Fortune's Wheel

by Rhoda Edwards

  Mistress Langwith hurried on, saying nothing. In a gap in the house roofs, Anne saw the spire of St Paul’s again, rearing so high in the sky that the gilded weathercock on top might have been ready to fly in at the gates of Heaven. It was familiar, but not reassuring. Here in the hot, disease-afflicted city, Anne felt very helpless and alone.

  14

  Pentecost Lane

  July – November 1471

  Then went I forth by London stone,

  Throughout all Can[dle]wyke streete;

  Drapers mutch cloth me offred anone;

  Then comes me one, cryed, ‘hot shepes feete’.

  One cryde, ‘mackerell’; ‘Ryshes grene’, another gan greete.

  One bad me by a hood to cover my head;

  But for want of mony, I myght not be sped.

  John Lydgate, London Lickpenny (15th cent.)

  14

  ‘Brawn!’ The woman’s face as she shrieked was the exact mottled colour of it. She yelled for the cook. ‘You call that brawn? I’d make a better brawn out of my backside. What is it then? Eyes, ears, arseholes and whoreson great gobbets of fat — that’s what it is, and I’m not having it. You give me my money back!’

  The housewives of London were not shy of making complaints, or of what they did in protest! This very forthright one had dumped the offending commodity upon the shop counter, sliding it out of its mould so it stood wobbling, pink and unwholesome, like bad legs, for by the time it had made the journey back to the shop in the woman’s basket it was far from fresh.

  The cook looked and sniffed. ‘Never known brawn that wasn’t,’ he said with superiority. ‘Honest pigs’ heads, ears and all. Never use anything but the best. Not bought yesterday either. Lady, I’m not giving back money on stale food I sold as fresh.’

  ‘I’ll report you!’

  ‘You’ll get yourself fined for making false complaints!’

  Anne Neville, after two months of observing London housewives, still marvelled at their outspokenness. She still could not understand their quick, vulgar speech. ‘Answer up according to your size, dear,’ friendly people said to her. But she was too shy to pit herself against their wit. The men seemed to be a constant threat to her virtue, and the women a censorious, jealous crowd, who mocked her behind their hands. She scarcely dared to speak to her employer, the master cook, yet his customers abused him freely. Her employer! That the mighty Earl of Warwick’s daughter came to be employed in a London shop, selling cooked food to those who had no hearth at home or no time to cook, was incredible even to herself.

  Within a week of Anne’s escape with her into the streets of London, Mistress Langwith had died of plague, and her sister, the cook’s wife, had given succour to several of her servants, though many would not have done so, for fear of infection. Somehow, in the cook shop, they were all still in health, and Anne’s own fear of the disease had been overtaken by many other fears. Now that cooler weather had come, things were safer.

  At least the cook and his wife kept an orderly house. Anne’s ignorance and blunders exasperated them, but her obvious gentility gave them a certain status. Though they could not hope to rival the big inn just round the corner, the Bull’s Head, which catered for much of the traffic entering or leaving London by Aldersgate, at least they had a serving maid who was something of a lady. For this reason, they had kept her on.

  Pentecost Lane lay in the parish of St Nicholas Shambles, north of St Paul’s, east of Newgate, and south of Aldersgate. The front of the house and the open part of the shop faced the narrow street; the rear had a yard which backed on to the wall of the Greyfriars’ garden. The lane itself led off Blowbladder Street, where the butchers’ market was, and made a dog-leg, with a dead end up against the wall enclosing the precinct of St Martin-le-Grand. This was the wall of the sanctuary, behind which even now a few remaining supporters of the Earl of Warwick found refuge. At first, it had occurred to Anne that she might seek sanctuary there, but she knew that sometimes the King seized people from even such protected places. The Duke of Exeter, who had been carried to Westminster sanctuary more dead than alive after Barnet, on King Edward’s orders had been removed to the Tower, before he was even fit to leave his bed. In any case, you needed money to live decently in St Martin’s; if you had none, you would have to hide like a rat in a thieves’ hovel with murderers and whores.

  The month of August had come and gone, and then September, without the signs Anne was desperately waiting for. It had now seemed certain that she was carrying, though there was no swelling of her belly that she could detect. All her few moments of inactivity were filled with dread. More than ever it was necessary to avoid discovery by the King, though discovery by the cook’s wife of her condition was nearly as much of a threat; she might well throw Anne out onto the street. No servant girl, living among so many others, could keep a pregnancy secret for more than a couple of months. There was no one in whom Anne might confide. Even God seemed far away, as if He did not know the ways of cook shops.

  Among all the other things there were to be afraid of, was that she made so inept a servant that suspicions would be aroused. The tendrils of the grapevine of gossip reached from Westminster to London daily, from highest to lowest, and there must be plenty of rumours of the disappearance of the Duchess of Clarence’s sister.

  But the cook and his wife would have been hard to persuade that Anne was indeed the missing great lady. The mere notion that such a person would willingly seek employment, or have landed up in their shop, was so manifestly absurd that if Anne had confessed to it on her knees, they would have laughed and assumed that she was touched in the head. Her vague explanation of a secluded upbringing in a country convent, the hint of her being a gentleman’s bastard, were enough to allay suspicions, if not to deflect their impatience of her shortcomings.

  The cook’s wife had luckily assumed at the beginning that a girl whose trade was fine sewing was unsuitable for kitchen duties. She saw in Anne a useful maid for serving customers in the shop. When it became clear that Anne had never served anyone across a counter in her life, had apparently never handled the coin of the realm, had never answered back to the aggressive, they were merely irritated and told her that she would have to learn to do all these things quickly, if she were to stay with them.

  The amazing thing was that Anne had managed to learn enough to induce her employers grudgingly to keep her. Anne was continually surprised at herself, meekly providing customers with their wares, picking out the small change from bewildering rows of coins. She had even begun to feel some satisfaction at not making the same mistake twice. Her mistakes had been many. She had found it impossible to tell the different foods apart, not knowing that a pie of one sort was immediately distinguishable from another by its shape, finish and garnish. The mint sprigs proclaimed the mutton and the sage the pork, scallop shells the fishy items. Customers cheerfully or irately instructed her.

  Every day the cook himself decorated the big counterfront of his shop with his wares to tempt customers, while his servants stood respectfully by. Pyramids of food, flourishes of herbs, coloured pastes and painted shells, created pictures which looked like shrines. The shop did a good trade; even some of the sanctuarymen at St Martin’s sent out their servants to buy food, steaming stews in coffins of pastry, pitchers of broth, roasted joints and fowls, brawns and pies.

  The cook had arrangements of convenience with certain butchers in the Shambles. Anne had only once been to the butchers’ market. If Hell had streets, surely they would be inhabited by butchers. All those gaping carcasses, the trays of livers and lights flopping about, the head with hairy ears still on, the maggoty horrors hiding forgotten in corners, and all the flies in London feasting there. The stink — years of accumulated stink — was enough to knock anyone down. It had got into the walls of all the houses round about; in summer the cook shop not only reeked of food, but was enveloped in the stink of the Shambles. Even the church of St Nicholas, and the fine house of the Greyfriars, must liv
e eternally in the stink.

  In the house in Pentecost Lane, Anne shared a tiny attic with three other girls. It was at the back, above the kitchen, and always smelt of cooking food, stale fat, and onion-scented breath. This ordinary crowded living with other people had been as difficult to get used to as the serving in the shop. Worst of all were the endless prying questions of the girls, whose curiosity was aroused by the simplest errors. Anne had very seldom in her life had to dress herself in the morning, or to remove her clothes at night, and she tried to hide her fumblings, in case they betrayed her. She was regarded as a harmless freak, or a foreigner; friendly gestures were not lacking, among the laughter and teasing, and spitefulness was confined to one girl only, who could be ignored. But Anne was cut off from her companions both by her class and the constraints imposed on her by fear of discovery.

  When, on the arrival of the month of October, Anne found herself visited by her monthly courses in the usual way, she had no room in her mind for wondering why this had happened, or why it previously had not, her relief was so great. That morning, huddled up and aching as she always was at such times, she sat on her bed and laughed and cried both at the same time, until the others thought she had gone crazy. The cook’s wife, who had begun to cast her suspicious looks, smiled at last, reassured of her maid’s respectability; now she would not have to have a word with the parish priest about her doubts. Safe from instant dismissal from the shop, Anne also realized that her importance to the King was now greatly diminished though, of course, he could not know it.

  Soon after, a chance remark by one of the customers aroused Anne’s fear all over again.

  ‘All arse over head they were at the Bull’s Head yesterday!’ a gossip had clucked, leaning her basket on the counter and addressing everyone else. ‘A Royal Person came down here — imagine — just round the corner, and was asking all these questions about the Earl of Warwick’s daughter, the Prince of Lancaster’s widow. Something about abduction — it seems the King’s looking for her all over London.’

  ‘What Royal Person?’ another woman said, hoping for a good long gossip.

  ‘No less than the King’s brother!’

  ‘Holy Virgin! Which one?’

  ‘The younger one.’

  ‘The Duke of Gloucester? Here? Himself?’

  ‘In person.’

  Anne piled veal patties into the cloth her customer had provided, with trembling hands. Her cousin Richard, the King’s henchman, no more than a few yards away at the end of the street, searching for her. Surely the King must put the price on her head very high, if his brother were willing to come to the City in person. She felt unreasoningly afraid of them. There was only one thing she could do, and that was to stay in the cook shop, never to go out, and to pray that for lack of success, the hunt might at length be called off.

  *

  King Edward looked like Jove ordering a parliament of the gods. It was Christmas night and he was King of England again, wearing his crown and presiding over the feasting in his palace of Westminster. Richard thought that he looked more magnificent than he ever had done before, all eyes in the White Hall followed him in fascination. Richard deliberately kept his own eyes away from the almost equally dazzling figure of the Queen. Elizabeth Woodville sparkled and shimmered like one of the tinsel-decked players, who had just performed the interlude, only every single stone of her glitter was worth its weight in pounds sterling, not halfpence. It hurt the eyes — in more ways than one — to gaze on her unblinking. Her six months’ pregnancy shone in rounded unmistakable glory in front of her, and her unbound hair spread like silver gilt tissue down her back. Any other woman of her age would not bear close inspection — she did. She had even bestowed a gracious little smile on Richard that evening, cut short his kneeling time, and asked him if he liked the north. She was probably hoping that he would stay there.

  The Queen’s greeting to her brother-in-law Clarence had been in contrast noticeably chilly, and his disdain all the more marked. Clarence was in favour with no one. In the last weeks, Richard had only just been able to restrain himself from bodily assault upon his brother. On his return from the north at Martinmas, he had found the brief period of cordiality between Clarence and the King at an end. Richard, when greeted with the news of Anne Neville’s disappearance, had lost his temper and accused George of deliberately hiding her, so that he might not have the opportunity to marry her. King Edward had ended the scene by shouting louder than them both and sending them out of his presence like two noisy schoolboys, though afterwards he had assured Richard of his support. But his consent to the marriage had come too late; Anne Neville could not be found.

  George swore repeatedly that he knew nothing of her whereabouts, until Richard was inclined to believe him. He seemed so angry at her disappearance himself, as if she had thwarted him in some way. For nearly two months, Richard had searched London for her, though he did not even know for certain that she was still in London, or even in England. He planted his servants where he could in every district, he visited every religious house or place of refuge himself and even sent men to all the best-known brothels and taverns. Every day Anne was constantly in his mind, as she would perhaps not have been had she not been in such trouble.

  Now, on Christmas night, Richard’s fears were redoubled. Surely this was the worst time in all the year to be in trouble and alone. The feasting in the hall had reached the stage where the noise was unendurable, the air stifling, and the company full of wine, making a spectacle of themselves in the dancing. Richard had been trying to have an interesting conversation with Lord Howard, about the east coast ports and the Iceland trade, but even with Howard at bellowing pitch, they had been obliged to give up.

  He had almost decided that he could stand it no longer, and was about to make his excuses to the King and leave, when he felt someone pluck at his sleeve.

  ‘Your Grace, excuse me — but I have news.’ They pushed towards the doorway, battling with noise and too many people.

  ‘Of the Lady Anne?’

  ‘There’s word about a maid servant in a cook shop — somewhere near Aldersgate, a street called Pentecost Lane. They have a girl who was once in the Duke of Clarence’s household. She was taken on as a maid sometime this summer. That is about all we know at present, your Grace.’

  ‘It’s enough. I’ll go there myself. Get a horse ready and a pair of boots and a warm cloak.’

  ‘Now, your Grace?’ The man stared at his master in surprise.

  ‘Now. And about a dozen men, I think. But mind, not bristling with arms. It is Christmas night, and we may be disturbing honest citizens for nothing.’

  The doors of the shop in Pentecost Lane were bolted against uninvited guests, but chinks of light showed through the shutters and sounds of noisy merrymaking came from within. Richard’s men banged on the door. There was no response. Probably they were all making too much noise to hear, and were three parts fuddled. It was late, and dancing seemed to be going on inside, to judge from the thumping, and the shuddering of the entire building. A determined hammering on the shutters did better, for after a little, a man opened them wide enough to allow him to put out his head.

  ‘We would like a word with the master of this shop. We are on the King’s business and believe that he may be able to help us. There is nothing to fear if he answers us honestly.’

  The head was withdrawn and the shutters inhospitably bolted again. One of Richard’s men swore.

  Richard said, ‘No good servant will allow strangers inside at night without his master’s permission.’ They waited. Presently the door opened. The servant appeared to fumble for words. A little too much strong ale had widened the gap between his thoughts and his tongue.

  ‘Sirs,’ he said carefully, ‘will you step inside. Christmas night, and we feast here as well as all the dukes in the kingdom. My master will speak to you over a cup of ale.’

  They followed him towards the back parlour where the noise was coming from. Even on the entr
ance of a dozen strangers it was slow to die down. Several couples were leaping up and down to the accompaniment of clapping and stamping, while somewhere a whistle pipe and a small drum struggled for a hearing. A fat woman, wobbling like a vast jelly, was prancing and showing her best white stockings and fancy garters. Her partner’s points were undone at the back, like a ditch digger’s, so his shirtail flapped. Another man was jigging on a table, wearing a sort of mask with a red nose, like fools use. With the extreme care of the drunk, he was fastening the ribbons of his codpiece into bows. Holly and ivy decorated the door lintels, rosemary the windows and a kissing bough hung in the middle of the room. Apple bobbing had been enjoyed — there was water all over the floor and down the fronts of many guests.

  Richard’s men could have put a stop to all this racket at once, but he did not wish them to enter like a raiding party of sheriff’s men. A short, enormously fat man and similar woman were pushing across the room towards them — the master cook himself, and his wife.

  Richard’s eye had scanned the whole room in the first moment, but he could not see Anne among all the people, and his hope began to fade once again. The smells of roasting and stewing, boiling and baking, were overlaid by onions, garlic, beer and sweating people of varying degrees of cleanliness. The rushes on the floor were fairly fresh. To judge from the demolished ruins of the feast, the cook’s family, friends and servants had eaten and drunk very well indeed. The room was as hot as Hell’s own kitchen.

  Richard slid off his cloak and his servant took it. This unintentionally created an effect equal to an appearance of Beelzebub in a pulpit. It silenced the revelry more quickly than could shouts, or drawing of swords. At Westminster, he had been just one gorgeously dressed male among a throng of others; here he was an apparition from another world.