Taking Wing

A Merlin for a Lady

Master Pink generously lends Kit and Isabel the players’ donkey, Delilah. The two of them can ride the last few miles from the tavern at Pease Magna to Aunt de Vere’s estate, following directions from the helpful tavern landlord. Evening has fallen by the time they arrive. Everything glows honey-colored in the fading light: honeysuckle in the hedges, marsh marigolds along the streams, warm stone walls.

The sight of the moated manor house makes Kit whistle in surprise; he hadn’t realized Isabel’s aunt lived somewhere so grand. Isabel admits she hadn’t known it herself. Kit asks anxiously whether her aunt is kind. Isabel can only say she’s met her twice in her life, once as a baby and once at Isabel’s own mother’s funeral. Father always describes her as devoted to religion and good works. During her sleepless last night in the players’ hayloft, Isabel had pictured Aunt de Vere as a second mother, tender and understanding. Now, drawing near, she braces herself instead for a sterner, more critical version of Aunt Elinor.

The town green is already crowded with servants setting up a maypole for the next day’s May Day revels. They eye Kit and Isabel with suspicion until Kit calls out that he’s escorting a young relative of their mistress. A woman gasps that this can’t be the child who was lost, and sends a little boy racing for the house. Villagers press around Isabel as she crosses the footbridge, touching her fearfully as though she might be a spirit risen from the grave.

The estate proves even larger up close, with its own chapel, stables, orchards, and market gardens planted with herbs and vegetables, and cottages sending up wisps of smoke like children’s drawings. Before they reach the great house, a tall, fair-haired woman in a plain gray gown hurries around the corner, a rosy little boy clinging to her hand and two hounds bounding at her heels. She takes one look at Isabel’s cropped hair and boy’s disguise and says quietly, “Isabel is alive.”

That night, Isabel washes and puts on a fresh linen shift and climbs into a bed with sky-blue curtains, still amazed to be clean and dressed as a girl again. Olivia, Aunt de Vere’s young ward, will be lending Isabel her clothes until the dressmaker can measure her properly. Aunt de Vere is plainly overjoyed to have her back, though she neither weeps nor fusses. When she learns of the servant who died protecting Isabel on the road, she says only that she’ll pray for his soul. She introduces Olivia and asks her to see Isabel to her chamber. Then she announces briskly that she’ll write to Father at once to tell him Isabel is safe.

Isabel has never met anyone quite like her aunt, whose keen blue eyes and fierce, purposeful energy are somewhat intimidating. She worries privately that Aunt de Vere, like Aunt Elinor, will eventually find her foolish and undisciplined once she knows her better. Olivia soon taps at the door with a candle, sweet-faced and warmly friendly, confessing she’d decided they would be friends the moment she heard Isabel was coming. Isabel, guilty over all the trouble she’s caused, is reassured that everyone is simply glad she’s safe.

Alone afterward, unused to sleeping without company, Isabel jumps at every sound in the dark. The shriek of owls, something scratching at her door. She finally discovers it’s only one of the household hounds looking for company.

At dawn, Isabel dresses in one of Olivia’s gowns and joins the servants heading out to go a-Maying, falling in with a troop of village children crowned in flowers. Gathering armfuls of sweet-scented may blossom in the woods feels like standing at the dawn of creation. Yet the sight of the world dressed for a wedding gives Isabel a pang of sorrow over the wedding she ruined back in London. A village fiddler soon turns the walk into a dance. Gossiping girls whisper that Isabel is the very girl kidnapped by brigands and rescued by traveling players.

To her mixed delight and dismay, Kit and Sam have come early to help bring in the May. Aunt de Vere has invited the players to perform. Sam teases that he wanted to see this “bold Mistress Isabel” for himself, and that now everyone understands why Master Robert used to blush so prettily. Walking beside Kit again feels strangely awkward now that Isabel is back in skirts and slippers.

The May revels stretch on with feasting, music, archery contests, and dancing around a maypole hung with ribbons. At midday the rest of the troupe arrives with Delilah’s cart, and Ned’s horn signals the start of the play. Watching from the audience for once feels peculiar. Isabel finds herself anxiously mouthing Philomena’s lines, relieved when the crowd laughs and weeps in all the right places, and blushing helplessly when Saint George kisses Philomena just as she once did playing the part.

Afterward, an astonished Master Pink tries to refuse the purse of gold and silver crowns Aunt de Vere presses on him in gratitude. Saying goodbye to Kit a second time proves harder than the first. They’ve gone oddly tongue-tied since their walk together gathering blossom. Isabel calls after him only to send her love to Meg. Kit turns back, solemn, and promises it isn’t farewell, that they’ll meet again if God wills it.

Walking home in her skirts, Isabel wonders miserably who she really is now, no longer Robert, no longer the pampered girl who left London. But remembering her aunt’s quiet words of welcome, she thinks this may not be home yet. Perhaps one day it will be.

The next day, Olivia is excused from her duties to show Isabel the rest of the estate—the dairy, the brewhouse, and a tantalizing peek into the mews. The hawks sit hunched and silent as monks despite the bright morning. A gruff old man soon orders the girls away, since they lack their mistress’s leave.

At the stables, Olivia introduces her favorite horse and proposes riding together every morning before lessons. Lessons is a word that fills Isabel with dread, since Aunt de Vere has decided to oversee her education herself. Olivia is amazed that Isabel’s father never mentioned how learned her aunt truly is. Famous London apothecaries write to her for medical advice, and that she somehow finds time for it all. Olivia laughs that she has more energy than Her Royal Grace herself.

That afternoon Isabel accompanies Olivia and Aunt de Vere to the clinic adjoining the private chapel, where villagers wait with warts and boils, agues and fevers. Isabel privately dreads the smell. But Aunt de Vere immediately puts her to work, first checking dosages in the herbal, then calling her over to examine a boy with suppurating boils on his neck. Isabel gulps out that pus is oozing from them and notices a stench like bad meat. Her aunt agrees the infection is too far gone to lance safely. Instead she has Isabel fetch yarrow and horse chestnut from the storage cupboard to mix a poultice that will draw out the evil humors.

As the afternoon wears on, Isabel’s queasiness fades into real concern for the patients. She listens as her aunt dispenses feverfew for headaches, comfrey for bruises and broken bones, barberry as an antiseptic, and yarrow to stop bleeding.

One woman begs for an elixir against plague, terrified since her husband must drive cattle into London where rumors say the sickness has returned. An old woman tries to comfort her by insisting plague only punishes sinners in the cities. Isabel bites back the urge to protest that her own family lives in that city and are no sinners. Aunt de Vere, rather than dismissing the fear, gives practical advice. Keep the house scrupulously clean, change clothes and bedding often, strew the doorstep with rue, and have her husband soak any coin in vinegar before touching it.

Isabel later learns that of her aunt’s five infants, none survived more than a few hours. Yet she pours her wealth and energy into caring for the less fortunate anyway.

Before they leave the clinic, Aunt de Vere mentions that Cole has told her how interested Isabel seemed in the hawks. She offers to introduce her properly if Isabel doesn’t mind rising early. Olivia excuses herself at once, admitting she can’t stand their smell. The next morning, before breaking their fast, Isabel follows her aunt into the mews, where strips of sacking hang between the perches like banners in a chapel. Unlike Olivia, Isabel doesn’t mind the sharp smell of the straw.

Cole emerges from the gloom with a creaky bow, studying Isabel with the same bright, impartial gaze he turns on his birds. Aunt de Vere speaks to him not as a servant but as an equal whose judgment she trusts. He disappears behind a screen and returns with a hooded young merlin on his thickly gloved wrist, her jesses looped securely around his finger so the half-trained bird can’t bolt in a panic. When he slips off the hood, the merlin’s unblinking, owlish eyes fix on Isabel, her brown plumage banded rust and cream.

Isabel gasps that she looks like a knight on a quest. Her aunt laughs that the knight is in fact a lady, since female hawks are always the largest and fiercest. From a pouch at her waist she produces a dead field mouse taken from the kitchen traps and lets the merlin seize and tear at it. Gruesome as it looks, Isabel understands the bird is only following its God-given nature, no crueler than a cat.

Suddenly another hawk streaks overhead like a vengeful arrow, its wingtip brushing Isabel’s cap before Cole hurries to call the jealous bird back to its perch. Aunt de Vere praises Isabel for not flinching. The two fall to discussing how a kestrel hangs motionless as a flash of lightning before stooping on prey from on high. A merlin, though, must chase its quarry low and fast across the ground.

Isabel wonders aloud whether that’s why merlins are considered fitting birds for ladies, since women aren’t supposed to soar to any great heights either. She immediately fears she’s spoken too boldly. Instead, Aunt de Vere bursts out laughing, delighted that Isabel is a female who thinks for herself. She warns, only half-joking, that Isabel will end up just like her if she isn’t careful.

Aunt de Vere explains that English law, the sumptuary law, forbids a poor man from aping his betters by wearing fine clothes. Hawking follows the very same hierarchy. Any knave may keep a kestrel, only an earl may fly a peregrine, only a king a gyrfalcon, and a merlin belongs to a lady. She adds that some believe hawking suits only the nobly born, since it demands such self-discipline and patience.

Cole shyly offers to let Isabel help with the merlin’s training, warning that she’ll have to rise early, soon after dawn being best. He gives her a small, mysterious smile. He says a merlin is a fitting bird for a lady.