“She had no priest, after all,” said Frances under her breath to Isoult, the same evening.
Lady Ashley added very softly, “She said we should find her asleep, if all went well. We found her asleep. Is it an omen that all did go well?”
Isoult could make no answer.
Where Honor Plantagenet was buried, no record remains to tell us, unless it be some early entry in a parish register of Cornwall or Devon. It might be in the family burying-place of her own kindred, the Grenvilles of Stow; or it might be with her first husband, Sir John Basset, at Umberleigh. Only it may be asserted without fear of contradiction, that it was not with the royal lord whom she had so bitterly lamented, and whose coffin lay, with many another as illustrious as his own, in the old Norman Chapel of the Tower. No stranger admixture can there be on earth, than among those coffins crowding that Norman Chapel,—from traitors of the blackest dye, up to saints and martyrs.
The first news which the Averys heard after their return home, was not encouraging to that religious party to which they belonged. Bishop Gardiner had been set free, and had gone back to his Palace at Farnham, Mr James Basset accompanying him. This was an evil augury; for wherever Gardiner was, there was mischief. But it soon appeared that Somerset kept his eye upon the wolf, and on his first renewed attempt upon the fold, he was quietly placed again in durance. Meanwhile the leaven of reformation was working slowly and surely. On Candlemas Day there were no candles in the Chapel Royal; no ashes on Ash Wednesday; no palms on Palm Sunday. At Paul’s Cross, after eight years’ silence, the earnest voice of Hugh Latimer was heard ringing: and to its sound flocked such a concourse, that the space round the Cross could not hold them, and a pulpit was set up in the King’s garden at Westminster Palace, where four times the number of those at the Cross might assemble. For eight years there had been “a famine of the word of the Lord” in England, and now men and women came hungering and ready to be fed. Perhaps, if we had borne eight years’ famine, we should not quite so readily cry out that the provisions are too abundant. An outcry for short sermons has always hitherto marked the spiritual decadence of a nation. “Behold, what a weariness is it!” There is another inscription on the reverse side of the seal. “I have no pleasure in you, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
The English service began with the following Easter. Confession—not yet abolished, yet so far relaxed as to be required of none who preferred to omit it—was made in English, and the Lord’s Supper was also celebrated in English at the King’s Chapel.
Isoult Avery began to think that she was to spend the year 1548 in visiting. She had not been long back from Crowe, when a letter reached her from her own home at Wynscote, inviting her to the wedding of her brother Hugh with Mrs Alice Wikes, which was to take place on the fourteenth of May. Jennifer Trevor shook her head in her most ominous style at the date. But Hugh, though a sailor, was nevertheless not at all superstitious, so far as concerned the point in question; and he had already sturdily declined to change the date selected by Alice, though half the gossips round Wynscote prophesied all manner of consequent evil. For a maiden of the sixteenth century, Alice also was remarkably free from the believing in omens and the observing of times: so Hugh and she were married on the fourteenth of May, and Isoult Avery was never able to discover that any harm had come of it.
On arrival at Wynscote, they found the house full and running over. Not only the family who ordinarily occupied it were there—namely, Mrs Barry, the widowed mother; Henry Barry, the head of the house, who was by calling a gentleman farmer, and by inclination the gentleman without the farmer; his wife Margaret, who would have made a better farmer than himself; and his three exceedingly noisy and mischievous boys, by name Michael, William, and Henry. But these, as I have said, were not by any means all. There was the bridegroom Hugh, who grumbled good-humouredly at being banished to Farmer Northcote’s for the night, for there was no room for him except in the day-time; there was Bessy Dennis, the eldest sister, and John Dennis her husband, and William, Nicholas, Anne, and Ellen, their children. No wonder that Isoult told her husband in confidence that she did not expect to lose her headache till she reached home. Will Barry was the incarnation of mischief, and Will Dennis, his cousin and namesake, followed him like his shadow. The discipline which ensued was of doubtful character, for Bessy’s two notions on the subject of rearing children were embodied in cakes or slaps, as they were respectively deserved, or rather, as she thought they were: while Mr Barry’s ideas of education lay in very oracular exhortations, stuffed with words of as many syllables as he had the good fortune to discover. His wife’s views were hardly better. Her interference consisted only in the invariable repetition of a formula—“Come, now, be good lads, do!”—which certainly did not err on the side of severity. But the grandmother, if possible, made matters worse. She had brought up her own children in abject terror and unanswering submission; and Nature, as usual, revenged herself by causing her never to cross the wills of her grandchildren on any consideration. Accordingly, when Will set fire to the barn, let the pony into the bean-field, and the cows into Farmer Northcote’s meadow, Grandmother only observed quietly that “Boys will be boys”—an assertion which certainly could not be contradicted—and went on spinning as before.
The amazement of Isoult Avery—who had not previously visited home for some time—was intense. Her childhood had been a scene of obedience, both active and passive; a birch-rod had hung behind the front door, and nobody had ever known Anne Barry hesitate to whip a child, if there were the slightest chance that he or she deserved it: the “benefit of the doubt” being commonly given on the side of the birch-rod. And now, to see these boys—wild men of the woods as they were—rush unreproached up to the inaccessible side of Grandmother, lay violent hands upon her inviolable hood, kiss her as if they were thinking of eating her, and never meet with any worse penalty than a fig-cake (the Devonshire name for a plum-cake)—this was the source of endless astonishment and reflection to Isoult. On the whole, she congratulated herself that she had left Kate and Walter at Bradmond.
The bride was a stranger to Isoult. She talked to Bessy about her, and found that lady rather looked down upon her. “She was all very well, but—”