by Mary Malloy
“Is this the original manuscript?” Lizzie asked with surprise. “I’m amazed you kept it this long.”
“You are a librarian to the core,” Kate added. “Not only did you save the thing for twenty-some years, but you were actually able to retrieve it!”
“And you will all be glad I did,” Jackie said as Kate reached to take the paper from her hands.
“You got an A on it, of course,” Kate said, reading the comment on the last page. “A particularly original and insightful essay. Excellent!”
Jackie grabbed it back and handed it to Lizzie. “You already knew that I was a brilliant student. Now let Lizzie benefit from it.”
Rose returned to the table with salads. “Are we still talking about some feminist interpretation of Canterbury Tales?” she asked as she passed a plate to each woman.
“As a matter of fact, we are,” Lizzie answered. “Jackie wrote a paper in college about the Wife of Bath character—the one whose path I will follow.”
“Do we like her or not?” Rose asked as she returned to her seat.
“We mostly like her,” Lizzie said, “but not the story she told.”
“So let’s hear the story.”
“May I tell it?” Jackie asked Lizzie. “I have reviewed it again since we spoke about this earlier.”
“By all means,” Lizzie said, making a gesture with her hand.
“Wait,” Rose said. “Let me get the pasta, more wine, and arrange for the coffee to come silently at the appropriate moment so that the story doesn’t get interrupted.”
When all the preparations had been made, Jackie cleared her throat and began.
“Back in the old days before Catholicism killed all the elves and fairies, a lusty bachelor knight from King Arthur’s court raped a young virgin whom he encountered near a river. His crime was discovered and he was sentenced to death. The Queen—who must have been Guinevere, but she is not mentioned by name in the story—stopped the execution and gave him a chance to save himself. He had to return to the court within one year and answer the question: ‘What is the thing that women most desire?’ He went off on the quest, traveling around the countryside, asking the question of everyone he met, encountering a group of fairy maidens along the way, and finally meeting a horrible old hag.”
Jackie stopped to take a few mouthfuls of food and Kate asked why every woman above the age of thirty in fairy tales was either a witch or a hag or both. “I think I’d recognize a hag, of course, because she would be ugly and poor, but is that it? Does she need to be evil?”
“No,” Jackie said, wiping her mouth with her napkin and taking a sip of her wine. “Ugly and poor pretty much does it, but the kicker in this case is that she is the only one who knows the answer to the queen’s question.”
“Does she tell the lusty knight?” Rose asked.
“Not at first,” Jackie continued. “She made him agree to take her back to court with him and, if she can provide the right answer, to give her whatever she asks for. Off they go then, like some ticking bomb in a Bruce Willis movie, with the hours and minutes racing down to the end of his allotted year.”
“And of course they make it just in time,” said Rose.
“Of course,” Jackie said, “and, as expected, she knows the right answer.”
The women at the table all leaned forward. “Okay,” Kate said, “let’s have it, what is the thing we most desire?”
“Let me,” Lizzie said, lifting her wine glass. “The thing we most desire is to be masters of our husbands!”
There was an anti-climactic moment of silence.
“That’s it?” Kate and Rose asked simultaneously.
“What else?” Jackie said facetiously. “As the Wife of Bath tells the story, everyone in the court has a moment where they slap themselves on the head and say ‘Oh my God! She’s absolutely right!’ ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ et cetera.”
“What does the hag want from the knight?” Kate asked.
“I hope she said that he should get his balls chopped off for raping the girl,” Rose added.
“Oh no,” Jackie said dramatically. “The hag insists that the knight marry her!”
“Oh for God’s sake!” Rose said. “How offensive is that! She wants to marry the rapist?”
Lizzie told them that the worst part was yet to come. “The knight and just about everybody else in the palace is ready to barf. I mean, he may be a rapist, but she is even worse, being all those really awful things like ugly, poor, low class, and old. But he’s a gentleman, so he does it. That night in bed she harangues him about what a jerk he is for being so shallow, insensitive, and snobbish, which seems to be exactly what he deserves, but then the story goes awry. For no reason whatsoever, the old hag turns into a beautiful young maiden and gives him a choice, ‘Would you like me to be beautiful by day and ugly by night?’”
“Thereby allowing him to show off a babe to the court, but being required to have sex with an ugly broad,” Jackie added.
“Or would you have me beautiful by night and ugly by day?”
“Thereby insuring good sex, but risking extreme embarrassment in front of his pals.”
Lizzie finished the story. “He, finally having learned something, says ‘You choose.’ And then, Hooray! That was the right answer, so now she will be beautiful all the time!”
Rose and Kate were outraged at the outcome.
“That is a horrible story, I absolutely hate it!” Kate said, throwing her napkin onto the table.
“And I will go back and read ‘The Miller’s Tale’ with fresh anger,” Rose declared with a wink. “How did the other pilgrims like the story?”
“They loved it,” Jackie said. “‘You go girl!’ they shouted. ‘You certainly do know a lot about relationships between men and women!’”
“As the company was made up almost entirely of men and nuns, they pretty much had to rely on the Wife of Bath for a woman’s wisdom on relationships,” Lizzie explained.
“She had been married five or six times,” Jackie said, finishing her glass of wine and accepting a refill from Rose.
By now, Rose had opened a third bottle of wine and a fairly bawdy discussion followed of what women really desired most. With each answer they laughed louder until all the other diners had either left the restaurant or moved closer to hear more clearly.
Chapter 5
During the weeks leading up to her departure for England, Lizzie read the Wife of Bath portions of The Canterbury Tales again in a side-by-side translation from Middle English to modern English, and a mountain of scholarly criticism on the text and its sources.
Kate stopped into her office one day with a gift and a request. The gift was a book called A Pennine Journey: The Story of a Long Walk in 1938, by Alfred Wainwright; the request was that she be able to join Lizzie for some portion of the walk. The walking part of the project was, in fact, much better suited to Kate than Lizzie. Kate was captain of St. Pat’s research vessel, St. Brendan’s Curragh, and was a runner and adventurer. She was very fit, and undaunted by the prospect of a walk of a few hundred miles.
“This guy devised a walk across England that I have frequently considered following,” Kate explained as Lizzie opened the book, “from St. Bee’s Head to Robin Hood’s Bay.”
She had a road map of England, which she laid across Lizzie’s desk. “This path goes across a much narrower part of England than you are walking, but I thought you might like to see it.”
“The names alone are enough to capture the imagination,” Lizzie said, looking as Kate traced her finger along the route.
“Here is Bath and here is Canterbury,” Kate continued, putting a finger at each end of Lizzie’s path. “What intermediate points will you stop at?”
Lizzie regretted that Alison had been so mysterious about the details.
“I’m not sure,” Lizzie said, “as I am not in charge of the itinerary, but I imagine at least every place that has a medieval cathedral, so Glastonbury, Salisbury, Win
chester and London.”
Kate pulled dividers from her bag, a standard tool of a navigator, and measured ten miles along the key with the two points of the instrument. Then she walked it across the map. “You’ll have to make eight or ten miles a day to do this in a month,” she said. “If you start, say, on April twentieth, that would put you in Salisbury around the fifth of May.” She snapped the dividers shut and put them back in her bag. “I’ll join you there!”
The advantage of having someone along who was good company, experienced at navigating and an efficient planner was clear to Lizzie, but she balked at accepting.
“I’m afraid my pace will be so much slower than yours,” she said apologetically. She knew she really should be out walking every day now, but with the snow and all....
“Don’t worry about that,” Kate said kindly. “I feel that having you as my personal guide to history and literature will make this much more fun than doing the Wainwright walk with anybody else!”
Lizzie thought about it. “Well, if you don’t join me until the middle part, I will hopefully be accustomed to the business when you arrive.”
“This guy probably won’t be your model,” Kate said, tapping a finger on the Wainwright book, “but he talks about what it is like to walk a pretty good distance every day.”
“I will read with interest!” Lizzie said. “Thanks for this.”
“Tell me more about the nature of a pilgrimage,” Kate asked. “You know that I was raised by heathens.” Kate’s family had been in New England for generations and Lizzie knew for a fact that her grandfather had been a Unitarian minister.
“You probably have actual Pilgrim ancestors!” Lizzie joked, “though I’m sure they never let any saints’ bones into Plymouth.”
“I think they were more into allegorical pilgrimages, like the one in The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
“Yuck,” Lizzie said. “That book was such a disappointment.”
“I only read it because the March sisters liked it in Little Women, but it was very very dull, especially for a 12-year-old—which I was when I first tackled it.”
“A good pilgrimage requires the bones of a saint,” Lizzie said.
Kate asked her what bones were in England and Lizzie was sorry to report that none of the bones that would have defined the pilgrimage of the Wife of Bath survived. “One of the things Henry the Eighth did at the time of the Reformation was to send around a gang of pillagers to destroy all the relics and it is a real shame because they had some corkers.”
She described some of the relics that had been viewable in England in Chaucer’s time. Bones were the most popular, often held and displayed in reliquaries that were shaped like the body part from which they had come, with heads, arms and hands being the most popular. “You would not believe how many heads there are of John the Baptist!” Lizzie said to her friend. “There are something like ten heads in various collections around the world, plus teeth and other bones, and even the block on which he got his head chopped off.”
“I hadn’t realized there were so many fakes around so early.”
“Many, if not most of the relics in medieval times were fakes. It wasn’t until five centuries after the time of Christ that relics began to be venerated, so who, for instance, would have saved pieces of the true cross, or the head of John the Baptist? Or the manger in which Christ was born? There were pieces of that all over England in the Middle Ages. Before Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral, they already claimed to have the table of the last supper, the stone from which Christ ascended into heaven, and the coup de grace, a piece of the clay used by God to make Adam!”
“Who would ever have believed any of that?” Kate scoffed.
“I think wanting to believe is a big part of it,” Lizzie answered philosophically. “These objects have power because we imbue them with meaning through faith and imagination.”
“But that doesn’t actually make them either real or powerful.”
Lizzie agreed this was so.
“I begin to understand the Reformation tendencies of Martin Luther and Henry the Eighth,” Kate said. “These things had really gotten out of control.”
“But that doesn’t mean that relics have gone away. People still crave a tangible connection to fame. Hair clippings from pop stars get sold on eBay for incredible prices!”
“How do you even know that?” Kate asked, astonished.
Lizzie laughed. “How do you not know it? It seems to me that news like that is everywhere!”
Kate had a collection of sand and shells, collected from places she had sailed, and Lizzie said that was a collection of relics too. “They are relics of places and experiences,” she said. “And it was common to sell pieces of famous ships when they got broken up,” she added, thinking of other maritime things. It reminded her of an exhibit at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich that she had seen on her last trip to England.
“Now that I am warming to the subject, I have just realized the relics that are still in England,” she said enthusiastically. “Just because the bones of saints are gone does not mean that the British have lost their desire to seek the magnificent and the historical in the tangible. In Greenwich, I saw the coat that Admiral Nelson was wearing when he was shot at Trafalgar, the bullet that killed him, and his bloody socks.”
“I guess there might have been a Nelson cult after his death that could have been something like the Becket cult that flourished earlier,” Kate said thoughtfully. “They were both martyrs to their cause.”
She asked Lizzie if the lack of relics would make her pilgrimage less meaningful.
“Not at all,” Lizzie answered. “I’m in this for the historical adventure, not the religious experience.” She added that the Wife of Bath had probably not undertaken the pilgrimage as a religious exercise either. “None of those jolly tradespeople in Canterbury Tales were particularly holy or reverent, just the opposite! But the pilgrimage was a legitimate way to see the world. It was an excuse for travel within a well-developed and acceptable framework. It was like a guided tour with published itineraries, specified routes, souvenir shops, and travelling companions. It allowed a woman like the Wife of Bath to travel by herself in safety, without losing dignity or blemishing her character.”
“Well then, ‘Onward History Soldiers!’” Kate said, starting to sing.
Lizzie stopped her before she could get too far in extemporaneously rewriting the old hymn. “I hope that won’t be our theme song while walking,” she said.
“Do we need a theme song?”
“I’m not sure,” Lizzie said, “I will probably sing while walking by myself, but we can still put a duet to a vote for that portion of the walk when you join me.”
“I’ll vote for a Beatles song.”
“I will ponder my choice in the weeks to come,” Lizzie said, but she could not, for the rest of the day, get Kate’s damn hymn out of her head.
Chapter 6
There was a bridge under construction in her house when Lizzie arrived home. Her husband, Martin Sanchez, had an international reputation as a painter and had been commissioned to create a mural on a public building in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the great industrial city in the north of England. For several months he had been putting together the various elements that identified the city, including coal mines, ships, trains, fish, a castle and several British footballers, captured running out of the painting and onto the street, where he planned to paint their feet just emerging onto the sidewalk. He had included a crate of his favorite ale among the cargo piled high on a pier, and now he was sketching in the arch of a bridge, which framed the whole work and tied the disparate images together.
“I love it!” Lizzie said as she plopped into her favorite chair and looked up at the expanse of paper on which he worked.
“Unfortunately, I’ve completely lost the light, but I have to finish this section of the bridge while I have it clearly in my mind.”
Martin’s studio rose two stories high on the back of t
heir South Boston row house. It had windows almost from floor to ceiling on three walls, but the short winter days were frustrating him.
“Are you on schedule with the work?” Lizzie asked him.
“Mostly,” he answered. “I think I have everything in it that’s going in it, but I need to look over my notes again from all the various conversations I’ve had with folks in Newcastle over the last year, and just make sure one more time that I’m not missing any of the components that people thought were important.” He spoke into his work as he added details to the riveting of the bridge, but Lizzie was used to talking to his back after so many years of watching him from this position.
“Do you need this light?” she asked, moving the lamp on the table near her so that she could take a first look at the Wainwright book Kate had given her.
“Hey!” Martin said quickly. “Put that back! I need it where it was.”
Lizzie angled the shade back up to the paper where her husband was working.
“Just a bit to the right,” he said. “That’s it.” He never turned around.
“I’m going off with Alfred Wainwright,” Lizzie said as she left the room. She thought she heard a grunt of acknowledgement, but couldn’t be sure.
Lying on a couch in the living room with a cup of tea and a warm afghan, Lizzie opened the book again. “Tell me about making a long walk,” she said as she leafed through the pages. Wainwright was a stylish writer with good descriptions of the English countryside, but he quickly made Lizzie realize just how ignorant she was of the undertaking to which she had committed herself. This doyen of walkers traveled some twenty miles a day, in the process climbing, crossing and descending ridges of 2000 feet. He knew his pace so well, he claimed, that after a careful study of the map and the landscape, a quick glance at his watch would tell him his exact position.
From the day she had so insistently demanded that she could do this thing, there had always been some doubt in Lizzie’s mind about her ability to actually complete a two-hundred-mile walk in thirty days, but she had pushed those doubts aside with bravado because the project sounded interesting. Reading the account of someone who actually knew what he was doing made her see clearly that she did not.