“Hast thou so learned, daughter?”
“Well, not much,” said I. “A little, now and then, maybe.”
“I never learned much,” saith he, “from the blunders of any man save Philip de Edyngdon. What I learned from other folks’ evil deeds was mostly to despise and be angered with them—not to beware for myself. And that lore cometh not of God. Thou mayest learn from such things set down in Holy Writ: but verily it takes God to pen them, so that we may indeed profit and not scorn,—that we may win and not lose. Be sure that whenever God puts in thine hand a golden coin of His realm, with the King’s image stamped fair thereon, Satan is near at hand, with a gold-washed copper counterfeit stamped with his image, and made so like that thou hast need to look close, to make sure which is the true. ‘Hold not all gold that shineth’—a wise saw, my daughter, whether it be a thing heavenly or earthly.”
“I will endeavour myself to profit by your good counsel, Father,” said I. “But mine husband bade me write this chronicle, though, sooth to say, I had no list thereto. And if I shall leave to deal with he and she, how then may my chronicle be writ?”
“Write thy chronicle, my daughter,” he answered. “But write it as God hath writ His Chronicles. Set down that which men did, that which thou sawest and heardest. Beware only of digging into men’s purposes where thou knewest them not, and sawest but the half thereof. And it is rarely possible for men to see the whole of that which passeth in their own day. Beware of setting down a man as all evil for one evil thing thou mayest see him to do. We see them we live amongst something too close to judge them truly. And beware, most of all, of imagining that thou canst get behind God’s purposes, and lay bare all His reasons. Verily, the wisest saint on earth cannot reach to the thousandth part thereof. God can be fully understood, only of God.”
I have set down these wise words of good Father Philip, for though they be too high and wide for mine understanding, maybe some that shall read my chronicle may have better brains than she that writ.
So now once again to my chronicling, and let me endeavour to do the same as Father Philip bade me.
It was on the eve of Saint Michael, 1325, that the Queen and her meynie (I being of them) reached Paris. We were ferried over the Seine to the gate of Nully (Note 1), and thence we clattered over the stones to the Hotel de Saint Pol (Note 2), where the Queen was lodged in the easternmost tower, next to our Lady Church, and we her meynie above. Dame Isabel de Lapyoun and I were appointed to lie in the pallet by turns. The Queen’s bedchamber was hung with red sindon, broidered in the border with golden swans, and her cabinet with blue say, powdered with lily-flowers in gold, which is the arms of France, as every man knoweth, seeing they are borne by our King that now is, in right of this same Queen Isabel his mother. He, that was then my Lord of Chester, was also of the cortege, having sailed from Dover two days before Holy Cross (Note 3), and joined the Queen in Guienne; but the Queen went over in March, and was all that time in Guienne.
Dear heart! but Jack—which loveth to be square and precise in his matters—should say this were strange fashion wherein to write chronicles, to date first September and then the March afore it! I had better go back a bit.
It was, then, the 9th of March the Queen crossed from Dover to Whitsand, which the French call Guissant. She dwelt first, as I said, in Guienne, for all that summer; very quiet and peaceful were we, letters going to and fro betwixt our Queen and her lord, and likewise betwixt her and the King of France; but no visitors (without there were one that evening Dame Isabel lay in the pallet in my stead, and was so late up, and passed by the antechamber door with her shoes in her hands, as little Meliora the sub-damsel would have it she saw by the keyhole): and we might nearhand as well have been in nunnery for all the folks we saw that were not of the house. Verily, I grew sick irked (wearied, distressed) of the calm, that was like a dead calm at sea, when ships lie to, and can win neither forward nor backward. Ah, foolish Cicely! thou hadst better have given thanks for the last peace thou wert to see for many a year.