The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  Well, well, well. Thus the bemused inhabitants of a small town in Dorset become privy to the bedchamber antics of the King of England. If, of course, what he said was true.

  The tailor was passing his hat around the company, exacting his ‘expenses’, as he put it. Eleanor and I, standing near the door, slipped out fast. As we scampered away down Cheap Street, Eleanor said that the tailor was probably telling the same tales, with variations, in every town through which he passed, and making good money out of it. I expect she was right. Everyone makes their money in whatever way they can. Some ways are more noxious than others. But I would not have missed the tailor’s performance for all the world.

  Some ways of making money are wholly innocent. One day after that summer’s end, when the nights were drawing in, I was coming home along Long Street and heard from a half-open door women’s voices singing psalms in the same way that Eleanor and I did, only better. I looked inside and saw about a dozen women sitting on the ground in a circle, working with their hands. In the middle of the circle was a pile of coloured stuffs. Standing at their door I was blocking what remained of the light. They stopped singing, looked towards me, judged I suppose that I was harmless, and beckoned me in.

  I sat down outside their circle. They went on talking and laughing among themselves, their hands busy. Then with one accord, as if it was time for a break, they put down their work and turned to me.

  One of them said, ‘Welcome. What brings you here?’

  ‘My name is Agnes Peppin and I am a stranger here.’

  ‘We are all strangers here. We are strangers everywhere. Except in this chamber, where we are – sisters.’

  They were all wearing cowl hoods in different colours and plain darkish gowns. Their feet were bare. There was a pile of sandals in a corner. They turned upon me a calm accepting gaze. I suddenly was sure what they were.

  ‘You are, you were, in the religious life? You were nuns?’

  They beamed and nodded.

  ‘You too?’

  So I told them my story and one by one they picked up their work again, still listening. They told me scraps of their own stories. Some were as young as me, some old enough to be our mothers. They were nuns cast off from abbeys and convents near and far, who had landed up in this place for different reasons, who knows why. They were from Kent, Sussex, Gloucester, Lincoln, I cannot remember the rest. They had never met anyone from Shaftesbury Abbey before.

  ‘But we knew,’ said one smiling woman of my own age, ‘as soon as you came in the door and sat down, that you were one of us.’

  They told me what they did. They begged snippets of woven stuff from tailors and seamstresses, and unsaleable remnants from peddlers. They acquired ragged old garments in the market and, it turned out, from our Master Palmer’s sister.

  They took anything, from sacking to satin, and made shifts, shirts, frocks and trews for children, patchworked fantastically. They fashioned clothes for wooden playdolls, and teased out shreds of silk for tassels and braiding and fringes. They unravelled old knitted garments and knitted up the twisty yarn into something else. They used sheep’s wool picked from hedges to stuff shoulder-pads. They collected round pebbles and covered them with fabric to make buttons. From the shortest off-cuts of bright ribbon, and with birds’ feathers from the fields, they contrived artificial flowers to embellish a gown.

  They showed me a basket-load of their work. It is not the kind of merchandise that attracts me, but it is ingenious. Not art, but artful.

  They call themselves the Winter Sisters.

  At Eastertime the Winter Sisters hold a sale. The lady wives of Sherborne’s prosperous tradesmen squeeze in to find what they would find nowhere else. Gentlemen buy trifles for their wives and sweethearts. In so short a time the Winter Sisters have become known, and sell everything that they make. For some, their connection with the old ways and the old religion forges a bond. Only the most fierce Protestants stayed away, the sisters told me.

  In the summer each of the sisters goes her own way – finding work at hirings, harvesting, fruit-picking, working in hospitals and taverns, nursing the aged wealthy in their homes, caring for the children of the rich. After Michaelmas the Winter Sisters return to this abandoned tenement, to each other, and to their work.

  ‘Sometimes we sing the Holy Office.’ And out of the dimness, a sister gave out the first line of the Nunc Dimittis. It was a chant that I knew well. It was heart-wrenching to hear it. I was back in the Abbey Church in my place among the rows of black and of white veils. The other Winter Sisters took up the chant and played with it, jiggling the rhythm, some voices rising high and staccato, some swooping low, and all in harmony.

  Two young boys stopped at the open door to listen. When the chanting came to an end the boys laughed and clapped their hands and went on their way.

  ‘You could sing like that at fairs,’ I said, ‘and make a lot more money for less work.’

  No, no, no, they said, a flurry of fowls flustering their feathers. It would be a blasphemy. They sang to make God smile, not to amuse ignorant loons.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Of course you could not do that. It is beautiful.’

  I did not tell Eleanor about the Winter Sisters. I cringed at the notion of her running straight off to them in Long Street, and talking too loud, and telling them what to do, like a fox in a henhouse.

  Eleanor said to me, as we sat on a bench outside the Abbey eating apples in the autumn sun, ‘Since we left Shaftesbury, and the religious life, it has been and will always be just one thing after another. No one to tell us what to do. We are free.’

  Most of the population, I told her, live under these conditions, even though one may think that our freedom is limited by the demands of landlords, lack of funds or friends or family or opportunity, or the general difficulty of being an unsupported female.

  ‘We are a particular case because we were nuns,’ said Eleanor. ‘Nobody wants a cast-adrift nun with no wealthy family to fall back on. That’s why I say that for us, it is going to be just one thing after another, with no reason for any of it. We have to go the way the wind blows us.’

  ‘I am not a leaf,’ I said.

  ‘Neither am I,’ said Eleanor. ‘In which case we have to think hard about what we want.’

  Eleanor and I, as it turned out, wanted different things. Her love for Jesus Christ and her belief in his particular love for her had seemingly waned. But she was the same Eleanor, desperate for some passionate attachment.

  *

  I think it was the following autumn, or maybe the one after, that Sherborne was again exposed to goings-on in the great world.

  One October morning there was a great pressure of people making for the Abbey precinct, in the wake of a procession of armed soldiery and horsemen and fine coaches and one great covered vehicle painted black and with black plumes and hangings. Eleanor and I followed along. We love a spectacle. A funeral, and of someone important. The catafalque stopped at the Abbey door, and a big coffin with brass all over it was carried by eight hefty gentlemen into the Abbey Church. The gentry filed in after it, in black fur-edged robes. The rest of us were kept out by guards with halberds.

  Grooms and pages held the bridles of steaming horses, loosening their girths, walking them around, bringing them water from the pump. Eleanor and I picked out way through horse-droppings, accosted a young fellow who looked approachable, and asked whose funeral this was.

  ‘It’s Sir Thomas Wyatt’s.’

  ‘The poet?’

  The groom could not say whether he was a poet, but from what he did say I knew it was the same one. A great man, said the groom. He had been in prison. He had been in the Tower. A bit of a brawler. A ladies’ man.

  ‘Don’t ask me about his poor wife, you don’t want to know.’

  He had carried on with Anne Boleyn, some said. Sometimes he was in favour with the King and sometimes he was not. But he served the King in high places, he was what they call an ambassador, said the gr
oom. He had been ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  How did he die? Why is his body brought here?

  Eleanor and I now found ourselves at the centre of a congregation of bored grooms happy to while away the time by gossiping. Between them, they told us what happened. Sir Thomas Wyatt and a grand entourage were on their way to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall to greet the Emperor’s ambassador who had sailed all the way from Spain, and to escort him back to London. Sir Thomas was a good acquaintance of this important personage, and feared to keep him waiting on shipboard. It is many, many miles from London to Falmouth and Sir Thomas, on horseback, rode as if the devil were on his tail; it was hard for the rest to keep up with him. He was no longer a young man, he was nearly forty years old.

  Perhaps he exhausted himself, or else the sickness was already upon him. However it was, when they stopped for the night he collapsed on dismounting. He was running a high fever and could barely speak. By dawn he seemed a dying man. His gentlemen decided to carry him back some distance to his friend Sir John Horsey’s house at Clifton Maybank.

  I knew of course who Sir Thomas Wyatt was, because of Arundell’s talk with the Abbess, way back. And we knew of course who Sir John Horsey was. Clifton Maybank is a nowhere kind of place a few miles downriver from here. It was there that Sir Thomas Wyatt died. A sad story.

  The church doors were opened and as the gentlemen attendants and mourners poured out I caught sight of someone I had seen somewhere before. He was a crow among the grandees, not dressed in velvet and silk and fur, nor wearing a sword. I recognised his high black woollen hat, his long nose, his creased dark face, and the satchel slung from his shoulder.

  I ran from the grooms and the horses and from Eleanor and placed myself in his way.

  ‘Master Leland! Master John Leland!’

  He looked hard at me, grasped my arm and drew me away from the procession.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  I reminded him of the day in Bruton, when we sat together on the stones beside the market cross.

  ‘You are the little maid who can read?’

  I said I was she – although I had been no maid. I was pregnant with Peterkin at the time.

  We stood together. He swayed on his feet. He was in an emotional state because of the death of Sir Thomas Wyatt.

  ‘He was my friend. I am, like he, a poet. I had no notion – it is pure chance that I happen to be here, and I was myself at Sir John Horsey’s place quite recently. He has a fine library although the books are damaged by damp. I am still cataloguing, you know, though for my own interest now. Tell me, if you live in this place, what do you know about the Missal? The Sherborne Missal?’

  I had never even heard of it.

  ‘That is why I came back. It is the most important and the most beautiful missal in all these islands. Very large. It is the work of a single monk’s hand, aided by one other. The paintings of birds alone are sans pareil, I have seen nothing like them anywhere. I held the Missal in my hands when I was here ten years ago and I marvelled. It is old, very old, and in perfect condition. The colours and the gilding, pristine. But no one knows where it is. It seems to be lost.’

  ‘The Commissioners?’

  ‘I would surely know if that were so. The acquisition of so great a treasure would be documented. I suspect it is in private hands.’

  ‘Sir John Horsey?’

  He sighed and shrugged. ‘That is why I paid him a visit. He denies all knowledge. But who can say? One can only pray that whoever holds it, whoever sells, it, whoever buys it, will care for it. It will no doubt reappear, but alas not in my lifetime.’

  Leland was not really talking to me. I could have been anybody, I was anybody.

  ‘Have you not heard? Now that there is printing, vellum manuscripts are cut up and pasted inside the covers of books to stiffen them and then concealed by plain paper. What is written upon them is lost for ever. Histories, legal documents, letters. No one cares. There is no respect for the old ways.’

  He turned to face me again and fixed his eyes on mine.

  ‘You are, did you say, the little maid who can read?’

  Yet again, I said that yes, yes, I was. He unbuckled his satchel and fumbled inside it and brought out a small fat printed book.

  ‘Take this. It is in English but not quite in our English of today, nor quite in the way we write it, it was written down about one hundred and fifty years ago, but if you read the words aloud to yourself the meaning will be quite clear. This is a modern rendering, and the printing is somewhat cramped. Persevere. With Chaucer, you will never be alone.’

  I took the book and thanked him and turned away to release him from my company. When I was ten steps away he called out to me:

  ‘I shall now compose an elegy to my friend and fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt! A long one! In Latin!’

  I think perhaps he has become a little unhinged. Like so many in these days.

  The book he gave me is The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I have never before read a book that was not devotional or in someway religious. Ballads, yes, broadsheets yes, but not a proper book.

  It is a book made up of stories. A group of pilgrims are setting forth together on horseback from an inn called the Tabard in Southwark – that is a part of London – to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. They agree to tell one another stories to while away the time on the roads.

  It is written as poetry, but not poetry as I have known it. Once you get used to the spellings you realise that Chaucer writes as we talk, in our ordinary way. That is what is astonishing about the book. One can do that? Write about how real people speak and behave? Well, Chaucer did, all those years ago, and his book is popular and respected, so anyone might do that. Even me.

  The book accompanied me every day, weighing down the pocket-bag beneath my gown. I mostly read it in the open air, because the light was dim in our attic chamber. I read the words aloud, quietly, as Leland had instructed me. I did not read it from beginning to end. I read in it, here and there. Before I started in on the stories the pilgrims tell, I read the Prologue over and over, in which Chaucer describes all the people on the pilgrimage. I came to see them in my mind’s eye. One of them is an Abbess travelling with a nun and three priests. Thinking of Dame Elizabeth Zouche, I read about her first.

  Chaucer’s Abbess is called Madam Eglantine. He writes that she has immaculate table manners. Her lips leave no mark on the cup. She drops no morsels from the platter on to her person. She speaks French with a London-French accent, not a Paris-French accent. I do not know the significance of that and have no one to ask, but I think the implication is that she is not truly cultured. She is kindly and tender-hearted. She has with her a number of little dogs whom she feeds with bits of roast meat. She is well-dressed, tall and grey-eyed with a wide fair forehead – nearly a span broad, Chaucer said.

  In Shaftesbury Abbey it was considered most immodest to bare one’s forehead. I do not understand the significance. There is a sort of nakedness perhaps in that smooth expanse. And also maybe a mark of breeding. Low people have low foreheads, the hair sprouting close above the eyebrows. I think Chaucer finds his Abbess amusing and attractive, and that he is mocking her as well. She is too genteel and womanish for me, and not at all like the last Abbess of Shaftesbury.

  Master Leland was right. After The Canterbury Tales became mine I never did feel alone. But reading does not make any money and we needed to supplement our pensions. Eleanor was adamant that we should make a plan – together. My immersion in the book shut her out. Thus my reading became more secret. It was as if I were stealing away to meet a lover.

  The plan which Eleanor and I evolved was not so unlike that of the Winter Sisters – that is, to make something out of almost nothing. Our idea was to buy wares cheaply and sell them on for a small profit, going from door to door. There are many old and infirm persons in Sherborne, as well as mothers with infants, all of whom find it hard to get to the market.

/>   Over weeks, we observed the pedlars and chapmen and traders who came regularly to the market in Sherborne, taking note of what they set out on the roadside, and of what sold most and most quickly, and of their style of salesmanship. We decided that we would have nothing to do with foodstuffs, which we had nowhere to store and soon rotted.

  We chose our trading partner. He was not there on every market day, but when he was, he made an impression. His name was Jack, that was all we knew, and we called him Jack Chapman. He was from Scotland and spoke in a way new to us which at first was hard to understand. A rowdy young fellow, as befits a huckster, with a yellowish beard and a round red face. We befriended him, and drank with him in the alehouse after market time, and we made an arrangement with him. That was not hard. It pleased him to have female company. That is, Eleanor pleased him. I think I made little impression.

  The arrangement was that before he packed up his wares at daylight end on market days, we would buy from him, on favourable terms, as much stock as he had not sold and did not care to retain. He travelled all over the country and liked to travel light, in order not to tire his oxen. He was a lazy, hard-drinking man and roved the countryside as his fancy took him. He restocked before the next market he went to – which could be in Cornwall, or Wiltshire, or anywhere at all. But he always came back to Sherborne. The lassies here, he said, looking at Eleanor, were the bonniest south of the border. Eleanor flashed her great eyes at him.

  She did the business amid rude jokes from him and shrieks of mock horror from her. I stood by clutching our purse and worrying whether we could afford to buy, or could ever sell, that short length of green ribbon, that roll of tape, that stained piece of velvet, those off-cuts of coarse linen, those wooden spoons, those tawdry shoe-buckles, or quite so many packets of needles and pins … But Eleanor knew what she was doing, and we always sold almost everything.