‘There were difficulties in the venture?’
The shipmaster shook his head. ‘No. No, the trading went well.’ He forced himself to smile, putting an arm around the burgher’s shoulders. ‘Come. Let me show you what I have brought you from the East.’ The two of them ascended the gangplank to the galley’s deck.
‘So, if the trading went well, what is it that troubles you, Matteo?’
‘We lost many men, Signor Villani. Constantinople is cursed. The Lord has seen fit to visit a pestilence upon its people, the foulest I have ever seen. Many of our men succumbed.’
The burgher shrugged, unconcerned. ‘God disposes, my friend. The people of Constantinople are schismatics, little better than heathens. If a pestilence troubles them, then it is no more than God’s judgement. Besides, Constantinople’s loss is our gain, eh? They brought such a punishment upon themselves, with their attempts to restrict the trade in silk.’
The shipmaster nodded, smiling, and led the burgher down to the hold, where bundles of silk were tightly stacked. As they descended the steep companionway, they could hear rats scuttling into the safety of the shadows.
The burgher reached out to test the quality of the silk between his fingers, and a grin slowly spread across his face. ‘It’s good – very good!’
‘Aye. And it came at three-quarters of the usual price. With so many of the people of Constantinople dead, the silk merchants must sell it to whom they can.’
‘Has the pestilence affected so many?’ the burgher asked in wonderment.
‘Aye. A vile death, too. I blanch just to think on it…’ He grimaced, and pinched at the bare skin on his arms. ‘God damn it!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’ The shipmaster held up the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, a flea pinched between them. He cracked its shell between his fingernails, and wiped them on his tunic. ‘Just a flea bite.’
Three days later he was dead. The burgher died a day after that. And within a matter of months, a third of the population of Sicily had been wiped out.
The pestilence had arrived in Europe.
Chapter Seven
A week before Martinmas – the anniversary of his birth, if his mother’s account of how he had come to be named Martin were true – Kemp came to London.
He approached from the south, walking up the insalubrious high street of the Borough of Southwark with its inns and stewhouses, overhung with the combined stink of the nearby tannery and lime-kilns. He passed the priory of Saint Mary Overie on his left and then the River Thames came into view, and beyond it the skyline of London itself.
Here was a city of about forty-five thousand souls crammed into the square mile of land enclosed within the ancient, crumbling city walls. To the left he could see turreted battlements of Baynard’s Castle – now part of a Dominican convent – glowering over the river. Behind it, the spire of Saint Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill rose over five hundred feet into the sky, one of the eighty or so spires that filled the city’s skyline. To the right the view was dominated by the ninety-foot high whitewashed keep of the Tower of London, where King David of Scotland was said to be imprisoned following his defeat and capture at the battle of Neville’s Cross the previous year. Below the Tower, the king’s ships were anchored on the river.
As he approached the bridge, he had first to cross a drawbridge before he came to a fortified gatehouse where two guards were on duty; but this was a city far from the threat of war, and their only tasks were to collect tolls from those who brought goods into the city by packhorse or cart, or to turn away lepers. Kemp was made to relinquish his broadsword, for the carrying of swords within the city itself was illegal. He surrendered it reluctantly, feeling naked without it. The chit the guards gave him would be little protection against a surprise attack by French men-at-arms… he caught himself: the war was over and he was back in the safety of England.
Then Kemp was on the bridge. Three hundred yards long, almost a hundred shops and houses were built on it so that, as he crossed, he caught only occasional glimpses of the river. There were glovers’ shops, pouch-makers’, goldsmiths’ and bowyers’. Kemp had seen enough plundered treasure in France for the sight of jewellery to leave him cold. He fancied that many of the treasures on display had been taken from France anyway; but then perhaps they had been stolen by Norman pirates from Englishmen before that.
He emerged from the bridge on to the north bank of the river by the Fishmongers’ Hall. Now he was in the City of London itself. A few houses were built of stone, with tiled roofs, like some he had seen in Caen, but most were made of wattle and wood, lath and plaster. Many of the houses were as tall as three or four storeys, and like the buildings on the bridge, the upper floors had overhangs to create more floor space without increasing the ground rent. In many of the narrower streets, the overhang was so pronounced that the streets were more like tunnels, with barely a glimmer of sky visible between the roofs of opposing buildings.
He walked five hundred yards up one street until he came to a busy corn-market, and found himself turning left because that was the way that most of the people who pressed around him seemed to be going. He had never seen so many people all crammed into one place: finely dressed young noblemen, rich burghers in gowns of costly cloth, artisans, farmers, labourers, housewives, people of every imaginable degree and station, all rubbing shoulders together. At first he was convinced that he must have entered London on the day of some local fair or festival, but slowly it dawned on him that the city was like this every day of the year.
A truce had been signed between King Edward and Philip of Valois a few weeks after the fall of Calais. The truce was for nine months, well into the following summer; the English would remain in possession of all the territorial gains they had acquired up to that point, including not only Gascony and Calais, but also land in Brittany and Poitou; and the independence of Flanders was to be preserved.
Like many of the men in the king’s army, Kemp had received the news of the truce with mixed feelings. Despite Warwick’s defeat near Saint-Omer, many men felt the English were poised to win the war outright, at least to the extent that they could dictate their own terms to Valois, perhaps even demanding their king be granted the throne of France. Many of the professional troops felt deflated by the anti-climax of it all: Calais was won, the French nobility on its knees, and suddenly there was no more fighting to be done, no more booty to be taken. Only the older, wiser heads smiled to themselves and pointed out that nine months was not such a long time, and that if the king ever did decide to renew the war, then his possession of Calais would make it easier for him to land troops in northern France.
Kemp at least had the advantage of knowing how he was to earn a living for the next twelve months, and the offer of a more long-term post in Holland’s retinue after that. He had looked forward to the end of his term of service for so long, and knew now that within a little over a year he would be a freeman, and able to return to Knighton and Lady Beatrice. Yet at the same time he too felt disappointed. Serving as an archer in the king’s army overseas was more interesting than the monotony of working in the fields, and at least in the army his social superiors treated him with respect; not the respect accorded to an equal, perhaps, but at least an acknowledgement that his services were valued. He had found more companionship than he ever had at home. For the first time in his life, he had felt as if he belonged.
The king and the Prince of Wales had sailed for England two weeks after the Truce of Calais, and from that day Kemp’s pardon came into effect. He had fulfilled his duty to his king. His ship had landed at Dover in the middle of October, and there he took his leave of those amongst his companions who had likewise settled for returning to England. Many did not. Holland and Preston had taken advantage of the truce to head south for Avignon, accompanied by a portly serjeant-at-law, leaving Brewster in charge of Holland’s inn in Calais, which was already starting to fill with English colonists.
Kemp pa
ssed a butchers’ market on his left, where stray cats, dogs and pigs scavenged amongst the offal. A man was imprisoned in a set of stocks, a loaf of bread hung around his neck to indicate his crime: selling bread in short measures. A few children paused in their game of leap-frog to jeer at him and scrape dung out of the gutter at the centre of the cobbled street to fling in his face, but most people walked past heedless. They had had stocks in Knighton where Kemp grew up. He considered it a good punishment, for if the man placed in them was thought to have been ill-served by justice, then people would bring him food and drink, rather than throw rotten food at him, and chat to him to keep him company.
Kemp walked on, through a market where hens and fish were on sale and market-traders’ wives sat in blizzards of their own making as they plucked dextrously at the white feathers of capons and pullets. He passed a church – Saint Thomas of Aeon – and a side-street, Ironmonger Lane, which rang deafeningly with the dinning of hammers against anvils. Almost immediately there was another church on his left, Saint Mary le Bow. A gaggle of geese being driven before a young poultry-herder overtook him, on their way to be slaughtered at market. He noticed a stone edifice, where the nets of Thames fishermen, confiscated for having too small a mesh, were being burned.
He was on West Cheap now, a broad thoroughfare lined with merchants’ two-storey storehouses, and countless stalls laden with country produce, the traders crying their wares. In the centre of the street stood the Great Cross, one of the marble edifices erected in honour of Queen Eleanor, the king’s grandmother, to mark her death fifty-seven years earlier. The cross was surrounded by stalls selling quill pens, ink, parchment and sealing wax. There were chapmen and hawkers everywhere, selling ale and wine, cherries and strawberries, peascods, pepper and saffron, hot sheep’s feet, cod and mackerel, pies and pasties.
‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’
‘What d’you lack? What d’you lack?’
‘What’ll you buy? What’ll you buy?’
Well might they ask. It seemed to Kemp that everything he could possibly imagine was for sale in London, as well as many things he could never have imagined.
He slipped into the precincts of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in search of respite from the crowds, but even here there was nothing but bustle. In addition to the priests and prelates hurrying to and fro, gardeners sold fruit and vegetables, cutlers sold knives from sheds built against the side of the chapter house, serjeants-at-law wearing red caps over their white silk coifs touted for clients in the cathedral porch and from the pulpit below the lead-plated wooden cross known as Paul’s Cross a friar preached a sermon to a crowd consisting of the devout and the curious, as well as unashamed hecklers.
Everywhere Kemp turned there were beggars in filthy rags. He saw one seated on a small wooden trolley, pulling himself about using the wooden blocks he gripped in hands at the end of muscular arms; his legs ended just above where the knee should have been. He wore a wooden placard on a string about his neck, and although Kemp could not read the crudely daubed words thereon, he could guess at them from the beggar’s cry for alms:
‘Alms for a veteran of Crécy! Please give generously. Won’t you spare a few farthings for a man who lost both legs at Crécy?’
Kemp felt sick. There but for the grace of God go I, he thought to himself, and was about to hurry past when something made him take a second glance at the beggar’s filthy, scabrous, unshaven face with its matted and tangled beard. The face seemed to have aged twenty years since he last saw it, yet that had been just over a year ago.
‘Hick?’ he asked incredulously.
The beggar looked up at him, and his seamed face cracked into a crooked grin, revealing blackened teeth. ‘Why, it’s Master Kemp, isn’t it?’ Hick Lowesby had always addressed Kemp as ‘Martin’ when they were companions-in-arms, but now that Kemp was walking around in a fine black cloak with a bulging purse at his hip and Lowesby was a filthy, stinking, crippled beggar dressed in foul and lousy rags, any other form of address would have seemed ludicrous. ‘I hardly recognised you in your fine clothes. How are you?’
‘Well enough,’ replied Kemp. ‘And you?’ he asked, not realising what a stupid question it was until the words were past his lips.
‘As well as can be expected,’ Lowesby replied with a cheeriness that seemed quite sincere. ‘I seem to manage. You know how it is.’
Kemp did not know how it was, nor had he any wish to find out. ‘I thought you were going back to…’ He struggled to recall whichever part of Leicester County it was that Lowesby had hailed from. ‘… Harborough?’
Lowesby shrugged. ‘So I once thought, too. But I can’t very well ride there, and I don’t intend to try dragging myself the whole way.’
‘But I thought you had a wife and family?’
‘Aye. But I heard tell as how they think me dead. I reckon it’s just as well.’
Kemp’s expression was one of undisguised horror. If it had been his legs that were crushed instead of Lowesby’s, he could not with confidence have said he would return to Knighton to see if Beatrice still loved him.
‘Anyway, it’s all for the best,’ Lowesby continued. ‘I’d like as not just be a burden on them. At least in London there’s enough money around for folks like me to scrape a living from begging. But you look well enough. What brings you to London?’
‘I’ve only just got back from France.’
Lowesby nodded. ‘All the talk has been of the fall of Calais these past few weeks. Is there any fresh news of the war? I’d heard a rumour it was ended.’
‘There’s a truce,’ admitted Kemp. ‘How long it will last, I don’t know.’
‘Are you headed back to Leicester, then?’
Kemp shook his head. ‘I’ve engaged to work here in London for a year and a day, to earn my freedom. Perhaps you can help me,’ he added. ‘I’m looking for John Chaucer’s house, in Thames Street. In the Vintry Ward.’
‘I don’t know of any John Chaucer, but Thames Street is easy enough. You leave the cathedral precincts by that gate there and turn right. Keep walking until you come to a junction like this –’ he made a T-shape with both arms – ‘and you’re there. Turn left, and eventually you’ll be in the Vintry Ward. Chances are someone around there will have heard of him.’
‘Thank you.’ Kemp fumbled for his purse, found a penny, and then rejected it in favour of a shilling; extravagance, but with a purse bulging with the proceeds of French plunder he could well afford it.
‘Thank you, master!’
Kemp hurried away, his heart heavy with guilt, his stomach churning with revulsion. It had been sheer luck that the dying warhorse had fallen across Lowesby’s legs rather than Kemp’s in the thick of the fray at Crécy. Lowesby had always been one of the quieter members of the platoon, never getting into trouble, never wishing anyone any harm; not even the French, much to Preston’s annoyance. That he should be cast so prematurely into such a living purgatory while Kemp, whose sins weighed so heavily on his conscience, continued to enjoy rude health and a moderate degree of financial comfort, seemed like a mockery of any concepts of natural justice. It should have been me, Kemp found himself thinking over and over again: it should have been me.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he did not notice the ragged street-urchin until the two of them bumped into one another. ‘Watch where you’re going, damn you!’ growled Kemp.
‘Sorry, master.’ The boy grinned at him, making it clear that he was not sorry at all. Kemp aimed a cuff at the boy’s head, but the urchin dodged nimbly out of his way and ran off. Scowling, Kemp continued on his way down Thames Street until he was passing the fortified enclosure called the Steelyard, the enclave of the Easterling merchants of the Hanseatic League, where ships from Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck unloaded their cargoes of wheat, flax, hemp, timber, ropes and cables, and the steel that gave it its name.
A hand grasped his shoulder. ‘Pardon me…’
Kemp whirled around to face the man, his hand reaching under his clo
ak for the hilt of his sword only to find it was no longer there, of course. The motion was not lost on the man, however, who backed away, holding his hands up to show that they were empty, except for the leather purse he held in the right one. ‘I think you dropped this.’
Kemp reached for his purse. It was gone, the thongs that had attached it to his belt neatly severed. He remembered the boy who had bumped into him, and cursed his own carelessness. ‘Dropped it?’ he echoed scathingly.
The man shrugged apologetically. He was probably around ten years older than Kemp, a tall, lean man of athletic build. His eyes twinkled with mischievous intelligence and his hair was pulled back in a short pony-tail, an outlandish fashion that Kemp had not encountered before. He wore charcoal-grey breeches, tall leather boots with the tops folded down, and a soft leather jerkin over a white silk chemise. A cloak of grey worsted was wrapped around his shoulders and pinned in place with a metal brooch. On his head was a broad-brimmed pilgrim’s hat of brown felt, tilted at a rakish angle. Kemp tried to guess what manner of man he was, and eventually had to give up.
‘I fear the young cut-purse I saw stealing this from you was too nimble for my clumsy feet, but when I called out after him he dropped this in his flight.’ The man handed the purse back to Kemp.
‘Thank you,’ Kemp responded grudgingly.
‘Perhaps it is just as well,’ continued the man. ‘There’s more than a shilling in there, and it would be a tragedy for one so young to be hanged for a youthful indiscretion.’
‘Maybe,’ allowed Kemp, who had come too close to being hanged for a crime of which he had been innocent to have much sympathy for those who were guilty.
‘You’ve come to London to seek work?’ asked the man.
‘What makes you think that?’
The man laughed at the suspicion in Kemp’s voice. ‘You’re not from London – your Midlander accent makes that much plain. And London is full of archers disbanded from the king’s service these days. Your broad shoulders and callused fingers betray your craft. You’ll be lucky to find work, unless you have some particular skill other than the ability to use a bow – a commonplace skill, I fear, and one little demanded in England these days.’
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