Midnight in Westminster Abbey

by Sean Dennis Cashman

  Ginny could not help smiling in spite of her silent condemnation of King Edward’s own ways of death.

  Ginny could not stop asking herself, “But was this triumph of the moment the final verdict of history?”

  Turning to young Ginny, Edward III asked her, “Would you like to see the verdict of history? We have to use the F word.”

  “F for French?”

  “Nothing so commonplace. I mean my history, of course—as written by our precious sycophant Froissart: F for Froissart.”

  Tired though she was by all the alarms and excursions, the noise and din in which trumpet flourishes provided no true musical relief, Ginny did not feel she could refuse. She dutifully read a paragraph Edward kindly pointed out to her from a well-worn modern pocket book.

  “When on this Saturday night the English heard no more hooting or shouting, nor any more crying out to particular lords, or their banners, they looked upon the field as their own and their enemies as beaten. They made great fires and lighted torches because of the obscurity of the night.”

  And yet again in her ear, Ginny heard the same mysterious unidentified courtly voice. It was like a snake trying to be pleasant with a specious jocular tone.

  “They never learn. As I said, even when it’s over and night descends on the torrid fiasco, men argue about the battle even as their puny legions scatter. When it’s pitch black, the chill night air resounds with the groans of wounded men. They send out pathetic prayers and piteous cries of pain. They neither hear nor heed one another. But I hear everything.” Noting Ginny brush aside a tear from her eye, he added sardonically, “It’s a site for sore eyes. That’s a pun,” he added unnecessarily.

  And with that throwaway remark, the gnat-like voice ceased its unwanted sermon. But it had left Ginny groping towards a bitter conclusion that there were no victors in this melee. So much for chivalrous knights in Hollywood movies.

  Yet Edward III had no doubt of the day’s outcome. As if reading Ginny’s unspoken question, he was in full flow: “Crecy was one of the decisive battles of history. The French lost 1,500 knights and 15,000 men while our casualties were only just over a hundred. If my grandfather, Edward I, was called the Hammer of the Scots, I should have been called the Longbow over the French.”

  Once again, Ginny could not stop wondering, “But surely his was not really the final verdict of history?”

  “Oh, no,” said the serpentine voice.

  BY OUR LADY

  Again, without her knowing how it had happened, Ginny was outside the last Book of Hours. She was no longer on a tempest-torn sea or in a dark night beside a cavernous forest but instead seated cross-legged on the ground like a child at a school play. She was looking at the third open book with its cream parchment. It was decorated not with elaborate lettering but a fanciful scene of a pretty medieval town with colourful shapes below tinted battlements. An excited crowd was moving around in gaudy clothes.

  Back at her side horseman Walter was getting ready to leave. Was it wishful thinking that made Ginny believe his spaniel eyes showed love while his words were still formal and his tone cold.

  "To answer your unspoken question about whose victory it was, young lady, what would I write if I were a historian who can not only read history but also write it? Can I do better than the royal historian Froissart? Let’s see:

  “By the end of the same year as Crecy, the English soldiers had had enough and wanted to go home. It took eleven months to bring their siege of Calais to a success. Famine brought Calais to its knees. Edward III was so angry and bitter at the delay that he wanted to cut the heads off the six noble citizens sent out as a peace deputation.”

  Ginny understood from this that the final pop-up picture represented the port of Calais. At one side stood Philippa of Hainault, Edward’s queen, played by a young boy actor in stylish clothes. This stage Philippa was heavily pregnant.

  “We had so many children,” Ginny heard King Edward say. “It wasn’t a case of having an heir and a spare. We had spares galore.”

  “I bet that stored up trouble for the future,” thought Ginny.

  She watched as the stage Queen Philippa raised her lovely arms to protest on behalf of the six citizens of Calais standing centre stage in arty-crafty clothes (in sharp contrast to the threadbare peasant attire of everyone else).

  “You’re about to see a little miracle,” said Edward III in smug tones to Ginny. “My charming lady wife has pre-arranged a tableau to show my generosity and noble heart.”

  Edward III moved from close-up beside Ginny to long-shot inside the pop-up picture. He stood in dark robes with his long and bushy hair adorned with a golden piecrust crown. The whole effect of person, costume, stance and attitude unintentionally emphasised the darker side of his character.

  Around the spectacle of the burghers advancing barefoot to meet the king from the right—but at a safe distance—timid onlookers punctuated the gentrified cityscape like hesitant flies around sweetbreads. It was a perfect medieval illustration of supplicants about to be rewarded by royal grace and favour.

  The stage Queen Philippa was saying to the six burghers of Calais, “Don’t you fret. It will all come right before the end.” Then she added confidentially in what to Ginny sounded like a TV voice-over explanation, “A play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of a king.”

  Then this Philippa of Hainault fell before Edward III in the prearranged tableau of Mercy pleading with Justice to have the worthy Sacrificial Lamb burghers spared. She got her way with his gracious assent. But did the king get his?

  Back in Westminster Abbey, the mysterious figure in the cowl inside the sentry box door on the right explained to Ginny with the voice she had heard in her ear earlier, “Calais was the sole, the only lasting fruit of this long expedition. The triumph and the exhaustion of England in France came together. They went hand in hand. The French knew they could not beat the English army in battle. They switched strategies, preferring to avoid a direct fight whenever possible. They chose siege warfare and made more use of new cannons. Similarly, the English could neither conquer nor hold France. Edward III agreed to waive his claim to the French throne in return for repossession of his family’s ancestral lands in France. Edward III’s famous victories may have been crowned with military laurels, but he failed to catch the French crown or even to keep the Anglo-French historical possessions in France.”

  “Before you can go on, we have a question for you,” said Edward III, who strode up to her in the abbey. Ginny braced herself but she thought that, whatever the question was, it would surely come naturally from the sights of Sluys, Crecy and Calais. But then, the question surprised her.

  “Why do you moderns call a weather front a front?” asked Edward III.

  Ginny was stumped. She looked blank as she tried to think really hard. Everything she had seen and heard so far was about wars and armies on the move and fighting one another—except that Henry III had advised her to stick to two subjects: the weather and everyone’s health. So that clue must provide the answer. It must be logically linked to what she had already observed.

  Then an answer came to her. She was so relieved that she blurted out, “It’s because weather fronts are like armies on the move. They fight against one another. The term ‘front’ also explains how the clashing of multiple weather fronts over the British Isles gives them such changeable weather.”

  Ginny wondered when the subject of ‘everyone’s health’ would surface. In the meantime, she had an unanswered question of her own. How long would it be before she saw Walter again—if ever?

  EARL KING

  Ginny had guessed that the voice without a face came not from another earthly king commemorated in Westminster Abbey but from Death eternal, a malevolent earl king. The voice issued (rather than came) from the hollowed-out doorframe with the capacious cloak. Ginny had never thought about what sort of voice Death would have. But if anyone had asked her she would probably have said, “A gravelly voice,” just a
s she would have expected any visual representation of Death to include a human skull. But the face of this Death remained hidden and the voice she heard was that of an educated young man—a university wit or a preppy party animal.

  Ginny knew she might never have the chance to question Death until her own last day. She was not going to waste this opportunity by asking the voice why he did not sound like a bass. She plunged straight ahead.

  “Is there a moral to this?” she asked. “I mean the Hundred Years War between England and France.”

  “Of course. War and Empire are not inseparable,” replied the hidden stranger. “Nor does one inevitably succeed the other,” he continued as mildly as if she had asked him about the weather. “King Edward III’s conquests in France melted away like snow at Easter.”

  Beside her, Edward III stayed silent. Ginny sensed that he was in awe of the mysterious hollow stranger.

  The stranger’s dark cloak seemed to grow farther apart at the top and the sides to reveal a city-scape inside him. Ginny’s inner sense told her that this unidentifiable shape represented Death not like a military commander surveying soldiers slain in battle but more like the harbinger of a dread disease.

  “It must be the Black Death,” she thought.

  Earlier she had not noticed a scroll of paper jutting out of one of Death’s long sleeves but now she saw it clearly enough. At his slight inclined gesture, she tugged at the paper to get the phantom to release it. When he did so, she read out its old-fashioned script:

  King Death was a rare old fellow.

  He sat where no sun could shine.

  And he lifted his hand so yellow,

  And poured out his coal black wine.

  Edward III still sounded quivery as he recovered from his involuntary numbness over Death’s slighting remark about the emptiness of his famous victories to explain, “It’s true what that absurd ditty says. And Christendom has no catastrophe equal to the Black Death.”

  “So, we’re at ‘everyone’s health’,” Ginny thought. Then she heard a cough, a little ‘ahem’ coming from somewhere behind the folds of royal cloth of the two kings. She was too polite to interrupt the majestic Edward III in full flow. But Ginny heard the little cough again. It came a third time and sounded more assertive. Then a small hand peeped through the gap between the two cloaks, as if a little fellow was pulling himself up through their swathes of cloth.

  Ginny noticed the tips of two very pointed shoes. As she was thinking, “I bet they’re uncomfortable,” a pleasant round face, careworn yet strangely fancy-free peeped out. Then the fellow came out from behind, no longer timid but contentedly proud.

  He beckoned Ginny and Edward III inwards to a sloping wooden ledge by a pillar where he took his place. The little man sat down on a rough stool and lent toward the ledge. He was surrounded by what Ginny thought must be a mix of pipe rolls and velum manuscripts propped up against the wall and with some other paper scrolls peeping out of his pockets. His fingers were inky and he kept scratching his head through wispy hair.

  Turning to Ginny, the shrivelled little man spoke with a flat tone as if he wanted Ginny to appreciate what he said as plain information devoid of emotion in order to make his harsh subject more terrible.

  "Horrible though the never-ending war between England and France was, you have to dig deeper to understand the calamitous fourteenth century. You’ve read Virgil’s Aeneid, I suppose? No? No matter. What about Dante’s Divine Comedy where our hero goes to Purgatory. I’ll take your silence as another ‘No’.

  "Well, it’s similar in The Subtle Knife, the second book of His Dark Materials. Our hero goes underground and sees how terrible life after death is for tender earthly shades promised so much but given nothing—betrayed by religion. You are about to see something similar for yourself. It’s for your own good.

  “In my day, we called it the Great Pestilence. The Black Death, a form of bubonic plague, came from a bacterium, Yersinia pestis.”

  “Of course,” Ginny said aloud, remembering the embroidered letters GP on the dark king’s cloak: “Great Pestilence.”

  “It began in China,” continued the little man amid the untidy rolls. “It lived in the burrows of tiny mammals in Tibet—darling little animals, gambolling away on windswept plains.”

  “Vermin,” interrupted Edward III, who did not like to be upstaged by a mere diplomat for that was what the little man had once been.

  “Rodents, gerbils—we’re all mammals,” said the scribe. “Well, it got itself into these little creatures and the fleas they hosted.” He paused slightly because he knew the king would sniff contemptuously. “Then it moved on to us, poor humans—mammals like I said. When Mongol armies invaded the Crimea, they brought it with them. It laid waste to Europe. What you now call the virus was almost unheard of then. It had several forms—bubonic and pneumonia.” The little scribe then added a gently pointed comment like a slur, “Human immunity was poor. People who were already exhausted and hungry because of continuous royal wars made easy victims.”

  Edward III had the good grace to look ashamed.

  “Trade carried it to us,” continued the writer. “And, as you will see, its longest lasting impact was to undermine the social order and bring about an explosion in trade that transformed society. As it swept across Europe—travelling a mile a day—it hit expectant mothers, children and poor people worst. Four-fifths of those who got it died. And those of us who lived by words did not even have the words to describe it.”

  “What were the effects?” Ginny asked.

  Edward III showed himself more comfortable with instances of human suffering and endurance not caused by war. He said, “The disease moved quickly from blotches on people’s skins. Hardening of glands under armpits and groins; swellings that no poultice could bring to a head; raging carbuncles. The poor victims tortured by delirious madness.”

  The scribe commented, “You could catch the plague from something as simple as a cough from an infected person. Then our homes had thatched roofs—something little fleas enjoyed. Even wooden structures were hospitable to the little pests.”

  Ginny now thought she had seen the face of the little fellow sitting at the impromptu desk before but she could not think where.

  “Sir, are you a chronicler—what we call a historian?”

  “Oh no, I’ve far too vivid and flowery an imagination for that.”

  “Are you what we call a foreign correspondent?”

  “No. Not that, either. Diplomat maybe. Customs collector certainly. But poems, romances, funny stories, satire—that’s what I write—they’re more in my line.”

  Seeing Ginny still could not place him, the little man decided to give her a clue. Rummaging around the papers, he found a crumpled hat and put it on. At that, it came to her. Ginny would have recognised him anywhere from this headgear—a sort of swirling turban and cap: it was Geoffrey Chaucer.

  Ginny knew Chaucer had been the leading English poet and storyteller of the late fourteenth century. He had worked as a royal official and sometimes as a diplomat at the courts of Edward III and Richard II. But he was most famous as the author of the Canterbury Tales, the never-completed collection of immortal stories that fictional pilgrims en route from London to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury told one another amid the rigours of their journey. In her junior year in high school with the help of a modern translation, Ginny had read the Prologue and the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ about a conceited but resourceful cockerel outwitting a wily fox. She had been surprised how much she had enjoyed it.

  Rather than embarrass both the scribe and herself by asking him directly if she had guessed his identity correctly, Ginny said, “I didn’t know you were here—in the abbey.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m the original poet in Poets’ Corner, you know. They named it after me.”

  “That’s right,” said Edward III—not to set Ginny right but more to turn the conversation back to the Black Death. This time, he was determined to tell it fr
om his royal perspective for Edward wanted Ginny to see his compassionate side.

  “Faced with the Great Pestilence, I knew I had to take charge of what you call society—to keep things running. It marked a turn of the monarchy to take what you call social responsibility.”

  “And maintain social hierarchy at all costs,” added little Geoffrey Chaucer.

  “That goes without saying,” Edward said abruptly.

  “You speak of concern and consideration now,” said the figure of Death who now moved from the shadows to join them. He was still covered by his cloak and cowl. He had listened to the little man and the mighty king from the side-lines and was not going to miss an opportunity to take a swipe at an earthly king:

  “Yes, you speak of care as if you really cared. But at the time, it reached England in 1348 you were enjoying feasts and tournaments at court at Windsor.”

  He paused for a moment to let his reproof sink in.

  Stung by Death’s implied suggestion of royal indifference, Edward III was again determined to regain the high ground of human compassion.

  “The toll was empty spaces in the population on such a wide scale and with such virulence that it stunned and almost destroyed the faith of the Christian world. Our holy church was threatened by growing disbelief. How could a merciful God allow such misery and suffering?”

  The more understanding Geoffrey Chaucer added, “In some monasteries half the monks were wiped out. Some law cases never reached court because all parties to the suit had died off.”

  With that, Geoffrey Chaucer went back to his ledge-desk. And so, the mysterious dark stranger guided Edward III and Ginny to the middle of the abbey where he could take centre stage unhindered.

  “You think Death is your enemy, don’t you? That’s too easy. I’m really your friend. I’m not the Great Pestilence itself but, when that plague struck, boy, did you need me.”