‘I’ll have some to tell about friars, too,’ the summoner roared back.
And that, for the moment, was the end of it.
*
The wife of Bath’s tale was less scandalous than her preamble had been. The friar’s, which followed, told of a summoner who the Devil dragged to hell, and the summoner, in response, told of a greedy friar, who, hoping to steal a dying man’s fortune, ending up with the nothing more than to have the man in question fart on his hand. The merchant rounded off the day’s storytelling with the tale of a young woman who cuckolded her older husband and got away with it.
It had not been, on the whole, a successful afternoon for entertainment, and none of the stories had come near, in my opinion, to winning the prize. Yet from my own point of view, and from my own particular concerns, I was well satisfied. As we rode into Ospringe towards dusk I reflected that only in the pardoner’s tale had there been talk of violent death. And thus - if the franklin were right in his thinking - it was only the pardoner who need fear not waking up the following morning.
Day the Fourth
Evening
I found an excuse to be alone with the franklin as soon as we had stabled our horses.
‘What is your plan?’ I asked the white-haired landowner. ‘You do have a plan, do you not?’
The franklin nodded. ‘Yes, I have a plan,’ he said. ‘The miller died from the thrust of a red-hot poker, the prioress had her throat slit. Such events had previously occurred in their tales.’
‘I would be a fool not to know that,’ I told him.
‘Death came in two forms in the pardoner’s tale,’ the franklin continued. ‘First as a dagger to the heart, and then as poison, but it seems both unlikely and unnecessary that the pardoner will be both poisoned and stabbed. Therefore, it must be one or the other.’
My dislike for this franklin, with his careful, pedantic explanations, was growing stronger every time we talked. Yet at the same time as my distaste sharpened, so did the realisation grow that he was my best ally available, and I had therefore little choice but to stick with him.
‘Have you understood all that?’ the franklin asked.
‘The poison or the dagger,’ I repeated, as if I really were the village idiot he seemed to take me for.
‘Exactly,’ the franklin agreed. ‘Now in the tale, the stabbing comes before the poisoning, but in the case of the pardoner it is more likely that if poison is to used, it will come earlier than the stabbing would have done.’
‘In other words,’ I said, ‘the murderer is more likely to poison him at supper and stab him in the night than he is to stab him at supper and poison him in the night?’
The franklin, missing the tone of my words completely, smiled encouragingly. ‘Well done, Thatcher,’ he said.
‘And how do we propose to stop either of those things happening?’ I asked him, biting back all of the barbed comments which I found were flooding into my mind.
The franklin smiled again, complacently this time - and I felt the urge to shake him until his teeth rattled.
‘As far as a stabbing goes, we will keep a watch much as we did last night,’ he said. ‘But,’ he allowed a significant pause, ‘there will be one big – one very big – difference tonight.’
‘And what might that be?’ I asked, playing the role of his dupe, as he clearly expected me to.
‘Last night we were in the gallery, watching everything that was going on,’ the franklin said. ‘You remember that, do you not?’
‘Yes, I remember it.’
‘I do not think that the murderer actually intended to commit any of his vile acts yesternight. Why should he have, when no tales had been told? But – and this is the point, Thatcher – he could not have done so even if he had wished to, because we were so very much in evidence.’
‘Yes, even if there was only the slightest possibility of a murder, that was the right thing to do,’ I said.
‘Perhaps so,’ the franklin agreed, off-handedly. ‘But the fact is that it got us no closer to uncovering the killer. We will not make the same mistake tonight. We will be there, but we will be hidden, and thus he will think there is nothing to impede him from carrying out his bloody homicide. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘I think I may have just about grasped it,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘But what about earlier in the evening?’
‘Earlier in the evening?’ the franklin repeated, puzzled.
‘There is no point in preventing him from being stabbed if he has already been poisoned,’ I explained.
‘A good point,’ the franklin agreed. ‘A very good point. We must watch him carefully at supper, to make sure that if anyone slips him poison, we will see who has done it.’
‘You mean, we must watch him carefully to see that he is not poisoned at all?’ I suggested.
‘Isn’t that what I said?’ the franklin asked irritably.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I agreed.
But it seemed to me that it hadn’t been what he’d said at all – it seemed to me, to be truthful – as if the franklin was far more interested in being thought extraordinarily clever for catching the murderer than he was in preventing anyone else from being killed.
*
The franklin and I agreed that it would look suspicious if we both joined the rogues’ table that night. Yet one of us had to be at the table, in order to ensure that the pardoner was not poisoned, and since the landowner seemed far more at home in formulating plans than he did in executing them, it was left to me to make the approach just before supper was served.
It would be painting a false picture for my reader to say that I was welcomed with open arms. In truth, my arrival was greeted by suspicion from all of those gathered there, though it was left to the carbuncular summoner to put those suspicions into words.
‘We are indeed honoured that you should wish to grace our board with your presence,’ the scabby man said. ‘Yet I cannot but wonder why you should choose to grace it now, when the pilgrimage is almost over.’
‘Might a man not choose to sit with his fellow travellers without his motives being questioned?’ I asked.
‘A man might choose to do many things, but it is a rare fellow indeed who will abandon his old habits,’ the summoner replied.
‘A man who sips from only one cup for the whole of his life is a dullard indeed,’ I countered.
The pardoner nodded. ‘True,’ he said. ‘Speaking for myself, I have always tried to sip from as many different cups as possible.’
And then he giggled, and gave the summoner a sideways glance.
Taking the pardoner’s words for as good an invitation as I was likely to be offered, I pulled up a stool and sat down. The serving wenches brought us food and drink, and I watched carefully to make sure that the pardoner partook of nothing which was not also partaken of by the summoner, the reeve and the manciple. Personally, I ate and drank as little as I could without drawing attention to myself, for there was just a possibility that the murderer might be so eager to kill the pardoner that he would be willing to poison the rest of the table as well.
Though on previous evenings the rogues had made a great clamour while they were eating, the meal that night was consumed in semi-silence. And since I was forced to accept the fact that I was the cause of that silence, I had little choice, if I wished them to speak – which both as a writer and an investigator, I did – but to be the engine which drove the conversation.
‘I had not really thought about it until you mentioned all the churches you have visited,’ I said to the pardoner, ‘but there can be few men who see as much as of the country as you do.’
‘That is true,’ the pardoner agreed. ‘My work takes me to all corners of the kingdom. Even tinkers see less of England than I do.’
‘They may see less, but they are of more use in the places they do see,’ the summoner said, sneering again from the corner of his scabby mouth.
‘And pray, what leads you to that conclu
sion?’ the pardoner asked.
‘Simply that theirs is honest work, and yours is not,’ the summoner replied. ‘They claim to be able to mend pails – and do so. You claim to be able mend souls – but if souls were buckets, they would still leak once you had dealt with them.’
I found myself wondering - not for the first time - about the relationship between the summoner and the pardoner. Often, in public, they seemed to dislike each other intensely, yet when it came to bedtime they always left the common room together.
‘I said that tinkers have more use,’ the summoner repeated, unwilling to let such a good line of attack fall away unnoticed. ‘For they claim to be able to mend pails and…’
‘You are wrong to say that I do not mend souls,’ the pardoner interrupted him - and if he had taken offence, it certainly did not show in his voice. ‘I have no interest in their souls, as I have already freely confessed. I care not, once they have handed over their money to me, whether their souls are saved or go ablackberrying. Yet because I am skilled at my work, I do more good than a score of well-meaning preachers who do not have my talent.’
‘What do the people you meet around the country think about the king?’ I asked him.
‘The king?’ the pardoner repeated. A puzzled look appeared on his face, but it was more for comic effect than because he was genuinely surprised. ‘The king, you say? Do we have a king in this country of ours? I had thought that all we had was a mouth which sat on a throne, and said whatever words the Duke of Gloucester wished it to say.’
It was treasonable talk, but, for all that, it was nonetheless accurate. I reminded myself that though the pardoner cut a grossly ridiculous figure, he should not be under-rated, for he probably had more brains than the rest of the table could muster between them - which made it all the more strange that he should have misjudged the situation so badly at the end of his tale that afternoon.
Why, I asked myself, when he had had the pilgrims in the palm of his hand, had he spoiled the effect by trying to sell them relics which he had already admitted were fakes?
Had he been drunk?
Or had there been some other, subtler motive behind it?
I turned my gaze to the other tables. The good woman of Bath was sitting at the ‘professional’ board, as she had the previous evening, but she was not gazing longingly at the squire. Instead, she was, but looking directly – and with frank curiosity - at the rogues’ table.
Directly – and with frank curiosity - at me!
Unable to stand such open scrutiny for long, I turned my attention quickly to the clerical table. In the Tabard, there had been eight sitting at it, including myself. Now I had moved on, the prioress was dead, and the monk and the friar were absent for reasons of their own, so the only the nuns’ priest and his three adoring ‘Madame Pertelotes’ remained.
The summoner stood up and farted loudly. ‘I am going up to my bed,’ he said.
‘So soon?’ the manciple asked, surprised.
‘So soon,’ the summoner agreed, not looking at him.
‘What, man? Go to your bed while there is still strong red wine left to be drunk?’
‘All the more for you,’ the summoner growled.
‘Are you ill?’ the manciple asked. ‘Have you been stricken down with the ague?’
‘You are not my priest, and you are not my doctor,’ the summoner said angrily. ‘A pox on all your questions.’
And after cutting a final fart to leave as a memory once he had departed, he strode rapidly to the door.
‘More wine!’ the pardoner called out to the serving wench.
So he intended to stay, even after his ‘friend’ had gone. But where had the summoner gone? I wondered. Would he head straight to his bedchamber, as he had said he intended? Or did he have other plans?
I looked across at the franklin’s table, and gave him a quick nod of the head which I hoped would indicate that he must keep watch over the pardoner while I was not there. Then, after the franklin had nodded back, I rose to my feet and followed the summoner out off the door.
I stepped into the tavern yard. Several torches were burning in wall brackets around the yard, and though these flickering flames still left many dark corners, there was certainly enough light to see anyone walking towards the steps which led to the bedchambers. Yet there was no sign of the summoner.
Perhaps he had already crossed the yard and was nearly at his chamber, I told myself.
I came to a stop and listened intently, but though I could hear the horses snorting in the stable, there was not even a hint of the summoner’s footfalls on the upper gallery.
‘You expected me to follow you out here, didn’t you?’ said a voice behind me.
I spun around and found myself facing the widow of Bath.
‘Follow me?’ I repeated stupidly. ‘No, madam, I assure you that I had not the slightest inkling that you would.’
‘Pray call me Alison, not ‘madam’,’ the five-times widow said. She gave a deep chuckle. ‘Though, the Lord knows, there are those who have called me ‘madam’ enough.’
‘It … it is quite chilly out here, is it not, madam,’ I said.
‘Alison,’ the widow insisted.
‘It is quite cold out here, is it not, Alison,’ I said.
‘I do not find it so,’ the widow replied.
As she spoke she advanced towards me, and did not stop that advance even when I took several steps backwards.
‘I…’ I gasped, as I felt the stable wall dig into my back, and realised that further retreat was impossible.
If the widow had gone on walking, she would undoubtedly have crushed me, and it was with some relief that I saw her come to a halt several inches before that painful process would have begun.
‘Whenever I tell my tale, as I did today, there is always at least one man who takes particular notice of me,’ the widow said, ‘but, in all truth, I did not think that on this occasion that man would be you.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ I protested.
The widow laughed again. ‘Oh no, I understand you all too well. Do you deny that you hardly took your eyes off me while I was speaking?’
‘No, but…’
‘And what can that mean?’
It means that I am a poet, madam, I wanted to tell her. It means that from raw material such as you are, I have been planning to create a comic character who will make Harlequin seem like a mere bungler.
But I could find no way to express these thoughts which would not have caused offence.
‘Well?’ the widow demanded, reaching out and putting one of her large hands on my hip.
‘Madam, I am married,’ I said.
‘And so have I been. Five times! And hope for more visits to the altar before I draw my dying breath.’
‘You have been married, madam, but I am married now,’ I said.
‘And when I was married, it did not stop me allowing men who were not my husband putting their buckets in my well,’ the widow replied, reaching out with her other hand and putting it on my other hip.
‘I thought your taste ran to younger men than me,’ I said desperately. ‘You told us not four hours ago that your last husband was only half your age.’
‘There is much to be said for a fit young colt,’ the widow told me. ‘But I have often found that it is the old steady horses who know how to plough a better furrow.’
‘But the squire…’ I said.
‘What about him?’
‘He is a colt who can plough better than an old horse like me, for I, in truth, am only fit for the knackers’ yard.’
The widow’s strong fingers had begun to pummel by hipbones. ‘And what makes you think that the squire can serve me better than you?’ she demanded.
‘Surely you must know it for yourself.’
‘And how should I know?’
I wondered how best to explain it. ‘I have heard … it has been rumoured…’ I began.
‘That I spent the night with him?’
‘Two nights?’ the widow said, puzzled.
‘Yes. The night in Dartford, and first night in Rochester.’
The widow took a deep breath, and her fingers ceased their urgent work on my hips.
‘Two nights,’ she said, as if she had just unravelled a knotty puzzle. ‘Yes, of course it was two nights.’
‘And surely, if he merits a second arrow at the target, then he must also be worthy of a third,’ I suggested hopefully.
The widow released her grip on me, and took two steps back. I felt like a prisoner finally released from his long sentence, and had to fight off the urge to embrace the blessed air which now separated us.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ the widow said, a little shakily. ‘Why settle for an old cur when there is a puppy to be tickled.’
She turned on her heel with great delicacy for a woman of her size, and crossed the yard back to the common room.
I stayed rooted to the spot for some moments after she had gone. It had been a narrow escape, I told myself, and like many a castle commander who has seen the besieging army strike camp and leave, I was still not sure what had caused her to abandon her assault. Yet though the victory was mine, it had only been gained at the cost of a defeat to me on another front, for wherever the summoner had gone, there was no chance that I could follow him now.
*
A man who wishes to experience the feeling of complete isolation need not crawl into a low cave or banish himself to some remote Scottish island, for there is no stronger sensation of being the last person on this earth than the one which can be obtained by crouching in the corner of an inn yard at three o’clock in the morning.
I was not alone, of course. Only a few feet behind me, on the other side of the stable wall, men and beasts lay in a deep slumber. I had merely to raise my eyes to see the doors to the bedchambers, behind which the more prosperous of the pilgrims were asleep. And though I could not see him – for our main aim was to be invisible to others – I knew that the knight’s yeoman was stationed in some other part of the yard, waiting – should it prove necessary – to come to my aid.
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