The Good Wife of Bath

by Karen Brooks

  Before you rush to judge, Master Raptus, explain this: if we’re meant to turn our minds towards the spiritual, why are there constant reminders of the pleasures of the flesh? Even the monks have damned badges shaped like women’s quoniam pinned to their cloaks, while all along the way, the churches are decorated with statues shaped like men’s pricks, and any number of reliquaries and souvenirs shaped like cocks and cunts are everywhere to purchase. After a few days, I stopped pondering the whys, and determined to enjoy my widowhood and the freedoms that come with being my own woman. I’ve encouraged Milda to do the same, Alyson too – though, in her usual fashion, she keeps to herself and shuns the offers made, preferring instead to ensure I’m only bothered to the degree I want to be. On this pilgrimage, it’s been more than I ever knew I would.

  I can feel your blushes, Geoffrey. The way you pretend not to be amused, turning your chuckles into hollow coughs. Dear God, man, if I cannot share my intimate thoughts with you, The Poet who captures the very heart of lust and love, of a woman’s part, then with whom?

  Rest assured, being away has done me the world of good. Cologne is a sacred town – it has to be with so many bloody churches (twelve at last count) – the cathedral notwithstanding. The Hanseatic League are here, a canny mob of merchants and traders if ever there was one and, if I had mastery of German and French and all the other languages from which these men seem to borrow, I would strike up negotiations with them here and now.

  As I walk, admiring the stone houses, cobbled streets, and enter the grand cathedral or the Dom, as it’s called, I find myself strangely disappointed. It’s not properly built. It’s crawling with scaffolding, builders, stonemasons, workers of all stripes, and you should see the state of other parts – the twin spires everyone’s boasting about look more like the nubs of goat horns. It will be centuries before the damn thing is finished. This hasn’t prevented us admiring the beautiful golden reliquary containing the remains of the Three Wise Men, which glows like honey beneath an enormous arched window and is what everyone really comes to see. It was worth the entire trip just to lay eyes upon it.

  Alyson and I had many nights in hotels and monasteries when we could discuss what I should do with all the offers for my hand that flooded in before I left Bath. Whether it was old Sir Percy, that down-on-his-luck merchant Richard de Angle, or the mercer Henry Makeward, I’ve decided that three husbands is more than enough. I’m happier being free of men and marriage. As a widow, I’ve the liberty to love where I choose and without judgement – even yours – well, not as much. I’ve control over my own destiny, and Fortuna can decide how far to turn her wheel on my behalf without the burden of a husband beside me.

  That is what I wanted to tell you, Geoffrey. I’m foreswearing marriage. From hereon, I wish to be known as the Widow of Bath. I will enjoy the fruits of my labours. As will Alyson, Milda, and my workers.

  Alyson asks that I send you her blessings and we both ask you to do the same on our behalf to Father Elias, Oriel, Sweteman, Wy and young Jankin should you be in Bath any time soon. I was so sorry to learn of Master Binder’s passing. I’m relieved Jankin is doing well in his studies and that these will go some way to being a much-needed distraction in his time of sorrow.

  I hope to be home before winter, Geoffrey, by which time I pray this matter with Cecilia will be put to bed (a poor choice of words). Just importune the Almighty there’s no child that will bind you forever to that termagant.

  Written on the Feast of St Swithun.

  I remain your constant friend – whatever the verdict,

  Eleanor.

  The Tale of Husband the Fourth, Simon de la Pole

  1380 to 1384

  That’s very near the truth it seems to me;

  A man can win us best with flattery.

  To dance attendance on us, make a fuss,

  Ensnare us all, the best and worst of us.

  The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Neville Coghill

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bath

  The Year of Our Lord 1380

  In the fourth year of the reign of Richard II

  I married the brogger, Simon de la Pole, on the steps of St Michael’s Without the Walls on a cool morning in late June with Geoffrey’s and Alyson’s disapproval ringing louder in my ears than the bloody church bells.

  Despite all the promises I’d made, the exciting plans shored up, the intentions I’d held close, once I returned to Bath from Cologne, they fell by the wayside the moment Simon de la Pole appeared on my doorstep.

  He’d made quite the impression at Mervyn’s funeral. Partly because something about him reminded me of Durand and the passions he’d aroused, and partly because he appeared to so swiftly forget me when I wasn’t looking at him. I was curious, inflamed and determined to win his attention – a deadly combination.

  For all that I’d been married three times, and enjoyed many trysts on my last pilgrimage, I wasn’t nearly as experienced with men as I liked to believe. I was, however, excellent at business and, I hoped, at managing my by now quite large household. I also thought I was a good friend, but short-sightedness, and refusing to hear what you don’t wish to hear, can make a poor one of the best of us.

  This isn’t something I’d have recognised back then. It’s only now, as an old woman reflecting on my younger years, I understand how ignorant I was, how foolish, and also, how desperate to be loved.

  That was my undoing – and not just with Simon.

  When Geoffrey learned I was intending to marry Simon, he made it his mission to come to Bath and dissuade me. Luckily for him, the case Cecilia Champain brought against him hadn’t proceeded, in no small part due to the powerful men he had to testify on his behalf.

  Geoffrey descended upon Slynge House in an uproar. I was hardly inclined to listen. As I said in the long letter from Cologne, and then shouted to his face, who was he to preach to me about poor choices when he carelessly shoved his prod in an unwed heifer? A heifer inclined to accuse him of a grievous crime? Simon, by contrast, wasn’t prepared to sard me until we were wed, and I was used goods and all.

  When Alyson added her concerns to Geoffrey’s, I was about ready to box their ears and order the two of them from the house. Instead, as we raged at each other one night, I balled my fists and stood my ground. They could do their worst.

  ‘Ask Mistress Ketch,’ cried Alyson, half out of her chair, pointing towards the window. ‘She’ll tell you what he did to her daughter. What he did to their neighbours’ girls as well.’

  ‘Who on God’s good earth is Mistress Ketch and why should I care about her, her daughter, or their bloody neighbours?’

  ‘They’re farmers, that’s who, and those girls, who were virgins until your debaucher came a-knocking, are about to drop de la Pole lambs, aren’t they?’

  ‘Who says they’re Simon’s?’ I screeched.

  ‘The girls!’ yelled Alyson.

  I’d no doubt the entire household could hear us. We stood feet apart in the solar, Geoffrey between us, Milda pretending to fold linens as we hollered and roared. I’d never seen Alyson so angry. Nay, angry is not the right word. Determined. Determined to have her say and make me listen. Alas, I was deaf to her entreaties. The fact Simon had fathered babes was confirmation his prick worked and I felt thrilled at the prospect he might fill me with child as well.

  I was love-sick. Afflicted with a disease of the heart. Geoffrey called me cunt-dazed.

  When rumours about Simon’s first wife dying from neglect reached us, I put it down to jealousy. Likewise when we heard a maid in Lady Frondwyn’s house had died giving birth to a child claimed to be his. A laundress at the Abbey said he’d forced himself upon her and was so shamed she threw herself in the river. She survived, but left Bath forthwith.

  Next there’d be folk claiming he fathered the entire choir of St Michael’s, or the tinker’s children who performed on market days. Stories about his womanising reached such a point of
absurdity, I closed my ears and instead chose to judge the man who paid court to me by his actions – towards me. The man who arrived dressed in his best clothes to escort me to church, the market, the pasture to see the flock, freely giving his advice about their fleeces, which he judged to be among the finest he’d seen (he was a brogger, after all). The man who never once tried to kiss my lips, or take advantage (God knows, I wanted him to), but treated me as if I were a princess, a virgin and a martyr all rolled into one. He would admire my eyes, teeth, mouth and body – not with his hands, lips or tongue (though he told me oft how much he desired me – one look at his breeches and I knew this to be true), but with words.

  I told Geoffrey he would do well to ape my lover’s words in his writing. I’d never seen Geoffrey look so hurt. ‘And you would expect me to ask a queen how to thread a loom just because she wears your cloth?’

  That silenced me.

  ‘Why rush, Eleanor?’ he said eventually, his face red, his eyes pained. ‘Not so long ago you claimed you’d never marry again.’

  ‘That was before Simon.’

  ‘Seems that no sooner is one husband dead and gone, you find some other Christian man to take you on,’ he whispered.

  Picking up her sewing once more, Alyson raised her head. ‘Haven’t you heard, Master Geoffrey? Simon de la Pole is no Christian, he’s a Lollard.’

  ‘Don’t you dare use that against him, Alyson,’ I said. ‘Yesterday you were saying it was the only thing about him you approved of.’

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t mean I approve of him, though.’

  I clucked in annoyance. ‘Nowhere does God say there’s a limit to the number of husbands a woman can have.’ I dared Geoffrey to challenge me.

  He didn’t. I took it as a cue to continue.

  ‘Where did the Lord command virginity? Tell me that, eh. On the contrary, He tells us to go forth and multiply. There’s no finite number of husbands for women, nor wives for men, so why not multiply them? It’s not as if I’m committing bigamy or adultery. My husbands are dead – may God assoil them. I love the Lord and my husbands equally. One in bed, the other in my heart and head.’

  Geoffrey gave a weak smile. ‘That as may be, Eleanor, but St Paul believes that one can only truly come to God if one remains chaste.’

  ‘Of course, that’s something a priest would say. But how many priests do you know who are virgins? Ha!’ I threw up my hands. ‘Answer me this, Poet. If seed is never sown, then how can fresh virgins be grown? Look,’ I went and sat beside him, ‘I’ve nothing against virgins, as you and Alyson well know. You can quote all you like from St Paul – who I reckon must have been a virgin to bleat about the state so – or Ptolemy or whoever, but it’s not like I can turn into one now, can I? That horse has bolted, the sheep’s been shorn, the gate’s been breached. I may as well tune my desires using the instrument of wedlock.’

  I never admitted to them how much Simon’s courting filled an emptiness I hadn’t known existed until he reappeared with his pretty manners and even prettier words. Aye, it was flattery, good and true, and I needed to hear it. Like one of Geoffrey’s love-sick fools, I believed his every utterance, about his desire, my beauty, even while my little ivory mirror, which I’d bought at the Haymarket in Cologne, told me otherwise. Even as Simon declared his love, a tiny voice whispered warnings, told me to proceed cautiously. Between them, my inner demons, Geoffrey and Alyson and even Father Elias, my stubbornness was inflamed to greater acts of resistance. The more they objected, the closer I came to saying ‘aye’ to Simon’s proposal. I was afraid that changing my mind now would be an act of weakness.

  Too late, I learned it would have signified strength.

  In the end it made no difference what anyone said or what stories I heard – or even what I saw with my own eyes. I made excuses for everything. I married Simon amid a crowd of the curious, the doubtful and the concerned, and as soon as I could, I tore him away from our marriage feast and the attractive servant he was talking to, and brought him to my – nay, our – bedroom.

  There, Simon de la Pole took me as his wife. For all I’d longed for this moment, it was but brief. Oh, his pole was de-la-lightful. Hard, his thrusts keen, but he barely kissed my mouth, he didn’t try to disrobe me, nor enjoy the flesh about which he’d rhapsodised so much over the months. He threw my skirts over my head, and pushed his way into my bower. Ready for him – as I had been for weeks – it was an easy entry and he was soon spent. I was just beginning, and wanting to be held and caressed until he was ready for round two. Instead, he leapt from the bed, pulled up his breeches, laced them, tidied his shirt and then, with a quick farewell, returned to the festivities downstairs.

  I lay there staring at the ceiling wondering what in heaven’s name had just happened. Here I was, on my wedding night, alone, while my husband celebrated his marriage the way, so it turned out, he preferred to live: sans wife.

  Sans me.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Bath, Kent and London

  The Year of Our Lord 1381

  In the fourth and fifth years of the reign of Richard II

  There’s not much to tell about my marriage to Simon de la Pole, not for the first years. It was exactly as Geoffrey and Alyson, and anyone else who possessed the courage to try and warn me had predicted: I worked and increased our wealth, while my husband not only strayed continuously, but kept a paramour.

  What everyone implied, but I’d been too caught up in the fairytale of romance to see, was that he’d had a woman for years, long before he met me. A whore in a brothel in the centre of town. She had a hold over him that nothing, not two marriages and numerous other affairs, could break. She went by the name Viola, though I was told her real name was Agatha Brown. Dressed like a lady (a wardrobe my coin contributed to after my marriage to Simon), she was a harlot, albeit a clever one. A lord’s by-blow was the story, who, years earlier, had come to Bath after following the King’s army and even, it was whispered, abandoning a baby.

  Winsome, with long, dark curls, she was a beauty. Creamy flesh, long, delicate fingers and a mouth even I wanted to kiss. I was eaten up with jealousy. I would sometimes hover outside the whorehouse just to catch a glimpse of her. Many times, I spotted her with my husband. It was a dirk driven into my heart, painful and enraging. This didn’t stop me seeking them out. I was a glutton; I couldn’t get enough. Each time, Alyson would grip me by the elbow and steer me back home, into the workshop, and sit me at a loom with a goblet of wine. Only weaving calmed me. Weaving and the solace of stories.

  The one thing wealth, even modest wealth, allows you is books. With the help of Father Elias and Geoffrey, as well as the books Mervyn had left, I now had a small library of fifteen tomes. If it hadn’t been for the tales of Ovid (which Father Elias read to me), the epics of Homer, Virgil and the ancients, I don’t know how I would have got through those early months as I reeled in shock from having my eyes opened to my husband’s ways.

  Of course I confronted him. He simply laughed.

  ‘I never tried to hide Viola, you fool,’ he said, and wrapped his arms around me. ‘Whatever made you think I’d be satisfied with just one woman?’

  ‘You married me.’

  Simon kissed the top of my head, then placed a long finger against my lips. ‘Aye. And that should be more than enough … for you.’

  That night, he made love to me the way I’d prayed he would on my wedding night. Instead of relishing it, all I could do as he kissed my breasts, ran his hands up and down my body, parted my legs, was wonder if he was thinking of her. When that wasn’t distracting me, I was wishing I was her and that my russet-coloured hair was dark, my teeth not quite so large and gapped, and that my freckles would vanish.

  Never one to doubt myself (too much), as the months went past and spring arrived sending forth tiny, perfumed blooms and sweet gambolling lambs, I began to drink to forget. Night after night, I downed ales and wine, settling in the solar, trying not to think about who my wayward hus
band was swiving or where he went until well past curfew. The servants learned not to bother me; Oriel and Milda too. Only Alyson stayed by my side, dismissing the others and keeping me and my misery company. Everyone knew what my husband was and where he went on those long nights. The pitying looks at church were more than I could bear, so for a while I stopped attending, preferring to pay a fine.

  Worried for my welfare, likely encouraged by Alyson, Father Elias visited, popping over most evenings and even some mornings, forcing me to rise from my stupor and my megrims to entertain him. Soon the loom ceased to provide any sort of comfort, and even reading or being read to held no joy. I began to replace the people in the tales with Simon and the sluts he bedded.

  At the beginning of June, Geoffrey arrived. The news he brought was enough to rouse me from self-pity for a time. While I wallowed and my husband jabbed his fleshy spear in countless women, not only had Geoffrey been blessed with another son, Lewis, but around the country, rebellion was fomenting.

  We sat in the solar, the full light from an overcast day streaming in the window. Milda and Oriel had brought ale and vittles. I merely picked. For certes, my kirtle and tunics were starting to hang. We ate and exchanged pleasantries – well, Alyson and Geoffrey did – as I wondered whether, if I continued to starve myself, I would resemble the slender Viola more …

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t heard –’ Geoffrey was saying.

  ‘Heard what?’ I asked, absently.