London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “Who?” he had asked, mortified.

  And then the reply, quite casual. “Barnikel,” the fellow said.

  Barnikel. That cursed, low-born fishmonger. Barnikel of Billingsgate, alderman of the Bulls’ own ward! For several minutes he stood outside the Guildhall, almost unable to take it in. And now, as he brooded about it once more, he knew: it was too much to bear.

  The great decision was made: it was time to go.

  Which left the smaller decision.

  It should have been easy – and pleasant too. The message from Bankside had certainly been intriguing. A virgin at the Dog’s Head. A rarity indeed. Only the most favoured customers were being told: you could be sure of that. Though his own excursions to the whorehouse were only occasional, he was still a patrician, and the brothelkeeper was always as respectful as he was discreet.

  So why did he hesitate? A pang of guilt. Was it really necessary to feel guilty? As if in answer to his thoughts at that moment, there was a thump at the door, followed by a querulous voice. Inwardly he groaned.

  “What are you doing?” His wife.

  “What the devil do you suppose?” he thundered.

  “No you aren’t. You’ve been in there an hour.” Was this, he asked himself, any way to address a middle-aged merchant of distinction? “I know what you’re doing,” her voice went on. “You’re thinking.” He sighed. The rows between his great-grandmother Ida and her husband were part of family legend: but surely, he thought, no Bull had ever had to put up with a wife like his. “I heard you,” she called. “You sighed.”

  He had tried, over twenty miserable years, to love her. After all, he daily reminded himself, she had given him three strong children. But it was not easy and, in the last few years, he had quietly given up. Grey, gaunt, insistent, she complained if he was out and harassed him if he was home. No wonder, he thought to himself, if he sometimes sought a little quiet solace on Bankside. Now therefore, if only to relieve the tedium, he told her his big decision.

  “We’re leaving London. We’re going to live at Bocton.” He paused, heard her gasp, and added for good measure: “All year round.”

  In fact, Bull’s plan was not unusual. While London merchants had often retired to their estates in the past, a number of his own patrician contemporaries, finding the competition in the city too hot, had stopped trading and turned into country gentlemen. Thank God there was still a substantial fortune. He would simply buy more land. But now he heard a cry of disbelief.

  “I hate the country.” He smiled. He knew. “I shall stay here in London,” she protested.

  “Not in this house,” he said cheerfully. “I’m selling it.”

  “To whom?”

  That, as it happened, was the easy bit. For if there was one feature of the booming city that all men remarked upon, it was the astonishing increase, since his childhood, in the number of drinking establishments. In a city with a resident population of around seventy thousand, there were already some three hundred taverns serving food and drink, not to mention another thousand little brew-houses offering a beaker of ale. Some of the taverns were quite large affairs, offering sleeping quarters for the city’s many visitors too; and some of their owners had made fortunes. Only a month ago an enterprising fellow who owned two of these had told him: “If you ever want to sell your own house, I’ll give you a good price.” So now Bull informed his wife: “I’m selling to a taverner.”

  “You beast.” She began to cry. He cast his eyes to heaven. “You brute!”

  “I’m going out,” he said, and prayed for silence. But there was only a brief and hostile pause, and then that dreadful, plaintive murmur.

  “I know where you’re going. After some woman.”

  It was too much. “I wish to God I were,” he bellowed back, thumping both hands on the embroidered cushion. “Shall I tell you where I’m going? I’m going to get the city sergeants. And when I come back with them, we’re going to put you in a scold’s bridle. And then I’ll have them lead you through the streets. That’s where I’m going.”

  It was not a pretty thing, the scold’s bridle. Foul-mouthed women were sometimes sentenced to wear the little iron cage that fitted over the head, with a cruel iron bit that went in the mouth to immobilize the tongue. Encased in this, unpopular women would be paraded about, in the same way as other malefactors were put in the stocks. He heard her weeping, and felt ashamed.

  He made up his mind. It was too much. He would stand no more. A moment later he was striding past her and out of his house. And so it was, just after noon, that William Bull arrived at the whore-house on Bankside, and, accompanied by the grinning brothelkeeper, strode towards Joan.

  He was, the man assured him, the very first to get there.

  Joan looked at William Bull.

  He was, she supposed, about forty. She saw a large, burly man in a cloak, with thick calves, hide boots folded over below the knee, and a florid face, who was obviously used to being obeyed. Already he had rewarded the brothelkeeper for the pleasure of taking her virginity.

  It was quiet. At that hour of the day there were few customers about, and most of the prostitutes were either out or sleeping. Of the Dogget sisters there was no sign.

  Suddenly, she became angry. Striding over to the brothelkeeper, she cried, “You promised me no customers until tomorrow, you filthy liar.”

  Bull looked questioningly at the man’s wife.

  “It’s nothing, sir,” that worthy woman called. “She’s just a little nervous.” To Joan she hissed: “You’ll do as you’re told.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Refuse?” the brothelkeeper spat.

  “You don’t understand, dear,” his wife cut in. She tried a motherly smile. “This is an important man. A good customer.”

  “I don’t care.”

  The smile vanished. The two little eyes in the cheese-like face were cold. “You need a whipping.”

  “You’ve no right to do such a thing.”

  The arrangement of the brothel was that each girl rented her room. Apart from this obligation, in theory she was free to come and go as she pleased. In practice, of course, the brothelkeeper had a hold of some kind over almost every one of them.

  “Maybe.” The brothelkeeper was cool now, and deadly. He stepped closer, and she could smell the stale food on his beard. “But I can call the bishop’s bailiff and throw you out of the Liberty within the hour. You’ll get no work after that.”

  And that was just what must not happen.

  “I’ll do it then,” she finally said. And she turned, and forced herself to smile at William Bull.

  The wooden staircase went up the outside of the brothel for two storeys, on each of which there were three chambers, which had been subdivided into pairs of cubicles by wooden partitions. Stepping in at the second storey, Joan and the merchant entered a narrow passage between wooden walls. It was dark. A few paces down the passage there was a little internal flight of stairs, hardly more than a ladder really. Feeling her way, she began to mount them.

  Joan’s room was an attic set in the gable of the house. Though very small, at least there was no cubicle beside it, so no banging and grunting would be heard. There was a little window, the upper part covered with parchment to let in light, the lower with a stout wooden shutter. When she had opened the shutter that morning, and felt the cold, damp air on her face, Joan realized that she could see straight across the river and even, over the rooftops of Blackfriars, catch a glimpse of the top of Newgate. It had comforted her to think that she could see the place where Martin Fleming was.

  The rushes on the floor had not been changed in months and they stank. She had managed, however, to persuade the brothelkeeper to give her fresh ones to put down, though he had grumbled at the expense. It was, therefore, as such places went, a reasonably pleasant little attic into which the merchant, breathing a trifle heavily after his climb, was led.

  The bed was a mattress stuffed with straw. It lay in the middle of
the floor. Joan dropped her shawl. She had not yet acquired the striped garb of her trade, but was simply dressed in a plain, long-sleeved undergown of linen, over which was a sleeveless smock with a pattern of flowers. She took the circlet off her head and her hair fell loose. She looked towards the window, stepped across and pushed the shutter open. A hundred yards away, the river was moving sluggishly. Her back to the merchant, she realized that she was trembling slightly. Had he noticed?

  In her mind was only one thought. How can I delay him? Wasn’t there, even now, some way out?

  “You are really a virgin?” His voice behind her.

  She did not turn round, but nodded.

  “Are you frightened?” The merchant’s voice was gruff. But did she detect a hint of awkwardness in it? A trace of guilt? She turned.

  He had taken off his cloak and was already undoing the buttons on the chest of his tunic. Evidently he meant to get on with the business in hand. She looked at his broad, hard face. Was there any sign of kindness there?

  “It won’t be so bad,” he said.

  And then it occurred to her. There was, after all, just one way in which her awful situation could be turned to advantage. It was a very small chance, but if she was bold – perhaps, just possibly, he might cooperate.

  She mustered all her calm.

  “I want you to do something,” she said. He looked down at her. Then she told him.

  “You want what?” He was staring at her with stupefaction, but she did not flinch.

  “Let me explain,” she said.

  It was an hour after noon that a single, robust figure, grinning from ear to ear, bounced out of the old royal palace, bounced to his horse, bounced into the saddle and rode off towards the city, with the ancient Abbey of Westminster looming behind him.

  In the year 1295, the Abbey of Westminster presented a most curious appearance, for when pious King Henry III had decided to rebuild it, he had made one unfortunate miscalculation. Notwithstanding the huge sum raised by the Jews, or the pawning of the jewels that Henry had intended for St Edward the Confessor’s sumptuous new shrine, he had run out of money. The magnificent eastern half of the church, the choir and transepts and a little bit of the nave rose splendidly, its soaring arches in the pointed Gothic style. But then, suddenly, the nave dropped sharply to the far more modest height of the Confessor’s old Norman church. And so it had remained for a quarter-century: two churches, in different styles, joined in a way that made no sense at all. Another century would pass before work restarted, more than another again before it was completed. For the reign of no fewer than twelve of England’s monarchs, the sacred coronation church was to be a mess.

  But if Waldus Barnikel had glanced back at the old Abbey, which he did not, he would have seen nothing wrong with it. Because that day, it seemed to him, everything was perfect. “I am,” he had just remarked to the king himself, “the happiest man in London.”

  Waldus Barnikel of Billingsgate was as round as a ball. It was as though nature, having decided to confine the towering strength and temper of his ancestors into a smaller space, had realized that so much fermenting energy could only be contained, with any hope of avoiding an explosion, in a perfect and solidly constructed sphere. He was clean-shaven, though his red hair hung halfway down his neck, and he wore a fur hat. He radiated confidence.

  As well he should. For hadn’t the common fishmongers raised their craft fraternity to the city’s heights? Already he was wearing the red robes of an alderman. Henceforth, all men would call him “Sire”. As for the humiliation of the proud, patrician Bulls whom he had hated all his life: “My soul is soaked in honey,” he confessed. Indeed, he need not even be in awe of the Bulls’ wealth nowadays. For Barnikel was rich.

  His route to riches was typical of the fishmongers. Soon after the reign of King John, the family had acquired a small fishing vessel, then another. By the time Waldus was born, they not only had a warehouse at Billingsgate wharf and a huge stall in the market with six men behind the counter, but most significant of all, like several of the more successful London fishmongers, they had also set up a second base of operations. This was at a small but busy port called Yarmouth, nearly a hundred miles away on the eastern coast, where they had two more fishing vessels and a half share in a highly profitable cargo ship. And it was in Yarmouth that Barnikel had met his wife, his great fortune, and also become part of a curious historic movement.

  The great territory of East Anglia had kept its ancient character in the centuries since the Conquest. True, outsiders had arrived – chiefly Flemish weavers, whose skills had been turned to good use. But in essence, the vast tracts of pasture, wood and fen were still the Danelaw: land of Angles and Danes, homesteaders and merchants; isolated, independent, open only to the great east wind that came in from the echoing sea. Like the rest of England that century, East Anglia had grown rich; and most notably had begun to export its own cloth, of two types, each taking the name of the village which was its centre of manufacture: Kersey in the southern part, and in the northern, the little town of Worsted.

  It was natural therefore that when Barnikel had met a rich young heiress from Worsted, a descendant, like him, of seafaring Vikings, he should have married her. This doubled his fortune. When he took her back to London, her whole family had come too.

  Of all the many groups who flocked into London in that generation, many were merchants from East Anglia. As Barnikel had recently remarked: “People are even starting to talk differently. They all sound like my in-laws!” But he did not perceive that this slight shift in London’s local accent was the signal of a deeper quirk of history. For whether by chance or by destiny, in the late thirteenth century, the Norsemen were coming to London again, not as Viking seafarers, but as their solid, middle-class descendants.

  He was a rich merchant. He still sold fish, to be sure; but his ships also carried furs and timber from the Baltic, and grain, and even wine. Then, yesterday, an alderman. And today? Nothing had prepared him for the summons that morning. It had come from King Edward himself.

  Only a short while before, he had stood before the tall, grey-bearded monarch, and the royal eyes had gazed steadily straight into his.

  “I need you,” the king had said. “I need you for my parliament.” And the fishmonger had blushed, hardly able to believe the honour. A Barnikel in Parliament.

  When King Edward I of England had decided to hold parliaments, as he called them, twice a year, and usually in Westminster, he displayed his usual cunning and sagacity. Remembering the humiliations of his father and grandfather, whose obstinacy brought them under the thumb of baronial councils, he had been much cleverer. No one would ever be able to say that Edward ruled without advice. Whenever there was a matter of special importance to decide, he summoned not only the council of barons but the other parties to be affected. If it concerned the Church, he summoned representatives of the clergy; if trade, then burghers from the towns; if general military service, then local knights. And sometimes all these together. Such parliaments also witnessed the dispensing of royal justice, of which the king in council was also the court of last resort. True, the king often made laws by himself too, with only his inner advisers. But he never went too far. He always had his parliaments as a sounding board.

  Just as he used the lesser merchants to break the power of the mayor of London and his oligarchs, so, with his parliaments, the monarch could limit his feudal magnates – which he did time and again, by statutes – and to a lesser extent he could break the Church as well. And so in the reign of King Edward I of England, the great institution of Parliament first began to take shape: not – God forbid – to place power in the hands of the people, but to strengthen the long political arm of the king.

  By chance, the day before, one of the London burgesses due to attend had fallen sick. “So I asked for you,” King Edward told Waldus with a smile.

  Of course, there was a reason. Barnikel was no fool. If the king wanted merchants at this Parliament, i
t meant he wanted taxes from the towns. If he was ready to flatter a newly made alderman, he must want a lot. Well, so be it.

  But he had asked for him, Barnikel, by name.

  No wonder then if Waldus Barnikel was ready to celebrate that afternoon. And this was exactly what he next proposed to do. For just before he left to see the king, he too had received a message from Bankside. About a virgin. And it was with cheerful eagerness, therefore, that he hurried now upon his way.

  Waldus Barnikel normally went to the Dog’s Head once a week. He had done so for nearly five years. As constant as he was regular, he always slept with one of the Dogget sisters.

  Their name amused him because, quite unrelated to them, there was now a highly respectable but humourless goldsmith of the same name in the city. “Saw your cousins across the river,” Barnikel would tease him, from time to time.

  He had been planning to go to Bankside today anyway. For, with typical clear-sightedness, King Edward had already understood the great truth which the history of nearly all future legislative assemblies would prove – that prostitutes and politicians are inevitably drawn together. “If I leave a lot of knights and burgesses hanging around in the city,” he observed, “they’re sure to go off whoring and get into trouble.” And so, when Parliament sat at Westminster, the Bankside brothels, at least officially, were closed. It might be some time, therefore, before he could go again.

  As for the news of a virgin at the Dog’s Head, it was indeed amazing. “And I’ll have her,” he murmured with mounting excitement. He’d give the Dogget girl a present too, though, to keep her happy.

  Only once, for a moment, did he pause. The broad, muddy lane from Westminster ran parallel with the river and less than half a mile from the Abbey it turned right, as the Thames made its final curve by the Aldwych to enter the great, straight sweep that led past London. At this turning there stood a tall, handsomely carved stone monument surmounted by a cross, before which Barnikel now paused to say a brief prayer.