She recognized me as well, I could tell from a flicker in her eyes. Yet we said nothing about that old business, moving immediately to her minglings with the mayor, which I got out of her with surprising ease. Brembre, it turned out, was one of the more frequent buyers of her peculiar services. Rykener seemed willing to describe their arrangements and couplings in as much detail as I wished.
“Aye, I swerve for my sustenance. Not many like me, not in London at least, though Oxford has a bevy of swervers, it does.”
“And your techniques? Do they make it apparent that you are a—that you are what you are?”
She poked a tongue against one of her cheeks, pushed it out, considering my question. “I got my own particular ways of tricking the fellows. Greased thighs, a pulsy hand.” She smiled. “My lord the mayor, though, he wants no tricks, as I told the Guildhall clerk. Arse up and straight in, no fuss and foisting about it.”
“Did he seem keen to protect his name?”
“Oh, aye, sire. Has me call him Harry, doesn’t he. As if I don’t know his face from his Ridings and mayoral entries and such.” Her eyes went wide. “Mayoral entries. You catch that, sire?” She laughed.
I allowed a smile, then asked, “Who questioned you at the Guildhall?”
“One of the sheriffs it was. Fierce fellow. Don’t know his name.”
I thought for a moment. “And who took the deposition?”
“Sire?”
“Do you recall the clerk taking down your words, his name or what he looked like?”
The swerver widened her eyes. “Now, him I remember. Strange face, that sribbling carl, all burned up, and an odd name to match. Pinkhouse or some likeness.”
“Pinkhurst?”
“Aye, Pinkhurst’s what it was.”
“I understand you named other jakes in this proceeding.”
“Oh, aye. Lords, abbots, your knights, and can’t say I haven’t swyved a bishop or two in my Gropecunt years. And one abbess, bless her nether lips!”
I was tempted to ask for their names but didn’t want to distract the maudlyn. “Why are you telling me all this so freely, even for good coin? And why did you confess before the sheriff? You’re not worried about Brembre’s taste for his accusers’ blood?”
Her eyes went cold. “I don’t take nicely to threats. But that sheriff said he’d have my cock off and all Joan Rugg’s mauds jailed if I didn’t spout the truth.” She smiled, her gaze unchanged above. “Sheriff wasn’t wagering on the truth I gave him, though. His face went white as a man’s seed when I told him Sir Nick Brembre lived a second life in my arse!”
Chapter 21
THE FIRST PART OF THAT DAY the mother, Mariota, rode alone toward the rear of the company. She had gathered a blanket about her shoulders against the chilling air along this stretch of the road below York. There was a lingering sadness in those shoulders, Margery observed, in the stooped back of the recently widowed.
The boy was doing better, in her estimation, having been befriended by a group of sympathetic men from the London group. They’d even got him laughing by the second day out from the last village, and now were on to snaring coneys and scaling fish, warning him his turn was coming to feed the company’s many maws with a good cooked meal.
The mother, though, sat heavy in her saddle, and Margery saw the faint sparks of doubt in those dull and sagging eyes. She decided to stoke them.
How to do it? At one point before the noon hour she slowed, then turned her horse in the road and waited for the widow to reach her. “A bright and cool morning, blessed with full sun,” she said once she was alongside Mariota.
The other woman did not look at her. “Aye,” was all she managed to say.
“We have had no storms along our way, with the roads free and clear,” Margery went on. “Often in these weeks it has felt as if the blessed St. Cuthbert himself were guiding our way, with fair weather, no illness or accident, no sudden strokes of ill fortune—”
Mariota twisted to look at her sharply, fury in her beady eyes.
“Ah!” Margery shook her head, lifted a hand to her mouth. “What a mindless thing to say. You will forgive me?”
Mariota turned toward the front, her lips tight.
“Please forgive me, mistress,” Margery said, reaching out a hand. Mariota felt it on her arm, shook it off.
“I am dreadful sorry, Mariota. My—my mind muddles easily since the birth, you see. I often find myself thinking things happier than they truly are.”
Mariota squinted at her.
“We lost a babe, you see,” said Margery quickly. “Before the pilgrimage began. That is why we journey to Durham.”
The other woman nodded tightly, looking eager for their exchange to end, though she was kind enough to give a fitting reply. “Lost two m’self. It’s a woman’s lot, isn’t it.”
“It is that,” said Margery, letting her face relax into a semblance of melancholy. They passed a fallow field, unusually flat for this region, and watched as two men hauled stones to one of its near corners.
“What was your husband’s occupation, Mariota?” she asked softly.
Silence for a while. “We have a mill, don’t we,” Mariota eventually said.
“And who is watching it for you during your pilgrimage?”
“Left it in the care and running of our John, didn’t we.”
“He is your brother, or your husband’s?”
“Our son,” she said. “The elder.”
“Ah. Two sons for you then?”
“Two sons, aye,” she said. Her chin went up slightly. “And we’ve a daughter of fifteen, don’t we.”
“Fifteen and left alone, under her brother’s care?” Margery asked in mock surprise. “And a miller’s daughter, no less! You don’t worry for her virtue?”
Mariota scoffed. “Honest to say, there’s more worry for her dowry than her virtue.”
“Tell me about the river, then. Is it well situated, and quite beautiful?”
“It takes a fair wide bend for us, doesn’t it,” Mariota said, turning slightly in her saddle toward Margery. “Narrows above us, broadens below. The perfect perch for a mill, or so my late John’s grandfather would say. He’s the one what built it there, stone by stone, didn’t he, and the house that adjoins.”
“And the shire’s farmers grow enough to keep the wheel turning?”
“Oh aye, that they do,” said Mariota, and she was off describing the lands, the neighboring manors, relations with the lords.
It was a light condescension Margery practiced that day, a woman of gentle birth speaking down to a miller’s widow, yet with enough warmth and kindness to keep the widow talking for hours and with an increasing openness about all matters of life.
She saw Robert watching them warily, yet there was little danger in the exchange as long as he was kept from answering too many of Mariota’s prying questions. By the late afternoon the two women had become fast friends, or so it seemed.
A steeple loomed ahead, signaling their resting place for the night. Mariota turned to her as they passed an outlying smithy. “Now it be your turn to discourse to me, good mistress. What reason would a gentlewoman such as yourself have t’take up with a scullion such as Robert Faulk?”
“As I have told you already, mistress, my husband is hardly a—”
“Don’t give me hardly this, hardly that,” she said softly, and somehow the lowness of her voice was more threatening than her screechy accusations days ago. “I’d know Robert Faulk were he traipsing ’cross the face of the moon. You two go together like sop and snakes. You’ll tell me what’s this about or I’ll shout it to our company, I will, every man and woman of them.”
Just as Margery had suspected. The scowls, the cold glares, the ugly, suspicious looks. Mariota knew, despite the clever way Robert had sought to convince her otherwise. Yet Mariota had said nothing about the Portbridge gaol, nor about Robert’s poaching, let alone about murder. Margery suspected that none of this was yet known to the woma
n for the moment. That could change, however, and instantly so, depending on how widely and speedily the sheriffs were searching the two of them out.
“Your son,” said Margery. She nodded to the boy up ahead.
“What of him?”
“You feel as if you would do anything to keep him safe, don’t you?”
“Aye to that, mistress,” said Mariota, raising her shoulders a notch. “Nothing I wouldn’t do to protect young Hugh.”
“Yet you have already lost your husband.”
“I have.”
“As I have lost mine, Mariota.”
“Yet Robert there—”
“Hardly my husband, as you have so shrewdly deduced, Mariota.”
“Then what are you—”
“My true husband beat me, Mariota. Used my flesh in every conceivable way. Hammered my ribs, bruised my legs. There was one day when he came home after a week of hunting boar with his lord the baron. He never took a boar himself, but the baron did, on that last morning. My husband had made some drunken wager with another in the party that he would butcher any man’s boar killed before his own, so it was up to him to string up the beast, skin it, gut it. No surprise that he made a mess of it. When he got to the manor he was still slathered with gore, still drunk, and he forced me up into our bedchamber in front of our servants, and with our doors and shutters open to the world he set upon me with every weapon in his arsenal. He made me bathe him afterwards.”
Margery cleared her throat, spat to the side, wishing the memory would leave her with the spittle. “He would have taken my life had I remained in his house much longer. So on a fair Sunday the next week I hid an axe in my dress. He came into the gallery late that morning. I waited for the blow I knew would come. When it fell I turned away from him, pulled out the axe, and chopped him to the neck bone. Three strokes.”
Mariota was staring at her, her mouth agape.
Margery smiled at the other woman. “I tell you my story not to inspire your pity, Mariota, nor to spark your outrage. Consider it, rather, a warning, to you and to your son. I will do anything to protect what is my own. My body, my dignity. My name. Anything. You are comprehending my words, Mariota?”
Mariota nodded, the fright apparent in her widened eyes.
“Your husband has recently died. You have a young son with you as your burden and your responsibility. Yet think what awaits you back home. The mill, the river, a grown son to manage things in this hour of sorrow.”
She reached over to place a hand on the other woman’s arm. “It would be a far better thing, would it not, to return to your home rather than continue on this pilgrimage to the remotest end of England? The road is perilous enough with a good man by your side. Now you have but a weak little boy as your sole companion. So go south, Mariota. Buy a Mass for your husband at your parish. Extol his dying bravery to your neighbors. See that the mill is passed on to your elder son without incident, and that your younger son is provided for. Give a thought to your daughter’s betrothal.”
Margery sat straight, taking her hand away. “St. Cuthbert was renowned for his patience, you know. His bones can wait until another day for the arrival of good Mariota.”
THEY SPENT THAT NIGHT in a pilgrims’ hamlet midway between York and Durham. In the morning Mariota announced to the company that she would be returning south, for London and Kent. Mother and son would remain where they were and join the next company traveling southward. There were some sad farewells though few tears as the company saddled and mounted.
Margery and Robert waited at the inn gate as the pilgrims departed the village for the way north. Once on the road they slowed their mounts until they rode at the rear of the company, and in the coming days they took what joy they could in the welcome reprieve from the widow’s presence. Yet their relief was mingled with a rising dread, neither of them knowing how many days and hours God would grant them to remain free.
Chapter 22
THE COURT OF CHIVALRY moves about England like a lamed plowhorse thinking itself a charger. Though occasionally hearing appeals of treason or desertion from the military ranks, the earl marshal’s court spends most of its time plodding through matters of heraldry, deliberating on such subjects as which knight should be allowed to emblazon what kind of lion on his shield, or what magnate may be permitted to display a certain length of unicorn horn on his faction’s badges. Presiding over this peripatetic body—in name, at least—were the lord high constable and the earl marshal: Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, though these two lords would rarely condescend to show their faces for the court’s routine proceedings. That duty fell to lower men such as Sir John Derwentwater, who sat uncomfortably on a monk’s narrow council chair in the abbey’s refectory, glaring at his latest deponent, Geoffrey Chaucer, as his clerk inked along at a nearby desk.
I could well understand the knight’s hostility. It was now the fifteenth day of October, and for months Derwentwater and several other knights of the court had been appointed to travel around deposing the cream of English chivalry in hopes of resolving the long-standing dispute between Sir Richard Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor. Assembled in the refectory that morning were over a dozen men, most of them knights, all of them aggrieved to have been summoned from their gentler parliamentary duties while in Westminster for an interrogation at the hands of the court: Sir Maurice de Bruyn, Sir Edward Dalyngrigge, Sir Robert Clavering, Sir Richard Waldegrave, Sir John St. Quintyn, Sir Bertram Mountboucher, Sir Thomas Sakevyle, Sir William Wingfield, and several others I did not recognize. The depositions had whisked by, all of them from men who supported Scrope, and nearly all identical in their recollections of the baron’s arms in years past. Though King Richard had expressed sympathy for Grosvenor, it was known that Woodstock supported Scrope, and in the constable’s own court there was little doubt as to the ultimate outcome. Even a higher knight was well advised to avoid entanglements over heraldry not his own.
Chaucer, the day’s final deponent and lowest in rank, was sitting on a lone chair in the middle of the chamber. Derwentwater looked at him with an air of fatigue. A long finger was pressed into a pocket of flesh above the knight’s cheek, which he pushed up to close his right eye and released to open it, a slow rhythm that marked his own boredom with this procedure he had been enlisted to oversee.
“Did you ever have occasion to witness Lord Richard, Baron Scrope, bearing the arms in question?” he said.
“I did not, Sir John,” said Chaucer.
A quick ripple through the knightly throng, which had expected Chaucer to rehearse the identical testimony provided by the day’s other deponents. Perhaps the proceedings would yield a twist after all.
Derwentwater’s finger stilled on his cheek. “Yet you were called here as a witness based on your knowledge of the baron’s right of claim to azure, a bend or. Do you remain confident in this knowledge?”
“I do, Sir John.”
“Yet you just told this court that you saw his lordship bearing the arms in question.”
“Not in question.”
“Pardon?”
“He bore the arms not in question, my lord, but on his shield.”
I smiled. A discerning knight somewhere to my left chortled through his nose.
“What’s that?” said Derwentwater, his finger still paused.
“The azure a bend or, Sir John. On his shield.”
“You saw this.”
“I did.”
Derwentwater’s finger continued its nudging work. “When were you first witness to the Baron Scrope bearing such arms?”
Chaucer looked off to the right. “My earliest memory of the Scrope arms comes from my time in France. With the Earl of Ulster.”
“Prince Lionel,” said Derwentwater.
“Yes. This was shortly before my imprisonment, some twenty-five years ago. We were encamped about the town of Retters. Monsieur Henry Scrope was a great presence in the camp, as he had been the victor in a tourn
ament held for King Edward a few weeks before. No one sat higher on his horse, no back was straighter in the king’s army. This was in Lord Scrope’s pre-baronial days, you understand, before his summons to the lords. He was Yorkshire stout and Yorkshire strong, a knight of the shire with a fresh new wife and a scare of mistresses cawing for his cock.”
This drew titters from the knights.
“And what were the precise circumstances under which you witnessed Lord Scrope bearing azure a bend or?”
“I distinctly remember the occasion.” Chaucer glanced up at his questioner. “Though it is rather an involved story, Sir John.”
Derwentwater sniffed and crossed his arms. “Tell us the short version, if you please.” A few mumbles of protest. “Well . . .” Derwentwater looked up, haplessly shrugged. “The moderate.”
“With pleasure, Sir John.” Chaucer was off, and over the next quarter hour spun a complex and ingenious tale involving Lord Scrope’s entanglement with a grocer, a maudlyn, a tinker, and an apprentice, all unfolding on the lanes of Retters and ending with a sober homily by the baron himself on the origin and meaning of his family’s venerable arms.
Chaucer could pull stories from his mind like groats from a purse, and as I looked around the refectory I could see the tale’s balming effect on these roiled gentles. If I dealt in coins and cunning, Chaucer dealt in words and figures, which he mingled, cooked, and distilled with the adept mastery of an alchemist. Nor was such invention a ritual of idleness or waste. Every knight in the room would remember the story told that morning, delight in its twists and perversions as he recounted it for his wife, his consort, his men, his lord. Yes yes, it was Chaucer himself who told it to me—no, not one of his poetical fancies, mind, but a true and real account of the baron himself, so Chaucer said; well, the fellow was under sworn oath to the very earl marshal’s Court of Chivalry, so who’s to doubt the truth of it?
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