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sutcliff_space2021-04-05 08:42 am
hedgebird) wrote in sutcliff_space2021-04-05 08:42 am
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A sample of The Queen Elizabeth Story (1950)
The Queen Elizabeth Story has, as far as I know, been out of print for decades, and is I think Rosemary Sutcliff's only novel not yet to have had an e-book release. As it's not easy for many people to find, I thought I'd give you a taste of it. I think you'll find these first two chapters something of a departure, in one way in particular, from the most familiar books of Sutcliff's canon (or rather that later books were a departure from this one.)
Notes:
I: All About Perdita
In the days when Queen Elizabeth was young, and ruled England from her great palace of Whitehall, and tulips and lilac-trees were strange new things from foreign parts, there was a little girl called Perdita Jane Pettle, who lived in a village in Devonshire. She lived in the Rectory with her father, who was the Rector, and her mother, who was lovely to look at and always laughing, and her elder brother Robin, when he was home from school. Then there were Tryphena-the-Kitchen and Billie-the-Garden, who were married and lived over the stables with a pot of marigolds on the window-sill, and last there was Peterkin, a dog with a large, soft heart, and a plumy tail like a collie, though the rest of him was pure otter-hound.
Broomhill – for that was the name of Perdita’s village – sat comfortably in a green valley, with its meadows and its spinneys and quiet, peaty-brown river, sheltered from the worst of the wild west winds by the hills that shut it off from the ten-mile-distant sea. The road, rounding a corner, came into the village suddenly. First there was Five-Oak Spinney, then the Rectory, sitting back from the road, with a patch of grass and cobbles, which the villagers called “Parson’s Platt”, spread out in front of it. Next came the church, with its squat Norman tower rising from a green froth of elm-trees which always seemed to be trying to join hands with the Five-Oak Spinney and so shut the Rectory off from the road altogether. The church was very plain outside, but inside there were cross-legged Crusader tombs, and crimson-winged angels supporting the hammer beams of the roof, and a strange old wall-painting of St. Sebastian stuck full of arrows; and in the belfry hung the five great bells – Halsyon, Hautclere, Douce, John, and Gabriel – which seemed more like real people than just bells, to the folk who lived within sound of them. Beyond the church was the village street, with all the cottages strung out higgledy-piggledy along it, with their herb plots and their apple-trees and their lean pigs. There was a Green half-way down the village, and at the farthest end of the street was a mossy stone gatehouse in the mossy stone wall that surrounded Whinworthy.
Whinworthy was half manor-house and half fortified farm. When the gates were open one could catch a glimpse of the warm huddle of out-buildings, and the house itself, long and grey and sleepy, with pigeons on the roof and lime-trees bending over it. It belonged to Adam Hilyarde, who went to school with Robin, as it had belonged to his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and when he left school he would live in it, as they had done. But that would not be yet awhile, and in the meantime he spent his holidays with his uncle, Sir John Annersly, over at Black Brendon, and there was a steward called George Prettyjohn living in the gatehouse and farming the land, with a wife who went in once a week to dust and air the house. Perdita’s mother sometimes spoke of the days when the house had been lived in, before Adam’s father had been drowned at sea and Adam’s mother had died and gone to join him; but that had all happened long ago, before Perdita was born, and so she never remembered Whinworthy when it was awake and lived in.
But every time she went that way and found the gates open, she stopped to look at the little, lonely manor-house, and she often thought how nice it would be when it woke up and was a proper lived-in house again, with snapdragon and tiger-lilies in its garden, and candle-shine in its windows after dark.
The Rectory was long and rambling, with stone floors on which Tryphena strewed green rushes instead of a carpet, and steps up into rooms and steps down into other rooms, and windows where you least expected them, and dark corners which might contain almost anything. There was a queer oak chest carved with grinning heads, that stood in the hall, and gay little posies embroidered on the green curtains of Perdita’s bed and the green coverlid which matched them; and a beautiful cup of Venetian glass a fine as a soap-bubble, which her mother kept wrapped up in her dower chest, and brought out only on special occasions, to be looked at, but never touched.
Then there was the garden. A big garden, with a little one full of sweet-smelling herbs in one corner, and a high red cob wall with thatch on top of it running all the way round. At the bottom of the garden there was a small, weather-stained door in the wall, and beyond it was the orchard, with Mazard cherry-trees, and a great old pear, and apple-trees with names that sing themselves in your head – russets, lilywhites, leatherjackets, golden pippins – and Cornish gillyflowers. And however much Perdita loved the things indoors, she loved the garden and the orchard even better, because of the fairies.
You see, Perdita was born just as the brass-faced clock in the Rector’s study struck half-past eleven on Midsummer’s Eve; and as everyone knows – or if they do not, they ought to – anyone born on Midsummer’s Eve, especially towards midnight, will be sure to see fairies – at any rate until the day they get married, and perhaps all their lives.
So Perdita knew that the world was full of fairies (Pharisees, the country-folk called them), because she could see them just as clearly as you or I can see a dragon-fly. There were a lot of them in the garden: stately creatures with flame-coloured robes and shimmering golden wings, among the Crown Imperials; little naked Pharisees, green all over, with velvety purple patches on their wings, hiding in the foxglove bells; cuddly ones in the pansies and violets; fierce, gold-helmeted little warriors among the tiger-lilies; moth-winged creatures clad in buff and grey and pink, clustering round the drooping honeysuckle. You could always find them, if you went softly so as not to frighten them, and knew where to look.
The Pharisees of the garden were tamer and much more reasonable, like their flowers, than those who lived on the other side of the red cob wall. But the wild Pharisees were more exciting than the garden ones, and when Perdita got to know them, they were staunch friends to her; though to other people – people who could not see them – well! They lived in the hills, in the great circles of gorse that grew amid the fields; they lived in Pidwidgeon Wood, and among the hazel-bushes down by the weir, and in a disused badger’s holt far upstream. They were mostly greeny-grey in colour, with long, wild hair, and eyes as blue as speedwell or as yellow as broom; their wings were bright, like those of a dragon-fly, and their voices were like the churr of a grasshopper. In fact, when you hear a grasshopper churring among the clover flowers, it may quite likely be a Pharisee calling to a friend.
Of course people really knew that there were Pharisees in England when Queen Elizabeth was young. People talked about them in whispers round the fire on winter nights or in the summer twilight when the day’s work was done. Sometimes they called them the Good Folk, or the Lordly Ones, and they put little bowls of milk outside the doors to keep them in a good humour. But they were so seldom seen that even then grown-ups and clever people were beginning to forget that the Pharisees were anything but old stories. So Perdita did not tell anyone about them, except her brother Robin, who she knew would not laugh at her. Besides, she had to tell Robin, because he had just told her his own secret, and it would not have been fair if she did not.
Robin had an uncle who was a Merchant Venturer, and was going to take Robin with him when he grew up. Everybody knew that. The secret was this: that Robin was not always going to serve in someone else’s ship; one day he was going to to have a ship of his own – a lovely, tall ship, with sails that swelled out like white wings, and a painted figure-head, and four culverin in the waist; and he was going to sail away in her, out beyond Lundy, away and away into the west, and do great deeds for the glory of Queen Elizabeth. And one day he meant to sail south, and then east around the Cape of Good Hope, and capture for England the trade with India which was now in the hands of the Portuguese. They were in the barn when Robin told her this, eating little withered apples; and Perdita listened so hard that she swallowed a pip and choked. But when she had stopped choking, she told Robin about the Pharisees; and Robin did not laugh at her, but only smiled his nice, slow smile, and said, “Is there a Pharisee anywhere about now?”
At first Perdita did not think there was, but when she looked round carefully she saw that there was a small one sitting in the edge of the cider-press. She told Robin exactly where it was, and he held out his finger to it – very gently, as though it was a mouse he was trying to make friends with.
At first the Pharisee fluttered its wings at a terrific rate, and Perdita thought for a moment that it was going to get into a rage. But gradually it calmed down, and at last it stepped delicately on to Robin’s patient finger, and began to walk down it into the palm of his hand.
“I think I’ve got it – haven’t I, Perdita?” he said, very quietly, so as not to disturb it.
“Yes,” said Perdita. “It’s in your hand. Oh, Robin, how did you know?”
“It tickles, like a bit of thistledown blowing across my hand.”
After that, Perdita often told Robin about the Pharisees, and in return he told her what he was going to do when he grew up and sailed away in the tall ship with the white sails and the painted figure-head and the four culverin in the waist; making a story out of it, which was just what she liked best.
Perdita loved stories, and was always wanting people to tell them to her. The five people of the Rectory household all told her stories, and all of them told quite different sorts of stories. Billie-the-Garden told her long, rambling ones while he dug manure into the strawberry bed or groomed the Rector’s horse Linnet – about the days when he was a soldier and carried a halberd against King Hal’s enemies, and did not take his boots off for weeks together.
Tryphena told queer tales of the sort you try not to think about when you are in bed, and the candle is out, and the moonlight makes queer, misty patches in the corners: about the elder-tree in the weir meadow that had once been a witch, and bled if it were cut; and about the ghosts of the old monks from the ruined Abbey, who fished the river on moonlit nights; and about her sailor uncle, who had been overlooked by a witch and drowned on his next voyage because she had turned into a hare and made off before he could draw blood from her and so break the spell.
Robin’s stories were all of the sea, and exploration, and adventure, either of what he was going to do, or of what other people had already done. Sometimes he told her about Anthony Jenkinson, who had travelled right up through the Turkish Empire in the year before Robin was born; how he had gone farther than any Englishman had ever gone before him, and seen the ancient glories of Bokhara and Samarkand; and sometimes he told her about brave Sir Hugh Willoughby, who that same year had set out from London in the Bona Esperanza, with all his flags flying and his sailors dressed in sky-blue cloth, to find the North-East Passage to Russia. And he told how the Bona Esperanza had been frozen into the ice at the far north of Norway, and the food had all gone, and one by one the men had died of cold and hunger, until only Sir Hugh Willoughby was left, and how he had sat in his cabin and written his journal, day by day, until he, too, died. Then Perdita would cry a little because, although she loved the story, she was so sorry for poor Sir Hugh, dying all alone in the great white emptiness. And even Robin’s voice would grow a little husky, because Sir Hugh Willoughby was his hero.
When she asked her father for a story, he always smiled his slow, lop-sided smile that lifted only one side of his mouth, and said that he could not make up stories. Then he would put an arm round her and cuddle her against him, and tell her wonderful tales that came out of the two big leather-bound books in his study, which were called “Le Morte D’Arthur” and “The Canterbury Tales”, stories about knights and ladies and priests and goblins, dragons and witches, kings and queens, and devils and enchanted maidens; all of which you can read for yourselves one day.
Perdita’s mother told stories that usually began, “When I was a little girl”, or “When your Uncle David was a little boy”, and ended up with her or Uncle David, or both, being whipped and sent to bed without any supper; which all went to show that both of them had been very naughty when they were little, but had had a lot of fun. Sometimes, for a change, Perdita’s mother told her about Great-Aunt Phoebe, whose forefathers had gone to Ireland four hundred years before, with Strongbow and his army of Barons, and stayed there ever since. Great-Aunt Phoebe had married Great-Uncle Richard and come to live in London, and never stirred from the City again, though she had been a widow for fifty years now. She had swaggered down the Strand in her husband’s doublet and hose for a wager, had Great-Aunt Phoebe. She had taken off her shoe at a Court ball and thrown it at someone she did not like; and when she was a girl she could sing your heart out of your breast. She was an outrageous person, and Perdita loved hearing about her.
But there was one story her mother told that Perdita loved better than any other, and she asked for it so often that at last her mother made a rule, and would tell it to her only during the three winter months, and on her birthday. It was about how Bloody Queen Mary had died in her great Palace of Whitehall, and men who were called “Queen’s Messengers” had set out to carry the news through England. How they had ridden through the wintry countryside – for it was November – shouting the news as they passed through each village; and everywhere the church bells had rung after their passing, to welcome the Princess Elizabeth. One of them had ridden through Broomhill, and stopped to give Perdita’s father his copy of the proclamation that was to be read in all the churches throughout England. Perdita’s mother had been making candles, with one eye on Robin, who was only three, to see he did not get his fingers into the hot tallow, when she heard the horseman arrive. She always said, in telling the story, that her heart stood still for a whole minute; for the Rector, like thousands of other men and women, did not agree with Queen Mary over a great many things, and Perdita’s mother was afraid of anything unusual just then, in case it meant that the Queen was going to harm him. She had done such terrible things to so many of the people who did not agree with her. But in a little while the horseman had ridden on again, and the Rector had come in search of Perdita’s mother, and told her that Queen Mary was dead, and the Princess Elizabeth was now Queen. Then he had sent word to Tommy, the captain of the bell-ringers, and in a little while Halsyon and Hautclere, Douce, John, and Gabriel had rung out over the village, calling all the people to church. And when they were gathered together, Perdita’s father had gone into the pulpit, and proclaimed Queen Elizabeth, God bless her! And after the Broomhill bells were silent, and the startled rooks had returned to the elm-trees, they could hear the bells of Wear Abbot and the bells of St. Giles and the bells of Black Brendon ringing in the distance.
Sometimes when she was in bed Perdita used to think about the Queen Elizabeth story, going over it in her mind, because it made her feels all happy and excited inside, and the last thing she would think about before she went to sleep would be the church bells ringing all across green England, to welcome Gloriana.
II: How Perdita Wished to See the Queen
On the morning of Perdita’s eighth birthday she jumped out of bed very early, and ran barefoot across the rush-strewn floor, and stuck her head out of the window. She saw that it was going to be a lovely day. There had been rain in the night, but it was quite gone now, and the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, flecked with little curling, golden, feathery clouds; and the blue sky and its golden feathers were reflected in the puddles in “Parson’s Platt”. Everything was wet and sparkling in the sunshine, and the honeysuckle which started by the front door and climbed up towards Perdita’s window held a great drop of rain in every crimson-tipped golden horn. There was a thrush singing in the churchyard elms, and a yellow-hammer sat on the topmost twig of the tallest oak in Five-Oak Spinney, and sang for a little bit of bread and no cheese. Perdita nodded to both of them; then she drew in her head, and sitting down on the edge of the bed began to pick the little bits of rush and rosemary from between her toes before putting on her clothes.
Everybody was particularly nice to Perdita, because it was her birthday. Her father gave her a tiny hand-mirror with a silver rim, and her mother had made her a new gown for Jessica, her doll – a lovely gown of leaf-green, with melon-shaped sleeves, and a farthingale of palest pink embroidered with tiny rosebuds. Robin was away at school, but he had left a small, gaily-painted wooden box with his mother, to be a surprise for Perdita’s birthday. Tryphena had baked her a gingerbread horse, with a man on its back, and both of them thick with gilding, and Billie gave her a frilly pink-and-white striped carnation in a pot – a little grudgingly, because he had grown it himself, and no gardener really likes giving away anything he has grown himself.
Every morning, birthday or no birthday, Perdita had to do lessons with her mother. She had to read a little bit of her horn-book, and do a sum, and write a copy; then she had to sew a fine seam (not a very long one) and add a little bit to her cross-stitch sampler, and practise for half an hour on the virginal – which was the great-great-grandmother of a piano – before she was free for the rest of the day.
However, Perdita did not particularly mind the horn-book and the plain seam, because of the sampler and virginal that came after, like cake after bread and butter. For the sampler was to have stiff little fir-trees, and strawberry plants in scarlet pots in the corners, and a zig-zag border of honeysuckle all the way round; and though there was the alphabet in the middle, there would be green and pink popinjays perching on nothing-in-particular, and two little black dogs, and a galleon in full sail – Robin’s galleon!
But lovely as the sampler was, the virginal was even lovelier; its ivory keys were yellow with age – as yellow as the outer petals of a daffodil – and felt smooth and almost soft under Perdita’s fingers, and when she had got through her scales, her mother would play little simple tunes, and then let her try to pick them out for herself – even if only with one finger; and Perdita loved the tinkly sound that the keys of the virginal made when her mother’s fingers moved over them.
That day Perdita’s mother played a new tune – a lovely tune – called “Greensleeves”. Perhaps you know it? People still hum and whistle it to this day, because it is one of the loveliest tunes that was ever made, and things as lovely as that go on for ever. But though it was new to Perdita, it was really quite old already, for her mother said she remembered everyone singing it in London Town when she was a little girl, long before she married Perdita’s father and came to live in Devonshire, and it had not been new then. She said that some people believed that King Hal had made it, words and music, too, perhaps for the Lady Anne Boleyn, who was Queen Elizabeth’s mother, before he stopped loving her.
Afterwards Perdita wandered out into the garden, with Jessica in her shabby old gown under one arm and the new green gown and the painted box under the other, and her mirror in her hand, and Peterkin paddling along on his short legs behind her. She took them all half-way down the garden, and settled herself on the grass plot in the shade of the old, crooked mulberry-tree. First of all she looked long and carefully into the mirror. She had often seen herself in the big, polished steel mirror in her mother’s room, and in the copper pans in the kitchen, and in the dark pool above the weir; but there was something different, something extra special, about looking at herself in a mirror that was her own and nobody else’s. It was like a little silver pool between her two hands; and at first it only reflected the leaves of the mulberry-tree dappled with golden sunshine, but when she tipped it a little, suddenly her own face was in the middle of it – a small, brown-skinned, pointed face, fluffy brown hair under a trim little coif, and eyes like two speedwell flowers, so blue that it did not seem quite possible that they could belong to such a little brown mouse. Whenever Perdita though about such things, she wished that she was like her mother, because her mother was beautiful, with a wild-rose flush in her cheeks, and a dusting of golden freckles across her nose, and hair that was neither brown nor golden, but a colour between the two, like the woods in October. When Perdita mentioned this to Tryphena, Tryphena said, “Handsome is as handsome does. You be a good li’l maid, and your looks won’t matter.” But that did not comfort Perdita at all, because she was sure that beautiful people generally had more fun than good ones.
But somehow today she did not mind the least little bit. So, after studying her reflection gravely, she put out her small pink tongue at it, and showed Peterkin his reflection instead. But Peterkin was not interested, and pretended that he had an itch behind his ear; so Perdita laid the mirror down on the grass, and began to take off Jessica’s old gown. Jessica was made of wood, and had no joints – only modern dolls have joints – and there were tooth-marks on her wooden stomach where Peterkin had once mistaken her for a bone; but her cheeks were beautifully pink, and her mouth beautifully red, and her painted hair as black as a rook’s wing; and Perdita thought that she was very lovely.
But if she was beautiful in her old gown of pease-porridge tawny, she was far more so when dressed in the new green kirtle and the pink farthingale with the embroidered rosebuds; so Perdita propped her up against the tree-trunk, and showed her her reflection in the mirror.
And all the time Perdita was humming little bits of “Greensleeves”, little bits of the tune, and little bits of the words:
“For Greensleeves was all my joy
And Greensleeves was my delight;
Greensleeves was my heart-of-gold,
And who but my Lady Greensleeves?”
She was sure that King Hal must have made it for Queen Elizabeth’s mother, before he stopped loving her. And whether it was because of that, or because of the things that happened later, Gloriana and My Lady Greensleeves got linked together in her head, so that ever afterwards, if she heard “Greensleeves”, she thought of the Queen, and if she thought of the Queen, the tune of Greensleeves began to sing itself inside her.
All through that day there were even fewer Pharisees to be seen than usual – and there never were very many. Perdita did find one curled up in a foxglove bell, and once she thought she saw another fluttering among the branches of the mulberry-tree, but it disappeared before she could be sure that it was not just a dancing sunbeam, which was disappointing. Still, the gingerbread man which she had for her supper (saving the horse for next day) made up for the absence of quite a lot of Pharisees; and afterwards her mother told her the Queen Elizabeth story, before she went to bed.
Being Midsummer’s Eve, it was light for quite a long while after Perdita’s bed-time; and she lay watching the golden patch of evening sunshine slanting farther and farther up the wall, and getting more and more red as sunset drew nearer. She was too excited to sleep, and began to count the embroidered knots of flowers on the green bed-curtains, until they seemed to move a little, as though they were going to life. The pink-and-white carnation on the window-sill seemed to be standing on tiptoe, and holding all its petals widely open so as not miss anything; and Jessica, propped agains the foot of the bed, was smiling to herself as though she knew a secret that nobody else knew. Perdita began to be sure that something was going to happen – something queer, that could happen only on Midsummer’s Eve.
A long time went by. The sunshine died away, and blue shadows hung like cobwebs in the corners of Perdita’s little room. The embroidered posies in the curtains grew dim, the blackbird in the mulberry-tree stopped singing, and in his place an owl hooted softly from Five-Oak Spinney, “Whoo-whoo, whoo-whoo”. The sky outside the window turned to a clear, lovely green, like a witch-ball. Then the full midsummer moon came swimming up over the tree-tops, and with the moon came the Pharisees.
The first that Perdita heard of them was a faint, dry rustling, like autumn leaves against her window. She sat up in bed and listened. For a moment everything was quiet, and then it began again; only this time it was louder, like tiny wings beating against the glass – moth wings or butterfly wings – and there was a tiny outcry, like the churring of many grasshoppers, but not so loud. Perdita slipped out of bed, padded across to the window, and, opening it, leaned out. The world outside was alive with Pharisees! They clung to the horns of the honeysuckle and clustered on the window-sill, and hovered up and down in the air, like a cloud of midges before a thunderstorm, their wings pearly in the moonlight, their eyes shining like jewels, just as the eyes of a night moth shine when the light catches them. Wild Pharisees and garden Pharisees, mingling together, and all crying in their little, shrill voices, “Perdita! Perdita!”
“Here I am,” said Perdita. “What do you want?”
“We want to give you a present,” came the answer.
“Oh!” exclaimed Perdita. “How lovely! What is it?”
“A wish,” chorused the Pharisees. “One wish, all to yourself: gold from the moon, or a farthingale of scarlet satin – a king to wed you – a white lilac-tree for your garden – a new story for every day of the year – anything your heart desires.”
“Oh!” said Perdita again, and them, screwing up her eyes, “I wish –”
“No, no!” cried the Pharisees. “Not here. Come with us. Come away up the Broomhill; come and wish on the Grey Maiden.”
Now, Perdita knew quite well the tall grey stone that people called the “Grey Maiden”. It stood up like a pointing finger on the very top of the Broomhill, with a bush of blackthorn beside it; but she had never heard that it had any magic in it, so she said, “Why the Grey Maiden?”
“People always wished on the Grey Maiden before the world got so forgetful,” said a tall Pharisee with peat-brown wings folded down his back. “Come, Perdita, do come!” and “Oh yes, do come!” cried the other Pharisees, hovering up and down faster than ever, and holding out their hands to her.
“Wait for me,” said Perdita. “I won’t be long. Wait for me by the back door.”
She pulled her cloak over her white night-rail, and leaving her door just a little open, as her mother always left it, ran down the curling stairway, her bare feet making little, soft, pitter-pattering sounds on the polished wood. There was a thin line of yellow candle-light under the parlour door, and her mother’s soft laugh sounded behind it as Perdita stole past. Tryphena and Billie were in their home over the stables long ago, and the kitchen was in darkness. Perdita felt for the key which always hung on the wall, and, opening the door, slipped through and closed it behind her, putting the key on the window-sill – for she was a sensible person, and Pharisees or no Pharisees, she did not intend to find herself locked out.
Next moment the Pharisees came round the corner of the house, and fluttered about her with chirping cries of welcome. They caught hold of her cloak with tiny hands that clung like brambles, and pulled her out into the moonlight. She went with them gladly, across the lawn, through the tangle of hollyhocks and guelder-rose at the bottom of the garden, and, opening the little door in the wall, danced out through the orchard and down to the river meadow beyond.
The sheep-nibbled turf was like cold, wet velvet beneath her feet, but the air was warm and full of the scent of honeysuckle; and clear over the tree-tops rode the great, round, midsummer moon, flooding the world with light. Perdita had never noticed before how much of gold there is in summer moon shine; not silver at all, really, but a wonderful pale silvery gold, like the colour of evening primroses. She would have liked to stand still for a moment and look at it; but the Pharisees were all round her, tugging at her cloak, her night-rail, and even at her hair, and she had to hurry on across the meadow and through the coppice where the wild cherry-trees grew. Then she was climbing the Broomhill, half running, her heart thudding with excitement, the Good Folk whirling round her.
The Broomhill was steep; great patches of gorse taller than a man grew on it, so that often she had to turn out of her way, and when she reached the top she was quite out of breath. But there was the Grey Maiden standing up all a-shimmer in the moonlight, as though waiting for her.
The Pharisees cried with great excitement, “See! Here she is, the Grey Maiden! Put your hands on either side of her, and wait while your heart beats seven times. Then say, ‘Oh, Grey Maiden, hearken to a maiden’s wish’; and whatever you wish for, it shall come to pass within a twelve-month and a day.”
Like a thousand tiny brambles caught in her garments and hair, they urged her forward, right up to the Grey Maiden. “Now!” they cried, “now! Do it as we told you!”
“Yes, yes,” said Perdita, and she put her hands on either side of the Grey Maiden.
The granite was cold against her fingers, and suddenly everything was very quiet; the Pharisees had ceased their whirling flight and settled on every twig of the thorn-tree above her, where their eyes shone like stars tangled among the thorns. Far, far to the west, the moonlight sparkled on the waters of Bideford Bay, with its wide, curved fringe of incoming Atlantic rollers, and Lundy floating like a dark shadow far out on the skyline. Far, far below, the world lay quiet in the moonshine, black woods and misty fields, and huddled cottages where people would be going to bed by the friendly glow of rushlights; but up on the crest of the Broomhill there was just the Grey Maiden, and the moon, and the Pharisees.
Perdita’s heart beat one, two, three, four: there was magic in the tall stone; she could feel like pins and needles, against her finger-tips, and her heart beat five, six, very quickly. The stone seemed to stir, like a real maiden awaking. Perdita’s heart beat seven, right up in her throat, but she never doubted what she was going to wish for. She said, “Oh, Grey Maiden, hearken to a maiden’s wish. I wish to see the Queen Elizabeth. I wish to see her so close I could put out my hand and touch her.”
Then the Pharisees were whirling round her like moths round a candle-flame, and she turned about and saw through the fluttering cloud of wings a tiny square of smoky saffron far below her, that she knew was the parlour window at home. And she began to run towards it, with her hair and her cloak blowing out behind her, and the Pharisees whirling closer and closer round her until she was dazzled and made giddy by the flicker of their wings.
Perdita never remembered getting home, but suddenly she was lying in her own little bed, with the moon shining in through the window, and her mother and father talking quietly in the next room while they got ready for bed.
Some people would say it was all a dream, but when Perdita came to get up on midsummer morning, something pricked between her toes; and when she looked to see what it was, she found a furze-prickle stuck there!
Notes:
- The queen in question is Elizabeth Tudor, not Elizabeth Windsor! George VI was still warming the throne when this was published.
- It's one of four novels she set in the Tudor period, all published in the 1950s. The Armourer's House and Brother Dusty-Feet (which is not the monk one!) are also for children and similar in tone. They're set respectively amid a lively London household of the 1530s and a band of travelling actors in the 1580s. Lady in Waiting is Sutcliff's first novel for adults, about Sir Walter Raleigh and his wife in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.
- The QES is Sutcliff's very first published book, although her second book published that same year, The Chronicles of Robin Hood, was written earlier. She later said of it, "I suppose most writers know the joy once, perhaps twice, in their whole working life, of a book which almost creates itself, ‘as a bird sings’.... For me, there have been two, among my published books, written with this effortless delight. The first was The Queen Elizabeth Story."
- The fictional village of Broomhill, ten miles from the sea at Bideford, is more or less the same area of Devonshire where Sutcliff and her parents lived. (As well as the Carey family in Simon, for that matter.)
- Perdita shares her Midsummer's Eve birthday with Sutcliff's mother Elizabeth "Nessie" Sutcliff, who claimed to have the Second Sight. Later in life Rosemary Sutcliff also celebrated her birthday on Midsummer's Eve, though she was born on December 14.
- The classic "Flower Fairies" books by Cicely Mary Barker were among Sutcliff's childhood reading – in fact she credited them with a good deal of her botanical knowledge. I would say that they probably had some influence on this story.
- I don't know if he invented it, or if it really was a widespread term, but Rudyard Kipling's Sussex dialect in another childhood favourite of Sutcliff's, Puck of Pook's Hill, also uses the word "Pharisees" for a class of beings who are decidedly not biblical.
I: All About Perdita
In the days when Queen Elizabeth was young, and ruled England from her great palace of Whitehall, and tulips and lilac-trees were strange new things from foreign parts, there was a little girl called Perdita Jane Pettle, who lived in a village in Devonshire. She lived in the Rectory with her father, who was the Rector, and her mother, who was lovely to look at and always laughing, and her elder brother Robin, when he was home from school. Then there were Tryphena-the-Kitchen and Billie-the-Garden, who were married and lived over the stables with a pot of marigolds on the window-sill, and last there was Peterkin, a dog with a large, soft heart, and a plumy tail like a collie, though the rest of him was pure otter-hound.
Broomhill – for that was the name of Perdita’s village – sat comfortably in a green valley, with its meadows and its spinneys and quiet, peaty-brown river, sheltered from the worst of the wild west winds by the hills that shut it off from the ten-mile-distant sea. The road, rounding a corner, came into the village suddenly. First there was Five-Oak Spinney, then the Rectory, sitting back from the road, with a patch of grass and cobbles, which the villagers called “Parson’s Platt”, spread out in front of it. Next came the church, with its squat Norman tower rising from a green froth of elm-trees which always seemed to be trying to join hands with the Five-Oak Spinney and so shut the Rectory off from the road altogether. The church was very plain outside, but inside there were cross-legged Crusader tombs, and crimson-winged angels supporting the hammer beams of the roof, and a strange old wall-painting of St. Sebastian stuck full of arrows; and in the belfry hung the five great bells – Halsyon, Hautclere, Douce, John, and Gabriel – which seemed more like real people than just bells, to the folk who lived within sound of them. Beyond the church was the village street, with all the cottages strung out higgledy-piggledy along it, with their herb plots and their apple-trees and their lean pigs. There was a Green half-way down the village, and at the farthest end of the street was a mossy stone gatehouse in the mossy stone wall that surrounded Whinworthy.
Whinworthy was half manor-house and half fortified farm. When the gates were open one could catch a glimpse of the warm huddle of out-buildings, and the house itself, long and grey and sleepy, with pigeons on the roof and lime-trees bending over it. It belonged to Adam Hilyarde, who went to school with Robin, as it had belonged to his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and when he left school he would live in it, as they had done. But that would not be yet awhile, and in the meantime he spent his holidays with his uncle, Sir John Annersly, over at Black Brendon, and there was a steward called George Prettyjohn living in the gatehouse and farming the land, with a wife who went in once a week to dust and air the house. Perdita’s mother sometimes spoke of the days when the house had been lived in, before Adam’s father had been drowned at sea and Adam’s mother had died and gone to join him; but that had all happened long ago, before Perdita was born, and so she never remembered Whinworthy when it was awake and lived in.
But every time she went that way and found the gates open, she stopped to look at the little, lonely manor-house, and she often thought how nice it would be when it woke up and was a proper lived-in house again, with snapdragon and tiger-lilies in its garden, and candle-shine in its windows after dark.
The Rectory was long and rambling, with stone floors on which Tryphena strewed green rushes instead of a carpet, and steps up into rooms and steps down into other rooms, and windows where you least expected them, and dark corners which might contain almost anything. There was a queer oak chest carved with grinning heads, that stood in the hall, and gay little posies embroidered on the green curtains of Perdita’s bed and the green coverlid which matched them; and a beautiful cup of Venetian glass a fine as a soap-bubble, which her mother kept wrapped up in her dower chest, and brought out only on special occasions, to be looked at, but never touched.
Then there was the garden. A big garden, with a little one full of sweet-smelling herbs in one corner, and a high red cob wall with thatch on top of it running all the way round. At the bottom of the garden there was a small, weather-stained door in the wall, and beyond it was the orchard, with Mazard cherry-trees, and a great old pear, and apple-trees with names that sing themselves in your head – russets, lilywhites, leatherjackets, golden pippins – and Cornish gillyflowers. And however much Perdita loved the things indoors, she loved the garden and the orchard even better, because of the fairies.
You see, Perdita was born just as the brass-faced clock in the Rector’s study struck half-past eleven on Midsummer’s Eve; and as everyone knows – or if they do not, they ought to – anyone born on Midsummer’s Eve, especially towards midnight, will be sure to see fairies – at any rate until the day they get married, and perhaps all their lives.
So Perdita knew that the world was full of fairies (Pharisees, the country-folk called them), because she could see them just as clearly as you or I can see a dragon-fly. There were a lot of them in the garden: stately creatures with flame-coloured robes and shimmering golden wings, among the Crown Imperials; little naked Pharisees, green all over, with velvety purple patches on their wings, hiding in the foxglove bells; cuddly ones in the pansies and violets; fierce, gold-helmeted little warriors among the tiger-lilies; moth-winged creatures clad in buff and grey and pink, clustering round the drooping honeysuckle. You could always find them, if you went softly so as not to frighten them, and knew where to look.
The Pharisees of the garden were tamer and much more reasonable, like their flowers, than those who lived on the other side of the red cob wall. But the wild Pharisees were more exciting than the garden ones, and when Perdita got to know them, they were staunch friends to her; though to other people – people who could not see them – well! They lived in the hills, in the great circles of gorse that grew amid the fields; they lived in Pidwidgeon Wood, and among the hazel-bushes down by the weir, and in a disused badger’s holt far upstream. They were mostly greeny-grey in colour, with long, wild hair, and eyes as blue as speedwell or as yellow as broom; their wings were bright, like those of a dragon-fly, and their voices were like the churr of a grasshopper. In fact, when you hear a grasshopper churring among the clover flowers, it may quite likely be a Pharisee calling to a friend.
Of course people really knew that there were Pharisees in England when Queen Elizabeth was young. People talked about them in whispers round the fire on winter nights or in the summer twilight when the day’s work was done. Sometimes they called them the Good Folk, or the Lordly Ones, and they put little bowls of milk outside the doors to keep them in a good humour. But they were so seldom seen that even then grown-ups and clever people were beginning to forget that the Pharisees were anything but old stories. So Perdita did not tell anyone about them, except her brother Robin, who she knew would not laugh at her. Besides, she had to tell Robin, because he had just told her his own secret, and it would not have been fair if she did not.
Robin had an uncle who was a Merchant Venturer, and was going to take Robin with him when he grew up. Everybody knew that. The secret was this: that Robin was not always going to serve in someone else’s ship; one day he was going to to have a ship of his own – a lovely, tall ship, with sails that swelled out like white wings, and a painted figure-head, and four culverin in the waist; and he was going to sail away in her, out beyond Lundy, away and away into the west, and do great deeds for the glory of Queen Elizabeth. And one day he meant to sail south, and then east around the Cape of Good Hope, and capture for England the trade with India which was now in the hands of the Portuguese. They were in the barn when Robin told her this, eating little withered apples; and Perdita listened so hard that she swallowed a pip and choked. But when she had stopped choking, she told Robin about the Pharisees; and Robin did not laugh at her, but only smiled his nice, slow smile, and said, “Is there a Pharisee anywhere about now?”
At first Perdita did not think there was, but when she looked round carefully she saw that there was a small one sitting in the edge of the cider-press. She told Robin exactly where it was, and he held out his finger to it – very gently, as though it was a mouse he was trying to make friends with.
At first the Pharisee fluttered its wings at a terrific rate, and Perdita thought for a moment that it was going to get into a rage. But gradually it calmed down, and at last it stepped delicately on to Robin’s patient finger, and began to walk down it into the palm of his hand.
“I think I’ve got it – haven’t I, Perdita?” he said, very quietly, so as not to disturb it.
“Yes,” said Perdita. “It’s in your hand. Oh, Robin, how did you know?”
“It tickles, like a bit of thistledown blowing across my hand.”
After that, Perdita often told Robin about the Pharisees, and in return he told her what he was going to do when he grew up and sailed away in the tall ship with the white sails and the painted figure-head and the four culverin in the waist; making a story out of it, which was just what she liked best.
Perdita loved stories, and was always wanting people to tell them to her. The five people of the Rectory household all told her stories, and all of them told quite different sorts of stories. Billie-the-Garden told her long, rambling ones while he dug manure into the strawberry bed or groomed the Rector’s horse Linnet – about the days when he was a soldier and carried a halberd against King Hal’s enemies, and did not take his boots off for weeks together.
Tryphena told queer tales of the sort you try not to think about when you are in bed, and the candle is out, and the moonlight makes queer, misty patches in the corners: about the elder-tree in the weir meadow that had once been a witch, and bled if it were cut; and about the ghosts of the old monks from the ruined Abbey, who fished the river on moonlit nights; and about her sailor uncle, who had been overlooked by a witch and drowned on his next voyage because she had turned into a hare and made off before he could draw blood from her and so break the spell.
Robin’s stories were all of the sea, and exploration, and adventure, either of what he was going to do, or of what other people had already done. Sometimes he told her about Anthony Jenkinson, who had travelled right up through the Turkish Empire in the year before Robin was born; how he had gone farther than any Englishman had ever gone before him, and seen the ancient glories of Bokhara and Samarkand; and sometimes he told her about brave Sir Hugh Willoughby, who that same year had set out from London in the Bona Esperanza, with all his flags flying and his sailors dressed in sky-blue cloth, to find the North-East Passage to Russia. And he told how the Bona Esperanza had been frozen into the ice at the far north of Norway, and the food had all gone, and one by one the men had died of cold and hunger, until only Sir Hugh Willoughby was left, and how he had sat in his cabin and written his journal, day by day, until he, too, died. Then Perdita would cry a little because, although she loved the story, she was so sorry for poor Sir Hugh, dying all alone in the great white emptiness. And even Robin’s voice would grow a little husky, because Sir Hugh Willoughby was his hero.
When she asked her father for a story, he always smiled his slow, lop-sided smile that lifted only one side of his mouth, and said that he could not make up stories. Then he would put an arm round her and cuddle her against him, and tell her wonderful tales that came out of the two big leather-bound books in his study, which were called “Le Morte D’Arthur” and “The Canterbury Tales”, stories about knights and ladies and priests and goblins, dragons and witches, kings and queens, and devils and enchanted maidens; all of which you can read for yourselves one day.
Perdita’s mother told stories that usually began, “When I was a little girl”, or “When your Uncle David was a little boy”, and ended up with her or Uncle David, or both, being whipped and sent to bed without any supper; which all went to show that both of them had been very naughty when they were little, but had had a lot of fun. Sometimes, for a change, Perdita’s mother told her about Great-Aunt Phoebe, whose forefathers had gone to Ireland four hundred years before, with Strongbow and his army of Barons, and stayed there ever since. Great-Aunt Phoebe had married Great-Uncle Richard and come to live in London, and never stirred from the City again, though she had been a widow for fifty years now. She had swaggered down the Strand in her husband’s doublet and hose for a wager, had Great-Aunt Phoebe. She had taken off her shoe at a Court ball and thrown it at someone she did not like; and when she was a girl she could sing your heart out of your breast. She was an outrageous person, and Perdita loved hearing about her.
But there was one story her mother told that Perdita loved better than any other, and she asked for it so often that at last her mother made a rule, and would tell it to her only during the three winter months, and on her birthday. It was about how Bloody Queen Mary had died in her great Palace of Whitehall, and men who were called “Queen’s Messengers” had set out to carry the news through England. How they had ridden through the wintry countryside – for it was November – shouting the news as they passed through each village; and everywhere the church bells had rung after their passing, to welcome the Princess Elizabeth. One of them had ridden through Broomhill, and stopped to give Perdita’s father his copy of the proclamation that was to be read in all the churches throughout England. Perdita’s mother had been making candles, with one eye on Robin, who was only three, to see he did not get his fingers into the hot tallow, when she heard the horseman arrive. She always said, in telling the story, that her heart stood still for a whole minute; for the Rector, like thousands of other men and women, did not agree with Queen Mary over a great many things, and Perdita’s mother was afraid of anything unusual just then, in case it meant that the Queen was going to harm him. She had done such terrible things to so many of the people who did not agree with her. But in a little while the horseman had ridden on again, and the Rector had come in search of Perdita’s mother, and told her that Queen Mary was dead, and the Princess Elizabeth was now Queen. Then he had sent word to Tommy, the captain of the bell-ringers, and in a little while Halsyon and Hautclere, Douce, John, and Gabriel had rung out over the village, calling all the people to church. And when they were gathered together, Perdita’s father had gone into the pulpit, and proclaimed Queen Elizabeth, God bless her! And after the Broomhill bells were silent, and the startled rooks had returned to the elm-trees, they could hear the bells of Wear Abbot and the bells of St. Giles and the bells of Black Brendon ringing in the distance.
Sometimes when she was in bed Perdita used to think about the Queen Elizabeth story, going over it in her mind, because it made her feels all happy and excited inside, and the last thing she would think about before she went to sleep would be the church bells ringing all across green England, to welcome Gloriana.
II: How Perdita Wished to See the Queen
On the morning of Perdita’s eighth birthday she jumped out of bed very early, and ran barefoot across the rush-strewn floor, and stuck her head out of the window. She saw that it was going to be a lovely day. There had been rain in the night, but it was quite gone now, and the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, flecked with little curling, golden, feathery clouds; and the blue sky and its golden feathers were reflected in the puddles in “Parson’s Platt”. Everything was wet and sparkling in the sunshine, and the honeysuckle which started by the front door and climbed up towards Perdita’s window held a great drop of rain in every crimson-tipped golden horn. There was a thrush singing in the churchyard elms, and a yellow-hammer sat on the topmost twig of the tallest oak in Five-Oak Spinney, and sang for a little bit of bread and no cheese. Perdita nodded to both of them; then she drew in her head, and sitting down on the edge of the bed began to pick the little bits of rush and rosemary from between her toes before putting on her clothes.
Everybody was particularly nice to Perdita, because it was her birthday. Her father gave her a tiny hand-mirror with a silver rim, and her mother had made her a new gown for Jessica, her doll – a lovely gown of leaf-green, with melon-shaped sleeves, and a farthingale of palest pink embroidered with tiny rosebuds. Robin was away at school, but he had left a small, gaily-painted wooden box with his mother, to be a surprise for Perdita’s birthday. Tryphena had baked her a gingerbread horse, with a man on its back, and both of them thick with gilding, and Billie gave her a frilly pink-and-white striped carnation in a pot – a little grudgingly, because he had grown it himself, and no gardener really likes giving away anything he has grown himself.
Every morning, birthday or no birthday, Perdita had to do lessons with her mother. She had to read a little bit of her horn-book, and do a sum, and write a copy; then she had to sew a fine seam (not a very long one) and add a little bit to her cross-stitch sampler, and practise for half an hour on the virginal – which was the great-great-grandmother of a piano – before she was free for the rest of the day.
However, Perdita did not particularly mind the horn-book and the plain seam, because of the sampler and virginal that came after, like cake after bread and butter. For the sampler was to have stiff little fir-trees, and strawberry plants in scarlet pots in the corners, and a zig-zag border of honeysuckle all the way round; and though there was the alphabet in the middle, there would be green and pink popinjays perching on nothing-in-particular, and two little black dogs, and a galleon in full sail – Robin’s galleon!
But lovely as the sampler was, the virginal was even lovelier; its ivory keys were yellow with age – as yellow as the outer petals of a daffodil – and felt smooth and almost soft under Perdita’s fingers, and when she had got through her scales, her mother would play little simple tunes, and then let her try to pick them out for herself – even if only with one finger; and Perdita loved the tinkly sound that the keys of the virginal made when her mother’s fingers moved over them.
That day Perdita’s mother played a new tune – a lovely tune – called “Greensleeves”. Perhaps you know it? People still hum and whistle it to this day, because it is one of the loveliest tunes that was ever made, and things as lovely as that go on for ever. But though it was new to Perdita, it was really quite old already, for her mother said she remembered everyone singing it in London Town when she was a little girl, long before she married Perdita’s father and came to live in Devonshire, and it had not been new then. She said that some people believed that King Hal had made it, words and music, too, perhaps for the Lady Anne Boleyn, who was Queen Elizabeth’s mother, before he stopped loving her.
Afterwards Perdita wandered out into the garden, with Jessica in her shabby old gown under one arm and the new green gown and the painted box under the other, and her mirror in her hand, and Peterkin paddling along on his short legs behind her. She took them all half-way down the garden, and settled herself on the grass plot in the shade of the old, crooked mulberry-tree. First of all she looked long and carefully into the mirror. She had often seen herself in the big, polished steel mirror in her mother’s room, and in the copper pans in the kitchen, and in the dark pool above the weir; but there was something different, something extra special, about looking at herself in a mirror that was her own and nobody else’s. It was like a little silver pool between her two hands; and at first it only reflected the leaves of the mulberry-tree dappled with golden sunshine, but when she tipped it a little, suddenly her own face was in the middle of it – a small, brown-skinned, pointed face, fluffy brown hair under a trim little coif, and eyes like two speedwell flowers, so blue that it did not seem quite possible that they could belong to such a little brown mouse. Whenever Perdita though about such things, she wished that she was like her mother, because her mother was beautiful, with a wild-rose flush in her cheeks, and a dusting of golden freckles across her nose, and hair that was neither brown nor golden, but a colour between the two, like the woods in October. When Perdita mentioned this to Tryphena, Tryphena said, “Handsome is as handsome does. You be a good li’l maid, and your looks won’t matter.” But that did not comfort Perdita at all, because she was sure that beautiful people generally had more fun than good ones.
But somehow today she did not mind the least little bit. So, after studying her reflection gravely, she put out her small pink tongue at it, and showed Peterkin his reflection instead. But Peterkin was not interested, and pretended that he had an itch behind his ear; so Perdita laid the mirror down on the grass, and began to take off Jessica’s old gown. Jessica was made of wood, and had no joints – only modern dolls have joints – and there were tooth-marks on her wooden stomach where Peterkin had once mistaken her for a bone; but her cheeks were beautifully pink, and her mouth beautifully red, and her painted hair as black as a rook’s wing; and Perdita thought that she was very lovely.
But if she was beautiful in her old gown of pease-porridge tawny, she was far more so when dressed in the new green kirtle and the pink farthingale with the embroidered rosebuds; so Perdita propped her up against the tree-trunk, and showed her her reflection in the mirror.
And all the time Perdita was humming little bits of “Greensleeves”, little bits of the tune, and little bits of the words:
“For Greensleeves was all my joy
And Greensleeves was my delight;
Greensleeves was my heart-of-gold,
And who but my Lady Greensleeves?”
She was sure that King Hal must have made it for Queen Elizabeth’s mother, before he stopped loving her. And whether it was because of that, or because of the things that happened later, Gloriana and My Lady Greensleeves got linked together in her head, so that ever afterwards, if she heard “Greensleeves”, she thought of the Queen, and if she thought of the Queen, the tune of Greensleeves began to sing itself inside her.
All through that day there were even fewer Pharisees to be seen than usual – and there never were very many. Perdita did find one curled up in a foxglove bell, and once she thought she saw another fluttering among the branches of the mulberry-tree, but it disappeared before she could be sure that it was not just a dancing sunbeam, which was disappointing. Still, the gingerbread man which she had for her supper (saving the horse for next day) made up for the absence of quite a lot of Pharisees; and afterwards her mother told her the Queen Elizabeth story, before she went to bed.
Being Midsummer’s Eve, it was light for quite a long while after Perdita’s bed-time; and she lay watching the golden patch of evening sunshine slanting farther and farther up the wall, and getting more and more red as sunset drew nearer. She was too excited to sleep, and began to count the embroidered knots of flowers on the green bed-curtains, until they seemed to move a little, as though they were going to life. The pink-and-white carnation on the window-sill seemed to be standing on tiptoe, and holding all its petals widely open so as not miss anything; and Jessica, propped agains the foot of the bed, was smiling to herself as though she knew a secret that nobody else knew. Perdita began to be sure that something was going to happen – something queer, that could happen only on Midsummer’s Eve.
A long time went by. The sunshine died away, and blue shadows hung like cobwebs in the corners of Perdita’s little room. The embroidered posies in the curtains grew dim, the blackbird in the mulberry-tree stopped singing, and in his place an owl hooted softly from Five-Oak Spinney, “Whoo-whoo, whoo-whoo”. The sky outside the window turned to a clear, lovely green, like a witch-ball. Then the full midsummer moon came swimming up over the tree-tops, and with the moon came the Pharisees.
The first that Perdita heard of them was a faint, dry rustling, like autumn leaves against her window. She sat up in bed and listened. For a moment everything was quiet, and then it began again; only this time it was louder, like tiny wings beating against the glass – moth wings or butterfly wings – and there was a tiny outcry, like the churring of many grasshoppers, but not so loud. Perdita slipped out of bed, padded across to the window, and, opening it, leaned out. The world outside was alive with Pharisees! They clung to the horns of the honeysuckle and clustered on the window-sill, and hovered up and down in the air, like a cloud of midges before a thunderstorm, their wings pearly in the moonlight, their eyes shining like jewels, just as the eyes of a night moth shine when the light catches them. Wild Pharisees and garden Pharisees, mingling together, and all crying in their little, shrill voices, “Perdita! Perdita!”
“Here I am,” said Perdita. “What do you want?”
“We want to give you a present,” came the answer.
“Oh!” exclaimed Perdita. “How lovely! What is it?”
“A wish,” chorused the Pharisees. “One wish, all to yourself: gold from the moon, or a farthingale of scarlet satin – a king to wed you – a white lilac-tree for your garden – a new story for every day of the year – anything your heart desires.”
“Oh!” said Perdita again, and them, screwing up her eyes, “I wish –”
“No, no!” cried the Pharisees. “Not here. Come with us. Come away up the Broomhill; come and wish on the Grey Maiden.”
Now, Perdita knew quite well the tall grey stone that people called the “Grey Maiden”. It stood up like a pointing finger on the very top of the Broomhill, with a bush of blackthorn beside it; but she had never heard that it had any magic in it, so she said, “Why the Grey Maiden?”
“People always wished on the Grey Maiden before the world got so forgetful,” said a tall Pharisee with peat-brown wings folded down his back. “Come, Perdita, do come!” and “Oh yes, do come!” cried the other Pharisees, hovering up and down faster than ever, and holding out their hands to her.
“Wait for me,” said Perdita. “I won’t be long. Wait for me by the back door.”
She pulled her cloak over her white night-rail, and leaving her door just a little open, as her mother always left it, ran down the curling stairway, her bare feet making little, soft, pitter-pattering sounds on the polished wood. There was a thin line of yellow candle-light under the parlour door, and her mother’s soft laugh sounded behind it as Perdita stole past. Tryphena and Billie were in their home over the stables long ago, and the kitchen was in darkness. Perdita felt for the key which always hung on the wall, and, opening the door, slipped through and closed it behind her, putting the key on the window-sill – for she was a sensible person, and Pharisees or no Pharisees, she did not intend to find herself locked out.
Next moment the Pharisees came round the corner of the house, and fluttered about her with chirping cries of welcome. They caught hold of her cloak with tiny hands that clung like brambles, and pulled her out into the moonlight. She went with them gladly, across the lawn, through the tangle of hollyhocks and guelder-rose at the bottom of the garden, and, opening the little door in the wall, danced out through the orchard and down to the river meadow beyond.
The sheep-nibbled turf was like cold, wet velvet beneath her feet, but the air was warm and full of the scent of honeysuckle; and clear over the tree-tops rode the great, round, midsummer moon, flooding the world with light. Perdita had never noticed before how much of gold there is in summer moon shine; not silver at all, really, but a wonderful pale silvery gold, like the colour of evening primroses. She would have liked to stand still for a moment and look at it; but the Pharisees were all round her, tugging at her cloak, her night-rail, and even at her hair, and she had to hurry on across the meadow and through the coppice where the wild cherry-trees grew. Then she was climbing the Broomhill, half running, her heart thudding with excitement, the Good Folk whirling round her.
The Broomhill was steep; great patches of gorse taller than a man grew on it, so that often she had to turn out of her way, and when she reached the top she was quite out of breath. But there was the Grey Maiden standing up all a-shimmer in the moonlight, as though waiting for her.
The Pharisees cried with great excitement, “See! Here she is, the Grey Maiden! Put your hands on either side of her, and wait while your heart beats seven times. Then say, ‘Oh, Grey Maiden, hearken to a maiden’s wish’; and whatever you wish for, it shall come to pass within a twelve-month and a day.”
Like a thousand tiny brambles caught in her garments and hair, they urged her forward, right up to the Grey Maiden. “Now!” they cried, “now! Do it as we told you!”
“Yes, yes,” said Perdita, and she put her hands on either side of the Grey Maiden.
The granite was cold against her fingers, and suddenly everything was very quiet; the Pharisees had ceased their whirling flight and settled on every twig of the thorn-tree above her, where their eyes shone like stars tangled among the thorns. Far, far to the west, the moonlight sparkled on the waters of Bideford Bay, with its wide, curved fringe of incoming Atlantic rollers, and Lundy floating like a dark shadow far out on the skyline. Far, far below, the world lay quiet in the moonshine, black woods and misty fields, and huddled cottages where people would be going to bed by the friendly glow of rushlights; but up on the crest of the Broomhill there was just the Grey Maiden, and the moon, and the Pharisees.
Perdita’s heart beat one, two, three, four: there was magic in the tall stone; she could feel like pins and needles, against her finger-tips, and her heart beat five, six, very quickly. The stone seemed to stir, like a real maiden awaking. Perdita’s heart beat seven, right up in her throat, but she never doubted what she was going to wish for. She said, “Oh, Grey Maiden, hearken to a maiden’s wish. I wish to see the Queen Elizabeth. I wish to see her so close I could put out my hand and touch her.”
Then the Pharisees were whirling round her like moths round a candle-flame, and she turned about and saw through the fluttering cloud of wings a tiny square of smoky saffron far below her, that she knew was the parlour window at home. And she began to run towards it, with her hair and her cloak blowing out behind her, and the Pharisees whirling closer and closer round her until she was dazzled and made giddy by the flicker of their wings.
Perdita never remembered getting home, but suddenly she was lying in her own little bed, with the moon shining in through the window, and her mother and father talking quietly in the next room while they got ready for bed.
Some people would say it was all a dream, but when Perdita came to get up on midsummer morning, something pricked between her toes; and when she looked to see what it was, she found a furze-prickle stuck there!
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Thank you for generously sharing this gem, and with insightful notes, too! ♥
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I've been thinking of posting sample chapters from four of her books I have that seem to be nigh-permanently out of print – this one, Houses and History, Heroes and History, and We Lived in Drumfyvie – if that's cool with you. Is there a tag I should use for that?
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We haven't had anything like it, so we'd need another tag.
We could have resources: about sutcliff (we'd had an 'about Rome' tag...) and/or resources: sutcliff out-of-print? Or something else? You decide!
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Those tags will work, thanks! I should go back and tag those essays I posted last year as well.
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