‘It’s all very well, Sir John,’ she said one evening shortly after her return to Corfe Gate. ‘But I’ve really achieved nothing at all. I suppose one’s bound to get a glow of wellbeing from a few small charities but looked at in a broad view they’re meaningless. One or two people are probably better off for not having to scrape and save and find their rent every week but what about all the rest I haven’t been able to do anything for? As long as the Church applies a censorship to certain forms of progress, which is what she does however strenuously the Popes deny it, we shall always be a scrappy little nation living just above the famine line. But what else am I to do?’
They were dining in the sixteenth century hall beside the great keep; she waved a hand at the furnishings, the richly hung walls, and spluttered over a mouthful of food. ‘I can’t pretend,’ she said, ‘that I don’t like this life, and being able to buy horses and dogs when I want and nylons and perfumes, things the ordinary people never get to see let alone afford… You know,’ she added, grinning suddenly, ‘when my poor father sent me off to town I had a fancy to run away and give it all up; just live the simple life, working the soil and rearing a family like a peasant girl. Only what I’ve seen has changed all that; I realise now I should have ended up having innumerable children by some brawny oaf who stank of pigs, and dying before I was thirty from sheer hard work. Or am I just getting cynical? Do tell me, you say so very little any more.’
He poured wine for her, smiling.
‘I was arguing with Father Sebastian the other day,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I quoted the thing about giving all you have to the poor. He said that was all very well but you had to come to terms with the Scriptures and realise there had to be teachers and leaders for the people’s own good. It seemed an awful get-out to me, and I couldn’t help saying so. I told him if the Church would sell half her altar plate she could buy shoes for everybody in the country, and a lot else besides; and that if the Pope would make a start in Rome I’d see about getting rid of a few job lots of furniture down in Corfe. I’m afraid he didn’t take very kindly to it. I know it was wrong of me but he annoys me sometimes; he’s so pious, and it seems to mean so very little. He’d walk miles in the snow to pray for a sick child, he’s a very good man; but if there was more money about to start with maybe the child wouldn’t have been taken ill. It all seems so unnecessary…’
The winter was hard and long, the brooks and soil frozen like stone, even the rim of the sea sharded with ice. The towers clacked, on days when the Signallers could clear their arms of ice, with news of other parts of the country suffering as badly or worse. The spring that followed was late and cold, and the summer nearly as bad. Charles postponed his trip to the New World till the following year, spending his time, according to the semaphores, in organising relief schemes for the areas worst hit by famine. When autumn came round again, and the rush-bearing to the churches, the worst news of all arrived, brought by the urgently clattering grids. The taxation system of the country was to be reviewed; commissioners were already at work assessing contributions to be made by each area not in money but in kind.
Eleanor swore when the news was brought to her, and would certainly have given the officials a hot reception had they presented themselves at her hall; but nobody came near. Instead she was supplied via the semaphores with a list of the goods she would be expected to levy. Other parts of the country had been taxed in everything from turned ware to parsnips; Dorset’s contribution would be in butter, grain, and stone. ‘It’s quite ridiculous,’ fumed Her Ladyship, stamping up and down the little room that served her as office and study combined. ‘Butter and stone are all very well, or would be if they didn’t represent extra taxes; but grain! The people who drew this up must know very well there’s practically no arable farming round here at all; what little wheat we do grow is strictly for our own use and after a summer like we’ve had there’ll be barely enough of that to go round; I’m confidently expecting to have to set up soup kitchens in the bailey like they did once or twice in my father’s time. In Italy they don’t seem to have much idea of what a bad season can do to the produce of the farms; not that I suppose for a minute this junk ever came from Rome. It was probably drawn out by some fatpaunched little clerk in Paris or Bordeaux who’s never seen England and doesn’t want to and will sell our stuff over there at vast profits as fast as we can ship it. Anybody would think they’re deliberately trying to break us. If I squeeze all they demand out of the folk round about there’ll be deaths from starvation before the spring; on the other hand why I should buy in from Newworlders in Poole, give them back what I took from them, and ruin myself in the process I can’t imag -’
She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics. ‘Sir John,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not going to do it. There’s no reason, except pure maliciousness, why I should either starve my people or pauperize myself.
She tapped her teeth thoughtfully with a stylus. ‘Have the towers send this message,’ she said. ‘Our crops are bad, if we meet these taxes we shall be in trouble before the spring. Tell them we’ll pay with a double levy next autumn; at least that’ll give us the chance to get some more acreage under cultivation, unless of course they decide to change their demands by then. Failing that we’ll make up in… oh, worsted, manufactured goods, whatever they want; but grain, no. It’s out of the question.’ So the message was passed; and a second signal was routed to Londinium informing the King of her reply to Rome.
Next day the towers brought word that Charles was displeased, and had ordered Eleanor to pay; but by then it was too late, her answer was already clattering across France. ‘I’m afraid there was no help for it,’ she said to her seneschal, ‘but to present him with a fait accompli; what I’d like to have said to him, and to Pope John as well, was that there was no blood to be got by squeezing Dorset stone, though they were both very welcome to come on down and try.’ She was sitting at her dressing table, making up her face as she had been taught at Court; she drew a careful bow on her lips, blotted with a tissue. ‘God knows the Church is rich enough already,’ she finished bitterly. ‘What she expects to gain by sitting on the necks of a few poor savages in England, I have no idea…’
She dismissed the whole subject; at the best of times politics tired her rapidly, and she was becoming very interested in certain surreptitious alterations she was making to her home. The most daring of them, and the most heretical, was the installation of electric lighting. She had commissioned a craftsman of the village to build and wind a generator, and proposed to drive it by a steam engine of a type designed to be fitted into lorries. The work had to be done secretly as although the principles of the electro-motive force had been known for many years the Church had never sanctioned its domestic use. The completed unit was to be housed in one of the towers of the lower bailey wall, far enough away for its clanking not to disturb the household’s rest, and Eleanor expected if not spectacular results, at least enough light to dispel the worst gloom of winter. And heating too, if things went well; for she had remembered from her schooling that a wire, suitably wound on an earthenware former, could be made to glow redly if sufficient difference in potential could be created between its ends. To her questions as to whether her generator would bring this state of affairs about, the seneschal replied quietly that such a thing was not inconceivable; but further than that he refused to be drawn.