by Mary Malloy
“That will save me a lot of walking!” Lizzie said with a laugh.
“On the contrary. It makes the walk that much more necessary,” Alison said seriously. “In order to compare what you will see in the landscape with what our Weaver documented here.”
“Of course it will,” Lizzie said. “With the journal and these images I will have a lot to inform me as I retrace the pilgrimage.”
One by one they held the photographs up to the tapestry and compared the vignettes of villages. They were clearly meant to capture specific features of each location, and though there were numerous castles and churches and roads and walled towns, each was unique. Her first destination was Wells, a city with a cathedral that had dramatic “scissor” arches that the Weaver had incorporated into the images of the building. Lizzie hoped she would be able to recognize other pieces of this ancient fabric in the places she visited along the route of her pilgrimage. When she felt she would be able to remember the tapestry from the photographs, Lizzie carefully slid them back into the envelope and the two women returned to Bath.
As they drove into the city, Lizzie looked again at the hills that lay beyond. She referred to the road map on her lap. Wells had to be the first stop. It was clearly described in the journal and illustrated on the tapestry, but it meant backtracking to the west before she put her steps firmly on the road east to Canterbury, and it meant crossing the Mendips. They looked mountainous.
When they returned to Alison’s house, Lizzie set herself up in the study and began to collate the resources, looking at the journal entries, the Weaver’s strip map, and the Ordnance Survey map of each section along the route. She looked at the road from Bath to Wells as the Weaver had illustrated it and began to wonder about how she had described and illustrated the hills. The photograph of the tapestry was clear, but Lizzie could not quite determine the meaning of some of the lines on it. Could they be compared to the elevation markings on the more modern map?
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” she asked Alison, hoping to get more deeply into the details.
They were in the library, sitting on either side of the partners’ desk that Alison’s father and grandfather had shared.
Alison began to pull the drawers out on her side. “I’m almost certain that I saw one here at one time, but it might have been on your side.”
Lizzie opened the top drawer and found two pieces of a broken lens, which she pulled out and laid on the table. “This larger one might work,” she said, sliding it over the top of the photograph, but it wasn’t big enough.
“If you can use that kind of lens for the job, then there are two in the Becket reliquary,” Alison said. She rose and went to the corner bookshelf. “I was meaning to pull out the original manuscript for you to see again anyway.” The small books from the shelf were quickly handed to Lizzie and piled on the desk, and Alison pulled out the board that hid the reliquary.
“I’m glad to see this again, too,” Lizzie said as Alison set it on the desk in front of her. “I never really had a chance to study it closely.” She put out a finger and gently slid it along the smooth surface, then around the gold embossed head of one of the murderers of Becket, which was applied onto the enamel. She opened the box and took out all the contents, laying the bone carefully on the wood of the desk, then the stiff scrap of fabric, the scallop shell, and then the two lenses. Alison took the Caxton edition of Canterbury Tales, with the inserted journal of the Weaver.
Lizzie picked up the two lenses, one in each hand, and held them up in front of her face with the slightly larger one behind the other.
“I think these are from a telescope,” she said. “I thought so when I first saw them in December, and now that I look closer I am even more convinced.” She put them back on the table and picked up the two pieces of the broken lens. “And this looks like one too.”
“My father ground his own lenses,” Alison said. “He learned how when he was at Oxford. There was an astronomy society there, and he maintained the interest and his connections with those men all his life.”
She had spoken to Lizzie of her father during their roundtrip to Oxford. He was the oldest of four children, all of whom, girls and boys, spent some of their childhood in various jobs in the mill. The family’s growing fortune had allowed his parents to educate them well, and he, as the oldest, inherited the business and the greatest part of the fortune. Alison’s mother was also from a large family, with little money but substantial aristocratic pretentions.
“I’m impressed that he had both the theoretical knowledge and the practical skill to pursue it,” Lizzie said. She moved the largest of the lenses over the top of the photograph of the area of the strip map that illustrated the road from Bath to Wells. Certainly the Weaver had marked hills.
She sat back, unwilling to tell Alison of her doubts about her ability to get through even the first day of walking. Now that the start of the pilgrimage was only a week away, she acknowledged again how much she did not know about what she was doing. She held the lens in her hand and rubbed her thumb across the concave surface of the glass, and then around the outer rim. There was a slight roughness, which stood out against the perfect smoothness of the rest of the lens. She held it up to her eye and saw that there was a small inscription: CC 7/7.
“Are you sure your father made this lens?”
Alison assured her that she was certain of it. “Why do you ask?”
“Because it seems to have someone else’s mark on it.” Lizzie held the lens across the desk for Alison to see where her finger marked the lettering incised into the glass.
Alison took it from her, but the letters were too tiny for her to read. “Are you sure this isn’t just a scratch?” she asked.
Lizzie took the other lens from the desktop and was about to hand it to her friend to use as a magnifier. As she picked it up, she felt a similar rough place along the edge and another inscription: StM 12/29.
“Well this is strange,” she said, reading out the letters to Alison. “If it isn’t a signature, could it refer to a particular telescope that it was made for?” She looked up. “Do you have any of his telescopes?”
“All his scientific instruments are still in this room, as far as I know.”
Lizzie had already noticed a fine old sextant on one of the shelves, and Alison pointed to several wooden boxes that she thought held instruments. A quick search revealed four telescopes and several additional lenses, but none of them were marked, and there was nothing on any of the telescopes to indicate that it had a special name or number.
“Why do you think these particular lenses are in the Becket box?” Even as Lizzie spoke, Alison was asking her a similar question.
“Is it possible that he observed something special with these lenses and marked them as souvenirs of the occasion?” Lizzie asked.
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure, maybe a comet or star or something?” Neither could remember having heard of any such celestial phenomenon with the initials C.C. or St. M., and the dates weren’t meaningful to Alison. After several minutes of discussion, they determined that whatever they were, they weren’t relevant to the Weaver’s pilgrimage, so they returned them to the box and went back to the journal.
Chapter 10
Alison and Lizzie spent the next several days poring over the journal, comparing it to the images on the tapestry, and looking at both ancient and modern maps to determine the route. They realized as they marked the path along the Ordnance Survey maps that two other literary themes were constantly intruding on their work: Jane Austen had lived at several places along the route, albeit three hundred years later, in the late 1700s, and sites associated with King Arthur unrolled across the south of England from Mount Baden, one of the Mendips—which was said by some to be where King Arthur fought the Saxons.
The latter topic had a connection to their project, as it was in King Arthur’s court that the “Wife of Bath” set her tale.
“There is plenty of critical sc
holarship that has already been done on Chaucer’s use of Arthurian sources,” Alison said one day to Lizzie, “and on where the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ comes from. I don’t intend to deal much with that, if at all, in our work.”
“But the Weaver has a mention in her journal of Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury,” Lizzie said. “So we’ll need to prepare a note on it to go with our annotations to the text.”
“I hope you realize that the so-called tomb of Arthur was a great medieval hoax,” Alison said, a hint of frustration in her voice. “I get so tired of hearing people talk about Arthur as a historical rather than a literary figure, but you are right, of course, we will have to include a note about it.” She made a gesture with her head to an area of shelving over her right shoulder. “There is a section here of different versions of the Arthur texts if you would like to take on that topic.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said with enthusiasm. She had loved the story since she had seen the Disney movie “The Sword in the Stone” as a child, avidly read Thomas Malory’s La Morte de Arthur in high school, and had probably seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” more often than any other film; she could quote numerous passages from it. That Alison did not consider Arthur to have any basis in a historical character was a surprise to her, but she could sense that a conversation on this topic would be better after she had gained more background, and she decided to choose some of the books from Alison’s collection and bring them with her when she retired for the evening to her room.
With the discovery that the tapestry illustrated a strip map of the Weaver’s pilgrimage as described in her journal, the structure of the book that Alison would write on the topic evolved very neatly. She said she considered Lizzie her collaborator on all aspects of the work, and the two of them were dividing up research tasks.
The most difficult problem was how to convincingly connect the Weaver to Geoffrey Chaucer, who was not mentioned by name in the journal. Even without that connection, a book linking the tapestry map to an actual fourteenth-century journal would be a remarkable achievement, but Alison was convinced that her ancestress was the Wife of Bath. Before Lizzie identified the tapestry as a map of the journey, that idea had steered the project, but now she seemed to waver.
“I don’t want to diminish the importance of the Weaver’s works by overstating the Chaucer context,” she told Lizzie one day. “If the reception of the book gets dominated by a debate over whether or not the Chaucer connection is supportable, then I will be disappointed.”
“I assume you would not mention this unless you thought there were scholars out there who will argue against it.”
“Of course there are!” Alison said pointedly. “That’s their job, the Dante Zettlers of the world. He will be the first in line to say that the Weaver was not a source for Chaucer; he will build his reputation on it.”
Lizzie asked Alison to lay out the evidence for her so that she could see the strengths and weaknesses in the argument for a correspondence between the Weaver and the Wife of Bath, and Alison began by reminding Lizzie of the structure of Canterbury Tales.
“There are three different passages that deal with the Wife of Bath,” she said. “The first is the glimpse we get of her when all the characters are introduced in the ‘Prologue,’ the second is the prologue to her own tale, the third is the tale itself. We learn that she is, first and foremost, an excellent weaver; she has been married five times, her socks are red, she has ample hips, she rides astride and wears spurs, she loves to laugh and gossip, she has travelled very widely, and she has a gap between her front teeth, which everybody says was a sure sign of promiscuity.” Alison added that the last part was ridiculous, of course, but it was an old literary shorthand to let physical features denote aspects of a person’s character.
“When the Wife of Bath introduces herself to her companions and her readers, she tells of her relationships with her husbands—beginning with the first when she was twelve years old—and compares her personal experience of love to what she has read in several books.”
Lizzie interrupted to ask Alison if she had read Jackie’s paper from college. “She deals specifically with the way that Chaucer presents the Wife of Bath’s relationship to books. She was meant to be hilarious to the knowledgeable reader because her interpretation of what she has read is completely unconventional—and therefore laughably wrong. There is a bit of a nudge and a wink to the reader as we make fun of her for it.”
“Your friend’s paper was very perceptive,” Alison responded. “I read it last night. Her notion that there might have been a woman who influenced Chaucer, and whom he treated cruelly in the text, hit close to home, I must say.”
“Weird, isn’t it. I’d like to tell her about the journal because I think she might be helpful on some of our research questions; she is an extremely astute librarian.”
It was Jackie’s perspective on the Wife of Bath that most intrigued Alison. “Most people dismiss or condemn the character because she is crude,” she said. “And that is what I most wanted to rescue the Weaver from. But your friend Jackie isn’t bothered by straightforward sexual talk; in fact she seems to admire it. What she doesn’t like is that Chaucer made the character seem stupid.”
To Lizzie, the combination of crude and stupid seemed the worst possible flaws the author could inflict on his character, especially as she was one of the few independent female characters depicted in the literature of the age.
“But the definition of what is vulgar has certainly changed in six hundred years,” she said, “and modern readers do not necessarily see an openness about sexual behavior in the same way as Chaucer intended.”
“That is certainly so, but I am more interested in his motives than the interpretation of readers today.”
Lizzie had to admit that in that case the Wife of Bath was extremely coarse. Not only did she express a willingness to have sex with any man at any time, but she mentions in delightful medieval terms how they praise her sexual anatomy. “I love the word she uses to describe her genital region,” Lizzie said, laughing to Alison. “Her ‘quonium!’ And she calls it the ‘beste that mighte be!’ In its own day that certainly must have been exceedingly vulgar.”
“Today we could use the word with impunity,” Alison responded. “Nobody knows what it means!”
“If they did, we’d have to refer to it as the ‘q’ word!”
Lizzie had tried to maintain a serious demeanor through the conversation, but now her composure failed and she gave a honk of laughter.
“This conversation might be even more interesting with a glass of scotch in my hand,” Alison said, pouring her ubiquitous drink into two glasses and handing one to Lizzie. The slight buzz it brought on made Lizzie laugh even more boisterously.
“I’m going to write a romance novel,” she said enthusiastically, “and use the word quonium! No more of those silly euphemisms like ‘mound of Venus’ or ‘gateway to Paradise!’”
“Those aren’t even particularly poetic,” Alison complained. “I’ve often thought that I could write a fairly racy novel—under a pseudonym of course—with metaphors that get the heart pumping.” She took a swig of scotch and laid the empty glass on the table with a clunk. “She exposed the nest that lay between her silken thighs,” she said with a gesture of her hand, “and the sacred bud opened to greet his throbbing manhood.”
Lizzie was slouched down in her chair and she slapped at her leg with hilarity as Alison described ever more graphic displays of semantic gymnastics. “You are mixing some metaphors,” she said after a particularly splendid offering.
Alison acknowledged that Lizzie was right. “Perhaps when we are finished with our present collaboration we can move on to a novel,” she said. “I think between us we could fill it with wonderful allusions to nastiness and you can correct my metaphors.”
The conversation devolved from there. After each had downed another scotch and soda their metaphors were no longer metaphors and they were speaking so crudely th
at Chaucer would have blushed to hear them.
“Do you think,” Lizzie said finally with a great sigh, “that maybe the Weaver and her circle of women friends sat in this very house speaking forthrightly about their quoniums, and Chaucer actually captured something about her that was real?” She paused, and then asked Alison if it would bother her if they somehow found that that part of the description was true.
“After our raunchy language tonight I could hardly condemn her for the same behavior, but you know of course that she didn’t live in this house, so if she discussed her sexual escapades it wasn’t here.”
That had not occurred to Lizzie. “I guess I should have known that your house isn’t quite that old,” she said. “But since the Weaver’s work was found here by your grandmother, I made a rash assumption that it was always here.”
“This house was built in the reign of Mary Tudor, when Catholics gained their positions back, and my family had some money to spend. We were wool merchants then.”
“So still the cloth and Catholicism motto?”
“Yes indeed. Someone involved in the building of this house was interested enough in the old fragments of cloth to collect them and bring them here, but I think that many more must have been lost.”
“Where was the original house?”
“It is described in an old deed as being near the northwest corner of Bath Abbey, so it was probably right on top of where the restored Roman baths are. There were remnants of several looms found in the excavation, so it seems there was a concentrated community of weavers at that spot during her lifetime, and Bath was pretty well known for being a center of the business.” She gave Lizzie a wink. “Cloth and Catholicism.”
The hour was late and as they made their plans for the next day, Lizzie expressed an interest in seeing the site where the Weaver had lived.
Chapter 11
Jackie once again proved her usefulness when Lizzie opened her email the next morning.