To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  Berna pursued them, maintaining her distance, to a grand pasture beyond a sort of artificial garden, and to an opening in a wattle fence, guarded by two peasants of savage appearance. Over the top of the fence Berna perceived a company of musicians on a stage embellished with paintures of roses and of hearts pierced through with arrows.

  The four young people Berna followed passed between the guards. When she attempted to do the same the guards stopped the way.

  ‘Let me pass,’ said Berna. ‘I am Lady Bernadine Corbet, daughter of Sir Guy Corbet of Outen Green, and I’ve paid what’s due.’

  The more of the guards bowed and told her he ne doubted her ancestry nor rank, but her poignet was the wrong colour; only those with a green poignet might pass through to the dancing, for it was a privy affair.

  Between the guards Berna could perceive the form of dancers in bright clothes.

  ‘This is an outrage,’ she said. ‘You will be punished.’

  The second guard saw what she carried.

  A maid with a book, he said to his companion. They’d be learning them to read next, then what?

  ‘Writing is generally held to be the next step,’ came a voice from behind Berna. The guards stepped back, lowered their heads and shoulders and were silent.

  Their defeat issued of a dame in a gown of red silk with a jewel on each finger and hair bound tightly to her head with a gold filet. She must have had an age of fifty. She wasn’t high, but cast a great shadow, and on her feet she wore a cracked old pair of men’s black leather hunting boots.

  ‘Are you the Corbet girl? Vas-y, vas-y. How they kept it fresh I cannot imagine but it’s sturgeon in those tarts. They must be eaten tonight.’

  SHE LED BERNA by the wrist past the dancers to a table covered in white cloth where a young man offered her a tart and a cup of wine.

  ‘Permit me,’ said the dame, removing the book from Berna’s hand. Berna took a gulp of wine and pressed the tart into her mouth. With her mouth full, she mumbled something and curtseyed. A piece of pastry fell from her lips and she swallowed.

  ‘I plead your pardon, madam,’ she said, ‘I was ravenous.’

  The dame looked up from the book, which she’d opened and commenced to study. ‘I discomfited you by guessing your name. You may call me Elizabeth.’ She extended her hand and Berna curtseyed again to kiss it.

  ‘You are very celebrable,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Everyone is interested in your position. Your husband-to-be, Sir Henry, was here earlier complaining piteously that he was to be married tomorrow, and his bride absent. He desired no more than to exchange his daughter for another man’s, which is apparently acceptable in this world. Ne look so frightened! He departed in a rage, on a report you were seen elsewhere.’

  Berna touched the shoulders of her marriage gown and looked down at it. ‘How might you know I am that demoiselle?’ she demanded.

  ‘I ne intend to slander your judgement, for it is a gown magnificent, but it is precisely the gown one would expect a girl of a Cotswold manor to wear for her marriage, and you are as your affianced descrived you, except that your face is more overt than I imagined.’

  ‘In what manner overt?’

  ‘I can tell you, but I have discovered by experience that to request a second compliment without having properly digested the first is generally taken as the sign of a glutton. Are you as ravenous for homage as you are for our tarts? You haven’t no mother? You’re the eldest child? An infancy of rural banquets and dances no further than two hours’ ride away from home, the company of mute young farmers? Assuredly, in the countryside, beauty may perish of a famine of appreciation.’

  ‘I passed two years in Bristol, at my uncle’s. He imports wine.’

  ‘I adore merchants. They are always so eager to improve their minds and the minds of others. And there you acquired your letters, and your French.’

  ‘I thought me I had French, for I can read it, but a Frenchwoman I met convinced me I ne speak it as one should, so I endeavour to prove my intelligence by meddling French with English, like everyone.’

  ‘Such unnecessary self-diminishment! Do I hear a reflection of a mordant note in my own discourse? So: your face – overt in that it ne refuses fresh discoveries. So many girls your age, having spent their virgin years in the furious pursuit of novelty, decide that their opinions are complete, and repel additions. Excuse me a moment, but ne move, I return presently.’

  Elizabeth began to talk with a long, dark, quick man in a peacock-blue tunic who had approached them at the table. Berna regarded the dance. The musicians on stage played a rapid melody, the rhythm beaten out on two sets of drums and a tambourine in the hand of the singer. She knew the singer: it was Madog, the archer with the deep distant eyes, the long hair in rings, and the rich tenor voice.

  The dancers were a muddle of nobles, who danced properly, in well-formed lines and circles, and others who leaped and kicked and linked arms like peasants at a church-ale, but who were dressed more strangely and richly than peasants she knew. In places, the gentle and the savage danced with each other, and Berna couldn’t tell whether the nobles constrained their inferiors to their manner of dancing, or attempted to achieve, by imitation of the commoners, a liberation of their inherited formalities. Among the dancers she knew Will and Sweetmouth, in the white surcoats with red roses on the breast that several people wore.

  Little by little she perceived that she and Dame Elizabeth hadn’t come in unnoticed, but were observed and defended. The young men who stood with their backs to the table, apparently regarding the dance and the musicians, formed a line none crossed without consent. People pleaded with the young men to be allowed to approach. People attended patiently, apparently expecting they would be summoned in due course. They regarded Lady Elizabeth as if at any moment she might perform a marvel. They regarded Berna.

  Among the dancers Berna saw Laurence. He saw her at the same time, froze with the palm of his hand against a demoiselle’s, and opened his mouth. Berna turned back to Elizabeth, who displayed the book to the man in the blue tunic. They regarded Berna, the man nodded and departed, and the two women moved towards each other.

  ‘I appreciate the value of this so-called romance to a certain sort of man,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It is a useful guide, I suppose, to the seduction of young women, were the sole purpose of such seduction to take the girl’s virginity. Am I too frank for you?’

  ‘Frankness is the very quality I would hope to find in one so high.’

  ‘If it seems to you that you know who I am, please set aside my highness. It ne likes me to talk through madam, madam, madam. But why frankness?’

  ‘Of the arrows the God of Love possesses, it is Frankness I prefer, because frankness is truly noble,’ said Bernadine. ‘The other arrows – Beauty, Simplicity, Courtesy, Company, Beau-Semblant – are the qualities in a woman that may injure a man’s heart while leaving his pride untouched. That woman may get herself a lover and never open her mouth. But the man who falls in love mostly by the wound of his lover’s frankness is ennobled, for he accepts her enumeration of his faults, without doubting the loving spirit in which they are given; and she accepts his frankness in return. It may be judged a demerit of Guillaume’s Romance that Frankness is the one arrow Love chooses not to use.’

  Dame Elizabeth stared at her in silence, then barst out laughing. ‘So ingenious, and so serious! I may fall in love with you myself, be you so frank with me. Now permit me some frankness in return. You confuse love and a husband. I was widowed three times before I was twenty-six. All my husbands were shits. I was very frank with them, and they were very frank with me, and I assure you there wasn’t nothing noble about it. I loved one of them, and they loved my money and my blood. They’re all departed, and I’m secure. I vowed chastity to protect my property, and chastity is a vow that may be made more than once. Love is whatever remains once one has made one’s accommodation with fate. What’s your accommodation to be? You’re to be married tomorrow, two days’ ride away,
and yet you’re here, alone, without family, without your future husband, without a retinue, without even a decent ravisher.’

  ‘On that point,’ said Bernadine, ‘there is one here who loved me par amour, and would ravish me of my family and that wretched knight.’

  She recounted her story to Elizabeth.

  THEY MOVED TO a wattle bay set into the fence, screened by an arch of roses. Under the roses was a small bank of turf. Just before they sat down a maidservant appeared and placed cushions on the bank.

  ‘I was ravished by agreement, to save me from an unpleasant marriage,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I married John at thirteen, and when he died four years later, with my father gone, uncle Eddie removed my liberty and pondered which baron to bestow me on. I communicated secretly with my friend Theo, and we agreed that he would steal me, as if by force, and marry me. Uncle Eddie was rageous when he was informed, and demanded compensation, which we paid, of course.’

  ‘And Theo was him you loved.’

  ‘I loved him. I received less in return, but there’s no bargaining in such matters. To demand that one’s love be returned has always had the savour of usury to me.’

  ‘I am curious to know which of you inspired the ravishment.’

  ‘As I remember, I was the proposer.’

  ‘Had I passed Laurence a message saying I desired him to ravish me of my family and marry me in secret, I’m sure he would have responded.’

  ‘In such cases the ravisher’s considerations tend to concern the ravishee’s inheritance as much as the delights of her person.’

  ‘Laurence knew that my family lives of a single manor when he asked my father for my hand. He ne spent a month in our house enditing me poetry in expectation of no inheritance. Besides, his valour at Crécy is rewarded with a manor worth forty pound a year.’

  ‘The perfect chevalier,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Galahad with a counting board.’ She caressed the book. ‘This isn’t no story of no marriage. Doesn’t it aggrieve you that Haket disports him here, when you ravished yourself to be with him? You might be married and halfway to France by now.’

  ‘We saw each other this morning,’ said Berna. ‘He promised he would marry me, but urged me to concealment while he performed some duty at the joust. I chose rather to engender his jealousy by appearing here as if I ne cared whether he married me or not.’

  ‘Your choice was judicious,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I suppose he recounted to you the nature of his duties here?’

  ‘I ne inquired,’ said Berna, lowering her eyes.

  ‘He was subtle enough to furnish us with some archers for our pageant to replace the proper players, who failed to appear. As reward he is to play the Lover.’

  Bernadine blushed and regarded the older woman fiercely. ‘Your pardon, madam,’ she said, ‘I were better to speak frankly, as I promised, and confess my ignorance. I ne know not of no pageant.’

  ‘I wish I had a place for you in my ménage. Most of the nobles I know would sooner confess to pissing on an altar than to ignorance of anything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be one of those nobles, yet it would be an honour to be known by you.’

  ‘Good. Let’s be amicable.’ She placed her hand on Bernadine’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. ‘It won’t harm your cause with your amour to be seen to be close to me. Now, this is a joust only in name, that it ne offend the clerks. It’s got up by my friend Bella. She’s also my aunt, though we’re the same age. We’ve experienced sufficient combat in our lives, very and pretend, and here’s a joust without jousting, but play, poetry, music, dance and wine. My friend’s son, my cousin Eddie, conducts a very joust tomorrow in Kent, and permits his mother to conduct our revels at the same time, on condition she be at least one hundred miles away, and ne tempt his favourites to join her. It’s more difficult than you suppose. Some marvellously savage young men-at-arms delight in attendance here, despite the absence of disports martial. It appears no man desires more ardently to prove the gentler aspect of his nature than he whose principal duty is butchery in battle. Nonetheless I am surprised Laurence is content to play the lover in a pageant when you have presented him with such an excellent opportunity to be the lover in life. What might explain his choice, I wonder? A certain esperance of preferment of my friend Bella? A rumour of especial royal favours granted to past players?’

  She paused, inviting a question, but Berna remained silent.

  With a change of tone to trenchant decisiveness, Elizabeth said: ‘I ne consider it proper that you should observe this spectacle with the others.’

  ‘No, madam?’ said Bernadine piteously.

  ‘I would prefer that you play a part. I mayn’t prevent from regaining you the husband your father intended, nor oblige your amour to ravish you, but I may place you close to him in play and see what comes of it.’

  ‘I ne know the play,’ protested Berna.

  Elizabeth raised the book. ‘Here’s the story,’ she said. ‘It is Le Roman de la Rose. Maestro Pavone! Here’s your Warm Welcome.’

  THE DRUM BEAT faster, Mad sang of a freke who went with an elf, and Sweetmouth hopped with two high-born maids who laughed so hard they had to hold each other to keep from falling over. Will drank two cups of wine and looked about. Another maid came up to him and asked if he were an archer, and had he been at Crécy.

  ‘Slew you many Frenchmen?’ she asked. ‘What was it like? Where are you from?’

  Cotswold, said Will.

  ‘D’you know the Granvilles of Moreton?’

  The lady Bernadine came in among the folk that hopped. Will asked for word of Madlen, and Lady Bernadine said Madlen had run away. She wouldn’t stint to say more. She went to speak to Laurence Haket, and they spoke, and each seemed to wrath, and Laurence Haket shouted at her. Lady Bernadine took his wrist, but he shook it off and left the hop, alone. Will lost sight of Lady Bernadine after that.

  Will told Sweetmouth he’d go, and Sweetmouth bade him bide longer, for he ne might swive two burds by himself. But Will bade him goodnight and went again through the meadow to the telds. The high-borns’ hires and followers cooked and washed there and besought their lords’ horses and falcons. When Will asked after Madlen they bade him look outside the joust field, where the hucksters, onlookers and beggars gathered who mightn’t spend the night inside.

  Will went out by the two outcome churls who warded the gate to the field. A bear-keeper with his bear on a rope told the wardens they must let him in, for the bear’s evening flesh was with a kinsman there and the bear was hungry. The keeper’s arms ached of holding him back that he ne snatch at a child. The wardens bade him knit the bear to a tree and find him a dog to sup on. In truth there wasn’t no lack of dogs. Starved and big of eye, they stepped between the hucksters’ cooking fires and took blows and stones to fight over bits of chewed pigskin spat in the dust. One licked the stumps of an old soldier, another stroked with his cold neb a thin, naked child in the arms of the ragged woman who begged at the gate.

  The bear struck at one of the wardens with his hand and the warden clubbed him on the ribs. The keeper dragged the bear away and cursed the wardens. They cursed him back and asked him where the chain was he’d had the bear on in the morning.

  He’d hired it to the Cotswold knave who’d caught the thief, said the keeper, the thrall that stole his lady’s gown, and went about as a maid. The knave had thought him he’d earn of the runaway and shift what he made with the keeper.

  While he spoke, and fought to get the bear in wield, the keeper nodded to a heap of folk gathered by the furze further up the cleeve.

  MADLEN SAT ON the dust in the middle of a ring of folk. She was held by the bear chain. One end was knit to a leather neck-cuff, the other to a stake hammered in the ground. Her dress was torn open down to the waist and she held her arms tightly on her chest to hill her tits. She bled of a slit over her eye and had a bruise on her cheek. She saw Will and turned her head away.

  Cockle stood nearby with a kinsman Will knew, Matt, who’d g
one to be a stoneworker with a guild in Cirencester. Cockle egged an old woman with three cock-sticks in her hand. ‘Throw true,’ he called. ‘It’s a thief and a runaway that stole his lord’s daughter’s wedding gown and his hayward’s boar. He goes against his kind and God’s behests. A true shot’s a godsend.’

  Will went up and took the woman by the wrist that she ne throw. Matt came over and helped two other men drag Will away. Folk took the woman’s side. They yall at Will that he hadn’t the right nor might to hamper folk’s games.

  ‘Let her go,’ said Will.

  ‘Her?’ said Cockle. ‘There’s no cunt on this, but you can fuck it in the arse for sixpence if you would.’ Folk laughed. Cockle shook the chain. Madlen’s head rocked and she fell on her side. She raised herself on one hand, keeping the other over her chest.

  ‘Let me alone,’ she said to Will. ‘Your help ne needs me. Go. Live a free life.’

  ‘This isn’t Hab, as it thinks you,’ said Will to Cockle. ‘It’s his sister Madlen.’

  ‘What sister? Throw, woman.’ The woman threw the sticks at Madlen. Two missed the mark. One struck her on the back of the neck. Madlen grunted at the smart and held her mouth shut.

  ‘Who’ll pitch sticks at the thief?’ called Cockle. ‘Penny a throw.’

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said Will.

  ‘It needs me to work him to hill the time I took to find him,’ said Cockle. ‘When we get him to the Green again he’ll be hung anywise, and not too soon. He were better not born.’

  ‘What harm’s she done to you?’

  ‘She! Would you learn the shed between man and woman?’ He made as if to lift the hem of Madlen’s gown but before he could do so a knave came forward with a penny and Cockle gathered up the sticks for him.

  ‘Christ’s love, would you take her to Outen Green, take her now, let her be deemed there without this pine,’ said Will.