The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

The Black Prince and Richard the Second are mentioned as owners, if not occupiers, and it is said that King Richard exchanged it with the Duke of Brittany for the castle of Brest. In the spacious days of great Elizabeth it was the Dukes of Norfolk who were in possession, off and on. Since then it has seemed to belong to Howards—sometimes one branch, sometimes another—and it belongs to Howards now. What volumes of history are written between the lines of this brief pedigree!

I went over the bridge and through the Norman gatehouse. I looked about at the magnificence within, crossed the greensward and turned the corner to the entrance door. I walked in and up the great staircase of stone to the splendid archway under which the dead people passed to their great hall, now roofless and ruined. I surveyed the vaulted stone room with the Norman windows that was once its vestibule (and at the last a caretaker's lodging); opened a little door in a corner which disclosed a stony shaft round which a stony newel stairway corkscrewed up and up to narrow stony passages and chambers and long arcaded galleries tunnelled in the thickness of the walls—the steps so worn away by the many centuries of use that one could not keep foothold on them without the hand-rope on the wall, the dimensions so circumscribed that one thought of the burrows in the Egyptian Pyramids. Then I considered that further exploration would impair the pleasure of an extended rummage at leisure in the afternoon; also that luncheon would now be ready. And I returned through the village to the Black Horse.

Looking about I found the salle-à-manger, chill, and empty of life. A long table was set for a meal, but was still without food and without company. Further investigation brought me to a garden beside the house where stood a few small tables, at one of which two ladies—mother and daughter who had shared the box seat of the drag with me—were taking a light luncheon in peace and privacy. They were having eggs and salad and bread-and-butter and tea, with green grass under their feet and the sweet air and sunshine round them; and at once I perceived that this was the sort of thing, and not the table d'hôte, for me. I took a table at a distance from them, but, no waitress forthcoming, I went across to ask them how they had obtained their provisions, which resulted in our joining forces and having a pleasant meal together. No one else came to the garden, except the maid who served us, and we chatted together as do callers at the same house on an At Home day, finding themselves isolated for the moment on contiguous chairs. One thing leading to another, it transpired that the young lady, who wore fine diamonds on her engagement finger, was going to be married in five weeks. A chance allusion to my own circumstances evoked the further information that her intended husband was a Melbourne man! That is to say, Melbourne was his birthplace and the place of business of his firm for which he acted as London manager. They mentioned his name and I knew it well. I see it in large letters on a factory wall every time I pass over the railway between the city and my home, and now I never see it without thinking of her. By this time if all went right she will have been married a long time. I hope she is well and happy.

I resumed my explorations of the castle, where I had several chance encounters with my friends of the inn garden on break-neck stairs and in stony corridors where there was scarce space for us to pass each other, while still wandering in the solitude I desired, companioned only by my thoughts. It was a memorable afternoon. I had never before been in such close touch with the people of the past, makers of the History of England which is the lay bible of the British race. The very chambers they slept in and where they were born and died; the same floors and walls and stone-ribbed ceilings, the same outlook from the same windows and loopholes over heath and marsh to distant sea and the dim line of the coast of Lincolnshire; the Chapel of their penances and dispensations, where they dedicated the swords of slaughter; the Hall where they brawled and feasted, the dark holes at blind ends of the stony labyrinth, which silently witnessed to unthinkable dark deeds. If I had been better acquainted with old castles than I was, I might have been less impressed by these things and the reflections they evoked. As it was, the whole place seemed so thronged with ghosts that I felt as if I had not room to move amongst them.

And yet I learned from a little talk with those who knew, that a caretaker—a lady "custodian," moreover—had kept house and home in the very middle of it all, up to a quite recent date. How could she? Her bedroom was the "Queen's Room" where Isabella herself had slept (next door to her "Confession Room"); another that she used was the "Priest's Chamber," up at the top of that slant-stepped newel stairway. The room at the top of the great main staircase, with the three Norman windows and the great dog-toothed Norman archway that once gave entrance to the hall, was her sitting-room. The evidences were there—archway bricked up, and a little iron stove (how little it did look, to be sure, in more ways than one) set against the bricks; windows glazed, boards (I think) laid down over the flagged floor. I tried to fancy how the lady custodian had furnished it—to picture her sitting at her book or needlework under that mighty overmantel above the hearth! I had not then seen the quarters of the chaplain of Malling Abbey, and how charmingly ancient and modern can be made to blend in the composition of a home by a person of intelligence, means and taste. Yet the gatehouse at Malling, apart from the chaplain's "treatment" of it, is snug and cosy indeed compared with this. I could live there delightfully myself. But here——! From kitchen to parlour, from parlour to bedroom the lady custodian had to make pilgrimages through ruins open to the sky and up stairways and along tunnel-passages such as one shuddered to think of in connection with dark nights. Imagine the wind rising after you have gone to bed, sighing and sobbing like ghosts of tortured captives come back to the scene of their Mediæval woes, whistling through the loopholes like the arrows of a besieging army. Think of hearing an owl hoot in the desolate great hall—the creepings and scratchings of things alive that you cannot account for—the deadly silence in between, that feels like the silence of a tiger watching you and crouched to spring!

I was not surprised to learn that the last woman to defy the associations of the place had found them too much for her, and that since her time the caretaker had lodged outside the castle instead of in. Her husband had died in that room of the bricked-up arch and the little iron stove, and what she went through in the nights of his last illness, when she had to sit up to watch him, and on the night when she was left with his coffined corpse for company, nearly drove her out of her mind. So I was told, and I quite believed it.

I came down at last from the wonderful place, having still time before me in which to explore the village. Mrs B. had warned me not to neglect this duty.

It is a beautiful village. As one saw "The King" written all over West Newton, Dersingham, Wolferton, every acre within a radius of miles from the royal seat, so here the impress of "The Howards" was plain upon Rising from end to end. The home of the family is in it; of course, withdrawn from the gaze of trippers. I passed its guardian walls and spoke to a gardener who came through a high gate, wheeling his barrowful of stuff from the grounds within. I think he said that his lady was in residence. I strolled on to the village green to look at an ancient cross which Mrs B. had mentioned as an important feature. So it is—a very interesting example of the wayside shrine. I could find no special story attached to it, but one felt sure that it commemorated "The Howards" in some way. The rectory near by—a home of dignified leisure, also withdrawn from the gaze of trippers—is in their gift. The church is full of memorials of them. If I know little of castles I know much of the churches of my native country, and how remarkable they are. This one must be ranked with the ecclesiastical gems of Norfolk, which is so rich in them—although I found that it had been very thoroughly "restored," which generally means in some points altered from the original plan, within late years. By the way, Mrs B. has a valuable collection of the etchings of John Sells Cotman, whose work is, for architects and antiquaries, an authority on Norfolk churches and cathedrals, abbeys and castles, as they were a century ago; and I am not sure, but I think that one of them shows the square tower of Rising church without the singular roof which now covers it. However, it is a beautiful building, plainly Norman throughout; with all its richness of ornamentation, massively simple and sincere, worthy to stand beside its great neighbour, which has defied the chances and changes of a thousand years. The hand of the Howards may be seen all over it, inside and out, but they have written only their love and taste, and said as little as possible about their own importance.

Just across the road from the church is another Howard institution of the past, in which I was deeply interested—Trinity Hospital, otherwise the Bede House, otherwise almshouses for decayed females of the working families on the estate. Here the gaze of the tripper is not objected to—is probably welcomed, since an alms-dish stands on the table at which the "Governess" (which I think is the correct title of the lady superintendent) gives you final items of information about the place; the vessel dumbly suggesting a donation from the visitor, to be devoted to the comfort of the old ladies in providing them with such little extra luxuries as they can enjoy. I did not need the hint, and I should think the offerings of visitors ought to almost "keep" the old ladies, who want so little.

It is a charming bit of architecture, and to me it seemed immensely old. I said so to the lady superintendent, and you should have seen her amused smile at my ignorance! "Oh dear, no," she politely corrected me, "this is not old; not more than three or four hundred years at the most." From her way of saying it, you would have supposed it had been jerry-built last week. But she was right; in Rising village, a neighbour of the great castle, an appanage of the Howards, it was a mere mushroom. Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, erected it in the reign of King James the Second.