“But the duke is a subtle man.”
“Subtle, yes. Sub telaris. Under the heel. Henry will have Richard under his heel.”
“And the nun has been ringing like a bell.”
“Oh? How so?”
“She says that the crop dwells beneath the root. That the world is changed overall.”
“That woman is a flyter,” Vavasour said. “A baratour. She will provoke the people into madness. Set her on the ducking stool and plunge her.”
“Oh no. Sister Clarice has become Christ’s darling. The common people follow her with open mouths.”
“The stink!” Suddenly the sergeant changed the subject; it was a habit he practised in the courtroom. “Now that I have you, leech, I find that I need you. I have the bone-shave.”
“The sciatica?”
“It is the pain of lightning. It travels down my leg.”
Gunter believed this condition to be the token of a melancholy or nervous complexion, to be cured by rest and easefulness rather than powders or mixtures; but he knew, also, that those in his charge required the consolation of herbs. “It is a full heavy and sharp pain, Sir Miles –”
“I know that well enough.”
“In a first case I would give you the herb water-pepper or skin-smart.”
“It is not the first. It is an old malady.”
“Then a sovereign remedy may be the juice of the feverfew mingled with honey. I will send it by messenger. Are you wakeful by night?”
“Very wakeful.”
“Great nightshade will make you sleep.”
“You mean banewort?”
“It can be known as that.”
“It is a plant full of malice to humankind, is it not?” One of the sergeant’s techniques, when engaged in cross-examination, was to pretend to more knowledge than he actually possessed.
“Just a little. A very little. You will not be disparkled.”
“So I need fear nothing from your hands, leech. Is that right?” He drank off the rest of the wine with a flourish. “Do you see this ring, Master Gunter?” He held out the fingers of his right hand.
“Indeed.”
“Its jewel has been taken from the head of a toad.”
“I know it well. It is known as the borax or chelonitis.”
“It is a preservative against poison. Its power leaps to my heart from my ring finger.”
At that moment the green jewel caught the light of a candle, and in that sudden flash Gunter glimpsed a great bonfire like that which gives the alarm. He blinked. It was gone. Yet he believed in the efficacy of dreams and visions. Some revelation concerning Miles Vavasour had been granted to him.
“Shall we go to eat?” The sergeant led his guest into the hall; on a dais, covered in a cloth of estate, was a large table with a chair at either end. Along one side of the hall was Vavasour’s livery cupboard, with all his plate displayed in the torchlight and candlelight. There was a low oak chest on the opposite side of the hall, with papers lying upon it; above it was a tapestry portraying the history of the King of Love. On his summons a servant entered, did obeisance, and then proceeded to serve the meats. The meal was soon over and, after their toast to the fistula, Gunter observed in passing that he had seen the body of one Hamo Fulberd lying in St. Sepulchre. Vavasour replied that he had marvelled that one young man could nourish such hatred against God’s church. The physician wondered out loud whether any more heretics would be found as a result of Hamo’s death. They are as mad as wild bullocks, Vavasour replied, and God would send them such worship as they deserved. So there were more of them? Gunter noticed the slightest unease cross the sergeant’s face as he claimed that he had not meddled in the matter.
“But some, Sir Miles, talk of a secret confederacy. A coivin of unknown men.”
“I know a good name for its leader then.” The sergeant’s eyes widened slowly as he spoke. “It should be John Destroy All.”
“I was hugely astonished to learn . . .” the physician continued, looking steadily at his host across the gleaming oak table, “. . . I was astonished that these troubles and commotions may be governed by the sign of five.”
“Who told you this?” The question came rapidly and suspiciously.
“I see wonder on your countenance, sir.”
“Wonder only at such horrible and abominable deeds. What is this about the five?”
“It was rumoured to me.”
“In the old books it is a sign of the ancient church. But in these new times –”
“It does not signify?”
“Not at all.”
The subject was then changed; the two men discussed the bad harvest and the price of bread, the new law restraining the length of shoes, the recent birth of a child with an eye in the middle of its forehead, until the conversation touched once more upon the miseries of the king.
Vavasour excused himself for a moment, to visit the latrine in his yard, and Gunter took that opportunity to walk over to the chest. There were two small parchments left there accidentally or hastily by the sergeant, and they concerned a court case at Westminster; Gunter could read the sentence, “In cuius rei testimonium presentibus sigillum meum apposui,” but the rest was obscure. But then he noticed some words scrawled in ink on the back of one of the documents. They comprised a list, or table, one entry after the other:
Oratorium. St. J.
Powles.
St. Sep.
St. M Le Q.
Giles.
The oratory in St. John’s Street had been fired. So had St. Sepulchre. There had been a killing in Paul’s. Would St. Michael le Querne follow? And Giles. Could that be St. Giles in the Fields?
Thomas Gunter was already in his seat when the sergeant returned. They were served more wine but parted soon after, at the time of the curfew bell. The sergeant apologised for the fact that he still had urgent business to conduct.
As the physician left, he could hear Vavasour calling for his horse.
Gunter now knew that his host was better acquainted with recent events than he had been prepared to admit. His list was of the churches. The conclusion was clear. Vavasour had a counterfeit face. He was disguised in manners. And where was he riding after curfew? Thomas Gunter determined to follow him on horseback.
Under cover of night and darkness, ducking under the overhanging signs, keeping his horse to the straw and the mud, whispering gently in its ear to guide it, he kept Vavasour in sight. The sergeant was a great man, and would not be hindered or questioned by the watch; Gunter was a known apothecary, on his way to administer to someone’s pain, and would pass unmolested. They were two figures enclosed by the darkness of the city. Vavasour rode south-eastward along Fetter Lane and Fleet Street, down Addle Hill with its deserted porters’ stalls like great bulks in the shadows.
Gunter stopped at the corner of Addle Hill and Berkley’s Inn, dismounted, and tethered his horse to a weather-beaten gate by the side of a tenter-yard; he had seen Vavasour ride up to the round tower north of Castle Baynard. Gunter concealed himself behind the ruin of an old postern gate, just as Vavasour knocked upon the door of the stone tower and was admitted.
A few moments later Gunter observed two cresset lights approaching, attached to spear-headed poles; a hooded figure came up to the door and, by the light of the torches, Gunter could plainly see the visage of Sir Geoffrey de Calis. Then a chair, pulled by two horses, emerged from the darkness; Gunter recognised William Swinderby, the canon of Paul’s, being helped from the vehicle. He was followed by an under-sheriff. Here was a wonder indeed, a wonder to pass all wonders. Why had the high men of the city come to this place by night? What had Bogo said of those who stayed in concealment and who walked in evil ways? “They use quaint craft,” he had told Gunter. “The world is brittle.”
Gunter found himself gazing at the round tower. He knew it to be of great antiquity; in the torchlight he could see the blocks of rough stone in the mortar at its base. If Brutus had founded London after the fall of Troy,
as all the historians suggested, could this be an emblem of New Troy lingering into the present with its own baleful history? The physician was filled with sensations of power and of purpose as he looked upon it; it had already completed its destiny, and now persisted in time through its indomitable will. So it attracted secret men like Miles Vavasour and Geoffrey de Calis. A rotten nut is called a deaf nut. Barren corn is known as deaf corn. This was deaf stone. Whatever dark business was conducted within its walls, it would never be whispered abroad.
Gunter stayed by his hidden point of vantage, while an hour passed. The under-sheriff was the first to leave, entering his chair in the flare of many torches. Geoffrey de Calis followed, in the company of a man whom Gunter did not recognise. Behind them walked Miles Vavasour who turned and waited for his horse beside the great wooden door. He had about him an air of expectancy, and he mounted lightly. Gunter quietly untethered his horse and decided to go after him. Vavasour turned up Addle Hill, and Gunter realised that he was not riding home when he turned eastward into Carter Lane. The gates of the city were closed but he seemed to be making his way towards Aldersgate; the streets were very quiet, and Gunter made sure that he kept his distance. He had thought of tying rags to his horse’s hooves, but he was content now to avoid cobbles and loose stones. He looked up at the universe of light which guided his way; he could see the stars in the highest celestial sphere, and was comforted by their brightness. There was one order which did not decay.
Vavasour had ridden down St. Martin’s towards the gate; it was closed, of course, and barred with chains which were fixed across the road. So he turned east down St. Anne’s Lane and then north into Noble Street at the corner of which, as Gunter could see, a section of the wall was being reconstructed. The workmen removed the ladders and scaffolding each night, for fear of thieves, so there was a narrow gap or rent in the structure. Vavasour had settled his horse for a moment, whispering in its ear, and then had leapt beyond the wall. Gunter murmured to himself the hunter’s cry, “So! Ho!” and followed him. He rode over the wall just as the sergeant was making his way down Little Britain towards Smithfield.
There was a wide path there between the priory church and the hospital, where sand had been laid for the easy conveyance of wagons and carts; it glowed in the moonlight, with the turrets and eaves of the surrounding buildings casting strange shadows across it. The posts by each side of the road, where the horses were tethered in daylight, seemed like stakes for the condemned. The physician always associated Smithfield with death – the animals being led to slaughter, the guilty men riding to the rope, the sick approaching their end in the hospital itself. But he knew that each part of the city had its own trouble and its own tainted air.
Vavasour was riding across the open market towards Cow Lane and Clerkenwell and, by the time he had reached the Fleet, Gunter knew his destination. Turnmill Street was a notorious stew haunted by gestours and lechours, roarers and bawds. By the time Gunter rode down the narrow thoroughfare, Vavasour’s horse was being kept by an old huckster who sold second-hand clothing by day.
Gunter dismounted and gave the man a groat. “Where has he gone?”
“To see the Wife of Bath.”
Dame Alice, familiarly known as the Wife of Bath, was the most notorious procuratrix in the city. She ran a tavern in Turnmill Street called the Broken Fiddle; it was known by everyone as the Broken Filly, however, because of the nature of its trade. The physician had been visited by some of Alice’s clients, who had contracted the pox known otherwise as the brand of Venus or the love-lick.
Dame Alice greeted Miles Vavasour in her usual fashion. “What! Are you here? Sir Robert Run-About?” She wore a kirtle of red velvet, with a girdle of gold-work around her waist; she had a caul over her hair embroidered with jewels, and a red hood behind her neck. “You have come for a sweet hole, have you, sir? Are you wanting a scabbard for your dagger?”
Dame Alice had pursued her trade for many years, despite manifold punishments and injuries. She had been placed in the compter; she had been exhibited in the stocks and on the stool; she had been paraded through the streets in a striped hood and beaver hat as tokens of her profession. In more recent times, however, she had been permitted to establish her tavern, or her “shop” as she called it, outside the walls; in any case she now had too many secrets to be prosecuted in open court. It was said that the monasteries and the nunneries would be emptied if she told all she knew.
“You old fetart, you lusk, what will it be with you tonight? What raging damsel will be your delight?”
Dame Alice had acquired a reputation for the contempt which she showed to her customers; they accepted it as part of their humiliation. She had many words for men like Miles Vavasour who came in search of young women – lorrel, loricart, lowt, slow-back, hedge-creeper, looby, lobcock, crafty Jack, long lubber, hopharlot – each with its own range of allusion and association.
“You are in high kick, I see, Miles Rakehell. You lift your leg like a dunghill dog. Well, I have a young fair one for you.” Dame Alice knew his tastes very well. “Eleven summers. Rose. I call her Rose-a-ruby because she smells like camomile.” She was standing on an old wooden staircase, much rubbed and discoloured with the tread of a thousand shoes, and she beckoned him upward. “She is still a maid.”
“I am glad to hear it, ma dame.”
She laughed, and a necklace suddenly appeared from beneath her chin. “I see your meat-wand is stirring in your hose, Sir Trindle-Tail.”
“Love is in season, Alice.”
“Love is hot in summer, then. Fall to work with a will.”
“If you will show me the way.”
Dame Alice never jangled about love, as she put it. Hers was a more practical humour. “I may not stop the evil that blows about the world,” she had told one of the priests who frequented her tavern. “But I may help men to forget it.”
“We are all frail,” the priest had replied. “We come of sinful stock.”
“By Christ’s cross it is the truth.”
She knew of what she spoke. Her mother had followed the same trade, from an undercroft in an alley off Turnmill Street. As a very young girl she had seen all the corners of lust. At the age of twelve she had conceived a child by Coke Bateman, the old miller’s son, whose dwelling was a few hundred yards to the north, but her mother had persuaded her to drown the newborn baby in the Fleet. Many infants had already floated down that river into the Thames, where they were “taken up” by watermen as a danger to nets. She had met Coke Bateman in a pudding shop, the following week, but he had not spoken of his child; they had sat side by side, but they had said nothing to one another. And she had thought then – what is all this feigning of love? It is a mere mock of the mouth.
After her mother’s death Alice had opened up a balneolum or small bath-house in St. John’s Street; that is how she had acquired her name. When she had purchased the lease rent on a tenement in Turnmill Street, however, she was surprised to learn that her landlord was the convent of St. Mary. But then she began to profit from her fame. “The Wife of Bath” became synonymous with bawdiness. A sermon was preached against her by the priest of St. Mary Abchurch, during which he had declared that “a fair woman that is foul of her body is like to a ring of gold in the snout of a sow.” She had heard the phrase a few days later, and ever afterwards she called him “the priest of Apechurch.” She compared him to the loathsome toad which cannot endure the sweet smell of the vine. He returned the insult, one evening in the pulpit, when he spoke against certain bawds or lenos who are like the painted beetle which, flying in the hot sun of May, has no liking for fair flowers but loves to alight on the filth of any beast wherein alone is its delight. It became known as “The Wife of Bath sermon,” and her fame in London was assured.
Dame Alice took Miles Vavasour into a small room warmed by a brazier. “We have no crowders tonight, Sir Piss-Pot.”
She had hired no musicians since, as she had said, lewdness needs no tunes. In truth the
last night of music had ended in disorder, when one of the musicians had insulted an elderly courtier. The old man had put his hand in his hose in order to scratch himself, and the musician had noticed the movement. “They should have taught you at Westminster,” he said to general laughter, “never to touch meat with your right hand.” The courtier had drawn his baselard and a scuffle ensued which, as always in London, ended as suddenly and as abruptly as it had begun. Dame Alice had ordered the musicians to leave her tavern – or, as she put it, “hitch your stained buttocks!” – and swore never to hire them again. So there was no music on the night of Miles Vavasour’s visit.
“She is a maid,” she said again, “but I swear that she will jet up and down for you. You will sweat well tonight.”
“Does she frisk about?”
“She is a giglet. A fisgig.”
“Then I will have her.”
“But you must pay. Empty fists retain no hawks.” Miles Vavasour had a reputation for meanness. He was known as a scrapegood or, as Dame Alice said, “a dry fellow who will not lose the droppings of his nose.”
“Well, ma dame, what is the reckoning?”
“Two shillings.”
“What?”
“You look more sour than wormwood. I said two shillings.”
“My doublet cost me the same!”
“It will not warm you so well, Sir Pox.”
“I can have a roast pig for eightpence, dame.”
“You may pay a penny a night for a bed with blankets and sheets, in any hostelry. Is that why you are here?”
“But two shillings!”
“If you do not like her, I have a remedy for lust. It can be put away by smelling the savour of your own shoes when they are taken off. Is that what you wish?”
The deal was done, and the child was brought into Miles’s chamber; she was wearing a blue robe trimmed with fur, and nothing else. “Well, girl,” he said, “it is not with your estate to wear such fine furs.”
“Dame Alice has been good to me, sir.”
The Clerkenwell Tales Page 14