by Karen Brooks
‘And where’s that gonna be, mistress?’ asked Yolande, stifling a yawn.
‘One day, it will be over there.’ I nodded towards the Thames. ‘On the other side of that great river. One day, we’ll have a house of our own and a thriving business where every maudlyn will want to work.’
Leda pushed back her stool. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice.’ She deposited a kiss on my cheek. ‘But methinks you’ve been hanging around that poet friend of yours too much. You’re having an attack of imagination.’
As I sat by my window that night, watching the early snow fall, I wondered if Leda was right.
Not about Geoffrey, but if what I was planning – to be my own woman – was nothing but an unrealistic dream.
FORTY-SEVEN
St Martin’s Le Grand, London
The Years of Our Lord 1399 to 1400
In the first year of the reign of Henry IV
‘Geoffrey, that’s marvellous news!’
It was not long after sext on Christmas Eve and, in answer to my invitation, Geoffrey had arrived not only with a goose, some lamprey and venison, but jugs of fine wine. Better still, he brought with him a copy of the lease agreement he’d just signed, which would make him a neighbour once more.
That very day, he’d moved into a tenement in the beautiful garden of the Lady Chapel in Westminster.
In honour of his relocation, we were enjoying wine in the solar. The fire roared, casting welcome warmth. Milda was spinning, her once-steady hands not quite so quick now her swollen fingers found it hard to twist the thread. Her eyesight was also beginning to fade. I’d told her over and over she didn’t have to keep working, but she insisted.
‘What else would I do?’
‘Look after me.’
‘I don’t even do that anymore,’ she grumbled. ‘You look after yourself.’
‘Then love me.’
‘Can’t do more of what I already do in abundance,’ she said with a gentle smile.
Oriel was cooking, Yolande helping. Drew was at the market. He’d become keen on the widow of a former cutpurse who was living with the butcher and his family. Emily was her name. It was hard to keep him indoors these days, which was a boon. Wace and Harry were at lessons. In the New Year, Wace would leave us to go and live in Master Adam Pinkhurst’s house and become his factotum – a general help when it came to scribing and researching. Geoffrey had arranged it. He would have taken Wace on himself, but said he couldn’t afford to. Again, I couldn’t conceive of how he lacked coin when King Henry had been so generous. Mayhap, I thought, it was because of this new lease. Fifty-three years he’d taken the place in Westminster. Who did he think he was? Methuselah? The girls and Master Stephen were, as always, over in Southwark, though I expected them home at any moment. The weather was terrible and while there’d always be men keen for a sard before Christmas, the snow would likely keep them beside their own hearths.
‘From here on, I’ll be able to concentrate on my writing,’ said Geoffrey, interrupting my thoughts. ‘Finish that damn poem.’
I regarded him over the top of the goblet. ‘I thought we agreed not to mention it anymore.’
Geoffrey shifted uncomfortably. ‘I only mention it because what you read was unfinished.’
‘So, you’re rewriting?’
Geoffrey had the grace to colour. ‘Parts, aye. Mainly the Wife’s Tale.’
‘I didn’t read that part. Only her Prologue – the bit that tells my story.’
‘It’s not exactly your story, Alyson.’
I flapped a hand to silence him. ‘So you’ve said, over and over. It’s close enough for discomfort.’
He gave a sad smile. ‘It was never my intention to cause you distress.’
‘But you did. You used me, Geoffrey. Used my life, plundered it, unearthed my soul, my dreams, and what for? To entertain your cronies.’
‘Nay, not just entertain. You make it sound trivial. I wrote it to bring ordinary people’s stories to the fore, the commons’ lives –’
I held up my palm. ‘Stop. Please. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Not today at any rate. Mayhap, one day I’ll be ready. Mayhap …’
He opened his mouth then, thinking better of it, closed it again.
Determined to change the subject, I lifted my mazer in Geoffrey’s direction. ‘You’ll enjoy being back in London. In the thick of things again,’ I said. ‘In the beating heart of the court.’
Geoffrey nodded. He was paler than last time I saw him, his eyes lacked their usual lustre. ‘Moreso because I’ve no official role. I can merely observe. Observe and write.’ His hand shook as he drank.
It was easy to forget he was old. What remained of his hair was mostly grey and white, his beard had grown bushy and long. Lines crossed his cheeks and forehead, crowded the corners of his eyes. It was his quick wit and warm voice that belied his age. No warble or stuttering for him. He was as sharp as ever.
We feasted that night with Geoffrey, and though it wasn’t officially Christmas, we wassailed, sang carols and burned the Yule Log. In all the time I’d known Geoffrey, we’d never spent Christmas together, and though we didn’t exchange presents, having him there was gift enough for me. I said so after a few wines as well.
‘Ah, but you’ll see plenty of me now you’ve forgiven me.’
‘Forgiven might be over-reaching –’ I smiled to soften the sting.
Geoffrey ignored me. ‘Because I’m so much closer, I’m hoping you’ll come to visit me as well.’
As the words were spoken, a shiver racked my body, as if a demon had walked over my grave. I hid my concern by drinking more, laughing louder and making extravagant promises to Geoffrey, Wace, Harry, Master Stephen and my girls.
Yet, as Geoffrey staggered out into the evening, Master Stephen taking a lantern to escort him to John Gower’s house, Wace scrambling for his coat and hat so he might accompany them, I was left with the heavy feeling that I’d never see Geoffrey again.
Dear Lord, but wine makes maudlin fools of us, doesn’t it? The man had just moved closer and here I was, predicting the end of our friendship.
I should have also known, in vino veritas. Truth glimpsed while drunk may seem like sentimental rubbish, but it’s still truth.
The New Year was clear and cold. Before the month was complete, Wace went to live in Adam Pinkhurst’s household, and within weeks they were singing his praises. Leda was bursting with pride and there wasn’t a day went past she didn’t mention her clever son – to passersby, customers, other maudlyns, barrow boys and milkmaids, the custodians at London Bridge or the boatmen who ferried her, Yolande and Master Stephen across the river daily. She kept mispronouncing factotum, turning it into a variety of words that had people asking her if a living could be made from farting and if so, we’d all be rich.
Milda and I spun and wove, the thread we sold barely covering the cost of the wool. Likewise, my slow-growing ells, beautifully made as they were, brought little. Sometimes, when I accompanied the girls to Southwark, I also took on clients. Don’t judge. I could scarce ask the others to do what I wasn’t prepared to do myself. I’d not had the heart to seek other whores to join my girls and none sought me out – not then; I suspected Ordric had a hand in that. The men I took had to be clean, well-spoken and pay for the privilege. I’d standards, you know. Sad thing, I made more sucking or tugging than I did weaving, and me an old woman and all. Albeit a lusty one with Venus in my veins.
My dream of moving to Southwark and opening a bathhouse retreated into a fog-bound distance. I didn’t let it go, it was just becoming harder to see. When Leda was knocked out by a brute of a sailor and Yolande lost another tooth and had her nose broken, and Master Stephen almost killed the rogues responsible, I had to use my acquaintance with Ordric to escape the worst penalties. Some hours in the pillory and a small fine sufficed, praise be to God (and Ordric). Even so, I’ll not forget the humiliation, the pain of being shackled by wrists and ankles for hours in a public place. Nor will I forg
et those who threw their rotten fruit at me – and that was the best of what was flung. Dung, eggs, mud, water, stones – and from some scarce old enough to wield them, the chuckling little bastards. As I cursed and rained threats upon those who stepped forward to administer their brand of punishment, growing dirtier, colder and more covered in shit than I’d been since I wrestled with Alyson all those years ago, my only consolation was that my shame spared the girls. Anyhow, it was nothing a good wash wouldn’t take care of.
‘The sooner you get those girls off the streets and into that bawdy house you’re wanting, the better,’ said Ordric, who happened along as I was freed, helping me stand as my aching limbs tried to work again.
If pigs were pigeons, it’d be raining bacon.
We marked the year after Lowdy’s death by casting off our mourning and spending the first part of the day in chapel saying prayers and lighting candles. I lit some for Alyson, too, and asked that both women forgive me that still, after all this time, I hadn’t managed to fulfil my silent promise to both of them, not really. I may have authority over my household, but my life and livelihood were still reliant on the monks of St Michael’s and the customers who used our services. We could be evicted for the slightest infringement and every day the girls and I walked through the city and were rowed to Southwark was dangerous, and that was before we sidled off into the shadows and rented rooms to please men.
Then, one day in November, everything changed.
I wish I could say Geoffrey’s death was sudden, only it wasn’t. I’d known it was coming late last year. I should have made more of an effort; taken up his invitation to visit, insisted when he declined my invitations that he tear himself away from his wretched poems.
But I didn’t. And he stayed in his beloved apartment and garden, dreaming, receiving visitors who interrupted his work, and writing. He wrote to me often, that’s why I knew not to visit. That’s why, I like to think, I felt him ever-close. Geoffrey had always been a man who communicated better with the written word than the spoken. Often underestimated in person, mistaken for a buffoon or a weak man of shallow thought, the opposite was true. Read any one of his works and you are given entree to a mind that observed closely, remembered faultlessly and was possessed of an acerbic and generous wit.
I didn’t find out Geoffrey had died until a week afterwards. By then, he was already buried and hymns sung for his soul. But the moment I saw Harry Bailly on my doorstep, the innkeep from the Tabard Inn in Southwark, I knew something was amiss.
‘May I come in, mistress?’ said Harry, studying my face curiously, as if trying to assess the changes the years had wrought since we’d last spoken.
‘Forgive me, Harry, of course.’
Once we were settled in the solar, ale in hand before the fire, Harry told me what brought him here.
I swear, I didn’t hear another word for a long time. All I could perceive was the sound of regret and grief pounding in my head, each pulse of my heart an ache against my ribs. I imagined it growing bigger and bigger until it would explode. My life with Geoffrey flashed before me, from the time he caught me with that young priest, Layamon. Holy Mary and all the saints, his name had been prescient, had it not? If I’d done anything in my life, it was lay with a man many times. All except Geoffrey. Yet, he’d not only been the first man to care for me, but he’d been the only constant one in my life.
My friend, my cousin, my confidant, my mentor and conscience.
Dear God in Heaven – my beloved.
That’s when the tears began. When I finally understood that Geoffrey was my one true love. Don’t mistake me, I don’t mean in the passionate way that he so oft wrote about. Nor do I mean in that heightened state of lust where a woman would risk her reputation, her very future, just to touch the man she desires. Nay. What I felt for Geoffrey was deeper, truer, than that. It was akin to the love I bore Alyson. It was a love that transcended the flesh and reached deep into the soul.
And now he was gone.
I buried my face in my hands and wept. Harry didn’t know what to do, so sat clearing his throat again and again between sips of ale. Milda rose and wrapped her plump arms around me, making soft crooning noises as she once did to quiet Wace.
There was no quieting me, not for a time. It wasn’t so much that Geoffrey was lost to me, because he wasn’t. I had my memories and, God be praised, I had his words.
It was because I had never told him what he meant to me.
When I finally dried my eyes (only for them to well up again), Harry coughed loudly. ‘There’s more, mistress.’
‘Oh,’ I said, raising a bleary, weary face. ‘You’ll have to speak up, Harry. My ear.’ I tapped it lightly. ‘It’s not good. When I shed tears, it’s worse.’
Harry shifted his chair closer, leaning forward. ‘That better?’ he shouted.
‘I’m not deaf, you know!’
Chagrined, Harry moderated his volume. Poor Harry, I could see he was battling to hold himself together. Geoffrey had been his friend, too. When he’d finished telling me whatever it was, then I’d suggest we get drunk. Roaring, mightily drunk.
‘A few months ago,’ said Harry, reaching into the bulging satchel he’d brought with him, ‘Chaucer asked me to hold on to these.’ He extracted some thick quires and a roll of parchment with five wax seals hanging off it. ‘He said to me that if anything should ever happen to him, I was to give them to you.’ He passed them over.
The quires tumbled into my lap. The scroll of parchment wobbled on top and rolled onto the floor. Milda retrieved it.
Cautiously, I picked up the first quire and opened it. I immediately recognised the hand. It was Adam Pinkhurst, Wace’s master and Geoffrey’s favoured scribe for copying out his poems and essays. My heart, so swollen and full, began to throb. Could it be? Aye, it was. It was his Canterbury Tales. Incomplete, but enough for anyone to understand what he wanted to achieve. I scanned the quire I’d plucked out swiftly. It was the one about the miller cuckolded by a young scholar. Dear Lord.
I read some lines aloud: ‘He knew not Cato, for his wit was rude/Who bade that man should wed his similitude.’
I’d forgotten the miller quotes Cato about men marrying their equal. The miller’s wife was also called Alyson – a woman who, along with her young lover, deceives her husband. It wasn’t hard to think where inspiration for that had come from. I only wish I’d enjoyed the success she had. I closed that quire and opened another, then another, until at last I found it. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and, in another thick quire, her Tale. The part that still remained unread by me.
No more.
For the first time, at Harry’s encouragement, I read the Tale – aloud.
The Wife tells a story about a handsome young knight who rapes a woman. When he is apprehended and sent to court for punishment, the Queen and her women set him a task: to find out what women most desire. He learns much in the year he searches for an answer – they want flattery, jewels, riches, nice clothes. How shallow. Geoffrey was most certainly having a laugh – but at whom? Women, or those who believed such nonsense?
I continued. It’s not until the knight is returning to court, defeated because his quest has failed, that he meets an ugly old woman. She promises to give him the answer he seeks – if he will do her a favour. He agrees and presents the answer she gives him to the court: women desire to have mastery over men.
I paused. Oh, Geoffrey. I returned to the tale.
When the old woman insists the knight marry her, he’s appalled, but is bound by their agreement. On their wedding night, he turns from his ancient bride in disgust – she’s physically repulsive, wrinkled, poor, and not of noble birth. She rebukes him for his manner, telling him nobility is not attained through birth, but through actions – through being a good person.
My eyes began to swim.
The old woman then reminds the knight that Christ was poor – poverty might bring misery, but it’s also an incentive to work harder. True friends stand by you
whether you’re poor or rich. And, as for being ugly, well, ugly women are less likely to make cuckolds of their husbands.
I couldn’t help it, my laughter burst forth, startling Harry and Milda, who were both lost in the tale.
Then, the old bride offers the knight something he’s unlikely to refuse. Capable of magic, she can either be young and beautiful and unfaithful to him, or old, ugly and constant. Which will it be? The knight considers her offer then, remorseful but also enlightened, puts the question back to her – he tells her to choose.
Judas’s prick in a noose. Geoffrey gives the woman the right to make her own choice …
I pressed the quire to my chest and bowed my head.
Harry wiped his eyes, not understanding the source of my tears, my long silence. ‘I’m in there too and all, mistress. Not that wondrous tale, but in the journey part – with the pilgrims. He told me to tell you not to be angry. To remind you it’s but a work of fiction, but one in which he granted you your heart’s desire.’
The authority to make my own decisions. Aye, well, his Wife of Bath did that, didn’t she? As brash and bold as you like. But it was in her Tale, not her Prologue, that her real story is told. Mayhap, mine as well.
It wasn’t quite what I’d have wished, but it would have to do.
‘Thank you, Geoffrey,’ I whispered.
‘What about this?’ Milda passed over the scroll with the seals.
‘Oh, aye,’ said Harry, wagging a finger at it. ‘He bade me deliver that into your hands as well.’
Very carefully, I unrolled the parchment, weighing it down with a mazer at one end and a candlestick at the other.
The room spun. This could not be.
‘What is it, mistress?’ asked Milda.
My shoulders began to shake, my hands, my lips. Milda and Harry exchanged concerned looks. Harry swept up my mazer, the parchment curling over, and thrust it into my hands. I gulped a few times.
