To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  Also by James Meek

  Fiction

  McFarlane Boils the Sea

  Last Orders

  Drivetime

  The Museum of Doubt

  The People’s Act of Love

  We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

  The Heart Broke In

  Non-Fiction

  Private Island

  Dreams of Leaving and Remaining

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © James Meek, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 674 2

  EXPORT ISBN 978 1 78689 676 6

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78689 675 9

  For Kay and Sophy

  God is deaf nowadays

  – William Langland, Piers Plowman

  Contents

  Outen Green

  Cut me that …

  The World

  Will went through …

  The End of the World

  Will beat on …

  The New World

  The shipmen wouldn’t …

  Acknowledgements

  OUTEN GREEN

  ‘CUT ME THAT rose,’ demanded Berna of the gardeners. She pointed to the most finely formed flower, coloured the most brilliant crimson.

  ‘A prize surely intended for your marriage,’ said her cousin Pogge. ‘Weren’t it sufficient provocation to take your papa’s book without consent?’

  Berna embraced the volume she carried. ‘Papa offered me the fulfilment of my desires in the garden, in lieu of my preference for a liberty general.’ She turned to the younger of the two gardeners. He had default of height, but was formed pleasantly, with puissant shoulders. His freshly razed face had an appearance of attentive tranquillity. ‘Will Quate, cut me the rose.’

  IT WAS SUNDAY, St Thomas’s Day eve, and there wasn’t no garden work to be done nor no other work neither. Will Quate wasn’t no gardener. He came to help Rufy bear home a heap of rose sticks for his fire. But the lady Bernadine happened to come by and bade them give her the best bloom on the bush, and they mightn’t say no, so Will hewed the rose with his knife, plucked five thorns of the stem with his fingers and gave it her. She took it and led her kinswoman through the door in the garden wall to her father’s wood.

  MY COMMISSION TO annotate the abbey’s property case is complete; I am obliged to transmit it to the advocates in Avignon. Nothing detains me in Malmesbury except the difficulty of leaving. It is not terror of events that obstructs my return to France, but the practicalities. It is impossible to be a solitary traveller in these times. I must find company for the journey, yet the roads to the southern ports, previously dense with viators, lie vacant.

  I suspect the prior has more intelligence about the progress of the plague in Avignon than he divulges. I have received no communication from the city since Marc’s brief note in March, informing me that the pestilence was general there, and that on the advice of his doctor the Pope now defends himself against the pestilential miasma by habitation at the median of two enormous fires.

  Written at Malmesbury Abbey, sixth July anno domini one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, of ordinary time the twenty-seventh, the Sunday preceding the festival of the translation of the relics of my name saint, Thomas martyr, by Thomas Pitkerro, proctor of Avignon.

  BERNA AND POGGE passed a line of village children who foraged in the husks of last year’s beechmast. They followed a path to the foot of a tree, sat on a blanket and placed between them the book and the rose. From a pouch she carried, Berna took a bowl and a bloodletting knife and demanded that Pogge bare her arm.

  ‘I prefer not to,’ said Pogge.

  ‘It is simply to demonstrate the method, that you might at some future point apply it yourself.’

  Pogge lifted her arm, rigidly enclosed in linen. ‘It’s sewn in,’ she said.

  ‘I advised you to permit your limbs liberty of movement.’

  ‘I desired to accustom myself to sewing in, in advance of your marriage ceremony.’

  ‘It is my opinion that you contrived this excuse. You doubt my ability to bleed.’

  ‘You know I admire your numerous virtues, but you are a knight’s daughter, not a surgeon.’

  ‘It is notorious in our family that I possess a plethora of blood.’ Berna rolled up her own left sleeve till it was above the elbow. ‘Regard,’ she said, demonstrating the faint marks of previous cuts in the crook of her arm, and one more fresh. ‘Are they not finely accomplished? I chanced to see my friend sanguinary, the barber, in Brimpsfield last week. He advised that should the advertisements of the clerks prove true my former comfort would be a form of defence. My chaperone left me unobserved for a moment and the barber supplied me with the knife.’

  ‘I would have held you too determined in your gentility to have acquaintance with barbers.’

  ‘I ne strain for gentility,’ said Berna, raising her voice a fraction. ‘It is courteous amiability towards such classes as barbers that distingues our relations with them from their relations with each other, determined, as they are, by money.’

  The pique left her, though not the ardour with which she spoke, accompanied by a certain generality of address, as if Pogge were only one of a number of listeners. ‘While my mother lived she conducted me to the barber to be bled once a month. My humours were of so special a nature. She would lie on a couch, supported by a cushion, I would lie against her in the same position, and she would fold me in her arms while the barber opened my veins. The cut would be pursued by silence, apart from the respiration of my mother in my ear and the gutter of the blood in the bowl. I have never known such contentment.’

  SIR GUY CAME and saw the rose was gone. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

  ‘Was my daughter here?’ he asked the men.

  They ne said nothing.

  Sir Guy beheld the heaps of rose sticks Will and Rufy had bound in bundles.

  ‘A heap of Sabbath-breakers,’ he said. ‘Would you have the murrain sent us sooner?’

  Rufy said it wasn’t work, he and Will only gathered the sticks for his hearth, as his lord had behest him the boot of the rose tree when he shred it.

  Sir Guy cut one of the bundles with his knife and took of it a thick, well-shaped length of rosewood, bent at one end in a handle, as it had grown. He held the handle, let the other end sit on the ground and leaned his weight on the wood.

  ‘A kind walking stick,’ he said.

  Rufy said the tree would grow that way, and his mum was lame.

  ‘There’s sap in your old dam yet,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I saw her hop about the pole two month ago.’

  Rufy said her bones were bad, and he ne thought it him no harm to take a good strong stick to help her walk about.

  ‘I’ll learn you otherwise,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I’ll have bad bones one day. Why would I lack a good stick of my own rose tree to help your shiftless mother? All hold me soft and reckon they might have what’s mine without no afterclap. I was robbed of a gown, and now you’d rob me of a walking stick.’

  Will said they mightn’t say no to the lady Bernadine when she bade them give her the bloom. He took a handful of little brown spikelets of his belt-bag and, with bowed head, offered them to his lord.

  ‘Eh? What’s that?’ said Sir Guy.

  Will said he hewed them from the rose branch. They were the thorns, he said, that must a
lso rightly be Sir Guy’s.

  A COMPANY OF archers pervenes to Malmesbury imminently, on its way to France. It is suggested I go with them.

  When travelling towards the pestilence was a theoretical possibility, I had fortitude. Now I may actually go, I am terrified. My mind cannot accommodate my own mortality, yet is capable of engendering an infinite series of images of colleagues and remote acquaintances who have succumbed. I remember Brozzi, the Rota lawyer with the enormous jaw. I have been visited repeatedly by a vision of him recumbent in a pit in his court robes, his face corroded by marauding dogs, the bone of the jaw protruding nude and white, while my baker asperses soil over him with a flour scoop.

  BERNA STROKED HER cousin’s cheek and told her how fortunate it was she’d come. She’d been about to take her own life.

  ‘How?’ demanded Pogge.

  ‘Thrown myself into the moat.’

  Pogge shook her head. ‘Your moat’s not profound enough for drownage. You’d kill several frogs and break your arm.’

  They disputed the best way a woman should contrive her death. Pogge favoured poison. Berna preferred a tumble from a high window. Pogge said she couldn’t have done it anywise, for suicide was the mortal sin that mightn’t never be absolved, and Berna were certain to go direct to hell, to burn till Judgement Day.

  ‘The King of Heaven will absolve me,’ said Berna. ‘He will perceive the purity of my soul and the sincerity of my ardour. He will see that by forcing me to marry an old man in place of my amour, my father left me no alternative method to preserve my honour. I shall be raised to heaven as a martyr to love.’

  Before Pogge might reply she was arrested by a noise of approaching pigs. The place Berna had chosen was a hollow between two roots that rose higher than their heads, hiding them from most of the forest. They could hear the beasts grunt, step through last year’s dry leaves and dig in the ground with their muzzles. They heard the voice of Hab the pigboy. Pogge lifted her head and looked round.

  ‘Please ne regard these villainous animals while I explain the misery and joy that contest for possession of my heart,’ said Berna.

  ‘I have a despite of pigs. They are large and hairy and have a displeasant odour,’ said Pogge. ‘I beg your pardon. I am yours entirely. Let’s consider your state in a manner proper.’

  ‘How well-tempered you are,’ said Berna. ‘How many times at night I’ve wished you were in bed with me that I might wake you and be solaced of your reason.’

  ‘How old is your affianced?’

  ‘Fifty! Fifty years! As old as papa!’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘He has hunted here. I call him Sir Hennery, because his face is like to it was pecked by chickens.’

  ‘But he isn’t otherwise disfigured.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s of fair height, sound in body.’

  ‘It’s a husband, not a horse! He becomes my master, till the end of his days!’

  ‘Of estate substantial.’

  Berna shrugged. ‘Three manors in Somerset-Somewhereset-Nowhereset.’

  ‘You’d be secure.’

  ‘He has hairs growing out of his nose.’

  ‘Encourage him to pluck them.’

  ‘He’s illiterate, hates music, and considers an evening well spent disputing the best hound to catch a hart in grease.’

  ‘England’s unloving husbands and wives may find relief of matrimony,’ said Pogge. ‘There’s a town in France where so many lay in the street they couldn’t neither bury them like Christians nor dig a pit to hold them all, and they burned them there, in front of the houses they were carried from.’

  ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘A Gascon who came to Bristol with merchandise for my father.’

  ‘I very much doubt the French have been burning people. In general we are too phlegmatic as creatures to burn well. Anyway, it ne troubles me. I’d rather the world perish than that I live without my amour.’

  ‘By “amour”, I suppose you refer to Laurence Haket?’

  ‘Ne speak his name,’ said Berna. ‘It’s discomfortable to me. Say “he” and “him”.’

  ‘Ah. Then I suppose you refer to he-and-him.’

  The church bell rang in the village. ‘Oh, for a priest romantic,’ said Berna, ‘who might say, for example, “Death is sent by Love to make us sensible how few hours remain to he who is desirous of the Rose, once the Rose has flowered.”’ She placed the rose on her lap. ‘Pestilence or no pestilence.’

  ‘To imagine Laurence will rescue you from your future husband will make you suffer more. Laurence is departed and won’t return. You live in a manor in Gloucestershire, not in Paris among the poets.’

  Berna laughed and touched the corners of the book. ‘How measurable you are, dear Pogge. Like the Lover in the book you pass too much time listening to Reason. Why not France? Calais is joined to England now, and Laurence is promised tenure of a grand manor outside the city. Why should he and I not voyage there together, and love and be secure?’

  ‘The pestilence.’

  ‘We’re all mortal.’

  ‘Your eyes are feverous, Berna. How might he come for you, if he’s in Calais, and you’re here?’

  ‘He’s not in Calais. He’s in Wiltshire for Saturday’s joust, and leaves for France next day.’

  Pogge folded her arms. ‘Only account for this,’ she said. ‘Your father would marry you to his friend. Yet your Laurence is, by your description, an excellent young man of a good family, with prospects for advancement. If he loves you, why not ask your father if he may have you?’

  ‘He requested, and was refused. Laurence has no daughter marriageable, whereas Sir Hennery does. And my father judges himself, like Sir Hennery, a widower in need of a wife.’

  ‘Berna!’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you, it’s so dishonourable. Their intention is that Sir Hennery arrive, we marry on Saturday, we journey to Somerset with my father, and there, after harvest, celebrate a second wedding, between my father and my new husband’s daughter.’

  Pogge bared her teeth. ‘Outrageous,’ she said.

  ‘Is it not hideous? I and this other poor maid are our own dowries.’

  ‘Can the clerks allow such a bargain?’

  ‘You see why I speak of martyrdom. I’ve never prayed more than now, and if the archdeacon will hear my confession, let him make himself comfortable for a long duration.’ Berna opened the book and placed her finger on the page. ‘Listen how perfectly the Romance descrives him: “Il m’a au coeur cinq plaies faites.” Love has pierced him with five golden arrows: Simplicity, Courtesy, Company, Beau-Semblant and Beauty.’

  ‘Your beauty?’

  ‘Pogge, you ne understand allegory, just listen. In being pierced with these five arrows, love has crippled him.’

  ‘Certainly it is a great inconvenience to a man going about his affairs to have five arrows sticking out of him.’

  ‘Shhh! No more interruptions. He is crippled by love, he is love’s vassal. When he was here, in Outen Green, he told me even were his will otherwise, he couldn’t but love me par amour. He’s all that love demands: courteous, free of pride, elegant, light-hearted and generous. Yet he suffers terribly from the pain of those five wounds. How he suffers, most of all when we parted, try to conceal it as he might. Five wounds, Pogge!’ Berna touched in turn the palms of her hands, her feet, and one of her ribs. ‘Cinq plaies! Pogge, you ne know what it’s like to love and be loved. Believe me when I tell you that to see his face when he regarded me for the last time at the moment of his departure was like seeing the very face of Christ on the cross.’

  Pogge wrinkled her nose. ‘I ne think it proper to know Christ’s love in a sense romantic.’

  Berna leaned forward, took Pogge’s hands in hers and pressed them tightly. ‘Might you joy the sentiment of true love, as I have, you see it like to a sphere with many aspects.’

  Pogge squealed, leapt to her feet and backed up against one fork of the tree roots. The
glistening snout, pointed tusks, stiff bristles and small black eyes of an enormous boar depended of the top of the root opposite. Over his ears hung a garland of mallow-flowers and from his half-open mouth fell threads of silver slime.

  Berna got up and scratched the boar on the cheek. ‘Enker,’ she said, ‘you frightened my cousin.’ The boar narrowed its eyes and snorted.

  Hab the pigboy appeared beside Enker and bowed his head to Berna and Pogge. Berna commanded him to keep the swine at a greater distance, and Hab bowed again, and answered, and they spoke for a time.

  He was a meagre brown youth in a patched tunic of undyed linen, barelegged, with shining black hair down to his shoulders, large black eyes and full red lips that gleamed as if he’d raised them from the surface of a spring. He spoke a word to Enker, the boar wheeled and they disappeared. There was a clatter as the herd moved off.

  ‘I lack your courage,’ said Pogge in a trembling voice.

  ‘I knew Enker as a piglet. They’re gentle beasts,’ said Berna, sitting down, ‘and cleaner than you suppose.’

  ‘The city pigs are nastier,’ said Pogge. She stayed on her feet and crossed her arms. ‘I can’t understand your villains. What did the pigboy say?’

  ‘It’s Cotswold,’ said Berna. ‘It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer. He said he hoped they’d catch the thief who stole my marriage gown.’

  ‘It’s marvellous that your villains have such familiarity with the privy troubles of their lord’s family.’

  ‘It’s not so very privy no more,’ said Berna. ‘After the gown was stolen my father looked to recover the expense of replacing it by raising their amercements. Well, one of them must have taken it, and they might easily have saved themselves the trouble by informing us as to the person of the thief. We must go. If anyone from the house sees us in the forest sans guardian we’ll be punished.’ But she ne moved to part, and ran her finger over the painture of the Lover in Le Roman de la Rose.