To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  Hab reached forward, grabbed Will’s middle and made to pull him down into the water. Will wrothe and Hab laughed. Will kicked with both feet and sent Hab flying back against the edge of the tub. Hab gasped, sank, rose, shook his head, stood and wrapped a linen round himself.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’ said Will ruthlessly.

  ‘The water’s cold,’ said Hab. ‘I’ll go away and you won’t never see me no more. Hab’s ended, for you won’t be with me.’

  ‘I’d be your friend, do you only bide for me to come again from France next year.’

  ‘There’s no time,’ said Hab. ‘All of Hab there is will be what you mind of him, no more.’

  He bade Will farewell. Tears stood in his eyes. Will rose, and did on his linen, and lifted his hand as if to hold Hab’s shoulder, but let it fall.

  Hab bade Will go to the back of the bath-house and bide there for his sister.

  ‘You sought too much of me,’ said Will.

  Hab ne answered, and went out through the dark door at the end of the hall.

  WILL BODE OUTSIDE the bath-house till the sun had gone and it was half dark. Madlen came out. She wore a dull-hued gown, a barmcloth and a white headcloth, and bore the bundle that’d been on the boar’s back.

  ‘Where’d you get the silver to buy another dress?’ said Will.

  ‘Work,’ said Madlen.

  ‘I ne know what you’d have me do,’ said Will.

  ‘Let me be near you. The days are few.’

  ‘Ne give me your tales of pestilence. I ne believe that priest’s swike.’

  ‘It ne hangs on your belief. There’s no time. The lady Bernadine’s groom Sir Henry is come to Melksham with Cockle the miller’s son, the one for his bride, the other for the thief of the lady Bernadine’s gown, that I be taken home to Outen Green and hung.’

  ‘I ne care,’ said Will. ‘Run away or be caught, it’s the same to me. I ne asked you or your brother to leave home and be my burden. I ne need your friendship or his. I came out of Outen Green to be free. I’d be rid of you all. Do they loll you up I’ll light you a candle when I get to Calais.’ He left Madlen and went again to the inn without her.

  BERNA LEFT HER chamber and turned the key in the lock. She pushed the door and it remained closed. She smiled and unlocked and locked it several times. From her chamber a gallery, open to the inn yard on one side, led to a stairway. She perceived a number of archers, Will among them, depart the inn through the yard gate.

  She went downstairs. The innkeeper and his wife were engaged in a muted disputation. They ceased when they saw her and regarded her doubtously. Beyond them in the common hall she distingued the forms of guests, male and female, dallying over food and drink.

  She held the key in one hand and her mother’s mirror in the other. She desired to show the mirror to Cess, to let her use it, and parle with her, but she couldn’t see her, and Softly was by the cart with the one who balmed and apparelled himself above his dignity, the one they called Holiday, and the two men regarded her. They appeared amused.

  She turned again to the hall. The innkeeper bowed his head and said if her needed anything, he might send it to her chamber.

  ‘I wish to dine in the common hall with the other guests,’ said Berna. ‘My maid must arrive at any moment.’

  The innkeeper refused. He ne doubted she was of gentle blood, he said, but a maid on the road without kin or servants owed to count herself fortunate to have a privy chamber, his best. She’d be safer and more comfortable remaining there until morning. Or he could send a message to a nearby manor; one of the noble ladies would surely invite her to pass the night.

  Berna demanded to be allowed to dine with Thomas, her confessor.

  She was told he was with the injured archer, and had requested he not be disturbed.

  She bade the innkeeper send up a light, some victuals and hot water, and went to her chamber.

  It had a bare wooden floor and a bed with a horsehair mattress, made up with rude linen that wasn’t quite dry and curtained around with heavy twill, discoloured in patches. There was a pot on the floor, a pitcher of water, a chipped basin and a towel on a small table, a larger table, and two chairs with leather seats. Berna opened the shutters on two windows that gave out on Melksham’s high street. They weren’t larger than a foot across but a little air blew through them and they gave sufficient light to illuminate the paintures of lords and ladies hawking and chasing hinds with dogs to the strakes of a horn that embellished the white walls.

  The girl who came to her chamber wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen, and Berna couldn’t make her speak nor stay with her while she laved and dined. In solitude, in the darkening chamber, Berna drank watered wine and ate a cherry tart and a little sausage and bread, but left the onions. She passed time at the window, regarding the people and dogs and horses that moved with sureness of purpose below.

  When the sun was almost set she placed the two candles the girl had brought her at either end of the large table and arranged her possessions in a line. The innkeeper had given her an uncountable number of pennies after she gave him her gold noble. From a purse she wore on a cord around her neck she took a ring, a chain and a nouche of gold of her mother’s. She had a whalebone comb, a toothbrush, a wimple, two sets of fresh linen, silk tape for her hair, a nail file, a jar of face cream, a vial of piment, a bag of grains de paradis, her bleed-knife, the key, the mirror, and the book.

  She opened the mirror. A shower of broken glass fell to the floor. She swept the shards up with the edge of her hand and put them in the purse. She lay on the bed for a time with her eyes open. She got up and began to read Le Roman de la Rose, sitting at the table and bringing the two candles close at either side. When the chamber was almost completely dark beyond the edges of the light, she closed the book and went downstairs. She ignored the innkeeper and his wife and Softly, all of whom cried out to her, and without knocking went into the chamber where the injured Dickle Dene lay.

  Thomas sat on the edge of one of the beds. He wrote on a piece of vellum that rested on a board across his knees, with an inkhorn on one corner and a candle on the other. Close to him, on a bed by the window, lay Dickle, his eyes closed. In the obscure corner furthest from the window was a grand armoire.

  ‘My lady,’ said Thomas, bowing his head. ‘I overfilled my inkhorn, or I’d greet you properly.’

  ‘I require confession,’ said Berna.

  ‘This soldier suffers,’ said Thomas. ‘Let him rest while I sit with him. Please return to your chamber.’

  The armoire moved; it rose and lengthened. It was Hayne Attenoke, who had been sitting still at the end of the bed. He said he would send Holiday to find a priest, and left.

  Berna sat down opposite the confessor. ‘I’m treated with disrespect,’ she said. ‘I’m a knight’s daughter. A Corbet. The meanest of my father’s cottagers may flee his bondage for Gloucester or Bristol and be free in a year, while I, a gentlewoman, ne move a foot without inciting suspicion of my motives, as if to be abroad without a man or servants were of itself a sin.’

  ‘The gown advertises an incompleted sacrament,’ said Thomas. ‘If only others might view in it the very story, that you are in the process of exchanging one man’s protection for another’s.’

  ‘This isn’t so plain a story as that, which you know,’ said Berna. ‘Is the archer very sound asleep?’

  BERNA SAID: ‘I’M uneasy in the choices I’ve made.’

  ‘And the choices made for you,’ said Thomas. ‘Your regrets are easily comprehended. Your father might have arrived at a consort better suited to you than to himself. You might have prepared more carefully for your departure. You might have been more attentive to the character of your amour.’

  ‘You ne value speech for itself,’ said Berna. ‘All virtue is in the argument and the conclusion for you. But there’s no conclusion here. Nothing is easily comprehended. I’m alone among strangers, without support or security, far from home, deceived by the amour on whom my w
hole hope rested, and in this moment, I bruise my late mother’s mirror. The occasion compels me to grieve, to abandon myself to grief. I lie on my bed to pass the night in tears. Yet I feel only joy. Never before have I had my own privy chamber, with a key to lock it. To be able to lock my own door is a queen’s power. And in the midst of such joy at the power to defend my solitude I am miserable because I have no one to tell how joyful I am and why. Is this how madness appears, when one sentiment opposes another?’

  ‘Were I a priest,’ said Thomas, ‘I would probably advise prayer and fasting.’

  ‘Have you read Le Roman de la Rose?’

  ‘I have known the rage of the doctors that I, like so many scholars, abused my literacy to enjoy the story of a young man’s dream of love for a perfect flower.’

  ‘I haven’t read the conclusion,’ said Berna. ‘The copy in my possession comprises solely Guillaume de Lorris’s portion, with the Lover left unsatisfied.’

  ‘The book in general, and the second part in particular, are not intended to be read by demoiselles,’ said Thomas.

  Berna made a gesture of impatience. ‘When I lived in my father’s manor house and Laurence Haket loved me par amour, I could imagine myself as the Rose. But now I go to him as if I were the Lover, and he the Rose. As if I, not he, suffered the wounds of Love’s arrows.’

  ‘And suffer you such very pain?’

  Berna smiled uncertainly.

  ‘Frankly I find a great mystery in the Romance,’ said Thomas. ‘It contains a male Lover, who is a single person. But there is also a female counterpart, who is divided into two personages. She is represented as the Rose: passive, unmoving, silent, vulnerable, of a value to men that is both immeasurable and transient. The Rose is the promise of sensual gratification, intense and brief. She is the embodiment of adolescence at the moment of the first stimulation of maturity. She may not act or speak; she can anticipate one of only two responses from the Lover, to be adored, or to be used. But the Lover’s female counterpart is also a second personage. She is also Warm Welcome, an aspect of the female in male form: generous, honest, courteous, amicable and loyal. She, as he, acts; she, as he, speaks; she, as he, has power. She, as he, desires not to be the passive recipient of the Lover’s desire, but his companion.’

  ‘You would entice me with reports of mysteries. A poet’s ruse.’

  ‘It is clear that the Lover desires the Rose. In the part you have read, he fails to obtain her, and languishes in a state of love denied.’

  ‘I find it poignant.’

  ‘But in Jean de Meun’s conclusion, the Lover possesses and uses the Rose, in a passage of the crudest, basest comedy.’

  ‘How disappointing,’ said Berna, wrinkling her nose. ‘How unmysterious.’

  ‘The mystery is that throughout the poem, from de Lorris to de Meun, we fail to discover the Lover’s sensibility in respect of Warm Welcome. Is he pleased or displeased with Warm Welcome’s company only so far as Warm Welcome facilitates his access to the Rose, or does he value Warm Welcome’s intelligence and accomplishments? Would he be Warm Welcome’s companion, even without the Rose?’

  ‘I marvel at the consideration you’ve given to such matters. Do you discuss them with your spouse?’

  ‘Indecisiveness and misjudgement of reasonable possibilities have left me a bachelor,’ said Thomas. ‘I couch with my library.’

  ‘I judge from your response that you carry old injuries.’

  ‘It is difficult to say without appearing to find fault with someone apart from oneself, but my encounters have been of Roses without Welcomes, and Welcomes without Roses.’

  ‘Am I now your confessor, master proctor?’

  Thomas smiled. ‘Really, I doubt the deity would have created male so singular and female so plural in matters amorous. Two Lovers, two Roses, two Welcomes; the very mystery is that there is only one Love. Where does he have his habitation?’

  They were silent and each turned, suddenly solemn, to regard Dickle, as if realising the impropriety of their parliament in the presence of a gravely injured stranger.

  The innkeeper came to the door and told Berna her servant had arrived.

  THE INNKEEPER LED Berna to the gallery outside the door of her chamber, where a maid attended. Berna let the innkeeper go, unlocked the door and prayed the maid to enter. She left the door open, stood with her back to the bed, and demanded that the maid step into the light of the candles that still flamed on the table.

  Before Berna stood a meagre maid of her own height, with black curls below her wimple and a familiar face – black eyes, tawny skin and full lips, the lower of which seemed pulled down by its own plenitude.

  She said she was Madlen, Hab’s sister.

  ‘You are marvellously and wonder like to your fugitive brother,’ said Berna.

  Madlen said they had little time. She opened her bundle and took out a wedding gown semblable to Berna’s. She placed it on the table and begged the demoiselle’s pardon for stealing it.

  ‘You might ask pardon and forgiveness of the folk and people of Outen Green for all the silver my father wrung and pressed of them in amends and mede for the loss.’

  Madlen said she’d brought the gown to Bernadine again, and now the demoiselle had two gowns, one to meet her lover in, and one spare.

  ‘How very free and generous you are with my chattels and possessions,’ said Berna. ‘But if you hopped and danced on the end of a rope, I’d still have both gowns.’

  There was a disturbance in the inn yard. Madlen went out to look over the balcony and came again into the room.

  To hang her, said Madlen, Bernadine must go home to her father again, and she’d have to wed the old man. Why not make Madlen her bondwoman instead?

  ‘And have a thief to be my maid?’

  She must choose now, said Madlen. Sir Henry was in Melksham, with men of Outen Green, come to find the lady and take her home.

  ‘Holy mother of God, protect me!’ said Berna.

  The demoiselle had learned, said Madlen, how hard it was for a woman to fare alone on the road, all were she a knight’s daughter. Westbury was four hours’ ride away, and the moon was bright. Let her ride now with Madlen as her maid, and find Laurence Haket, and afterwards they might do with Madlen as they would.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Berna.

  ‘They’re here,’ said Madlen.

  They heard Cockle’s voice below, and the sound of a high-born fellow raising a hue and cry over a lady. Feet hammered on the stairs. Berna crossed her arms over her breast, moved back and pressed herself against the far wall. Madlen called for the key. Berna threw it to her and she closed and locked the door.

  A fist beat on the door. ‘God’s bones, Bernadine Corbet, you’ve led me a dance,’ came Sir Henry’s voice. ‘Now I’ve others with me, and a fine honest scourge, and your father’s benison to tan your hide with it, comen’t you with me to Cotswold instantly.’

  ‘Sweet queen of heaven!’ said Berna.

  A cry pierced the room, not from the gallery outside the chamber, but through the floor. It increased in force and divided into phrases. It was Hornstrake, crying to the world to flee, for the pest had come to Melksham, and he was infected.

  The very feet that had passed so violently along the gallery towards Berna’s chamber could now be heard running in the opposite direction, and when Berna and Madlen went out, the moon was bright enough to see, amid the tumult in the yard, Cockle and an old knight attempting to push their way into the stables to recover their mounts and escape from the plague-struck inn.

  WILL WALKED THROUGH the heap of folk that flew of the inn into the night, that shoff each other to be first, cried their beads and paternosters and saints’ names and the names of their kin, and dragged their horses and chattels behind them in the bark and squawk of dogs and geese. He went into the hall.

  When Hornstrake yall, the hall had been halfway between wake and sleep, with some still at ale, some gone to bed. A board had been overturned and shards of
broken can poked of pools of spilled ale that oversprad the floor. In the doorway that led to the kitchen the innkeeper stood with his arms around his wife, who had her neb buried in his chest. He beheld Will like to a child beholds its mother when it meets something it ne understands, and bides on her to unfold the meaning.

  Will took a horn lamp of the wall and went toward the sound of weeping.

  Sheets and bedstraw lay where the fearful had thrown them. Hornstrake sat in the midst of a field of clothes and sacks and shoon. His cheeks were wet with tears and he’d bound a rag over his eyes. Dust of unearthly hues glittered about his lips, limed to his skin by some murky uncouth honey. His left forearm was smeared with blood. He held a small steel blade in his right hand and in his left a clear glass ball hung of a band around his neck.

  He turned toward the sound of footsteps.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  ‘What ails you?’ said Will.

  ‘Is it you, Will? Ne come nearer. I’m qualm-sick, but you won’t get it of my eyes, for I hilled them well with a good thick strip of linen.’

  Sweetmouth, Mad and Longfreke came into the hall and stood near.

  ‘Fly!’ yall Hornstrake. ‘Ne throng about me.’

  ‘What’s the dust and honey about your lips?’ Will asked.

  ‘Treacle against qualm,’ said Hornstrake, ‘that I bought of the Malmesbury doctor.’

  ‘The doctor bade you bleed yourself, not hack off your arm,’ said Mad.

  ‘You owe not to laugh,’ said Hornstrake. ‘You might be next to die.’

  ‘How do you know the pest is in you?’ said Will.

  ‘I woke in a sweat, and felt hard botches in my pits, of the muchness of eggs. Shield yourselves, boys, keep ten yards of me, and fetch a priest.’

  ‘You ne need no priest,’ said Sweetmouth.

  ‘I’m at grave’s brink,’ said Hornstrake.

  ‘I’ll heal you,’ said Sweetmouth. He reached inside Hornstrake’s shirt. Hornstrake wrothe and snorked as Sweetmouth dug under his armpits and took out two of the hard green apples they’d been given at the monks’ board.