And thus it now happened with the younger son of Sir Mort Abyssum. Mother Guggery, having assumed by her lady’s look that more was in the air than she could cope with just then, came bolt out with the message from the kitchen, and, as she turned to go, her eyes fell on that last year’s alder-leaf lying on the floor. With the end of her ebony stick the old woman endeavoured, by obstinately poking at it, to get the leaf near enough to her feet to be able to stoop and pick it up. This whole picture, the ebony stick, the thin bent back, the patient motionless leaf, was enough, when taken in at a glance, to cause young John to rush forward and snatch up the leaf himself.
And then, all in a second, an airy connection struck him between this whole small event and the teaching of Friar Bacon, who had always instructed him to save such vegetable waifs from bonfires, and to cast them, loose and free, as near their birthplace as possible. So into the young man’s most intimate pocket went this lucky leaf to be disposed of later.
XII THE HERESY HUNT
It was more than a surprise to the simpler dwellers in that portion of Wessex dominated by the traditional Manors of Roque and of Cone, and perpetually being interfered with by the unprecedented and incalculable domain of Lost Towers, when the holy, the thrice-blessed, the miraculously learned representative of the Holy Father himself in Rome, Bonaventura, the most famous of all Franciscans since Saint Francis, began, in that early spring of the year of grace 1272, searching the district for heretics and unbelievers, and using as his band of retainers nothing less than a regular cohort of brown-vested bandits from the swamps of Lost Towers.
And this singular heresy-hunt, led by a reputed saint commanding a body-guard of reputed devils, was an incredible event even to the good-natured Baron of Cone himself, whom it disturbed not a little. He finally made up his mind to accept it at its face-value; but since his youth, when serving under King Henry at the battle of Lewes, he had beheld the triumph of Simon de Montfort, he had never had such a spiritual shock.
When in the course of chronicling these events we seek to understand this shock, we are driven to conclude that it came from a certain inherent simplicity in Baron Boncor’s nature, which instinctively accepted without question all those natural assumptions about good and evil, which like the biblical “charity” are only too apt to “cover a multitude of sins.”
In spite of the rapid healing of the serious hurt he had received from the arrow, shot at him by Baron Maldung, he felt convinced that it would be a case of taking the side of the Devil against God if he gave any aid, shelter, refreshment, hospitality, information, comfort, encouragement or welcome to Bonaventura and his brown-jerkin’d band.
It was quite another thing with Lady Ulanda, Baron Boncor’s wife. Lady Ulanda had recently abandoned herself to a savage campaign against Friar Bacon and all his works. Ulanda was anything but a religious lady. Her whole nature was practical. She was in the fullest sense a woman of action. She was suspicious of all thought, of all art, of all mental analysis. She wasn’t a vicious woman, but she was what is called a possessive woman, to a degree that was a danger to everybody round her and especially to the object of this possessiveness.
The object of it in this case was no child in her domestic world and no lover in the world outside. It was simply and solely her husband. And it was because of several very curious reasons, some physical, some mental, and some the result of occurrences in the early days of her marriage, that this dominant element in her nature had never from the beginning asserted itself in any perceptible degree in regard to her son. Her attitude to young Sir William was more like that of an affectionate aunt than a mother. She doted on him as a fanciful old maid might dote on a favourite pet; and it was a real blow to her when destiny brought it about that she was compelled to witness, day by day, the rapidly growing love-affair between her husband’s friend and cousin, Raymond de Laon, and the daughter of Lady Val of the Fortress.
Ulanda’s almost frantic hostility to Friar Bacon was intimately connected with Baron Boncor’s affection for his relative Raymond. It had been pain and poison to her from the start — the interest Baron Boncor took in Raymond. She had hated his coming to be an inmate of their castle from the very first, but Boncor was so set upon it that, without a greater quarrel than she dared to embark on, she had to accept it.
At the bottom of it was her simple recognition that her husband’s regard for Raymond de Laon was not unconnected with the young man’s exceptional good looks and the magnetic charm of his whole personality. She knew only too well that she herself, though full of an intense vitality and always able to carry off with dignity the proud assumptions of high-born authority, was grotesquely lacking in that sort of tender and appealing physical beauty which wins favour wherever it goes.
Like many another high-spirited and passionate lady, Ulanda of Cone felt such an intense longing to be as beautiful in reality as she was beautiful in her inner ideal of herself, that she had actually visited Friar Bacon in that upper chamber in the Priory where he was virtually a prisoner, and made a direct personal face-to-face appeal to him to help her, by means of those mysterious arts in which she understood he was such a master, to acquire, without any drastic change in her appearance, that particular magnetic charm by which the most formidable of men can be seduced and captivated by a woman.
As any of the serious disciples and pupils of the scientific Friar could have warned her, this shameless and unblushing assumption that he was some kind of a sex-wizard annoyed Roger Bacon so much that he refused point-blank to have anything to do with her; and Lady Ulanda came down the stone staircase from the Friar’s chamber resolved to have the most deadly revenge she could bring about on a man who refused so rudely — and he a sort of half-condemned heretic too — a natural and perfectly lawful request from a lady of her importance in that western district of the kingdom.
Lady Ulanda was not particularly fussy or punctilious in what might be called the heraldic or antiquarian aspects of the Barony of Cone. In fact she was a good deal less primed in such matters than were most of her contemporary ladies of title. She herself came of an old yeoman family called Dunderog entirely independent of any baronial manor, but claiming direct descent from Ralph Rorsuk, the predatory nephew of King Stephen.
When not fishing or hunting or fighting or riding between his arable-fields and his pasture-fields, or surveying his forestry, Baron Boncor was in the habit of spending his time in a spacious chamber at the top of a small round tower above the south-west ramparts of the Castle. This chamber ever since his grandfather once, on a pilgrimage to Rome, purchased some illuminated scrolls, and obtained in the same city the aid of a famous book-binder to cover them with specially prepared skins, had come to be known as the Library.
Boncor’s grandfather had fastened with golden-headed nails upon an enormous oak table opposite the hearth in this room a great number of large pictorial maps of the world, adapted to the comprehension of unclassical and unscholarly persons by the appearance at certain crucial points, on both land and sea, of various land-monsters and sea-monsters, and also of various voyagers, these latter enlarged in size so as to indicate by their dresses, arms, and banners, whether they came from Christian or Heathen countries, while the ships that carried them were reduced in size in comparison with the men — and women too sometimes — whom they carried, as if to compel recognition that a Power and a Mystery, that is at once half-human and half-divine, is ruling and will always rule the Air, the Earth, the Water and the Fire.