestry weaving in the early part of the Middle Ages was to tell a story. Few colors were used, and instead of making one large picture, which would have been very difficult with the looms then in use, the tapestries were made in sets, in which a series of pictures from some legends or chronicle could be shown. When in place, they were wall-coverings hung loosely from great iron hooks over which rings were slipped, or hangings for state beds, or sometimes a strip of tapestry was hung above the carved choir-stalls of a church, horizontally, to add a touch of color to the gray walls. When a court moved, or there was a festival day in the church, these woven or embroidered hangings could be taken from one place to another. Many tapestries were embroidered by hand, which was easier for the ordinary woman than weaving a picture, but took far more time. Kings and noblemen who had money to spend on such things would order sets of tapestry woven by such skilled workmen as Cornelys Bat and his Flemings, or the monks of Saumur in France, or the weavers of Poitiers. In Sicily, these hangings were often made of silk, for silk was already made there. Gold and silver thread was used sometimes, both in weaving and embroidery. Wool, however, was very satisfactory, not only because it was less costly than silk, but because it took dye well and made a web of rich soft colors. It was this which had drawn Robert Edrupt into Flanders to see what the weavers there were about, what sort of wool they used, and what the outlook was for their work. In Cornelys Bat he had found a man who could tell him very nearly all that there was to know about weaving.
Yet weaving is a craft of so many possibilities and complexities that a man may spend his whole life at it and still feel himself only a learner. The master weaver liked Cimarron because the boy never chattered, but kept his whole mind on his work. When Cornelys was revolving some new combination or design in his head, his drawboy was as silent as the weaver’s beam, and the whirr and clack of the loom were the only sounds in the place.
The weaver at such a loom sat at one end on a little board, with the heavy roller or weaver’s beam on which the warp, the lengthwise thread, was fastened in front of him. At the far end of the frame was another roller, the warp being stretched taut between the two. As the work progressed the web was rolled up gradually toward the weaver, and the pattern, if there was one, lay under the warp and was rolled up on a separate roller. Every skilled weaver had a number of simple patterns in his head, as a knitter has, but for a tapestry picture a pattern was drawn and colored on parchment ruled in squares, and a duplicate pattern made without the color, showing all the arrangement of the threads and used in “gating” as the arrangement of the warp in the beginning was called. Every weaver had his own way of gating, and his own little tricks of weaving. It was a craft that gave a chance for any amount of ingenuity.
In plain, “tabby” or “taffety” weaving, the weft or woof, the crosswise thread, went in and out exactly as in darning, and the two treadles underneath the web, worked by the feet, lifted alternately the odd threads and the even threads, the weaver tossing the shuttle from hand to hand between them. At each stroke of the shuttle the swinging beam, or batten, beat up the weft to make a close, firm, even weave. The shuttle, made of boxwood and shaped like a little boat, held in its hollow the “quill” or bobbin carrying the weft. When all the “yarn,” as thread for weaving was always called, was wound off, the weaver fastened on the end of the next thread with what is even now called a “weaver’s knot.” As the side of the web toward him was the wrong side of the cloth, no knot was allowed to show on the right side.
In brocaded, figured or tapestry weaving, leashes or loops called heddles were hung from above and lifted whatever part of the warp they were attached to. For example, three threads out of ten in the warp could be lifted by one group of heddles with one motion of the treadle, the heddles being grouped or “harnessed” to make this possible. It can be seen that in weaving by hand a tapestry with perhaps forty or fifty figures and animals, besides flowers and trees, the most convenient arrangement of the heddles called for brains as well as skill of hand in the weaver who did the work. The drawboy’s work was to pull each set of cords in regular order forward and downward. These cords had to raise a weight of about thirty-six pounds, which the boy must hold for perhaps a third of a minute while the ground was woven. He was in a way a part of the machine, but a part which had a brain.
A ratchet on the roller which held the finished web kept it from slipping back and held the warp stretched firm at that end, and in some looms there was a ratchet on the other roller as well. But Cornelys Bat preferred weights at the far end of the warp. These allowed the warp to give a tiny bit at every blow of the batten and then drew it instantly taut, no matter how heavy the box was made. “This kindly giving,” explained the weaver, “preventeth the breaking of the slender threads. No law may be kept too straitly and no thread drawn too strictly. That is a part of the craft.”
Cornelys may have been thinking of something more than weaving when he made that observation. The quiet tapissiers of Arras had caused an uproar in the Guild of London Weavers. A few cool heads advised the others to live and let live. The Flemings would be good English folk in time, and whatever they knew would help the craft in the future. But others, forgetting that they had refused to let their sons serve apprenticeship to Cornelys Bat when he came, railed at him for taking Flemings, Gascons, Florentines and even a vagabond from nobody knew where, into his employ.
“We will have no black sheep in our fold,” vociferated the leader of this faction, a keen-faced, tow-headed man of middle age. “These foreigners will ruin the craft.”
“Tut, tut,” protested Martin Byram, “I have heard Master Cole of Reading say that thy grandfather, his ’prentice boy, was a Swabian, Simon. And he brought no craft to England.”
There was a laugh, for everybody knew that the superior skill of the Flemings was one main cause of their success in the market. Some of the weavers even had the insight to see that so far from taking work away from any English weaver, they were thus far doing work which would have gone abroad to find them if they had not been here, and the gold paid them was kept and spent in London markets.
For all that, the feeling against the Flemings grew and spread, and might have broken out into open violence if they had not been working on the King’s tapestries. Nobody felt like interfering with them until that job was done, for the King might ask questions, and not like the answers.
How much of all this Cornelys Bat knew, no one could tell. Cimarron watched him, but the broad, thoughtful face was placid as usual. One day, however, the dark young apprentice was set upon in the street, where he had gone on an errand, by a crowd of other lads who nearly tore the clothes off his back. They had not reckoned on effectual fighting strength in this foreign youth, and they found that even a black sheep can be dangerous on occasion. The threats which they muttered set the boy’s mountain-bred senses on the alert, and he went back to the master weaver with the information that as soon as the King’s tapestries were finished the looms and their shelter would be burned over their heads.
“I hid in the loft and heard,” said Cimarron earnestly. “They are evil men here, master.”
The Fleming frowned slightly and balanced the beam of his loom—he was about to begin the last panel—thoughtfully in his hand. “So it seems,” he said. “Well, we will finish the tapestries as early as may be.”
One of the weavers saw lights in the Flemish loom-rooms that night, and reported that the strangers were working by candle-light, contrary to the law of the Guild—to which they did not belong. But Cornelys Bat was gathering together the work already done, and he and Cimarron and two of the other men carried it before morning to the warehouse of Gilbert Gay, the merchant, where it would be safe. They also took there certain bales of fine wool, dyes, and some household goods, and all this was loaded the next day on a boat and sent up the Thames to a point above London, where Robert Edrupt’s pack-horses took it to King’s Barton.
“It is no use to try to fight the entire Guild,” said Edrupt ruefully. “You had best come to our village and make your home there. When this has blown over you may come back to London.”
“If I were alone I would not budge,” said the Fleming with a sternness in his blue eyes. “But there are the old folk and the little ones. We have left our own land and come where the wool was; it is now time for the work to come to us.”
“I will warrant you it will,” said Master Gay. “But are you going to leave your looms for them to burn?”
“Not quite,” said Cornelys Bat, grimly.
The mob came just after nightfall of the day after the women and children, with the rest of the household goods, had gone on their way to a new home. It was not a very well organized crowd, and was armed with clubs, pikes, and torches mainly. It found to its astonishment that the timbers of a loom, heavy and well seasoned, may make excellent weapons, and that the arm of a weaver is not feeble nor his spirit weak. It was no part of the plan of Cornelys Bat to leave the buildings of Master Gay undefended, and the determined, organized resistance of the Flemings repelled the attack. The next day it was found that the weavers had gone, and their quarters were occupied by some of Master Gay’s men who were storing there a quantity of this year’s fleeces. Meanwhile the Flemings had settled in the little road that ran past the nunnery at King’s Barton and was called Minchen Lane.
There was thunder in the air, one summer day in King’s Barton. Dame Lavender, putting her drying herbs under cover, wondered anxiously what Mary was doing. The moods of the royal lady in the castle depended very much on the weather, and both of late had been uncertain. Strong-willed, hot-tempered, ambitious and adventurous, this Queen had no traits that were suited to a quiet existence in the country. Yet she would have been about as safe a person to have at large as a wild-cat among harriers. Whoever had the worst of it, the fight would be sensational.
When made prisoner she was on the way to the court of France, in which her rebellious sons could always find aid. Aquitaine was all but in open revolt against the Norman interloper—it was only through her that Henry had held that province at all. Scotland was ready for trouble at any time; Ireland was in tumult; the Welsh were in a permanent state of revolt. But Norman though he was, the King had won his way among his English subjects. They never forgot that he was only half Norman after all. His Saxon blood, cold and stubborn, steadied his Norman daring, and he could be alternately bold and crafty.
Eleanor of Aquitaine was more an exile in her husband’s own country than she would have been in France or Italy. His people might rebel against their King themselves, but they did not sympathize with her for doing it. They were as unfeeling as their gray, calm skies.
Instead of weeping and bemoaning herself she made life difficult for her household. Oddly enough the two English girls got on with her better than the rest. Mary’s even, sunny temper was never ruffled, and Barbara’s North-country disposition had an iron common-sense at the core. The gentle-born damsels of the court were too yielding.
When little hot flashes lightened among the far-off hills, and a distant rumble sounded occasionally, the Queen was pacing to and fro on the top of the great keep. It was not the safest place to be in case of a storm, for the castle was the highest building in the neighborhood. Philippa, working sedately at a tapestry emblem of a tower in flames, looked up the stairway and shivered as if she were cold.
“Mary,” she queried, as the still-room maid came through the bower, “where is Master Tomaso?”
“In his study, I think,” Mary answered. “Shall I call him?”
“Nay—I thought——” Philippa left the sentence unfinished and folded her work; then she climbed the narrow stair. When the Queen turned and saw her she was standing with her slim hands resting on the battlement.
“What are you doing away from your tapestry-frame, wench?” demanded her mistress. “Are you spying on me again?”
“Your Grace,” Philippa answered gently, “I could never spy on you—not even if my own father wished it. I—I was talking with Master Tomaso last night, and he said strange things about the stars. I would you could have heard him.”
The Queen laughed scornfully. “As if it were not enough to be prisoned in four walls, the girl wants to believe herself the puppet of the heavens! Look you, silly pigeon, if there be a Plantagenet star you may well fear it, for brother hates brother and all hate their father—and belike will hate their children. Were you asking him the day of my death?”
“I was but asking what flowers belonged to the figures of the zodiac in my tapestry,” answered Philippa. “He says that a man may rule the stars.”
“I wish that a woman could,” mocked the Queen. “How you silly creatures can go on, sticking the needle in and out, in and out, day after day, I cannot see. One would think that you were weavers of Fate. I had rather cast myself over the battlements than look forward to thirty years of stitchery!” She swept her trailing robes about her and vanished down the stairs. Philippa, following, saw with a certain relief that she turned toward the rooms occupied by old Tomaso. The physician was equal to most situations. Yet in the Queen’s present mood anything might arouse her anger.
The study was of a quaint, bare simplicity in furnishing. It had a chair, a stool, a bench under the window, a table piled with leather-bound books, a large chest and a small one, an old worm-eaten oaken dresser with some flasks and dishes. A door led into the laboratory, and another into the cell where the philosopher slept. As the Queen entered he rose and with grave courtesy offered her his chair, which she did not take. She stood looking out across the quiet hills, and pressed one hand and then the other against her cheeks—then she turned, a dark figure against the stormy sky.
“They say that you know all medicine,” she flung out at him. “Have you any physic for a wasted soul?” With a fierce gesture she pointed at the half-open door. “Why do you stay in this dull sodden England—you who are free?”
“There are times, your Grace,” the physician replied tranquilly, “when I forget whether this is England or Venetia.”
The Queen moved restlessly about the room, and stopped to look at an herbal. “Will you teach me the properties of plants?” she asked, as she turned the pages carelessly. “With Mary’s help we might make here an herb-garden. It is well to know the noxious plants from the wholesome, lest—unintentionally—one should put the wrong flavor in a draught.”
Tomaso had seen persons in this frame of mind before. He had taught many pupils the properties of plants, but he had his own ways of doing it. In his native city of Padua and elsewhere, there were chemists who owed their fame to the number of poisons they understood.
“I have some experiments in hand which may interest your Grace,” he answered. “If you will come into my poor studio you shall see them.” He led the way into the inner chamber where no one was ever allowed to come. The walls were lined with shelves on which stood jars, flasks, mortars and other utensils whose use the Queen could not guess. Tomaso did not warn her not to touch any flask. She handled, sniffed and all but tasted. She finally went so far as to pour a small quantity of an unsensational-looking fluid into a glass, and a drop fell on the edge of her mantle, in which it burned a clean hole.
Tomaso was pouring something into a bowl from a retort, and seemed not to have seen the action. Then he added a pinch of a colorless powder, and dipped a skein of silk into the bowl. It came out ruby-red. Another pinch of powder, another bath, and it was like a handful of iris petals. Other experiments gave emerald like rain-wet leaves in sunlight, gold like the pale outer petals of asphodels, ripe glowing orange, blue like the Mediterranean. Then suddenly the light in the stone-arched window was darkened and thunder crashed overhead. The little brazier in the far corner glowed like a red eye, and Tomaso had to light a horn lantern before the Queen could see her way out of the room.
“We shall have to wait, now, until after the storm,” he said, as he led the way into the outer room. “I am making these experiments for the benefit of a company of weavers whom a young friend of mine has brought here. The young man—he is a wool-merchant—has an idea that we can weave tapestry here as well as they can in Damascus if we have the wherewithal, and I said that I would attend to the dyeing of the yarn.”
The Queen gave a contemptuous little laugh and sank into the great chair. “These Saxons! I think they are born with paws instead of hands! They are good for nothing but to herd cattle and plow and reap. Do your stars tell you foolish tales like that, Master Tomaso?”
“I did not ask them,” said the old man tranquilly. “I use my eyes when I can. The weavers are Flemish, and I see no cause why they should not weave as good cloth here as they did at home. They had English wool there, and they will have it here. There is a Spaniard among them, and I do not know what he will do when the chilly rains come, poor imp. He does not like anything in England, as it is.”
“Poor imp!” the Queen repeated. “How do these weavers come here, so far from any town?”
“Well, they came like most folk, because they had to come,” smiled the Paduan. “The English weavers are inclined to be jealous folk, and they took the view that these Flemings were foreigners and had no right within London Wall—or outside it either, for they were in a lane somewhere about Mile End. Jealousy fed also on their success in their work—it was far superior to anything London looms can do. And certain dealers in fine cloth saw their profits threatened, and so did the Florentine importers. What with one thing and another Cornelys Bat and his people had to leave the city, or lose all that they possessed. The reasons were as mixed as the threads of a tapestry, but that is the way with life.”
“And why are you wasting time on them?” the Queen demanded.
“My motives are also mixed,” answered the old man. “Being myself an alien in a strange land, I had sympathy for them—especially Cimarron, the imp. Also it is interesting to work in a new field, and I have never done much with dyestuffs. I sometimes feel like a child gathering bright pebbles on the shore; each one seems brighter than the last. But really, I think I work because I dislike to spend my time in things which will not live after me. It seemed to me that if these Flemish weavers come here in colonies, teaching their art to such English as can learn, it will bring this land independence and wealth in years to come. There is plenty of pasturage for sheep, and wool needs much labor to make it fit for human use. Edrupt, the merchant—his wife is one of your women, by the way—says that this one craft of weaving will make cities stronger than anything else. And that will disturb some people.”
The Queen’s eyes flashed with wicked amusement. She had heard the King rail to his barons upon the impudence of London. She knew that those who invaded London privilege came poorly out of it.
“Barbara’s husband,” she said thoughtfully. “I did not know that he was a merchant—I thought he was one of these clod-hopping farmers.”
Tomaso did not enlighten her. Curiosity is the mother of knowledge. He peered out at his fast-filling cisterns. “This rain-water,” he observed, “will be excellent for my dyestuffs.”
The Queen gave a little light laugh. “The heavens roar anathema maranatha,” she cried, “and the philosopher says, ‘I will fill my tubs.’ You seem to be assured that the powers above are devoted to your service.”
“It is as well,” smiled the physician, “to have them to your aid if possible. Some men have a—positive genius—for being on the wrong side. The growth of a people is like the growth of a vine. It will not twine contrary to nature.”
“But these are not your people,” the Queen persisted. “No one will know who did the work you are doing.”
“Cornelys Bat the tapissier told me,” Tomaso answered, “that no one knows now who it was who set the foot at work by tipping the loom over, and separated the warp threads by two treadles. Yet that changed the whole rule of weaving.”
“I have a mind to see this tapestry,” announced Eleanor abruptly. “Tell your Cat, or Rat, or Bat, whatever his name is, to bring his looms here. If he works well we will have something for our walls besides this everlasting embroidery. I have watched Philippa working the histories of the saints this six months,—I believe she has all the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Ursula to march along the wall. I am ready to burn a candle to Saint Attila.”
Tomaso’s eyes twinkled. That friendly twinkle went far to unlock the Queen’s confidence. “Here am I,” she went on impetuously, “mewed up here like a clipped goose that hears the cry of the flock. If there is another Crusade I would joyfully set forth as a man-at-arms, but belike I shall never even hear of it. I warrant you Richard will lead a host to Jerusalem some day—and I shall not be there to see.”
The Paduan lifted one long finger. “You fret because you are strong and see far. Your descendants may rule Europe. The Plantagenets are a building race. You can lay foundations for kings of the years to come. You have here the chance of knowing this people, whom none of your race did ever know truly. Your tiring women, the men who till these fields and live by their toil, the churchmen, the traders—knowing them you know the kingdom. Bend your wit and will to rule the stars, madam. Thus you bring wisdom out of ill-hap, and in that way only can a King be secure.”
The Queen sat silent, chin in hand, her eyes searching the shadows of the room, for the storm had passed and twilight was falling. “Gramercy for your sermon, Master Tomaso,” she said at last, as she rose to leave the room. “Some day Henry will see that it was not I who taught the Plantagenets to quarrel. Send for your tapissiers to-morrow, and I will study weaving for a day.”
To the comfort of all, the Queen was in a gay humor that evening. The carved ivory chessmen were brought out, and as she watched Ranulph and Philippa in the mimic war-game Eleanor pondered over the recent betrothal of Princess Joan to the King of Sicily. “Women,” she muttered, “are only pawns on a man’s chessboard.”
“Aye,” laughed Ranulph, as his white knight retreated, “but your Grace may remember that the pawn when it comes to Queen may win the game.”
The bulky loom of Cornelys Bat was set up next morning in the old hall, and the Queen came down to watch the strange, complex, curious task. Then she would take the shuttle herself and try it, and to the surprise of every one, kept at the task until she might well have challenged a journeyman. While the threads interlaced and shifted in a rainbow maze her mind was traveling strange pathways. The shuttle, flung to and fro in deft strong skill, was not like the needle with its maddening stitch after stitch, and there was no petty chatter in the room. The Flemish weaver might be silent, but he was not stupid, and the drawboy, the dusky youth with the coarse black hair, was like a wild panther-cub. Such a blend as these weaving-folk, brought together by one aim, could teach the arbitrary barons their place. Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Brittany,—England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales—what a web of Empire they would make! And if into the dull russet and gray of this England there came a vivid young life like her Richard’s—yellow hair, sea-blue eyes, gay daring, impulsive gallantry—and under all the stern fiber of the Norman—what kind of a tapestry would that be? Thus, as women have done through the centuries, Eleanor of Aquitaine let her mind play about her fingers.
After a while she left the work to the weavers and watched Mary Lavender making dyestuffs under Tomaso’s direction. It was fascinating to try for a color and make it come to a shade. It was yet more so to make new combinations and see what happened. Red and green dulled each other. A touch of orange made scarlet more brilliant. Lavender might be deepened to royal violet or paled to the purple-gray of ashes. The yarns, as the skillful Flemings handled them, were better than any gold thread, and the gorgeous blossom-hues of the wools were like an Eastern carpet.
Presently the Queen began devising a set of hangings for a State bedchamber, the pictures to be scenes from the life of Charlemagne—the suggested comparison of this monarch with the King had its point. An Irish monk-bred lad with a knack at catching likenesses came by, and made the designs, under Queen Eleanor’s direction; and during this undertaking she learned much concerning the state of Ireland. That ended and the weaving begun, she took to questioning Cimarron the drawboy.
“I suppose,” she jibed, “men grow like that they live by, or you would never have been driven out of London like sheep. I may become lamblike myself some day.”
Cimarron’s white teeth gleamed. “I would not say that we went like sheep,” he retorted, and he told the story of their going. “There were the old folk and the little ones, your Grace,” he ended. “The master cares for his own people, and his work. He does not heed other folk’s opinions.”
The Queen laughed gleefully. “I wish I had been at that hunting—the wolves driven by their quarry. My faith, a weaver’s beam is not such a bad weapon after all.”
More than ten years after, when Richard I. was crowned King of England, one of his first acts was to make his mother regent in his absence. It was she who raised the money to outbid Philip of France when Cœur de Lion was to be ransomed. As one historian has said, she displayed qualities then and later, which prove that she spent her days in something besides needlework. She did not stay long at King’s Barton, but one of Cornelys Bat’s tapestries was always known as the Queen’s Maze. In one way and another during the sixteen years of her captivity she learned nearly all that there was to know of the temper of the people and the nature of the land.