by Mary Malloy
She called Kate. “Yikes!” she said. “You were right that Mr. Wainwright cannot be my model.” She paused, twirling a long strand of hair around her finger. “Can I actually do this?” she said finally. The question sounded more plaintive than she intended.
“Of course you can,” Kate answered without hesitation. “I thought you’d like the book because he describes the sort of paths we’ll be on.”
“I guess I hadn’t realized quite how serious the English are about this stuff.”
Kate began to describe a group she knew of that worked hard to keep access open to the ancient footpaths in Britain, even as private property owners increasingly objected. “There is a society of ramblers in England that tries to get people out on each of the paths every year,” Kate explained, “just to insure that they remain accessible to the public.”
Lizzie remembered the “Public Footpath” signs that delineated paths she had walked on near Hengemont. Some of them went along the edges of cultivated fields or grazing grounds of animals. “Wainwright said that he was afraid of getting into a field with a bull, and now so am I,” she wailed.
Kate laughed. “That was seventy years ago and I think the terrain was a bit wilder.”
“You know that he wore a flannel suit, complete with vest and tie, he carried no other clothes, and slept in his suit at least twice?”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to. I have to admit that I haven’t read the whole book. I’ve known of it for a long time though.”
“I have no idea what my pace is.”
“That’s okay. This isn’t a race and it will be your primary occupation for a month.”
“I’m glad you’re coming along,” Lizzie said, her voice full of emotion.
“Me too! The more I think about it the more excited I am at the prospect.”
Lizzie returned to the book and quickly skimmed the rest of the text, her fear and frustration turning to anger. She sat up and put her feet on the floor, reaching into her purse for a marking pen, and highlighted several passages where Wainwright described what he thought of women. He had never, he wrote, “witnessed genuine enthusiasm in one of them.” (Sometimes there was the “pretense of it” but the “divine spark” was missing.) In another passage he wrote, “it is the comparative deficiency in intellect that makes woman’s claim for equality with man pathetic.”
The sound of Martin in the kitchen brought her to her feet. “Listen to this,” she called as she moved to find him. “Alfred Wainwright says that women are ‘strangers to dependability’ and ‘have not the rigid standards of men, nor the same loyalty.’” She made little rabbit ear gestures with two fingers to identify the quoted passages. “He wrote this in 1938! It is as if nothing changed in the six hundred years since Chaucer!”
“Isn’t this the man you said you were going away with?”
“Not anymore!” She tossed the book onto the kitchen counter. “He is banished to the rubbish heap, as he would say. My God! What English women have had to put up with for the last thousand years!”
“What is that, my love?” Martin asked.
“English men!” She described the conversation at lunch. “The story the Wife of Bath tells in Canterbury Tales is really bothering me, especially since I am about to literally follow in her footsteps. But Jackie has an interesting take on it, and even wrote a paper in college about how Chaucer might have been punishing a real woman by putting that story in her mouth.”
“Did you tell her about the manuscript journal?”
Lizzie pushed herself up to sit on the kitchen counter as Martin prepared their dinner. “Alison absolutely swore me to secrecy. Jackie has no idea how close she is to the truth—that there was an actual Wife of Bath.”
“Does Alison know that I know?”
“She does.” Lizzie reached out to touch Martin with her toe. “But she isn’t worried about you because you don’t know any Chaucer scholars. Jackie, on the other hand, corresponds with bunches of them. I sent Jackie’s paper to Alison, though, and asked if I could bring her into the sacred circle.” She left her perch to set the small table in their kitchen as she saw Martin put the final touches on dinner.
“I’ve been reading Canterbury Tales, too,” he said, deftly turning two pieces of fish onto plates and adding rice. He pointed with his elbow and told her there was a salad in the refrigerator.
“And what do you think of it?”
“Chaucer clearly didn’t think much of the church, despite the fact that half his characters are in the clergy and all of them are on a religious pilgrimage!”
“I read in a biography that Chaucer once beat a friar and was fined two shillings as punishment, so he wasn’t exactly a reverent man, but it still seems amazing that he got away with being so disdainful of the Catholic Church.”
“Ha!” Martin laughed. “That must be why friars live up Satan’s ‘arse’ in the book!”
“That is a particularly compelling image,” Lizzie said. She complimented him on the fish before continuing. “One has to keep in mind that the fourteenth century was a really a low point for the church, with lots of false relics, dubious indulgences, rich bishops, and fornicating priests. It was also when there were two competing popes, so it isn’t that surprising that people, even the most faithful, must have begun to have doubts.”
“The most troublesome story to me is the one told by the prioress, who is a rich old hag and a raving anti-Semite, despite the fact that she runs a convent. Her description of the horrible Jews, who murder innocent little Christian children just to throw their bodies into muck heaps, is absolutely disgusting.”
Lizzie agreed that it was the most offensive story in the book. “But all the clergy come off badly. The monk is rich, the pardoner is a crook, the friar is a womanizer, and the summoner is a drunken blackmailer.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes.
Martin was the first to speak again. “Chaucer was kind of a creep, wasn’t he?”
Lizzie looked up at her husband. “Is that it? It’s true that the more I read the angrier I get.” She paused. “But perhaps that is his genius—that his themes are so human that we are still battling the same bad behaviors. It’s pretty impressive that he is still getting such a rise out of us six hundred years later.”
“I have to admit, some of it is hilarious,” Martin said sheepishly. “The ‘Summoner’s Tale’ is a great big fart joke!”
“Rose Geminiani said that at St. Angela’s High School ‘The Miller’s Tale’ got passed around under the desks because they weren’t officially allowed to read it.”
“Ah, ‘The Miller’s Tale,’” he said, smiling. “Chaucer did tap into a deeply perverse part of the adolescent brain with that one.”
“So the poor hate the rich and visa versa, schoolboys are constantly thinking of sex, men mock each other by throwing around fart comments, powerful people make deeply offensive racist remarks about people they almost certainly don’t know personally, men degrade women, and the Catholic Church is in trouble. It actually sounds quite modern!”
“And probably has since it was first written. That may be its enduring quality.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on his. “Thank you for this conversation,” she said. “I feel better about Chaucer.”
He turned his hand over and held hers. “And the Wife of Bath?”
“I really want to love her.”
Martin squeezed her hand. “You will. Chaucer doesn’t have the final word on her. She left her own version of the story, and now you get to rediscover it.”
Chapter 7
When she entered Alison’s house the second time, both the house and its owner had less of a Havishamian feel to Lizzie. There was still a mountainous landscape of books around the perimeters of most of the rooms, but there seemed to be more space and fewer papers in the interiors. Lizzie had tried to argue over the phone that she thought she should stay at a hotel when she was in Bath, but Alison insisted that she must stay in th
e house with her. The general cleanup must have been for her benefit, Lizzie thought, and she appreciated the effort. The rooms she was given were certainly comfortable. The ceilings were low and the path to get to them went up and down several small staircases, but the bedroom was cozy, the study was airy, and the bathroom had a big claw-footed tub that looked comfortable for a long soak.
It wasn’t long after her arrival that the scotch came out and she found herself back in the familiar chair. The Becket reliquary was no longer on the table, and there was no sign of either the early Chaucer edition or the manuscript journal of Alison’s ancestress, but a plain black binder had a label with Lizzie’s name on it.
“Let’s get straight to work,” Alison said, handing the binder to Lizzie.
It was evening and already dark outside as they sat at the small table. Alison asked Lizzie if she needed to rest from the time change, but she had spent a few days in London with Martin before they went off to their respective jobs, and she was ready to work. She opened the binder and found a typescript of the journal and a road map of the South of England, across which Alison had drawn a route in red.
“I translated the journal from Middle English for you. It isn’t word for word, but I think it captures something of her language.”
Lizzie turned over a few pages and found descriptions that fairly leapt off the page, of verdant hills and wooly lambs, of the smell of new-mown hay and the peaty smoke from cottage hearths, and of the sounds of distant bells and of wind rustling new leaves in a spring forest.
“Lovely,” she said, looking from the page to her hostess. “Either she or you has a wonderful turn of phrase.
“It’s probably a combination of the two of us,” Alison responded. “As I said it isn’t word for word but it will guide you through the landscape. That is the only copy,” she added. “I made the translation as I went and typed it on a typewriter, so there is no chance of anyone else seeing it unless you let it out of your hands, and I cannot stress enough how important it is to me that you not let that happen.”
Trying not to be rude, Lizzie asked if there was really a danger that someone might try to steal it.
“Indeed,” Alison said pointedly, “someone already has.”
When Lizzie asked for more details, Alison told her about her discovery of the Becket box and its contents.
“My father was very ill for a long time,” she began. “He had for years told me that there was a family secret that he needed to tell me before he died, and that he left clues to its discovery in case he wasn’t able to.” She seemed sad as she recounted her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s and his eventual inability to distinguish fact from fantasy. “He became paranoid about protecting this secret, whatever it was,” she explained, “and developed elaborate hiding places around the house where he secreted important documents and cash, but also train schedules and worthless circulars from stores. He lost his ability to distinguish what was valuable from what was not.” She described how she had, in the ten years since his death, found piles of things all around the house, tucked into corners, hidden behind or under loose boards, and even pushed into canisters of flour and sugar. “He especially liked to hide things among and in books, and he ruined a number of very good books by cutting holes in the pages to hide things.”
At the mention of the books, the two women simultaneously looked around the room. Lizzie didn’t want to embarrass Alison, but despite the tragedy in the story, when their eyes met she had to stifle a smile. The number of books in this room alone bordered on absurdity, and as she thought of the rest of the house, with its book-lined corridors, and bursting shelves, the idea of ever finding anything hidden in a single volume struck her as hilarious. The older woman did what Lizzie had worked to hold back, and gave an explosive laugh that was contagious. The two women laughed hard until Lizzie could feel her eyes watering.
“There are a lot of books,” she said when she could finally catch her breath.
“Yes there are,” Alison admitted.
“Where did you find the Becket reliquary?”
Alison stood and gestured to Lizzie to follow her, wiping her eyes on her sleeve as she walked. They went to a part of the house that Lizzie had not yet seen, and through a low door into a dark room.
“Wait until I turn on the light,” Alison said, walking ahead. “There is no overhead light here.” She pulled a chain to turn on a green-shaded desk lamp and Lizzie took in the space.
The room was dominated by a big desk with leather chairs on opposite sides. An ancient fireplace, big enough to sit in, looked like it had not been warm in years, and the room was lined with the ubiquitous shelves of books
“This was my father’s study,” Alison said. “From the time I was a child it was my favorite room in the house; we often sat here and talked of so many topics. He was a real historian, an amateur astronomer, and a lover of literature.” Her tone turned regretful. “When he became sick he wouldn’t even let me enter, and after he died I avoided coming in here.”
She walked behind the desk and put her hand on a shelf at shoulder level. “Until two years ago. We were hiring a new faculty member at the University and the leading candidate was to give a lecture on The Canterbury Tales, so I came in here looking for a copy of the book that I could review in advance. My father collected multiple editions of Chaucer.”
Lizzie stepped over to the shelf. There were at least twenty different editions of Canterbury Tales, bound in vellum, leather, cloth and paper; some had the title stamped in gold along the spine. They took up one full section of shelving, one end of which was bisected by a short board to allow the smallest volumes to be stacked on two smaller shelves.
“When I came to find a reading copy of the book,” Alison explained, “I wasn’t really interested in these small copies. They tend to be the oldest and are both valuable and hard to read, but I was being methodical and so I pulled each one off the shelf and thumbed through it.” Even as she said it, she began to transfer the small books from the shelf to the desk. She pulled Lizzie closer beside her. “And look what I found,” she said, tapping on the back of the shelf. “The shelves here are not only half as high, but half as deep as the others.”
It was not an elaborate hiding place, simply two pieces of wood, with one joined to the other at a right angle along the center line. The larger of the two formed the false back wall, the other the small shelf. Alison pulled it out easily and showed Lizzie the Becket reliquary sitting on the shelf behind it; the gold and enamel glowed in the reflected light of the desk lamp.
Lizzie couldn’t help making a sound as she drew in her breath in surprise. The box and the book inside it were each enormously valuable. How many decades had they sat quietly on the shelf without anyone knowing of their existence?
“I had seen stories in The Times about the Becket box that the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased,” Alison said, continuing her story, “so I knew what it was and how much it might be worth.” She turned to Lizzie. “It is, by the way, not commonly known that I have such a valuable item in my house, and I hope that situation will continue.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said in response.
Alison replaced the board and the shelf. “The box even had the key in it. I expected that the edition of Canterbury Tales hidden in it was probably special, but I didn’t then have any idea how special it was. I decided to bring it to the lecture and see if our visiting scholar could tell me something about it. It still had the manuscript pages tucked into it.”
Lizzie listened intently as she handed the small books, one after another, to Alison.
Alison talked as she filled the small shelves. “It was the first time I met Dante Zettler and I handed it over to him, without any suspicion of its value, either historical or monetary.”
“Dante Zettler?” Lizzie asked. “He’s the Chaucer scholar?”
Allison nodded as she continued. “He was interested in the Caxton Chaucer, of course, but he also quickly realized the pot
ential importance of the manuscript. He asked if he might borrow it to study it, and I was cautious enough to refuse, but I later found him at the copy machine, making a copy of it. I don’t even know how he got it; he must have taken it from my satchel when I wasn’t looking.”
“What a sneaky bastard! Were you able to get the copy he made?”
“I think so. I caught him and was furious, but he is, as you note, a sneaky bastard. He insisted that he had simply misunderstood me and repeatedly declared his innocence.”
“I hope you didn’t hire him!”
“I’m sorry to say that we did. He has a very engaging manner, and his father is a famous literary scholar, which was influential to some of my colleagues who don’t know anything about literature.”
“That explains his name, I guess.”
Alison made a derisive harrumphing sound. “Yes, all the children in the family are named after authors. My colleagues thought that was charming!”
Lizzie had looked up Alison on the website of the University of Bath, and knew that the college didn’t offer much in the way of English Literature. “It’s not a large department, is it?” she said carefully.
Allison told her that there were only five people who were literary scholars in a larger department of Modern Languages.
“We began as a technical college, we don’t have the grand old buildings, and English Literature doesn’t even have its own department; most of the students in our courses are foreign students. Dante thought he would be here for a year at most—an interim step on a fast-tracked career, but the economy has been so bad that most colleges have frozen hiring so now he is rather stuck here and it clearly isn’t the place he wants to be. He is depending on a book he is writing to propel him up to the next level.” She put her hand again on the shelf with the multiple volumes of Chaucer. “His book is on Chaucer’s sources for Canterbury Tales, and now that he knows that I have a manuscript by a woman who might have been the model for the Wife of Bath, he cannot publish without it.”