Knaves Templar

by Leonard Tourney

  A few drops of rain began to fall, and since she had no wish to get wetter than she needed to be, Joan decided to find some shelter and perhaps something to eat, for the morning jaunt had given her an enormous appetite. She went the way the woman had gone, turning down a narrow side street, and although it was a shabby neighborhood she had entered, she went in the first public house she came to.

  The tavern was very busy for midday, a noisy, dissolute crowd whose company she would have scorned had not the drizzle become a light rain. There were trencher tables all round and hardly a stool to sit upon, but she managed to find a place by the window, and after some time trying to catch the attention of a servingman, she ordered a hot caudle and some bread and cheese. She waited impatiently for what seemed an hour before the servingman returned to present her with her drink and his regret that there was neither bread nor cheese in the larder, for he said the storm had driven such a multitude into the Gull that they had consumed every bit.

  “The Gull?” she asked, reaching in her purse to pay for the ale and thinking it ridiculous that a business establishment should be so poorly provisioned for the likely instance of foul weather.

  “The tavern’s name,” said the servingman, who seemed a pleasant enough sort, she decided.

  Since Joan’s arrival, even more customers had straggled in, coughing, dripping wet, and cursing the weather and greeting their friends in the same breath. Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, and although it could not have been more than three in the afternoon, it seemed already to be getting dark. Inside, the almost exclusively male company that had met her eye when she entered was now diluted by a handful of women. Most were blowsy, rough women of the neighborhood, possibly even the washingwomen Matthew had said were allowed access to the chambers at the Temple. The women were holding their own with the men, laughing and talking, trading jibes and insults, but all in a rough good humor as though they all had known each other for years. There were also young women, some very young, shabbily dressed with bare necks and low-cut bodices and much plump pink flesh showing, to the delight of the leering men. These were going from table to table and seemed to know the men who sat there and treated them familiarly and called to them by names, greeting them with kisses and squeezes and indecent touchings so as to leave Joan with little doubt what sort of women they were. “Filthy tavern and brothel too,” she almost said aloud, viewing her situation now in its true light and beginning to regret she had ever ventured abroad, much less taken so precarious a refuge as the Gull.

  In the next moment Joan’s attention was drawn to a newcomer descending from the upper parts of the house. To her amazement she saw that it was the very young woman she had seen earlier at the riverbank—she who had caught Joan’s attention by her beauty. As this same woman made her appearance, a chorus of rough male voices cried out her name in greeting.

  “Why, it’s Nan, our own Nan.”

  “Good evening, Nan, what news?”

  “Give us a song, Nan, or a kiss at least.”

  Shocked to find the woman she had admired a denizen of

  so loathsome a place, Joan gaped, while Nan, returning the various greetings of the tavern’s customers, laughed and swung her hips provocatively. She was dressed very much as the other women of the Gull, in a loose-fitting smock that left her white neck and much of her breast open to view. She swaggered toward the bar and threw her arms around the shoulders of several of the unsavory types lounging there, while from other tables men began to move toward her as though there were something quite wonderful in her very proximity.

  But Joan was disgusted—disgusted by the lechery, the drunkenness—and dismayed, too, by the spectacle of beauty abused by so foul a condition. She rose to go, but had no sooner taken a step toward the door than she felt a rough hand upon her shoulder.

  She looked upward to see a tall sailor looming over her. He was a large, barrel-chested man with round, unshaven face and cruel eyes, and he smiled down at her with a grin that made her blood run cold. He smelled of fish and sweat, and she would have recoiled from him even if he had not taken the liberty of touching her as he now was.

  “Mind my company, mistress?’’

  “I prefer my own,” she returned sharply, fixing him with a cold stare of disdain.

  “Oh, do you?” he said. “But I prefer yours, so will join you without your leave. I see there’s room here.”

  The man plunked himself down on the stool and then drew Joan into his lap, squeezing her wrist painfully. His thick speech, vacant stare, and foul breath testified to his drunkenness. Disapproval of his impertinent touching of her had now become something more than annoyance. She struggled to free herself, protesting his bad manners and fishy smell, which seemed to grow stronger as he exerted himself. ‘ ‘Don’t be unkind, my girl,” he said. “I don’t like it when my company is scorned. I suppose you think yourself too fine for me—or worse, that I have no money. Well, my purse is full enough, and I’ll offer you as much as any man here, for although you seem a bit long in the tooth, yet you are a plump, juicy wench.”

  Thrusting his hand inside Joan’s cloak; he began fondling her breast as though he had a husband’s rights. The insult shook her from her previous immobility. She twisted herself from his grip and, standing, swung at him with all of her strength. The blow caught him on the jaw and sent him reeling backward. Her eyes blazing, she said: “How dare you, you dog-face! I am a respectable woman, no whore. Here in these vile surroundings for refuge, not for vice, as you seem to suppose. Nor would I give my body to you were you the last man on earth.”

  Joan spat out these words as the sailor struggled to his feet, helped by his friends, as unsavory a bunch as he. They were glaring at Joan as though the man she struck had received an undeserved blow. Standing now, the sailor unleashed a flood of insults aimed at her, vile names, some of which were sailors’ terms she had never heard before, although she had no doubt from his angry, twisted visage and tone of voice that each was as degrading as the next. Meanwhile, the sailor’s friends joined in the abuse, calling her proud slattern and greasy whore, and other filthy names that made her quiver with rage and almost forget the danger she faced from the sailor’s violence. Now she hoped for nothing more than to be revenged on these foulmouthed, mean-spirited creatures glowering at her.

  “A fine lot are you all to combine your strengths against a lone woman. Base cowards and knaves too! Is there no one here to give me aid in my distress?”

  She had no sooner made her request than it was answered. Nan came pushing her way through the crowd and began to appeal to the sailor and his friends to leave their insults and go back to the bar, where she promised them a round of drinks at her own expense. Nan flattered, cajoled; Joan could see what a favorite Nan was. Manipulating, without threat of force or violence, she could have her way, simply by that voice, that face, the body moving beneath the gown.

  Yet while the obnoxious sailor’s friends were moved by Nan’s persuasions, the sailor himself was not so easily placated. With an expression that clearly revealed how deeply his pride had been hurt by Joan’s rebuff and blow, he cursed Nan, the Gull, the whole female race. He shoved Nan aside and made for Joan.

  Joan grabbed the stool, thrust it outward defensively. One of its legs jabbed the sailor hard in the groin. He howled and doubled over with pain.

  Joan stared incredulously at what her quick thinking had wrought; the sailor remained bent, like a broken limb, clutching his groin, his face hideous with rage. But she knew she had stopped him for the moment only; he would be at her again, no question about it, and this time the knife he wore in his belt would be in his hand.

  She would have run for the door had the crowd of onlookers not pressed her so closely.

  The sight of the sailor undone by a mere woman provoked great hilarity on all sides, even from the sailor’s shipmates who before had been so sympathetic to his cause. They laughed and slapped each other and the victim of Joan’s stool on the back, as though he were
suffering from a piece of meat lodged in his throat, and in all the laughter and jostling a candle was upset on a nearby table and a fire started in the rushes.

  Cries of “Fire!” mixed with the raucous laughter as some of the tavern’s customers scrambled over tables for the door while others, immobilized by drunkenness, stood there gaping or continued to drink or shouted for the servingmen to douse the fire before the whole house was consumed by it.

  Then Joan felt a tug at her sleeve and turned to face Nan. “Follow me, make haste,” Nan shouted above the din.

  Thinking that any retreat could only improve her situation, Joan followed without question, allowing the young woman to lead her through the mob and then quickly up the stairs that minutes before Joan had watched Nan descend.

  At the top of the stairs an old woman in a red wig appeared to ask what the riot was below. Nan said it was nothing but a jest on one of the customers, and the old woman went away, apparently satisfied with the explanation despite the uproar below and the frequent shouts of “Fire!”

  Nan dragged Joan into one of the chambers off the passage and bolted the door behind them. It was the first chance Joan had had to express her gratitude to her rescuer.

  “Foul weather breeds foul custom,” Nan said, as though the ordeal Joan had just suffered was a frequent occurrence at the Gull and to be borne like any other inconvenience of London life. “You’ll be safe enough here, at least for the time being. The good tosspots below will have forgotten all about you in a quarter of an hour. As for the fire, the servers know how to put it out, if they have to piss upon it.”

  The young woman said her name was Nan Warren, and Joan identified herself. “I thought the sailor meant to kill me, so angry he was,” she said.

  “Ha,” said Nan: “That’s Flynch, Will Flynch. He’s one of Ned Hodge’s cronies. Ned owns the Gull. That’s why he offered you no protection.”

  Nan made further disparaging remarks about the host of the Gull and his friends, and Joan was forced to laugh despite the fact her heart was still racing.

  “As for Flynch,” Nan said, “you have served his turn. You aimed truly with the stool, for his privy member shall be perpetually limp hereafter. You have quite undone him, for pleasure or procreation.”

  “The loss of pleasure is his own fault,” Joan said, feeling again the indignities visited upon her. “That he will not father a litter of his own kind is the world’s gain. ”

  The two women continued to talk, and Joan found Nan of goodly conversation despite her disreputable trade. The girl was pleasant and well spoken and seemed as interested in Joan’s life and reason for being at the Gull as Joan was in hers. Joan asked how long Nan had lived in London—for she recognized from the gift’s speech that she was no native to the place—and Nan said five years come Michaelmas. She also asked Nan how she had come to her present employment in a house she spoke so disparagingly of, and Nan, without apparent embarrassment at Joan’s directness, answered that she had fallen on very hard times since coming to the City and had been forced to thrive as she might.

  Then Joan told Nan how she had come to the Gull that day, and how she had been walking in the vicinity of the

  Middle Temple because her husband was a visitor there. She confessed, too, how vexed she was at having been excluded, and Nan said she understood very well and remarked with some bitterness that men were good for little else but lording it over women and that one’s true friends could hardly be found beyond one’s own sex.

  Joan herself was not quite so hostile to men that she was ready to accept Nan’s proposition, but given the girl’s account of her own experience, Joan sympathized with it.

  “Your husband is a lawyer, then?” Nan asked.

  “No, a clothier—and constable,” Joan answered.

  “Then he goes to the Temple to make an arrest?”

  “Arrests are to be made by others,” Joan answered. She wasn’t sure how much to disclose of her husband’s true purpose at the Middle Temple. Nan was, after all, a total stranger. And yet she was so amiable a person, so open and good-hearted, that Joan felt little need for discretion. “There have been certain crimes within its walls,” she confided.

  “I’m not surprised,’’ Nan said. ‘‘I know many young gentlemen of the Temple who are patrons of the Gull. They all think very highly of themselves, but most are not worth a farthing. As for these crimes you speak of, I have heard of none, save for lawyers’ fees, but that’s no news. Yet if graver crimes are practiced by lawyers, it’s no marvel, for reasonable it is that he who knows the law best is best equipped to break it.”

  Joan found this response more than apt, and she had an even higher opinion of her new friend than before. Whispering as they were in the darkness, she felt as though she were speaking beneath covers with a sister. She had almost forgotten the danger that had driven her to this place—or that might still remain below.

  “It is quieter downstairs now,” Nan said. “It is probably safe for you to leave. ’’

  “But what of Flynch and his besotted friends?”

  “I’ll go see the coast is clear,” Nan said.

  “And what if someone comes? How shall I answer?”

  “I have this chamber for the night. You’ll not be disturbed. As you no doubt noticed, I have some seniority here

  amid the flock, having pecked in this yard longer than other of Hodge’s birds. ”

  Nan slipped out, leaving Joan alone and fearful again, for despite Nan’s assurance that she was safe, doubts assailed her. What if Flynch attacked Nan, who had heroically put herself between Joan and his wrath? The little chamber, a welcome shelter when Nan was by her side, now seemed to Joan a dreary cell, where she faced the prospect of an indefinite and solitary confinement.

  She waited for what seemed a long time and was at the point of leaving despite what danger awaited her when she heard a knock and Nan’s voice. Joan unbolted the door and let her friend in.

  “You were right, Mistress Stock,” Nan said when the door was closed behind her again. “Flynch is still at the bar—and in a worse mood. Hodge has been plying him with drink to console him for his humiliation and wound. Flynch is full of threats and has worked his shipmates up into a fine frenzy.”

  Joan’s heart sank at this ominous report. She looked at Nan in desperation. “Is there nothing to be done? I can’t stay here forever. My hosts will be beside themselves with worry. And my poor husband, when he hears I’m lost in London, will fear I have been murdered!”

  Nan said, “Don’t worry. I have a plan that will save all.”

  Joan urged her to say what this plan was.

  “I told them you fled—out a window.”

  “But did they believe it?” Joan asked.

  “Probably not.”

  “Then how am I to escape? I’m fearful of heights.”

  “There’ll be no windows to climb through, trust me.”

  Nan went to a little bed that occupied one comer of the chamber and, kneeling down, reached beneath, withdrawing a chest. She opened the lid and searched the contents while Joan watched. Then Nan said: “Here’s what will make your escape perfect.”

  Even in the darkness Joan could see that what Nan had furnished her was another suit of clothes—clothes for a man, jerkin, doublet, hose, and stockings, even shoes.

  “Flynch and his friends will be watching for a woman, if not too besotted to see. These clothes belonged to a former customer of mine. A married man, would you believe, who sought his pleasures in strange houses, to his wife’s annoyance. He was having his fun one night when his wife and her brothers—all as tall as trees—came to demand where he was. Our honest host, Master Hodge, accepted sixpence for revealing the married man’s whereabouts, and wife and brothers all come thundering upstairs without further ado. Each of the brothers had a stout cudgel, and the wife was armed with an iron skillet and the will to rattle her husband’s head with it at first opportunity. I barred the door against them, and the married man went ou
t the window, headfirst and naked as a babe, leaving these things in my custody. To this day he has not returned, but whether dead or merely in his good wife’s custody, I cannot say. I was going to sell them, then decided on some occasion I might require their use for an escape of my own. Here, let’s see how they fit.”

  Joan hesitated to put the clothes on. They were moth-eaten and smelly, and besides, they had belonged to an adulterous husband who undoubtedly richly deserved his coxcomb to be rattled for his transgressions. But she recognized the merit in Nan’s plan. Flynch and his filthy crew would have their eyes peeled for a farthingale, not for doublet and hose. What was more, she would have to leave sometime.

  Joan removed her cloak and gown and petticoats, telling Nan to keep them for her, for they were of great worth. Then she put on the doublet and hose. The doublet fit her tightly, as did the hose. ‘‘What about my hair? Will not my sex reveal itself?”

  “Never fear. I have a cap. Besides, your hair is short. Many men wear theirs at that length, and some of the gallants of the town at even longer length for fashion’s sake. As for the little rouge upon your cheeks, no one will notice. The color will be taken as the fruit of your recent amorous exertions.” Nan laughed, and her confidence bolstered Joan’s own. Maybe, she thought, the trick would work after all. What had she to lose?

  Nan presented Joan with a cap of the kind apprentices were wont to wear in the streets. It was too large for her head, but Nan assured her that its size would work to her advantage in concealing more of her face.

  Joan pressed Nan’s hand warmly and kissed her on the cheek. She made Nan promise to come to see her at Cooke House. “These surroundings cannot be to your liking.”

  Nan looked around her and shrugged. “Believe me, Mistress Stock, there are worse surroundings, as you call them. There are poor women within the sound of Paul’s bells who live in the street for want of a roof, or if roofed, live no better than pigs in their sty. The truth is that I hate the life I live, but have learned to accommodate myself to necessity, no matter how grim.”