The Clerkenwell Tales

by Peter Ackroyd

  He had persuaded them, therefore, that five London churches or sacred places must be visited by fire and death. Only in this manner could the day of doom be delivered.

  The clerk, Emnot Hallyng, had left the conventicle and was striding down Bladder Street towards his tenement in Bevis Marks. It was close to curfew; the last street-traders were packing up their chests and boxes, while in the dying light the fruiterers and waferers pressed their merchandise upon all those hurrying home. He passed an inn known as the Wrestlers, and heard the words “crown” and “peace”; those deep in drink were arguing about King Richard’s decision to sail to Ireland, even as he was being threatened by the enmity of Henry Bolingbroke who had been banished to France. But Emnot was not concerned with such matters; he regarded the events of this world with a boredom amounting to distaste. What was the king to him? Less than a straw.

  He had taken up a wafer for a farthing and, as he bit into its crisp baked surface, he asked himself a question. What is the quantity of this night? He was teaching himself geometry or art-metricke. This day the sun was 21 degrees and six minutes of Taurus, a good day for the sinews and the heart. It was well known that the world was created at the vernal equinox, and that God first made mankind in the month of April; so this season was filled with magical properties. But was it a good night for experiment? Emnot practised alchemy in the hours of curfew, making sure that all the windows of his lodging were covered with black cloth so that the burning coals could not be seen. It was he who had manufactured the gunpowder, and had brought it to Richard Marrow in the green shed outside the walls.

  “This is good powder,” he had said to him. “You take two ounces of your sal petre and half an ounce of your brimstone, and temper them together in a mortar with your red vinegar. Do you smell the brimstone? Then you add your sal ammoniac and your nitre blended with small coals. That accounts for its blackish cast. You dry it in your earth pan over a soft fire and, when it is well dried, you grind it until it becomes this small powder. It is so small that it can be put through a sieve! There is no coal that serves better than the coals of the lime-tree.”

  These were also the coals which he used in his pursuit of alchemical gold. He was not an avaricious man. He was always eager, and curious, but not greedy. He had no conception of worldly things and, like the salamander of legend, lived only in the fire of his imagination. He had calculated his nativity as that time when the sun was in Gemini and a little from his declination in Cancer; this was the period of Jupiter’s exaltation, thereby confirming to Emnot that his life would be one of study and of learning. The worth of the gold did not concern him, therefore; it was the pursuit itself that pleased him. As one of the predestined men, he believed himself to be singularly blessed in all his operations and did not doubt his ability to create gold out of inferior substances. It was a question both of meditation and of calculation, of locking all the forces of the world into one pattern. When the sun grows old and in his hot declination enters Capricorn and shines pale, then begins the work. When the spheres were in alignment with his own bodily humours, when the elements of the base matter were calcined and revived in proportion to the eight and twenty mansions which belong with the moon, then the radiant hour would enter his alembic.

  Emnot loved number and pattern. He had tried to devise a geometry for the movement of pigeons in the yard below his tenement; he calculated the chances of seeing the same stranger more than once in a certain street; he looked into the night sky, and tried to divine the distance between each of the nine spheres. That is why he was so powerfully convinced by William Exmewe’s image of the circles which were part of some larger circle; it corroborated all that he thought and believed. Emnot Hallyng was always eager, always active; he licked the egg and cheese off his fingers before running up the stairs.

  Something was crouched in a corner, waiting for him there.

  “Whoa! Who are you? Why are you here in the darkness?”

  “It am I. Gabriel.”

  Gabriel Hilton, a jeweller by trade, was Emnot’s cousin. They had attended school together, at St. Anthony’s in Threadneedle Street, after which Gabriel had gone into his father’s business and Emnot had been enrolled at Oxford. Emnot’s sponsor was the late Bishop of Ely, who had surmised by various signs that he was one of the predestined and had trained him accordingly. Emnot became known in the family as “the clerk of Oxenforde,” and was often gently ridiculed for his pale face and spare frame; it was widely remarked that he was even leaner than his horse. Yet he was clever and quick-witted. It had been he who taught Gabriel Hilton the properties of the stones which he sold. He told him, for example, that the diamond must always be worn on the left side; its strength was always growing to the north, which is the left side of the world. If an emerald was kept with little pieces of rock, and watered with the dew of May, then it would grow. An amethyst gave hardiness and manhood. A sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole. Agate protected its wearer from evil dreams, enchantments and illusions of wicked spirits. If venom or poison were brought into the presence of the ruby, it became moist and began to sweat. He taught Gabriel, too, that all of these stones could lose their virtues through the sin and incontinence of those who wore them.

  “What wind has guided you here, cousin? I have not seen you in a long time.” Emnot took his cousin by the shoulder. “Quick. Come in. Take off your overslope. Sit.” Then he noticed Gabriel’s face. “Have you seen harm?”

  “Yis. There is harm approaching me. Of that I am certain.”

  “Sit.”

  “Emnot, you know the sliding science very well?” His hand was moving quickly, as if he were shaking invisible dice. “You know of dreamers and geomancers?”

  “I am a clerk, Gabriel, not an enchanter. Do sit.”

  “Yet you told me that in the stars is written the death of every man, clearer than any glass.”

  “It is so.” He hesitated. “Are you in sickness?”

  “Not one that any leech could cure.” Gabriel sat down upon a little wooden stool, but then immediately rose and walked over to the horn window. “I am in wanhope.”

  “Never say so, Gabriel. Even to speak those words is a great sin.”

  “But mine is a great trouble.” He was looking down into the street below. “I am marked down.”

  Then he began his story. He had been resting in his lodging in Camomile Street, when he heard noises in the room above his own. He noted the footsteps of several people, as well as voices engaged in conversation; the words were so muttered and confused, however, that he could not make them out. They made a low and indistinct sound, which reminded him of the noise of the city when heard from the fields. He had been lying quietly upon his mattress, but suddenly he sneezed very loudly. The conversation above him stopped, and for a moment there was absolute silence. Then there was the noise of footsteps, and the door of the upstairs chamber was flung open. Gabriel could hear two of them coming down the stairs very quickly and, to his horror, there was a ferocious banging upon his door. It continued until Gabriel could bear it no longer; he crept over to the door, and put his ear against it. It was then he heard the sound of heavy breathing, loud and intense. Slowly he unlocked the door, raised the latch, and looked outside. There was no one there.

  Emnot could not help breaking in. “So these were bloodless and boneless ones behind the door?”

  Gabriel enquired among his neighbours, but no one had heard or seen anything that evening; the room was itself untenanted, given over to worms and spiders. Gabriel would have dismissed the matter from his mind since, as he said to Emnot, “men may die of imagination.” But then two days later he had been walking down Camomile Street towards his shop in Forster Lane, when he was possessed by the strangest sensation of being followed. He looked around, but could see nobody except the traders and the casual populace of the area. He thought that he had heard someone calling out, “Head him! Head him!,” but amid the general clamour it might have been the baker’s cry of “Bread!” He
also recalled that, at this moment, a horse reared up and threw its rider into the kennel of water and rubbish in the middle of the road.

  On his way to work the following morning, in the same part of the street, he believed that he was once more being pursued; someone then put a hand upon his shoulder but, when he turned in alarm, there was no one. The same fear had come upon him, in that street, many times since. “It is more horrible than all monsters,” he told Emnot.

  “When does it press about you?”

  “At dawn. And then again about curfew. Sometimes, too, I hear the steps above me in the room.”

  “Can you cast in your thought what they may be?”

  “No. I cannot.”

  “They say that the souls of those who betray friends or guests go to hell, while their bodies continue to live.”

  “But there are no bodies. They are without shape or form.”

  “It is marvellous and strange to me. They seem to be of this earth but they cannot be seen upon it.”

  “Yet they are more menacing than cruel mouths.”

  Emnot rose from his chair and joined Gabriel by the window in the waning light. “Let me consider. If their anger arouses in you these floods of tremblings, then they possess an influence like that of intolerable heat or cold. Now it is said that where a great fire has for a long time endured, there still dwells some vapour of warmness. Could this be your case?”

  “How so?”

  “They may be creatures of a time beyond human memory.” Emnot was troubled by his cousin’s story in another sense, since these invisible meetings were like a ghostly image of the predestined men who met in secret places. All his fears of pursuit and capture were aroused by Gabriel’s haunted life. “Like the mist which is made of disintegrating clouds, they may be a memory of passed things.”

  “If that is so, Emnot, then they have come to my infinite harm.”

  “Or these people may be upon a different path. What if they were ahead of us?”

  “And are yet unborn? Why would they come into Camomile Street?”

  “Yes. True. So they must be a sad token of what is gone.” Emnot was distracted by a memory of William Exmewe’s vision of the circles interlinked, circles that partook of each other’s nature so that it was not clear where one began and another ended. He thought of the round drops of light rain, or mist, or dew, running into one another. If you looked into the circles deep enough, all would be cured.

  “Whatever path they tread, I am foully vexed with them.”

  “They are but dead, Gabriel.”

  “One touched me, Emnot.”

  Emnot went over to a small cupboard, took out an enamelled jug, and poured two cups of wine. There were some crumbs of bread floating on the surface, and he picked them out with his finger. “How great be these darknesses. And therefore David says, Abissus abissum invocat. Deepness calls unto deepness.”

  Gabriel looked at him with pity. “You are still a man of learning, I see. A very perfect gentle clerk.”

  “And as a clerk I will give you my avisement.”

  “Go to the nun?”

  “By no means see that witch. Remove from your lodgings, and shun Camomile Street.”

  Gabriel Hilton did indeed take his cousin’s advice. He rented three rooms in Duck Lane, and never ventured again down Camomile Street; it became what he called “an avoided place.”6 Yet he did not follow all of Emnot’s counsel. He had heard that Sister Clarice was to visit the female prisoners of the Mint, beside the Tower of London. He waited there by the postern gate on the appointed day and, as she approached, he held out his hands to her in the familiar gesture of supplication. “Release me,” he said. “Release me, dear sister, from a world of woe.”

  Clarice saw his handsome face, and his dark eyes rendered darker by tribulation. “What is your trouble?” There was no one with her but another nun, Sister Bridget, and she gestured her to stand apart.

  Gabriel Hilton then told her of the spirits haunting him. She bit her underlip, and shook her head in apparent dismay. “There are other such stories in the wind. There is a great perturbation of spirits in London. They see some evil day approaching.” Then she kissed her finger and touched his cheek with it. He stepped backwards in surprise, but she smiled at him. “Are you afraid of me, or of my sex? You see from my dress that I am devoted to God. Why fear me then?”

  He suspected that the nun was mocking him. “I am afraid not of you, nor of any woman born.”

  She put her finger upon his forehead. “Your cousin will be in great joy and comfort.”

  “Emnot?”

  “He is being led to the light. Other men are at his back, hastening him onward into bliss.”

  “Emnot is solitary. He is a full learned clerk.”

  “Listen to what I say. He must continue his course without fear. Exmewe is his fast friend. Tell him that he must not weaken or waver. Will you tell him this?”

  “Of course. If you wish it.”

  “I wish it.” She left him there, and entered the little gate of the prison.

  With many other citizens Gabriel watched her as she mounted a stone block in the yard, put out her arms as if she were Christ crucified, and spoke to the narrow gratings which concealed the female prisoners. The wind from the river was so strong that he heard only snatches of what she said. “I am in irons. I am in fetters. This body is my prison house. My eyes are my grilles.” Then she spoke of a day when all doors would be opened and all locks would be broken.

  There was no sound from the prison itself, but suddenly a pale face appeared at one of the gratings. A mouth opened, screaming out, “False witch of hell! Ripe for the burning! When rotten fruit falls to the ground, the dogs disdain it!”

  Sister Clarice turned and descended from the stone block. She called Sister Bridget to her, and together they went out of the prison of the Mint. She passed Gabriel Hilton, but she did not acknowledge him. He noticed that she whispered something to her companion, and that she laughed out loud. Surely, to be so merry, Clarice must be blessed by God? Even as he considered this, he determined not to mention her advice to his cousin. As his father had taught him, it were best not to mingle heaven and earth.

  Chapter Five

  The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale

  In the week following the explosion in St. John’s Street, the under-sheriff had made public proclamation by the cross in Cheapside that this ruination by fire had been “rotten, stinking, and abominable to the human race.” If the offender was found he would be taken with trumpets and pipes to the stocks by the market, there to stand for a day and a night. If he were still in life, he would be taken from there and hanged beside the elms in Smithfield. He would be utterly excommunicate, and his body thrown into a lime-pit outside the walls.

  There was much speculation about the identity of the miscreant, with city opinion inclining to the belief that the Lollards were responsible. These were a loosely knit group of Christian men and women who approached their faith with an egalitarian fervour. They doubted the efficacy of certain church practices, and were in any case inviolably opposed to the wealth and social power of the Church in the world. Confession could only be effective if the priest was full of grace, but no such priest had ever been found. Bread could not be made holier by being muttered over by priests. It was a sin to venerate images of the saints. Pilgrims to Canterbury were in danger of damnation, since St. Thomas had been consigned to hell for endowing the church with possessions. There was no purgatory other than this life, and so all masses for the dead and all chantry priests were without value. The Lollards asserted that it was contrary to Holy Scripture that priests should have any temporal possessions, and that friars were bound to obtain their living by the labour of their hands rather than by begging in the streets. They protested against chanting and church bells, saints’ days and precious vestments, oaths and festivals, fastings and pilgrimages.7

  Some days after the proclamation by the under-sheriff, the members of the Guild of Mary the Vi
rgin met for a solemn dinner in the Hall of the Mercers along Ironmonger Lane. The guild encompassed the worthies of London, the richer merchants, the abbots and priors of city foundations, the more notable landowners and clerics; there was among them, too, a certain canon named William Swinderby. He was accompanied by his yeoman, Drago, who always followed him at a respectful distance. Swinderby lived in the clergy house of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and had acquired fame as a preacher at Paul’s Cross; his sermons against the Lollards in recent days had excited many London crowds.8 He had attacked John Wycliffe, dead for fifteen years, as “the arch-parent of this heretical depravity.” He had then dismissed the Lollards themselves as “beardless blabbering boys who, yes, believe me, deserve to be well birched”; at that aside, Drago looked at him strangely.

  Drago gave his dagger to the porter of the Mercers’ Hall before attending to his master. Swinderby handed his cloak and gloves to him at the door of the hall, and stood before the screen until the usher took him to his table. It was often wondered how such a powerful voice came from such an attenuated body; Swinderby was short and a little stooped, with a face so pale that he looked to some as if he were being led towards his death. The sweat often stood out on his forehead, and his clothes smelt of nutmeg and ink.

  There was the usual music of pipes and tabors, echoing beneath the great hammerbeam roof, as the guests greeted their neighbours at the tables. On the left side of Swinderby sat the London knight, Geoffrey de Calis; the squire, Oliver Boteler, sat upon his other side.

  “Well, sir,” de Calis asked Swinderby, “what is the new news?”

  “King Richard has grown honest.” A servant brought over a basin of water, and Swinderby washed his fingers before crossing his mouth. The bread, and trencher, had already been laid before him.

  “Honesty will not save him now.” Geoffrey de Calis looked around for service with the gusto of one longing for meat. “His followers will be hunted as wolves are.”