by Ben Hopkins
“You’re not old, master.”
“I feel it. Especially today. Coming home.”
The last sunlight is brushing the ridge of the Black Forest above Offenau, the first stars are silver points in ultramarine. Venus, pale blue, gazes from her crystal sphere, offering solace to those who yearn. Rettich drinks from the shepherd’s cup, cool springwater.
“How was lambing this year?”
“Good, master. Just two stillborn. And only one ewe died.”
“Foxes, wolves?”
“No, master. Blackie keeps them guarded well.” His young hands ruffle the dog’s head, and the yellow, canine eyes close with pleasure.
“Forget ‘master.’ Call me Rettich. I used to be a shepherd boy, just like you.”
The boy smiles and turns the rabbit once again. “Won’t you be heading down, before the dark?” he asks coyly, and nods to where, far below, a bonfire burns in the village square. Faint, almost inaudible, the sound of music, dancing; an echo from a busy, more crowded, troubled world.
Rettich shrugs, and then laughs, unbridled. He, the stone-cutter, has been carrying a block of stone these last twelve years, and now, finally, he lays it down. Settles it, rests it in the summer meadows of his childhood home.
† † †
The fire has sunk to its embers, the dog stands guard. The flock’s thirteen bells sing an evening roundelay. In the tent, Rettich and Ludo lie together.
When Rettich was a boy, sometimes the elder shepherds came to his tent, and put their cocks between his legs. When he himself grew of age, they showed him how to do it too.
And he’s tried to keep it from his mind ever since, but it’s always been there, an indelible, shadowy sin. As he walked up the hill to visit his childhood pastures, he told himself he was only coming for the innocent memories of his shepherd’s life.
But inside he knew why he was here, again, after so many unsatisfying and melancholy years.
THE PAVILION
(ANNO 1241. GRETE GERBER II)
It’s six years now since we got our first Big Diocesan Commission; to make the cloth pavilion and the liveries for the Imperial Visit. Since then I’ve known no rest, but I can’t complain: money’s flowed through my hands like millrace water.
But what’s ill got is ill fated they say, and it may be just old wives’ tales, but when I think about it, a shiver runs up my back, and the hairs on my arms stand on end.
That summer, once we’d pinched ourselves to make sure the Imperial Visit Commission was real, we got straight down to work. We had our old team of weavers in the city and villages, plus the heretic whore Elise, who was still in our employ back then. I went racing round the whole wide open world, from Lenzenbach to Honau, from Rheinau to Egersheim, to supervise the girls and prepare for the fulling and the dyeing. I spent all the last pennies we had. I swear, on the last day, my flour barrel was empty and the cupboard was bare, and we’d’ve gone hungry if it hadn’t worked right.
When you think of one thing and one thing only and dream of it too and live and breathe and drink it, and then, finally, when it comes true in front of your eyes, it’s the strangest thing. We stood with the throng in the fields down by Finckweiler and watched as the Emperor, with trumpets a’droning and drums a’pounding, rode up on his white stallion. The little balding ginger dwarf! He needed a box to get down from his horse! And then the Bishop, swollen like a beer barrel, had to be carried by two men-at-arms so that he could kneel before the Emperor.
What a pair, a midget and a wallow-hog! But all Manfred and I were thinking was God forbid the pavilion will fall down God forbid the livery is wrong God forbid the fabric will tear. It was windy that day and with every gust our hearts lurched into our mouths.
Bishop and Emperor spent all day in the pavilion in discussion. They discussed the division of the Dagsburg lands, the Emperor cancelled some tariffs on goods crossing the Alps to Lombardy, and He made the Hagenburg Jews his subjects. Inheritances, Jews and Taxes. That’s what they were talking about all day in our bright and sturdy pavilion, the Bishop and the Emperor. And then they retired to their Castles—the Bishop to Haldenheim, and the Emperor to the old Staufen fort at Kronenburg.
And Manfred and me, we stood there in the field as everyone wandered off, as the servants took down the trestles and scattered the fires, as the minstrels and musicians wrapped up their lutes and flutes and as the Bishop’s kitchen boys handed out the uneaten pies to the poor.
At ringing of the Vespers bell it was just me and Manfred and the Pavilion left standing there. “Maybe the Bishop’s men will come by and take it down in the morning?” said my Manfred, and shrugged.
I laughed and kissed him, and said, “Whatever will be, let’s go home and celebrate.” On the way home we passed the Fleischmarkt and bought a suckling piglet and a barrel of Doroltzheimer from zum Creutze. We invited our neighbours and our weaving girls, and had such a revelry that the Town Watch came past to close us down. But Manfred handed each of them a tumbler of wine and a wedge of pork, and they made merry with us too until the ringing of the Matins bell.
The next day, feeling a bit tender, we wandered back out to the Finckweiler field just outside the City walls. The Pavilion was still standing there, empty, with no one around. Today, Bishop and Emperor were meeting for Mass in the Cathedral. Yesterday the Bishop bowed before the Emperor. Today the Emperor will kneel to receive the Bishop’s blessing. And then he will ride over the Alps to Italy to his endless battles with the Pope.
And the Pavilion is standing there, alone in the field, empty. Three hundred ells of best-woven cloth. “We better just . . . take it down? And store it? In case it rains?” I ventured. My husband and I looked at each other. And then we ran to get some helping hands.
Months and months passed and not a word. The first days I would jump at a knock on the door, thinking that it was the Bishop’s provost come to claim the pavilion. But soon I forgot to worry and life went on.
We hired some laid-off workers from the Cathedral site to come and re-build the backyard stables, adding shuttered windows, a proper roof, and a hearth for winter heating. We bought trestle tables and benches, kitted it out as a proper workhouse. And that was our first proper cloth atelier, with its seven busy looms.
Manfred said one day soon after the Emperor’s visit, “I’m giving the whole textile trade to you, Gretl sweet. I’ve more than enough to deal with on the river boats and the new church.” And that’s how we divided things from now on. Two trades, two concerns, and two money chests, his at the Pfennigplatz Counting House, and mine in the home in the Müllergass.
One year passed, and more. At dinner I turned to Manfred and said “Männle, you know that pavilion cloth?” And he cut me short and said “I don’t want to know.” So I took that as a “yes” to do what I wanted to do and I started to cut sections from it and sell them at ninepence a length. It was beautiful cloth—sturdy and supple and with a shine to it, perfect for an overcoat. In fact Elise made me one as a present, trimmed with red piping, I still wear it today. My Empress Coat I call it. That was the last thing Elise made me. The day she gave it to me I found out she was opening her legs to my Manfred and had her thrown out on the street.
I’d already sold half the pavilion cloth when that knock on the door actually came. I was at home resting, I’d just lost the baby; my second stillborn. Little Manfredle was playing with the puppy, the boy’s screaming and the puppy’s yapping, and then there’s a pounding at the door. The new maid, Maria, who’s ugly as a pugdog with the scabies (I choose the domestics now), goes to answer and comes back with a tall, stooping Benedictine. “Brother Hieronymus from the Treasury to see you, ma’am.”
My heart’s in my throat and I nearly bite it in half. “Sit down, Brother. Maria, let’s have some calm around here.” Maria packs off Manfredle and the puppy and the Brother looks at me, peering, like he’s short-sighted. “Eigh
teen months ago, we ordered a pavilion from you, madam, and took delivery of said pavilion.” He’s trying to speak like the Treasurer, but he’s got an upper Aargau accent, and it doesn’t work. “We paid the agreed sum, thereby fulfilling the contract. But a recent inventory of the Bishop’s household possessions revealed . . . no pavilion. Madam, do you know where it is?”
“I have no idea where it is, Brother,” I say, as calm as a cow on the cud. “We made it, delivered it and after that it is no concern of ours. How could it have gone missing?”
“It seems the Bishop’s Master of Ceremonies celebrated rather too enthusiastically on the occasion of the Emperor’s visit. He forgot to order the pavilion to be dismantled, and . . . well, we do not know what happened to it subsequently.”
That was five years ago. I had quite forgotten about the whole thing. When, now, I am suddenly summoned to a meeting with the Bishop’s Treasurer.
† † †
“Frau Gerber! Follow me.”
He is standing waiting for me on the Cathedral’s south steps, beneath the statue of King Solomon. His long, elegant hands, heavy with silver, gesture towards the church’s interior. “Let us find a place to sit.”
We walk inside. His long strides leave me tip-tapping in his wake like a Saracen wife behind her Pasha. What possessed me to wear my Empress Coat cut from the pavilion cloth I will never know, but indeed I look very fine, with my cream-and-red trimmed overcoat, my gown of night-blue Ghent, my silverthread girdle hanging low, and a soft black hood trimmed in foxfur.
The Treasurer even seems to notice my finery. As he gestures to a bench in a quiet corner, I note his eyes flick up and down my figure. Let him look at what he can’t have. I don’t mind.
I am not often in the Cathedral, and I am surprised by the crowds. It seems more a marketplace than a Church, with all its hawkers and salesmen and beggars and the business meetings going on all around.
The Nave has extended by another arch towards the West. My brother and his colleagues are working slowly, but they are working. The new Nave soars as high as three tall trees, flooded with coloured light . . . until the screen that cuts it in half, blocking out the building site.
“You will be wondering why I summoned you to this discussion?”
“I will.”
It doesn’t look like he’s about to have me hauled in front of the town executioner. He’s even attempting a friendly smile. He speaks softly. “The new church roof at Lenzenbach. Your husband’s church of St. Niklaus in the Brandplatz. Not to mention the many donations I have heard about. To the new Dominican church and nunnery in Finckweiler.”
He pauses, and I raise my eyebrows. I have no idea where this is leading. And why me, here, with him, now?
“My question, dear lady, is this. You, the merchant estate,” (he says these words as if talking of the clap or the secret name of a demon), “seem most open-handed. Most generous. Most desirous of securing your salvation by Good Works.”
I nod tentatively.
“But you do not give to . . . this splendid Cathedral. And, for a few years now, I have been wondering why.”
As well he should.
“And so, I thought, I would simply ask you.”
“My Lord, you should speak with my Husband. I am just a Woman.”
“Please do not assay false modesty with me, Frau Gerber. You are a person of achievement . . . ” I swear I even blush at that point. Compliments from a Canon! And me born with clogs on my feet.
“ . . . if only of the commercial ilk.”
I should have waited for that.
He leans towards me. “Tell me why, if you would be so kind.”
And so I tell him. And once I open that door, there’s no easy way of closing it.
“Well, why should we pay and get nothing in return? We have no say in the Cathedral, how it looks, who it is for, how it is built.”
The Treasurer raises his eyebrows. Smiles his acidic smile. I just keep going. “And look who is a Canon! Two Cardinals in Rome and three other Italians who have never been here. Or Count von Schwanenstein. A gambler, a fighter, a drunk . . . Why does he deserve an annual golden prebend from the diocese money?”
Von Zabern waves his hand. As if he’s saying Keep going, dear Lady. Hang yourself with your own rope.
“It’s our trade that keeps this City going, it’s us merchants who bring in the meat and the milk and the cheese and the wine and the thread and the fabrics, it’s we who feed and clothe and water everyone, and every second pace we take, there’s a toll to pay, a tax, a tithe. We can hardly walk from one City Gate to another without paying away all our profit in tolls and taxes. And so why should we give one farthing more than we already do? We’re not noblemen, so we can’t be canons nor town councillors. We give the money for you to play with, but we’re not allowed to throw the dice!”
Canon von Zabern looks at me and shakes his head in disbelief. “I had heard you had an insolent mouth.” He chuckles quietly. “You think, if you commoners could be Canons and Councillors, then Hagenburg would be the earthly paradise?”
“I think we could run things better.”
“Power looks so easy from the outside, dear lady. To exercise it is a burden. A complicated and challenging one.”
“Oh, is it so?”
“Tell me this,” he says, stroking his clean-shaven chin. “If you could buy a place on the Council, or a Ministerial Office, or any position of influence, how much would you pay?”
“Quite a lot.”
“I thought so.”
He straightens his back, stretches his limbs. It seems our interview has finished. “I thank you, Frau Gerber. This has been instructive.”
I am angry with myself. I had an opportunity, and all I did was grouse like a brat.
“Is there anything I can do for you, my lady? You have been helpful to me.”
I have? How? Before I know what I’m doing, my mouth is flapping away. “The Council is drawing up the charter of a Drapers’ Guild. They are talking about Master-membership of the guilds being only available to men.”
“Are they?” He frowns, looking bored. An impatient Crow in a long black robe.
“They are trying to . . . cut me out, my Lord. It is not just. If anyone in this City is a Master Draper, it is me.”
“Indeed. I will have a word with my cousin the Burgrave. Frau Gerber . . . ” He stands and bows the slightest of bows. “It has been instructive. My thanks to you.”
And he walks off, striding like the sun won’t rise tomorrow, to a small, hidden door at the side of the Choir. And he’s gone.
And I’m left alone in my corner of the Cathedral, and wondering what’s happened.
I walk outside where the autumn sun is setting. Time for home. From inside, the sounds of the Vespers chants. People stream out of the southern portal, on their way home before the Angelus bell. I look up. High above the doors, my brother’s statue, holding the sundial.
“Admiring my work?”
Rettich is at my shoulder. I turn and embrace him, happy for the surprise. Beside him, carrying his tools, a young apprentice boy, fresh-faced and jolly. He bows low, lower than is really needed. “Madam.”
Rettich presents him; “My little apprentice, Friedl. My little sister, Gretl. What brings you here, sister?”
† † †
A week later, I’ve been paying the fishmonger for the month’s fish and the butcher for the month’s meat, and I’m walking back home along the Market Quay. As usual, boats are unloading and Thelonarius Thieme is there, calculating how much money the City needs to steal from the merchants and call it “toll,” and he sees me walking past and frowning and he says, “I thought you’d be smiling, Frau Gerber, today of all days.”
And I say, “What’s there to smile about? My purse is five shillings lighter than it was an hour ago.”
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He says, “Oh, haven’t you heard?” and I say, “What?” and he says, “The new Guild of Drapers has published its statutes and they’re allowing women as Guild Masters!”
I walk away and my heart is leaping like a lamb at springtime. I will be Mistress Gerber of the Honourable Guild of Drapers! And all thanks to that Crow, Eugenius von Zabern!
I bustle my way back to the Müllergass, give ha’pennies to all the beggars waiting outside our shop, go out back to the atelier and sit in the cold sun, just dreaming of my happy future and how I’ll thank Canon Eugenius and how I’ll tell Manfred and how envious he’s going to be . . . when Manfred’s messenger boy comes tearing up from the Rhine Harbour. He’s run all the way, he’s out of breath, and his face is pale.
I pour him water from the jug, watch him drink long and deep. “Well, out with it, boy.”
“Master bids me tell you they’ve lost a whole ship.”
My heart starts thudding. Like I’ve seen a ghost. Like the Devil touched my shoulder. “A whole ship, lad? It went down?”
“No ma’am, it was attacked by river pirates. Like with the pilgrims’ boat this spring, they ran chains across the Rhine, brought the boat to ground. They took the lot, ma’am. The lot.”
That Devil’s hand, it just keeps on running up and down my back. My skin goes cold and clammy. And in my mind’s eye, what do I see? I see the damned pavilion, the pavilion I stole from the Bishop. Its white cloth and scarlet-trimmed pennants fluttering in the wind. The trumpets sounding, the drums pounding.
God has a way of Justice, and he gives with one hand. And with the other hand he takes it all away.
ANNO
1242
SCHWANENSTEIN
(ANNO 1242. BARON VOLMAR VON KRONTHAL I)
Are you Elise?”
It’s a simple enough question. I get no bloody answer. But I suppose I must look quite daunting saddled up on my charger Jerusalem. He’s a good sixteen hands and I’m no midget neither. So I dismount to look at her more closely.