Pilgrimage of Death

by Sally Spencer

  Was I, an esquire and a justice of the peace, in truth capable of reacting to an insult with violence? And if I were, would not a lesser man than me – a man such as the reeve most certainly was – have been spurred on to even greater violence by an insult to his uncertain dignity?

  In other words, was it not possible that the reeve had killed the miller in revenge for the miller’s lewd suggestion that all old men and all carpenters – and the reeve unquestionably fitted into both of these classes – were bound, by the very nature of the way things, to be cuckolded, sooner or later, by their wives?

  I closed my eyes and pictured the thin, reedy carpenter with a red-hot ploughshare in his hands. Yes, it was possible that a sour, bitter man like him could have slain the miller, I conceded – and more than likely that he would have taken a twisted pleasure in seeing his victim die in the way he had. But as I had established earlier – at least to my own satisfaction - he could not possibly have done the deed alone. And who, in our caravan, would have been willing to help him?

  Certainly, he could never have expected any assistance from one of the better class of pilgrims, which meant that he would have been forced to delve among the dregs for assistance in his murderous intent.

  Would the drunken cook have given him such assistance?

  Or the scab-covered summoner?

  It did not seem likely that either of them would take such a risk, except they were to receive some considerable reward in return for their efforts, and the reeve did not give the impression of one inclined to be bountiful. Indeed, if ever a man seemed incapable of opening his fist again once he closed it around money, then that man was the estate manager.

  With the immediate circumstances of the miller’s death so much at the forefront of my mind, I had not given a thought all morning to the men who had been following us the day before, but now I did. I glanced over my shoulder, and there they were – reunited and keeping the same the same distance between themselves and us as they had maintained since we left Southwark.

  Could they have killed the miller? I wondered. But why should they even have wished to? And if they had, indeed, been responsible for the murder, why were they still following us now that they had achieved their objective?

  *

  The man of law reached the end of his tiresome tale, and our host, after lavishing more praise on it than I considered it deserved, turned his attention to the poor parson.

  ‘The time has come to tell your tale, sir priest,’ he said, full of good humour. ‘And by God’s bones, I’ll wager that a man as learned as you has within him the power to tell a fine one.’

  ‘From where came such a blasphemous tongue as yours?’ the parson asked the host sternly.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ the host demanded, amazed.

  ‘Christ died once for your sins,’ the parson told him. ‘Must you crucify Him again with your words? For do you not know that with each and every curse you nail His sweet hands to the wooden cross anew?’

  The host’s good spirits melted away as quickly as will butter when thrown into a raging fire.

  ‘By God’s dignity, I’ll not have you accusing me of impiety, sir priest’ Harry Bailey said. ‘Indeed I will not. No Lollard that has ever drawn breath will put me in my place.’

  I had not considered the possibility that the parson was a Lollard until then, but now that I did, I began to see it was more than likely that a Lollard was just what he was. For was it not from the ranks of such earnest men as him – men who were pained to see their superiors in their bishops’ palaces living off the fat of the land while the poor they themselves lived amongst struggled to survive – that Wycliffe drew his support? Was it not the poor parsons with principles, rather than the plump cardinals with none, who preached the idea that if a man’s soul were pure, then he needed no priest to help him speak to God?

  Our host, never a man who had been noted for his tact, was still venting his anger on the parson.

  ‘Be warned,’ he told the other pilgrims, ‘this man means not to entertain you - as is the intent of this merry contest - but to preach at you. Understand, before it is too late, that he will never be at rest until he has led you onto the same path of heresy as he treads himself.’

  ‘Then he must not be allowed to speak,’ said the shipman. ‘His place should, instead, be filled by a honest, straightforward man like myself.’

  To paint this shipman as honest and straightforward is as difficult a feat of imagination as to picture the miller ascending directly into his heavenly reward. The truth was that I had studied the man the previous evening, and it had taken me little time to decide that his roguery was blacker than his beard – that he was not so much a merchant who had taken his business onto the sea as a highwayman who had abandoned horse for ship.

  Whatever my views on the man, his offer to tell his tale was most warmly accepted by our host, who would rather endure a dozen sailor’s tall tales than another single rebuke from the stern and upright parson.

  The shipman’s tale concerned a merchant, the merchant’s wife, and a monk who pretended, for his own devious purposes, to be the merchant’s cousin. The gist of the tale is that the monk borrows money from the merchant and gives it to the merchant’s wife in order that he might bed her. When the merchant asks for the return of his loan, the monk says he has already given it to the wife, thus, at the end of the tale, the merchant has been both cuckolded and robbed.

  Neither our merchant nor our monk looked pleased at the way the story unfolded, and I wondered briefly – and, I admit, whimsically - whether the shipman would wake up in the middle of the night to find a red-hot poker being shoved up his arsehole.

  ‘That was what I call a good tale,’ said our host, who seemed not to have noticed the effect it had had on some of his travelling companions. ‘May bad luck follow such a monk, who not only turned the merchant into an ape,’ he paused to chuckle, ‘but also put his own ape inside the merchant’s wife! Well, let that be a lesson to all you husbands here. Keep your doors well bolted against men in holy orders, lest they cause holy disorder in your very marriage bed.’

  The monk’s frown deepened, and I wondered – still whimsical – if our host, too, had put himself in the running for a poker up the back passage.

  The host glanced around, and as his gaze settled on the prioress all lechery disappeared from his face and was replaced by expression which would have done a virgin credit.

  ‘I hesitate to ask you to tell a tale, my lady prioress, for fear it would discomfort or embarrass you,’ he said, as meekly as a maiden. ‘But should you be willing to share your wisdom with us, I assure you that we would gladly listen and be instructed.’

  The prioress smiled coyly. ‘If you would gladly listen, then I would gladly tell,’ she said.

  Looking at her, I found a secret smile coming to my lips. If I had been asked beforehand what manner of tale this prioress would tell, I would have wagered - from the airs and graces of the woman herself - that it would concern gentility and courtly love. But had I placed such a wager, I would have lost my money. For while the story that she told was one of sickly sentimentality, it was also one well suited to a true daughter of the church – though not, perhaps, so well suited to a woman who professed a degree of Christian charity.

  There was once a town in Asia, she began. Though its inhabitants were, for the most part, Christian, there was also a Jewish ghetto, for usury was necessary part of life and who - but the vile Jews - would involve themselves in such a filthy business as money lending.

  Through this ghetto a small Christian boy passed on his way to school every morning. Though he was only seven years old he was a very devout child, claimed the prioress - who had plainly never had any seven-year-old children of her own.

  The boy so worshipped the Blessed Virgin Mary that he would sing O Alma Redemptoris, a hymn of praise to her, wherever he went, the prioress continued. Such goodness naturally drove the Devil into a black rage, and in order to put a stop
to it he turned to the Jews.

  ‘The Jews?’ I said, before I could stop myself. ‘The Devil turned to the Jews?’

  Yes, since the Jews were, by their very nature, the Devil’s natural helpers, explained the prioress, who, since all the Jews of England had been expelled by our king’s great-great-grandfather, knew as little about them as she knew about young children.

  These Jews, after very little persuasion on Satan’s part, agreed to hire an assassin, the prioress continued. This evil man – naturally enough, a Jew himself – hid in a dark alley, and when the boy approached he slit his throat and threw the body in a convenient cess-pit.

  The boy’s mother, stricken with grief and worry, goes searching for her child. She passes this same cess-pit, and despite his ripped-out throat (and the fact that he is floating in shit) the boy starts to sing O Alma, and continues to sing it until his mother finds him. He tells his mother what has happened, and the Jews are arrested and taken before the Provost.

  ‘And he, that goodly man, condemned those vile Jews to death – condemned them to be torn apart by wild horses, and afterwards to be hanged,’ the prioress said with great relish.

  Once justice has been served, the holy woman continued, the boy is allowed to die and ascends into heaven into the waiting arms of the Virgin.

  Having reached the end of her tale, she simpered and looked around to see the effect it had had upon her listeners. She must have been well-pleased by the expressions of conventional piety which gazed back at her, and was probably not perceptive enough to realise that there were a few of us, at least, who felt that that if the boy had been a little less eager to show off his own piety in hostile territory, he might have lived to sing another day.

  Our host, however, was the kind of man for whom such stories are specifically constructed, and was much moved. Yet such a man as he, so easily moved, usually finds it easy to move on, too, and soon he was once more the fellow who had laughed at the miller’s antics and warned us to be cautious of monks after the shipman’s tale.

  ‘You, my good sir! Why are you staring at the ground with such concentration?’ he asked. ‘Are you hoping perhaps to find a hare down there for your supper?’

  My heart sank as I realised he was talking to me, though I had always known that this moment would eventually arrive.

  ‘Answer me, sir,’ the host called out. ‘What ails you?’

  I raised my head. ‘I was thinking of the poor child who so loved the Virgin that it cost him his life,’ I lied, hoping that this would be enough to make the host pass over me and select one of my fellows as the next story teller.

  Alas, it was not to be. ‘We are all sad of soul,’ the host said, ‘and that is why we need a man like you to tell us a jolly tale which will raise our spirits.’

  There was plainly no way to get out of it. ‘I will do as well as I am able,’ I promised.

  *

  Those who have no experience in any particular art will always believe that mastery of it is simple, while those with just a little skill will always seek out others with even less, in order to convince themselves that their own mastery is perfect. Thus, there were those among the pilgrims who could pass as fairer tellers of tales than they really were. But I am a professional – a true master of my craft - and therein lay my difficulty. For put a bow in the hands of a skilled archer, and it is hard for him to miss his target, even if he wills it - and ask a poet to tell a story and he will find it difficult not to weave his spell. Yet if my disguise were to be maintained – if I were to hold my position as a largely unnoticed observer – it would not do to mark myself out as a man expert in the use of words.

  I did the best I could, choosing to tell a story which my fellow poets would recognise as a parody of bad poetry, but which I hoped the pilgrims would see as bad poetry itself.

  My plan worked! I had only completed four verses when our impatient host interrupted me.

  ‘Enough!’ Harry Bailey said. ‘You’re wearying me to death with your illiterate stuff. Your frowtsy story fair makes my ears ache.’

  ‘Why interrupt me when you gave the others leave to tell their entire tales?’ I demanded, sounding cut to the quick - and beginning to enjoy myself. ‘I’m doing the best I can.’

  ‘The best you can!’ repeated our host, never a man to mince his words. ‘I wouldn’t give you one my turds as payment for your dreary rhymes. For God’s sake, abandon rhyme altogether, and give us something in prose – a tale with so much interest in itself that it will amuse us even when told by a bungler like you.’

  I nodded meekly, and having established the reputation I desired, I did indeed tell a story in prose. It was a moral tale full of weighty argument and high principles. The heroine was a prudent woman who – taking a leaf out of the sergeant at law’s book – I called Dame Prudence. And the tale served its purpose, pleasing the host and my fellow pilgrims well-enough, while still confirming to them all that I was something of a dullard.

  ‘I’d gladly give a barrel of ale to have my wife hear that story,’ the host said enthusiastically. ‘Prudence, indeed! She – my wife, that is - doesn’t know the meaning of the word. It only takes the gentlest of slights – even if it be unintended – for her to demand that I defend her honour to the death. And if I plead caution, as good Dame Prudence does in your fine tale, I’m called nothing but a milksop or a cowardly ape!’

  I hid my smile, as did my fellow travellers, for our host, though amusing us, was not doing so intentionally. In fact, he was speaking in deadly earnest. And no doubt the others reflected, as I did myself, that for a man with a wife such as he appeared to have, this short pilgrimage must have come as a blessed relief.

  By chance, I had just finished my tale as we were drawing level with a country inn.

  ‘Shall we break our journey here and have a bite to eat, my good friends?’ the host inquired, putting aside all thoughts of the dragon waiting for him at home.

  My companions all agreed that we should. And I, myself, was more than glad of a pause, for it would afford me the opportunity to study at closer hand the two men who, I was now fully convinced, were following our party.

  Day the Third

  Afternoon

  My plan concerning the strangers who were following us was a simple one. I would stand by the door of the inn, watch them pass, and try to ascertain what manner of men they were.

  And if they did not pass?

  If they came to halt as we had done, and entered the inn?

  Then it was my purpose to follow them inside, to sit as close to them as was possible, and, from their conversation, to learn as much of their business as my keen ears could take in.

  What I might have uncovered I will never now know, for while my mind was filled with curiosity, my body – so it soon became apparent – was filled with something else entirely.

  In short, a grumbling which had started in my gut while I was mounted on my horse became a sharper pain the moment I climbed off. It was my bowels which spoke, informing me that I must give them some relief soon - and whether I did it in public or private was a matter of pure indifference to them.

  I spent the next half-hour sitting, in some discomfort, on the thunder-box at the back of the inn. By the time I emerged again, pale and sweating from my exertions, the pilgrims had already begun to mount their horses, and though the two young men may have visited the inn while I groaned and strained in the darkness, by then there was neither hide nor hair of them to be seen.

  *

  The monk, it was, who served as the next target for our genial host’s barbed sense of humour.

  ‘However did a fine figure of a man like you ever come to be in holy orders?’ Harry Bailey demanded of him. ‘Who was he who ordained that the strong seed which seeps from your manly frame should fall on barren ground? By God, if I were Pope I’d see to it that every mighty cleric like you took a wife - if not for the good of yourselves, then for the good of the nation. Look at all us laymen. In comparison to you, we’r
e nothing but shrimps. And we all know that weak trees make sorry seedlings, do we not?’

  ‘Good host…’ the knight interrupted.

  But it was clear that the host was, as always, determined to have his say. ‘Look at the children that we poor laymen produce,’ he continued. ‘How slender and feeble they are. Is it any wonder that wives consort behind our backs with monks and friars? It is only in their arms that our women can hope to find the honest coin to pay the debts of Venus, for, as is widely known, we laymen hardly have a groat between us.’

  Several of the party chuckled out loud at this, and the monk himself did not seem to take much offence.

  ‘Would you have a tale from me now, good host?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye,’ Harry Bailey replied. ‘And make it one with the same fire in its belly as you have burning in yours.’

  But the monk did not deliver what the host had pleaded from him. Instead he served on us a string of short tragedies - beginning even before the creation of man, with the fall of Lucifer. I know not why he chose to do this. Mayhap he felt it was unseemly for a monk to tell a tale with spirit. Or mayhap he considered it his duty to make us sinners suffer with his accounts of the downfall and misery which can strike even the most favoured of men. Whatever his aim, his list of woes seemed endless, and not content to dwell on the suffering of those in the Bible, he had soon stepped out, like a bold adventurer, into the miseries of Ancient Greece.

  Perhaps he would still have been telling those tales to us even now - as we sat there, skeletons on our skeleton horses, pretending to listen – had not the knight intervened.

  ‘No more, good sir,’ this warrior of Christ exclaimed as the monk expounded on the downfall of Croesus. ‘You are no doubt right in all you say, but a little tragedy is more than enough for most of us. For my part, I delight more to hear of the opposite to tragedy – of men born to lowly estate who yet manage to rise to great heights.’