The Yeoman's Tale, page 14
In the fetid warmth of a stable, Maghfield the merchant venturer sat idly stropping his falchion on a stone which stuck out of the rough wall. Fortunately for him and all the sleepers in the inn, the straw was too damp to catch fire as sparks fell onto it. The edge glinted evilly in the moonlight coming through the top half of the door, open to the sky. Maghfield was not a patient man and he had told himself that, as soon as his sword was sharp enough to cut a moonbeam, he would be going back to his bed, no matter how crowded with life, both human and insect. He was not a man to brood on decisions made – no one in his line of business would live a long and healthy life if they lost sleep over bad choices – but he was now beginning to wonder why he had agreed to this assignation at all. Boredom, he decided. That was why – he was a man of action, and to have spent the last few days pacing the limited space within the growing walls was torture. He would be on his way tomorrow, no matter what was going on outside. There was money to be made wherever chaos reigned – he had lived long enough to know that.
The horse shifted at Maghfield’s side and stamped a hoof, tossing its head. Its ears had detected a soft footfall and a smell that made it uncomfortable. Maghfield stood and fondled the beast’s ears, crooning softly to it in his native language. The horse rolled its eyes, but was still. From the deep shadow at the horse’s head, Maghfield watched intently, listening hard. The door opened and a figure stepped inside. Maghfield stifled a sigh. He had been right; he was meeting with an imbecile. If he wished, the newcomer could be dead at his feet and not know what had hit him. But Maghfield was one who liked to know what was going on, and he felt that this man could have information which would be useful, so he slid his falchion silently back into the scabbard and stepped forward, his soft leather boots silent in the damp straw.
‘Is that you, Master Maghfield?’ The harsh tones could only belong to Inskip the Miller.
‘Yes.’ Maghfield’s answer was as soft as a breath. ‘Keep your voice down, you oaf. What is the point of secrecy if you then shout?’
‘I ent shouting,’ Inskip said, testily. ‘This is my normal voice.’
‘Well, whisper in your normal voice, then.’
‘There’s nobody about,’ the miller said. ‘But I’ll whisper if you insist. What I have to say won’t take but a minute and I can say it in any voice you choose.’
Maghfield stepped forward, his hand on his falchion hilt. ‘Miller,’ he hissed between his teeth. ‘Tell me what you came to tell me and let’s be gone. My boots are ruined in this straw, my temper is short, and the little maid who I have paid good money for will not keep my bed warm for ever. So spit it out and make it snappy.’
The miller also took a step forward, a snarl beginning to curl his all but toothless mouth. ‘Mind your words, merchant,’ he said, his voice low. ‘What I have to tell you will …’ His head snapped round. ‘What was that?’
Both men held their breath as soft footfalls approached the stables. The miller looked at the merchant and shook his head, covering his mouth and wagging his finger. The merchant made sure his falchion was firm in his grasp and he crept nearer to the door, standing pressed against the wall and peering round.
He mouthed, ‘It’s Ambrosius and that drab.’
The miller signalled with his eyebrows that he had no idea what the merchant had just said, but moved back further into the shadows of the stable.
For a moment, Maghfield considered miming, to clarify who had disturbed them. But then, he decided that he had played the spy for long enough on this hot and sultry night. He looked again to see where Ambrosius and Nell had ensconced themselves and, seeing they were intent on each other, he slipped away out of the stable, leaving the miller behind, gesticulating wildly and impotently behind his back. As he crept out of the stables, he glanced back at the interlopers and saw Nell’s bright eyes over the priest’s shoulder. One of them closed, slowly and disconcertingly, in a wink.
The miller, alone in the ammonia-scented dark, waited. He stifled a chuckle. If his luck were in, he should be set fair for some fun and games with Nell when the priest was done with her. He had never met a yellow hood yet who turned down a chance of a groat or two. And, he smoothed his hair and twitched his jerkin, especially not with as fine a specimen of manhood as he. And, in his wide experience of the world and of the religious in particular, he doubted the priest would keep him waiting long. He leaned against the wall, folded his arms, and lost himself in thoughts to keep him in the mood for love. A slow smile crept across his unlovely face and the world held its breath.
EIGHT
The King came down from Windsor that day, his entourage bright with his banners, outriders trotting along both banks of the Thames as his barges butted through the sparkling water, the oarsmen in their deep green velvet keeping time to the beat of a single drum.
Sir Robert Knollys had been sent by the Earl of Salisbury the day before, the old soldier trying to talk sense to the boy without making him shit his breeches. Not that much actually troubled young Richard. He was fourteen and the cost of his haircut alone would keep Wat Tyler in clover for a year. Knollys looked down at the lad now, lolling on his throne at the stern of the boat. When he was little, people said that he had the looks of his father, Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince. But his clear blue eyes now looked arrogant, his lips thin and sneering. Above all, there seemed to be a perpetual smell under his nose.
‘Do they do things differently there?’ he asked, looking up from the locket he was holding.
‘Where, Your Grace?’ Knollys had given up trying to discern any logic in the boy hours ago.
‘Bohemia,’ the King said. ‘Where she comes from.’
She was Anne of Bohemia, the intended bride of the Lord’s Anointed, and he had not met her yet. For a moment, Knollys toyed with telling the lad that Bohemians had faces in the middle of their chests and that they walked on their hands, but he suspected the boy had no sense of humour at all. ‘The ladies, I believe, ride side-saddle,’ the old man said, ‘and, at court at least, they use forks, two-pronged skewers, to pick up food.’
The disgust on the King’s face said it all. ‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘But I meant in the bedroom. Swiving. Is it done in Bohemia as it is here?’
Robert Knollys’s children had long ago flown the nest. He had lost his own virginity when he was a page, before the Flood, and he had no intention of sharing intimate details with his King, especially one whose voice had not yet broken. ‘Perhaps Your Grace should discuss that with your Father Confessor,’ he suggested.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Knollys!’ Richard snapped. ‘The man’s a churchman. Doesn’t know one end of a woman from another.’
Robert Knollys raised an eyebrow. Clearly the boy was more of an ingénu than he realized. In the event, a petitioner, one of a clutch waiting patiently at the barge’s prow, intervened to save the day.
‘Grant mercy, liege lord,’ the man said, kneeling before the boy and handing him a scrolled parchment.
Richard clicked his fingers and a lackey took the document and read it. ‘Request for crenellation, sire,’ the clerk said. ‘Stoke by Nayland.’
‘Another one?’ Richard tutted. ‘Does no one want anything but lumps of stone on their houses?’
‘Status, sire,’ Knollys said. ‘It means everything to some people.’
‘Where are we, Knollys?’ The portrait of the pretty Anne had been consigned to a slop bucket. The veteran of Crécy and Nájera scanned the banks on both sides of the river. ‘Chertsey, Your Grace.’
‘Are we nearly there yet?’
Knollys held up a wetted finger to test the wind. ‘We should be at the Tower by nightfall, sire,’ he said.
‘And then what?’ the King yawned. ‘More petitioners?’
‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has requested an audience, sire,’ Knollys told him.
‘Old Sudbury?’ Richard sneered. ‘He can bore for England, that man.’ Something caught the boy’s eye along the riverbank where the chestnuts bowed over the water and the sun gilded the great abbey beyond. ‘Handful of monks,’ he observed as the brethren bowed towards his gilded boat. ‘Shouldn’t there be more … what’s the word, Knollys? Adulation?’
Indeed there should. In the old King’s day, whenever he rode the river, the banks would be crawling with locals, the great and the good on their jetties, their men-at-arms standing to attention, pretty girls throwing flowers and milky babies beaming for the highest in the land. But today, a few threadbare brothers and the odd peasant. Some of them were waving, cheering feebly, bowing as the King passed by. But there was a sullen cast to their faces, a darkness in their eyes that Knollys neither liked nor trusted. He thought to himself what an easy target the lad who wore the crown made, ostentatious in his velvet, pearls and ermine, a diadem glittering in his golden curls. And instinctively, he edged closer, signalling to his crossbowmen on each side to turn so that their bulk stood between the King and his people.
‘It’ll be different when we reach London, sire,’ he lied, and crossed his fingers behind his back.
It wasn’t unusual for Witton Gilbert to get the shitty end of the stick. Fifteenth of sixteen children, he had been the baby of the family for a scant ten months and had no recollection of the experience. He was not only the next-to-youngest, he was also possibly the most ill-favoured of an unattractive bunch. Rumour had it that his mother had once been offered a noble for him by a travelling pedlar, so that he could display him and attract a crowd to which he could sell his wares. While she had bustled off into the house to fetch the lad’s spare jerkin and hose, the pedlar had changed his mind, reneged on the deal and hot-footed it down the road.
So Witton Gilbert took up his pitchfork with resignation and regarded the dung pile which steamed gently before him. He always turned the dung pile on a Wednesday – that had been dinned into his head by frequent slaps over the years. Raining? Turn the dung pile. Snowing? Turn the dung pile. Uprising of the peasantry? Turn the dung pile. He had a slight problem this Wednesday which he had never had before. The yard was so full of tethered horses, people, baulks of timber and just general noise and scurry that he wasn’t sure where he could turn the dung pile to. As a rule, he would move it a couple of yards to left or right, as appropriate, so the older, riper, rotted straw and horse-shit mixture would come to the top, for the farmers and smallholders to come and take away after a suitable recompense to Harry Baillie. And so the dung pile waxed and waned, and so Witton Gilbert would turn it.
His other problem was that the dung pile was now the biggest he had ever seen it. Despite the horses in the stables being kept in deep litter in these uncertain times – with thousands of men on the march, mucking out a horse was not high on men’s priorities – some of the worst of it still needed to be removed; and here it was, warm and rotting in the June sun. The chambermaids had taken the opportunity to empty the pots onto it as well, so the urine running into the gutter was not all equine, as Witton’s nose told him. In fact, Witton Gilbert was getting as close to angry as he ever became. His eyebrow knotted and his virtually toothless mouth worked with some silent curses that would have turned milk. He stepped forward and plunged his pitchfork into the heap. His brain was not of the highest calibre and didn’t work well when he was upset, but it ran true as an arrow when dung was involved. Get air to it, that was the key. So as long as Witton Gilbert had breath in his body, he would turn that dung pile, come hell or high water. A man did, after all, have his pride.
‘It’s gnawing away at you, isn’t it, Geoff?’ John Gower was sipping Harry Baillie’s ale as the afternoon sun kissed the new ramparts of the Tabard. ‘The murder of Mistress Gillis.’
‘Is it that obvious?’ Chaucer was munching the crust of bread he had saved from earlier in the day. The evening repast was a bit of a hit-or-miss affair at the Tabard in these turbulent times and so he was getting into the habit of keeping edible morsels close at hand, against the day. ‘I thought I was doing a convincing job of making you believe I was focusing on the Armageddon that’s coming our way.’
‘Oh, that,’ Gower shrugged. ‘It’s been days now and … nothing. Somebody will have bought the peasants off. Everyman has his price, after all.’
‘What price a pilgrim’s wife with her throat cut?’
‘Who’s your money on?’ Gower was swatting away the gnats drawn to his goblet.
‘They say there are forty thousand people in London,’ the comptroller said. ‘Take out the children, the old and infirm … what’s that leave? Twenty-five thousand? Perhaps more.’ It was Chaucer’s turn to shrug. ‘Could be any of them.’
‘Could be the husband,’ Gower murmured.
‘Arend?’ Chaucer frowned. ‘Husbands don’t kill their wives … do they?’
Something in Gower’s expression told Chaucer that he thought they did. ‘He’s a miserable bastard, Geoff. Treats his children like servants.’
‘So did Fye, apparently. Odd, that. Maternal instinct and all that. Women are supposed to love their offspring.’
‘I got the impression that Fye Gillis didn’t love anybody,’ Gower said. ‘We need to find someone who didn’t love her back. She loved money, though.’ Gower splatted a gnat on Baillie’s table, one of the few still standing. ‘But then, show me a Fleming who doesn’t.’
‘Don’t you care for our Walloon cousins, John?’ Chaucer asked with a wry smile on his face.
‘Wearing my day hat,’ Gower said, ‘I’ve crossed swords with too many of them, coming over here, setting up their looms all over the place.’
‘Hardly all over the place, John,’ Chaucer remonstrated. ‘They’re mostly outside the walls. Bishopsgate. Portsoken.’
‘The Gillises aren’t,’ Gower persisted. ‘Walbrook Ward, aren’t they?’
‘Needlers’ Lane,’ Chaucer nodded.
‘I don’t have to tell you what a dog-eat-dog world the world of the weaver-merchant is, Geoffrey. Arend Gillis will have his enemies, business rivals by the score. If they can’t get at him, they can perhaps get his wife.’
Chaucer nodded. ‘Of course, there are the children.’
Gower sat upright. ‘The Gillis children? Surely not. They seem too … cowed, for one thing.’
‘Oh, it’s unlikely, I’ll grant you,’ the comptroller said, getting up and leaning over the rail of the landing, scattering the crumbs off his lap onto the boards for the sparrows. ‘Only the girl seemed genuinely upset, though. And only because she has no autonomy; without her mother, she is rudderless. But she’ll learn, hopefully. The boy, though – he seemed curiously unmoved. More interested in his mother’s savings.’
‘Chip off the old block,’ Gower muttered. ‘But is he unmoved enough to cut his own mother’s throat?’
Chaucer straightened and looked out over the Tabard’s roof to the south, where the strip fields of Southwark lay golden in the summer light. ‘We can’t see each other’s hearts, John,’ he sighed. ‘That’s the pity of it. What we really think. What we’re driven to in the watches of the night.’ He turned his back on whatever may have been massing in the mists of the Neckinger and trickling, even as he spoke, around the grey stone of Bermondsey Abbey. ‘Needlers’ Lane,’ he said. ‘We’ll get some answers there, hopefully. Coming?’
Gower looked up at his old friend. ‘Two things, Geoffrey,’ he said. ‘First, how do we get out of this place now that Hardesty’s walled us in? And second, I wouldn’t, as you now know, pass water on the Flemings if they were on fire.’
There was a less than subtle cough at Chaucer’s elbow and Harry Baillie stood there, beaming. ‘Sorry, lordings,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing that last bit, seeing as we’re so overcrowded. As to the second, Master Gower, strictly between us three, I am with you there. But the first, Master Chaucer, I think I may have … wait a minute? What’s that idiot doing now? I only gave him a job as a favour to his mother …’ He stepped forward and leaned over the rail. ‘Oi, you!’ Baillie turned and propelled himself down the stairs at a rate close to suicidal, given their steepness, their fragility and his size.
‘That was odd,’ Gower observed, getting up and looking out over the yard. ‘Is he finding all this a bit too much, do you think?’
Chaucer raised an eyebrow and sipped again at his ale. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t let him forget to tell me about the first thing, though. What is he doing now?’
Gilbert was stopped in his tracks by a sudden shout from the back door of the inn. He turned, leaning on his pitchfork; sometimes his slightly shorter left leg gave him gyp and it was good to relax a little.
‘You! Filbert, whatever your name is!’ Harry Baillie had better things to do than remember everyone’s name. ‘What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing?’ Baillie set off at a smart pace across the yard, minions scattering left and right. ‘You can’t turn the dung pile in all this …’ he waved his hands impotently. ‘In all this! Stop it!’
‘Dung pile’ll fester, Master Baillie,’ Gilbert ventured. He didn’t know much, but he knew for a certain fact that he knew more about dung piles than any innkeeper born. ‘You’ll get gases, y’see. Her might even blow up.’
Baillie looked sceptical.
‘Seen it.’ Witton Gilbert knew he was on strong ground. ‘Dung pile at the livery in Giltspur Street weren’t turned right and her blew up and besmottered everything in half a league with horse shit. The monks at Bart’s were proper put out.’ He leaned more heavily on his pitchfork. ‘All for the want of a bit of a turn.’
Baillie looked at his yard, full of people and their belongings. Some of them he would be quite happy to see covered in horse shit, but in someone else’s yard, not here. So he nodded to his dung-pile-turner and said, ‘In that case, Gilbert,’ the name had come to him in a sudden flash, ‘do your worst. But please, for the love of God, don’t spread it around. Just turn it gently.’ Baillie mimed a gentle twist of the pitchfork and Gilbert looked at him with sympathy. It was a mystery to him how a man could run a great business such as the Tabard but had no idea how a dung pile needed turning. He swung round, pitchfork held low, ready to jab and twist and let the air in.
