Hallingbury
by
Bryan McNerney
The ruins of Hallingbury Hall was the only place they had ever been able to be alone together.
They would meet secretly there, but only on those nights when the moon was at the full and when all those who might have prevented them were safely abed. In the summer months they would play at hazard to continue seeing one another even when the moon waxed or waned slowly, for it was then, in those all-too-short nights with their longed-for warmth, that their lovemaking was at its sweetest and most languid, like the slowly coming fruitfulness of the surrounding valleys.
He loosened what little grip he had on the reins and eased his horse to a walk, letting it find its own way through the scattered rubble of the fallen arch and into the courtyard beyond. His horse made little or no noise but from the deep funereal shadow beneath the huge coffin-elms that had once framed the gate her horse whickered at his approach.
He saw the mare straining against her reins for the treat he always had for her. Tonight though he had been forced to come empty handed. With nothing to give her he reached out to stroke her muzzle. She turned sharply away from him to the full length of her reins champing noisily and reproachfully on her bit. He shrugged, smiling to himself at how oftentimes like her mistress the mare could be. He tied his stallion to a large dead branch that’d fallen from the tree earlier that summer. It’d dislodged the coping stones of the wall and he wondered how many winters it would be before the wind-driven rain would force small wedges of ice into the mortar and tumble it all to the ground, course by course, undoing what its builder once thought would stand forever.
Walking quickly across the inner courtyard, he was a ghostly, momentary flickering between the chequered flushwork of pewter moonlight and the bible-black shadow of the building. The brightness fell across the empty west wing, and although the east wing had long-ago collapsed the moonlight ached outwards to that empty space where it had once etched the unblemished glass and marble with silver… just as she had once used her diamond ring to etch and entwine their initials on one of the tiny leaded panes in a window that looked down into the courtyard; a window near to where they had first made love along the narrow stone bench of a wide and rounded Oriel window.
Once, upon many a morning, and not so long since, in the dark grey, dismal hour before dawn the courtyard had echoed with the shouting, clattering, baying excitement of the Royal Hunt as it readied itself for the day’s hunting across the Rockingham Forest. Now, with the fighting all but finished, all but a few of that bright-eyed, noisy throng lay silent beneath unfamiliar and far-flung fields. Here, where each of them had, all unknowing, left a faint and distant echo of themselves the gently swollen mounds of rabbit-cropped turf were silently taking the courtyard’s limestone cobbles back down into the earth.
He strode past the massive, iron-bound but long-open doors of the long-abandoned Great Hall. He neither saw nor heard the growing family of yellow-throated field-mice that were nesting deep in the draw-bar socket of the wall. They neither saw nor heard him - but they suddenly left-off feasting on their hard-won hazelnuts, their huge luminescent, fear-filled, eyes searching for something they could not see but which they sensed was still near.
He hurried on knowing where she would be waiting, where they always waited for one another.
They had known each other all of their lives. He had been glad for her at her wedding; a good match that would repair her family’s fortunes and give her a great house to run. Her new husband paid her much attention throughout that day and there had seemed some hope for her happiness. Only when her old friend saw her sit down to dinner in the candlelight of that late autumn afternoon did he truly see for the first time the woman the girl had become. From that moment on he was bereft at his own loss and thus, lost to all others.
In the years that followed, her husband had risen high at Court. The courtier soon concluded that he might rise higher still unencumbered by a beautiful but embarrassingly plain-spoken wife. He quietly set her aside from him, abandoned her in her quietly acquiescent sadness. In that new-found loneliness she had returned to former comforts. Too young to see the danger she neither sought nor hoped for anything beyond old friendship renewed. One summer’s morn she rode with her maid to Hallingbury to sketch the coats of arms in the plasterwork ceilings of the Great Presence Chamber. Her old friend had chanced to meet them in the parkland and fell-in with them. The maid, long fond of her mistress and saddened by her loneliness, found reason to go back to the horses for a time upon some suddenly needful but wholly imagined errand. When she finally returned it was obvious that more than words had passed between the two young people. The following night was the first full moon of the summer of 1642.
They knew they betrayed her marriage bed each time they rode to Hallingbury but it was a betrayal forced upon them by the circumstance of her position and his poverty. In an age when few married for love, nor expected to find it, love had slipped unlooked for into their lives. They embraced it with all their broken heartedness though it made a wasteland of their world. Now there could be no joy except in one another and no hope of being together beyond the echoing emptiness of Hallingbury.
The house had been a ruin for twenty years - since each of them had been bound in swaddling cloths. Her grandfather had all but bankrupted her family to build it. A pitch-perfect, Italianate palace, the epitome of conspicuous consumption, conjured incongruously from the small, gently rolling Northamptonshire farmland. It was a huge house whose sole function was to be so exquisitely alluring as to catch the eye of the Sovereign and persuade her to grace its owner with a visit during one of Her Majesty’s royal summer progresses across her realm. Its construction was the all-but obligatory act of the successful courtier, a prodigious expenditure that underscored a family’s loyalty to the crown.
A Royal Visit betokened Royal Favour. It demanded phenomenal expenditure but it promised phenomenal riches… the spring from which great men could slake their thirst for greater wealth and power. Her grandfather had built his dreams as carefully as he’d built Hallingbury itself and both stood waiting for their royal guest for twenty-three years. Queen Elizabeth never came. She rightly judged this courtier to be already too powerful, too ambitious…. so she humbled him. He had rolled a gambler’s throw and failed. Elizabeth won and Hallingbury’s owner was ruined.
In a last irony, when both players were gone to dust, Elizabeth’s successor stumbled upon Hallingbury and became enchanted by its sugar-spun confection of balconies and pinnacles, pergolas and arches. He fled London for its quiet charm whenever opportunity offered. An obsessive huntsman who ever preferred the excitement of the chase to the tedium of the council chamber James I blithely treated Hallingbury as a magnificently appointed hunting lodge in the midst of the royal hunting preserve of the Rockingham Forest. But by then her family had fallen too hard and too far to be able to turn it to their advantage.
When her father inherited he returned from whence they’d come and lived quiet and small in the old manor house his father had long-ago abandoned. He had to sell two thirds of the land and all of Hallingbury simply to remain solvent. He laid his father and his father’s dreams to rest and took a certain, secret, pleasure placing them both beneath his mother’s simple, sparsely adorned and all but impoverished tomb.
At Hallingbury the vast acreage of leaded roofs were sold to one Williams, a wealthy pewterer. He had them stripped away, melted down and turned to ingots – each and all of them destined for the cherry-wood moulds of his manufactory in Birmingham. He used the lesser timbers of purlins and common rafters, even doors and wainscoting, to feed the smelting fires. When that work was done his sons had supervised the sawing out of the greater timbers which were re-sold on site and carted away by lesser men content to build smaller dreams.
The parti-coloured, Italian marble that had cleverly hidden the dull grey, work-a-day Northamptonshire limestone had been snapped-up by dealers from London. They’d avariciously eyed the hundreds of Classical statues that’d once been so carefully collected across the length and breadth of Europe but these had already been even more carefully acquired by royal agents to grace the galleries of the new King’s palace at Whitehall. For twenty years the winter storms slowly scoured, their empty scalloped niches and the tiered and carved pedestals that had been especially wrought for those statues had stood forlorn and abandoned. Now in these latter days the very statues themselves also stood forlorn and abandoned– the private galleries had been shut-up by order of the Parliament after King Charles had been driven from his palace at Whitehall. Driven out by rebel subjects who thought him too powerful, too ambitious and his rarefied taste in foreign art too Popish, too autocratic.
War came into England that summer with all the inevitability of Death. A war men pretended not to want - though both sides had earnestly sought it and young men embraced it like a wanton mid-summer night. Her husband had raised his ‘companie of blewcotes’ from his tenants and labourers and led them to the King at Oxford. At supper on the night before ‘his going to the warres’ her husband had been quietly contemptuous of the tears in her eyes as she played for him and his officers at supper. He thought her a foolish, green girl to be so public with such a private emotion.
She sang the song that had been upon everybody’s lips for several years but which had never possessed such poignancy until that fate-filled first summer of the war.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may for Time He is a’ flying
And that same flower that blooms today, tomorrow will be dying.”
But it was not her husband whom she sang for that night… she sang for her beloved, seated so far down the table that she could scarcely see him through the tears that she wept for him and for herself.
Not once in the three years of fighting, nor when the regiment returned to winter quarters, nor even the precious snatched moments they’d contrived when he’d been unexpectedly sent home to the estate with despatches, not once had either of them ever spoke of or prayed for her husband’s death. Each believed that to give voice to that desire would be to betray one another. Though they knew it was sinful, oftentimes each longed for it in the silence of their hearts with all the desire with which they longed each for the other. But, afterwards, in the silence of their hearts they guiltily prayed for forgiveness. Neither knew that God does not much heed the spoken prayer, that, rather, He is a searcher of hearts and that sometimes He answers the prayers He finds discarded there.
No more than a long-day’s ride from Hallingbury, on the gentle, scarcely noticeable slope of Naseby Field, with the wreckage of King Charles’ last hopes in red ruin all about him, her husband was cut down with the remainder of Prince Rupert’s Blewcotes as they tried desperately, despairingly, to halt the collapse of the King’s centre. In the rout that followed her sweetheart had been knocked aside by a Royalist trooper who rode loose rein and bloody spur with two of Cromwell’s Ironsides after him. He lay for a long time, his face pressed close to the dark earth, drinking in the sweet scent of the trampled grass, mercifully stronger than the sweeter smell of spilt blood. When he felt steady enough to regain his feet he unwrapped the scarlet silk scarf that identified him as a King's man, threw down his helmet with the bunch of oak leaves he’d tied there for a field sign only five hours since, bowed his head and led his horse away through the hopeless, pointless wreckage.
He had done his duty beside a man he neither loved nor respected and now by the careless fortune of a war he hated he would be free to be with her for the rest of his life. He walked near to some rebels who were rifling a baggage waggon, he feared they would take him prisoner, but intent on their reward and with the fighting over none challenged him though he stumbled by within sword reach of his erstwhile enemies. One looked at him, a silk shirt grasped in his gauntleted hand, his brown, dry-blooded sword hanging loosely from his other wrist, all recent passion already drained from his unseeing eyes - the trooper let him pass as if he was not there.
Later that night, sometime before the grey cobwebs of dawn appeared in the eastern sky he was drinking from a small brook when he noticed the almost full moon rippling in the black water. He knew she would be at Hallingbury, waiting. He climbed wearily back into the saddle and turned for home, kicking his tired horse to the gentlest of trots. He saw not a soul throughout that long, sunlit summer's day, the harvest growing in the field as strongly as his desire grew in his heart, and nobody saw him go by.
And so it was that the next night he moved easily up the broad dark staircase, his hand familiarly shaping itself around the rolled fillet of rubbed and moulded stone that had been deeply cut into the walls as a bannister. It swept gently in great curves above the broad darkling staircase guiding him safely upwards.
He stepped quietly into the long gallery. She did not hear him so he stood for long, loving moments and watched her. She stood tracing her fingers upon their entwined initials in the glass she had cut with her diamond ring. Her riding hood was thrown back from her face and in the moon-light he could see her smiling wistfully at some far-off memory of the all-too brief moments they had shared in this place. He called out to her, finally able to shout out her name, a name that until now he had only ever whispered. She turned towards him as he shouted again, the ringlets of her auburn hair dancing about her moonlit face and throat. Suddenly he was sobbing with joy and blinking away the tears that flooded into his eyes – tears which had been three years in the coming. Unable to move he called her name again as she ran towards his outstretched arms.
A small, gentle hand nervously touched his shoulder. He spun about in surprise. Her young maid stood there, her face aged and withered with tears. He turned back, stepping towards the window but there was no-one there, none in that long, silvered hall save him and her maid-servant and the deep, endless shadows between the shining windows. He collapsed to his knees as the voice behind him brought all his dreams down to dark ruin.
“Oh, Sir, she loved you so much. She fought so hard to stay, she fought so hard to cling to their lives. Near to the end, she begged me to find you - tell you that it was your baby… that she longed for you, ached for you to hold them both in your arms… and that she was so sorry, so very sorry. She loved you so much!”
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