The Wife of Bath had been listening at the door but now, with a candle in her hand, she made her way quietly down the staircase. Then she saw Thomas Gunter leaning against a small prie-dieu by the door; he was examining its wooden carvings of grotesques. She knew him very well. “Is it you, leech? We have no need of you tonight, you carcass bird.”
“At least, ma dame, I am no screech owl.” They both enjoyed the play of insults, in which neither ever triumphed.
“How do you, nurrit?” She had a wealth of words to express his littleness – knurl, nirb, murch, nurg – and never refrained from using them.
“Well, thank God.” He lifted his eyes to the top of the staircase. “And how does Miles?”
“Hold your tongue and say the best.” It was an ancient proverb. “And let your neighbour lie in rest.”
“I am not a carry tale, Alice. I will not nick anyone’s name. Sir Miles is under my charge, and I have a great care for him –”
“Is it so? Well, have no care at all. This smith is good. Can you hear him beating with his hammer?” She laughed. “He has a young tutty. A tuzziemuzzie.”
“A maid girl, then?”
“Rose le Pilcherer. Of this parish.”
“I warrant she is too young to be found in the catch-poll book.”
“Not too young to be fisked and ramped. Eleven years. I found her in the clipping house. Sweeping hair.”
“And you stalked her like a crane.”
“I spoke with her, and she followed me. She wants coin.”
“It is no wisdom to want a thing that is not honest.”
“How! Trolli-lolli, Master Gunter. A fool will always be teaching and never be taught. There are girls who will go behind a hedge for twopence or a sheaf of wheat. Rose will have shillings in her purse. Am I to be blamed for doing good works? Truss up your gear, and ride away.”
The Wife of Bath was as hard as London, some said, and as merry. You could no more rail against her than against the city itself. So Gunter bade farewell to her with the kiss of peace. It was not returned.
Chapter Sixteen
The Cook’s Tale
The coquina on Nuncheon Street was the largest in London; its principal chamber could hold one hundred people, and there were several rooms or “messes” where a smaller number could eat together. It was familiarly known as “Roger’s” after Roger of Ware, the cook who owned it and who still supervised the preparation of the food. He was a slim man with a small and neatly cut beard, who wore the white pie-shaped hat which was the symbol of his trade. “Everything must be scrubbed fair!” He was walking around the great kitchen beside the principal chamber. “Fair! Fair! Fair! Do you hear me, Walter?” He approached a young servant. “Let me see your hands. Have you been touching turds? Go wash! John, this skimmer needs rinsing. Do you see the scum upon it? It is not good. Not good!”
There were two fireplaces facing each other on opposite sides of the kitchen, a fish fire and a meat fire, and the combined heat of their flames was so intense that most of the workers had taken off their shirts and were working in their under-linen. So the smell of human sweat mixed with the other odours. Roger walked among them in a richly embroidered jacket, with his hose attached to it by latchets known as gadlings or harlots; he wore long and pointed shoes fashionably curved at the tip and known as cracows. His pie-shaped hat, however, turned him into what he called a “mixed medley.”
“There is white grease in the base of this skillet! Do I need to scrub everything with my own hands?” He inspected the pots and flesh-hooks, the ladles and the pestles, the plates and pans, hanging against the plastered walls. “Simkin, have you sent to the spicer’s shop?” He loved to shout over the general noise. “There is no more saffron here than in a nun’s arse!” Simkin was one of the three cooks who tended to the meats, an ill-favoured man who was said by his colleagues to have a trick of curdling milk by belching into it. He was pounding larks and pigeons in a platter bowl and paid no attention to Roger. “God forbid, Simkin, that you should hear me.” Roger wiped his fingers across the rim of a wooden bowl containing pig grease. “They say that evil manners follow the likeness of an ugly man. Is that so, Simkin?”
Simkin studied him for a moment. “I have too much business here, Master Roger, to run after saffron like some pannier woman.”
“Oh, tra-la. She answers back.” Roger was known privately by those who worked for him as Dame Durden or Old Mother Trot; he had the same sharpness of tongue, and the same ribald humour, as those old ladies from the interludes. With his pinched features and exaggeratedly mincing gait, he also resembled them.
On one long table were laid out pheasant, goose, wild fowl, brawn, pork, bacon and tripe; some meats were already turning on the spit, together with the head of a boar and a side of venison. A large cauldron stood over one part of the fire, its three legs planted firmly in the burning embers. An elderly man was drawing out pieces of meat with a flesh-hook, as he had done for thirty years; he had worked in this kitchen long before Roger had come here. There had been a cookshop on this site for more than a hundred years, testifying if nothing else to the fixed habits of the London population.
Thick waves of smell, meat upon meat, were mingled with the sharper savours of pike and of tench; the musty odour of eel was mixed with the tang of pig’s flesh, the quickness of herring with the slowness of oxen. It was point and counterpoint taken out of a songbook of smell. The kitchen was a little city of smells. There was not one person who passed the cookshop who did not perceive the differences between them, who did not distinguish between the savour of beam and of perch, of leeks and of beans, of green figs and of cabbage. The savour of cooked food, fish or flesh, permeated the stones of the neighbourhood; the area was haunted by dogs of every description, which were sometimes killed by the arrows or slingshots of the apprentices and flung into the ditch at the end of the street. The name of the street itself, “nuncheon,” signified a meal or repast taken in the afternoon.
“This is the man who started to build and could not finish!” Roger was watching one of his cooks, who was trying unsuccessfully to blend chopped pigs’ livers, milk, hard-boiled eggs and ginger. “God may send a man good meat, but the devil may send an evil cook to destroy it. Is that not so, Myttok?”
The young cook did not look up from his board, but he cut a little more deeply into the ginger. “These livers, Master Roger, are so hard that I might play ball with them. When did you go to market?”
“I see that it must be my own fault. Bless me, Mary, for I have sinned.” The heat and the noise of the kitchen always infected their words; anyone coming upon them, from the street, would believe them to be engaged in continual ferocious argument.
“Well, master, fair words will only fatten your head.”
“You should know, whoreson. Your arse is as big as two barrels.”
Walter, the knave of the kitchen, ran through the passage and put his hand to his mouth in order to make the sound of a bugle. “They are come! They are come!” The first customers had arrived for their noon meat, and had pulled off their caps. Walter had already set the tables. The places had been prepared with trencher, napkin and wooden spoon; every man had his own loaf of bread and cup laid out before him, together with a bowl of salt for each pair. On each table was a small iron lantern with horn windows, to be lit on dark days, although the coquina itself was bright enough. Its walls had been plastered and decorated with scenes of hunting and hawking; there were words coming out of the mouths of the huntsmen, such as “sa cy avaunt!,” “so ho!” and “ware! ware!” The red clay floor was strewn with fresh rushes.
As Roger walked into the chamber to welcome the first arrivals, he was surrounded by the familiar and friendly language of greeting. “What do you?” “How is it with you?” “How do you fare?” “God give you good day.” These phrases were a form of perpetual renewal, so that each day was joined to others in the line of harmony. Roger took their cloaks and gowns from them, nodding to strangers and
addressing familiar acquaintances as “sir gully-gut” or “sir lick-dish” or “sir glutton.” As the bells of St. Denis rang twelve the room was filled with calls for boiled beef in cloves and fried almonds, mussels in pike broth, pigs’ ears boiled in wine, partridges roasted with ginger, fried eels in sugar and mackerel in mint sauce. In the kitchen the cooks were making plates of fruit and vegetables, all boiled or stewed; it was considered unhealthy to eat anything which had not been cooked. The customers ate with their own knives off plates of pewter; they drank out of cups made of leather or wood or tin. There was also a voider on each table, for all the slops and crumbs which would be distributed by Roger to the beggars outside the door.
The conversation was loud and coarse and animated. Who had heard news of the king? There were many rumours and false reports exchanged between the tables, as well as laments about the condition of the time. It was known for certain only that Henry Bolingbroke, with Richard II as his prisoner, had recently arrived in Dunstable. He had proclaimed to the crowd from the clock tower there that he would arrive in London on the first day of the new month. The first of September was the Feast of the Twelve Martyrs, and the customers in Roger’s coquina spoke of a thirteenth. Henry had a violent ambition for the throne. “The change of season may make us all sad and sick,” Hanekyn Fytheler said to Hugyn Richokson.
“I pray God send us a merry world,” Hugyn replied.
“I do not say to the contrary. How does your sister do?”
“Well. Never better.”
At the next table Roger of Ware himself was examining a jewelled box handed to him by Henry Huttescrane. “What is it worth?”
“You shall have it cheap, Roger.”
“I smell a beard.”
“No, I swear not. It is out of Afric.”
The physician, Thomas Gunter, was eating with Emnot Hallyng, the clerk; they were both members of the Ancient Order of Men Who Like to Stroke Cats. The title may have had some literal connotation but “to stroke a cat” meant also to approach a problem or conundrum in a quiet and amicable spirit. The question they had been discussing the previous evening had been, “If Adam had never known Eve, would all humankind be male?” During the course of these proceedings Gunter had asked Hallyng to eat with him on the following day. He did not know that the clerk was one of the predestined men, but he enjoyed both his company and his conversation on abstruse matters. In fact he had been telling Gunter about his cousin’s encounter with certain supposed spirits in Camomile Street; to which the physician had replied, it were possible that shapes, whether corporeal or incorporeal, might be conjured forth from powers which were neither earth nor water, fire nor air, nor any creature made from them. He recalled the words of the monk, Gervase of Winchester, before his sudden death, which were, “Who is there knocking?” There were many deep in mawmettrie who cast plots and said the night-spells. “Well enough, master clerk. There are so many subtle passings and dissimulations that I say no more. How is your cheese?”
“Too dry,” Emnot replied. “I like Essex cheese, not this Sussex cheese.”
“Have no more then. Dry cheese stops the liver and engenders the stone. If it lies long enough it makes a stinking breath and a scurvy skin.”
“But I am hungry.”
“Take some butter instead. You know the sentence. Butter is gold in the morning, silver at noon and lead at night. Try some silver.”
“You never leave off your trade, Thomas Gunter. You are bound to the stake.”
“It is for your good. Butter is best for children while they are growing and old men when they are declining. You are in the middle way. Eat butter first and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past. Have you heard that verse?”
“I have heard that a good cook is half a physician. That seems to be your theme.”
“And a good physician is half a cook. I cook essences and qualities over the fire. As no one will eat night-old vegetables, so no one will trust a cure that has not lately been mixed. Why, the other day –”
“Stint your clap, leech.” Emnot said this in good humour; it was the licence of the coquina. “My ears ache with your drasty speech.”
“For the earache I have a very good ointment.”
“No more.”
“Better unfed than untaught, master clerk.”
“I said, no more. Do you have any news that does not come by rote?”
The physician leaned forward. “Only that the nun is about to be challenged.”
“For what?”
“For prophesying against the king.”
“Everyone now prophesies against him, Thomas. She will not be so wrong if she fears his ending.”
“The city will take her, be sure of it. They wish to keep her silent until they know what will befall. They are for Henry, if Henry wishes to be king. They will roll their dice with the winner. But you know, Emnot, I have more news than that.” The physician sat closer, and savoured the odour of the clerk’s breath. “May I speak in secrecy?”
“You may.”
“You know of the five wounds?”
“Of our Saviour?”
“No. Of our city.”
It had begun to rain, and Emnot Hallyng allowed his eyes to settle upon the open doorway; the rain slanted across the prospect of a horse and cart standing idly by the side of the road.
“I think,” Gunter said, “there will be wild fire at St. Michael le Querne. And then later at St. Giles in the Fields.”
Emnot pretended to cough upon the piece of Sussex cheese, which gave him the opportunity to put a cloth up to his face. How could Gunter know about the preparations of the predestined men? He was no part of their assembly and, as far as Emnot Hallyng knew, was acquainted with no other member. Could it be some black art that had given him the skill to peer into their conventicles in Paternoster Row?
“How is all this known to you? How?”
“A poor summoner spoke to me of some arrow pointed into the heart of the city. Of secret men and hidden ways. Then I learned further from one much more exalted.”
“Who was this?”
Gunter looked around at those eating in the coquina, to ensure that no one could overhear him. “What I say, Emnot, must be declared to nobody in life.” He then informed the clerk of his dinner with Miles Vavasour, and of the notes he had found scrawled on the back of a legal parchment; he described, too, the clandestine meeting of the London notables in the round tower.
Emnot Hallyng had no need to feign surprise. He was alarmed, and horrified, by what Gunter had told him. How could these meetings – of alderman and under-sheriff, knight and sergeant – be connected with the actions of the predestined men? Miles Vavasour was not one of the foreknown, and yet he had written down something about the fire soon to visit the church in Bladder Street. How could such a high man of law have foreknowledge of a great crime – that is, of felony and sacrilege – without making any attempt to forestall it? Thomas Gunter had whispered of secret bands and concealed associates, but the physician had no knowledge of the predestined men. Gunter knew only that the guardians of the city were meeting in private conclave under cover of night and darkness. Then Emnot repeated the question to himself. How did any outsider know of Exmewe’s preparations? Emnot Hallyng felt himself to be in a maze, and he suspected that great danger was already lurking there. He believed that he and his companions were free in every sense, and that they carried within themselves the seeds of divine life, but that vision had acquired the darker vestures of human fear and suspicion.
Now the meal was over. The clerk and the physician took cardamom seeds, from a bowl, to sweeten their breath. Then they walked over to Roger’s stables. “I am afraid,” Gunter was saying as he shielded himself with his cloak from the rain, “that ignorance, the mother of error, has blinded and deceived certain persons.”
“It seems so, Master Gunter. God keep you in His care.”
“I commend you to God, Emnot Hallyng. Ride hard through this wind and rain.”
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Roger of Ware was standing at the door of his coquina, murmuring “God give you good day” or “May God be with you” to each departing guest.
“It was fine meat, Roger.”
“Sir, by God, you are welcome.” Hanekyn Fytheler had drunk too much, and Roger helped him across the cobbles to his horse. Then he went back into the cookshop, wiping his hands. “God save this fair company and its farts! God give them good turds!” He began to inspect the premises. “Who is this that has thrown his bones under the table? Who was at this table, Walter?”
“Four velvet hoods from the Swithin guild.”
“When men are fools, four is three too many. Did you belch in their faces, Walter? Did you blow your nose on their napkins? Did you pick your putrefied teeth?”
“No, sir.”
“More the pity.” The servers were putting the stale bread trenchers and the leavings into the alms-dishes. “Did you see Goodman Rochford? His hose was so tight that I could see his horrible member. It was like some swollen hernia. I almost fainted away.”
“In his hind part,” Walter added, “all the guns were blasting. It made a terrible stink in this part of the room.”
“It is a foul world, Walter. There are some ox-tongues left here. Take them up for supper. And sponge your jacket. I spy fat upon it.” He stopped and bent down in a corner. “Jesus, someone has pissed here. Fetch a bucket. May God’s curse be upon him!”
Walter laughed, and went out whistling “Double me this burden.”
Roger sighed, and took from the pocket of his jacket the small jewelled box. It had come from Africa, according to Henry Huttescrane, where men dwell in trees and eat the flesh of great white worms, where women have the heads of hounds, and all the people have eight toes upon each foot. In truth it was a world of wonders.
Chapter Seventeen
The Squire’s Tale
Some children were singing at the foot of the Cross in Cheapside; they came from the neighbouring streets and by unspoken consent gathered here in the late afternoon, where they played top and penny-prick. They engaged in tugs of war and in the game of pig on the back. Some would pull their hoods over their faces to take part in “I Tell On Who Strikes Me.” Others would bring their toy horses, or their lead images of knights in armour. They formed a circle, holding hands, and chanted the old verse:
The Clerkenwell Tales Page 15