Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Summer 1446 #2
The rest of the guard are local men, and every day, men and women labourers come to the island to break slate stones from the cliff to hammer into the towering mud walls of the old fortifications.
Once or twice a day at slack tide, if it is calm water, the castle passes the lifeline to the shore and a little flat-bottomed ferry is hauled along it, bringing the labourers, guards, and provisions.
On stormy days, everyone has to wade across.
I suppose that a bigger ship must come from Liverpool every three months, bringing weapons and provisions, goods, and the new guards; but none has come since my imprisonment.
Perhaps a merchant ship sometimes calls with a delivery of wine or luxuries – but nobody in the village could afford them, and as far as I know, I am the only nobility in the castle.
When they impiously turned the cathedral into a fort, they kept a little chapel and the stone tracery of the east window, though all the glass has broken and fallen out.
There are a couple of priests in the fort, and they keep the hours of prayer; their bell has a lower tone than the constant clang of the changing of the guard.
I demand that I be allowed to confess and pray, and Captain Glegg orders them to come to my doorway to listen to my confession through the spyhole.
At first, they tremble with fear, convinced that the devil I raised would stalk them like a black dog down the stairs, but after a few whispered confessions about nothing, I convince them that I have repented of love-magic and done my penance.
I persuade them that I should be allowed to see the celebration of the mass, and this is my first escape from my room.
I am marched under guard across the stony path to the castle and up a short gallery that leads to a squint-hole in a blank wall.
I am allowed to sit here on a stone bench to view the altar.
No one inside the chapel can see me, or even know I am behind the wall, peering through the slanted opening.
I assume this squint hole was made for lepers – to keep them from the congregation.
I am irritated that they think that a woman who has danced with the devil is as noxious as a leper; but at least I have got out of my room for an hour, even though a guard stands behind me and there is a wall of rock before me.
I glimpse Glegg at the front of the congregation and his guard, and some servants behind him and the priests hidden behind the chancel screen.
In the back of the church, standing in a rabble, are the fort guards, the servants, and the villagers who are working on the island today.
There is no choir; there is no chanting.
The chapel – once the Lady Chapel of the cathedral of Peel – is half-ruined.
The mass is celebrated by the priests behind the rood screen, without the congregation taking either bread or wine.
It is a poor fumbled service, and I can’t even hear the blessing.
It is quite without any sense of holiness.
I could refuse to go to mass again, but it earns me a brief walk from my tower to the castle and a glimpse of the walls, the mainland, and other people.
I am starting to long for the sight of other people, even the closed suspicious glares of the guards and the frightened downturned faces of the Manx inhabitants, who are as like to people as their stunted ponies are to horses or their devilish goats to real sheep.
I walk to and from the cathedral shielded from the roaring sea below by an inner wall of blood-red stone.
The ruined cathedral and the main castle are built of the same dark-red rock.
Glegg is housed in the castellan’s tower of the castle, where he can overlook the gateway to the fort, the sea boiling over the underwater causeway, the fishing village upriver, and my prison tower from each of his four arrow-slit windows facing all the points of the compass.
I am reminded, with a pang of homesickness, of the beautiful scholars’ tower and the divining room and the library below, the windows set open for the southerly winds.
I don’t even know if anyone studies there now that Roger Bolingbroke is dead.
Glegg runs the fort as if it were a ship: the watches are the same as for sailors at sea; the guards rotated like a ship’s watch; they ring the bell every half hour, to prove they are always awake.
The men from the town could be the weak link in the guarding of the fort, but they cannot smuggle me out, wading across at low tide or exposed to view on the ferry boat, even if I could bribe them.
The Stanley servants are changed out every quarter day, and punishment for any breach of the castle rules is to stay another three months.
Besides, nobody here thinks I have been misjudged or wrongly accused; nobody here saw me in my great days.
Nobody here thinks well of me, and I cannot get hold of anyone for long enough to change their minds.
I speak only to the woman who serves as my maid, and I make her tell me her name, by telling her that if I don’t know her name, I will have to call her ‘woman’ and that is an insult I don’t want to heap on her.
She tells me her name is Mary, which I don’t believe; but I talk to her when she brings my food or fetches my linen for washing, and I do everything I can to teach her I am a tragic victim of my husband’s ambition.
Some days, she comes in and finds me tearful.
I stand before the cold blast from the narrow window and look out to sea.
I make a little prie-dieu in the corner of my chamber and kneel before it, praying for the king and for justice.
She is either too stupid to care or so superstitious that she believes I am a witch even when I am enacting innocence.
I fail to persuade her; but as the weeks go on, I start to believe my own lies.
It was my husband and Roger Bolingbroke’s ambition that led them into the folly of studying black arts; but what they did was little more than mumming or playacting.
They played at the appearance of sorcery, but the reality of it was far away – locked in the old spells, in the charts, in the chained books.
To draw the king’s horoscope was a treason since it showed his death; but it was an authentic scientific enquiry, and since then, he has commissioned a horoscope from another scholar, so it cannot be an intrinsic crime.
I should have argued that with the clerk of my trial, Adam Moleyns.
There is no logic that one horoscope should be allowed and the other illegal.
And besides, why should I be punished? I didn’t draw the horoscope!
Punishing me proves that everyone knew it was the work of my husband’s scholars, working for him, in the household that I maintained for him.
But the Duke of Gloucester is too great a man to be pulled down by the Beauforts.
They attack me instead of him. The punishment falls on me, though it rightly belongs to him; I am jailed in this cold hell for his crimes.
My only sin has been womanly vanity: I wanted to marry well, like every woman in the world; I wanted to live richly, like every woman in the world.
Nothing that deserves a lifetime imprisonment in a fortress on an island surrounded by dangerous seas.
This is terrible injustice, and I hope to convince the woman Mary that I am a victim of my husband’s ambition and that she should first sympathise with me – and then act for me.
Captain Glegg must at least pity me, and he can speak for me to Lord Stanley, and he can speak to the king.
Glegg comes to visit briefly, once a week.
He looks around my room for any signs of attempts to escape, searches my possessions for any smuggled goods, and asks if I am in good health.
He exam-ines me as he inspects his guard at the castle and the day labourers with cool efficiency.
I ask for things that are easy for him to give: my books, paper for writing, a crucifix for my prie-dieu, a cushion to kneel on.
I ask for them one at a time to teach him the habit of doing things for me, the pleasure of giving things to me, and the reward of my smile.
I ask him for news of the outside world and show him my joy that the king is well and my concern for my husband, who has such a tendency to error and bad company.
Glegg calls him the Duke of Gloucester, but I call him ‘my husband’, and he does not correct me.
I let him understand my sorrow that I was an obedient wife, a puppet – used by men for wrongdoing.
I speak sweetly, loyally, lovingly, and I watch his face for one warm look of understanding or sympathy; but I see nothing.
I tell him I will become ill if he does not let me walk outside.
I am a woman who has travelled across Europe in the service of my country; I cannot be confined to two small rooms. Besides, it is unfair that I should be so confined when my husband – who was Roger Bolingbroke’s patron – rides out freely in England, and when Bolingbroke’s great friend John Somerset is still the king’s tutor.
Glegg says I may walk in the morning after Prime, for an hour every day, accompanied by my maid Mary and by two guards.
I am not to walk around the fort or near the buildings, not to speak to anyone; but I may walk to the seaward end of the island and back again.
I am absurdly pleased by this concession – not that I hope to escape, but just to be out of my room and be seen by people as a great lady, not as a shamed prisoner.
The first day that I come out of my lazaret seat in the chapel and face the great hill opposite, Horse Hill, where the sea god Manannán is said to sleep.